Authors: Rebecca West
We looked at her, wishing it were not so, making sure that it was so. The disregarded ape between us cried and clutched, but we hushed it till we were quite sure. We saw four people very clearly in the circle made by the elephant, cloud-coloured under the strong lights and standing very high against the stained and hazy sky, the flimsier, lower, sandy camels, the frail and erect white figures of their attendants. The old man and the woman in the sari watched Nestor and Rosamund with the close and impersonal attention they might have given to a complicated gymnastic feat. Nestor was springing from foot to foot, and caressing the air, he was enacting the praise of all women and of this supreme woman. He folded his hands and held them horizontally and laid his face against them, and groaned and pouted. He was plainly depicting himself as a sick man on his pillow, and must be describing his first meeting with Rosamund, who was all this time standing quite still, as still as the circle of animals. He reached the climax of his story, stepped nearer Rosamund and put his arm round her. We lived through a moment we had lived through once before. Standing on tiptoe, because he was so much shorter than she was, he strained up his round flat face, which resembled the sun in a medieval carving, and it seemed certain that he was going to press his mouth against her shoulders and rub his plump white cheeks on her flesh. Of course he did not. But before it was sure that he would not the old man and the woman in the sari moved sharply, as if about to flee from these curious hosts. At once Nestor changed himself into a clownish
tourbillon,
he spun about and spread out his arms as if to turn a cartwheel, and he said something which made his guests laugh. He thought this would make them forgive him. He was mistaken. It would only make them remember it longer. Before they had stopped laughing they turned an inquisitive and censorious glance on Rosamund, who made no attempt at an ingratiating defence. She remained quite still. Her body was an ideograph which signified: ‘I want to die. This is a wretched moment, and not less wretched than the one which came before it, not less wretched than the one which will come after it, not less wretched than all the moments which will come after that.’
There were some steps leading down from the terrace and an iron gate into the garden. The ape ran after us, squalling, but was comforted when Mary led it by the crimson tinsel ribbon. We walked over the white grass in front of the arc-lamps, our shadows long and black before us, touching the feet of the people we sought as soon as we started. I hoped we could take Rosamund home with us that very night. Somewhere in the crowd that sauntered between the gold and silver masts there would be Cordelia, her prettiness pursed in contempt, her white gloves clenching and unclenching and twitching the pearls about her neck, as she raged to Alan that all the things she had said about Rosamund were true. She would be on the point of weeping for fear, lest they were indeed not the lies she had always known them to be. But there would be an end to her fear, and to all our fears, if Rosamund came back with us. But as we drew nearer the group it was not the same group that we had seen from the terrace, and did not permit the same conclusions.
The elephant and the camels ceased to be familiar and credible. We no longer saw them from the distance, as painters and photographers see such great beasts, in order to fit them into their canvases or lenses. The creatures lacked the unity the further vision gave them. Surely each camel’s front legs belonged to a tall and supple Negro runner, the hind legs to another; and the two had joined together in fame under some shabby hides, older than themselves, and were carrying before them in play a great swag of a neck and a mask made with great clacking teeth taken from other beasts, which they had stolen from a medicine man’s hut. It had long fair eyelashes, which surely it had failed to darken not because animals do not make up but because it was unworldly; and behind these lashes were distressed myopic eyes, which showed these odds and ends to be inhabited by one spirit, at a loss. The elephant had seemed smooth and cast in a mould of flowing lines, we now saw the deep corrugations of its trunk, the rough linen-like surface of its tusks, the wet pink formless gash of its mouth, the shapelessness of its ear, clapped on the sides of its head like bits of sacking; and from the stuffed tent of the vast bulk protruded a small mean tail, belonging to a smaller beast. But again there was the eye, little and genial and self-possessed, to show that all these things were one.
