The Fountain Overflows (11 page)

“Cross beast,” I said, “your own clothes are just as untidy.” It was true; and if it had been Mary who had been in a temper with me she would have recognized the truth and stopped. But Cordelia went on scolding me.

At school, we noticed, she got on discreditably well. The wrong sort of teacher liked her in the wrong sort of way, and they were constantly giving her what they called “little tasks” and mentioning her as an example of “
esprit de corps”;
and she spoke to them with an air of professed insipidity which we took seriously as a betrayal of childhood. Of course grown-ups wanted children to be blanks, but no decent child, with parents like ours, would encourage them. We saw her paying too high a price for the approval of people who were not like Papa and Mamma, and we felt about her as a soldier in a besieged citadel might feel about a comrade who is meditating desertion. Quite often we hated her. But the love of the flesh which binds a family together in its infancy was still strong. I hated the cold much more than anybody else in the family, and she used sometimes to take me into her bed if she heard me tossing and grumbling in the night, although she was a light sleeper and it was a sacrifice. Often we loved her.

But even so we recognized Cordelia as a complicated problem, and it distressed us that Mamma, though regarding her as a problem, saw it as simple. To her Cordelia was someone who could not play the violin and who insisted on doing so. She saw the problem as half solved when Cordelia took her violin to school, saying vaguely she had a chance to practise there, and ceased to ask her for evening lessons. It even appeared to her possible that this might be a subterfuge, and that Cordelia had recognized her lack of talent and had adopted this way of quietly giving up her studies. Mamma’s optimism made her find further food for hope in Cordelia’s request, which was made at the beginning of December, that she should be allowed to bring one of her teachers, a Miss Beevor, home to tea. Mamma asked what subject she taught and Cordelia replied, “Advanced French,” and Mamma was delighted, thinking that perhaps Cordelia was developing her own talent for languages. We knew well enough that Cordelia was only in with what we called the scum of the teachers, but we could not tell tales, and we knew Mamma would grasp the situation as soon as Miss Beevor arrived. But we became alarmed when we saw how vigorously Mamma had imagined a visit and a visitor that were going to solve completely the problem of her eldest daughter. Because of the advanced French, Mamma had that morning travelled some distance to a bakery that sold brioches and babas, and she put on her best clothes in order not to be disgraced before Miss Beevor, whom she pictured as being unusually elegant for a suburban schoolmistress, as a result of long residence in Paris. As half-past four approached she walked restlessly about the sitting room, filling the vases with Parma violets, a flower which she always associated with France, and speaking with incredible bravery her ambitious thoughts. “If Papa goes on doing so well, we should be able to afford to send Cordelia for six months to France, and six months to Germany, and then to Girton or Newnham.”

Just then Cordelia came in, looking the perfect schoolgirl as our teachers would have had her, neat and submissive. She looked round the room and at Mamma, and her face expressed anguish; and indeed if one had not been told that my mother was wearing her best clothes one would never have guessed it. Cordelia pointed at the revolving bookcase containing our Encyclopædia Britannica and asked solemnly, “Can that not be put somewhere else?”

“Why should it, dear?” inquired Mamma.

“Miss Beevor will think it very odd to see an Encyclopaedia Britannica in the drawing room,” said Cordelia.

“Would a schoolmistress not be glad to see an Encyclopaedia Britannica in any room?” asked Mamma.

Mary and I stuck our tongues out at Cordelia, and made quite hideous faces, she knew quite well that we had to have the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the drawing room, because Papa had to have the third downstairs room for his study. We also wanted to stop her making any other comments on the look of the room. We knew that Mamma grieved perpetually over the horrid furniture she had instead of Aunt Clara’s, so we made really horrible faces. Cordelia said mechanically, “Mamma, make Mary and Rose behave,” but just at that moment Miss Beevor arrived.

