THREE DAYS after Christmas my mother brought a letter into the sitting room, where I was sitting alone, playing with my dolls’ house. The others had gone with Papa to luncheon with the Langhams, and Mamma had thought three children were too many. She said, “Rose, my cousin Constance thanks me for our presents, but she still does not ask us to go and see her and does not say that she will come here, though God knows I asked her. There must be something wrong. I am going now. You can stay here with Kate if you like, but it would be nice if you would come. You will like Rosamund, I am sure.”
I said I would go with her, because I was really so unhappy about her. She did not seem able to stop worrying about Cordelia, who ever since that disgusting invasion of our house on Christmas Day had been playing the violin all over the house with the air of somebody who is being photographed. We started off at once, and very soon we both forgot Cordelia, it was such an exciting journey. First we went in a train, there was a Lancer sitting opposite us, one of those lovely soldiers who wore scarlet jackets to the waist, very tight trousers with braid down the outer seams, and little round pill-box caps on the side of the head, and were said to be very brave. Then we went up iron steps that clanked under one’s feet to a station right up in the air on a level with the treetops and took a train which ran high above parks in which boys were playing football, a sight which almost made me glad I was a girl and could do really interesting and adventurous things. Then the train ran nearer earth between dark, close-pressed houses with bits built out behind like ladies’ bustles, and thin strips of garden, each as different as people are, some tidy, some riotous, some lovely, some nothing, and at last we came to our station. A subway was damp and echoing and as there was nobody else going through it I was allowed to halloo there for a moment or two, and then we came up beside a grey public house called the King of Prussia. To our right and left stretched a grey road, never getting any better, though one could see quite a long way down it.
“Please,” said Mamma to a passer-by, “could you tell us the way to Knightlily Road? What, this is it? Oh, no. Oh, surely no. Oh, I beg your pardon, I did not mean that you were wrong. I am sure you are right. But it is such a disappointment to us.”
But we were standing outside Number 250, and Constance lived at Number 475. We had to ask which way to turn of a baker’s boy, who was carrying a wicker basket full of smoking and sweet-smelling loaves from a van to a shop, and when he heard the number he pointed to the right, and stood still and followed us with his eyes when we started to go there. “Why did he stare?” asked Mamma. “Am I looking very funny?” I told her that she did not, though of course she always looked queerly thin and nerve-ridden and shabby. She did not believe me, she paused for a minute to straighten her shoulders and cock her hat and assume the character of a smart and undefeated woman. Then we started off, while I realized without emotion that Constance lived among the kind of people which in those days were called “common.” More fortunate children than ourselves might have called them poor, but we knew better, for most of them were no poorer than we were. They were people who live in ugly houses in ugly streets among neighbours who got drunk on Saturday nights, and who did not read books or play music or go to picture galleries and who were unnecessarily rude to one another, and, what was specially degrading, “made faces,” as well as not having baths every day. We did not despise these people, we simply felt that they did not have as amusing a time as we did, and we had understood, almost as soon as we could understand anything, that we had to rely on our own efforts if we were not to find ourselves living on that level, and I was not surprised, therefore, to find that a relative of mine had sunk to that level; I was only anxious to find out whether she found life there supportable. But I noticed that my mother was of a different mind. She was dismayed by the discovery, and though she invented a distraction from the dreariness of the road by noting the patterns of the Nottingham lace curtains in the window, some of which were indeed very pretty, she could not keep her attention on them. At last she exclaimed, “To make Constance live here is like keeping the crown jewels in an old tin trunk.”
By then she was getting impatient, as she easily did at all times, for when we reached the four hundred and seventies we found that the figures on the transoms were so indistinct that we could not be sure which house was Number 475. We halted in front of one which we thought must be right, and immediately there came to me the feeling that we were being watched. On the other side of the road, winter though it was, a couple of window-sashes went up. A woman putting a latchkey into the door of the next house became oddly slow in her movements and twisted herself towards us, dipping her head but surely throwing a sideways glance at us. Suddenly there broke through the overcast sky a shaft of lemon-yellow, year’s-end sunshine. Everything in the street, the cornices and window-frames and porches, the railings, the lamp-posts, stood out bright and sharp and unlikeable, and so too did these furtive signs of vigilance.