We had forgotten the inherent strangeness of the world. Though human beings are less strangely shaped than the great beasts, what is within keeps the balance even. The strangeness of these people, to our distress, was not where we would have preferred it, among the strangers. The old man and the woman in the sari were a king and queen from the East as they are pictured in a thousand children’s books. Nestor had been seen almost as often, as the rogue who went out of the gabled city riding backwards on an ass. But Rosamund was not to be recognised, not to be understood. She was staring towards us but did not see us, for she was blinded by the lamps. She was therefore not veiled by any pretence. It was her true face that we saw; and its meaning was not the meaning of her body. That still told its story of complete disgust. But the straight bar of her eyebrows and the curved bars of her lips showed her as much at peace as if she were sleeping. The dejection of her spine, the weary clumsiness of her arms and hands, which worsened the moment by making her seem unworthy of Nestor’s ecstasy, spoke of an accumulation of sick perceptions. The old man and the woman in the sari could keep their opinion of her secret no better than Lord Branchester and Lord Catterock; indeed she had an even sharper knowledge of their misjudgment, for the last few months had given her practice in measuring contempt. But as we drew nearer, it became more certain that her peace was untroubled by the least bad dream. In her eye there was no explanation that disunity was unity. Her pure blank gaze simply stated that disgust and serenity could lie down in her together.
When she saw us she cried out, ‘Mary! Rose!’ and Nestor said, ‘Ah, it is the great pianists come to see how the poor boy who married their cousin can give a party.’ He drew us both to him and we shut our eyes, since he intended to kiss us. But he suddenly stepped back and pointed his finger at something behind us. Mary had let fall the crimson tinsel ribbon, and the ape was now lamenting its abandonment, holding its head in its hands and rocking itself and groaning. ‘What, it is a monkey!’ exclaimed Nestor, in loathing. He watched it for a moment, then put his hands up to his head and rocked himself and groaned. ‘This is the most horrible thing I ever saw, it looks like a little man, it looks so like a little man.’ He covered his eyes, ‘Rosamund, Rosamund, get them to take it away. It should be killed, it looks like a man being sad.’
The woman in the sari looked at the old man and raised her eyebrows, as if to say their host was even stranger than had at first appeared. But he ignored her and said, ‘Yes. It looks just like a man when he is sad.’
Rosamund put her arm round Nestor’s shoulder and soothed him. But she did not have to do anything about the monkey, for the attendant standing beside the elephant silently came forward and held out his arms to the little creature, who jumped up into the embrace. The attendant wheeled about and held it up to the elephant, who threw out his trunk to grip it and lifted it on to his back. There the monkey bowed to the four quarters and began to somersault, over and over and over, and Rosamund said, ‘Nestor, look. You can look now. Up there.’
He was instantly enchanted. ‘Ah, the little one! Up there on the big one! He is not afraid!’ The attendant said, in a shallow, sweet, quick, oriental voice, ‘No, they are great friends, they spend nearly all day together.’ Nestor, his eyes on the somersaulting, took a note from his pocket and held it out to the attendant, mistaking the direction by a wide angle. When he realised this he made no motion to move it nearer the attendant, who had to walk to him to get it. His generosity became a proclamation of indifference to its object. ‘Ah, nothing so comical as a monkey,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said the old man, ‘there is no animal more comical than a monkey.’
Later we sat with Nestor and Rosamund beside a stage in the centre of the lawn and watched two great dancers without seeing them. She sometimes stroked our hands and once asked with terrible candour and humility, ‘Can you enjoy anything of all this?’ We stayed till nearly the end, and would have stayed longer had it not been that Mr Ramponetti had sat down beside us and wearied us.
‘Tomorrow morning, when the sun comes up,’ he said, smiling at the glittering scene, ‘how bad all this will look. All the lawn trodden, bits of broken champagne-glasses, and where the animals have been. Shocking it will be.’ He glowed with a sense of co-operation with ruin. ‘We will pay, of course, but it will be a long time before the poor people in all these houses have a nice garden again, a long time indeed.’
R
OSAMUND
did not speak of staying in England, or of visiting it again, and in the next day’s evening papers there were photographs of them leaving Croydon Airport for the second party in Paris. We were tormented and we were alone. Our only consolation was the perfect efficiency with which the business of most importance in our world was transacted, without the aid of Rosamund. Nancy gave birth to her son, Richard Adam Bates, without trouble to herself or anybody else. She even contrived that he should be born not at night but a most convenient period of the day, at an hour which allowed Oswald to go off to the school in the morning without suspecting that there was anything unusual afoot and to return home in the evening and find everything in order. It was represented that she had sent for Aunt Lily as soon as she felt the first pains, but there had been some finesse there, for it was all over when Aunt Lily arrived.
