The Fountain Overflows (44 page)

We said we had seen the concert from an unusual viewpoint, and Richard Quin said, “Yes, through a window, high up. You looked lovely, and the people all thought so, the ladies in their flowery hats all knew they were none of them as lovely as you.” She was pleased; but her desire to provide another appealing scene for her imaginary audience made her assume the expression of one in the last stage of fatigue, who wanted nothing less than a noisy tribute from a boisterous young brother, but who would rather have died than let any trace of her suffering be detected. Our possession of our new discovery about her future kept us benevolent, but we left after a moment or two, pleading that we must get back to do our homework and our practice, because Miss Beevor asked us with a certain archness whether we had liked the encore, and we guessed there was a salient point on which she expected we would have a comment. It had probably been some adaptation of a classical composition signally unsuited to the violin, the poor creature, as Mamma had once sighed, having a weakness for that kind of thing. We were in no hurry to explain that the window through which we viewed the concert had been closed, so we were soon on our way to a bus-stop.

“Oh, how I wish we were going back to practice and not to homework,” sighed Mary. “How I should like to work and work on Schumann’s
Carnaval.
”

“I say, are you ready for that yet?” I asked. “I’m not. I have had a go at it, but I’m not there.”

“No, I can’t really play it, not as Mamma does,” said Mary. “But that’s an absurd way of putting it, if we studied for a hundred years we should never play like her. But I can’t play it even by lower standards, but I think I would have got there by now if only I could give all my time to my work.”

“But what fun it will be when you are great concert pianists,” said Richard Quin, “everybody liking you everywhere.”

“Yes,” I said, “fancy having a full orchestra to play with.”

“Or the pick of the violinists to play all the sonatas for piano and violin.”

“It will be heaven.”

“That was our bus that went by and stopped lower down,” said Mary. “How stupid of us, we are like something in that old beast La Fontaine, not getting our bus because we are talking of the time when we will be great. He was horrid, the way he liked ants better than grasshoppers, and frogs that wanted to be big, though surely that’s harmless enough, and wretched dairymaids who break jugs of milk, he was always kicking what’s down.”

“Yes, he was awful,” said Richard Quin. “We are just learning ‘Le
Corbeau et le Fromage.
’ He’s positively pleased because a poor wretched bird does itself out of a bit of cheese.”

“Ruskin was a beast too,” I said. “
Sesame and Lilies
has made this term disgusting. It’s all about how every woman ought to behave like a queen. Why should she, when there are such lots of exciting things to do?”

“Think of spoiling our minds with all this sort of rubbish when we might be playing the piano,” said Mary.

Indeed, the family was getting on very well. Mary and I were in the state of monomania proper to our destiny, and our relations with Cordelia were much improved by our certainty, which was as absolute as if we had read the news in
The Times,
that Cordelia would shortly stop playing the violin and get married, Mamma was quite pleased with us all, though Richard Quin did not always make her wholly happy. I remember her once passing her hand over her brow and saying apprehensively, “He is like quicksilver.” But often he made her supremely happy, more ecstatically happy than any of the rest of us could do, particularly when he consented to show what he could do if he worked at his music. The social restrictions of Lovegrove never cramped Richard Quin, who would by mysterious means discover the existence of interesting groups in the dreariest social landscape, and though they were total strangers would establish connection with them by means that never struck them as odd. He unearthed some amateur musicians who practised chamber music in their homes and though they were adult and he was still a schoolboy, became their flautist. My mother went to hear one of their practices and we jeered at her because she came home and said, quite indignantly, “I wish Mozart could have heard Richard Quin play the flute.” It seemed that Mozart had once complained (as others among the great have done) that flautists are never in tune; and it seemed to her for one idiotic maternal moment as if he had shown gross carelessness in not being prophetically aware of her son’s perfect ear and astonishing, idle, gay technique.

