The Fountain Overflows (16 page)

A train puffed through the cutting; we looked at it over the ears of the rabbits in our arms. Two boys hanging out of a carriage window waved at us but we took no notice, though we would have waved back if they had been girls.

“I make up animals,” said Rosamund. “I don’t suppose you do. I do it because these rabbits can’t talk, and I get lonely. But you have a brother and two sisters.”

I said that all the same we made up animals. Papa had told us about three little dogs Grand-Aunt Willoughby had had, a black-faced mushroom-coloured pug with asthma, a toy spaniel, and a lapdog of a kind Papa could not identify, which looked just like a fawn fur necklet. We were always pretending they were lying about on the chairs, or jumping up on the beds, or out in the garden, though they were all so pampered that you couldn’t even pretend that they would be out in the fresh air except on the finest days. Richard Quin was very fond of them, and they were really quite nice old things, considering how spoiled they had been.

I asked what animals she had made up, and she said, “The most important one is a hare. He has always been here. He was here before they made the railway, he stayed on when they built these houses all round him. He isn’t very clever, you see. But he is very nice, I am really fonder of him than I am of the mice or the bear, and he is beautiful, I have his picture in a book, I must show it to you.”

We could not stay out long, it was so cold. On the way back along the path Rosamund stopped and gathered me some sprigs of mint and sage. Her Mamma had bought the plants at the greengrocers and she herself had planted them. They had done well, they were still growing, the winter had not killed them. I said, “We are not good at gardening. Papa and Mamma do not know anything about it, and sometimes we have tried to put in seeds, but nothing happened.”

She was puzzled. “Is there anything to know about gardening? Mamma and I put plants in, and they come up. We had some nice plants here, very nice roses, until those things tore them up.”

Indoors she showed me her dolls. She was at the same stage that we were, she was too old to play with dolls but she still liked having them about. Hers were not very pretty, though they were nicely dressed, and their names were not very interesting, but they all had pleasant characters. The things in the house had injured every one of them, but they had all been mended. There were a lady and her husband who lived near Clapham Common and were dolls’ doctors, Rosamund said. They had got interested in the case and had charged almost nothing for the repairs. Then Constance called us because it was teatime. It was good that she was Scottish, it meant that she gave us a good tea. Our family was still shocked by the nullity of Lovegrove bakeries compared to what we had become accustomed to in Edinburgh. Constance gave us hot oatmeal scones, which we spread with butter and golden syrup, and she had some homemade Scotch bun, the rich cake in a pastry case which is known as “black death.”

While we were still eating I heard noises which made me frightened in case the horrible things had come back. There was a slam which seemed to come from the front door, and someone wiped his feet on the mat, but with an insane amount of noise. There were two thuds, like an exaggeration of the sound people make when they take off their shoes and drop them on the floor; all these noises were not merely the sounds made by a person performing these actions; they were that and something more. They were meant to be heard and to distress. I looked at Rosamund with anxious eyes, and she answered, “It is Papa.” She did not show any surprise, or any distress, like mine, or any pleasure. Heavy steps clumped along the passage towards us, and finally the door was thrown open and a man put his head round the door. Rosamund did not look up at him. I was startled by the suspicion that though she was so calm a child she might have real trouble to bear. I did not consider the invasion of her home by demons to fall under the heading of real trouble, particularly now that it seemed to have been repelled. Real troubles were things like Cordelia’s being so cross and insisting on playing the violin when she could not, and Papa’s selling Aunt Clara’s furniture when Mamma wanted to keep it.

I at once saw that Rosamund’s papa was real trouble. His head, so long as he kept it sticking round the door, was very nice. His face was long and fair, and his temples were delicately indented; his nostrils were thin as paper and his lips were pursed as if he were keeping a secret. If there had been a fourth real poet at the time of Byron and Shelley and Keats, he might have looked like that. But as soon as he saw who was in the kitchen and brought his body round the doorpost he changed. He canted his head on one side and surveyed us with a wide-eyed leer, while his mouth gaped open, the lips drawn close to his teeth and lifted at the corners, as if he would have said something impudent and amusing but was prevented by a flow of saliva.

