The Fountain Overflows (19 page)

As we got to the end of the poplar avenue we always began to laugh till it hurt. At the end of the poplars was a dreadful little house built of red brick, not just red like the institutions but bluish-crimson, surrounded by a garden blazing with scarlet geraniums, blue lobelias, and yellow calceolarias, and on its pea-green gate was pinned a notice: “Wanted, a Lady Typewriter to take down letters from dictation in return for swimming-lessons.” The first time we had seen it Mamma had laughed so much that, when she wanted to tell us not to laugh in case the people in the house should see us from the windows and be hurt, she could not speak and had to slap us, as if she were a common mother. On all later occasions we started laughing as soon as we got out of the train, and it hurt like wanting to sneeze when we went along the path wondering whether the notice would still be there and holding back our laughter so that we could go politely past the house. It was really a very singular advertisement. There can have been no place within miles where swimming was possible, indoor or outdoor; it was exposed all the year round; the chances of any “lady typewriter” passing by were remote, for the path was never used save by the nurses from the hospital and the labourers who worked on the sewage farm; and the advertiser never knew when he was beaten, for the notice was there year after year, and was replaced when the weather had faded it.

When we had passed it and got over our ecstasy we found ourselves at another station, secret in character, and took one of the three trains which ran in the day on a line built in the seventies under some apprehension concerning the future site of London industry. It has long been closed and grown over with grass; and even then we were often the only travellers on the train, which consisted of a single-passenger coach at the front of some goods wagons. It took us past the camp of gorilla tombstones of which we had seen the clambering outposts on the hill behind the poplars. Then we passed streets of mean houses where there were dreary washings on the lines in the back yards, and these changed into villas, and we got out at a station which was the most secret of all. It was beside an abandoned factory in a deserted garden, which we left by a wicket gate, and found ourselves in a street planted with big houses which had nothing to do with the factory, which were certainly inhabited by people who could never have wanted to travel to that odd place where there were the isolation hospital and the workhouse and the sewage farm.

This street was still and laid with thick dust, unstirred by any wind, and we despised it and were angry when Cordelia once said she would like to live there. Mary and I got on each side of her and furiously asked why, and she said she was sure there was not a house on the road which had chairs covered with leather that was rubbing away into dust and stairs that had to be left bare because the stair-carpets were so worn they were not safe to use. We were astonished that she minded these things, because they could not be helped, and forgot to be cross with her any more in perplexity at her lack of logic.

In no time we were at Kew Green, and looking at the church that looks so like a comfortable four-poster bed that Mamma said that she expected the parson gave up and let the congregation bring pillows and quilts. Now we were within a stone’s throw of the Gardens, but Mamma liked to walk slowly and look at the eighteenth-century houses. She loved the red of the brick, soft as red hawthorn blossom; the languishing flowers and leaves of the wisteria which pretended to be so delicate they must surely fall, but were supported by gnarled tree-trunks thick as king-snakes; the gleaming window-panes which spoke of several perfectly trained housemaids. We used to run ahead to the gates and paw the ground like ponies till she came, and we were never disappointed. We always had a lovely time in the Gardens, although of course the very best time of all was Rosamund’s very first visit. She was very nice about it when we told her we were going to take her there, but we could see she did not know what was waiting for her, she just thought it would be a garden like any other public garden. But when she got in and saw the temple on the little hill, and the pagoda, and the lily with the great flat leaves in the tank in the greenhouse, she liked it so much that she could not speak. It was not that her stammer had come to her, it was that she could find no words. Richard took her about and showed her the place as if he were big and she were little. That same day it occurred to us that there was no reason why flowers should not be made up as well as animals, and after that there was for us a tree of fire down by the lake at the end of the broad grass walk, not far from the azaleas and magnolias, and not far from the rock garden there was a group of tall golden lilies, taller than a man, which in adult life I remembered so well that I had some trouble in believing the botanists who assured me that no such variety is known.

