The Fountain Overflows (59 page)

But Rosamund also reversed what had seemed bound to be a painful process. The rest of us had thought that, no matter what we did, Mary and I must go out into the world on our musical business, and leave our proud and ambitious Cordelia at home, humiliated by lack of occupation. But it was she who moved away from us and we who were left behind. Her bed was like a barge and we were on the quay. Rosamund was constantly with her, and did all her needlework in the sick-room, and Constance often joined her, and so did Kate when her work was done, and the three would sit sewing. It was as if the needles in their hands were oars, and they were rowing Cordelia away to the land where people were who are not musical. But of course this was music too. All these women worked in strict time, within a flowing rhythm. They imposed that time and rhythm on the room, on Cordelia. Soon there were pieces of stuff cut in queer shapes laid on the counterpane, and it appeared that Cordelia understood how they had to be put together to make something. We would be surprised to find by her bed all sorts of threads and silks we had never seen before, and queer-shaped needles, and Cordelia would tell us what they were as if she had been long familiar with their uses. Now she was always turning over magazines which had never come into the house before, full of paper patterns and transfers, and talking as if there were many things to do, but no one thing that had to be done by any particular time or very well. Now she was as tranquil in her prettiness as the flowers we put by her bed.

Mary and I got our scholarships at different schools of music; she got into the Prince Albert College in Kensington and I was taken by the Athenæum in Marylebone. Mary was to take my mother’s maiden name, and become Mary Keith, while I stayed Rose Aubrey. We did not like these prescriptions; they made becoming a musician seem like having an operation or dying, one of those grim things one must do without company. But Mr. Kisch had insisted on them. He said it would not do for two concert pianists to have the same surname; it was his idea that if we were together we might dig ourselves into a hole and criticize our teachers by applying our family standards to them. He had told me too that it would be a pity if Mary and I were to compete against each other for awards. When I assured him that that would not matter for we would never be jealous of each other, he cleared his throat and told me that that was not what he feared. He had been afraid that it might be discouraging for me to be reminded too often that Mary played better than I did. This I had often suspected, but it had never been put into words by any of us, and I was astonished to find that his pronouncement brought tears to my eyes. I turned my head away and looked out of the window, so that he should not see them. But he had known they would be there, and he went on to explain that Mary played like an angel, as if she came straight from heaven, and if nobody else knew that that was not how I played, I would myself always know it. But I need not worry, because there was something in me which would carry me through, I would go on until I dropped, and in the end I would play, in a sense, as well as Mary. It was odd that when he told me this he showed more embarrassment than when he had told me of my inferiority, it was as if the quality which was to save me was something rough and coarse.

It was strange that we were not at home when we learned that we had got our scholarships, and heard the news in a strange house where we had never been before. Mr. Kisch had asked us to play at a private concert given by a man who lived in Regent’s Park, a man who looked rather like Mr. Morpurgo, but who cared for music, whereas Mr. Morpurgo, we had discovered with regret, for it made paying back his kindness more difficult, cared not for music but for pictures. The purpose of the concert was to give a first performance to some songs written by a new composer called Oliver Something, and we had just to fill in time between the songs, and Mary was to play some Chopin and I was to play some Schumann. We were very pleased to go because Mr. Kisch said we were to be paid. We did not know how much, but it would be the first money we had ever earned. But he went on to say that he was sending us along because this man liked saying that people who afterwards became famous had played for him before they had made their names. That made us feel sudden terror.

The house was a nineteenth-century copy of an Italian palace, with lawns, at that time yellow with daffodils, dropping to a canal. Its rooms were high and splendid and the walls were painted with pale bright colours, against which Italian pictures of holy people and battles in full rage, tall Chinese vases covered with a tracery of flowers and huge, gross Buddhas, calm as if they had been small and shapely, and toy-neat French furniture, showed rich and solid and durable in beauty. We were not overawed, any more than we had been by Mr. Morpurgo’s house, for we had known Hampton Court Palace since we were small; and presently we had to switch our minds onto our music and notice nothing. The concert was given in the ballroom, and we waited in what was evidently the music room, there was another grand piano in there, and the panelled walls were inset with shelves filled by books about music. When I got back after playing my last piece we were both free, so we went round the shelves, wondering if we could ask permission to look at some of the books. I was wondering if I could own up how tremendously I had enjoyed the applause, and finally I said something about it, it seemed so dishonest not to admit it; and Mary winked at me, and said she had felt just the same. Then the butler came in with a telegram on a very big silver tray, and it was from Mamma to say that the letters we had been waiting for had come by the second post and we had both got our scholarships.