But the ground cracked under our feet again. Papa at last set himself the task of writing a book: not just a pamphlet but a full-length book. At first he was very happy in this enterprise and wondered why he had left it so long. He reread many old books and read many new ones, and talked them over with himself as he paced the garden; and on his desk a pile of manuscript grew higher through the weeks. But after a certain time it grew no higher, and though reading was a function he could no more abandon than breathing, he read much less than before. Then a change came over him which we recognized with alarm. He became self-confident and worldly in manner, he dressed with a perfunctory effort at care, he took to going out a great deal, and he brought home a number of strangers. It was quite clear to us that our father had once again fallen into despair at the state of the world, and had once again resolved to set aside the useless tool of the intellect and trust himself to blind chance, which he imagined was the presiding genius responsible for the successes of those who had another sort of intelligence than his.

Once again we foresaw distress for our mother, and privation for all of us, no holidays, no new clothes, no concerts, and we had not long to wait for that catastrophe. But it struck us in an even fiercer form than we had yet experienced. For about a week half a dozen angry men kept on driving up in cabs and going away and coming back still angry. Not for one moment do I think my father had done anything criminal or illegal. He had simply done something infuriating. But he had never before infuriated so many people at the same time. One night they all came together, and did not go till all all of us children were in bed. At last the front door banged and we heard for hours, from the room below ours, Mamma’s astonished voice asking questions, many questions, and when Papa had answered them with his sneering laugh, pressing for another answer. Then Papa’s voice swept up and down the scale, an assurance that a fuss was being made about nothing. We knew he was not telling the truth, for when we lied it was in those very cadences. Suddenly it was daylight, and Mamma was standing at the door, telling us that we must hurry or we would be late for school, somehow everybody had overslept.

That crisis passed. Our crises always passed. Mary and I nodded wisely at each other and said, “You see, in the end it turned out all right.” In those days, when the Navy led a more leisured life, a certain number of naval officers read enormously when they were afloat and picked up some very strange notions; and as soon as they retired became evangelists for some religious or political movement of the more eccentric kind. An old admiral who had formed an admiration of my father’s writings on the high seas came to his rescue. We felt gratitude to the admiral but were not much interested, for the rescue was incomplete. As usual, Papa immediately effaced from his mind the memory of this skirmish with ruin, he was unembarrassed, he felt the contempt for the world natural in one who, so far as he remembered, had never known failure. But the ruin he refused to acknowledge would not consent to leave him and was visible. It was his hands which distressed me. They were beautiful in shape, and had always been alive and busy, even when he was reading, for then they twisted and turned according to the course of his argument with the writer. One had only to look at them to see that he could carve and paint and chisel. But now they were immobile and dirty, not as if he had failed to wash them but as if some internal dinginess were working outward. He had always some dark hairs on the back of his hands, now they were longer and thicker and greyish. Now, too, his wrists were thin, they looked worn like the cuffs of his old suit, and his sleeves hung loose.

But more had altered than his body. Whenever I read the word “estrangement” I think of my father’s relations with us at this time. It is a word misused as a synonym for hostility; its pure meaning describes our situation. My father had no enmity towards any of us, but he had become a stranger. There was no warmth between us. He would still approve of us, tell us that we were walking well and had straight backs, and warn us that whatever looks we had would go for nothing if we stooped or poked our chins, he would bowl to Richard Quin in the garden and would note how his batting was coming on, but it was as if what he had found to praise in us was the only recommendation we had to his favour. We felt ourselves obliged to suspect that he would have passed us by if we had been plain and clumsy. He still had some interest in Richard Quin and in Rosamund, but we were not jealous. We knew that among a crowd of adolescents who meant nothing to him, he could pick these out most easily, for Richard was his only son and good at games, and Rosamund was tall and fair—he liked women to be. They were themselves aware that there was no stronger reason for his preference, and were careful not to confuse him by too warm a response.

