The Fountain Overflows (48 page)

When Mr. Pennington arrived he was disconcerted to find me with Mamma. But she did not consider herself separate from her children, she would have said, “Yes, I was quite alone,” of an occasion when all four of us were with her. Mr. Pennington looked at me very hard and said, “Miss Rose will find this a dull affair,” but I looked stolid and would not go, for I was afraid, since he stood so near the sources of power, that my father might through him become involved again in some deed of heroism which would leave my mother and all of us without resources. But there was nothing of that sort afoot. Mr. Pennington had a roll of typewritten papers in his hand, and he spread these out on his knee and said, “Mrs. Aubrey, do you not think that your husband should take a holiday?”

“I am sure he needs it,” said Mamma brightly, hoping that the old days had come back and Papa was going to be asked to some great house.

“Where could you take him?” asked Mr. Pennington.

“Oh—I see. That is difficult. Sometimes I take my girls and my boy to the seaside, but my husband never cares to come with us.”

“Has he not a family in Ireland?”

Mamma hesitated and looked tired. “Yes. But all the relatives he was fond of are dead. He could not go there.”

“Can you think of somewhere else he could go? For a complete rest? A complete rest. Listen, Mrs. Aubrey. You know I have the friendliest feelings towards your husband. I have never forgotten, I never shall forget the afternoon when Miss Rose here”—he looked at me very kindly— “and her father came up to the House of Commons and your husband gave me a warning which I nearly did not take, and it would have been the worst thing for my uncle and for me if we had not acted on it. I quite misunderstood him, I really did. Afterwards it was a revelation to me that a thing like that can ever happen to a man, and he could so utterly fail to get the hang of what was happening. It was a lesson to me, it really was. Well, it’s because I am so grateful to your husband that I’ve come to see you today. I suppose you know our little group commissioned him to write a short pamphlet on the future. The future of Europe and our foreign policy.”

We had noticed that some weeks before he had been writing steadily for some days, but he had not told us of this pamphlet. No doubt he had been paid for it in advance and had already lost the money.

“Well, I can’t publish it. I really can’t. Every line he has written till now has seemed to me wonderful, I think he’ll be among the classics when he is dead. But, Mrs. Aubrey, I can’t publish this. He needs a holiday. A long holiday.”

“I see what you are trying to convey,” said Mamma. “But I find it very odd that anything written on such a cloudy theme as the future, when nobody can say if the author is right or wrong, should provoke in you such strong feelings. What has my husband said to disturb you so?”

“Mrs. Aubrey, I hope you will forgive me, and Miss Rose here, if I tell you that it’s the most terrible stuff.”

“Do tell us what he says.”

“Well, it’s hardly stuff to amuse the ladies.”

“Ladies are more accustomed to not being amused than gentlemen seem to realize,” said Mamma. “Please tell us what is in the pamphlet.”

“Well, it starts all right. It says that it is dangerous to give the state powers beyond those necessary to maintain public services plainly outside the scope of individual effort, such as the army, the navy, the police force, and the postal system. So far so good. My friends and I agreed on that. Socialism’s an awful thing,” he said, suddenly raising his head and looking at my mother like a big dog that thinks it has heard burglars. “And then Mr. Aubrey goes into the theory of it all. I’m not good at that. But my uncle says it’s all right. Your husband says it is far more difficult to punish the state than it is to punish individuals, and that there is no reason to suppose the state, if given as free rein as the individual, will be any less likely to deserve punishment. The only way to control the state is to leave so much power in the hands of individuals that the state is at the disadvantage in dealing with individuals unless it acts in conformity with their desires. It is impossible to exaggerate the calamities that would befall if this precaution were abandoned. Well, up to there, it’s all right.”

“Yes, I think I could understand it if I wanted to,” said Mamma.

