The Fountain Overflows (22 page)

“We do notice it,” I said, “but we do not care.”

Cordelia waved at me impatiently. Her face was getting whiter and whiter. I thought she might faint as some of the girls at school did at prayers, and despised her. In our family we did not faint. “We have nothing, nothing,” she said, “and now that I have a chance to make something you will not let me take it because you love the others best. I want to make money and save it so that I can get a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music or the Guildhall and have something to live on— “I do not think she had heard our mother’s cry, she paused only because her desire for fame was like a winnowing fan in her throat— “then I will make some money and study at Prague and then I will really make a lot of money and if I hurry up before the others get too old I will be able to help them. If I don’t,” she cried, “who will? Mary and Rose,” she said, after a pause, staring sadly at us, “must do something to earn their living, they must teach or go into the post office, I will be able to pay for their trainings, and Richard Quin, something must, it must, be done for him.” With a tragic gesture of her whole arm she pointed at him as he sat on the floor by his tray. “It’s worse for him, because he’s a boy. He must go to a good school, he’s so dreadfully spoiled, he must go to a proper school,” she said, looking at him with her upper lip curled in worried distaste, “or he will be worse than Papa.”

Richard Quin brought his spoon down on his plate with a bang, and cried happily, trying to echo a phrase that my mother often used in argumentative crises, “Change a subject. Change a subject. Silly Cordelia, change a subject.”

“See how he speaks to me,” said Cordelia hotly, “and I am the eldest.” Suddenly she began to scream again. “Oh, Mamma,” she shrieked, “we are being so badly brought up.”

Mamma moved her lips, but we could not hear any words.

“I do not mean to be rude, Mamma,” said Cordelia, her voice dropping suddenly to a murmur. “It is not your fault, it is Papa’s”—again Mamma’s lips moved, but she was still inaudible— “but we are being so very badly brought up. Everybody at school,” she said, shivering, “thinks Mary and Rose so odd.”

“Change a subject, change a subject,” advised Richard Quin robustly from the floor.

“We must be more like other people,” she went on frantically, “we must fit in better, and you will not let me do anything to help, and if we only had ordinary clothes it would be better. If I made anything, anything at all, it would be something. Oh, let me earn what I can”—she wept— “I am so miserable, and I am the only one that can do anything for us.”

She could speak no longer, and we all watched her in silence. We had to respect her tears because she had been painfully wounded by her destiny. But it was also true that she had inflicted wounds, which would never completely heal, on everybody in that room, except Richard, who was, for a particular reason of which neither she nor any of the rest of us was aware, proof against such injury. Mary slipped her left hand into my right. We had known the people at school did not like us, and we had wished it was not so; I had spoken of that very misery to Rosamund. But we had thought that some of the dislike felt against us was to our credit. Because of Papa and Mamma we knew the meaning of long words and were forward in our French and tried to speak it with a proper accent, and we recognized the pictures the art mistress put up on the walls, and of course the people who were good at gymnastics and hockey thought we were silly, and many teachers are irredeemably cross by nature. Some of our unpopularity was our own fault, we knew that. We were often awkward and bumped up against things, and we often came out of our thoughts and found that something was expected of us and we had no idea what, and then everybody laughed. And of course it is funny when everybody has sat down and only two people are left standing up, though perhaps they laughed rather a long time over it, for it is funny but not very funny. But now Cordelia had suggested to us that if people did not like us it was a sentence passed on our serious faults, and we were not merely absent-minded, there was a real flaw, a censurable unpleasantness, in our behaviour.

We did not quite believe her. We knew that she had always been silly and always would be. She was showing that by talking such nonsense about money. She would never be able to help us very much about that, and there would be no need, because we would earn all we needed as soon as we were grown up. But we could not quite disbelieve her, for we knew that she was far nearer to the people at school than we were, and perhaps it is true that numbers count, it is not quite natural that two people should be right and hundreds of people wrong. So it happened that from this hour Mary and I had less power than before to make friends. Till that day we had supposed that the coldness strangers showed us could be broken down if we were nice to them, but forever after we were impeded in our dealings with any but our familiars by the suspicion that the more they saw of us the more they were bound to dislike us.

