by Rebecca West
Still, it would have helped if Papa had seemed to hear what I had said. But he continued, “When I go to prison, however, that will not be the end of this affair. For I have written a second pamphlet which will be published as soon as the jail doors close on me. In this I do not attack Mr. Justice Ludost as much as I attack your uncle the Home Secretary. It will be impossible to suppress this pamphlet. It is not contempt of court to attack a politician, and I have been scrupulously careful to avoid making any statement which could possibly be the basis for a prosecution under the libel laws. You may remember how impossible it was to prosecute me for any statement made in the Turner pamphlet. That was so partly because they were all true, partly because I exercised an ingenuity which really gave the pamphlet a parallel existence in the spheres of literature and the game of chess. It will, you realize, be generally known that I have been sent to prison for saying that Mr. Justice Ludost is mad and that his conduct of the trial of Queenie Phillips was shameful. My second pamphlet will reprint reports in northern newspapers which give accounts of what happened at the trials of certain women criminals which took place before Mr. Justice Ludost on the Northern Circuit during the last few weeks. They provide evidence that the man is mad. But I shall not say so. I shall simply say that certain persons present at these trials laid the facts revealed in these cuttings before the Home Secretary. Some of those trials took place in your constituency and several of your constituents wrote to you about them. You and he got those letters, for you acknowledged them.”
“Now how can you know that?” wondered Mr. Pennington.
“After the first morning of the trial I got to work,” said my father. “I found out what had been his last circuit, and I sent Langham—”
“What, do you still hunt in couples?” asked Mr. Pennington, with intense distaste.
“The world will think he comes off far better in this business than you do,” said my father. “He believes in liberty, and he takes my word for truth, and he went up north and at my direction found the historic truth in the places where it is warehoused by the bale and nobody ever looks for it, the offices of local newspapers. There were the reports you saw; and the men who had written to you and to your uncle had written to their local newspapers also, and could be traced, and were still angry. I have to own that several of them were your political opponents, and I would not stake my life on the purity of their resentment, but what they did serves my purpose.”
“But these northern trials were nothing like as bad as what you say happened at the Old Bailey!” protested Mr. Pennington. “And it’s very awkward, my uncle found out there was nothing he could do. There’s no way of removing a judge.”
“The northern trials were nothing like so bad as the trial of Queenie Phillips,” my father agreed, “and indeed your uncle is quite helpless. There is no way of removing a judge, nor should there ever be, lest barbarism come back again, and politicians try to deprive the people of their liberties. But let us remind you that every sentence in the second pamphlet will have a force superior to argument. It will be written by a man in prison, and that is always a great thing with the mob. I will write with the authority of a martyr; and I will have behind me the support of quite a number of reasonable citizens who prefer judges to be in their right mind, and of a huge army of idiots who believe Queenie Phillips to be innocent. For no better causes than these, people will believe every word I write and make a saint and hero of me, and will think your uncle a monster, and you another, though on a smaller scale. Say that Mr. Brackenbird will be a minotaur, Queenie Phillips having been by that time converted by popular legend into a virgin sacrifice, and you will be a gryphon, a mirror monster, but still a monster. When Mr. Justice Ludost is certified as insane, as he certainly will be in a very short time, the popular image of you two will not be improved, and it will be very black indeed if in the meantime you have hanged Queenie. I have written this pamphlet as well as I have ever written anything in my life and the dirt will stick to you both till the day you die.”
“I could remind you,” said Mr. Pennington, “that I once did you a kindness.”
“You would not balance a kindness, however considerable both you and I might think it, against a tribunal which would preserve the law from the corruption of the flesh,” my father said. “Or,” he added as an afterthought, “against the life of Queenie Phillips. For surely you understand what I’m telling you.”
“No, except that it’s disagreeable.”
“I have been trying to convey to you that neither the first nor the second pamphlet will be published if Queenie Phillips is reprieved,” said my father, “but that they will be issued later in one form or another unless your uncle withdraws his opposition to the establishment of a Court of Appeal. Now my daughter and I must go. The first pamphlet will be issued in three days’ time. Ten thousand of each are in the printing.”
“This is blackmail,” said Mr. Pennington.
