The Fountain Overflows (49 page)

So on these occasions Kate would brush my father’s clothes and his Homburg hat and polish his shoes with special care, and he would dress as neatly as if he were going up to the House of Commons; and he would start off with Aunt Lily, who did not disgrace him, for she was soberly attired. This did not mean that her parakeet taste had been tamed, but that Mamma’s benign cunning had made another such discovery as had served us well during the trial, when she represented that it would be a pity if Aunt Lily’s beautiful clothes should arouse envious rage against her, and consequently against poor Queenie, in the breasts of women unable to afford them. Mamma now ascribed a similar envy to wardresses, not blaming them, but pointing out how depressing it must be for any true woman to wear uniform. So Aunt Lily consented to assume for these visits garments which seemed to her the next thing to sackcloth and ashes. “Don’t I look odd in this plain thing?” she used to ask, and Mamma used to answer, “You must remember those poor women.” But if that worry were lifted from my father’s shoulders others remained.

“What was it like, Papa?” I asked, when he brought Aunt Lily home in the twilight, and when Mamma had taken Aunt Lily off his hands. He had strayed into the sitting room and found me about to take away the tea-tray, and had asked for a cup of tea, saying that it might not be hot but it would be as he liked it, very strong, strong as they had it in Ireland.

“The outward journey is always bad,” he said. “If there is a really absorbing serial story in
Home Chat
it is all right, she reads it and is quiet. If not, she plays her trick, she invokes cheerfulness by the use of phrases which have old and exhausted associations with levity. As the train goes into a tunnel she will say, ‘Ah, where was Moses when the light went out?’ and she repeats the remark until I take the point. But it is even worse when she thinks she must not ask me to descend to her intellectual level, and she rises to mine, by leaning far forward and asking some such question as ‘And what has Mr. Labouchère been doing lately?’ and, good creature, she waits for an answer.”

He drank some tea, and I brought him a cushion for his back, and would have drawn the curtains, but he said he liked to see the darkness come down.

Later he said, “But the homeward journey is better. There is a mechanism at work, which it is interesting to watch. We drive back in the cab to Aylesbury town, and I take her into a public house which is used to such visitors, and gives us a little sitting room where she can have tea and weep. Then she wipes her eyes and starts to spit out a hundred stupid and baseless suspicions of the prison authorities. I tell her she is talking nonsense, because one should protest against any lie, and they are treating her sister quite well. But she is dealing, you see, with a situation that well might wound her. The wretched Queenie is now feeling more vigorous and she is snarling with the pain such a woman must feel in prison, through the vast constriction of her forces in her small cell. She snarls like a dog at her poor faithful sister. Surely she would have been better hanged. But we saved her. I forget really why we saved her. Oh, yes, the Court of Appeal bill, we have that now. But your mother says this woman was worth saving for herself, that she will come to something. I wonder why your mother says that? But she is sure to be right.

“We got into the train, and then the mechanism set to work, which is so interesting to watch. She is a good creature. By the time we were puffing through Amersham Wood Aunt Lily had decided to regard her sister’s snarling as a wholly admirable demonstration of integrity and courage. ‘They can’t get her down, Mr. Aubrey,’ she said, and tapped me hard on my knee. I am getting very thin. By the time the train reached Chorley Wood, she was sure that the prison staff must share her opinion. ‘Mark my words’ she said, ‘you’ll find they respect her, they won’t have many come in and keep their heads high the way she’s doing.’ When we got out at Baker Street she had developed a theory that her sister could not be behaving with such magnificent defiance had she not been innocent. During the journey across London she developed a pendant to that theory which supposes that the prison governor, finding that his own admiration for Queenie is shared by his entire staff, high and low, will send the Home Secretary a recommendation that she should be immediately released, which will reach him at the same moment as some irrefutable proof that somebody else had done away with poor Harry. Now her mind is steaming with plans for expediting and exploiting this happy state of affairs, and when I opened the front door with my key she ran past me into the hall, calling for your Mamma, crying, ‘Oh, she was marvellous, that girl, I tell you, I was proud of her.’ Listen. You can hear her telling the story to your Mamma on the landing.” And indeed the Cockney voice was going on and on, like a child skipping. “She is telling it honestly, too,” said my father. “That gimcrack style is her way of admitting to your Mamma that she herself knows that not a word of what she says is true. Really it is wonderful to see how this simple mind has developed this device for protecting itself from despair. But more complicated minds do not enjoy such protection, Thought that is worth calling thought has no mercy on itself, that is the dreadful proof of its quality.”

