The Fountain Overflows

by Rebecca West

  “Mamma,” said Richard Quin, “Mamma.”

  But she did not listen to him. She said, “As it is, it looks as if I would have been better off with either Papa or you, as if I should not have had both, and that is ridiculous, for I could not bear to be without you, and you are you because he was your father, he is in all of you, I had to have both. What is the answer to this riddle? But you see, it is only if I can think that he found something valuable in the cupboard that I will ever have an easy mind again.”

  She covered her face with her hands. “Mamma,” said Richard Quin, “Mamma.” But still she did not listen to him. It was extraordinary that she should not listen when Richard Quin spoke to her. We were right, her grief was so deep we could not touch it.

  Rosamund stammered, “W-well, anyway, Rose, you need not be frightened any more.”

  Mamma’s hands came down from her face. She asked, “Rose, were you frightened?”

  Before I could say that Rosamund was wrong, she blurted out, stupidly, “Yes, she was frightened. They all were, but they did not say so, for fear of upsetting you. But all the girls have been worried for a long time, they have always been quite envious when I said I was going to be a nurse, because it was so easy to arrange, and of course none of them know how they can be musicians if they cannot get a proper training, and Richard Quin has been wondering what he could do if he had to leave school so long before the proper time. And, of course, this morning it all seemed to have happened, what they feared.”

  We could not have believed she would be so foolish. But she returned our angry stares blankly and said, “Why should I not tell the truth?”

  Under our eyes our mother was restored. “Oh, my poor children,” she sighed, opening her arms to all of us. She let the lapageria flower fall to the ground, she did not even notice it.

  “Of course one is afraid when one thinks that one is going to have absolutely no money,” said Richard Quin, who had in fact been afraid of nothing except that Papa might be dead. We all drew closer to her still, and breathed confessions of how abandoned and helpless we had felt, how we had feared that Cousin Ralph would not let us stay in the house if we could pay no rent, how impossible it had seemed that we should ever become musicians, how we too had dreaded the thought that one of us might become ill, how it had sometimes seemed to us that we might starve; and of how all that was over, because of what she had done about the portraits. The light that poured down from the high glass vaults through the green confusion of boughs and vines made her look paler even than she was by habit; yet it could be seen that now she was well again, she was strong. “You might have known,” she murmured, “that I would manage for you somehow. But to think I did not know of all this you were feeling. Oh, children, you must always tell me when you are frightened.”

  16

  SO WHEN we woke next morning we did not feel ourselves to be deserted children, we simply lay awake a little before rising and wondered how our father was faring on this last adventure, at once so spectacular and invisible. We were also very much interested in the sale of the portraits. This we looked forward to, though we liked them, for we assumed that when we were rich we would buy them back, and it was amusing to let our possessions go out into the world for a time and be admired. We longed for the excitement to begin, and the first thing after breakfast Mamma sat down and wrote a letter to Mr. Morpurgo, in which, after due apologies for my father’s strange behaviour, she asked him to recommend to her a picture-dealer, and we all went together to post the letter. We wondered if Mr. Morpurgo would come down and see us, and if he would resemble the picture we had drawn of him as a Pasha with a face as big and jolly and yellow as a harvest moon. Then we dressed for church, but there was a knock at the front door. The little man from Papa’s office who had come to see Mamma the day before was there again. Mamma got quite white, and took him into the dining room, and Constance asked us if we would care to go to church with her, but we said not. We went into the sitting room and waited. We did not mind being there, for while we had been at Kew the day before Kate had got the cupboard to close and had rehung the picture of the Spanish cathedral over the mantelpiece. Cordelia and Mary and I took off our Sunday hats and put them on the round table, making a pattern with them.

  “I wonder,” said Mary, “why Mamma thinks these hats are worthier of being our Sunday hats than our everyday ones.”

  “I cannot think,” said Cordelia bitterly, “they look far worse and cost as little.”

  “Perhaps,” said Richard Quin, “it is because on Sunday people are supposed to be good and kind, and may be expected to take a more charitable view of hats as well as everything else.”

  While we were inventing charitable things people might find to say about our hats, Mamma came in and said, “Really, your Papa is very thoughtless, though not so thoughtless as you children, not a day passes without your losing something. It seems he has taken away some keys from the office. Can any of you remember seeing three keys tied together with red tape? Well, then I will look in Papa’s study.”

