The Fountain Overflows (55 page)

We were, as a rule, however, united in wonder at what was happening to us. Mamma’s visits to Mr. Wertheimer went well, though the business was not concluded at once, and we were of course haunted by the fear which never left us till the cheque was actually paid into Mamma’s bank, that the portraits were really copies after all. But there was much to distract our attention from that fear. Mamma had numerous callers. Some of them were duns, whom she could now refer to Mr. Morpurgo’s solicitors, though even then the interviews were disagreeable. I still remember with a sharp pang of hatred a little yellowish man, looking up from the letter the solicitors had given Mamma to show to Papa’s creditors, saying that they would consider all claims against him, and snarling at her, “If this is a trick, you’ll hear something from me you won’t like.” Mamma pleaded in his behalf that he was probably very poor, but it still seems to me that he deserved to be poor.

Most of the callers, however, were friendly. There was, needless to say, Mr. Langham, who came with boxes of Carlsbad plums, though it was not Christmastime, and paid long lugubrious visits, ostensibly to condole with Mamma, but rather to receive her condolences on the long betrayal of his devotion. His wife also called to offer her sympathy, but there again the purpose of the visit was executed in reverse, for it appeared that Mr. Lang-ham’s private life was not above reproach. Other admirers of my father came, after they had digested for some days whatever rumour of his flight had reached them, partly because they were still under the charm and sought the place where the enchanter had last been seen, partly because they had been drawn to him in the first place by political idealism and were too humanitarian to contemplate my mother’s probable position unmoved. At any rate most of them offered her help, which she rejected in a manner that sent them away much happier. Laughing and speaking in a tone of rueful amusement, as if they might have offended her had it not been for her sense of humour, she told them of the sale of the family portraits. Papa was, she admitted, eccentric, and had perhaps been unusually eccentric, even for him, when he suddenly set sail to write his long book in peace, for some place unknown, whence he would return at any time with a like lack of the usual observances. But to leave his wife and children unprovided for, oh, no, her amused voice told them, he was not as eccentric as all that. And his worshippers went away in the happy belief that their worship had not all been error.

There came the wonderful day when the cheque was paid; and very soon afterwards there was an even more wonderful day. Mamma went to town early in the morning, and came back when we were at tea. It was plain that the day had gone well from her point of view, for she looked quite young for her, and held her head high, and had brought us a box of marrons glacés. She said, “Mary, Rose, you must listen. You are to go to the Panmure Hall on Tuesday at three. I will tell them at school that you are to be excused.”

“Who is playing?” we demanded.

“This is not a concert,” said Mamma, bringing the rabbit out of the hat with immense gusto, “and it is you who are going to play. You are to show Maurus Kisch what you can do and if you are good enough he will give you lessons till you go up for your scholarships.”

We could not speak. Kisch was the best piano-teacher in London who would trouble with quite young players. It was marvellous. Glory was about to begin: after this we were going to live a heavenly life of playing and doing nothing else, playing the best music with superb orchestras in halls big enough to give the music its due amount of room, to give the tone we got from the keyboard a chance to spread and show its quality. But it was also terrible. We might be no good after all. Mamma might just think we could play because she loved us. But Mary and I nodded at each other across the table, and said again what we had been saying throughout our childhood, “It will be all right,” and we kissed and hugged Mamma.

“Now, for you, Cordelia,” Mamma went on happily. We drew back, disconcerted. Was Cordelia to have lessons too? That would be a terrible waste of money. But after a shocked instant we quite saw that Mamma had to do this.

“And you, Cordelia,” Mamma went on happily, “you are to go to the Regent Studios, in the Marylebone Road, on Wednesday at half-past two, to play to Miss Irene Meyer.”

Cordelia said nothing, and we knew why.

“She is an excellent teacher,” Mamma continued, pushing up her voice into cheerful curves. “I have asked several people, and they all recommended her.”

“Did they?” said Cordelia coldly. “I have never heard of her.” Then she burst out with the question which was, from her point of view, quite logical. “If Mary and Rose are to be given the chance of being taught by Maurus Kisch, why am I not to be taught by Hans Fechter?”

We all saw her point. The two names were on the same level. But Mamma was more sharply pricked by that point than the rest of us. She cried, “Oh, child, never think of Hans Fechter.”