He drank his tea and rose, and said humbly, “Aunt Lily is an admirable woman, a most admirable woman,” and went to his study. Later I looked out of the uncurtained panes to see the lighted square his study window cast upon the lawn. But there was none. He was sitting in the dark.

15

O
NE
S
ATURDAY
morning, not long after the beginning of the autumn term, we three girls were all dressing, and Mary and I were quarrelling with Cordelia, though not really badly, when Mamma came in with a sheet of writing paper in her hand.

She said, “Your Papa has gone away and is not coming back.”

We stopped dressing and stared at her. We were all in our cambric camisoles and petticoats; Cordelia was brushing her hair in front of the mirror, Mary was brushing hers as she lay on her bed, I was putting on my black thread stockings. Mamma’s eyes were staring and her mouth was open, she looked more shocked than she had done the evening Papa had passed her in the High Street without speaking to her. Mary and Cordelia threw down their brushes, we all went to her and kissed her. She quivered like an animal under an unwelcome caress, backed away from us, and repeated, “Your Papa has gone away.”

None of us could think what to say. This was something new and worse than anything which had happened to us before. We could not advance in intelligence and worldly knowledge without becoming daily more conscious of how much less he was doing for us than other fathers did for their children. But to have lost him was terrible. He had apparently given us more than we knew, for now we felt bitterly cold.

Mamma said, “I loved him so.”

Cordelia said with sudden hopefulness, “Do you mean that he has died in the night?” It was not that she lacked love for Papa, she loved him so much that all her life long she looked specially lovely when she spoke of him. But now that she had to lose him she would have preferred that it should be by death, which happened to even the most respectable fathers, rather than by desertion.

“I said he had gone away,” answered Mamma, with a flash of irritation, “if he had died I would have said so. I went downstairs just now and found this letter on the hall table. He says he cannot stay with us any longer, and we must forgive him, and he has taken away his clothes, and his bed has not been slept in. He has gone away.”

I said, “We must find out where he has gone and get him to come back.”

“If he does not want to stay with us,” said Mary, “it will be no use finding him.”

“What shall I do?” asked Mamma, shivering. “What shall I do? Dress yourselves, dress yourselves, or we shall never get breakfast.”

We made her sit down on a bed, and she sat in a heap, looking furtively at the letter in her hand, plainly not wanting us to ask her to let us read it. We were glad to get on with our dressing, our loss continued to chill us, we felt as if it were the middle of winter.

“Don’t worry about money, Mamma,” said Mary as she pulled on her clothes. “Now we can really do what we always wanted to do as children, leave school and earn our livings, we are old enough.”

“Yes, yes,” I said, “and we will get back to our music somehow later on.”

“If only this had happened a year or two later,” said Cordelia, “I would have got somewhere, and we would all be all right.”

At this point Mamma cried out and at the same time raised her head and looked quite wildly at the three copies of family portraits which hung above our beds. I wondered if she, like Rosamund, had been exasperated by the sight of those women whose protective menfolk had made it possible for them to be so smooth and beautiful and bejewelled. But it was not likely. Mamma had never envied women who did not work, while Rosamund would see nothing wrong in the enjoyment of leisure. In the midst of my preoccupation I recognized this as a sharp difference between two people whom I loved.

“Oh, as to money, as to money—” Mamma began, but just then Constance came into the room. All three of us, we learned afterwards, felt the same hope: Constance will tell us something which will prove that this is not true. But she said to Mamma, “Kate tells me you are upset about something.”

Mamma, sitting amongst the tumbled bedclothes, said, “He has gone away.” She lifted her head and suffered Constance to kiss her, but while Constance’s lips were still on her cheek, she said, “Where will he go? He has tired out all his friends.”