I thought, Really Cordelia should not have done this to us, and returned the pressure of Mary’s hand. But we forgot our pain when Mamma rose to her feet. She seemed to have grown even thinner during the last few moments and her eyes were protruding. We wished she did not look so ugly when she was distressed, we knew that Cordelia would be feeling as horrid about it as if she were a stranger. But mercifully Mamma’s voice was always much more beautiful when she was distressed. It became a thin, silver thread, rather high, spinning from behind her high forehead. The sound was quite lovely when she turned her face towards Cordelia and said, her eyes looking blank as if she did not see her, “I will put on my bonnet and go and make my peace with Miss Beevor and she can accept all the professional engagements for you that you like.”

Cordelia cried, “Oh, Mamma, thank you, thank you.” She glowed at having scored a point. But we were not sure. We knew that Mamma had been so hurt that she was astonished at her own pain, yet she looked also as if she were inflicting pain. When she went to the door her fingers came down on the handle as if she were reluctantly going out to perform some agonizing mystery. She seemed very tired.

After she had gone Cordelia sighed with satisfaction and began to take off her gloves. Mary said, “Come, Richard Quin, pick up your cup and plate.”

“It is not his bedtime,” said Cordelia.

“We are going down to sit in the kitchen till Mamma comes back,” said Mary.

After a moment’s silence Cordelia said with an air of thrift, “It will mean burning two gases.”

“I will give Mamma the half-crown Mr. Langham gave me last time he was here,” said Mary. “That will pay for a great deal of gas.”

“The book, the Brass City,” said Richard Quin. “You did not get to the mermaids, you must read me the bit about the mermaids, I will have mermaids, lots and lots of mermaids, when I am grown up.”

We three went down the steep stairs to the kitchen and I stood on the chair and lit the gas. It was more poetic than electric light, and I am sorry that so many children of today never see it. Over the gas-jet, inside the inverted glass bell, was a thing called an incandescent mantle, which, when you delicately turned on the tap in the gas-bracket and held a lit match over it, glimmered with a pale unsteady whiteness, like a little man risen from the dead whose cerements partook in the light of his immortality. There was also a faint pop as if a spirit were bursting its material bonds. Then you turned the tap full on and the shrouded man shone with the steady light of the angels, and you did not notice him any more, eternity had set in. Kate had left the kitchen looking very nice, she always did. The fire in the range was out because it was early summer and we did most of our cooking on a gas stove, but she had blackleaded it so that it gave out brightness from its highlights. It was a huge range, but coal was so cheap in those days that we could afford to use it though we were so very poor. On the clean straw-coloured wooden table there were some folded sheets which Kate had been ironing before she went out, the strong, businesslike smell of the iron still rising from them. On the dresser there were the plates of our dinner service, which was a Mason Ironstone set, with three red and orange and gold Chinamen against a primrose background with little bits of deep blue scattered over it. On the top of the dresser were the polished copper moulds in which the blancmanges and jellies were made, we sometimes used them as castles in a game on the kitchen table. By gaslight it could not be seen that we had not had enough money to have the place properly done up since we moved into it, and coal ranges made kitchens very dirty. Mary sat down at the table and rested the
Arabian Nights
on the folded sheets, and turned over the leaves to find “The City of Brass,” while Richard Quin took a piece of kitchen paper out of a dresser drawer and a pencil out of his pocket. He enjoyed drawing while he was being read to; he always liked to do two things at once. I got some of our stockings out of Kate’s workbasket and sat in the creaky wicker armchair on the rag hearthrug and mended them. We all wished very much that this had not happened when both Rosamund and Kate were out. We would not have told either of them exactly what was wrong, but they would have understood, and the time would have passed more quickly while we were waiting for our Mamma to come back.

