by Rebecca West
“Before he went,” repeated Richard Quin. “Mamma, has Papa really gone away?”
“Yes,” she sighed, and went over to the chimney-piece.
“What do you think was inside it?” asked Mary harshly.
“I don’t know, dear,” Mamma answered languidly. Then her voice rose, as if in hope. “All sorts of things may have been in there.” She put her hand inside the cupboard, and suddenly cried, “Oh, look. Oh, look.” She held up to us some lengths of string, some of them joined by knots caked with red sealing-wax, and her face was flooded with joy. We gathered round her to see if we could detect her reason for relief, and to our blank faces she explained. “There were some packets in here, valuable packets. It must be so. People do not seal up packets with this sort of string unless there is something valuable inside. Oh, thank God, children, thank God, your father had something to take away with him, he has not gone out into the world penniless.”
We did not respond. She cried again, “You must be thankful, dears. Your father will have something.”
“Yes, Mamma,” said Mary, “but Papa might have thought of you and left something behind of what he found.”
“Yes, he might have thought of his children,” said Cordelia. “I don’t mean myself. I shall be all right in a year or two. But there are the others.”
“Oh, hush,” cried Mamma. “You do not understand.”
“I don’t care what was in the cupboard,” said Richard Quin. “But I do think he might have told us it was there.”
I was remembering how I had felt in the lobby of the House of Commons when I had realized that Papa proposed to go to prison without sparing a thought for his family and how they were to live. I thought it would be heaven if I could shut my eyes and open them again and find myself standing beside him in that brown place, while I said fiercely, “He should have thought of you, Mamma.”
“No,” she said, “children, you do not understand. I will tell you afterwards, but I cannot now, this morning has been too much for me. As I was coming downstairs, I looked down on the hall table, and I saw the letter lying there, and though he has often left notes out for me, asking me to call him or let him sleep, he has never put the sheet of paper in an envelope before, and I knew there must be something wrong. I knew exactly what was wrong. It is what it all meant, what has been happening for a long time, though none of us dared put a name to it. But do not worry about yourselves, children, you need only be sorry for your Papa. You will be all right, at least I think so, I do not know what the amount will be. I thought your Papa had gone out into the world empty-handed, and thank God, thank God, he has not.” But then she halted, her joy fell from her, she lamented, “But what is the use of that? Whatever the value of what he took with him, he will gamble the money away in no time, he will be penniless, and now he will be all alone.”
“Mamma, it will be all right,” said Richard Quin. “If Papa has money for just a little time, he will find somebody else like Mr. Langham, and they will go about together, and he will meet people, and you know how much people like him to begin with.”
“Yes,” said Mamma, “and he likes them too. But they are so hard on him in the end. I cannot think why nobody trusts him.” We were silent, and her words evidently rang in her own ears as disputable. “People distrust him before he has done anything untrustworthy,” she explained, but still she knew it was not right. “Oh, if people would only consider the large things in him and not the small!” she raged. “And you, I hope you will not think me too wicked when I tell you everything. You promise you will remember that I have always struggled to do what I could for you children?”
Puzzled, we assured her that of course we knew it well, and she puzzled us further by saying, “That is the trouble.” But she went no further, for Constance said from the doorway, “Had we not better all have breakfast?”
We all ate a lot because we felt as if we had been up for hours, and had done a great deal. Mamma took her cup of tea to the window and said, “How queer, it is a lovely day. But windy, the leaves are falling fast.” She spun round suddenly and asked, “Children, is it not about this time that the lapageria comes out at Kew?” We told her that it was, and she said, “Rosamund, have you ever seen the lapageria in the Temperate House?” and when Rosamund said that she did not think she had, we all told her that she would have remembered it if she had, for it was one of the loveliest creepers in the world, and Mamma said we would spend the day at Kew.
It was no use starting too early, as none of the hothouses were open until one. But we started earlier than we meant, because somebody from the Lovegrove Gazette came to ask where Papa was, as he had not been to the office for the last three days; and as soon as Mamma had dealt with him another man came about some money Papa owed him. It was not a big debt, but Mamma had not heard of it before. Then she came into the sitting room and listened to Mary practising, and said, more quietly than she had ever spoken before when we were playing badly, “You are doing no good.” Then she took my French composition out of my hands and said, “I have told you ten thousand times that the past participles of verbs conjugated with avoir take the gender of the object if it precedes them, and I know it is difficult to remember, because it is hard to see what can be the thought behind this foolish practice, but you have broken this rule six times in this exercise which is obviously written to test your knowledge of this very thing, you are doing no good either.” She opened the french windows and stood on the iron steps to hear whether Cordelia was practising out in the stables, and after listening a minute uttered one of her low moans. Cordelia’s private thoughts, always so public, were never less private than when she was playing the violin. One could constantly hear her thinking, They must admire the feeling I put into this phrase that is just coming; and now she was playing the solo part of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with what both Mamma and myself recognized as an intention to show that after this first experience of tragedy her art was going to mature and deepen to a degree astonishing in one so young. Mamma said, “Go and get the poor child to stop, and I will put on my hat and coat and we will start at once. I keep on thinking the front doorbell is going to sound again. I cannot talk to any more strangers about Papa.”