It irritated us that on our return from such expeditions Cordelia would not come down to the kitchen with the rest of us to tell Kate all about it, she rushed up to our room and picked up her violin and got in as much practising as she could before supper. She was practising longer and longer every day, and she did in fact improve her technique more than any of us had expected, though still this merely meant that her general musical inaptitude was more cruelly exposed. It may be thought that our household then, and myself several decades later, made much too much fuss because a little girl could not play the violin very well. But Cordelia was a dynamic person, any stone she threw into the water raised such enormous waves that we were drenched by them. She had left us in no doubt that when she played the violin other elements were involved. One of these elements was exposed one evening when her indifference to Rosamund became a dislike that never quite mended. Mr. Langham, the City financier, who had become involved with Papa in the abortive deal at Manchester, who was sometimes rich and sometimes poor, was a person of undistinguished appearance, lean and brisk and sprightly in his dress, a specimen of the type I now recognize with the help of the literature of the time as a masher. We all gathered that Mamma disapproved of him, because he gave Papa the idea that he might some time make money on the Stock Exchange, and also because he was addicted to vulgar pleasures, and sometimes took Papa with him to call on ladies who lived on houseboats on the river near Maidenhead and spent the evening playing the banjo while their male guests smoked large cigars and drank champagne. This evening he had an appointment to come and play chess, and had telegraphed so late to say that he could not come that Papa already had the men out on the board. It occurred to me that he might care to play a game with Rosamund, though I did not suppose she was anything like as good as a grown-up would be, so I took her into his study. He was sitting there sunk in his disappointment, with blue hollows under his high cheekbones, his chin resting on his clasped hands, which were small and fine and stained with nicotine. “The Wearing of the Green” was coming out of his closed lips in his flattened, groaning chant. When he saw Rosamund he greeted her with an unusual kindness, and they had a soft conversation, almost as empty of statement as the cooing of doves, but as amiable. Presently she stretched out her hand and held it level above the board. She stuttered, “I p-p-play ch-ch-chess,” and Papa said kindly, “Do you? Not one of my children has the brains to learn it. Sit down and let us have a game.”

She struck me as stupidly not afraid of playing with Papa, and the expression on her face was dreamy, she made no effort to pull herself together and become alert. She moved the pieces very slowly, and her hands, though they were white and well shaped, seemed large and clumsy as she moved the chessmen. I was frightened lest Papa should get cross, and when he gave a sharp exclamation I felt wretched. But he told me, “Rosamund knows what she is doing.”

She smiled faintly and said, “It is a nice game.”

They went on playing, and Papa presently said to me, “Do you know, I am finding it difficult to hold my own.”

I watched, though I found it hard to follow what was happening. But I could see that again and again he nearly got command over her, and she always escaped him by the exercise of her impeded and stumbling power.

At last they came to the end of the game, and Papa exclaimed, “Why, you are a very clever girl, cleverer than my daughters.” But she answered, looking very blind, “No, I am not. This is all I can do.”

“But that is a very great deal,” said Papa. “You can play the most intricate game in the world, and if you can do that, then you can do a great many other things as well.”

Just then Mamma and Cordelia, who was carrying her violin, came in to tell us our supper was ready, and Papa said to them, “Rosamund has just given me a sound beating. She plays chess very well indeed, very few grown-up people can play as well as she does.”

Cordelia lifted up her violin and hugged it to her breast as if it were a talisman that could save her from a grave danger. She looked astonished and bereft. I understood that she had wished to play the violin because Mamma and Mary and I played the piano, and now she would feel a still greater need to play it because Rosamund played chess. It was unfortunate that Mamma was caught off her guard and exclaimed, “Oh, no, Cordelia!”

It was shortly after this that Mamma told me that she had had a letter from Miss Beevor asking if she might call, and that she had asked her to tea the next day. “You and Mary must be very good,” she said, “for the poor woman must think us all savages after the way we treated her on Christmas Day, I had not the faintest idea who she was. You must leave the room as soon as I can tell you that you can go and play. She will want to talk about Cordelia.”

“Why do you let her talk to you about Cordelia?” I said. “There’s nothing to be said about Cordelia except that she can’t play the violin and never will be able to. Why do you spoil Cordelia so?”

“You do not understand, dear,” said Mamma vaguely, and went into reverie. “The first time Miss Beevor came she wore sage-green, the second time violet purple, I wonder which she will wear this time. I wonder what the full range of what is called ‘art shades’ includes.”