But sometimes Rosamund was of special use for him. In the evening she and her mother always brought their sewing down to the sitting room, and settled down on the sofa and worked on the lapfuls of delicate stuff without making a sound while Mamma gave Mary and me our lessons. Sometimes, as one or other of us played, Mamma would suddenly say, “Stop, dear.” However intent on the music she had seemed, she knew at once when Papa had come into the room. He would stand in the doorway, his quill pen a long pale feather in his hands, and would say in a tired voice that he could not go on with his writing, and would be glad if Rosamund could play a game of chess with him. Constance would answer in her prim voice that it would be a pleasure for Rosamund, who would gather up the pale garments from her lap, roll them in a woollen cloth, lay them on the table, and, rising carefully, so that no pins fell on the carpet, and follow him into the study. If I had finished all my lessons, I would go with them, though my father’s study, like everything else about him, was no longer as pleasant as it had been. It had always been apparently disordered. When he was writing an article there were papers and open books spread out on his desk and the deep window-ledge and even on the floor. But when the article was finished the papers were gathered up and the books closed and put back in the shelves, and though their place was immediately taken by others, there was real order there, we would have known that anybody who thought Papa’s study untidy was uneducated. But now the disorder of the room was real. The books and papers were never cleared up nor replaced by others. They lay one on the other, overlapping under dust, and in the shelves they were treated with a new and shocking disrespect. A Blue Book, something about South Africa, had been thrust into the case back upwards, the pages crushed down in a roll on the shelf. I watched it day by day and noted that though Papa sometimes took books from the same shelf, he never set this maltreated volume to rights.

When Rosamund had seated herself he would sweep clear his desk, open the chess-board, and take the pieces out of the dark lacquer box, faintly patterned with gold figures, which his own father had given him when he was a boy. I do not like the game; all such exercises of ingenuity make me feel as though the mind is being treated like a performing animal and forced to do tricks. But to watch these players was to consider a mystery peculiar to themselves. Usually my father’s speech and movements were swift to the point of fierceness. But now he moved more slowly than slow Rosamund. There would be long periods when he sat staring at the chess-board in silence, so long that my thoughts would settle in a standing pool. I would not think or feel, I would be aware of the sound of the wind, of Cordelia playing the violin upstairs, or Mary playing the piano across the hall, and it would seem as if they were all the sounds I should ever hear, and they would become charged with significance. I would expect a revelation, until my father’s stained and wasted hand shot forward from his frayed cuff and contentiously moved a piece. Then it would be Rosamund’s turn for deliberation, but hers was of a different character from his. He plainly thought out every move. When my sisters and I were little we had noticed that grownups’ foreheads were often hot and dry, and were sure it had something to do with the way they worried. It seemed certain that my father’s forehead must have been hotter and drier when he played chess.

But when it was time for Rosamund to make a move it was as if the game already existed, and she was waiting for her senses to tell her not what the next move should be, but what it unalterably was. She would stretch out her hand to the board, and her loose sleeve would fall back and show her milky wrist and forearm; she had nice arms and a nice neck, and always looked well in her petticoat when she was dressing. She and her mother were like statues, we had often remarked it. Now she was like one of the Greek statues in the British Museum, she was like stone that dreamed. Her hand had a sleeping look as it travelled across the board and moved the piece that was foreordained to move.

Then, if the game were drawing near to the close, Papa would throw himself back in his chair with an exclamation of bewilderment, for she was always right. He never won now. He would try. I could see him consciously reviving his fires, commanding his mind to be acute and powerful, and prophetic about little things, as it had been before; but Rosamund, firm behind the veil of trance, would establish the fact of her game, and it would be other than the game he tried to enforce. Sooner or later he would scatter the pieces and close the board, saying that she had grown far too clever for him. He said it in many ways, all of them kind and well-mannered, but she nearly always answered in the same words: “No, I am not clever.” Then they would together put the chessmen back in the box, and we would sit together for a little time longer, as if the game were still going on, Papa black and lean, Rosamund giving out light from her fairness.