“I think this must be it,” said Mamma. “But I wonder if we might ask the lady who is just going into the next house …” She made a step in that direction, and the lady at once brought her face down to her latchkey and the lock, and would have been sheltered from us by the thickness of her front door in another second, had she not been, like us, suddenly frozen by shock. A poker flew straight through the glass of the ground-floor window of the house we were facing and fell at our feet. After a second the front door banged behind this woman. I pushed aside my mother’s hand, which she had clapped over my face a second before the poker came arrowing through the air towards us. We both stared at the window. There was a round hole in one of the panes and no other sign of damage. On the other side of the road several more sashes were thrown up.
“I am going into the house,” said Mamma, like a splendid eagle, “but you must stay outside.”
At all times when my mother and I were together in the presence of anything that looked like danger I had the fantasy that I was a big, tall man who was protecting her. I picked up the poker and said, “I am going in with you.”
She did not argue with me. She often did seem to look to her daughters for protection, which was not unnatural in a very feminine woman who had not only no masculine protection but was threatened by its negative. Moreover she understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them. Also I think she knew that if she and I did not go into that house something terrible would happen to the people in it.
As it was we went to the door and Mamma let the knocker fall on it twice. We then heard a crash inside the house; it was as if a heavy piece of furniture had been thrown over and smashed at the same time. This frightened us much more than the poker coming through the window. My grip tightened on the poker and Mamma drew a deep breath. Shortly afterwards we heard footsteps and the door was opened by a woman who made one think of a Roman statue. She had large, regular features and was pale as stone, and where her fingers gripped her apron it fell into sculptural folds. In a remote, composed voice she spoke my mother’s name, and my mother cried, “Constance,” and they embraced.
Constance drew back with large, regular tears running down her face. “You see,” she said, “I couldn’t ask you to come here.”
“Why, Constance,” said Mamma, “as if I of all people wouldn’t have understood. And you could have come to me.”
“And run the risk of bringing this trouble with me into your house? Oh, you don’t know what it has been like.” Though she spoke urgently, the speed and level of her voice never varied, and I cannot now remember how it was that the effect of urgency was conveyed. “It had been going on for eighteen months, the neighbours talked, I suppose you cannot blame them. So there were reporters and photographers until I nearly went mad, apart from the inconvenience of the thing itself. But come in. Come in. Is this Rose?” She drew us into the hall with her large gentle arm, and gave me an abstracted kiss. As she bowed over me it seemed that her eyes were blank, like the eyes of a statue. “Come in and talk to me,” she said, taking off my mother’s hat, “while I make luncheon for you.”
“Make nothing for us,” said Mamma, whose eyes were wet. “I’ll take the child out for a bun. Oh, if I had only known.”
“Nonsense, I must make a meal for Rosamund and me anyway,” said Constance. “I am so glad that you have come. I didn’t want to make you share this awful thing, perhaps I am wicked to be glad that you are here.”
By now she had led us into the kitchen at the back of the house, and there she and my mother stood together on the coconut mat in front of the range and clung together in a curiously calm yet passionate embrace. I was very much puzzled by their imprudence. Surely the person who had thrown the poker through the window and overturned the wardrobe, or whatever it was, must still be in the house, and presumably at large. I was thinking that it was extraordinary of them to take no precautions for their defense, but to stand there crying and vulnerable, when a movement outside the window caught my eye. A few yards from the house there was a clothesline, on which there were hanging four dishcloths. Three heavy iron saucepans sailed through the air, hit the dishcloths, and fell on the ground. I put down the poker, for I realized the nature of the violence raging through this house.
