Authors: Rebecca West
‘You will not,’ said Essington. ‘You will sit down. Then Mr Pitt can sit down. Then I can sit down. Where’s Parkyns? She ought to be here. My God, your wayward, woodland charm shows nowhere more strongly than in your domestic arrangements.’ He stamped on the electric bell till Parkyns came in; she too was shivering. She had, Sunflower now realised, been shivering when she opened the door. ‘Take your mistress’s coat and hat. And bring in the soup.’
‘I don’t want any,’ said Sunflower. ‘I’ll start where you are.’
‘Oh, no. Oh, no. You’re going to see the kind of dinner we had. We’ll wait.’
‘Ah, now,’ objected Francis Pitt, ‘the dinner’s been grand,’ and his sallow sister broke into a corroborating murmur.
They all sat down. Sunflower felt half-asleep. The misery that filled her mind was not Essington’s behaviour, which was so awful that it was raised to a kind of remoteness, like some calamity read of in the newspapers, but the way she looked. She had cried a little in the car, thinking of Alice Hester, and had not troubled to powder; and her hat had been a close one. It was horrid, because Francis Pitt was the sort of man who cared about people being well-groomed. Though his sister was plainly indifferent to those things, since her thick eyebrows were not plucked, she had been drilled into quite a good black dress of the Handley-Seymour sort. And he himself, though his red-brown hair straggled over his ears in bearish disorder, was dressed even more carefully than Essington. He had pretty studs.
She put up her hand to see what she could do with her hair, but Essington said, ‘Don’t fuss! Don’t fuss!’ and added, ‘Parkyns, turn on all the lights.’
But Parkyns was very nice. She brought Sunflower only a very little soup and hardly any fish. And meanwhile, Francis Pitt leaned forward, chuckling again, and said, ‘You’ll not be able to guess what I’ve been doing today.’ Sunflower liked the way he laughed on no particular cue, but just on general principles. Essington never laughed except at the exact point of something that was certifiably funny. The little man’s way took her back to contacts of her youth: when one went on a visit to Cousin Gladys who was married to the stationmaster at Redhill. She opened the front door, and there was laughter. Then she kissed Mummie and you, and there was laughter. Then one went upstairs. ‘This is your room’; more laughter. ‘Oh, it’s ever so nice’; more laughter. ‘Well, I’ll be downstairs getting the tea, and you’ll come down when you’re ready’; more laughter, senseless and kindly. Those were easy days.
‘What was that?’ asked Essington. She was amazed at his interest. He must really respect the little man.
He chuckled again. ‘I went down to my old school in South London and gave the little boys some good advice. I hope to God they don’t follow it, or I shall have a grave responsibility on my soul. For I didn’t dare tell them the truth about the way I made my money, and maybe what I told them they won’t find quite so useful.’
‘What school was that?’
‘Oh, a rotten private school down at Dulwich. I have no pleasant memories of it, God knows, but the old man who runs it came up to my office. At first I nearly had him thrown out, but he spun a hard luck yarn, and said it would help the school pick up if I came down, and so in the end I said I would.’ She thought what a kind man he was; but there flashed across her mind a suspicion that the up-and-down lilt of his voice conveyed so perfectly the ruminations of a stern but good-natured man because it was meant to do so. Deliberately she put the thought away. There was something about his voice, something rich and appetising like the smell of good food cooking, that made her want to like him.
‘Lord, those suburban dumps,’ said Essington. ‘Silly old men and bitter young ones in dusty gowns, an art room with a plaster-cast of the Discobolos, a laboratory with half a dozen test-tubes and miserable little boarders who are mostly the children of licensed victuallers who’ve sent them away from home because of the pub atmosphere, and more miserable little day-boys who are sent there because their parents are snobs and won’t send them to the elementary school though they can’t afford a better one.’
‘That was me,’ said Francis Pitt. ‘My father was a Wesleyan minister.’
‘Ah, you’re like me, an example of what a pious home can do.’ They both laughed, that laughter by which men courteously give each other to understand that they are quite sure that they have the more picturesque irregularities in common. ‘My father was vicar of Brodip in Norfolk. Eight of us there were.’ The note that came into his voice when he spoke of his childhood always broke her heart. It was whining, ungracious, greedy, pathetic: the complaint of a child born with raw nerve-ends into a crowded nursery. Rage ceased to burn in her throat. She would have liked to slip her hand into his under the table, but of course she did not dare. Under her brows she looked at the others to see if they were liking him enough, for she was afraid they must have been prejudiced by his rudeness when she came in. Francis Pitt’s eyes slid away from her. Miss Pitt, eating salted almonds, gave her that curious fellow-servant look.