I turned on Mary and said angrily, “It is no use saying we should not go after him because he does not want to stay with us. That is being proud. He will have nowhere to go, nobody to look after him. He will have no money. Why, if he leaves us, he leaves everything. If he goes away from Lovegrove he will not be able to edit the paper any more, and he will not be able to write articles without his books, and I do not suppose he took them with him in the middle of the night. What has he taken from his study? I will run downstairs and look.”

“Even if all his books and papers are still there,” said Mamma, divining my thought, “it is still no use hoping that he will come back. He has gone.”

It seemed to me that she was helping my father to desert us by accepting the fact that he had done so, and I stamped my foot. But at that moment Rosamund and Richard Quin came into the room, and again we hoped: They will tell us something which will prove that what Mamma says is not true. It was, however, other news which made them both troubled and excited. Richard Quin said, “Mamma, do not be frightened, but there were burglars in the house last night.”

“I do not think so, dear,” said Mamma. “I suppose you have found a door or window open, but it must have been Papa who left it like that when he went away. For he has gone away. But burglars would not come to this house. There is no silver or jewellery here, nor anything which is known to be valuable, and they would not think it worth their trouble.”

“No, Mamma, there really have been burglars. Come and see.”

“Richard Quin,” said Cordelia irritably. She had been shaking her head and frowning at him ever since he came into the room. “This, I suppose, is one of your silly jokes, but this is no time for joking.”

“It is half-past eight in the morning,” said Richard Quin impatiently. “I must always remember that at half-past eight in the morning I must not make jokes. Please do not tell me why. I realize perfectly that I will understand when I am older. But, the rest of you, there really have been burglars in the sitting room. Haven’t there, Rosamund?”

She nodded. She was looking from face to face, noting our signs of distress shrewdly as well as sympathetically, wondering, I imagine, whether some real misfortune had broken over us, or if we were wantonly attacking the calm which was her only luxury. Constance asked, “Is anything missing?” and she answered, “No, nothing seems to have gone. Or, at least nothing that they knew they had.”

Infantile dreams upheld us. Perhaps if the burglars had taken nothing, they were not burglars but kidnappers, and had made him write that letter to Mamma against his will, and the police and some detective like Sherlock Holmes would find him for us. Cordelia and Mary and I rushed downstairs and stopped at the sitting-room door.

“Look,” said Richard, behind us, “over the chimney-piece.”

The picture which always hung there, the water-colour of a Spanish cathedral by an early-Victorian painter, had been taken down and set up on a chair where it would come to no harm. The person who had put it there had then cut into the square of wallpaper which it had covered. He had known there was a cupboard behind it. Now the door of that cupboard swung out into the room, showing a neat cedar-wood interior, which was empty.

“This reminds me of something,” murmured Cordelia. “Something that happened when we first came here from Scotland.”

“Yes, I have not thought of it for years,” said Mary.

“I almost thought it was a dream,” I said.

Impatiently Richard Quin asked, “What are you all talking about?”

We did not answer him, we were in a daze, we were small again, and Papa was with us, instead of just having gone away he had just come back. Richard Quin pulled my hair to attract my attention, saying, “Oh, you have all taken up being older than me as a profession. Tell me what you are remembering.”

Mary said, “The first day we came to this house from Edinburgh, Mamma brought us, and we thought Papa was miles away, and when we opened the front door we heard a noise, and Mamma thought it was a burglar, but she ran straight in, and it was Papa scraping away at the wallpaper just where it comes down to the chimney-piece, and he said there was something hidden behind it. But he stopped when we came in, and we were all so glad to see him after the long journey, he picked me up and kissed me.”

“Well, he picked up all of us and kissed us,” I said. “And he told us that this was the house where he had stayed with his Grand-Aunt Georgiana when he was a boy, and we were all very pleased, and we went out to the stables, and he told us all about Cream and Sugar, Caesar and Pompey, and Sultan. You were there, Richard Quin, it was the first time you heard him tell that story you often used to ask him for, about the time that Sultan bolted with the French tutor.”