“And why not?” asked Cordelia.

“He is a very cruel man,” answered Mamma. “Never think of playing to him. I knew him when he was young, and he was terrible then, and now that he is older they say that he is worse, he has a tongue like a whip.”

“I wonder why you are so sure that he would want to use that whip on me,” said Cordelia, and soon after rose from the table and left the room, though we had not finished tea.

Mamma shook her head. “Hans Fechter. God forbid.”

“Oh, poor Mamma,” we said.

“No, poor Cordelia,” she corrected us.

“She is like somebody in Shakespeare when they get an idea in their heads and go on and on,” said Richard Quin. “You know, like Macbeth over the crown of Scotland.”

“Why do people make such a fuss about
Hamlet,
as if it was the greatest of all the plays?” Mary asked. “Nothing in
Hamlet
ever strikes one as very like anything in real life, but people are always behaving like Macbeth and Othello and King Lear. Our headmistress is just like King Lear when she goes on and on about how we all lack
esprit de corps,
though really we behave reasonably well, and she should be contented.”

“I wish there was some more of Hamlet in all of you,” said Mamma. “I would treasure a little indecision amongst you. He carried the thing too far, but I would like to see Cordelia unable to make up her mind about going in for a scholarship and the rest of you showing some hesitation in commenting on her. What a delight it is to have Richard Quin and Rosamund, who do not seem to want anything very much.”

“Oh, we do,” said Richard Quin. “I want to be liked. And so does Rosamund.”

She threw back her head and exclaimed, “Oh, yes, I must be liked,” with an earnestness that surprised us and made us laugh. But really she was very alarming. The firelight played over her face and made the barley-sugar curls lying on her shoulders a brighter gold, and there was a fullness about her like the Muscatel grapes we sometimes saw in shops, and all these things put together meant that she was more grown up than any of us. It was tame to be a grown-up, and she engaged in none of our mental adventures; she was certainly stupid, nobody ever had claimed she was not. Also she was quiet, she was neat-handed and slow in movement, she looked forward to earning a staid livelihood as a nurse, she always told us what was the prudent thing to do. Yet it might be that she was going to be the least tamed of us all. Everything about her was very contradictory.

“How I wish Hans Fechter wanted to be liked,” said Mamma. “Oh, children, I hope Cordelia will get Fechter out of her mind. But I will go and see Miss Beevor tomorrow evening, though it is very tiresome to have to argy-bargy about my own child with a stranger. I resent it that she is a stranger, I think of her as the strange woman that King Solomon wrote about, though he could not have had a more different type of woman in mind.”

But the next evening Kate ushered Miss Beevor into the room. Of course Mamma groaned aloud, as she was apt to do at the appearance of this harbinger of evil; and indeed the passage of time had made Miss Beevor’s appearance even less pleasing to us. It was not that her taste in dress had worsened, she was still faithful to Pre-Raphaelite costume, and had abandoned her favourite violet and sage-green only for a dull rusty red, and as usual she carried a white hide bag inscribed in pokerwork with the name of a foreign town. This time it was Venezia. We missed the mosaic brooch representing doves drinking from a fountain, but instead she wore an even less attractive trinket, a large heart-shaped gold locket, with a lute in repousse work on it. But the alteration we really did not like was in her expression and bearing. She looked roguish and younger and plumper, and we knew that it was Cordelia’s career that was nourishing her.

After the first groan Mamma regained her self-control and greeted Miss Beevor civilly, and said, “Yes, indeed,” when Miss Beevor said, “It is time we talked of Cordelia’s future. Twenty-seven concerts last year.” It was apparent she thought of those idiotic occasions as a score over Mamma. “I think we must all realize, mustn’t we, that Cordelia’s technique has improved immensely.” When my mother did not answer Miss Beevor touched the large heart-shaped locket on her bosom as if it were a cross and she were drawing strength from it. “It had occurred to me that perhaps, as I understand you have a very lucky windfall, on which I congratulate you, we might hope for some lessons for Cordelia from someone worthier than myself. I’ve always known I’m not worthy, you know.”

My mother could still find nothing to say.

“We had thought,” said Miss Beevor humbly, “of Hans Fechter.”

My mother shook her head.