7

T
HERE THEN BEGAN
a period when, for the first time, I would have described myself as unhappy at home. I thought Mamma ought not to have allowed Miss Beevor to bring out Cordelia as a schoolgirl prodigy, partly because I was really a musician, and disliked having my sister get up on a platform and make a fool of herself, and partly because Cordelia had expressed contempt for Mary and me and I wanted her punished by frustration. But when I tackled Mamma I got an answer which seemed to me weak indeed.

“You see,” she said, “supposing that you had a young musical genius of the magnitude of Mozart, and you had a wise and courageous teacher willing to give his life to save this genius from a cruel and unappreciative family …” She paused, letting her mouth fall open, and looking, I could not help thinking, rather foolish.

“Yes?” I said impatiently.

“Well, they would feel just like Cordelia and Miss Beevor.”

“But we know that Cordelia isn’t a genius and Miss Beevor’s awful.”

“Yes, but they do not know that. They feel just like Mozart and a guardian angel.”

“Well, tell them, tell them!”

“But they will not believe me. Why should they? And you know, it would be a bad thing if people always believed other people who said they were not geniuses. Many geniuses have been told at some stage or other that they were no good at all. Really, nature is very foolish. I do not see that there is much need for all of us to be able to distinguish in a second between a lion and a tiger, or a giraffe and a zebra, but there you are, it requires no knowledge of zoology to tell the difference at a glance. But only a good musician with a lot of time can tell the difference between a bad and a good musician.”

“Well, you’re a good musician and you’ve had lots of time,” I persisted, “and you know that Cordelia can’t play for toffee. You ought to stop her. Really you should.”

“How can I dam up all that force?” sighed Mamma.

I thought she ought to try. Mary had once said to me that the adjectives which really suited grown-ups were “lily-livered” and “chicken-hearted.” They were incapable of taking decisive action when it was needed. For the first time it occurred to me that Mamma was infected with this vice. When Mamma found out about Aunt Clara’s furniture’s having gone she should not have come to Lovegrove, she should have gone to some strange place without leaving an address, and gone with us to work in a factory, surely the four of us could have made enough to live on, and Papa would have been broken-hearted, and he would have got the police to trace us, and then he would have begged Mamma to bring us to Lovegrove, and she should have consented only on condition he promised never to gamble on the Stock Exchange again. But here we all were, with Mamma worrying all summer lest the gas be cut off, all winter lest the coal-merchant stop supplies. And here was Cordelia, who surely ought to have been whipped till she promised never to play the violin again. Whipping was, of course, wrong. It was a gross abuse of the physical advantage that grown-ups so unfairly enjoyed over children. But surely this was the one exception in which it would have been permissible.

I grew the more angry with Mamma because I detected that she had relaxed her attitude of hostility to Miss Beevor, whom I saw simply as the architect of our family disgrace, was beginning to regard her with compassion and even with amusement. She was always receiving little notes signed “Beatrice Beevor” which announced triumphantly such news as that the Beckenham Freemasons had been so delighted with our little wonder-child’s performance that the day after they had written to engage her for next year’s banquet. Once, after Cordelia had appeared with dazzling success between Lisa Lehmann’s “In a Persian Garden” and a selection from Amy Woodforde Finden’s
Indian Love Lyrics,
she inquired whether the usual note had come; and on hearing that it had not, she said, with deliberate nonchalance, “I can’t understand it, Aunt Bay-ah-tree-chay was most eager you should hear all about the reception I got.”

Mamma’s eyebrows lifted at the news that Miss Beevor had joined our family, but a wanton light flamed up in her eye. “Bay-ah-tree-chay?” she inquired.

“It is the Italian form of Beatrice,” Cordelia informed her.

“Yes, I know,” said Mamma. “But why should Miss Beevor be called by an Italian name? I never met a woman more soundly English.”

“Of course she’s English,” said Cordelia pettishly. “This is just a name that people call her if they know her awfully well. It seems that there’s a very beautiful picture of Dante and some of his friends meeting Beatrice and some of her friends walking by the Arno, and just staring at each other because they don’t know each other, and of course they didn’t ever meet, which makes it all the more wonderful, and when Miss Beevor was young lots of people thought she looked just like Beatrice in the picture, so they started calling her Bay-ah-tree-chay.”