“I understand that blackmailers hear that superfluous remark constantly,” said my father, “but I never hear of any but the least intelligent practitioners of the art begging their bread from door to door. I shall expect your uncle to reprieve Queenie Phillips.”
“My uncle is not a man you can threaten.”
“I do not hope that he will give in to my threats,” said my father. “When he reads my pamphlet he will see that Mr. Justice Ludost did in fact behave like a lunatic and that Queenie Phillips had nothing that could be called a trial, and he will not wish to defend what is morally indefensible. Then my threats will help the parts of him which are not on the same moral level to come to an agreement. But we must go.”
Mr. Pennington, however, seemed reluctant to part from us. “I say,” he said. “You pamphleteers. You really are an extraordinary race. You and Wilkes and Voltaire and Mirabeau—”
“And Milton,” suggested my father. “As unpleasant a set of men as I can imagine.”
“But you believe all you say, don’t you?” persisted the large, puzzled man. “You mean you’d go to prison for the sake of all this, don’t you? Oh, I believe you. When I came up and you were asleep, I looked at your face and really you—” He gave up. By a weak gesture he indicated that he had found my father more admirable then than when awake. “And there’s so much you don’t seem to think of.” I guessed, from a wavering of his gesture, that he meant me. “Can’t you,” he demanded, “just be a writer and not keep getting into all these fights? Our lot could find you work to do. You’re a magnificent writer. I’ll never forget that first article of yours I ever saw. Why, the other evening I read it again, and in spite of all that’s happened I think it’s wonderful, there’s nobody like you. . . .”
But my father had turned away, in what looked like an arrogant refusal to discuss the challenge he had laid down. His arrogance might have had another appointment elsewhere. But the truth was that he was too tired to go on talking. As he and I went along the corridor between the statues and the frescoes he complained that the floor was rocking under his feet, and that it was not within the strength of any man to write as much as he had written within the last three days. Out in the street his strained eyes blinked at the afternoon light and he said he felt too sick to start on the journey home. We turned our backs on the towers and spires and might of St. Stephen’s, and tried to find some shelter in the mediocre London lying before us not likely to involve us in too great expense. At the corner of Victoria Street there was a tea-shop in a basement, which looked as if it might be dark; and there we found a table in a shaded alcove. Papa asked for specially strong tea and drank cup after cup, and sat back in his chair, and muttered, and forgot me.
I thought how oddly things worked out for the best. In an attempt at decorative fantasy somebody had twisted strands of purple and green cloth round the electric bulbs and the trick looked hideous, but created a half-light in which Papa could rest his eyes and doze. I looked at him to satisfy myself that he was really sleeping and it struck me how fragile was this man wh
o planned to go to prison. No candles were lit in my head this time, but I was again exalted by his bravery. And again I was chilled by his vast indifference to my fate. He had woven a cobweb of thoughts and feelings about his intention to run the risk of imprisonment, and not one of these thoughts and feelings related to me or to any of his family, I had a glorious father, I had no father at all. Moreover, I had understood enough of the conversation in the central lobby to realize that my father had on some occasion treated Mr. Pennington badly, and that his dealings with him during the present crisis were hardly too scrupulous. The force which had taken Aunt Clara’s furniture out of our lives had often been at work elsewhere, and was active at the present moment. But it was how working to protect Aunt Lily and Nancy from a cruel grief. Papa was brave, he was cruel, he was dishonest, he was kind, he said he had ordered ten thousand copies of each pamphlet when he had ordered two thousand, he had this terrible cold way of mentioning Queenie as an afterthought. I might have added to the list of his paradoxical qualities that he was penniless and discredited and enormously powerful; for twenty-four hours later Mr. Brackenbird reprieved Queenie Phillips.
