The Fountain Overflows (29 page)

At this point the smoke that was puffing out of the front of the car changed its rhythm, and he transferred his interest to it, leaning forward and calling questions to George, who did not answer. This left us still uncertain whether the car was on fire or not, and though we were not really frightened, we were feeling in the darkness for the door handle so that we could jump if the worst came to the worst, when George leaped back into the driver’s seat, just in time to take the wheel before we rushed off on the longest continuous run of the journey. For more than five minutes we proceeded in the same direction, without reversing once, and at such a pace that people on the pavements stopped dead to look at us with expressions of alarm that Rosamund and I commented on as indicating cowardice and lack of enterprise but which we feared meant prophetic good sense. Then the car, after bumping the curb, stopped with a suddenness which jolted us both off our seats, and began to emit smoke not in puffs but in a continuous stifling cloud.

George got out and, by the light coming from a lamp-post with which he had nearly collided, we saw that he looked very cross. Mr. Phillips turned round and asked, “Does your Papa play snooker?” I explained that Rosamund and I had different Papas, but if snooker was a game neither of our Papas played it, for they did not play games. Mr. Phillips sighed. “That’s the worst of Lovegrove, there’s nobody here wants to do anything, there’s no life about the place,” and he sat and stared in front of him in silence for a time, but presently turned back again to say, “But yachting’s not a game. Your fathers and mothers might like to come along to Blackwater. Probably they’d enjoy it as much as anything they’d done in their lives. It would put a bit of life in them. Just what they need. People mope, you know, they go about with faces as long as a fiddle, while if they’d get out and have some fun and fresh air they’d feel as right as rain.” He was silent again, and then turned to us and said sadly, “Look at me, I’m always happy as a king.”

Some seconds later George reappeared at the side of the car and stood scowling at Mr. Phillips, who did not seem to notice him.

I said, “I think Mr. George wants to speak to you,” and Mr. Phillips said, “Oh, does he? Does he? Oh, there you are, George. Well, how are things going, George?”

George, after holding him with his eye as if he were an animal that had to be tamed, asked, “You been touching this engine?”

Mr. Phillips wriggled on his seat and said, “What do you mean?”

George, maintaining the hypnotic stare, said, “Wednesday, when I had my day off, you been touching this engine?”

“No, no,” said Mr. Phillips, “Wednesday? Wednesday? I had dinner early and went straight off to the Conservative Club, they had a bit of a sing-song.”

There was a pause, during which George continued to stare at what was called, by an irony that struck me even then, his master.

“Never went into the coach-house at all that evening,” said Mr. Phillips jauntily.

After a further rude pause, George took his face away, and the sound of hammering started again.

Mr. Phillips did not turn round in his seat to speak to us for quite a long time. For a space we were amused by a man and woman who halted as they were walking by and stationed themselves under the lamp-post, regarding the car with a solemn expression, as if they were broad-minded and were determined to be friends of progress at any cost, come the smoke as thick and evil-smelling as it might. But they wearied of progress when it remained stationary for so long, and even Mr. Phillips, though plainly less liable to consciousness of tedium than his fellow creatures, got out of the door and walked up and down outside. The yellow front of a little shop ahead of us suddenly darkened. It must be getting late, perhaps Mamma and Constance would be getting anxious, we were indeed ourselves quite looking forward to having supper and showing the others the huge box of chocolates and going to bed. We were now not more than three minutes from home, we were in the main street from which Lovegrove Place turned off. But was it as rude to get out of a motor-car because it had broken down as it would be to walk out of a party because the servants were late in bringing the tea? We did not know what the etiquette was, but Rosamund said, “You know, they will be anxious.” So I pulled down the window and timidly called Mr. Phillips by his name.

He was within a foot of me, and for the moment had come to a halt. But he did not hear me. I said again, “Mr. Phillips,” but he still made no reply. It was true that he was far below me, for in those days the passengers in a car were as high above the pavement as the speakers on a platform usually are above their audience. So I leaned out of the window and called down to him, “Mr. Phillips, we are quite close to our home, we think our Mammas will be getting anxious, would you mind if we got out and walked home?” In the light shed by the street-lamp I could see his vein-streaked cheeks, his round ginger eyebrows, his prominent and aggrieved eyes, his tightly twirled and stiffly waxed ginger moustache, the stag’s-head pin in his tie. By the same light he might have seen me had he raised his eyes from the ground. But he neither heard nor saw me. He was contemplating some fact which had turned him to stone. We felt afraid, being still children, at finding ourselves in a strange machine which showed all the signs we had been taught to interpret as warnings of fire, at an hour when we were always at home having supper and thinking of bed, in the charge of a man who, though round and jolly, had thoughts that made him blind and deaf.

