by Rebecca West
We realized that it had occurred to Mamma, as it had occurred to us at the Thameside Town Hall, that Cordelia was very pretty and might get married. But that now seemed to us a vain hope, her dedication had become so extreme. At school prayers we still stood on the floor of the hall, while she was with the highest class on the platform, ranged on each side of the headmistress’s lectern; and we noted that she appeared among the other girls as a nun among the laity, so deeply was she disciplined by determination to polish her repertoire of Wieniawski and Chaminade to the highest degree of perfection, so different from her companions’ adolescent dreaminess was the precise anticipation in her neat small features. But in the spring we saw a sudden change. One evening she left the house with Miss Beevor, not so tense with the effort of impersonation as was usual when she was to fulfil a professional engagement, because the evening was to be something of a party for her. She was to play at a banquet held by a volunteer regiment in a neighbouring suburb, Ringwood, and the colonel of the regiment, a banker, had an Italian wife who had been an opera singer, a coloratura soprano, named Madame Corando, and she was going to be there. Mamma and she had known each other in their young days, and when she met Cordelia at local charity concerts, of which she was often a patroness, she always made a great fuss over her. So before this concert Cordelia had dressed with special care, and had gone away looking very lovely in a cherub style, with her pert nose looking perter because she was wearing a little wreath of white flowers and green leaves, set rather to the back of her head. At supper we spoke of her happily, knowing that she would be living part of that evening easily, not as the taut slave of her obsession, but as a pretty girl. But long before we expected her she was with us again; and it was a cab, not a car, that had stopped at our gate, so Madame Corando and her husband had not brought her home, as they usually did. She came into the sitting room and stared at us absently, absorbed in some remote calculations, and we stared back at her in wonder, for she was not the same. She had taken off her wreath and was slowly turning it in her hands, and her face was heavy as if she were brooding on something with such fierce concentration that she had no energy left to keep her muscles taut. As she drew off her coat, she was thinking so little of what she was doing, so much of something else, that she might have been a sleepwalker, her sleep disordered for a great cause.
Mamma said mildly, “Your dress looks very nice, dear.”
Cordelia started, looked down at her skirt, and ran a disparaging hand down it. She did not answer.
“Did it go well?” asked Mamma.
“Very well,” said Cordelia, “they asked for a second encore, but I did not give it to them.”
“And how was Madame Corando?” asked Mamma.
After a pause Cordelia said, “She talks too loud,” and added coldly, “She is a very common woman.” A flash of triumph irrelevant to what she was saying passed across her face.
“So are many excellent musicians,” said Mamma. At this Cordelia made a slow, impatient gesture, and turned from us, and went out of the room, still moving like a sleepwalker.
“Now, what does that mean?” pondered Mamma, but without much anxiety. Cordelia had spirit, if something disagreeable had happened at the dinner, her sturdiness would have been up in arms to defend her pride. But it seemed more probable that she was entranced by some prospect which had opened before her, so novel that she did not know how to speak of it to us, who represented the familiar in her life. Mary and I spoke with perplexity of the change that night when we were undressing in our room, which we no longer shared with Cordelia, who had been given Papa’s room. After we had put out the light, and were lying side by side in our beds, Mary said, “Do you think that she can have fallen in love with someone at that dinner? We are almost old enough for that sort of thing, I suppose.”
The darkness seemed hostile and unexplored. I broke the silence by saying, “Anyway she is, we might be too young, she isn’t. Lots of people in Spain and Italy are married at her age.”
“But would she meet anybody at a Territorial Army dinner in Ringwood that she would want to marry?” Mary wondered.
“Well,” I said, “if the colonel of the regiment was good enough for Madame Corando to marry, there might be someone else in it who would do for Cordelia.”
“Please God, please God,” said Mary, “let it be that she has fallen in love with somebody, and let him fall in love with her, and let them get married soon.”
