by Rebecca West
I had a great awe and admiration for Mamma’s detective powers. I owned up. “I did a thought-reading trick.”
“Oh, Rose!” groaned Mamma.
“It was not much,” I said. “I put my hands on each side of a girl’s face, and I made her guess the number and say it just to herself, and then I told her what the number was.”
I had never had an unkindly look from Constance before, but she was now staring at me very coldly; and Mamma was sealed in her anger, motionless.
Aunt Lily broke the silence, saying, “Well, I’m sorry if I’ve spoken out of turn. And I’m sorry if I’ve got poor little Rose into trouble. But thought-reading. I don’t see nothing wrong in that. I mean, I don’t see anything wrong in that.”
The humility of that self-correction broke the ice of my mother’s anger. She explained gently, “Yes, there is no harm in thought-reading as a trick. But—”
“But it’s not a trick,” interrupted Aunt Lily. In her embarrassment she had been looking down on her black open-work stockings and her high-heeled shoes, wriggling her feet as if she wanted to get the effect from different angles. Now she raised her head and said with a certain shrewdness and obstinacy, “But it wasn’t a trick. I watched her. It wasn’t as if the two kiddies had done it together and had a code, like the people on the music-halls. She did it all herself, your daughter did. She’s got a gift, the gift, some people call it.”
My mother shuddered as at an unbearable vulgarity. “The trouble is that people who do such things go on to other things. To fortune-telling. To table-turning. To spirit-rapping.”
“Well, what’s the harm in that?” said Aunt Lily. “Fortune-telling I mean. The rest I don’t care about. I don’t want to have anything to do with spirits. But fortune-telling. If you don’t know what’s going to happen, and it might all come out one way, and then you’d be very happy all your life long, and on the other hand it would come so that you’d never have anything to live for. Well, what’s the harm in finding out which way it’s going to work out?”
Hope overlaid with brightness the other bright colours of her face. Mamma and Constance looked on her with a sort of tender horror, and Mamma said softly, “But it is wrong.”
“Oh, I grant you it may be wrong,” said Aunt Lily, “but you don’t really mean you think it’s so wrong that you shouldn’t do it? Don’t you ever read tea leaves?” Mamma and Constance shook their heads. “Well, you are funny. It does no harm. That and the cards, how can there be any harm? If ever there was anything that was just a bit of fun, surely it’s that?”
“If it is just a bit of fun,” asked Mamma, “then why are you so eager for it?”
At that Aunt Lily looked as if she were going to cry, and I turned my back on the room and looked out onto the road. I had heard Constance’s voice say with her peculiar large primness, “It is wrong. The Roman Catholics forbid any of their people to practise it and I think they are right,” and Mamma declared fierily, “If there is a wall between the present and the future it is not for us to pull it down,” when a hansom cab came jingling along the road. Mrs. Phillips got out. She had not been able to wait any longer. I wondered whether her arrival would make things worse or better. It would at any rate precipitate them, for she looked up at the driver on his perch behind the roof and spoke to him but did not hand him up his fare. Hansom cabs were so expensive by our family standards that I was unable to imagine anybody sane keeping one waiting for long, so I assumed that she and her sister would soon be gone. That meant I would have to face my mother’s naked anger. All the same I did not want Mrs. Phillips to make a lengthy visit.
After she had spoken to the driver she stood still on the pavement under the lamp-post opposite our gate, where the still unextinguished light was sallow and owlish, and stared hungrily at our house. I wanted to lean out of the window and call to her that it was our house, she should not stare at it so. The cab-driver gazed down on her with complacence and approval, twirling his moustache. Hansom drivers took themselves seriously as at once servants and arbiters of elegance. They were always smartly dressed, this one had a buttonhole though it was December, and they liked to have smart fares. In those days all tall women were admired, and Mrs. Phillips was very tall, and she was certainly elegant. She wore a wine-coloured beaver hat rising in a crest of darker plumes, and a wine-coloured coat and skirt. The skirt touched the ground and was immensely flared; it was a triangle with the apex at her sternly corseted waist. A dark fur stole fell from her shoulders to her knees and her arms were buried to the elbow in a muff of the same fur. The inner darkness in the colours of her dress and fur, the swarthiness of her skin, made her part of the disgrace of winter; not its cold, not its rain, but the rutted grease on the roadway, the discolouration left by the wet night on the pavement. The regard she was concentrating on our house was also drab. She wanted something here but her face shone as little as if she wanted nothing. Mamma, paying homage to a diamond in a jeweller’s window, gave out light like the jewel itself. Rosamund, wanting us all to go together to the seaside, was like a beach under noon. But Mrs. Phillips’s craving was tedious.