“But then, really, Mrs. Aubrey, your husband goes quite off the rails. He says that if we give too much power to the state we go back to barbarism. At present the state sends out its police force in pursuit of such men as Charles Peace, because the experience of ages has convinced the average man that robbery and murder are wrong. But when the state grows strong enough to snap its fingers at the average man, service in the state, bureaucracy, you know, would appeal to the more audacious kind of criminal as an organization which, if he and his kind capture it, will enable him to rob and kill without fear of Wormwood Scrubs and Dartmoor. So we will see police forces which consist of none but Charles Peaces, and do no work but hound down and drag to prison those people who will not abandon their poor opinion of robbery and murder. Mrs. Aubrey, if there’s one thing we know it is that the world is getting better and better. There’s such a thing as the law of progress. Your husband puts down in black and white the idea that we’re not going forward, we’re going backward. He says that civilization’s going to collapse. It’s going to shrink instead of spreading. He says that country after country is going to be taken over by common criminals.”

“Well, perhaps that is true,” said Mamma.

“Oh, Mrs. Aubrey, you can’t possibly agree with him. He doesn’t mean the United States or South America, or Australia, which would make some sense, there is a lot of rag, tag, and bobtail there. He says this may happen in Europe. And he goes on to say the most extraordinary things about the wars we are going to have after the criminals have taken over. He says there will have to be wars, because when these criminals have wiped out all the resistance in their own countries they will need some other excuse for killing, and they will get it in war; and they will be pressed by economic need because once they had stolen all the wealth honest men had stored up in their countries, there would be nothing more being accumulated, honest men would be reluctant to go on working just to lay up loot for a criminal government, and they would be forced to make war to get at the wealth of other countries. Really, Mrs. Aubrey, did you ever hear anything so extraordinary in your life? He talks as if these criminals would take over the whole machinery of a country, the parliament, the civil service, the banks, the factories, everything. It’s preposterous.”

“Well, the world is a preposterous place,” said Mamma. “It is very brave of us to teach history in schools, it is so discouraging.”

“But what your husband says couldn’t possibly happen in history. It really couldn’t. Do you know that he says that the Austrian Empire is going to crumble to pieces? Something about the nationalist ideas of the nineteenth century. Well, the Austrian Empire’s as sound as a bell. And he says the most extraordinary things about the wars that are to come. He takes balloons and these other things they’re starting quite seriously. He says they may wipe out cities. Oh, he makes the most dreadful forecasts, they cannot come true, and God forbid they ever should.”

“I do not know what strikes you as so strange about all this,” said Mamma. “The fall of Constantinople must have been very disagreeable.”

“Yes, but that was a long time ago,” Mr. Pennington said.

“What difference does that make?” asked Mamma. “Why should it distress you more that a great many people should die by violence in the future than that a great many people should have died by violence in the past? The suffering must be the same.”

“Oh, it is different,” Mr. Pennington almost moaned. “Wouldn’t you care less if your great-grandmother had been killed in war than if your great-granddaughter were to be killed?”

“No, I should pray as much for one as for the other,” said my mother in astonishment.

“Did you say pray for them? Oh, yes, I see. Well, I suppose it’s stupid of me,” said Mr. Pennington. “I’m wrong on this perhaps because it always seems worse for a young person to die than an old one.” We gazed at him in some surprise. He was not really so stupid as to suppose that when one’s great-grandmother died she must necessarily be old, and that when one’s great-grandchild dies she must necessarily be young, but he had been shaken to his foundations by Papa’s pamphlet, and he had been further disturbed by my mother’s conversation. She had tried to answer him quite simply, on the plane of common sense, in terms he would find acceptable; but wherever Richard Quin got his power to adapt himself to strangers, it was not from her. She felt about for a soothing remark, and sighed. “Oh, Mr. Pennington, I am sure that if I knew anything about the Austrian Empire, I would agree with you over that.”

“Well, the Austrian Empire, that’s a long story,” said Mr. Pennington thoughtfully. “And, come to think of it,” he added after a second’s reflection, “I don’t know it.” A silence fell, and he turned back to the typescript on his knee, and read bits of it to himself, shaking his head and sometimes groaning. “It’s terrible to see such things in black and white,” he muttered.

“But, Mr. Pennington,” Mamma said, “you gave me to understand that you feared my husband was going out of his mind because you thought that this pamphlet he has written on the future of Europe says that a lot of things are going to happen which you think will not happen. But it is quite evident that this is not the situation at all. You must think that my husband’s forecasts are probably going to come true, or you would not feel such distress as you read them. Had you not better admit that perhaps my husband is a prophet and a seer?”

“Why, you don’t believe in clairvoyance and crystal-gazing and all that sort of thing?” demanded Mr. Pennington.

