The Fountain Overflows (47 page)

“But Mamma says that men have quite different sorts of minds, not better but different, and can do work we cannot,” I said.

“Oh, I am not talking of their work,” said Rosamund, “it is all the states they get into. Your Papa goes on and on about the world falling into ruin. But what would that mean but that a whole lot of people are going to live as he has made you and your Mamma live? And if my Papa is so sad because life is terrible, why does he do so little to make it less terrible for my Mamma and me? If he feels so horrified at the thought of people getting cancer, might it not occur to him that Mamma and I are just as likely to get cancer as anybody else and let us have a little gaiety?”

“Yes, they are awful, when you come to think of it,” I said. “But they cannot help it. Nobody teaches bulls to bellow and stamp, it is their nature. But we must go. Mamma is calling us.”

She made no move to rise, and went on, “And think how foolish they will look later on.”

“When? Why?” I asked, rather tartly. I felt this conversation to be impious.

“Well, the world must be getting worse, if they say so,” she explained. “Both your Papa and my Papa are very clever. So life is not so hard as it is going to be when we are grown up. But our Papas are doing very well in the present. Someone always saves your Papa at the last moment, and my Papa makes lots of money. But as for you and me, and Cordelia and Mary and Richard Quin, all the trouble the Papas foresee will come down on us. It is we who will have to bear the hardships and do heroic things.” She broke into laughter that was malicious, but only gently so. “Oh, the Papas will seem such fuss-and-botherers then.”

I felt dazed as I followed her downstairs. This was not such a surprising conversation for the period when feminism was spreading like a forest fire, even in households like ours, where the father vehemently disapproved, and the mother was too busy to consider it, and no propagandist literature entered the home. We were, after all, only a year or so below the age when we might have gone to the university, had we had that sort of mind, and many girl undergraduates at that time might have discussed their fathers as disrespectfully, though not so artlessly. But I was as startled as I had been at Nancy Phillips’s party when Rosamund, whom we all supposed tone-deaf, had turned to me and remarked that the piano was slightly out of tune. She never criticized anybody. Her comments were invariably bland. When we had raged against Cordelia’s violin-playing she had always pointed out (what we afterwards had seen to be the real issue at stake) that she looked charming when she was playing the violin, that nearly everybody had ugly elbows but hers were beautiful. But now Rosamund had laid an axe at the roots of a tree which I did not care to identify; and I was displeased too because she mocked at what angered her. It was the way in our family to hate without humour, and now it seemed to me that was the only fair way of fighting. You did not hit people below the belt or take from them their seriousness. But I had to admit that this did not apply. She had not spoken as if she hated either my father or her father; she only laughed at them, lying on my bed among her spilled golden hair.

But it could not be said that she was wrong. The next few weeks were to prove abundantly that fathers behaved surely more strangely than was necessary. We were all unhappily aware that Papa’s friendships passed through a cycle. A man would give my father over years unstinted admiration and would give or lend him money. It could be believed only by those who have had a gambler in the family how poor we were in our childhood, and how large the sums acquired in the same period by our father, as earnings and gifts and loans that became gifts. Then my father’s unpunctuality and irrationality, and his instant and contemptuous rupture of any arrangement made for his benefit which required patience and some reciprocal effort, would become more than any admirer could bear without protest. My father never became aware of these protests; he was aware that people kept on making them, but then organ-grinders kept on grinding out popular tunes on their barrel organs, and obviously he would not be expected to pay them any attention. But at the same time he would tire of his friend, for reasons that were genuine enough. No ordinary intelligence could long satisfy the demands he made from his intellectual companions. Then the friend, to save his pride, would announce that his patience was exhausted, and there would be a long quarrel late at night, ending with a banged door; and afterwards Mamma would reproach Papa for his unkindness and Papa would answer with his mocking laugh and go out to pace the garden.