When my sisters and I had dressed we all waited for Mamma and Rosamund in the hall. It was as if we were going on a long journey and it seemed odd that there was no luggage. When Rosamund came downstairs, we all exclaimed, she looked so grown up. She was wearing her new winter coat for the first time, and coats meant much to us just then, for though one was manifestly a schoolgirl till one’s skirt touched the ground, a coat could steal such adult privileges as a waist. This coat was cut close to her bust and had a full skirt, and it was the same blue as distance. We nodded our heads in grave admiration. She had proved that our generation could do it too, we could become grown-ups. We had need of the assurance.
She and her mother had made the coat, but nobody could have told that it had not come from a shop. “It seems almost a pity you should be a nurse,” said Cordelia. “You and your mother should have a shop in Bond Street.”
Rosamund said, her grey-blue eyes cool with prudence, “No, we thought of that, but it is impossible to have your own shop unless you have something which they call capital, though it seems to be just money.”
“It isn’t just money,” I said. “It is money you do not spend but put aside and use for buying land and machinery and paying people who work for you so that you make more things and get more money selling them, and you have to be jolly careful that the money comes in at more than a certain rate. Papa explained it to me once.”
I had spoken his name, he was among us once more.
When Mamma came downstairs we had to tidy her up for going out, she looked too distraught. She was wearing a jacket which was really a disgrace, but we did not make her take it off. She liked wearing it whenever she was assailed by misfortune, deriving confidence from the fact that it was made of sealskin. She had never noticed that it was worn
down to the shiny underpelt, and we did not point this out to her, as she had no other garment which she could possibly have supposed to be impressive. We retied the veil on her hat, too, so that a big hole did not come just over her nose, while she was giving Kate directions as to what she was to do if Papa came back while we were out. At last the front door closed behind us. She paused at the gate to say, “Kate is sensible, she would send for the doctor if he should be looking ill. Or should we tell her?” But we hurried her on. We knew and she knew that he would never come back. Otherwise we would none of us have left the house.
It was one of those autumn mornings which are devoid of melancholy, when the weather seems to be cleaning its house. A broom of wind sent the clouds above flying briskly and kept the fallen leaves scudding along the pavements, the trees looked as if they were being stripped to let the rains get at them better. On a neighbour’s apple trees the fruit shone clear yellow-green, sharp as the taste would be. The people who walked towards us had faces overlaid with colour by the low red sun, and might have been bronzed holiday-makers. We would have been running and jumping among the scurrying leaves, had we been a year or two younger. Now we walked slowly, because we were older, because our mother had suddenly become much older, and was walking with short pattering steps, and taking in the air by shallow and distressed breaths. We felt distress at the prospect of having to trust her fragility on a crowded bus or train, but our fears were unfounded. When we reached the High Street, though there were many more people than usual travelling on trams and buses, and also in traps and wagons and carriages, they were all going in the opposite direction to the one we wanted to follow, they were all going northwards, to the heart of London, and we remembered that there was to be some sort of royal procession that day. It cannot have been a major ceremony, for had it been so the spectators would have taken up their positions in the streets or in houses on the route nearer breakfast-time. But it was important enough to draw to itself so many Londoners that we travelled on a bus as empty as if it had been forbidden to take passengers and we were phantoms who could steal a ride because we were invisible, while there streamed past us a counter-traffic of vehicles crammed with people as happy as we were sad, often playing on little trumpets and mouth-organs and penny whistles. At the end of our ride we got into as empty a train, and we reached the peculiar station which stood in a suburban landscape bare save for a hospital and a workhouse and a sewage farm, we saw that the opposite platform was thronged with a crowd ready to board the London-bound train, all carrying packets of sandwiches or field glasses or a Brownie camera, tapping their feet in light, tolerable impatience, and turning their contented faces to catch the warmth of the tawny sun.
“They are like a choir,” said Mamma, and so they were. Perhaps because the men and women came from the staffs of the different institutions, the sexes had not mixed, and the men were massed on the left and the women to the right, according to the conventional rule of choral societies. Since Mamma presented so strange a figure, in her worn fur jacket, with her stricken face, all their eyes turned towards her, as if she were the conductor and they were waiting for the beat. “How wonderful it would be,” she said, “if they suddenly started singing, and what they sang happened by chance to be as good as The Messiah or The Creation.” For a second or two she floated on her fancy, and then turned away, murmuring, “If extraordinary things must happen, what a pity it is not that sort of extraordinary thing that happens.”
