The Fountain Overflows

by Rebecca West

  As he filled the glass he looked very handsome, for his skin was flushed with hurry and his features clear-cut with scorn. Cousin Jock looked up at him, and let his own beauty come back to him. He ceased to leer, again he might have been a young poet when a great poetical age was young. He asked, “You play the flute yourself, don’t you, laddy?”

  Richard Quin shocked us all by answering, “Not a note.”

  Cousin Jock opened his mouth as if he were going to protest that he had often been told otherwise. But he closed it again. He recognized that Richard Quin was playing his own game, he was being insolent and letting it be seen that he knew he was seen to be insolent. At last Cousin Jock said slowly, and with no comedian accent, “No? Then I was wrong. But I play the flute. I will play it for you now.”

  He rose, paused for an instant. He was taller than we thought, when he stretched up his long delicate hand and turned out the lights in the gas chandelier he looked very tall. While the last whiteness turned to rose in the incandescent mantles, he went out and got his flute from the hall. While he was gone we were all silent. Mamma’s eyes went to the windows, which were still uncurtained though the darkness had fallen. There was an oblong of light on the lawn, which meant Papa was working in his study. Constance filled her chair with her usual monumental calm, but Rosamund went and sat at her feet, bending her head back so that her golden hair flowed onto her mother’s lap; I had seen her do this before when she thought her mother sad, it was a remote form of caress. Cousin Jock came back into the room, quiet as a spectre, and took his stand at the fireplace. We could see nothing of him through the gloom but his fair hair and the whiteness of his shirt.

  A note from a flute is like the call of a young owl through the summer night. It is extraordinary that the flute should make what seems so like a simple, natural sound and should be so subtle in its work, with the paradoxical power of lingering on the ear, and yet responding to the player’s fingers and tongue and breath with a readiness that makes it one of the most agile of instruments. When I had heard Cousin Jock play before it had seemed to me he played too perfectly; it was as if he had sold his soul to the devil for power of performance and naturally enough performed without a soul. But now his playing failed in transmitting no part of the triple mystery in the music he chose, which was the famous flute solo from Gluck’s Orpheus and the familiar variations on it. That passage is sublime as pure sound; the mere relationship between the notes must cause delight. It is also a perfect description of the situation of Orpheus and Eurydice at that particular moment in the opera. It also states what is felt by all human beings when they have suffered a deep grief which is still, because they are not barbarians, within control, but is yet irreparable, even if its consequences should be afterwards annulled. Gluck described what filled my mother’s heart when her eyes looked through the window into the dark garden and saw the square of light on the lawn. He described what Constance must have felt within her large marmoreal body as she was confronted with the grotesque disturber of her peace. That was another mystery, that the man who disturbed her peace should transmit Gluck’s restoration of it.

  When he came to an end we sat silent in the darkness. So I was not prepared for it when my mother burst out, in the full flood of impatience, “Jock, nobody could play the flute like that with ill-fitting dentures. I do not believe you have false teeth at all.”

  “So far as I know he has not,” said Constance.

  “He would not have them, since he is so young for his age,” my mother angrily pursued. “Jock, why must you play the clown? Mrs. O’Shaughnessy! That way of talking Scotch! When you can play the flute like that! Why must you try to spoil everything?”

  He answered with no more accent than herself, “Life is so terrible. There is nothing to do with it but break it down into nonsense.”

  “Terrible?” asked Mamma in surprise.

  “What’s the good of music,” he asked, “if there’s all this cancer in the world?”

  There came a voice out of the darkness, speaking so earnestly that it was shaken with tears. “What’s the harm in cancer, if there’s all this music in the world?”

