The Fountain Overflows (17 page)

“I’m no sae bad,” he said, putting his flute away. It had been obvious from the way she rose from the piano that she was not going to play for him again; and I think he had known that she would not. “But I’m no one to pay compliments for the sake of paying compliments, and I’ll no say the same of you. I wouldna say ye hadna slipped a wheen.”

A tremor ran through Mamma’s body. “I have the four of them,” she said, “and there is a great deal to do.”

“Ay, it’s bound to tell,” said Cousin Jock. “No use shutting the eyes on hard facts, it’s bound to tell.”

My mother looked round the defaced room and its smashed furniture, as if she were thinking that she and it were wrecked alike. When her eyes fell on Rosamund they moved no farther, and she said, smiling, “Your girl is tall.”

“So she is,” agreed Constance placidly, her hands folded in front of her over her spreading skirts.

“Ay, a great maypole,” grumbled Cousin Jock, going on packing up his flute. But he could not hurt us any more when we were all looking at Rosamund. Her shining golden curls, her solid white flesh that was full over her eyebrows and deeply cleft between her mouth and chin, her straight body, which even when she was at rest suggested the idea of leisurely movement, made us forget the horrid perfection of her father’s flute-playing and the cruelty of his attempt to hurt Mamma. She did not mind us all staring at her, and made it easy for us by smiling vaguely, as if she had gone away in her own thoughts. I noticed that Mamma was looking at her as I had never seen her look at anybody except us children, and it was strange, I was not angry, though usually I was very jealous of Mamma’s affection.

“She must come over and play with the children,” said Mamma.

“How’s your husband?” asked Cousin Jock. “Will he keep this job?”

I hated the room with the smears on the walls, the twisted candlesticks on the piano, the stinted gaslight, and Cousin Jock. Papa and Mamma and my sisters and my brother and I, Constance, and Rosamund were all living in a more dangerous way than the children I knew at school and their fathers and mothers and teachers; and in this house somebody, and I supposed it was Cousin Jock, was trying to push us over the edge of the abyss to which we clung. I said violently, “Can’t Rosamund come back with us tonight?”

Rosamund slowly shook her head, smiling slightly.

“We’d love to take her,” said Mamma.

“Would you like to go?” asked Constance. “Say if you would like it.”

Again Rosamund shook her head. Stammering, she thanked Mamma and said that she would come for the whole day sometime soon, but not that night.

After that Mamma and I went and got our hats and coats, and the others dressed too, to take us to the station. Cousin Jock said that we had come the wrong way, and he would send us off from another station. When we got out into the dark street we all halted and stood looking at the house and listening. There was no sound. Cousin Jock turned round and spoke rudely to a child who was bowling a hoop along the pavement, telling it to be quiet, though it was really not making much noise. He grumbled, “Well, I expect that the morn will find them all the worse.”

“No,” said Constance in her prim, hollow voice.

“What gars ye say that?” he asked crossly.

“I can feel that they have gone for good,” she answered with composure. “There is a difference between feeling that a tooth has stopped aching and that it has been taken out.”

The three grown-ups moved ahead, and we children followed. “Are you sure they’ve gone?” I asked Rosamund. She answered, stammering a little and looking on the ground, “Oh yes; quite far away. Besides, there was—” I knew we were both thinking of the stream of salt dripping from the kitchen mantelpiece and falling in a spray on the hearthstone. We walked through the darkness in silence for some minutes and then I said, “I’ll never tell.”

She murmured, “It’s better not,” still looking down.

We slackened our pace to be alone with our secrets, our sense of mystery and power, until the three in front turned round and called on us to hurry. As we obeyed, Rosamund said, “I never showed you the picture of my hare.”

I said, “I’ll see it another time.”

“I would have liked you to see him,” said Rosamund. “I told you how lovely he was, but I don’t believe I told you how really beautiful he is.”

“Oh, I know how you feel,” I said. “One does get so fond of made-up animals. But I quite understand he’s beautiful.”

The grown-ups called to us again, for they had reached the corner of a high street, where there were lighted shops and crowds, and they were always frightened of us children’s being in crowds, though actually nobody ever took any notice of us.

