The Fountain Overflows (27 page)

At first we all sat, most of us on the floor, and played games. But that did not go well, perhaps because there was an unpleasant scene before we had really got going with Postman’s Knock. The fire flagged, and Aunt Lily rang for more logs, and the bell was answered by a tall, pale, queenly parlourmaid, very handsome in the manner of a Tennysonian princess, who made her coronet cap and its long starched streamers seem medieval wear. But on hearing what was required this lily maid became brutally incensed, saying such things ought to be thought of while the boy was still about. Later she came back and dumped down a basket of logs with the clownish emphasis of the horribly funny people in pantomimes. The interchange between this big, coarse, beautiful girl in her becoming black and white dress and little, ugly Aunt Lily in her sky-blue taffeta blouse and her trailing skirt of flounces and ruches had indeed the air of a theatrical scene, for it was played on the hearthrug before the strange Oriental extension of the chimney-piece, the gilded shelves on which were little lolling Buddhas, ivory monkeys and elephants, and lumps of brilliantly coloured stone, all perfectly irrelevant to the two contending women.

When the door had shut on silence Aunt Lily rushed to the piano and started playing “The Bees’ Wedding,” very quickly, so quickly that the bees could never have been sure whether they were married or not, dipping her head over the keys and nodding till her hairpins dropped out, to convey that she was not at all embarrassed and was able to lose herself in music. We passed from games to accomplishments, greatly to my pleasure. Then and now I can enjoy almost any performance in any sphere except my own; if any musician plays to me I am precipitated back into my particular combat with the angels, but if anybody acts or recites or dances I am there on my knees, there is isolated for me another specimen of the hopeless and idiotic and divine desire of imperfect beings to achieve perfection. That afternoon I was irritated when a girl played Chopin’s “Nocturne in F,” and indeed with some reason, for she had been taught an old-fashioned aberrant practice of giving the last note in every slurred phrase half its value; also the piano was slightly out of tune. On the other hand, I enjoyed the accompaniments and voluntaries which Aunt Lily zestfully proffered. She played so badly that her performance was not within the scope of criticism, nor could evoke any emotion except amusement. She made the instrument sound like a barrel-organ; her trills and runs had a Cockney accent; and when she had sounded a volley of chords it was her habit to wink at her audience and say, “Hi tiddly pom pom,” absently, as if obeying some recognized convention. And I certainly enjoyed it when a fat girl called Elsie Biglow recited “Lasca,” a poem we had learned in elocution class, about a man who had been in love with a girl on a ranch out in South America, and one day the cattle stampeded, and she saved his life by shielding him with her body and was killed. Papa was very fond of this poem, and said that if Lasca really performed this feat she must have been a yard or two wide and made of some substance like corrugated iron, but all the same as a man he was glad to hear that such self-sacrifice was held up to young girls as exemplary conduct. But Elsie believed in “Lasca” and for the moment I was glad to share her belief. Then somebody danced an Irish jig and somebody else danced a skirt dance. But after that the tide of talent ebbed.

In a half-hearted way somebody asked, “Doesn’t Rose play the piano?” All heads were turned towards me but I shook my head. They would never hear me play. I was afraid they were all so stupid about music that even after they had heard me they might still think Cordelia played better than I did, and would misunderstand our family tragedy. I knew I was conceding power to their opinion which my independence should have disputed; but it would have been hard for me, with this uneasiness in my mind, to play at that piano. Yet I was a little troubled by my failure to be sociable, and I turned to Rosamund and murmured, “I really can’t play here.”

“No, indeed,” she answered softly, “you could not be expected to, as the piano is out of tune.”

This astonished me. The piano was only slightly out of tune, and I had thought Rosamund quite unmusical. I felt as if someone understood to be stone-deaf had suddenly joined in a general conversation.