She spoke without irony but with apprehension that was not justified. There was nothing new in Miss Beevor’s appearance when she arrived. She wore the large purple beaver hat and a purple velveteen stole with the sage-green dress, but not the mosaic brooch showing the two doves drinking from a fountain. There could be traced in her costume a reflection that it was not Christmas, there was no need for festal attire, but that also it was probably wise to appear before such an eccentric woman as my mother with some slight advantage of the sort given by elegance. It could be seen from her bearing that she regarded herself as a shining and militant figure, prepared to do battle for the right, and she began the assault so soon that we never shared in the tea-party at all. For shortly after her arrival she announced that she had taught Cordelia a new piece called “Humoreske” by Dvorak, staring into Mamma’s eyes in the way that is said, though never on very good authority, to subdue dangerous animals, and casting a protective arm round Cordelia, who had crept to her side as seeking shelter. Mamma then gave us the signal to go, and we were glad to leave, because we were afraid we were going to giggle.

But later that evening I found Mamma sitting on the stairs, looking at the door of Papa’s study and murmuring to herself, “When that woman speaks of the child one hears the idiot voice of love itself.” I sat down beside her and asked her what the matter was, and she told me that at Miss Beevor’s request she had given Cordelia permission to play at a concert to be given at a church hall in aid of a missionary society.

I was greatly shocked. “Why did you do that, Mamma?”

She said in soft and wretched tones, “If I did not let her play she would think that we were standing between her and success.” Suddenly hope shone about her like the noon. “But people are very hard-hearted nowadays. It is a charity concert. Perhaps there will be nobody there.”

Her hope was to be disappointed. When she returned from the concert, she reported with affected gratification that the church hall had been packed, and it turned out later that the audience had been of a curiously active sort. So there was to follow a period when Mamma was driven to distraction by a double misery. As time went on there appeared in my father’s study certain documents, the like of which I faintly remembered from our Edinburgh days. There were sheets of squared paper inscribed with jagged lines, which looked like the serrated edges of certain mountain plateaux to be seen in Spain and New Mexico. To this day I cannot look at such mountains without a feeling of horror, and I think of them as accumulations of copper instead of limestone, as they usually are; for those papers in my father’s room were graphs showing the rise and fall of the copper market, and their presence meant that Papa was again gambling on the Stock Exchange. This was suicide. Mr. Morpurgo was paying him a good salary, much more substantial than would normally be drawn by the editor of a suburban newspaper, and he should have been able to give himself and his family all that they wanted, and even to save. But he had a need for gambling which I can understand only if I shut my eyes and see him as he used to pace the garden, vehemently arguing with an unseen adversary, pausing to retract his head like a cobra about to strike before he covered him with sneering laughter. I understand it then. He so much disliked the situation which was produced by the logic of events that he wanted to appeal over the head of logic to chance, and this he did, without thought for us. So we slipped back into the poverty we had known during the last few months of our life in Edinburgh.

We got used to Kate’s coming and saying with a peculiar inflection in her voice that a man had come to see Papa. Then, if Papa was in, he went out by the back door and through the stables, without hurrying; Mamma used to turn her back so that she should not see him go. But whether he was in or out, Mamma had to see the dun. There was a sentence in our history books that we grimly enjoyed because we felt we had a special understanding of it. When we read, “The garrison then sent out one of their number to parley with the attacking troops,” we knew exactly what it had been like, we had so often seen Mamma do it. Her task was particularly difficult, because sometimes they were not duns. Papa had performed a feat more extraordinary than we realized. His leaders in the little
Lovegrove Gazette
were collected in pamphlet form and were widely sold, and when he spoke in public he left an enduring impression of nobility and good sense on his audience. Hence more and more people wanted to enlist his support for causes in which they were interested, and though the more sensible among them wrote to him the others called at our house. Somebody had to see them, because they might be people who wanted to give Papa work for which he would be paid. Some of them were so mad that we were glad of their visits, they made Mamma laugh so much. She was happy for days after she had interviewed a man who said he would pay Papa a hundred pounds to write a book which would convert England to his belief that the way to cure a cold was to lie in the middle of a flower-bed and do deep-breathing exercises, and that all the public parks ought to be covered with flower-beds so that people with colds could lie down in them and be cured. But usually they were cranks who should have been watch-dogs, who dug their teeth into the attention of any persons whom they found breathing the same air, and would not let them go until they had been taken in charge by the intellectual police, as represented by some tedious and obscure economic theory.