“Mrs. Phillips is here,” I said to Aunt Lily, and she made a frightened noise and jumped up, saying, “Let me open the door, it’ll save the girl, and I’ll explain.”
She ran from the room before we could forestall her and Mamma whispered to Constance, “Oh, the poor thing!” and Constance whispered back, “Yes, indeed, to hope, at that age, with that appearance!” Wheeling about, Mamma hissed at me, “You put yourself into a position where you would have had to lie to that poor creature,” and Constance added in the same tone, “That, or break her heart.” Their whispers had enormous force and seemed more impersonal than the kind of rebuke I had ever received before. It was like being rebuked by the winds.
My first thought, when I saw how Mamma and Constance received Mrs. Phillips, was that they recognized her as somebody whom they already knew. So definite was their rejection of her that it seemed as if it must be fully informed and documented. But she had never seen them before. She showed it first by the half-amused knitting of her brows as she took in the odd Punch-and-Judy vehemence of my emaciated Mamma, the overhanging, sculptural quality of Constance, their shabby clothes, the poverty-stricken room; and then she too obviously thought that heaven help her if she failed to get her way, since this was all she was up against. Meanwhile Mamma and Constance paled and flinched, each stretched an arm to push her own child behind her. In an instant they recovered themselves, far too quickly for Mrs. Phillips, who was not one of those people whom Papa described as able to turn around in their own length, to be quite sure of what she had seen. But Mamma kept her hand on my arm as she said, “I am sorry to receive you in the dining room, Mrs. Phillips, but this is a small house and we are a large family, and I know that as these are the holidays what should be my drawing room will be strewn with toys and books and music.”
Mrs. Phillips replied that she knew what it was, that when her Nancy and Cecil were at home the place looked like a pigsty, and settled in the armchair where Aunt Lily had been sitting. She turned her large picturesque face towards Rosamund and me, gave us a shallow smile, and told Mamma that she hoped her sister was wrong in thinking they weren’t going to be able to borrow the kiddies for the afternoon. I heard Mamma sigh deeply. Winter her frailty could bear well enough, but not this extreme desolation, this universal lack. I felt very glad that hansoms were so expensive, that even Mrs. Phillips would not be able to keep one waiting forever.
Mamma said, “I must tell you that I am angry at the children for doing that thought-reading trick. You see, we are Scottish, and we take these things more seriously than the English.” And while she went on with her explanation Mrs. Phillips appeared to lose all interest. She was wearing only one glove, and she began examining the other, stretching and smoothing it. She could not bear it, that a shabby little woman like my mother should stand between her and what she had arranged to have. But she ceased to feel
that resentment or anything else, for she suddenly went from us, passing into the cavern of her preoccupation. She stood up suddenly, and spared us just as much of her attention as was necessary to say, “Well, well, we must be going, and sometime the kiddies must come along and have tea with Nancy, and we won’t have any tricks, I promise you. Come on, Lily.” She needed to be out of this little room so full of people, she wanted to be alone, or with Lily, whom she could disregard, so that she could think of what she wanted. Mamma rose, eager to say good-bye, but as their hands went out to meet a look of duty came into her eyes, and she sat down again, as if she must refuse to let this pair go until she had settled something with them. Gazing up at Mrs. Phillips, who was taking no notice of her, and was putting on her other glove with absorbed interest, she said, in a voice so tense that it cracked, “You won’t go on with—with the idea?”