“Is this what you call a poltergeist?” I asked Mamma. We had read about them in books by that early psychical researcher, Andrew Lang.
“Yes, Rose,” said Mamma, her voice quivering with indignation, “you see I am right, supernatural things are horrible.”
I was a little frightened, but not much; and I tried to remain imperturbable, because I assumed that the supernatural took this coarse form in Constance’s house because she lived among common people, and I had no desire to be impolite by drawing attention to her circumstances.
“If you are old-fashioned enough to eat soup in the middle of the day,” said Constance, “I have still some of the turkey broth, and I was thinking of frying some Christmas pudding, and there are tangerines. Oh, my dear, it has been so dreadful. There is a thing called the Society of Psychical Research—Oh, listen, it’s starting again.”
Out in the pantry a jug fell off a hook on the top shelf and was smashed to pieces on the floor. Small pieces of coal were showered on us through the open door, and out there a tattoo was banged on the side of a flour-bin, louder and louder, so that for the time being it was useless to talk.
When the din had died away my mother breathed indignantly, looking about her with a curled lip, “The lowest of the low.”
“The dregs,” agreed Constance. “But this society, it made everything so much worse. They seemed to think poor Rosamund had something to do with it. They followed her about as if she were a pickpocket, they questioned me about her as if she were a bad child, though it happens just as much when she is not in the house or anywhere near it, and though the wretched things are harder on her than on anyone, they drag the clothes off her bed at night.”
“It is always terribly hard on the children,” sighed Mamma.
“Well, it was hard on us,” said Constance calmly, “and we are here.”
My mother made a tragic gesture. But Constance ignored it and continued. “The trouble is to arrange for her to have friends. You are lucky in having four, they can find company among themselves. But as Rosamund is the only one she must find friends outside and she could have done it if these people had not come bothering us, for she can keep her own secrets, but now everyone knows.” Her eyes moved from my mother to me and were benignant. “But now you have come, Rose, she has at least one friend. Go out and fetch her. She is in the garden.”
“Do I have to go out past that clothesline?” I asked.
She looked out of the window and saw what I meant. A large cooking pot, tied up in newspaper, had sailed through the air, just as the saucepans had done.
“My preserving pan, which I packed away in the attic for the winter!” she said primly, as if it were a housemaid’s fault that it had taken this journey through the air. “Come with me, I will show you the other way out.” She took me into the dining room, which looked as if a lunatic had been laying about him with a hatchet, and opened the french windows, which gave onto a neatly kept strip of garden running down to a railway cutting. At the very end were some hutches, and by these was kneeling a little girl of my sort of age. She was too far away for me to be sure of anything except that she was wearing a blue coat, but the sight of her filled me with a sudden desire to turn round and go straight home. I waited with a heavy heart while Constance called in her clear, hollow, unhurried voice, “Rosamund, Rosamund.”
The little girl slowly raised her head, slowly straightened herself to her feet, and stood quite still, turning her face towards us but making no other sign that she had heard her mother.
“Rosamund, came at once, your cousin Rose is here,” called Constance, and then, as a very loud crash came from the kitchen, went back into the house. I held my ground for a second, then turned about, with the intention of following her back to the kitchen and finding some way of getting Mamma to leave the house. But already Constance had closed the french windows with a kind, inflexible gesture. I began to walk slowly towards Rosamund, who was walking slowly towards me. She moved with a hesitancy so great, particularly when she had to follow a curve in the path, that I wondered whether she were blind.