We instinctively knew that we hated her and hoped we would never see her again. She was not at all as Mamma had imagined her, being a tall and sallow woman, with a battered Pre-Raphaelite look to her, wearing a sage-green coat and dress and a wide felt hat of a darker green, and a long string of amber beads. In those days, when skirts reached the ground, a big woman in badly cut and sad-coloured clothes had a massively depressing effect hard to imagine today. She was carrying a white hide handbag stamped with the word “Bayreuth” in pokerwork. She did nothing to recommend herself when we had got used to her appearance, for though she was civil enough to Mamma her eyes went at once to Cordelia and stayed there, fixed in lustre. She evidently liked her very much. It was a great effort for her to force her attention back to Mamma, and an even greater one to make it stay there, for through no fault of hers she was perplexed by what Mamma was saying to her. She seemed puzzled as to why brioches and babas should have been procured for her, and it turned out that she had never lived in Paris, or in any other part of France. She did not even teach French, but she had taken some sort of diploma in the subject long ago, so that when Miss Raine the senior French mistress had been borne away, with the new complaint of appendicitis, she had taken some of her classes.

“But,” she said, after an exchange of humorous glances with Cordelia, “your little girl will tell you that very often I had to fall back on Dick Tay.”

“Who is Dick Tay?” asked Mamma stupidly.

“
Dictée,
” whispered Cordelia savagely.

My mother grew red with shame. “You must excuse me,” she said. “The children will tell you how very deaf I am.” She went on to invent some ridiculous mistakes that she said she had made through deafness, then to explain how happy we all three seemed to be at school, and how much she and Papa liked being at Lovegrove, but then she stopped talking, because Miss Beevor was not listening to her, but kept on looking at Cordelia. With a distracted gesture she put a baba on her plate when we had nearly all finished, and had to eat it all by herself, while the silence grew more oppressive, and it became more and more obvious that Cordelia and Miss Beevor were giving each other signals. Presently Kate came in to take away the tea things, and Cordelia made an excuse to go out with her.

Miss Beevor cleared her throat and said, “It was in the French class I first met Cordelia. I wouldn’t wish poor Miss Raine to have had appendicitis on my account, but that is how I came to meet Cordelia, and I can’t help being very grateful. Of course I saw at once that there was something special about her.”

“You think there is?” said Mamma hopefully.

“I was so sure she was an exceptional child that I asked her to stay behind instead of going down to the eleven o’clock break,” Miss Beevor continued, her eyes misted.

“Well, is she exceptional?” asked Mamma with interest

“Oh, of course she is!” exclaimed Miss Beevor, clapping her hands, indignant and smiling at the same time. “And what was so exciting, as you can imagine, was finding that her special talent was for my very own subject!”

“What is your subject?” asked Mamma urgently.

“Why, I teach the violin,” said Miss Beevor with proud modesty.

Mamma was unable to speak, and presently Miss Beevor continued, “Your little girl has remarkable musical gifts.”

“But Cordelia has no musical gift at all,” said Mamma. “She couldn’t tell the difference between Beethoven and Tchaikovski.”

“But you are quite mistaken,” said Miss Beevor. “It is amazing, truly amazing, how many classical compositions our little Cordelia can recognize.”

“I didn’t say,” my mother corrected her waspishly, “that poor Cordelia couldn’t tell Beethoven from Tchaikovski, I said she couldn’t tell the difference between them.” She waved a tragic hand at us. “Mary, Rose, go away.”

Miss Beevor left the house about half an hour later, and Mamma came into the dining room, where Mary and I were doing our homework, and asked sternly, “Did either of you know this was going on?”

“Of course not,” we protested. “We would have told you about it, Mamma.”

“To think of Cordelia going off every morning to the school and playing the violin with that woman day after day, and I here, without the slightest suspicion,” said poor Mamma, covering her face with her hands. “Oh, this had been a season of deceit.”

Papa came in, dazed with preoccupation, and when he saw us children hid what he had in his hand behind his back. “That stuff doesn’t take paint,” he told Mamma sadly.

“Kate thought it might not,” said Mamma, caught up into happiness by his presence. “We will find something else.” Before she left the room she turned to us and said gravely, “I had to be very plain with that woman, I told her she must not fill poor Cordelia’s head with all that nonsense. So if your poor sister seems unhappy you must be kind to her.”