When I had read it I threw it down on the piano.

I said through tears that surprised me, “I would give this scholarship up, I would never touch the piano again, if only Papa would come back.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mary, “oh, yes.”

We went to the window and stood looking out into the garden, each with an arm about the other’s waist. The sheets of daffodils were catching the wind, it looked as if the nap were being stroked the wrong way.

“But this will mean a great deal to Mamma,” I said, “she had so little of the career that was hers by right.”

“Yes, it is a shame,” said Mary, “so far as Mamma is concerned, all of it is a shame.”

“But she still likes a great deal of her life,” I said. “There is always Richard Quin and she enjoys having Constance and Rosamund to live with us. But, I say, Mary, do you understand Rosamund?”

“Quite often, no,” said Mary.

“Of course, we would find it easier to understand her if she were a musician too,” I said.

“Well, she may not be a musician, but she is what music is about,” said Mary.

“What is music about?” I asked.

“Oh, it is about life, I suppose, and specially about the parts of life we do not understand, otherwise people would not have to worry about it by explaining it by music. Oh, I can’t say what I mean.”

What was music? I suddenly felt sick because I did not know the answer. I crossed the room and put my ear to the crack in the double doors which led into the ballroom. A song came through to me as a thin thread. I remembered how, when Cordelia had played the violin, her private thoughts, which were so contrary to the essence of music, had immediately become public property, audible to the deafest ear. The thoughts that this young composer had intended to make public had obstinately remained private. We had met him for a few minutes when we arrived at the house: he was a slender young man, with grey eyes clear as water, not so many years older than we were, gentle in manner, and from what he had said to us and from the character of his compositions it was plain that he was as essentially musical as Cordelia was unmusical. Yet even he was evidently finding it difficult to be a musician. I suddenly realized that for me it would be impossible. I looked round the room, lined with books on music, and felt that I was in prison, I had been shut up in a cube of music, and could not even have full use of my cell, so much of it was occupied by the grand piano, which seemed to me now not an instrument I had studied with results that till now had been successful, but an engine which throughout the years had established tyrannous claims on my life, and was now enforcing them, and would enforce them forever and ever, to my ruin.

For it was idiotic that I should become a musician. I had no musical gifts save those which had been transmitted to me by my mother, and these must be pitifully diminished in the transmission, I was so much lesser a thing than she was. If I played any composition well, it was because she had taught me to play it, and I knew that my performances, even considered as reproductions of hers, were always faulty. I did not want to be a musician. I did not want to grow up. I could not face the task of being a human being, because I did not fully exist. It was my father and mother who existed. I could see them as two springs, bursting from a stony cliff, and rushing down a mountainside in torrent, and joining to flow through the world as a great river. I was so inferior that it did not matter if I should be prudent and escape the ruin to which my father had dedicated himself. His ruin, I saw, was nearer salvation than my small safety could ever come. I wished it was I, and not Cordelia, who had taken to her bed, and I realized that there was indeed no mere cowardice in her retreat, that indeed her stubbornness had risen to the heights of brave self-defence in her renunciation of the impossible task of living on the same scale as our father and mother.

“I would like to run away,” I said to Mary.

I have never known whether she heard me. At that moment the double doors opened, the dark, kind, smiling, Eastern face of our host appeared, behind him there was the sound of subsiding applause, like a fan falling to silence in an exhausted hand. He said that Kisch had told him that we played some of Schumann’s duets very well, that he had mentioned this to somebody in the audience who was a specialist in Schumann’s piano music, and who had expressed a great desire to hear us play them, and though he knew we had already done all that we had contracted to do, he would be so very pleased if we would play, say, “Am
Springbrunnen
” and “
Versteckens.
” Nothing could have stopped me from doing as he wished. Before he had finished speaking, Mary and I had turned to each other with our four hands spread; for the last month or two we had been fascinated by this suite, which we had never been taught, and which we had practised simply for our own amusement. We had also a sense that our host was disconcerted because the songs had been too faintly appreciated, and that he had thought it would be pleasanter for everybody, and certainly for the young composer, if the audience took something away with them other than the lassitude excited by his work. I was a musician in my own right, though I could not yet say to what degree, and I was a human being and liked my kind, so I went with my sister back into the concert-room. Or perhaps I was swept on by the strong flood of which I was a part.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

A serial version of this novel appeared in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
.

copyright © 1956 by Rebecca West

cover design by ORIM

ISBN: 978-1-4532-0698-0

This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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