He drawled, “Well, well, who have we here?” and shook hands with Mamma, but stared at me without shaking hands when she told him which one of her three daughters I was. Children are used to rudeness from grownups, but this man was ruder than most. His Scottish accent was horrid, not like Mamma’s or Constance’s, but like the Edinburgh keelies you heard hawking at one another when you went down the Canongate to Holyrood. But Scottish people, if they were horrid, did do that. It was part of a determination to be funny though they could not think of anything really funny to say, and that was part of a determination to be better than other people, though they were not. They were educated, nearly everybody is in Scotland, it is not like England, but to get the better of other educated people they pretended to be simpletons who were somehow much cleverer than educated people and were laughing at them all the time. I could hardly sit in my chair, I hated Cousin Jock so much. I did not like to think that he was related to Mamma and was married to Constance and was Rosamund’s papa. I also did not like to think that he was related to me. But of course it was worse for Rosamund. I saw that there were great advantages about our Papa, although of course there were disadvantages.

Constance let Cousin Jock get out something he wanted to say, which was not serious but not funny either, about being sorry that he had changed into carpet slippers in the lobby, but that anyway he was no ladies’ man, and we must forgive him, though no doubt we were used to more refined ways in the la-di-da district of Lovegrove. Then she told him that the things were gone, there had been no sign of them for the last six hours, and she thought we had done it. At first he said he thought she was wrong, he was certain he had heard something go bump upstairs in one of the bedrooms as he came in; when Constance and Rosamund made him listen he had to admit that the house was quiet and he thanked us and said that he had always known that Mamma was a wonderful character. But I could see that really he was sorry the things had gone. He was on their side. You could tell that because the noises he made just coming into the house and changing his outdoor shoes were the same sort of noises that they would have made if they had been human and had not special advantages in being horrible.

After that it was only a question of how soon we could get home. We had to wait while he had tea. He chose himself an oatmeal scone and cut himself a slice of Scotch bun as if he were doing something sly and clever, and when he wanted more tea he passed his cup to Constance with the remark that he didna expect there was any mair tea for a puir man in this housefu’ o’ women. There was no possible reason why he should talk like that. Nobody else in the family talked like that. In fact very few Scottish people talked like that. I could not think of ever having heard anyone speak quite so broadly before except a disgusting man in kilts we had seen in a pantomime, who went round the stage on a scooter, making skirling noises and smoothing his kilts down when they blew up as if he were ashamed, and was much the worst thing in the show. You could not think how Constance, who was so still and dignified, could have married Cousin Jock. You could not think how Rosamund, whom you could not imagine doing anything that people would want to laugh at, could be his daughter. You could see at once why my Papa and Mamma had married, they had the same eagle look about them, and my trouble was that people must always be surprised because I had so little in me, considering I was their daughter. Mamma was being very clever about Cousin Jock, pretending to be amused by his jokes, but not going over to his side. I was able to sit quiet because it occurred to me that he might die soon and leave Rosamund free, and then Constance and she could come and live near us.

When we had finished he pushed his cup and saucer right into the middle of the table, wiped his mouth, slowly and much more than you would need to unless you were an animal and had eaten something on the floor, and said to Mamma, “Now we’ve satisfied the inner man, may I ask if ye’ve kept up with your pianoforty playing?” Mamma said that, though of course she had had to give up practising now that she had all the children, she still played a little. “Awa’ into the next room,” he said, “and ye’ll have the preevilege of making music with your Cousin Jock, who’s thrown awa’ his immortal heritage and gone into the marts of trade.”