So it happened that one morning we all stood outside the gate, waving good-bye to Aunt Lily as she drove away in a dog-cart with Milly’s husband, a retired bookmaker, a florid bloodhound of a man, who had already asked us to call him Uncle Len. Though we were sorry to see Aunt Lily go, our hearts were light. There had been lifted from our house a horror: if we had still to think of Queenie as a block of blackness compressed into a cell too small for it, we had not to think of anything worse. There was also lifted from us the heavy burden of good works too long continued: at last the piano was ours alone, we need not fear that Aunt Lily would seat herself at it, and, to cheer us up, would play by ear (in her case a most treacherous organ) popular songs of the day with the loud pedal down; we need not, if a stray dog ran into the garden or a thrush hopped on the window-sill, nerve ourselves till we heard, “My daddy won’t buy me a bow-wow,” or “The little bird said twee-twee.” The relief was enormous, though we dearly loved Aunt Lily and were glad to see her go away in the charge of such a kind man. For he was very kind, though oddly realistic. We had heard him say, as he took sherry and a biscuit with Papa in the sitting room while Aunt Lily did the last of her packing, that everybody had warned him against marrying Milly, and he had just told them to mind their own business, though he knew what they meant. But they had been wrong. She had gone as straight as a die ever since, he repeated twice. A better wife he couldn’t have wished for, and if she said she wanted Lily behind the bar at the Dog and Duck, she had to have her. But he had to admit that Aunt Lily wasn’t what he had hoped to see in his licensed premises, particularly after Ruby, who had been a good-looking girl.
“That face,” he said sadly, his jowls hanging the heavier; and he said it again when Mamma came down to see him and told him how impressed we had been by Aunt Lily’s loyalty to her sister, and the depth of her unselfish grief. His air suggested that perhaps Mamma was making too much of troubles that would pass, whereas what he deplored was a permanent tragedy. But he meant well by her, he hoped to mitigate that tragedy. When she cried at leaving us as she got up into the dog-cart, he smacked her on the behind and told her to turn off the waterworks, very tenderly.
When they had clattered out of sight Mamma, her arm in Papa’s, sighed, “Well, that is over,” and we all went back into the house, Kate, who was the last, shutting the door with a ceremonial bang. Cordelia ran upstairs and started her violin practice, the rest of us went into the sitting room. Richard found his three balls that he used for juggling and went out into the garden. Mary hung about the piano, longing for Mamma to start her lesson. We would have expected Papa to go straight to his study, but he seemed to want to be with us. He went to the table where the sherry and biscuits were, and took a biscuit, and stood nibbling it at the french windows. We each took a biscuit too, and went and ate them beside him.
He said to Mamma, “Look, Clare, all the bushes are in leaf, most of the trees. It is nearly summer. This thing began in midwinter.”
She sighed. “Yes, Piers, it has been very long for the poor creatures.”
“It has been very long for you,” he said.
“Long for all of us,” she told him, “longest for you, with all the other things you have to do. Oh, what you did for them! And I have had no time to ask how you did it.”
“I hardly know myself,” he answered with determined lightness. “But it is not what one does so much as the way that while one does it time runs past forever. You always take such pleasure in the spring, you have seen nothing of this one.”
“Well, we will make up for that, we must get some days at Kew and Richmond,” she said, “and it will be lovely for the children if you could take them out on the river.”
“Yes, I must do that,” he said, and after we had nibbled in silence for a minute or two, he said, sadly, “It is a pity we are so far from the river, none of the children can row properly. My brothers and I all learned on the lake when we were far younger than Richard Quin.”
“Oh, it will come, my dear, you are so good with them,” said Mamma. She nibbled on, staring out through the window, and murmured, “In justice, a most tiresome man. But still a terrible woman.” Something outside caught her attention, she choked on her crumb, she waved her biscuit at the garden to show she had seen something of great moment out there, and would give us news of it as soon as she could. “The second lilac in that row of four is almost out, see, it has several flowers,” she proclaimed. “It is always the first of the lilacs to bloom. Now, why should that be?” Her mouth fell open at the mystery. Then she went on, “I always think that it looks so nice when the lilacs are out and Rosamund and Richard Quin play their games amongst them. Would you mind, my dear, if I had Constance and Rosamund to stay, now the room is free?”
“No, no,” said Papa eagerly.
13
THE LILACS were fully out when Constance and Rosamund came to stay with us. Richard Quin and I took the luggage up to their room and then went down and sat on the iron steps that led from the sitting room into the garden, and waited for Rosamund. We supposed we would first go round the stables, and though we were now all too old to go on pretending with made-up animals, we thought we might recall the days when such play was possible by greeting Cream and Sugar, Caesar and Pompey. But when Rosamund came down there hung over her arm a billow of white taffeta, and she told us that she must finish making a petticoat. I exclaimed in distress, for it was the kind of female garment that my sisters and I bitterly resented and thought an insult to our native force. At that time schoolgirls were dressed sensibly enough and we were happy enough in blouses and skirts joined by petersham belts with silver buckles, but the adult costume of our sex waited for us round the next bend in the path, as a handicap and a humiliation, heavy, crippling, loaded with rows of buttons and hooks and eyes that were always coming off and had to be sewn on again, and boned in all sorts of places where bones break. I thought she had gone into slavery before she need.