But Cordelia did not seem at all unhappy. Nobody seemed unhappy in our house as Christmas came towards us, bearing its sure and certain rapture. Mamma was so much restored by her communion with Papa that she dealt courageously with a grief which might have turned to something else and been a deprivation for all of us. She said to me one day, “Rose, you are little, but you are very sensible. I showed you the letter I had from my cousin Constance. Do you think it would do any harm if I sent presents to her and the little girl?”

I told her that I did not believe it could ever do any harm to send people presents. So she cut up a dress of some light, washable material she had worn to play at a summer concert in Berlin seventeen years before, and made it into an apron which Constance might like to wear when she was doing housework; Constance’s husband did not give her much money, she had to do a lot of housework. For Rosamund she got Papa to carve a wooden angel copied from a photograph of a group in a church at Nuremberg. He said it was very difficult and he could only give a rough impression of the statue, but he made a little figure that looked as if it were bending down to save someone. Mamma mentioned Berlin and Nuremberg so often in connection with these presents that I asked her if Constance and Rosamund had lived much in Germany, but she told me that so far as she knew they had never been there. These presents had just suggested themselves as suitable, and they had associations with these two places she had known well, so she had talked of them. That was all.

In case these two presents should arrive a long time before Christmas, and Constance should feel obliged to send presents in return, Mamma arranged for the apron and the doll to be delivered at Constance’s home on the other side of South London by one of those local carrier wagons which still crawled all over the suburbs, and she made the carrier promise that they should be held back till Christmas Eve itself, so that Constance would have no time to send presents in response. And while we were spending Christmas Eve as we always did, by having our hair washed and drying it before the fire while we roasted chestnuts and drank milk, my mother had one of the most intense moments of pleasure that I ever saw her experience. Suddenly we heard the clack of hooves and the jingle of bells. Instantly my mother knew that on the other side of London an equal delicacy had been practised on the inspiration, she at once believed, of an equal love. Constance had sent us presents by her local carrier. Mother told us what she believed to have happened in a recitative like a long trumpet call and rushed out to test her faith. She was right. When we followed her to the front door, stumbling over our dressing-gowns, we found her taking in the parcels, which looked as if they had come from a far country, for they were tied up with a peculiar white braid with a red cross-stitch pattern on it, very pretty and old-fashioned. Mother would not let us open them, of course. She ran with them into Papa’s study and put them with the rest of the presents we were to be given on Christmas morning, and then she hurried us back to the fireside, because our hair was still damp. She sat down beside us and wept with joy because Constance was still fond of her. That evening we lay in our beds and listened to the voices of our father and mother as they dressed the Christmas tree in the room below, and my mother’s voice came fresh and eager like a thrush’s song. Once or twice they laughed for quite a long time.

4

W
E NEVER
had a better Christmas, up till four o’clock. We woke up quite late, of course, because we had been so long in going to sleep, and found the stockings at the ends of our beds. But before we could see what Papa and Mamma had put in them, Richard Quin staggered in, holding in front of him the big stocking Mamma had lent him because his socks were too small to hold anything. He could not bear to look into it for fear of his own delight. He asked hoarsely, “Would there be soldiers, do you think?” He always wanted tin soldiers, for Christmas and birthdays, and whenever anybody gave him any money to spend. We told him there certainly would. But he could not bear to deal with the stocking, he was all to pieces at the prospect of exquisite pleasure piling on exquisite pleasure, all day long. We urged him to be a man and start taking out his presents, but he sat down on Mary’s bed and rocked himself and gasped, his eyes glazed. “And there are better presents downstairs, aren’t there?”

We told him that there would be in the sitting room, where the Christmas tree was, the same as there had been last year in Edinburgh.

“Then why,” he panted, “don’t we go downstairs and get those in case anything happens to them and then hurry back to these?”

“Why should we do that?” asked Mary, cuddling him to her. “There’s all the time in the world.” It was a phrase that my mother often used when we hurried a bar.

His face grew piteous and he cried, “There’s not, there’s not.”