But grown-ups had all the power and we had to follow on our parents’ heels more quickly than we liked past shops lit by naphtha flares, a form of street-lighting much more exciting than anything that has superseded it. Loose red and yellow flames burned on suspended plates, open to the wind, which sometimes blew them to a bunch of streaming ribbons and jerked all the shadows askew. “I love these lights,” said Rosamund. “Do you like fireworks?”

“They are the loveliest things in the world,” I said.

“I once heard, or I read it somewhere in a book,” she went on dreamily, “that sometimes people light bonfires on the top of mountains, I should like that too.”

“I’ve heard about that too, I can’t think where,” I said, “but it must be gorgeous. We’ll probably see it sometime. We’re lucky, don’t you think? We know more than the other girls at school. We have mothers that are wonderful. I can see your mother is like mine, better than anyone else’s. And we have a great advantage over the other girls at school, we know all sorts of things they don’t. They don’t have demons in the house, and so long as you can get rid of them it gives you a great advantage to know there are such things. I think we’ll always be lucky. Don’t you? Don’t you?”

We came to a stop to watch some very fine flares outside a butcher’s shop, where a big red-faced man in a blue smock was shouting out long things about meat, as if he were making a speech in a historical play by Shakespeare, “Attend me, lords, the proud insulting queen, with Clifford and the haughty Northumberland and of their feather many more proud birds, have wrought the easy melting kind like wax.” As we watched, my mind clung onto what it was saying, and I persisted, “Don’t you think we’re lucky?” The lights and shadows wavered on her face without disturbing her look of being soft but immovable. Then as I repeated my question again a spasm convulsed her face. I realized that she could not answer, that her inability was giving her acute physical pain. I stood in an agony of sympathy, and presently she said, “I stammer. Didn’t you know? I sometimes stammer. You must forgive me. It is just a way of being stupid.”

“Oh, no, it isn’t,” I said. “One of the cleverest girls at school with us in Edinburgh stammered. But I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

We found ourselves waiting with our parents on the curb till the traffic gave us a chance to cross. A string of tall scarlet trams loaded with light jerked past, making a nice rhythmic noise on the points. A coster and his family drove by in a cart drawn by two ash-coloured donkeys, he and his boys dressed in whitish corduroys sewn all over with pearl buttons, the women wearing huge hats trimmed with green and red and blue ostrich feathers, all made mysterious, like what you would think the people in the masque at the end of
The Tempest
would be, by the night and the cross-hatchings of light and the street-lamps. A hansom jingled by, with a man wearing a top hat all askew and a lady swathed in a feather boa behind its wooden apron, and the grown-ups all exclaimed at the cost of taking such a vehicle down from the West End. At this talk of money I reflected on the financial position of Rosamund’s family and my own, and felt a moment of terror. It seemed not nearly impossible enough that an unlucky happening would send us to the workhouse. But of course it would be all right when I was grown up, I would be rich, I would be able to take hansoms anywhere. The traffic dwindled and we all ran across the cobbled road and walked beside a patch of common, along a row of bright stalls where people were selling things to eat, and then we two lagged again.

“This coffee smells nearly like coffee at home, but not quite,” I said.

“Yes, it’s a little like something burned in the garden,” said Rosamund.

We made these remarks with great distinctness, having no malice, just in front of the man who kept the coffee stall, and when he looked angrily at us we thought placidly and critically that he was one of the many grown-ups who were cross by nature, and strolled on to the next stall.

“Could you eat jellied eels?” I asked.

Hesitantly she answered, “If I were dared.”

“Do they dare much at your school?” I asked. “They do at ours, and I think it’s so silly.”

“They dare all the time,” she said wearily, “and such stupid little things.”

“They don’t like us at our school,” I said. “Do they like you at yours?”

“No,” she answered.

We walked on in silence for a minute and I felt a desire to be honest about this. “It’s awful, I think they’re horrid and silly, but I wish they liked me.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “I don’t think there’s anything I should rather have than that they should like me,” and she spoke with such a quiet, candid admission of pain that I felt no longer lonely in my exclusion, and was certain that if she shared it it could not be a shame to me. Just when I got back my voice we passed a stall where they were selling roast chestnuts, and she said, “That is the nicest smell of all.”

