The Fountain Overflows (9 page)

I put on my outdoor shoes and the old coat which had once belonged to Cordelia and was now my dressing-gown, and ran downstairs, partly because I wanted to help my mother if there was anything dangerous abroad, and partly because I thought of what was happening as not a danger at all, but a tide. White as the moonlight but not the same as the moonlight, it was washing the walls of the house, it might make them rock on their foundations but would not break them down, it would suffuse one in pleasure if one bathed in it. I too had difficulty with the handle of the french window, and by the time my small hands had dragged it round my mother had passed through the door in the wall, and I was out in the moonlight and had to cross the white challenging square of the garden before I could reach her. I began to be afraid of the night, of the horses behind the wall that were stamping but were not there, of the scolding I would get from Cordelia if she woke up and missed me and came down and found me before I had got to my mother. The two fears competed, and I went forward. I dreaded Cordelia more than the night.

Mamma had left the door in the wall open, which was as well, for the handle was high. Perhaps she had known that I was following her, perhaps she had known I would follow her before I left my bed. But when I found her she had forgotten me. She had gone to the farther end of the stable and set her lantern down on a window-ledge, and was looking back at the four stalls. The yellow light shone on the perfect emptiness which filled the lesser spaces of those stalls, the larger space contained by the plastered walls and broken windows. The light showed everything, the brackets of frail cobweb which cast much stouter shadows, the mangers which held nothing but dust and shadows, the pail which was cracked, though its shadow looked sound enough. But in this emptiness four horses slept and dreamed after their different fashions. Now it was Pompey or Caesar that shifted a heavy and complaining hoof, now it was Cream or Sugar that moved lightly like a drowsing dancer among the thick litter that was not there. Now one of the carriage horses snorted, now Cream or Sugar delicately ground his teeth, then a carriage horse slowly blurted bubbles through his muzzle. They were not so sad as the brick and wood and plaster about them, but they sounded anxious about an issue not yet settled. My mother was looking towards them and beyond them. Her mouth was open in the bafflement of extreme stupidity, and her eyes shone with wisdom. I wondered what it was that she knew.

A silence fell, far away a clock struck two, and in the loose-box Sultan, who had been an old horse when my father was a child, whinnied loudly. My mother’s eyes moved to my face. The horses in the stalls became luminous shapes. We knew that if we willed it, if we made a movement of the mind comparable with the action of throwing all one’s weight on one foot, we could make them visible as ourselves. But we abstained. It was my mother’s choice to abstain. The horses remained faint outlines for a minute or so and then were only sound again. Mamma looked past me into the distance, at the remote sources from which she had drawn her assurance, before picking up her lamp and coming towards me, meeting the shadows and sending them jerking into a dark mass behind her. She said my name very softly and took my hand, and we went out of the stable, pausing on the threshold to give a last civil glance at the horses which we could not see. “Hurry,” she breathed as we went through the door in the wall, and we ran together over the white grass to the house, which now seemed a small pale box, dwarfed by black trees and curiously stamped with the filigree shadows of the wrought iron balconies and veranda. When we got into the sitting room she knelt down and grasped me closely and whispered in Scots, asking me if my feet were not as cold as ice. Putting my arms round her neck, I told her they were not, but she said that I must be freezing, and grieved over her fear, though she herself was also clad in only a nightdress and dressing-gown, and her flesh was far colder than mine. I rubbed my body against her to warm her, and we nestled together for a little while. Then she softly broke the grip of my arm and murmured, “Come down very quietly to the kitchen, and I’ll warm you some milk.” I remember the chill of her flesh against my fingers, and on my lips; I remember the warmth of the milk in my mouth, she made it hotter than I liked it. Surely it cannot have been a dream.

3

“A
S SOON
as you children go out,” said Mamma, as we stood at the french windows after lunch the next day, “I am going to write to my cousin Constance and ask her to come and see us. It cannot be a long journey for her, she lives in South London too. Oh, dear, I wish we could furnish the attic room next Kate’s, so that Constance could come and stay with us, and bring her little girl Rosamund. But I cannot spare a stick of furniture from the other rooms.” She stared through the glass as if she hoped to see some overlooked chairs and tables on the lawn.