The hitch in the entertainment continued. I heard it suggested that some of the girls should play a scene from
As You
Like It,
which their form had been doing that term. This distressed me. The world is against me on this point, but it has always seemed to me that the exiles in the Forest of Arden must have been rejected by their communities on conversational grounds. I looked about me, and was repelled again by the pictures of motoring accidents and animals in motoring clothes, such unworthy company for the Oriental dishes, with their bright flowers shining in everlasting summer against milky backgrounds, and the prints in which a deer or a fish or a dragon disengaged itself just sufficiently from the surface of the paper to indicate the existence of a totally graceful world. I was incensed for another reason by the straw wallpaper, so faintly striped by a designer who used gold without ostentation, without thought for its secondary value as a sign of wealth, simply for its beauty. Lately the rain had got into Mamma’s room through a faulty gutter, and Mamma had had to have it redecorated with the plainest paper because it was the cheapest. I looked round the room and made certain what I would have guessed, that every girl there had a nicer party-dress than mine; and at the same time I heard a girl sitting in the row in front of us say to her neighbour, “I went to a party the other day, over in Croydon, and there was a girl who did the most curious thought-reading trick. She put her hands on each side of your face and told you to think of a number, and then she told you what number you had thought of.”

Immediately I knew I could do this trick. It was as if it had been waiting for years that I should hear of it and perform it. I had, after all, certain advantages over my schoolfellows, over Nancy’s horrible Mamma, who had been so rude to us all, her idiotic Papa who hung up these ugly pictures among the lovely plates and prints and wallpaper that he had acquired by no better right than by being able to pay for them. I had even advantages over Miss Furness and her mother. For I belonged to a family which had magical powers, there was no doubt of that. Did not everybody who knew our household well say that Mamma had second sight? And had not Mamma and Constance, Rosamund and I, driven the evil spirits out of the house in Knightlily Road by our mere presence? And Rosamund knew something about death that made it not terrible. Of course I could undertake this small interference with the ordinary processes of life, and everybody in the room would have to admit that I was a superior being.

I said to Rosamund in an excited whisper, “I am going to do a thought-reading trick.”

She whispered back, “Oh, but the Mammas would not like it.” She was convulsed with a painful attack of stammering, but I had no mercy on her. Though it was largely my recognition that she knew more than other people which give me confidence in the extraordinary character of my family, I at once told myself that she did not do nearly as well at school as I did and I need pay no attention to what she said.

I stood up and said, “Please, I can do a trick,” and Aunt Lily said, “There’s a clever kiddy. Come out here and do it, I’m sure we’ll all enjoy it.”

The tigerskin in front of the fireplace had been lifted so that the two girls could do their dances, and I stood myself in the cleared space. Aunt Lily asked, “It isn’t a rough trick, is it?” and looked up at the curios on the mantelpiece. Without using my thought-reading powers I knew that if I broke anything she would be terribly blamed, and I liked the people in this house even less.

“No,” I said. “Let me put my hands on each side of your face. Now think of a number. Think of it hard.” Up it came, slowly and clumsily, like a wheelbarrow being trundled out of a dark stable, fifty-three. She squealed, “But that’s the very number I was thinking of,” and everybody in the room gasped as if they were watching fireworks.

I was afraid I would not be able to do it again, but of course I could. Elsie Biglow, the girl who had recited “Lasca,” was the first to come up and as soon as my hands pressed into her plump cheeks I knew that she would think of an even number, even before it floated before me like a perfectly symmetrical pear floating in a syrup. I was, of course, performing an action which presents hardly more mystery than the undoubted fact that a person standing some feet away from the keyboard of a piano and speaking clearly will cause certain notes to sound of their own accord, often quite loudly. The only difference in the thought-reading trick is that it is not a question of transmitting a wave to a detached object, but of receiving it. Countless children have discovered this way of amusing themselves, and if there was anything remarkable about my performance it was in the invariability of my success. I never gave a wrong number till after twenty minutes or so, when I suddenly felt very tired and would not go on. But I had won the distinction I had wanted. All the girls were looking at me as they did at the head of the school or the winner of the tennis championship.