  I knew that Mamma and Mary and Richard Quin would be as disconcerted as I was by this brave answer, for it was Cordelia who had given it, Cordelia who would never know what music was. It was as if Cousin Jock had not gone far enough, it was as if life were breaking itself down into nonsense. Mamma said, “Light the gas, please, Richard Quin,” and we were all suddenly visible, blinking under the brightness, still pleased and startled by the beautiful music we had heard, and confused by the interchange that had followed it. Mamma looked tenderly at Cordelia and said, “We must leave those poor souls who have cancer, please God we all may be spared, to work out that argument.” Then she turned her eyes to Cousin Jock, who had gone back to his chair and was sitting with his face in his hands. “Why, Jock!” she said. Of course she felt kindly to him now, nobody could dislike a man who played the flute like that, no matter what he was like. “We all love you when you are reasonable. And from today you can ask my children for anything you want. None of them will forget your playing till the last day of their lives. Drink your beer, eat your sandwich.”

  He answered into his hands, “Oh, thank you, my dear, but I want nothing. I never want anything now. I cannot bear this ugly world we live in.”

  “Do you want us to come back with you?” asked Constance.

  “I would be very grateful,” said Cousin Jock, humbly. “I hoped you would. I have the brougham outside.”

  “We have only to pack, dear,” said Constance, “and we will not take long.”

  “God bless you,” said Cousin Jock.

  “Is there anything that you would like better than that ham sandwich?” asked Mamma. “We could heat some soup. I have an idea you have not eaten all day. Oh, why did you not take up the flute professionally?”

  “I will do the packing, Mamma,” said Rosamund. “We did not bring many clothes. We have not many clothes to bring.”

  I went up to help her. In the intoxication of listening to the Gluck music I had quite forgotten our disaccord in the kitchen. Now I was merely sorry that she was going away, but I no longer saw her as showing cowardly submission to a tyrannous and repulsive parent. Cousin Jock had established himself in my mind as the possessor of a unique talent, and if he showed strange and inconvenient preferences I was willing to admit that Rosamund might know something else about him which justified her in gratifying them. But this time it was she who seemed reluctant to go. Leisurely as she always was in her movements, she was now almost provoking in her refusal to hurry over her packing; and when we went into the bedroom I shared with my sisters, in order to see if one of her nightdresses had been put among ours, she sat down on my bed, and looked about her, and shuffled her feet on the floor as if she were practising a dance-step, and showed every sign of defiant loitering.

  It was unlike her, she was always so dutiful. I was surprised too when she pointed her finger at each of the three copies of family portraits which hung over our beds: at the Gainsborough cat-woman crowned with a sugar-loaf of plumes and gauze; at the Lawrence calm woman, so like Mary, who though her tight Empire bodice was cut so low seemed fully clothed in her reserve; at our mischievous great-grand-aunt, with her bright curls, her bright eyes, the bright jewels on her head and on her hands and arms, her bright gold cup. For it was with such sharp irony that my cousin said, “What sensible Papas those ladies must have had.”

  “Why, how can you tell that?” I asked.

  “They could not have had all those lovely dresses and those jewels and feathers and cloaks, or looked so smooth and content, if their Papas had not stayed quiet and got on with what they had to do.”

  This was a new idea to me, and I was shocked. Temperamentally I was born to acquiesce in patriarchy.

  “But they have so much to think about,” I said vaguely.

  “Have they?” she asked. “They leave themselves little time to think,
they make such a fuss about everything. Oh, really,” she said, laughing, “I get very tired of it all. It is like bulls. Why should a bull roar and stamp the ground and blow out of his nostrils and chase poor people that cross the field where he is, just because he is a bull? It can’t be any more difficult to be a bull than to be a cow.” She swung up her feet and lay flat on the bed, her gold curls spilling over my pillow, and laughed up at me. “Silly Papas, silly Papas.”

  “But Mamma says that men have quite different sorts of minds, not better but different, and can do work we cannot,” I said.

  “Oh, I am not talking of their work,” said Rosamund, “it is all the states they get into. Your Papa goes on and on about the world falling into ruin. But what would that mean but that a whole lot of people are going to live as he has made you and your Mamma live? And if my Papa is so sad because life is terrible, why does he do so little to make it less terrible for my Mamma and me? If he feels so horrified at the thought of people getting cancer, might it not occur to him that Mamma and I are just as likely to get cancer as anybody else and let us have a little gaiety?”