“But why not?” asked Miss Beevor. She flushed suddenly, she trembled, her voice broke when she repeated, “But why not?”

Mamma at last found her voice. “Miss Beevor, I beg of you, never let poor Cordelia go near him. He is a terrible man.”

“Well, if it comes to that,” said Miss Beevor wildly, “lots of people are terrible. Terrible in their refusal to see what’s under their nose, terrible in their lack of natural affection. But what is terrible about Hans Fechter? Surely he has the highest reputation as a teacher?” But suddenly she clasped the locket. “Or—can you mean—is he a Bohemian character? Do you feel that a beautiful girl like Cordelia would not be safe with him?”

“Fechter a Bohemian!” exclaimed Mamma. “I should think not, Mrs. Fechter beats him. No, no, Miss Beevor, I do not mean that literally. And the case against Fechter is that he is a first-rate teacher who is bitter because he tried to be a concert violinist himself and could not succeed because he is not an attractive performer, and of course that is not fair, though fairness has nothing to do with the case, and he is too just to be harsh to his good pupils, but on the ones who are untalented he avenges himself cruelly.”

Miss Beevor said shakily, tugging at the locket, “Cordelia is not untalented. I wish you would not call her ‘poor Cordelia’! ‘Poor Cordelia’ indeed!”

Again Mamma fell into that silence which in fact proceeded from her love and pity for Cordelia, but which the other woman could not take except as a sign of craziness, or a deliberate and uncivil provocation, based on spite. “Well, anyway,” she said fiercely, “there is no use for you to worry. My old teacher, Signor Sala, has said he’ll take Cordelia. He retired some years ago and went back to live in Milan, but his wife has just died, and he is returning to London to be near his daughter, who is married here. He heard Cordelia play yesterday, and he has offered to teach her for nothing until she goes up and gets her scholarship at the Victoria School of Music this spring. So there is nothing for you to worry about.”

“How hard you try to make things easy for Cordelia,” said Mamma, at last.

“Most people would think it a privilege to make things easy for Cordelia,” said Miss Beevor grimly. She looked at my mother as if she were trying to puzzle something out; then lifted her arms and began to scrabble among the ends of her hair underneath her Pre-Raphaelite bun at the back of her neck, for the clasp of the golden chain from which her locket hung. “Look what I had made for me the other day,” she said. She held the locket out to us on the palm of her hand and pressed the spring. We looked down on a tiny coloured photograph of Cordelia playing the violin.

“I took the photograph myself,” said Miss Beevor, “on the lawn one day, with my Brownie, and a friend of mine who is very artistic coloured it for me. He lives up in Scotland, and Cordelia cut off one of her curls for me, and I sent it up to him to copy. And I had the locket made for me by a cousin of mine who works for Liberty’s. Isn’t it lovely? Take it and look at it closely, I don’t mind.”

Mamma took the locket in her own hand and murmured, “What a charming idea.” She went on staring at it until Miss Beevor gave a little laugh and said, “You know you’re really quite proud of her in your heart of hearts,” and took it from her, and joined the chain again about her neck. “If things go as well as I hope they will in the spring,” she announced, “we must give you a locket just like this in celebration.”

“Thank you,” said Mamma.

“And things will go well,” Miss Beevor promised defiantly. “Signor Sala is a wonderful teacher, and Cordelia will learn a great deal from him besides just music. He is a most cultured man. A great student of Dante. ‘
Nel mezzo del camin’ di mia vita Mi troverai in una selva oscura.
’ Well, well, I must be going now, and I am sure that in a short time everything will seem much, much clearer before our troubled eyes.”

When I came back from letting her out of the house I found that Mamma was sitting on the floor by the fire, as we children did and grown-ups hardly ever did in those days. “Well,” she said, “I was wishing that your father was here. But even if he had been he could have been no help. Though would it not be wonderful, wonderful, Rose to have him back, just for ten minutes, five minutes, sitting here? But I know he could have done nothing here. Oh, poor Cordelia, poor Cordelia, how that silly woman degrades her with her love. How queer it was to see your sister’s lovely eyes painted the same blue as the sea in a coloured picture postcard. It is not fair, that you and Mary should be able to play, and that she should not. It is not fair that this fool should fall in love with her. Yes, I find myself in a dark wood.”