Then years would pass, and my father would suffer some conspicuous misfortune. The friend would return, glad to have an excuse for finding his way back to the enjoyment of my father’s charm. It salved his pride that he could appear in the guise of a Good Samaritan, and it was usually true that he was the kind of man who found a real pleasure in benevolence. My father’s response was always a quite honest welcome. He was not interested in his friend as a Good Samaritan, because, though he had often been rescued, he had never noticed it. But he was eager to know what his friend had been thinking about of late. The man was certain to have a fairly good brain, or he would not have been admitted to my father’s intimacy in the first place; and though my father had exhausted its contents at the date of the breach, it must by this time have accumulated fresh material. So there would follow long and enthralling conversations, which would break up only when the friend left our house in the early hours of the morning, full of an elation which would presently engender a desire to relieve my father’s anxieties and give him a chance to do his work untroubled. Papa would at once spend the money on some speculation which, he would say, was bound to end all this dependence on his friends, which was always irksome, however good they were. The cycle then started all over again.

But now we were really alarmed. This time Papa was not turning against a friend who had given or lent him money, he was turning against the friend who, through the years, had helped him to lose it; and this, given my father’s temperament, was quite unnatural. He had at last tired of Mr. Langham. This man had been a familiar of our household since we arrived in London, and we thought him one of the dullest people we had ever met, dull even for a man, and we thought men much the duller sex. He was tall and thin, it had puzzled us in our naive youth that Mamma had long ago in Scotland called him “a little, little man.” He had a gliding walk, and always reminded us of an eel in his City uniform of morning coat and top hat, and the neatness of his rolled-up umbrella seemed to us very prissy; and when he put on sporting checks, for he was not insensible to the gaieties of life, he still looked dull inside the checks. He had a pale and undistinguished oval face, which was always harrowed by a sense of impending political doom, due to the advance of socialism, and by affectionate and lugubrious concern for my father. Nothing he said ever interested us, which I am now willing to concede was not his fault. He had taken a First in Natural Philosophy at Cambridge, and in between his disastrous attempts at making a fortune in the City he engaged in some mathematical studies of statistics which were of permanent value. But to us he was a dull old family retainer, and we did not like to see Papa turn him away.

But if Mr. Langham came when Papa was in, he was no longer welcomed. Papa was polite to him, even tender, but hardly spoke to him. Mamma would find the two men sitting silent in the study, drawing on their pipes, and would send in Richard Quin, to ask advice about something he was painting, or one of his lessons, so that there could be a basis for some sort of talk. This would smooth over that particular visit, for Richard Quin’s tact was perfect, and every stranger presented him with a technical problem which he enjoyed solving. It was more difficult when Papa made appointments with Mr. Langham and forgot all about them. Then Richard Quin would do his best to follow up things that he had noticed interested Mr. Langham, they would talk about mathematics, and Cordelia would talk to him like a grown-up, and Mamma would give him whisky, which, such was her pity for him, she had bought out of her meagre housekeeping money just for the purpose of solacing him on these wounding occasions. At first he used to like sitting quietly and talking to us about Papa and how wonderful he was, and all about the wonderful times they had had together in the past, such as Papa’s famous debate with the red-haired young Irish Socialist named George Bernard Shaw, which had begun at seven o’clock one evening in a small hall somewhere near the Gray’s Inn Road, and when that closed had been carried on in various public places till the police interfered and they had to move on, and ended on the steps of St. Paul’s at two in the morning. But presently Mr. Langham stayed not nearly so long. I think he dreaded the moment when we would hear the key in the front door, and Papa would come in and look at him with a dead eye, instead of plunging at once into a mournful denunciation of Municipal Trading or the growing contempt for States Rights in the United States, asked how he was, with a weary civility which spoke of iciness struggling to thaw itself. So the poor man would come at the exact appointed hour, hoping against hope that the miracle had happened and he was restored to favour, and he would go as soon as it became certain that he had again been scorned.