Mrs. Phillips answered drowsily, “Go on with the idea? With what idea? The thought-reading?” She laughed gently as if it were an absurd notion that she would pursue with assiduity anything connected with us. “No, I won’t think of it again. We’re not a spooky family.”
“Tea-leaves and cards we do try sometimes,” interjected Aunt Lily stoutly, both for the sake of honesty and to show Mamma that she would not be browbeaten.
“Yes, just for fun,” admitted Mrs. Phillips, “but I don’t suppose we think of it twice in a year, and I wouldn’t have thought of it now if it hadn’t been for your dear clever little girlies. Little, say I. I do believe the fair one’s as big as that great maypole, my Nancy. Well, good-bye for now.”
Mamma opened her mouth, but she was defeated by the tall woman’s indifference, which was nearly that of an inanimate object. It seemed as foolish to talk to her as it would have been to talk to a stove. At that moment Kate came in with the hot plates for luncheon, and Constance swooped down to pick up the cardboard box, which was lying on the hearthrug, and handed it to Aunt Lily, who said with a wry smile, “Well, if that’s not allowed, it’s not allowed.”
It was not until the front door had closed that Mamma and Constance spoke. I had expected them to turn on me at once, but first they exchanged broken expressions of horror. “Why, she is half consumed!” exclaimed Mamma in loathing, and then nervously, as if she feared the answer, she asked, “But what exactly, what exactly is it that she has in mind to do?”
“She means, I suppose, to go away and leave them,” said Constance grimly.
“Only that?” pondered Mamma. “Well, one cannot warn people. And I have seen her husband. But still.” Her thoughts returned slowly to the visible world and me, and there came the cry which wrung me though I had been waiting for it. “How could you, Rose, how could you!”
But before I could give an answer, which would have been angry, for it was not in my nature to meet rage with anything but rage, Rosamund had spoken. She had sat down at the table, and, looking blind and stolid and more childish than usual, was drawing on the tablecloth with her fork. “You see, it was a horrible party. We did not tell you, because you were worried about Richard Quin. But it was a horrid party, and a horrid house. You have seen how horrid Nancy’s Mamma is. Yesterday she was very rude to all of us. She came down into the drawing room in a sort of dressing-gown, to look for a book she wanted to read while she was lying down, and she did not say how do you do to any of us. And then when we started playing games a servant came in and was rude to Nancy’s aunt, and you have seen, she is quite nice, she was not doing any harm, she only asked for some logs. She nearly cried.”
“Stop drawing on the tablecloth with that fork,” said Constance. “It ruins the linen.”
Rosamund obeyed with a readiness that established her as a good, submissive child. “Then Rose got into one of her states,” she said. I heard the announcement with surprise. Had I got into a state at the party? I had felt very cross, but I did not think that I had got into a state. Indeed I was unaware that I ever got into “states,” yet the expression had evoked sounds of recognition from both Mamma and Constance. “Then,” continued Rosamund, “the party got horrider than ever. We had been playing games but that all stopped, somehow, when the servant was so rude. People did not seem to want to go on. Then they all began to do things, some girls danced and others recited, and they wanted Rose to play the piano. But it was the last straw, the piano was terribly out of tune.”
“Oh, poor Rose!” cried Mamma.
“So Rose said she could not, but of course everybody was doing what they could, so it was a little awkward, and then somebody suggested this trick, and it just happened that Rose was the one who could do it. And she didn’t do it long. And then there was tea, and after it was finished we went into the drawing room, and we would have done what the others were doing, but Nancy’s Mamma sent for Rose, and she started this about fortune-telling. You don’t like her, do you?” she asked, turning a penetrating glance first on Constance, then on Mamma. “Well, she is nicer to grown-ups than she is to children. And Rose never meant to go this afternoon, but Miss Moon was with you when we came back from shopping. So you see that Rose is not to blame at all.” She went back to the childish trick of drawing on the tablecloth with a fork, and again obeyed when she was checked.