  “Yes, they are awful, when you come to think of it,” I said. “But they cannot help it. Nobody teaches bulls to bellow and stamp, it is their nature. But we must go. Mamma is calling us.”

  She made no move to rise, and went on, “And think how foolish they will look later on.”

  “When? Why?” I asked, rather tartly. I felt this conversation to be impious.

  “Well, the world must be getting worse, if they say so,” she explained. “Both your Papa and my Papa are very clever. So life is not so hard as it is going to be when we are grown up. But our Papas are doing very well in the present. Someone always saves your Papa at the last moment, and my Papa makes lots of money. But as for you and me, and Cordelia and Mary and Richard Quin, all the trouble the Papas foresee will come down on us. It is we who will have to bear the hardships and do heroic things.” She broke into laughter that was malicious, but only gently so. “Oh, the Papas will seem such fuss-and-botherers then.”

  I felt dazed as I followed her downstairs. This was not such a surprising conversation for the period when feminism was spreading like a forest fire, even in households like ours, where the father vehemently disapproved, and the mother was too busy to consider it, and no propagandist literature entered the home. We were, after all, only a year or so below the age when we might have gone to the university, had we had that sort of mind, and many girl undergraduates at that time might have discussed their fathers as disrespectfully, though not so artlessly. But I was as startled as I had been at Nancy Phillips’s party when Rosamund, whom we all supposed tone-deaf, had turned to me and remarked that the piano was slightly out of tune. She never criticized anybody. Her comments were invariably bland. When we had raged against Cordelia’s violin-playing she had always pointed out (what we afterwards had seen to be the real issue at stake) that she looked charming when she was playing the violin, that nearly everybody had ugly elbows but hers were beautiful. But now Rosamund had laid an axe at the roots of a tree which I did not care to identify; and I was displeased too because she mocked at what angered her. It was the way in our family to hate without humour, and now it seemed to me that was the only fair way of fighting. You did not hit people below the belt or take from them their seriousness. But I had to admit that this did not apply. She had not spoken as if she hated either my father or her father; she only laughed at them, lying on my bed among her spilled golden hair.

  But it could not be said that she was wrong. The next few weeks were to prove abundantly that fathers behaved surely more strangely than was necessary. We were all unhappily aware that Papa’s friendships passed through a cycle. A man would give my father over years unstinted admiration and would give or lend him money. It could be believed only by those who have had a gambler in the family how poor we were in our childhood, and how large the sums acquired in the same period by our father, as earnings and gifts and loans that became gifts. Then my father’s unpunctuality and irrationality, and his instant and contemptuous rupture of any arrangement made for his benefit which required patience and some reciprocal effort, would become more than any admirer could bear without protest. My father never became aware of these protests; he was aware that people kept on making them, but then organ-grinders kept on grinding out popular tunes on their barrel organs, and obviously he would not be expected to pay them any attention. But at the same time he would tire of his friend, for reasons that were genuine enough. No ordinary intelligence could long satisfy the demands he made from his intellectual companions. Then the friend, to save his pride, would announce that his patience was exhausted, and there would be a long quarrel late at night, ending with a banged door; and afterwards Mamma would reproach Papa for his unkindness and Papa would answer with his mocking laugh and go out to pace the garden.

  Then years would pass, and my father would suffer some conspicuous misfortune. The friend would return, glad to have an excuse for finding his way back to the enjoyment of my father’s charm. It salved his pride that he could appear in the guise of a Good Samaritan, and it was usually true that he was the kind of man who found a real pleasure in benevolence. My father’s response was always a quite honest welcome. He was not interested in his friend as a Good Samaritan, because, though he had often been rescued, he had never noticed it. But he was eager to know what his friend had been thinking about of late. The man was certain to have a fairly good brain, or he would not have been admitted to my father’s intimacy in the first place; and though my father had exhausted its contents at the date of the breach, it must by this time have accumulated fresh material. So there would follow long and enthralling conversations, which would break up only when the friend left our house in the early hours of the morning, full of an elation which would presently engender a desire to relieve my father’s anxieties and give him a chance to do his work untroubled. Papa would at once spend the money on some speculation which, he would say, was bound to end all this dependence on his friends, which was always irksome, however good they were. The cycle then started all over again.

