by Rebecca West
During these walks Rosamund was perfectly happy. She exercised a great influence on my sisters and myself, we looked up to her as our superior, but she was most at home talking with our younger brother, and now he was growing older it was apparent that she was lingering on another plane. He spoke of the facts and ideas he learned at school and from his precocious reading of books and magazines, and she answered him on a nursery-rhyme level. Yet no matter how much she was enjoying her walk with us she always and without complaint turned homeward in time for her to start work again at the proper hour. Indeed that was one of the ways she governed me. I was having difficulties with my playing: my mother’s teaching had brought me, perhaps prematurely, to a stage of technical advancement when the spirit flags and passes through a desert. Rosamund’s biddability, and the calm spectacle offered by her and her mother as they sat with their laps full of pale fine stuffs, their eyes bent on their unhurried hands, always made me conscious that I was apt to get into “states” and sent me back to my piano.
Rosamund’s power to make us calm and industrious was not perfect in its exercise. It included Cordelia in its scope; she played the violin no better, and incessantly. But it left Richard Quin untouched. He was doing well, in a way. We had been apprehensive when he had to move to a school for bigger boys, because he was so good-looking and rather like a girl, and he liked doing things his own way. But he was far more of a success at his school than we were at ours. For one thing, he was good at games. He could do anything he liked with a ball, if he threw one or hit it with a bat or kicked it, it did something which nobody expected but himself, and, laughing, he took advantage of everybody’s astonishment. He could run very quickly too. At his lessons he was good, arithmetic and mathematics were like another game to him, but he was naughty about his homework. He neglected it for his music, but that did not put the score right, for he was not industrious about that either. He was more interested in playing a number of instruments than in playing any of them really well. Like Cordelia, he had absolute pitch, which neither Mamma nor Mary nor I had, and he had a far better musical memory than any of us. He had a violin quite early, one of his teachers had given him one that was in the family. People were always giving him presents. The father of one of the boys gave him a flute, and he had always had a recorder, so with the piano that was four instruments to start with. But he would practise none of them properly. What he enjoyed most was playing the flute or the recorder in the stables or to Rosamund in the garden, making up variations on tunes, sometimes absurd ones, so that you had to laugh, and sometimes making up new tunes, which made Mamma very angry.
I remember her throwing up a bedroom window and leaning out to cry, “What is the use of pouring out that stuff if you will not sit down and learn about harmony and counterpoint?” Like all artists, she feared improvisation, though of course you are not really an artist unless you can improvise. “It is like—it is like—”
“Gargling?” suggested Richard Quin, looking up at her very gravely.
“Yes, that is it, gargling,” she agreed, and banged down the window when he laughed and waved his flute at her.
But it did not really matter. We knew he would be all right in the end. Things went very well for us at this time, for so long as a year, or perhaps even two. Papa enjoyed an unusual period of success and prosperity, as an unlooked-for consequence of his intervention in the Phillips case. About a fortnight later Mr. Pennington drove down in his carriage to see him, and burst into our house, the deep wave in his handsome brown hair quite loose and uncontrolled, so excited was he. As soon as I took him into the study he grasped both Papa’s hands and cried, “Really, I have to apologize to you! I see now that you came to the Commons that afternoon to do my uncle and me the greatest of kindnesses! I quite misunderstood you! You came to give me a warning and my uncle and I thought you were forcing our hands, and didn’t like you any better for it. But, upon my word, if you hadn’t told us what you did we should have been in a terrible mess today!”
“Down, Rover, down,” said my father.
Mr. Pennington cast a puzzled glance about the floor.
“I thought my dog was in here,” explained my father. We had no dog, nor ever had had one. “What exactly has happened?”
“Ludost went mad this morning.”
“Now what does your uncle say about the establishment of a Court of Appeal?” inquired my father.
But Mr. Pennington wanted to tell his story and would not be denied. “And in such a public place too, God knows what we would have done if that poor woman had been hanged, this thing can’t be hushed up, but, if you’ll excuse me, I don’t think what I have to say will much amuse young Miss Rose here, if it is Miss Rose, isn’t it?”
That was all I was to see of him that afternoon, but he was to visit us on many other occasions. He insisted on regarding my father as a benevolent oracle and came to consult him whenever he was troubled by a political perplexity. My father liked his devotion, for he had now few enough disciples, and he also liked the young man’s health and handsomeness, and the candour with which he gaped when he heard something he had never known before. But Papa would have been better pleased if Mr. Pennington had not consulted him about so many matters which Papa thought that a Member of Parliament should understand fairly well before he offered himself for election.