“You’re not going to wear that?” I asked furiously.
Laughing, she shook her head. It was astonishing how her golden simplicity dispelled Queenie’s blackness. Then she stammered out that now she and her mother were sewing for a shop in Bond Street.
“But why? Your Papa has lots of money,” I raged.
“He does not like to spend it.” She smiled.
“But that is horrible,” I said. “Our Papa cannot give us enough money because he keeps on gambling it away, in the hope of making a lot more. But if he ever won anything he would give it all except what he kept to go on gambling. But do you mean to say your Papa has it and doesn’t gamble and doesn’t give you any?”
Richard Quin said, “Never mind. One Papa with another, it works out that we all have nothing, and we can break that into as many pieces as we like, you can do that with nothing, there will be a share for us all.”
“
I will make my cakes of nothing, then everybody in the world can have a slice,” said Rosamund, beginning to sew.
“What does nothing taste like?”
She thought. “Nice nothing or horrid nothing?”
“Both.”
“Nice nothing is like lemon sponge. Horrid nothing is like a very thin dusty biscuit, I can’t think of its name.”
“It can’t have a name if it is nothing.”
“But then you can’t call it a biscuit.”
“I didn’t call it a biscuit, you did. It is your bit of nothing. You are giving me nothing and expecting me to find names for it, it is not fair.” He took some strands of her golden hair and pulled it, she threw back her head and laughed at him.
They were not serious-minded. I said, “But look here, about this money—”
“Oh, of course it is very silly,” said Rosamund, getting on with her sewing, “but Mamma says we would be worse off if he were a really poor man, or if he were dead. And we are both very fond of sewing, you know.”
They were indeed as tranquil as could be, though their situation was, as I afterwards came to realize, as exasperating as ever wife and daughter suffered. Cousin Jock was so able that his firm not only paid him a considerable salary as chief accountant but had made him a director of one of its subsidiary companies; but he refused to move from Knightlily Road and he could have been said to live like a poor man, had he not spent large sums on spiritualism. He passed half his evenings playing the flute and the other half taking part in séances; and he even imported mediums from the Continent and supported them for weeks while societies investigated their claims. So little did he give to Constance and Rosamund that, even though they were with us only at holidays or at weekends, they had to bring their sewing with them. But they explained in a good-tempered way that they needed to work continuously because they were so slow, and indeed by their industry they introduced an element of contented leisure into our household, they set an easier pace. They used to settle down on the lawn in two deep wicker chairs we had found in the house when we came, lay clean cloths on their laps, and bring out of bags the lengths of silk and batiste they had to prepare for women who were probably not richer than themselves but were not persecuted by their natural protectors; and very comfortably they would work for some hours. The scallops flowed round the hem of a petticoat under Constance’s fingers, very slowly, as the shadows of the grove behind them moved across the lawn; and Rosamund built stitches on the bosom of a nightdress till, as gradually as a bud changes to a flower, they made a monogram. In the afternoons we went walking, Richard Quin always at Rosamund’s side, going the round of the loved exceptional places children always find in their environment, remembering at the right season to peer through the railings at the house which had so long been empty that the rose-trees had all gone back to briars and were now bushes standing higher than the shuttered ground-floor windows, covered with flat coppery flowers. We had some new pleasures too. Richard Quin was very good at arithmetic and mathematics, and he had a liking for numbers as things in themselves. As we went up a long dull street he would pause in delight when we came to a house with a number that was one of those prime numbers which are four times something plus one and can always be expressed as the sum of two squares. About these he felt as somebody fond of roses might feel in a garden full of them when he came on one rose that was larger and brighter and more fragrant than the others; and of course they were the same to us. He wrote out a table of these prime numbers, and we took it about with us. We had a rapturous moment when, in an endless and horrid street with many shops, we found Number 281 before he noticed it.