  But now we were really alarmed. This time Papa was not turning against a friend who had given or lent him money, he was turning against the friend who, through the years, had helped him to lose it; and this, given my father’s temperament, was quite unnatural. He had at last tired of Mr. Langham. This man had been a familiar of our household since we arrived in London, and we thought him one of the dullest people we had ever met, dull even for a man, and we thought men much the duller sex. He was tall and thin, it had puzzled us in our naive youth that Mamma had long ago in Scotland called him “a little, little man.” He had a gliding walk, and always reminded us of an eel in his City uniform of morning coat and top hat, and the neatness of his rolled-up umbrella seemed to us very prissy; and when he put on sporting checks, for he was not insensible to the gaieties of life, he still looked dull inside the checks. He had a pale and undistinguished oval face, which was always harrowed by a sense of impending political doom, due to the advance of socialism, and by affectionate and lugubrious concern for my father. Nothing he said ever interested us, which I am now willing to concede was not his fault. He had taken a First in Natural Philosophy at Cambridge, and in between his disastrous attempts at making a fortune in the City he engaged in some mathematical studies of statistics which were of permanent value. But to us he was a dull old family retainer, and we did not like to see Papa turn him away.

  But if Mr. Langham came when Papa was in, he was no longer welcomed. Papa was polite to him, even tender, but hardly spoke to him. Mamma would find the two men sitting silent in the study, drawing on their pipes, and would send in Richard Quin, to ask advice about something he was painting, or one of his lessons, so that there could be a basis for some sort of talk. This would smooth over that particular visit, for Richard Quin’s tact was perfect, and every stranger presented him with a technical problem which he enjoyed solving. It was m
ore difficult when Papa made appointments with Mr. Langham and forgot all about them. Then Richard Quin would do his best to follow up things that he had noticed interested Mr. Langham, they would talk about mathematics, and Cordelia would talk to him like a grown-up, and Mamma would give him whisky, which, such was her pity for him, she had bought out of her meagre housekeeping money just for the purpose of solacing him on these wounding occasions. At first he used to like sitting quietly and talking to us about Papa and how wonderful he was, and all about the wonderful times they had had together in the past, such as Papa’s famous debate with the red-haired young Irish Socialist named George Bernard Shaw, which had begun at seven o’clock one evening in a small hall somewhere near the Gray’s Inn Road, and when that closed had been carried on in various public places till the police interfered and they had to move on, and ended on the steps of St. Paul’s at two in the morning. But presently Mr. Langham stayed not nearly so long. I think he dreaded the moment when we would hear the key in the front door, and Papa would come in and look at him with a dead eye, instead of plunging at once into a mournful denunciation of Municipal Trading or the growing contempt for States Rights in the United States, asked how he was, with a weary civility which spoke of iciness struggling to thaw itself. So the poor man would come at the exact appointed hour, hoping against hope that the miracle had happened and he was restored to favour, and he would go as soon as it became certain that he had again been scorned.

  Mr. Langham tried to do that very thing as promptly as might be, one late afternoon, when he arrived and found that not only was Papa absent at the appointed hour, but that Mamma was out shopping. Kate brought up the whisky and biscuits, and he listened to Mary playing a Chopin “Nocturne,” and he told Richard Quin how he had seen Lord Hawke bowling at Hove a fortnight before; and then he sadly said he must go. But just then we heard the front door open, and Mr. Langham sank happily back into his chair, saying, “Not so late after all, not for him, I don’t know why I was so impatient.”