We all went into the drawing room, which was in the front of the house, and I felt very sorry for Rosamund, because I felt sure that her father would not be able to play. The piano was an upright Broadwood, and though the candle brackets on it had been twisted till they hung upside down and the panels had been scratched, the keyboard and strings and hammers seemed to have suffered no damage. I found this out by running my hand over the treble keys, and Cousin Jock took my wrist and put my arm down by my side. It was a gentle movement yet extremely brutal. It told me that I had no rights, that I was a child, and children are slaves, and that I was a fool besides; I knew that I hated him and would hate him all my life. I also knew that he had wanted me to hate him, and had cleverly made it worse for me by seeing to it that I could never feel easy in hating him, because he had been so rude to me that I must always suspect my hatred of springing from hurt vanity.

I backed away from him into a corner and leaned against the wall, and Rosamund joined me. We could not sit down; there was not an undamaged chair in the room except the music stool. Cousin Jock fumbled among the music in a Canterbury. None of the sheets were torn. The things that had been driven out had evidently respected music. My mother stood watching him with an air of reserve quite unlike her. It would have been hard for a stranger to tell whether she liked him or not. With exaggerated uncouthness he poked a sheet of music at her, saying, “Ye ken this weel. The auld arrangements. Mose-are’s Flute Concerto in G major, or ate ye so grand these days that ye maun call him Mozart?”

“I know it well,” Mamma answered, in quite an English accent. She often talked Scots to us at home, but she would not have it used as a silly joke. “And I’ve never unlearned to call him Mozart, as you apparently have since we were both young.” She sat down at the piano and softly tried over the music, while he took his flute out of its case and put it together, with ugly movements, full of mean conceit in technique, which made the instrument seem as if it were something horrid from a chemist’s shop, like the thing they would use to give one an enema when one was ill. I looked down at the points of my boots and waited hungrily for the music to begin, so that I could enjoy despising him. But I was to have no such pleasure, only a new fear.

I had thought that Cousin Jock would play like Cordelia, and in a sense I was right. Both he and she removed all effort from music. It did not seem hard any more. But his playing was as good as hers was bad. It was in a sense as good as any playing I have ever heard before or since, on any instrument, indeed it was better, for reasons I was to spend all my later life in learning to understand. I, and any other player, think how we should play a phrase, and take a vow that we shall play it in a certain way, but never succeed in keeping our vow. Our fingers are not clever enough to carry out the orders issued by our wills; also our wills themselves, when it comes to the point, flinch from even so much of perfection as they can conceive. But Cousin Jock played the music as he had heard it in his mind. His fingers had all the skill which could conceivably be demanded by any music written for the flute, and his will was not disconcerted by the idea of perfection. So the clean line of melody drew a delightful design on the silence, which faded and was replaced by another which was different yet belonged to the same order of delight as the first, and the listening mind at once clung to the phrase it had first heard, yet was refreshed by change.

But a long sigh shook the tall body of Rosamund, leaning against the wall beside me. Constance, who had seated herself on the side of an armchair that had its back torn out, was grave as an angel on a tomb. I thought this strange, for surely there could be no greater joy than seeing one of one’s own family doing something really well. But as I listened it came to me that Cousin Jock was not playing really well at all. I think I understand now the dissatisfaction that was then only a strong but vague repulsion. When Mamma played well she was making clear something which the composer had found out and which nobody had known before him. It might even be that by the emphasis she placed on the different parts of his discovery she could add something to it of which nobody, not even the composer, had before been conscious. In her playing there was a gospel and an evangelist who preached it, and that implied a church which worshipped a God not yet fully revealed but in the course of revelation. But when Cousin Jock played he created about him a world in which all was known, and in which art was not a discovery but a decoration. All was then trivial, and there was no meaning in art or in life. His playing was perfect yet it was a part of the same destruction that had defaced the room where we sat. I hated it, and Rosamund put out her hand and stroked my skirt.

At the end Mamma rose and closed the piano and said, “Well, Jock, you certainly play better than you did when you were a young man. Far better,” she added with desperate justice.