“No, no,” I said. “Stop, Mary, please. Of course you wouldn’t get a prayer answered if it was wrong, but still we ought to remember that Cordelia might not be happy, she is young to make up her mind, and she can’t have seen him more than once.”
“Well, lots of people have fallen in love like that,” said Mary, “and anyway she is sure to be happy for a time.” She was silent and I felt she was going on praying in the darkness; and was a little worried about it till I fell asleep. Cordelia took things, I realized, less passionately and more seriously than we did.
It appeared possible that Mary’s prayers had been answered. Cordelia’s aspect at school prayers, when she stood with the girls of her class on the platform beside the schoolmistress and we watched her from the floor, was now completely different. Now she no longer looked like a nun among the laity, she looked wilder and more passionate than the girls beside her, and she did not prevent herself from looking radiant even in the middle of the most melancholy Lenten hymn. But what was giving her that radiance had not happened yet, she had the bloom on her that comes of expectation. Also, if it had happened there would not have come those other moments when she forgot to bow her head in prayer, because she was staring straight in front of her, terrified lest what she hoped for would never be hers. All this corresponded with what we had read of love in books. But I was not so happy over this as Mary was, for it seemed to me that I recognized at times the bright falsity, the glittering misjudgment, which often shone about her when she played the violin.
But there was much to confirm our suspicions. One night at supper Cordelia asked Mamma sleepily if she could go up to London on Saturday morning with Rosamund to choose a new coat and skirt. She added, when she had been given permission, that it was going to be a grown-up coat and skirt. Mamma said, “Well, I have seen things in the shops ready for Easter, though it seems early yet to buy for the summer, and all this summer you will still be at school. But it is your own money, and of course you will certainly be leaving school by the autumn, and if you get something really good it will last. But remember that it is not sensible to buy before you need, for you get interest on your money so long as it is in the post office.”
Cordelia did not reply, as we would have expected her to if she had been the same as she used to be, by pointing out, impatiently, how little that interest was. She simply continued to live in a trance; and a few days later she walked into the sitting room wearing the new coat and skirt. At this period the scissors had suddenly got to work on women’s clothes. We were still not fully enfranchised from the load of textiles that our sex had been condemned to wear, but we were transformed, so far as the weight we had to carry and our agility, from cows to the heavier kind of antelope. Skirts were still long, but they were tubular, and were slit up the hem. The narrowness of Cordelia’s skirt turned her into a walking pillar, slender and rounded and strong, built of some warm stone with the light shining on it, for the cloth was a pale golden fawn; and on her short red-gold curls she wore a round brown hat wreathed with creamy flowers. She was carrying her head high, her short nose, so exquisitely drawn, with its tiny triangular flatness between the point and the nostrils, was literally turned up and her pure rounded chin was raised. In her hand she carried her violin bow as if it were a sceptre. “Do I look all right?” she asked carelessly, but she listened fiercely to our answer. Up till now she had always been confident that her appearance was good enough to help her win applause from her concert audiences, and that had been her only interest in it; but now she evidently hoped to buy with
it some object on which she herself set a higher price. She stayed in the room for some time, standing upright, for narrow skirts crushed easily; but was far from us, even in another season of the year, for though Lent was still cold about us, she was carrying about her a private springtime, glowing in her thin clothes under some sun we could not see.
When she had gone Mary said, “She has bought that coat and skirt because she expects whoever it is she is in love with to call on Mamma and ask to take her out somewhere.”
“But where could he take her?” I said doubtfully. “It isn’t summer, they can’t go on the river.”
“Young men in magazine stories and novels take girls they want to marry to all sorts of places,” said Mary. “Hurlingham and Ranelagh, oh, there must be places open at this time of year. People don’t fall in love just in summer. Oh, please God, let it happen.”
“Don’t do that,” I said, “until we know that he is really nice.”
“I keep on telling you, she is sure to be happy for a time,” said Mary, “and if it goes wrong, we will have got our scholarships and after that we will make money, and we can get her a divorce. The thing is to stop her playing now.”