We sat and swung our legs and told each other that it would be all right. Then Mr. Phillips turned about and got in beside us, saying, “It’s all right, George always finds what’s wrong. Splendid fellow, George, you mustn’t mind what he says. But about our having some fun. The circus, now, that would be all right, wouldn’t it? I mean, it’s not a game, is it? Your fathers wouldn’t object to that, would they? That’s what we’ll do, make up a big party and go to the circus, you can’t have fun unless there’s lots of you, with your minds made up to have a good time. All be jolly together, that’s the ticket.” Then we sped forward, and with a great lurch at the corner we found ourselves in Lovegrove Place, and we were again intoxicated with pride in our adventure and the nonchalance with which we had embarked on it, and were glad because the motor-car at that point developed a new and peculiar noise, like a kettledrum being played very slowly. Everybody would come running out to see what was happening, and they would be astonished when they discovered that it was us.

But nobody came out, and we did not even get in at once, though Mr. Phillips banged the knocker down on the door very hard indeed, so hard that he murmured apologetically, as if he were repeating something he had been told when he was a child, “Mustn’t alarm the ladies, mustn’t alarm the ladies,” and then brought down the knocker very softly indeed, as if he were trying to strike an average. We saw the light in the hall go on. We were at that time so poor that we did not light the gas in the hall except when people knocked. Mamma opened the door, looking very tired, and she did not seem very interested in the motor-car and though she thanked him for bringing us home, it was only as much as she would have done if he had brought us back in a cab, or had walked with us. Her face was as I had seen it when I had imagined her in Mrs. Phillips’s drawing room, it was gleaming white like polished bone. But it was possibly not anger which had made it so, and presently, after Mr. Phillips had finished telling her what a couple of charming young ladies he had found us, and that he wouldn’t have had different passengers, no, not even the Princess of Wales and the Duchess of York, she said that she was sorry she could not ask him in, but Papa was out, and she was very anxious because her little boy had had a violent attack of a sort which had afflicted him several times this autumn.

This evoked response from Mr. Phillips so boisterous that she put up her hands to shield her temples. “Your little boy ill?” he cried. “Splendid, splendid, it couldn’t be better.”

She echoed in amazement, “It couldn’t be better?”

“Yes, ma’am, it couldn’t be better,” he repeated joyously, seizing her hand and shaking it as if he were congratulating her. “Your little boy’s ill, I’m here, I’ve got my motor-car, I can go and fetch the doctor, he’ll be here in no time, you won’t believe how fast George can take us along, excellent fellow George, if we tell him it’s for a sick kiddy he’ll skim along like the wind.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said my poor mother, “but the doctor has seen him already.”

“Oh, the doctor’s seen him,” said Mr. Phillips sadly. “Seen him, has he? Well, then, I suppose I’d better be saying good night.” But he was daunted only for a second. “When did he see him?” he asked.

“We sent for him about four, and he came almost at once,” said Mamma wearily.

“At four o’clock? Why, that’s a long time ago, you have to be careful with a sick kiddy, if a kiddy’s really sick a good doctor sees him every hour. Come, come, now, four o’clock, that’s not good enough, it’s time he saw him again,” said Mr. Phillips, with mounting happiness. “I’ll go and get him, high time he saw the little chap again, where does he live?”

“But we do not want the doctor to come again,” said Mamma, her tired voice getting very Scotch. “He has left me powders for my son to take, I know all that we have to do.”

“Well, it wouldn’t do any harm,” pressed Mr. Phillips, though without much hope. Long experience had evidently left him well acquainted with the signs of defeat. “Are you quite sure you wouldn’t like to see him again before you tuck the little fellow up for the night, just in case?” Firmly discouraged by my mother, he had said his good-byes, and was going down the steps when another thought struck him, and he spun round and ran up to the door, crying, “I say! What about medicines? I’m a demon at getting chemists to open after hours. I get ’em out like a boy getting a winkle out of its shell with a pin. What d’you need for the little man?”

