The Fountain Overflows (45 page)

I could not understand it at all. What they had been playing was stranger than a game, for here was Papa thinking out each move, obviously often choosing between two or three alternatives and altering his mind at the last minute, yet here was Rosamund, not using her reason at all, simply knowing what moves succeeded each other in a game that existed somewhere in full completion, even before they had sat down to play it. How could there be one game which Papa made up as he went along, and another which existed before it began, and how could they both be the same game? I would ask myself that question, and various passages of music would come into my mind, until Papa would begin to mutter phrases and feel for his quill pen, though he dropped it as soon as he had found it, and Rosamund’s hand would twitch as if she missed her needle. Papa would rise and thank her for having given him such a good game, and force himself to find some action which would assure me that I also meant something to him, running his hand through my hair and telling me that I was like some relative of whom I had never heard. When we returned to the sitting room Mamma always asked, “Did you have a nice game with Papa?” It was her habit now to question us whenever we had been with him, as if he lived a long way away from her, and she wished for news of him.

14

I
N SPITE
of everything, all our family, even Cordelia, who plainly was the most discontented of us, remained conscious of Papa’s enormous worth, of the good fortune we enjoyed in contrast to the predicament of poor Rosamund, who had to call Cousin Jock Papa. We realized this very strongly when he paid us a visit one summer night, just after supper, without warning. I opened the door to him. In those distant days it shamed a household not to have a servant on hand to open the door to visitors, but, as a generation younger than mine was to rediscover, the host gained an advantage if he did it himself. After a visitor has rung the bell or dropped the knocker he falls into a dream about what he is going to do or say when he is admitted to the house; so if it be the host who opens the door to him he will have a second before the visitor comes out of his dream during which he can divine the purpose of the visit. Through the light summer dusk I saw the curious fair beauty, the slender Mercury look, of this objectionable elderly man, and I had an impression that he had come to us because he had been hurt and wanted help. Nothing seemed more unlikely, he was of proven malignancy, and I then took it for granted that malignant people do not need help. Very doubtfully I stared at him. He had very strongly the air of belonging to the century we had just left, even to the beginning of it. I had thought years ago that he resembled an old portrait of a poet, and I could imagine him an enigmatic and transient companion of the Lake Poets, a promising young man who stayed a night with Wordsworth and made a nuisance of himself, wandered off uncivilly the next morning, reappeared as getting on well with de Quincey, and died in a garret, with lots of laudanum. I thought authors foolish people who gave themselves airs, for they permitted themselves to behave as foolishly as the most foolish musicians, though their product was manifestly so much less important. But then I noticed that he had his flute-case under his arm and his gloved fingers were moving as if on the stops. He was a musician. He was even a very fine musician. Since I had opened the door, I not only had been identifying him as a sensitive poet too sensitive to write any poetry, I had been childishly wondering if it would be any good shutting it again in his face and telling Mamma that it had been a drunk man, for I feared that he had come to take away Constance and Rosamund, who were on what had been promised as a long visit to us. Between my views of him, I did not ask him to come in. But in a second he assumed his chosen clownishness and pushed his way into the hall with the bowlegged stride of the Scottish comedian, the pointless leer.

“Weel,” he said, “how are you all in this guid Scots home that’s established itself among the heathen? One of you scrapin’ on the fiddle till all hours, I hear, while the rest of you are going on pom-pom-tweedle-tweedle on the pianno-forty, as I’ve nae doot ye call it in your refined cirrcles. I just thocht I’d call in and tak awa’ ma leddy wife and ma young duchess of a daughter, who have graced ower long your hospitable halls. Hey there!”

He had laid his flute-case on the hall chair, and I had laid his hat and coat on top of it. It was with a snarl that he snatched it up, and I snarled back at him. Then it occurred to me that he thought his flute-case might have been in an unsafe place under a coat which anybody might have picked up, and after all a musical instrument is a musical instrument, no matter whose it is, so I swallowed and said I was sorry, and prepared to take him into the sitting room, but he pushed past me, with a movement that said he despised me, because I was not grown up, and a female and a fool at that.