I went back to Rosamund and said, “You see, it was all right,” but she did not answer. She was heavy and pale, as if she had suddenly caught a cold. But then we went in to tea, which was very good. There were several cakes made in the new way which had just been introduced from America, in layers with butter icing between them; and there was something we had never seen before, brandy snaps rolled up in cornets full of whipped cream. Even Rosamund cheered up over them. Then we went back to the drawing room, ready to play whatever game was proposed, since it was not polite to go home immediately after tea. But the parlourmaid came in and said something to Aunt Lily, and she nodded and tiptoed over to us and she wanted me to go into the dining room and speak to Nancy’s Mamma for a minute. At this I felt frightened. I did not want to see that tall, rude, too dark woman again, and I turned to Rosamund, whom I had been despising a short time before, and said quite urgently, “You will come too?” She nodded, and it interested me, and even a little disturbed me, to see that when Aunt Lily tried to intimate that she was not required, Rosamund assumed that blind look which I had almost believed to be beyond her control, the result of either some actual defect of sight or of absorption in her inner life; and she pressed forward at my side in the dining room, completely a big stupid girl, who never sees when she is not wanted.

At the disordered table sat Mrs. Phillips, the light pouring down from the big brass chandelier on her raw-boned handsomeness, her purple gown. She said angrily, “Look, Lil, all the cakes carried down the very first moment the kids are out of the room, and all the dirty china left. You bet they’re having a grand guzzle in the kitchen, and we’ll have a late washing-up, for all I said they could have the char in, and a scamped dinner again. I don’t think we’ve ever had a set of girls I hated worse. But there’s two children. When you came up to my room you only spoke of one.”

“It’s this one that’s Rose, the clever little kiddy,” said Aunt Lily. “The other one’s just with her, chums, you know.”

“This is my cousin Rosamund,” I said, and Rosamund said gravely, with an affectation of simplicity, “How do you do?”

“How do you do,” said Mrs. Phillips irritably. “Rose, this thought-reading you do, I suppose it’s some sort of trick?”

I stared into her eyes and said coldly, “How could it be a trick?”

She surprised me by cringing. “Of course, of course. I didn’t mean anything. But could you do it with me?”

I might have said, “I am too tired.” But I was glad of an opportunity to show this stupid and repulsive grown-up that I had powers of a sort that evidently impressed her. I got up and walked over to her with a deliberation in which there was some showmanship, and put my hands on each side of her face, loathing my contact with her hot skin. She was not really so very dark, not nearly so dark as would put her outside the limits beyond which it is recognized that admiration must stop; yet I felt that if she were any darker she would have been as revolting as if she had been entirely covered with the stain of a birthmark. It was not comfortable, reading her mind. Had there been numbers more uneven than odd ones her choice would have lain among them. I did it for her twice, to establish my superiority, and I refused her a third test, for the pleasure of refusing her.

When I was back in my seat, she asked me if my cousin and I would like more cake. I said thank you, no, we had had all we wanted at teatime, and that it had been lovely, particularly the brandy snaps filled with whipped cream. She looked round the table and saw that there were none left, and told Aunt Lily to run down to the kitchen and put some more on a plate, she knew there were lots, for that was the sweet for dinner. But I said thank you, no, we had had as many as we wanted at teatime. Then she asked, smiling, if we had not a corner for another chocolate or two. It was at once amusing and horrible to see a grown-up so anxious to please a schoolgirl. When I said no, we really wanted nothing, Mrs. Phillips fell silent and for a moment drew a pattern on the tablecloth with her finger, while we looked round the room. They had all sorts of things we did not have at home, particularly on the sideboard, where there were two silver biscuit boxes and a cut-glass and silver thing with whisky in it, which I knew was called a tantalus, because my mother never could see one in a shop-window without pausing and bursting into indignant cries, because it had a mechanical device by which nobody without a key could open it, so that the servants should not steal a drink, and it seemed to her to advertise brutally a condition of mistrust. It was also interesting for me to see what leather-covered chairs were like when they were not worn out and torn like ours.

“Well, you’re a very clever little girl,” said Mrs. Phillips in tones indicative of impatience and dislike, and I rose and put out my hand as if to bid her good-bye, pretending that I thought this all she wanted. She did not take it and abruptly asked me whether I could tell fortunes; and Aunt Lily leaned forward in her chair, the light from the chandelier shining very brightly on the bridge of her nose, and slowly rubbed her thin hands together as if she were very anxious to hear the answer.