Once, when I went to tell Papa that supper was ready, at the end of such a visit, he said to me, “I understand that you and your sisters think very badly of Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare.”
“Of course we do,” I said. “Who wants to read all that without the poetry?”
“Believe me,” he sighed, “Lambs’ Tales from Edmund Burke is a far more lamentable production.”
“Did they do that? I never heard of it.”
“Oh, this abridgment of Burke’s doctrines is not prepared by the Lambs, but for the use of a lamb.” He suddenly shot up into vigour. “Come now, I should write that pamphlet he wants from me. There is an immense sheep population in this country. Why should they not know the conditions of the field they graze? It is only kind to tell them.”
He wrote several pamphlets on the elements of political theory and on contemporary problems at the instigation of Mr. Pennington, and they were much admired, and he made some money out of them. It very fortunately happened that at this time Mr. Langham brought Papa a scheme for making money out of hitherto unexploited minerals in Australia, which was so vague that Mr. Langham himself had to go out to Ballarat to find out the mere name and address of the waiting fortune; and this meant that though Papa and Mr. Langham lost their money, they lost it at a much slower rate than usual, and anyway it was nearly all what Papa made out of the pamphlets, and that left his salary untouched. Mamma said sometimes, stretching out her long, narrow, bony hands to touch the nearest wood, that she had never been so well satisfied. Papa was busy and happy, and there was no doubt at all now that we were going to be professional pianists. Mamma became apparently more and more anguished about our playing: Jeremiah spoke no more kindly about the tribes of Israel than she did concerning our powers of technique and interpretation. This distress was quite genuine, she knew we were very far from being fit to play Beethoven to Beethoven and Mozart to Mozart in the courts of heaven, which is the impossible aim that all pianists must hold before themselves, but what she thought of us by the standards of earth we gathered from certain lamentations which my father would quite suddenly utter as he went for walks with us or we sat with him in his study. He would express despair at the problem of how we were to make our return from the evening concerts that we were going to give, as we had no lady’s maid to accompany us, and Mamma would not be strong enough to go out so often at night. As he grew older he spoke more and more as from the eighteenth-century enclave that Ireland had been in the nineteenth century, and to him the streets after dark had not yet been cleared of the Mohocks, and were full of open ditches exhaling miasma specially dangerous by night. But for the rest he too seemed content.
It also made for a more placid home that Mary and Richard Quin and I were much easier in our minds about Cordelia. That dated from one summer afternoon, when we went with her and Miss Beevor to a Thames Valley suburb. Cordelia was going to play at a concert in the town hall, and we wanted an hour on the river, for though Papa was grieved by our bad rowing we could now handle a boat well enough to go out by ourselves, and somehow or other we had got hold of money enough to give us a dinghy for an hour and a tip for the man. Of course Cordelia’s concert lasted much longer than an hour, and after we had returned the boat we went and sat in a square outside the town hall, which overlooked the river. It was very pretty. Old people and mothers with prams were sitting on benches, and children were bowling their hoops, and there was a balloon-seller, and the sunlight poured down on these people, and beds of flowers rose between them, dividing them by banks of blue delphiniums, crescents of rosy geraniums, lozenges of lilies. Running alongside the town hall, below a terrace, were beds full of pale pink peonies, at the stage when they are loose swirls held in by bands of curiously prim outer petals. We went to look at them, and saw that along the terrace were tubs of fuchsias, which were a flower dear to us for a family reason. Because the flowers look so like little ballet-dancers Mamma never could remember their name, and she always called them “Taglionis—Vestris—what do I mean?” We thought we would like a closer look at them, and we found a brick staircase beside a toolshed, hidden behind a hedge, which looked as if it would take us up to the terrace, but it made a sharp turn and mounted to a locked doorway at some height in the town hall tower. Mary and I went down again, but Richard Quin called us back. There was an œil-de-bœuf window beside the doorway and he was leaning on the ledge. “I say, come and see Cordelia!” he said.