A month later, Nancy said, ‘There was almost no fuss. It was important.’ She was pouring out tea for Aunt Lily and me in the dining-room. ‘I wanted to keep Oswald calm. He worried himself ill thinking I was going to die. It’s all his father’s fault, those everlasting sermons about the Last Day. The old man didn’t mean any harm, of course, but it is a pity to bring up a sensitive child not to realise that there are a lot of days as well as the Last Day.’ Aunt Lily wistfully objected that it was nice to have a husband who made a fuss of his wife, but Nancy shook her head. ‘No, it is tiring too. If I am to have four we cannot have all this fuss.’ Her upper lip rose from her teeth, she was gay but she was weak, she warned us that she could not work beyond her strength.
‘Why must you have four?’ I asked.
‘Oswald will feel so grand with four, and we can afford to keep them.’ She meant, ‘I will take this bullied child that has been terrorised by eternity and make him at ease in time.’ She did in fact love him. He was not simply the sole companion her circumstances allowed her, not the one instrument by which she could make herself new company. Yet she was honest and was obliged to add, ‘And I have always thought it would be nice to have four.’
The baby had been stirring and squeaking in its Moses basket. She rose and picked it up without passion, with a movement that was neat and debonair. ‘Nothing the matter with you, my lambkin,’ she said. ‘Only a minute’s cuddle and down you go again. But how beautiful you are, oh, how beautiful.’
‘Maybe you won’t have as many as four,’ said Aunt Lily, ‘but I’ll be glad when you have another. For the mite’s sake. It would be awful to be an only child. I couldn’t have borne it myself. I should have been so lonely without Queenie, it would have been past bearing.’
‘Yes, you have a sister, I have a brother, Baby must have a sister and brother,’ said Nancy. Her cynicism was really enormous.
‘Bless him, he’s the image of Mr Bates,’ said Aunt Lily.
‘Yes, he’ll be a handsome man,’ said Nancy, ‘but he mustn’t preach silly-willy sermy-wermons. Mummy won’t let him. Look at his little puds, aren’t they sweet.’
It was remarkable how she practised the ritual in spite of her cynicism.
‘Nothing to worry about, his being like Father Bates,’ said Nancy. ‘And nothing to worry about if the next one is Janet Ruth, and looks like Mrs Bates.’ Our eyes went up to the enlarged photographs: to the preacher, not defying the lightning but taking it into his bosom, to the preacher’s wife with her oval face, her troubled brows, her tiny mouth. ‘I wonder why she drank.’
Aunt Lily winced. ‘Oh, hush. Don’t say it out like that.’
‘Yes, I will,’ said Nancy. ‘Skeletons must feel hurt at being kept in cupboards all the time. If we’re not to forget Oswald’s mother, as I shouldn’t like to be forgotten, we have to own she drank.’
‘The poor thing, it’s a madness,’ said Aunt Lily. ‘Your tongue goes up to the roof of your mouth, and then you’re gone. So they say. But you’re right. I wonder why she should have had that weakness, though. She had her own home and a husband. You might say she had everything.’
‘Nobody has everything,’ said Nancy. ‘But my Richard, my Dick, my precious, I have you.’ She and the baby were fused in an embrace which had no tension in it, not even warmth; it was as if a spring wind had blown a flowering branch back against the tree that bore it, and rocked them together.
‘Queenie isn’t coming home to something lovely, not half she isn’t,’ said Aunt Lily, and then sighed. Hesitantly she began, ‘Talking of your brother,’ but Nancy said, ‘We all want another cup. Run and get some more hot water, Aunt Lil, there’s a dear.’ As the door closed she put the baby back in the Moses basket and looked at me through tears. ‘I am stupid since Baby came,’ she said, ‘I can’t do anything more. I can’t rise to it. Please tell Aunt Lily what Cecil wrote to me.’
In the kitchen a kettle had been put on to boil, and Aunt Lily was passing the time by comparing methods of tea-leaf-reading with Bronwyn. ‘Well,’ she was saying, turning a cup round and round between her hands, ‘my mother would have said that meant a commercial traveller. I’m sure she would. But your mother may be right. And in a way it’s the same thing.’ I took her out into the hall, and we sat down side by side on the stairs, and I wished very much that Rosamund could have been there.