As we set foot on the path beside the poplar trees which led to the other station, a fist of wind struck each tree in turn, the golden leaves sprayed across the path, out to the muddy fields, Mamma reeled as if she herself had been hit, and she clutched her worthless hat as if it were precious. Cordelia and Rosamund closed in on her, and she leaned on them, and in the rear Mary and Richard Quin and I loitered to keep pace with her slowness, and noted a change. We had played, when we were younger, that the red brick buildings on the landscape before us, the hospital and the workhouse and the sewage farm, were tombs built round ogres that had been slain in battle and were too vast to bury. It had delighted us to discover, or rather to decide, that the long barracks of the workhouse enclosed the corpses of tall ogres, the bungalows and towers of the hospital and the sewage farm had been built round the squat ogres which were broader than they were long. Why did it give us no delight today to think on that happy nonsense? When we got near the dreadful little bluish-crimson brick house at the end of the poplar walk we could see that the familiar notice was pinned on the garden gate, we spoke aloud the demand we knew it would proclaim: “Wanted, a Lady Typewriter to take down letters from dictation in return for swimming lessons.” But these words, which always before had made us laugh until it hurt our middles, now seemed like any other dull public words, like “Please keep off the grass” or “This way to the goods yard.” Had it been necessary, then, before buildings could become a joke, that Papa should be at home and working in his study? It seemed so now. Mary fell behind, dragging her feet, as if we were not nearly grown up, as if we were still small.
We saw the white graves flowing over the hill from the cemetery beyond. Richard Quin pointed to them and muttered, “That is all that matters. Papa is not dead. Oh, Rose, I am so frightened of death.”
I asked, “Why? It cannot be so bad.”
“What? Not so bad,” he demanded, “to lie outside in the rain and cold?”
“One will not feel the rain and the cold,” I said.
“Well, at any rate live people will be warmer,” he said.
“But dying will be over in a moment,” I said. “Oh, poor Richard Quin, I am so sorry you are frightened about that, it must be horrid.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m not frightened of it like that, if I had to die I could do it, I would not run away. But it’s”—he laughed shyly— “such an expensive business, such a trouble, so disagreeable.” Suddenly he shrugged his shoulders, looked ahead of him at Rosamund, and as if he knew she would understand what he meant better than I did, ran forward to her.
When we reached the other station, people were streaming out of it, flushed not only by the ruddy sunshine, but also with haste. They had to take their places in a line of brakes, and the drivers and conductors were crying out that they must hurry, the train had been late, and there was not a moment to spare. But we had all the day on our hands, it did not distress us when we mounted the train they had just left and it did not start for a long time. It did not matter when we got to Kew, it did not matter when we got home, Papa would not be there. We looked out at the encampment of white graves on the hill and no longer did it seem the army of crosses and broken pillars and obelisks that had routed the ogres lying encased in red brick on the plains behind; nor did we try to work out from the washing on the lines in the back yards the train passed (where it was always washing-day even on Saturday) which of the horrid little houses were inhabited by abnormally shaped families. “Nonsense, children, that is not a garment, that is a mat,” Mamma would say, trying to restore us to reason, though only as part of the game. “No, Mamma,” Richard Quin would assure her, “in that house one of the elder children is completely oval and fond of pink.” Now no games were worth playing, none at all. When we got out at the station we had not a look to spare for the reflective rustic derrick by the deserted factory, we went out into the street of villas in silence, as if we were quite another family.
Mary and I lagged behind, but Cordelia left the rest and turned back to stand in our path. She pointed to the villas on each side of us, and said, “You have always been angry with me for wanting to live in a street like this. But if we were the kind of family that lives here, Papa would not have gone away.”
The tears in her eyes did not move Mary. “The kind of family that lives here? Didn’t the Phillipses live in a house like these?”
It did no good. Cordelia drifted away from us, her eyes stricken, as if we had taken her last refuge away from her, she could not even fancy that som
ewhere else she would have been safe.
Kew Gardens was not what it had always been before. There was nothing there but grass and trees and plants and hothouses and museums, and gardeners sweeping up dead leaves, there was no cause for ecstasy. Without joy we walked about for a time, looking at the beds of Michaelmas daisies and outdoor chrysanthemums and late dahlias. You could see them a long way off, patches of brightness, beyond lawns of dark sullen winter grass, behind the meagre screen of shrubs that had more leaves lying on the wet earth round them than on their branches. We liked the flowers, but not much, and indeed they were much less beautiful than they were to become in later years. All of them then ran too much to a coarse reddish-purple, a maroon stained with magenta, which was miscalled wine-colour, and the indoor chrysanthemums suffered from a prevalence of muddy bronze. Mamma sharply cried out her disapproval of the worst of them, as if their colour was what ailed the world. Then we turned aside to walk among the trees which were scarlet and gold and silver except where the pines and holm-oaks were dark. Then we found ourselves going down Syon Vista, the broad grass avenue which runs alongside the narrow winding lake, and looks down towards the Thames and to the Duke of Northumberland’s battlemented palace, Syon House, on the other bank. Our father had walked here with us, six months before. Each of us drew apart from the rest, because of that memory, and we spread right across the wide walk. I kept my head up and my eyes open so that no gardener working among the groves on either side should look up and see that I was weeping.