This explanation satisfied Constance and Mamma, who then and forever after regarded me as Mrs. Phillips’s victim, but it did not entirely satisfy me, though it had saved me from terrible disgrace. As soon as Rosamund and I were alone after luncheon I said, “But Rosamund, it didn’t happen quite like that at the party,” and she raised her eyebrows in bewilderment and answered, “But it did.”
“No, Rosamund, no,” I said, for my conscience was pricking me. “I was naughtier than that. I did suggest doing the trick, and I did enjoy it when Mrs. Phillips wanted me so terribly to tell her fortune that she nearly went mad offering to give us things.”
“I d-d-did not s-say anything that did not happen,” she protested, stammering very badly.
“I think I had better tell Mamma I really was naughty,” I said.
“But, Rose, if you do that, then my Mamma and your Mamma will think that I was not telling the truth,” she said plaintively.
Perhaps she was as stupid as we sometimes thought her. Indeed the importance of the incident seemed to have passed her by, she evidently did not realize that we had been within a hair’s breadth of one of those terrible clashes between Mamma and myself that had happened once or twice, when we had become fountains of rage and pain. Quite placidly she settled down to do some mending for Mamma, although I was not at ease and had serious qualms that evening when Mamma asked me to come into Papa’s study and talk to her.
“It is a mercy he is out,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you alone, and this is such a little house, and there are so many of us, it is hard to find a place for a private conversation. But if we had a bigger house no doubt we should not be so close together.” She sat down at Papa’s desk and looked proudly round the room and its bookshelves. “So many books, and your Papa has read them all. You should be very proud of him. It is a pity we do not live in some country where clever men are honoured.”
She had grown much younger since morning. “Is Richard Quin much better?” I asked.
“Yes, the doctor is astonished, he is so much improved. But it was because I was so anxious about him that I was cross with you this morning when Mrs. Phillips came. Rose, I do not know how to say it to you, but do not ever do any thought-reading or anything like that again.”
“I promise, Mamma.”
“Oh, it is not to please me. It is because it is really dangerous. You see, you are allowed to read the newspapers now. I hope you will not attach too much importance to them. They give you a picture of an ordinary world that does not exist. You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.”
“Yes, Mamma.”
“It is always wrong to have anything to do with the supernatural. When the dead come back, or the future is no longer a mystery, then there is doubt and filth. Th
ere should not be if the world were what it is represented in the newspapers, but it is never that. We are for some reason meant to live within limits, as music lives within a certain range of sound, and within a structure of rhythm. But you know all that. Well, if we do not live within limits, it all goes wrong.”
“Yes, Mamma.”
“So you see, you did a thought-reading trick at a party and then that brought Mrs. Phillips to this house.”
“Yes, Mamma.”
“I am sure of that, I know it,” said Mamma. “And, my dear, you ought to know it too. I would not have taken you to Knightlily Road if I had known about the poltergeist there, but you saw it, and having seen it, do not forget it. It was a hideous thing in itself, and it carried doubt with it. A lot of people came down from a learned society and investigated it, and some of them actually said Rosamund was playing tricks.”
“That was a shame,” I said. “I saw things happen she could not have done.”
“Oh, no, she did not do it,” said Mamma. “She is good, like Richard Quin, good, as other people are not. But it got about the neighbourhood. And other people said that the mischief was done by someone who had the key of the house and crept in and laid traps.” She paused, and I knew that it was Cousin Jock who had been accused. “But there were things happened that not even the most inventive malice could have contrived by natural means.” She paused again; and I thought it possible she was considering whether Cousin Jock could have contrived them by unnatural means. “Oh, Rose,” she said, speaking with some emotion, “if you played enough thought-reading tricks, if you dabbled long enough with the unseen, you might end up a medium, promising fathers and mothers to raise lost children from the grave in a dark room, and sometimes keeping faith with them but sometimes cheating them, and always disturbing the dead and keeping them from their duty. It could happen to any of us, if we let it.”