Though no young man appeared in Lovegrove Place, Cordelia’s behaviour continued to support our theory. She now took great interest in the post, which she explained as anxiety about the date of a big evening concert, which had been postponed because of a death, and might be fixed for some date when she was already booked. But such an anxiety would not have been burning, nor would it have given place to a burning satisfaction. And the day after she ceased to watch the post brought confirmation which even Rosamund had to admit was impressive, though she had never agreed with us that Cordelia might be in love, and had said that since we were always getting into states she did not see how we could fail to recognize that was all that was happening to our eldest sister too. “Why, if sh-she were in love,” she stammered, “she would look different. Not like this at all.” But that morning Cordelia left for school early, telling Mamma that she wanted to speak to one of the teachers before prayers. But when Mary and Rosamund and I got to school she was not there at all. When we came home at one o’clock we learned that she had told Mamma that she was going to have luncheon with Miss Beevor. We felt a painful sense of crisis. We would never have dared to play truant from school, and Cordelia was more law-abiding than we were; also Cordelia was very truthful. Then Kate said to us, with an air of knowing nothing, that when Cordelia had left that morning she had been carrying a large cardboard box and a big paper bag, and we went up and looked in her room, and the new coat and skirt and hat were gone.
“You see,” Mary said, “she has gone to meet him, and probably his mother, and they will come back and tell Mamma that they are engaged.”
But I did not like it. The empty wardrobe looked wrong, as Papa’s empty study looked wrong. And Rosamund shrugged an indifference I did not think she felt.
Anything might have happened. So Mary and I were not altogether surprised when, on our way back from school that afternoon, alone because Rosamund had gone to do some shopping, turning from the High Street into Lovegrove Place, we saw Miss Beevor ahead of us, hastening towards our home, and saw too that she was agitated. She was walking very fast, and sometimes trotted, till her long copper-coloured dress caught round her ankles, and her big feathered hat fell awry.
“Look, look,” said Mary, “she is in a terrible state. I tell you it is not all imagination, it must be just what I thought. Cordelia has run away with someone and has written to tell Miss Beevor that she will not go on with her music. Come on, come on, let us ask her.”
When Miss Beevor heard our running feet she turned, closed her eyes on seeing us, and leaned against the railings. As we reached her, she breathed bitterly, “I thought it was Cordelia.”
“What is the matter?” asked Mary. “What has happened to her?”
Miss Beevor sobbed, and began to trot on again towards our house. We walked beside her, pressing her to explain, so that we could be prepared if there should be news to break to Mamma. We knew Miss Beevor to be very stupid and she might be making a fuss about nothing, but we had to be sure. But she only made sounds expressive of impatience and disgust, and waved us away. Her hands were bare, which was startling in those days; and as she made hostile gestures against us, she said in accents appealing for sympathy, “I have lost my gloves, that too,” and, bursting into tears again, scuttled on quite fast till she got to our gate.
There we saw at once that whatever bad news Miss Beevor had received, it had been heard here also. The front door was open and as we mounted the steps we saw that the handbag Mamma usually carried about with her was cast down on the mat. We hurried in, brushing past Miss Beevor, who was crying, “I couldn’t even get a cab, there is always a cab at the station, this day of all days there wasn’t one.” She followed us into the sitting room, which was empty. But the french windows into the garden were open, and Mamma was standing on the lawn and looking up at the window of the little bedroom which had been Papa’s, which was now Cordelia’s.
We ran towards her, calling out, “What has happened?” and Mamma took no notice, her eyes were fixed on the empty window. But when Miss Beevor was making her way down the iron steps into the garden, she slipped and fell to the bottom onto the gravel path, squealing as people do when they have reached such a pitch of misery that the inorganic world turns against them, and heels come off their shoes, and stones wait to bruise their knees. Mamma heard her, turned her great staring eyes upon her, and said to us, “Pick that poor idiot up.” But Miss Beevor’s frenzy had brought her to her feet before we could get to her, and she hobbled towards Mamma, crying out, “I have lost Cordelia, I could not help it, she ran away from me.”