We met halfway down the garden, where the lawn touched a vegetable patch. As soon as I could see her face my heart began to beat very fast. She was not blind. Indeed what I saw in her face was chiefly that she was seeing me and that she liked the sight. This I knew, not because she gave a friendly greeting, for it took her a moment to recall that this would be expected of her, but because her grey eyes rested on me with a wide, contented gaze, and her mouth, though hardly smiling, had a look of sweetness about it. She was not pretty like Cordelia, nor beautiful like Mary, but she was very handsome. Over her blue coat hung heavy, shining golden curls of the sort that hang to the shoulders of the court ladies in the pictures at Hampton Court, and her skin was white. She did not look at all silly, as grown-ups like children to be. She had a deeply indented upper lip, there was a faint cleft in her chin, and I knew from everything about her that she was in the same case as myself, as every child I liked, she found childhood an embarrassing state. We did not like wearing ridiculous clothes, and being ordered about by people whom we often recognized as stupid and horrid, and we could not earn our own livings or, because of our ignorance, draw fully on our own powers. But Rosamund bore her dissatisfaction mildly. There was a golden heaviness about her face, to look on it was like watching honey drop slowly from a spoon.
As we met I said, “I am your Cousin Rose,” and she said, “You’re one of the two who play the piano, aren’t you? I’m afraid I can’t do anything well. Except play chess.”
“Play chess? But isn’t that very difficult?” I asked. Papa played chess.
“No. I will teach you how to play if you like,” said Rosamund.
“No, no,” I said hastily. “Thank you very much, but I don’t like games. They make me feel funny.” In fact, they were a nightmare to me. I hated losing, but I could never win, because I felt an irresistible impulsion to throw the game away just as it came to its end, and then if I burst into tears at my odd folly grown-ups thought I was not being sporting.
Rosamund did not mind a bit. “Would you like to see my rabbits? I’ve got six. Three of them are brown and three grey. They’re very tame.”
She turned about and we walked towards the end of the garden, and presently she took a grey rabbit out of its hutch and put it in my arms, and while I realized its perfections, particularly the way it wiggled its nose, she said, “Bert Nichols gave me this and the doe. They’re the best of my rabbits. Bert was very nice. He was the son of our charwoman Mrs. Nichols, but she got frightened when a coal-scuttle chased her, and she wouldn’t come any more. You can’t blame her. But it’s horrid because we never see them any more.”
“Isn’t there any way you can see him?” I asked sympathetically. There was nothing we three children disliked more about our nomadic life than the way that people we had learned to like passed out of our knowledge.
“Well, he is a porter at Clapham Junction, and Mamma says she will take me there one day,” said Rosamund, “but of course we don’t know when he is on duty.” She turned her head very slowly as I turned mine very quickly because there had come from the house behind us a noise like a weakly and malicious factory hooter. We were in time to see the sashes of every window fly up and every pair of curtains flute into folds, as if a hand were wrenching them from their rods, then billow through the air down to the garden below. I wondered with the financial nervousness of a child bred in poverty whether they were insured.
Rosamund said, “I’m afraid we’ll have to put Sir Thomas Lipton back in the hutch. I must go and help Mamma start the copper. Oh, dear, it will have to be such a big wash. And of course nobody comes in to help us now.”
“You haven’t anybody?” I said, aghast. People of our sort had to be desperately poor to keep no servants in those days, and at home we thought of housework as something dangerous, like handling acids in a laboratory, because it spoiled our hands for piano-playing.
“Well, we never had anybody but a charwoman, this Mrs. Nichols,” said Rosamund. “Papa does not like us to spend much money. And since she went away we have had other people but they always get frightened, none of them stays.”
We were close to the house now, and we had come to a curtain lying right across the path. Rosamund bent to pick it up and I hastened to help her. I had thought that I was excited and not frightened, but I knew better when I felt the drag on the farthest corner. Surely I felt that. I know the hair stirred on my scalp, and surely Rosamund flicked the curtain from the grip of the invisible hand, and we stood face to face and folded it. “My Mamma will be very glad that your Mamma has come,” she said as our fingers met.
“Mine is always talking about yours,” I said.