“Don’t bother to have them just because you think we would like to play with the little girl,” I said.

“We have you and Papa and Richard Quin, and that is enough,” said Mary.

“But I want them,” said Mamma, her eyes wide with desire. “Constance is not my cousin, she is married to my Cousin Jock, God help her, but she was at school with me, we were like sisters. I want to see her. Think what you two would feel like if when you were grown up you never managed to be together. You cannot think how lonely it is,” she said with a passion which we children sympathetically recognized as the passion of a child, “never to be with anybody who knew you when you were little. And also I must try to make a world for you. It is not good for you never to be with other people than yourselves, and Papa’s relatives are not friendly, and things may not be easy with the people here…” Her voice faded away.

“Oh, Mamma, we will be all right,” said Mary.

“Yes, Mamma, we will always be all right,” I said.

“I will sit down and write the letter now so that you can post it at once,” Mamma said ecstatically.

At first her fears that things might not be easy at Lovegrove seemed groundless. Papa was always happy when he was engaged in certain activities. Of these the one which gave him greatest pleasure was his lifelong wrestling match with money. He was infatuated with it though he could not get on good terms with it. He felt towards it as a man of his type might have felt towards a gipsy mistress, he loved it and hated it, he wanted hugely to possess it and then drove it away, so that he nearly perished of his need for it. But he knew almost as great joy if he were conducting a campaign against some social injustice, particularly if it were the rights of property which had been dealt with unjustly. This was not because he himself had any property, of which he possessed not one farthing’s worth, nor because he any longer numbered among his friends any property-owners, nor because he was callous about the sufferings of the poor, but because he was a disciple of Herbert Spencer and believed the right to own property to be the only instrument by which the individual could protect his freedom from the tyranny of the state. It happened that an ideal specimen of this type of campaign came his way very soon after we arrived at Lovegrove.

We heard of it first one Saturday afternoon which was so wet that we could not go out even in mackintoshes, so my mother sat down and played the whole of Schumann’s
Carnaval
to us, which was our great treat. Just as she had finished Kate put her head round the door and said, “Madam, did you know it, there is a double rainbow,” and we all ran out into the garden, which was suffused with the grey-green end-of-the-world light which comes after a storm, and we did the nine hops and the three curtsies that are called for by a double rainbow. Then Mamma heard a muffin-bell in the distance, and gave us sixpence, and Kate ran up from the basement with some plates and we ran down the street until we overtook the man with the green baize apron and the brass bell and the heavy wooden tray on his head, and we bought lots of muffins and crumpets. We were eating them at teatime, when Papa came in and joined us, and Mamma advised him to have some, saying that Kate could not have done them better, though she had put so much butter on them that we would have to be economical for the rest of the week.

“Butter?” said Papa, his eyes blazing. “There should be no butter eaten in this house. Do not offer me butter. The children should not eat butter.”

“My dear, why not?” asked Mamma. She was not too perturbed, for she knew that when he spoke with this earnestness he was happy and occupied.

“We must eat margarine,” he told her.

This was an astonishing pronouncement in those days, when dietetic error flourished. Skim milk was emptied down the drains, it was the worst condemnation of jam that it contained glucose, and margarine was held to promote rickets.

“There is a conspiracy,” said Papa.

And so there was. Papa had been going through Hansard at his office and had read the text of a bill which proposed that all margarine should be coloured purple, and which was being supported by the government. This had struck him as strange and sinister, so he went to the House of Commons and looked up an Irish M.P. whom he knew, and together they inquired into the origins of the bill. They found that it was backed by land-owning members, and had been drafted by the dairy-farming interest, in order to exploit the facts that taste is three-fourths sight, and that sight is prejudiced, and that the poorer class of customer, who would be the most likely to buy margarine, would not buy it if it were coloured purple. ‘This is the attempt of a vested interest to monopolize a market by depriving the poor of a valuable article of food,” said Papa, “and I am going to fight it.” This he did, by gathering a company of dissidents, some anarchists, some socialists, some followers of Herbert Spencer, some men of wealth and influence, some poor as himself, who protested against this measure in the press, at street-corner meetings, and by lobbying members of the House of Commons. So pure was this movement in its motives that it only accidentally came into contact with the manufacturers of margarine, who were conducting a much less effective campaign of their own and were bewildered by this curious and unsolicited championship. One astonished manufacturer showed his gratitude by sending my father a case of port and another of sherry. Alcohol meant nothing to my father. All of his being was under the control of his secret purposes, and he was content it should be so, he never wished for relaxation. A bottle of each was kept out to be offered to visitors and the rest was sent down to the cellar. Poor though we were, it did not occur to either my father or my mother to sell the wine. In that age it would have seemed very disreputable to sell a gift.