‘Six of us there were,’ said Francis Pitt. He sat curiously in his chair, his broad shoulders jutting forward, as a lion would sit if he were made to eat at table.
‘Lord, how they could! How they could!’
‘Well, we got through.’
‘We had to pay.’
‘Had you to pay much? I thought things had come easily with you.’
‘Easily! Oh, my God!’ He stirred irritably in his seat. ‘I got a Balliol scholarship from my grammar school and couldn’t take it because my people hadn’t any money. You know how badly one takes things when one is young. I don’t feel life’s made up to me for that. I had to go to London University, and eke out a scholarship by teaching in one of those private schools. Out at Sydenham it was. A mean little den. Then I got my degree, and I taught at Blagdon. There wasn’t anything very good going for me, because I was no good at games. Then I started doing journalism, and read law. I was called to the Middle Temple in ’91, and I went into Brandram’s chambers. When I was forty I stood for Burdsend. That was a by-election. In 1906. Then in 1910 Brandram died and left me all his money. He was a widower, you know, and his boy had died at Oxford. Strained his heart in that running tomfoolery. The money seemed a good thing at the time. It made it possible for me to give up the Bar and go in for politics as a career. Now I’m sorry the old man wasted his money on me.’
‘It’s been no waste,’ said Francis Pitt. With his deep voice and a gesture of his spatulate hands he made his deference to the older man seem a charming abnegation of his strength’s right to dominate.
‘It has. It’s been utter waste. The old man left me his money partly because he was fond of me, but more because he thought I’d do something for Liberalism. He was a great Liberal. God, if he could see how little I’ve been able to do for Liberalism; and what the Liberal Party is today.’
‘I suppose it would break the old-timer’s heart,’ said Francis Pitt. ‘Now what do you suppose has happened to us? What does it all mean? It seems to me sometimes when I sit in the House and look round at us that we’re not only a beaten party, we’re a guilty party, and we know it. We feel we’ve brought it on ourselves. What was it we did? Was it, do you think, that we stuck to Bryce Atkin after the war, when people’s minds were clearer and they could see the little villain’s quality, and we lost all our moral prestige through having such a leader?’
Sunflower felt unaccountably disappointed at hearing that he too was in politics. But the evening was settling down into the kind of thing that Essington liked. She sat with her head down, doggedly thinking of Alice Hester.
‘Oh, no,’ answered Essington. ‘We all knew Bryce Atkin’s quality quite well long before the peace, and even long before the war, for that matter. In point of fact that gave him, and us, our chance in the war. Of course he’s obviously a cocotte, God bless him, with his obviously hireable charm and his taste for rich men and those queer perorations of his in which he shows off his Nonconformist quality in a way which isn’t decent, like a girl lifting up her skirt to show her ankles. But it’s one of the superstitions of the mob that there’s no sicknurse like Nell Gwynn if she turns her hand to it. Haven’t you read again and again in second-rate novels of the great-hearted cocotte who nurses the penniless stranger through typhoid or whatnot? That’s why England trusted herself to Bryce Atkin in the war. No, he’s never done us as much harm as Oppenshaw.’
‘Oh, Oppenshaw!’
‘He is our real curse. I often dream of his silly, handsome old face, all curves and whirls of chins and dimples, and soft, soft, soft. It’s like a giant nose done in butter for a Grocers’ Exhibition. Oh, they both did their bit in dragging us down. But it was the fault of all of us. For we all stood by while those two with their passion for fiddling negotiation made the Party take the first step downhill. That was before the war. Let me see, you weren’t in the House then, were you?’
‘No. I got in for Braystoke in 1919. I only came to England from California in 1913.’
‘Ah. Our paths crossed. You went in as I came out. Well, I wish you better luck than I had.’
They raised their glasses to each other. That was a gesture of friendship; and she knew that Essington’s fretful sincerity about even the smallest things in life would not have let him make it had he not meant it. But by throwing the two into the same attitude of bowed head and lifted hand it exhibited them as so different that with a sinking of the heart she feared that they would not remain friends very long; that Francis Pitt might not come to the house very often. Essington sat high in his chair, like some great cat with delicate bones, a puma or a cheetah, with his lean sloping shoulders, and his small poised head, that was broad across the square brow and narrowed suddenly below the wide cheekbones to the little, fine, snapping jaw, over which the silver moustache stuck out like feelers. His eyes were like a cat’s, limpid as water, but secretively set; and he had that feline look of having been moulded out of a plastic substance by long, sweeping fingers. He would have been beautiful to look at had he not been disfigured by the expression that the world thought to be sourness, but that she knew to be tortured sweetness. His face was tragic with qualities which life had infected with their opposites: kindliness that because of the million objections which had been raised to his plans for being kind was now chiefly impatience; sensitiveness that because of the wounds inflicted on it had become brutally insensitive in its own defence. She cried out to herself, obstinately, ‘I will go on loving him, I will go on loving him.’