  She was so relieved because the man from the office was not a dun that we all wanted to go to church, but it was too late. So Constance and Rosamund went to their room to finish some sewing; and Cordelia announced, knitting her brows and looking importantly into the distance, that she would go round and see Bayahtreechay, for so she still called Miss Beevor, about some things which had to be settled about next week’s concerts; and Richard Quin produced three balls from the crevices of the sofa and went out into the garden, juggling even before he had got out into the air, even while he was going down the steps. Mary and I tossed who was to have the piano, I won, and she took her harmony notebook upstairs. Left alone, I found the room so full of Papa that I had scarcely the heart to start my scales. And before I had got to E major Kate showed in a visitor, telling me that he had come to see Mamma, but that she was still busy with the man from the office. I was sorry that Mamma had to see him. For whatever Papa had done to this sad man, he could not stand up against it. If it were his money that Papa had taken from him, he could not afford to lose it. If it were his trust that had been betrayed, he had been wounded too often before.

  I tried to make him feel at home. There was a copy of George Borrow’s The Bible in Spain lying on the table, and I asked him if he had read it. I explained that we had liked Lavengro and The Romany Rye very much, but we had never read this one, because the title sounded preachy, but Richard Quin had said there was no harm in trying, and we had got it out of the library, and it was the loveliest of all. I stopped there, because there did not seem anything else to say. He did not answer, but rolled on me a dark brown eye shining like a fried egg when it is not quite cooked. I did not think his health could be good. At length he cleared his throat and said no, he had not read The Bible in Spain, but he had often heard of it. Then silence fell.

  Suddenly he asked, “Are you Rose or Mary?”

  I said I was Rose and asked if Papa had told him about us. He said he had. Then silence fell again. It was odd, we hardly ever met people who did not talk to us. I supposed that what Papa had done had upset him so much that he could not think of anything else.

  I was thinking I would go away and ask Kate to make the poor man some tea, when Mamma came in, carrying a small tin box. She smiled at the visitor and said, “How do you do, I am so sorry that we must ask you to wait, but we were all hunting for some keys that are apparently very important to somebody.” She emptied the box over the table, and lots and lots of keys fell out. “It really is most astonishing,” she exclaimed, “I found this box with some keys in it, and our servant and I have put in it all the keys we could find lying about the house, and it turns out that I have many more keys than I have things that lock. Can you understand that?”

  The little man did not seem to realize that she wanted an answer till she turned her eyes full on him, and then he cleared his throat, and smiled, and said that he could not.

  “Of course you would not,” Mamma a
ssured him. “I am a bad manager. We are all careless in this house, we must clear things up, we must start tomorrow, fitting all these keys into the locks, and throwing away all that do not fit. But now I must find these office keys that are lost. There are three of like size, which were tied together with red tape when Papa got them, but who can tell now? Rose, help me to put aside those we know to belong to this house. These can go, they are all trunk keys.”

  “And that is a clock key,” I said.

  “And that, I think, is a key for some large piece of furniture probably of the Empire period,” said our visitor, growing interested. “But not French, Italian.”

  “Yes,” said Mamma, hastily, “I had some Empire furniture once, but I sold it long ago.” She passed her hand across her forehead and went on with her search.

  The visitor’s viscid eye rolled slowly round the room. He is thinking we have nothing left to sell and is afraid he will never get his money back, I thought. I hope Papa did not owe him so much money that Mamma will have to give him all the money she gets for the portraits. But his eye returned to the keys. “May I help?” he asked, and drew his chair up to the table. “And that is a key for a piece of furniture that must have been seventeenth-century Dutch. Probably a cupboard. You haven’t got it now? No?” he sighed.

  “This belongs to Cordelia’s workbox,” I said, “and this belongs to my music-case.”

  “Oh, you are careless children,” said Mamma.

  “It is not that,” I said, “but what sense is there in locking up a workbox or a music-case? Nobody else in the world would want what one keeps in them.”

  “Yes, but one often uses things for what they were not meant,” said Mamma. “Someday Cordelia may find that she wants to keep something really valuable in her workbox and you may want to keep something secret in your music-case, and then where will you both be?”

  For a moment we continued to turn over the keys. Then our visitor stopped helping us. He put his elbows on the table and rested his pale, lax chin on his clasped hands. “Why,” he asked, smiling faintly, “how could that be?”

  “How could what be?” said Mamma absently. She had just picked up a key, looked hard at it, and murmured, “Piers.” But our visitor was smiling into the distance, and did not notice. He repeated, “How could it come about that this young lady and her sister should want to keep something valuable in a workbox and a music-case?”