But my mother got something better than money out of this crusade. Papa wrote some brilliant leaders on his crusade in the
Lovegrove Gazette,
which were quoted in the national newspapers. Mr. Morpurgo, though he still showed no desire to meet Papa, wrote to him several times congratulating him on those leaders and on the liveliness he had brought to the paper; and as Papa wholly neglected every part of his duties except his writing, Mr. Morpurgo put in a technical journalist who did the editorial work instead of Papa. Also a speech Papa made at a public meeting brought him some friendly letters from the other speakers, who were all distinguished men. He had nothing of that beggar look about him now. The situation produced a certain conflict in my mother’s heart, because she did not really like giving us children margarine instead of butter, but that was settled by our servant Kate. She pointed out to us that we liked dripping, and that we could do our Mamma a good turn if we started hollering for it all the time.

Yet my mother was not altogether happy. I had found her weeping in her room, with Constance’s answer to her letter in her hand. It was a cold answer, excusing herself from a visit to Lovegrove on the ground that her daughter Rosamund was not well, and making no suggestion that my mother should visit her. With the cruelty of a child I was shocked at seeing my mother abandon herself to grief. It was as if she had let me see her in too few clothes. For the first time I felt curious about this Constance and her Rosamund. The letter gave not the faintest token of affection, but I had noticed that when people rejected the advances of my parents they usually made some pretence that they were not doing so. Papa’s employers and relatives were apt to be openly disagreeable. But for the rest, “He writes very nicely, and says that he will write again next week and suggest something definite,” was the usual formula. But Constance made no such pretences. I felt that perhaps she and her daughter were in some special case, and I wondered if they were better or worse than appeared.

My mother spoke of them several times with bewilderment and regret, but soon they were displaced by another anxiety. During the first month or so after our arrival at Lovegrove a number of ladies called on her, and she bought a new hat and dress and returned the calls, and even gave some simple tea-parties. But as the year drew on towards its close, there came a Saturday morning when a brougham drove up to our house, and a short, stout man got out and went up to our door and asked for my father, and on hearing from Kate that he was away for the day, went down the steps again, wearing a very odd expression for a grown-up. His eyes were bleared and his cheeks puffy as if he had been crying. My mother, who was in the front garden, helping me to get Richard Quin’s kitten out of the laburnum tree, caught sight of his face and ran after him, laid a hand on his arm, and asked if there was anything she could do for him. He lifted his head and looked at her without saying anything. I thought he must be drunk, for in Scotland I had got used to the sight of drunken men, and I was much surprised when Mamma, her eyes grown huge in her thin face, led him back to the house. Then she sent Kate out to tell us that we must not come into the sitting room till the man had gone, and when we asked Kate what was happening she said that she did not know, but surely we had recognized the man as the Mayor of Lovegrove. She was surprised that we had not known who it was, for we had had a good look at him wearing his badge and gold chain when she had taken us to see Princess Beatrice open the new hospital. Presently Cordelia came out with her violin, complaining that she did not know how she could be expected ever to learn how to play decently when she could not get a moment’s peace to practise. Mary and I jeered at her, and went down into the kitchen and sat miserably in front of the range, wondering what Mamma could sell this time. The furniture now left to us would fetch nothing and, anyway, we needed it. Every now and then we tried to cheer ourselves up by telling each other that there was probably nothing really wrong, though we knew there was.