But Francis Pitt was a being of a different kind; it seemed, of a different time. With his ape’s mouth, his over-large head, and his over-broad shoulders he had an air of having been created before the human structure had added to itself such refinements as beauty and shapeliness. Yet he had as much of a body as a man needs. He looked enormously strong, and as if he could go through anything. Captain Scott. Gold prospectors. Seekers for the source of tropical rivers. She saw them all, on the snow, on the lye-frosted sand, in the green oven of the forest, with his troglodyte body, his unperishable face that also, like his body, rejected certain human novelties. There was there no such tangle of transmuted sweetness and kindliness and sensitiveness as there was in Essington. He seemed to have been created before the human soul had split itself up into these subdivisions. The only modern thing in his face, the only thing which would have been surprising in the death’s-head of a mummy found crouching in a grave dug in a place now desert but not so a million years ago, was a certain whimsicality, a certain puckishness, which spoke of an intention to break up life whenever it seemed to be settling down into a form that encouraged these recent psychological inventions. Yet he had surely as much of a nature as a man needs. She tried to put into words what she guessed about it, but since it was his essential quality that he belonged to an age when words were not yet important she could not do it, and simply saw images. He made her think of an iron spade with clods of earth still clinging to it. Suddenly a gust of pleasure at his presence passed over her, and it seemed to her as if she were in a high place, where the air was very clear. Woods ran down to a lake, the green fire of young leaves crackling among the treetops; the milder mirrored woods ran out into the lake, the leaves’ fire quenched to a paste of green jewels. She stood among rocks by the water. Something like the fire of the leaves crackled all round her; and within her the mirrored woods were troubled, they were fluted into ribs of thick glass. There was coming a canoe that was driven forward to her, to the fire that crackled round her and in her, by a man with strong arms, with broad shoulders, who cried to her across the water, a round-mouthed cry without words; who was this man.
It was silly to have daydreams when one was grown-up. Under the table she rubbed her hands, which felt as if they were charged with electricity.
‘Better luck!’ repeated Essington, as he set down his glass.
‘And what better luck can you have than to be a great man?’ asked Francis Pitt.
She looked at Essington with real interest as to what his answer would be. But he made none, though he acknowledged the implied compliment with a little ironic bow. She turned towards Francis Pitt, hoping he would press his question; but he was thinking of nothing but the turtle savoury he was eating, and it was apparent that he had never expected an answer. She supposed it was typical of her stupidity that she had not seen that it was just one of those questions that men ask for the sake of asking, in political speeches and in newspaper articles: like ‘Shall we let Germany?’, as it used to be, or as it was now, ‘Shall we let France?’ But suddenly she rebelled against that customary way of looking at it. It was they who were stupid not to see that the question did need an answer. Most people thought it was good luck to be great. But here was Essington, who was great, and it had been no luck for him. He was miserable. It was of no value to him that the dinner was really very good. It was of no value to him that she had made the room so pretty with its apple-green walls and its black lacquer furniture faintly inscribed with golden beauty. The loveliest thing in it, the dark bush starred with white flowers that stood on the settle behind the windows, he never looked at, though he knew all about it, and when she had brought it home, having bought it because she thought it lovely, he had been able to tell her exactly when it had been made and in what part of China. And it was of no value to him that she was sitting there ready to be nice to him. He knew what she was, how much she loved him, but it did not seem to matter. He looked peevishly past all these offers of satisfaction to a future that was to be reformed half for its own sake and half as an insult to the hated present. That was the fault of his greatness; it was because he had to roll in such fierce grips with his times in his effort to dominate them that he loathed them. It was the fault of his greatness too that he minded it all so much. He could not take anything easily because the knowledge of his power and his responsibility pulled his head stiff and high like an invisible bearing-rein. It had been no luck at all for him. Look at the querulous beauty of his long fingers, for ever restless, now kneading the stem of his wineglass, as if he hoped to change its shape, which could not be done! There must be better luck than his. What was it then that a man ought to try to be? She turned to Francis Pitt, who, she thought, might know. But again his eyes slid away from hers. She looked across the table at Miss Pitt, wondering whether she had come by observation of her male to any understanding of what men were up to; but Miss Pitt’s eyes were on her brother’s empty plate, and she took advantage of the silence of the two men to ask, with such nervous hurry as might be shown by somebody who had been allowed by the police to cross a street just before a royal procession came along, what the name of this exceedingly nice savoury might be.