“When we have our hair washed,” I said, “we all sit round the fire in our dressing-gowns and we roast chestnuts in a wire thing among the coals and eat them and drink milk.”

“Mamma and I do that, too,” she said. “I think your Mamma and mine did it together when they were little.”

“And I’ll tell you one thing,” I said, “I like keeping a chestnut in my mouth and then taking a drink of milk. But Mamma says it’s a horrid trick.”

“So does my Mamma,” said Rosamund.

“I can’t think why,” I complained. “People would have to look hard at you before they could see that you were doing it, so hard that they’d be in the wrong because they were being rude, and anyway there’s nobody there but us.”

“And sucking chocolate, that’s another thing,” said Rosamund. “Mamma says you must eat it, not suck it, and surely nobody could see that without staring either.”

“Yet they let you cut your bread and butter into fingers and dip it in your egg,” I said, “and I would have thought that if the other things were wrong that was too.”

“Yes,” said Rosamund, “those are the things I call really queer.”

Now we had come to one of those South London stations which have taken to the air. The beautiful rubies and emeralds of the signals shone up in the dark sky, above the sloping slate roofs of the houses, which in the night shone like water. The platforms and the waiting rooms were a vague pavilion between these tilted slate ponds and the stars. We thought it so lovely that we stood stock still in a dream, and the grown-ups had to call us again. “Don’t you like the night far better than the day?” I asked Rosamund, as we ran up the steep wooden staircase.

“Yes,” she answered, “it is more—” Her mouth again became a struggling hole as her stammer seized her. She had not found her voice by the time the handsome train came in, spitting fire from its engine, and Mamma and I got into one of its golden compartments. But it did not matter that my conversation with Rosamund was not finished, for I would see her again and again, we would go through life together, she would never go over to the side of the enemy. I waved to her through the shut glass of the window with a fervour which I at once regretted, lest she should have thought me silly. But she took a step nearer the train when she waved to me, as if she mistrusted the hesitant motion of her hand, the blind softness of her smile, to tell me how little silly she thought me. The train puffed off, then stopped before it got out of the station, and backed, so that Mamma and I saw the three of them again, going along the platform to the exit. Cousin Jock was looking canny in his horrid Scots comedian way; what on earth was there for him to look canny about on a railway platform in the dark? But he was not putting on ‘that expression very hard, because he did not know there was anybody looking at him very closely. You could pierce through it and see how easily he did things, how easily he played the flute, with the ease of a snake gliding, casting its skin. Constance was stately beside him, taking no notice of him, though not looking cross with him; it was as if they had been told to walk side by side in a procession, and that was all she knew of him. Rosamund was a pace behind them, making no sign, yet eloquent, like a tree before its leaves have come out.

Mamma and I were alone in the carriage. Mamma took off her shoe to see what had been hurting her all day. We had to buy very cheap boots and shoes and they were always going wrong one way or another. “There must be a nail coming through,” she muttered. “Oh, it was good to have Constance back. We’ve had a grand day, have we not, my wee lamb?”

“Yes,” I said, “and I do like Cousin Constance and Cousin Rosamund.”

“It is funny that I called you Rose and she called her Rosamund,” Mamma said, feeling inside the shoe. “It was chance, we were far away from each other at the time.”

“But those horrible things,” I said, “that were there when we first got there.”

“I doubt the heel of a hammer will take out that nail,” she mourned. “If it doesn’t I’ll have to send it to the cobbler, and my other good pair is there already. Yes, they were horrible things.”

“I was frightened at first,” I said. Thinking of the day, I felt quite frightened.

“Yes, yes,” she said. Being very brave, she sometimes failed in tenderness to us when fear was our trouble.

I felt lost for a moment, then, remembering something I had read in a book, I said, “Oughtn’t we to have said the Lord’s Prayer?”

She sighed. “It’s not so easy as all that. How should it be?” And put her shoe on again, murmuring, “Poor Constance, poor Constance.”