“Nothing, nothing,” pleaded my mother, wringing her hands. I do not know how long this scene would have gone on had not Kate come up from the basement with the soup tureen, which she took into the dining room, and then returned to stand beside Mamma at the open door. She listened for a minute and then said to Mr. Phillips, with the same simple grimness that George employed when speaking to him, “Quiet is what we want. We got to keep the little boy quiet.”

Immediately he was subdued. Nervously he agreed, “Yes, quiet, that’s the great thing for a sick kiddy. Well, I’ll send George along in the morning, see what we can do, nothing more pathetic than a sick kiddy, I always say.”

We watched him hasten down the garden path to the motor-car, which was now making a hissing noise and was surrounded by sparks, and Kate closed the door. We all instantly forgot him. Kate and Mamma did not speak or move, they stood silent and still, sorrowful and perplexed. In those days, because of the flickering light given by gas-mantles, houses seemed shaken by a pulse, and the trembling hall and staircase seemed to be sharing in Richard Quin’s fever. I hugged the great box of chocolates I was carrying as if it were he, and Rosamund stammered, “Is h-he very ill?”

Mamma replied hesitantly, “Well, we cannot understand what is the matter with him,” and ran her forefinger back and forwards over her closed lips. When we went up to say good night to him we could see that he was very ill. His hair was not fair over dark any longer, it had become altogether dark, and when he put his hand outside the coverlet, as he rolled over to see who had come in, his knuckles were blue and shining with sweat. You would not have thought him a pretty little boy any more, he was like a monkey. Rosamund laid her head down on the pillow beside him, and he moved so that his head rested on her hair, and they clasped hands. I bent over him and said softly, “Nancy Phillips’s Papa brought us home in their motor-car.”

“You are lucky!” he said. “But you are older, I suppose it was sure to happen to you first.” The motor-car suddenly screamed and then slowly roared off into the darkness. “A good jinn would be quieter,” he said and closed his eyes.

Mamma, at the foot of the bed, said, “What an enormous box of chocolates! Where on earth did you get that?”

“Mrs. Phillips gave it to us,” I said, perhaps too artlessly.

“But why? Did all the children get presents like that?”

“No,” I said. “She took a fancy to us. I will tell you about it afterwards.”

But Richard Quin asked for a drink, and all our affairs were forgotten. I went downstairs and found Mary lying on her tummy on the hearthrug copying out some Liszt fingering of a Beethoven sonata from an old edition someone had lent her, waving her legs in the air the way one did in those days when one was working really hard, and she said she would go on till she had finished. In the dining room Cordelia was sitting alone at the table, for Papa was out, speaking at a public meeting held to demand the repeal of the excessive death duties introduced by Sir William Vernon Harcourt some years before, which were eating away the solid fortunes which should be the foundation stones of the nation; I think it probable that no human being alive at that moment was engaged in a more disinterested activity. Cordelia explained that it might be all right for Mary and Rosamund and me to go without supper until all hours, but she was utterly exhausted. The strain of public appearances was more than we could imagine.

In the early morning I awoke, and wondered what hour it was. There was no clock in my room, for our family found it impossible to keep any timepiece going. Papa had a big gold hunter and Mamma a little French watch which dangled from an enamelled bow pinned to her blouse, but these were often so wildly out of order that even my parents noticed that they were fast or slow, and sent them to the watchmakers. So we grew as clever at detecting signs of the progress of the hours as if we were peasants in some backward land. It is dark, I thought; yes, but at this season it might be dark till eight. But it was not eight, for there was as yet no traffic passing along the main road at the end of our street. Such traffic was then more reverberant than it is today. The highways were paved with cobblestones on which the horses’ hooves made a great clattering, and the cobblestones were set in a bed of concrete which offered the surface of a drum. If the wagons coming up from Kent and Surrey were not yet on their way then it must be before half-past five. I must get some more sleep or I would not be able to do my practice well the next day, so I closed my eyes; and as I sank to sleep it came to me that I had forgotten some disagreeable thing that it was foolish and light-minded not to remember.