“She is here,” said Mamma. “She is in her room. She has locked the door. What have you done to her?”
“I did nothing, she ran away from me,” said Miss Beevor, “oh, thank God she is safe.”
“Safe?” said Mamma. “What did you do to her?”
“I did nothing,” said Miss Beevor. “What have I ever done to Cordelia but love her?”
“She has been with you, you tell me yourself, and she came home half an hour ago, older than I am. What did you do to her?”
“I know, I know,” said Miss Beevor. “Oh, her face. Her lovely little face. She looked hard, cruel, just like you. Oh, Cordelia.”
“Well, what did you do to her?” said Mamma.
“I did nothing,” said Miss Beevor, “it was that horrible man.”
“What horrible man?” asked Mamma. “Stop clutching your hat, I cannot see your face.”
“Why,” said Miss Beevor, “Hans Fechter.”
Mamma looked upwards at the windows of Cordelia’s room and stretched out her arms. “My lamb, my lamb,” she said. Then she raged at Miss Beevor, “Did I not tell you not to take her near him?”
“I could not help it,” said Miss Beevor. “It was that vulgar woman, Madame Corando. She never should have been allowed to come near Cordelia. She has been married three times.”
“What, Giulia Corando sent Cordelia to Hans Fechter?” exclaimed Mamma. “I do not believe it.”
“No, no, it was not like that at all,” said Miss Beevor. “It was at that banquet. Cordelia played beautifully. She did, she did. If she did not, then there is no such thing as playing beautifully. And Madame Corando complimented her, and Cordelia thanked her, and told her what hopes we had for the scholarship, and then suddenly the woman was not nice any more. She said that being a professional was very different from being even a good amateur. And oh, then it became very unpleasant.”
“But all the same I cannot believe that Giulia Corando could have been ill-natured enough to send Cordelia to Hans Fechter,” cried Mamma.
“No, no,” said Miss Beevor querulously, “I keep on telling you it was not like that at all. But Cordelia always said it was impossible to tell you anything because you would not listen. It all happened
because Cordelia held her ground and said that she was studying with Signor Sala. Then this dreadful woman said, ‘What, not old Silvio Sala?’ and when Cordelia said yes, she burst out into the most vulgar laugh, everybody looked round, and she said he was an old rascal, and told a long story about how his father was a macaroni manufacturer who was mad about music, and he had determined to have a son who was a violinist, and he had pushed him as a boy, but he had never been any good, and the old father had left all his money to a nephew who really was a good violinist, and so the son had just had to get on as he could, and had swaggered about and pretended all sorts of things, and had said he had taught in Milan Conservatory, though he had never seen the inside of the place. Oh, the lies she told. Yet, after all, they may be true.”
“In the name of goodness tell me how Cordelia got to Hans Fechter,” demanded Mamma.
“I am coming to that,” said Miss Beevor. “After that Cordelia would not stay any longer, she insisted on going home, and in the dressing room I remember now, in the dressing room she gave me such a hard look, I should have known that she was going to turn against me, though how she could, when she knew how I loved her—”
“Never mind that now,” said Mamma, “go on, go on.”
“Then she told me that she did not believe what Madame Corando had said, but all the same she was afraid that she might lose her self-confidence because of it, and she asked me to arrange for her to play to Hans Fechter, and so I said I would, and we were so happy coming back in the train. And now we shall never be happy again.”
“What did Fechter say to Cordelia?” demanded Mamma, digging her nails into the palms of her hands.
“I do not know,” said Miss Beevor. “Oh, he is a horrible man. And he was against us from the start. When we went in he looked at me in a most insulting way, and told me to go and sit in the hall while Cordelia played. Then—” she choked and stood wagging her head this way and that.
“Then what happened?” pressed my mother, shaking her, though not so violently as we had feared she might.