We looked down into the concert-hall. There was the audience, the backs of their heads towards us, all very still, not a bob or stir out of the flowery hats and brilliantined male scalps; and there on the platform at the end was our sister fiddling away, and keeping them so still. The sight of her was a revelation to us. Till that moment we really had not noticed what she was like, or, rather, what she had come to look like in the last year or so. If one sees people every day one never sees them at all. Now we were viewing her through a lens that made her appear as a stranger. To a degree to be comprehended only by the musical, our eldest sister was to all the rest of the family first and foremost a pervert who insisted on drawing deplorable sounds from the violin. But we were now seeing her in circumstances which presented quite another aspect of her. For the window was closed, it was not made to open. Not the faintest sound penetrated the thick glass and the heavy imperforate metal casing. What we saw had its disadvantageous musical significance. We could see her bowing horribly, but not a rasp reached us. We could see her faulty stance waver and knew her tone must do worse than waver, it must wobble, but we did not hear it. We could see a phrase slide to sheer grease, we could see her resort to a sledge-hammer pizzicato, but for us the silence was unbroken. However, we saw clearly enough that though Cordelia’s violin-playing was a blot on the family name, Cordelia playing the violin was an occasion for pride and glory.
She was, of course, deliciously pretty. We had always known that, and I think we knew too, though we could not then have put it into words, that any sensible female would rather be pretty than beautiful. Cordelia had her tight red-gold curls, her white skin, her large eyes, set just the right distance apart, her neatly incised features, so definitely drawn that as we looked down into the hall we could recognize, even at that distance, the amusing character of her face, its delicate stubbornness, its solemn, innocently contentious simplicity. Also she was exquisite in detail, her wrists and ankles were slender, and her throat was long, but there was a trick in her proportions which suggested that she was really as sturdy as a little pony; and this was a teasing, challenging contradiction. She was now, however, much more than just this pretty girl. When she came to the end of whatever it was that she was playing, she lowered her bow and curtsied. At the beginning of her career she had affected a foolish surprise because the audience was clapping her, though obviously what would have surprised her would have been if they had booed. But now she was incapable of that or any other vulgarity, her body lacked the necessary resources. To this applauding audience she merely continued to present her loveliness, clouded with a tender smile. They would not forget her. They were flailing their hands together, which might have have been made of cotton-wool as far as our ears were concerned, but must have been raising far more noise than one would have expected to hear in a suburban town hall at an afternoon concert.
Certainly Cordelia had not given these people music. But she had given them something, something, something which reminded me of the hour we had just spent on the Thames, watching the glassy river run past our plunging oars, the water netted like cracked glass, watching the network spread and break and broaden the green images of the trees on the banks, till we floated on the greenness of green, on the glassiness of glass. She reminded me of the pink peonies in the beds outside, and I was not wide of the mark. Then, and all through the years to come, Cordelia was to be one of those women whose flesh betrays nothing of the human trouble that is within, and who refreshes the eye like water, trees, and flowers.
“I tell you what,” exclaimed Mary, “we needn’t worry about Cordelia. She’ll get married.”
“Get married!” I repeated. “Of course, she would, like a shot, if we were an ordinary family. But you know quite well none of us will ever get married. We don’t know anybody we could marry.”
This conviction of my parents had increased with the years, and we were well acquainted with it. They had matched the circumstances of their youths with our situation, and felt despair. When Papa was young he had seen that the young women of his family married as soon as young men of equally distinguished families looked round for handsome and agreeable and not destitute wives, and when their fathers could agree about settlements. Mamma, brought up in the less elegant but still lively and prosperous world of Edinburgh professional and musical society, regarded marriage as the result of shaking up a number of young men and women at such festivities as dances, musical evenings, picnics, and parties given on such occasions as New Year’s Eve, or Halloween, or Midsummer’s Night, at which natural attractions would declare themselves with some slight financial bias. Papa, as I knew, was capable of forgetting the fact of our existence at moments when he should have been most careful to remember it, but from time to time suffered agonies because he realized that we were never going to be presented at court and that the Irish landowners who might have been our husbands could in all probability never hear of our existence; and Mamma often surveyed the social stagnation of Lovegrove and never at any time saw a professor of Greek improvising iambic pentameters as he ladled out egg-nog at midnight, or Hans von Bülow dropping in for supper. They had thought we had better realize the worst. We thought it not bad at all. How, Mary had impatiently asked me more than once, did they think that we could run a big house and look after a husband and children and travel all over the world giving concerts? But we took their word for it that the occasion was not going to arise.
“No, Rose,” said Richard Quin, “Mary is right. Someone will come along and insist on marrying Cordelia.”
“If people fall in love at all,” said Mary, “and novels and poetry seem to be about almost nothing else, far too much, really, and they can’t have suddenly stopped doing it, some stranger will see Cordelia in the street, and arrange to get to know us, and will ask Papa’s permission to marry her, and there we are, she will be happy, and there will be no more nonsense about playing the violin.”