Mr. Langham tried to do that very thing as promptly as might be, one late afternoon, when he arrived and found that not only was Papa absent at the appointed hour, but that Mamma was out shopping. Kate brought up the whisky and biscuits, and he listened to Mary playing a Chopin “Nocturne,” and he told Richard Quin how he had seen Lord Hawke bowling at Hove a fortnight before; and then he sadly said he must go. But just then we heard the front door open, and Mr. Langham sank happily back into his chair, saying, “Not so late after all, not for him, I don’t know why I was so impatient.”

I went out into the hall and found it was Mamma, her arms full of parcels. When she saw me, she let them fall on the floor. I heard glass break, but she was so white that I did not trouble to see what it was. She said, “Rose, Rose, you are sensible, I can tell you. Your Papa walked past me in the High Street and looked me full in the face, and did not speak a word, and went on.”

“Oh, Mamma, he was thinking of something in one of his articles,” I said. “Think how absent-minded we all are, we always lose our gloves.”

“No, no,” insisted Mamma, gasping for breath, “he saw me, he saw me.”

“Oh, Mrs. Aubrey, come and sit down,” said Mr. Langham. He had followed me out of the room. Very kindly he guided Mamma to a chair and I poured out a glass of water for her. He sat down beside her, without invitation, not that either of us minded that, so pathetic was his desire to keep a foothold in the house on any pretext, and said, “If you’ve had any little difference with him, that’s common enough between husband and wife, however fond they may be of each other, and it usually doesn’t last long if there’s good sense shown by one or other of the parties. If I could be of any help in clearing up any little misunderstanding …”

My mother was astonished at the idea. “No, there are no differences between my husband and myself.” She thought for some time, and then exclaimed, “It would be terrible if my husband and I did not get on together,” and took a sip of water.

Staring down at the carpet and tapping it with his foot, Mr. Langham meditated for a while; and then asked, choking, “Is he mad, do you think? To turn against you, you’re the best of wives. To turn against me.”

“What is the good of talking about madness?” asked my mother. “When people say someone is mad, they mean something strange is going on in them. It is not help if one does not know what it is that is going on. It just puts a name to it.”

Her distress was so great that Mr. Langham felt about for one of the approved phrases used to victims of catastrophe. “Whether he is or not,” he said piously, “it is out of our hands.”

My mother was so uninterested in words that she never recognized a cliché. “Well, that is exactly what one does not like,” she said, in some perplexity.

But Mr. Langham was enveloped in his own grief. “There is nobody like him, nobody I ever met.”

Mamma gazed at him in sudden pity. With as much blame in her voice as I ever heard it carry when she was speaking of my father, she said, “My husband has not been grateful enough to you. But he is not himself.”

“Oh, this is nothing new,” said Mr. Langham bitterly. “He has treated everybody like this. But somehow I never thought that someday it might be my turn.”

“He has always had such special difficulties,” said Mamma. “Oh, if I knew what to do!”

There was more than appeared in Mr. Langham’s query about my father’s sanity. There was a general feeling just then that his writings showed a sharp decline as a writer. Up to that time he had won respect to a degree that was remarkable for the editor, or rather leader-writer, of a suburban newspaper. He now attracted an amount of ridicule almost as extraordinary for such a hidden target. One of the national newspapers christened him the “Seer of Lovegrove,” and ran funny articles about him, illustrated with cartoons. The tradesmen in shops and the people at school looked at us quizzically, and the worst ones asked us how our father was. How far this public mockery of him had gone and what suspicions it had engendered was brought home to us one day in late summer, after kind Mr. Pennington, the M. P. with the deep wave in his brown hair, wrote Mamma a letter asking her to give him an appointment at some hour when my father was likely to be away from home. He reminded her that he had often proved the warmth of his friendship for my father, and that he would not make this request without good reason. She told him to come on any day, at any hour that suited him. Papa was very often out at this period, and when he came in he sat in his study; and if Mamma received a visitor in the sitting room he would never know. It was characteristic of Mamma that she happily wondered what new and flattering employment Mr. Pennington had found for Papa, and why he wished her to know of it first.