Mamma swung round on the piano-stool and said, “Why, Jock! You should have told us that you were coming!” Constance said placidly, “Where in the world have you come from?” Rosamund laid aside her needlework and went to kiss her father’s cheek, not hurrying to get it over, but ready to turn away at once just as any of us might have kissed Papa when we did not know whether he wanted to talk or not. I felt angry with them for being nice to him.

“What way would ony mon need to explain the irresistible attractions that draw all and sundry to the fair toon of Lovegrove? Forbye,” he added, as if he were saying something very clever and satirical, “I am playing first flute in the Croywood Choral Society’s performance of
The Messiah
next month. A repeat performance. We played it at Easter and thousands were turned away. Or so it was believed by the more simple-minded members. So we are giving it again, God help us, and I came down for a wee rehairsal and a crack with the secretary.”

“How does it happen that you belong to the Croywood Choral Society?” asked Mamma. Croywood was a borough some miles south of us, outside London, in Surrey.

“I do not, but there’s not a mon living has played first flute in
The Messiah
more often and with a greater number of associations devoted to the art of song than your humble sairvant,” said Cousin Jock. “And I’m tellin’ ye all, there’s something gey and wrong with that composition, ower many gowks sing it, ower many gowks listen to it. Gie a lug to one that kens.”

Mamma asked, “Have you had supper? Will you not have something to eat?”

Rosamund had pushed forward a chair for him, but he preferred the one from which Mary had risen on his entrance. Though she was standing in front of it he waved her away loutishly and planted himself down in it. “A humble glass of beer I wouldna scorn, if anything so low and vulgar can be found in this genteel home. Ay,” he said, after a pause during which he breathed deeply and noisily, “and a sawndwich. I think I desairve a sawndwich. For tee-hee, tee-hee,” he giggled, “I’ve been at heavier work in Lovegrove than attending a rehairsal. Ay, I wasna idle this afternoon.”

Plainly he wanted Mamma to inquire what it was that he had been doing, but she would not let herself be drawn. He was playing an intolerable game. He was hoping that some of us might be embarrassed by having a relative who spoke with so coarse an accent, but hoping even more strongly that we might be acute enough to see through his affectation and know a fiercer embarrassment at having a relative who had visited us with an uncivil and a candid intention of embarrassing us. He had asked for beer with that same double intention. It was certain we would have none in the house, for it was considered a vulgar drink in those days; I do not think that my father ever tasted it in his life. If Cousin Jock lost on the roundabouts he would get it back on the swings; we would be ashamed either of a beer-drinking relative or of one who pretended to drink beer for malicious purposes. But each time he produced his twin-pointed barb we answered him as if he had put before us a simple and reasonable proposition.

Richard Quin said, “Mamma, I will get Cousin Jock some beer. The old man at the second of the little houses down the road, he drinks beer, he always has a bottle or two, he likes me very much, he has seen me play cricket, he goes to all the cricket matches round here, he was a groundsman at the Oval for thirty years, he says I could be a great cricketer if I would work at it, he will give me some beer.” He ran out of the room.

“Games, games,” sighed Cousin Jock, “that’ll never boil the pot.” He repeated it with a worse accent. “That’ll niver bile th’ pot.”

“What kind of sandwich would you like?” asked Mamma.

“Och, I canna expect a meal, coming at this hour, and me no invited.”

“A ham sandwich is what he prefers,” said Constance placidly. “I think there was some ham left over at midday. Perhaps Rosamund might go down and cut a sandwich, if there is any stale bread. Remember your Papa likes pepper as well as mustard.”

“She’ll need the reminder,” said Cousin Jock. “She will have forgotten a’ her puir feyther’s foolish and unfashionable ways, being awbsent from his hairth so long.”

My mother said, “Girls, if you want to go and finish your homework, you can.”

“Am I to be treated like a leper?” asked Cousin Jock, suddenly in full whine. “I suppose things have been said about me round here that are past a’ believing. Ah, weel, that was a’ that could be expected.”

I went down with Rosamund to the kitchen. On the stairs she said, “I hope we will find some pepper. None of you take it, but perhaps Kate does.”

“Perhaps she does,” I said, “she likes some horrid things, like pickles and vinegar. But listen, your Papa said when I opened the door’ to him that he had come to take you and your Mamma away with him. What are you going to do?”