  He was asking Mamma for a story, as we had so often done when we were little, and she was glad to tell it, to prevent her weeping. She dropped the key that had reminded her of Papa and began, “Well, they might have been walking in Hyde Park one Sunday and stopped to listen to the orators and been converted to Home Rule—” But then there came a knock at the door, and Mamma said wearily, “Oh, the man from the office is growing impatient and I do not wonder. Forgive me,” she said to our visitor, smiling with a gentle kind of caution, to warn him that she might not be able to give him the satisfaction that he wanted, “I will come back as soon as I can.”

  I said, “I will go on tidying the keys.”

  He quietly went on helping me to sort them, but presently broke out into soft chuckling, that set the jowls of his small face shaking. “That is a very delightful lady,” he said. “Is she a relative of yours?”

  “Why, she is our Mamma,” I answered.

  He let the key in his hand fall on the table and stared at me. “Oh, no,” he exclaimed. “Oh, no.”

  “Why, did you know her before?” I asked.

  “Yes, indeed,” he answered, “indeed I did.” He took out a handkerchief and drew it across his lips and kneaded it in his clasped hands. Everything about him drooped. His egglike eyes seemed about to slide down his face.

  “She often looks much better than this,” I said, “she is very much upset just now.” But I was angry, and doubted if I should have pandered to him by making that excuse. Mamma might have changed from being young and attractive to being old and bony, but he can never have been anything but funny-looking at any time of his life, so it was sheer impudence for him to be shocked at the way she looked.

  “But of course it is Piers’ wife,” the little man cried out, suddenly hitting the table and getting up and walking round the room. “Of course it is she. She must come back at once. What is this business about keys?”

  “Papa has taken away or lost the keys of the newspaper office where he worked,” I said, “and they have sent a clerk round to get them.”

  “That is easily settled. I will go and tell him to stop bothering your Mamma and get a locksmith on Monday,” said the little man, preparing to leave the room. But at that moment Mamma came back, and said to me, “It is all right, Kate has found them, they were in his old Dutch tobacco box. Oh, the things he loves that he has had to leave behind him.” Then, remembering she spoke before a stranger, she sighed, and said to me, “Now run away, dear,” and turned to him, squared her shoulders, and held her head high and said, “Now, what can I do for you?”

  He asked, “Do you not remember me?”

  She looked bewildered and he was hurt. I thought how funny it was to be a man, he thought it natural and her fault that he had not recognized her, but unkind of her not to recognize him. Reproachfully, he said, “I am Edgar Morpurgo.”

  She flung out both her hands, crying, “Oh, you have been so good to us.”

  “But you did not remember me,” he mourned.

  “It is because you are so much thinner,” she pleaded.

  “No, I am much stouter,” he said plaintively.

  “Well, I knew there was no great difference,” said Mamma, and he was so glad to be with her that the answer seemed to satisfy him. They sat down side by side on the sofa, looking at each other happily.

  “But how can it be you?” she asked, her voice quite young. “We posted the letter to you only this morning.”

  “I did not come because of your letter,” he assured her, “but my wife and I got home from Scotland only last night, and it was too late to do anything when I read the message from the business manager of the Gazette saying he had gone.”

  “It is so kind of you to have come,” she said, “and so quickly. It is the kinder because Piers must have caused you so much trouble by going like this.”

  “Never mind that,” he said. “Do you know why he went?”

  “No, no,” she said, “if he had told me, I would have made him come with me to see you, whatever it was. Even though it might have meant that you decided to help him no more, you had a right to know.”

  Mr. Morpurgo thought over this proposition, then sadly shook his head. “A man like me has no rights over a man like him,” he said.

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “Even now there is no doubt about that, is there? We are all less than Piers. But to accept kindness from a friend and not be quite frank with him, that would be wrong if he were the greatest man in the world.”

  “Yes, but we will forget it,” said Mr. Morpurgo. “I mean that. I would have remembered if it had happened at any earlier time, for prudential reasons, to remind myself that there were risks I should not take in the future, for everybody’s sake, even his own. But if, as everybody seems to think, this is the end of a chapter, I will not remember it. There are many other things about him to remember, as you know.” They were silent for a little, both looking out into the garden. “Have you any idea where he has gone?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “He could be found, you know,” said Mr. Morpurgo. “There are ways.” She said nothing, and he sighed. “But no, you wouldn’t care for that. And perhaps you are right. If he felt there was reason to go, he was probably right.”

  “Yet I wish he could be found for his own sake,” said Mamma. “I think he has some money. But you know what he is. It will be gone in no time. And then—and then—But there it is. If he felt there was reason to go, we had better not interfere.”

  He patted her hand, saying presently, “Now what about you? I have come
to give you all the help that may be needed, and I want no argument. What is your position?”

  “You can help me at once by telling me what art dealer would give me the best price for a Gainsborough and a Lawrence,” said Mamma.