“No, not the vulgar thing,” said Mamma, “but there is such a thing as a wide, general foreknowledge. I am a musician, you know. We find that in the great composers. Much of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven is much more comprehensible than it was when it was written, or even than it was when I was young. My teachers found Beethoven’s later quartets quite baffling. That can only mean that he wrote in full knowledge of a musical universe which was still chaos while he lived.” Her voice died away. She knew when she had not taken her audience with her. Her eye went to the clock under the water-colour of a Spanish cathedral which hung over the chimney-piece. “Rose, go and tell Kate we will not wait till half-past four for tea.”

“You may be right, Mrs. Aubrey,” said Mr. Pennington, “but music is not about real things. There’s the difference. You can’t just lunge away as you like in a pamphlet called ‘The Future of Europe and Foreign Policy,’ you really can’t.”

“If you can find Richard Quin,” Mamma begged me.

“And what he says about India!” Mr. Pennington was saying as I left the room. “What he says about India!”

After he had gone my mother seemed very agitated and played Schumann’s
Carnaval
right through, but even at the end of that was forced to say, “How tiresome it is to have at any point in one’s life to consider the opinion of such a stupid man as poor Mr. Pennington. I suppose he buys the right of admission by reliability, or some such sort of virtue and we must not despise that. Oh, he is very nice!” she said with an attempt at justice. “You did not appreciate it, Rose, but his manner to you was meant to be very kind. He tried to tell you that he thought you pretty, and that you need not feel shy about coming out next year, and being presented at court and going to balls. If you were that sort of girl it would have been charming. But how misplaced! And how misplaced his attempts to judge your father. Who has his own sort of reliability,” she added hotly, “if it comes to that.”

I realized what she meant by that not so long afterwards. One afternoon I came home from school and found some familiar luggage in the hall, and called out, “Where are you, Rosamund?” She ran halfway downstairs and hung over the banisters, stammering, “M-my P-papa has started brooding on the sorrows of the world again, and has so greatly added to them, so far as we are concerned, that we have come to take refuge with you for a time.” She was shaken by mild laughter, and I could not make out whether she minded this calamity not at all or very much indeed. But it was so grave a calamity that my mother was at that moment asking my father if Constance and Rosamund could make their home with us, while Rosamund had her last year’s education at the school we attended, before she went to nurse in a children’s hospital; this meant no expense, for Constance had a small income and she and Rosamund would continue sewing for the shop in Bond Street. But it meant a crowded house, and already Papa seemed to grow tired if all of us were in the room with him at once. Still he said without hesitation that they could come, and that night he had supper with us all, though for some time we had been taking him a tray to his study in the evening, and he looked down the table and said to Mamma, “I like it better now.”

“What do you like better now, my dear?” asked Mamma.

“Having more people at the table,” he said. “At home, when I was a child, there were always so many of us.”

It was so pleasantly said, so casually, as if the thought had just passed through his mind, Constance and Rosamund were bound to believe him. He could still be kind. He could still be very kind. He always went with Aunt Lily when she visited Queenie in Aylesbury Prison, though it might have been hoped that he would not have to do so. She was now living very happily as barmaid at the Dog and Duck at Harpleford, an inn standing beside a flint church on a bend of the Thames above Reading; and her friend’s husband, Len, the retired bookmaker, was better fitted to escort her to Aylesbury than most men. He was not an unimaginative man, but he economized his forces, and he had refused to become excited about the murder of Mr. Phillips. It was his opinion that there had been a lot of people in the house at the time, and so far as he could see anyone might have done it, and he thought it might have been left at that. He could have taken Aunt Lily to Aylesbury, and brought her back without a tremor of his bloodhound jowls, and he would gladly have done it, not because he sympathized with her passion for her sister, but because he still felt tenderly for her as one of the ugliest women he had ever seen, and thought it was a shame. But Aunt Lily was haunted by a fear that Aylesbury Prison, or indeed any other prison, was a stone version of a fly-catching orchid. She thought that she might enter it as a visitor and that the walls would close round her and she would become a prisoner, and that she dared not run the risk unless she was accompanied by a magician, that is to say, a real gentleman. Such a companion would also bring it home to the prison officials how exceptional it was that Queenie should have got herself into this fix.