“Well, if he wants us to go home with him, I suppose we will have to go,” said Rosamund. I tried to hold her back so that we would discuss this hateful crisis in the passage, but she hurried on into the kitchen and stammered, “K-Kate, my Papa has come, and I have to make him a sandwich. No, I will make it for him, I know how to make it for him. But have you any pepper?” The gaslight streamed down on her and showed her as wonderful as I thought her, golden, elect, superior; but she was taking the threat of her degradation with what seemed to me stupid calm.

Kate put down
The Daily Mail
and told us, “Of course we have pepper. It is up there in that small blue canister. We have to have it for Irish stew, it wouldn’t be right to make Irish stew without pepper.”

“That’s why none of us ever like Irish stew,” I said furiously, “we like the onions and the way the mutton comes off the bone, but we hate the pepper, why can’t you leave it out? And, Kate, it is too horrible, Rosamund’s father wants her to go home! We must not let her go with him!”

“It would not be Irish stew if you left out the pepper,” said Kate, “and if Miss Rosamund’s Papa wants her to go home, she cannot stay.”

“It can’t be right to put pepper in Irish stew if it makes it nasty,” I said, “and why should Rosamund go home with her horrible Papa?”

“It is right,” said Kate.

“Oh, like the pepper,” I raged.

“Have you black and white pepper?” asked Rosamund.

“Yes, the white is in the little blue canister, as I said, the black is in a plain tin,” said Kate. “But why do you want both?”

“Papa likes to grumble,” said Rosamund, in full tranquillity. “I am going to make him two sandwiches, one with the ham thick and the other with the ham thin. He will bite into one, and complain of the way the ham is in that particular one, and then I will tell him to try the other one. And I am going to cut each in half, and in one I will put black pepper, and in the other white; and when he bites into one of those he will say that he likes the other kind of pepper, and again I will tell him to try the other one.”

These words shocked me. I was prepared to think it right that Rosamund should hate her father, but not that she should regard him with what seemed to me a hard and frivolous amusement. I tried to make her speak more honestly and more savagely, and I called, “But he is a monster! He is a cruel monster! You cannot go back to him!”

“Oh, poor Papa, poor Papa,” said Rosamund, with a lazy smile, as she continued to cut the sandwiches.

“Miss Rose,” said Kate, “you must not speak so about Miss Rosamund’s Papa, or you will become plain Rose, and plain Kate will box your ears. Growing up is going to do you no good at all with me. You are not built big, and you will never come up to my shoulder. I will not have these tempers in my kitchen, and I will not be taught how to make Irish stew, and I will not have you speaking so rudely about a visitor’s Papa. Miss Rosamund, does all this mean that they would be better for a pot of tea upstairs?”

“I think they would,” said Rosamund.

As Kate busied herself with the kettle at the range, I stood in miserable silence beside Rosamund. But as she sprinkled the pepper from a knife on the ham, I noticed how the right side of her forefinger was roughened by continual sewing, and I burst out in anger, “How can you bear to go back to him when he is so disgustingly mean about money?”

Through her laughter, she slowly stammered, “Oh, p-p-poor P-p-papa! Oh, p-p-poor Papa!” My love was laced with hatred. I even wished I could have found it in my heart to mock her by imitating her stammer.

“No, Miss Rose, take up this tray and remember to honour thy father and mother that thy days shall be long in the land,” said Kate.

“He is not my father,” I sulked.

“Everything in the Bible includes visitors,” said Kate. “You should know that, the way you have been brought up.”

I carried the tray upstairs, with Rosamund just behind me, stammering conciliatory remarks which I ignored because there was surely still amusement in her voice. In the sitting room we found Mamma passing her handkerchief over her brows and saying gently, “No, Jock, I have not heard of this Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, and I will not go near her.”

“Awa’ wi’ ye, for an unspiritual woman,” said Cousin Jock. “There she sits, a wee hauf-mile fra here, bang opposite Lovegrove Station, a bairn couldna miss it, and she kindly offers to welcome you or ony ither buddy that has a mind to pairt with five shillings of the King’s silver and to share with you all the secrets of Etairnity. Think shame on yersel’ for no taking advawntage of such a handsome offer.”