“They met when they were about as old as we are,” said Rosamund. Her eyes met mine over the top of the curtain and then she turned aside, folding the curtain to a size easy to carry. Now I could be sure that she liked me, that she would always like me, as I was sure that Mamma and Mary and Richard Quin liked me and would always like me. I hoped that Papa liked me in this way too, but one could not be sure. I choked with gratitude. I began to make a promise to myself that I would always like Rosamund, but my head began to hurt. Thinking of her future I saw a summer sky ridden by shining clouds, space rising on space above them till the blue faded brightly into pure light. All the same I could not bear to let my mind dwell on it. I found myself content to stay in the present, although a pack of demons were skylarking within a couple of yards of me.
“There’s one thing,” said Rosamund, coming to a halt. “They never hurt us. They just break things and spoil things, so that we have to spend our lives mending and washing.” Thus she managed to say “Don’t be afraid,” without making it plain that she had noticed I was afraid, as for the last few moments, finding I had a mob of spectral monsters between my Mamma and me, I certainly had been, though not to the degree that an adult would have been. That was Rosamund’s way, I was to find.
So we went in by the back door, and before we reached the kitchen heard the din that possessed it. Mamma and Constance were sitting at the table, their faces contorted as by neuralgic pain, while a flour-dredger, a tin tray, and a spiky cloud of kitchen cutlery were thrown into the room through the other door, forks striking spoons, knives clashing on knives. But as soon as Rosamund and I entered the kitchen all this possessed ironmongery suddenly became quiet. Each fork, each spoon, each knife, the flour-dredger and the tray, wavered slowly downwards and softly took the ground, after the meditative fashion of falling leaves. There they lay and stirred no more, nor were ever to stir again in all the known history of that house. To drive out the evil presence it had been needed simply that we four should be in a room together, nothing more.
We let the silence settle. Then Constance said, “Rosamund, go and look out into the garden.”
At the curtainless window Rosamund said, “There is not a sign of anything.”
“Wait,” said Constance, “we will wait five minutes.” We all looked at the big kitchen clock.
Before the time was up Rosamund broke out, “Mamma, do you suppose we won’t have to go on mending things and knowing that they will be broken again at once, and washing what’s made dirty as soon as it’s clean?”
“I do not mind anything,” said Constance, “if only they stop pulling the bedclothes off you at night.”
“But, Mamma, it has done me no harm,” said Rosamund. “I am sure I feel quite well on it.”
“I have been a foolish woman,” said Constance, turning to my mother. “I should have asked you here long ago, but I was ashamed, I knew you would never have let things get so out of hand—”
“As if one could help this sort of thing,” Mamma said warmly.
“And I lost my confidence,” Constance went on. “I was afraid it might work either way if you came here.”
“Well, so it might,” admitted Mamma, “and of course you didn’t want the whole place burned down.”
“Yes, but I should have known it wouldn’t work that way, not with you,” persisted Constance.
“Why should you think that a house would not go up in flames because I was in it?” asked my mother, so bitterly that I looked through her face at our home in Lovegrove Place and saw its blackened ruins. “But it hasn’t, has it?” I asked, aghast.
There was a moment of silence which Rosamund broke by pointing at the clock and crying, “Time’s up. Time’s up,” and Constance told us that not for three weeks had there been five minutes’ peace and since my mother had caused this peace she knew it would last forever. “Listen to it,” she said, piously clasping her hands. And we all listened to the silence.
“We must be the only people in London listening to nothing,” said Rosamund, and we all laughed and began to get our meal ready.
We ate in the kitchen, because all the other rooms were even more disordered. It was a very good meal, for all the Christmas things were still about. While I was eating my turkey soup I noticed that a packet of table salt on the mantelpiece had been overturned and was soberly voiding its contents in a thin white trickle which spread out into a fine spray as it reached the hearthstone below. Both Rosamund and I exclaimed in wonder, but without apprehension, for there was nothing violent or malicious about the staid little flow, but though our mothers looked sharply in the direction of my pointing finger, they looked away again at once. Rosamund and I thought they had not seen the salt and tried to direct their attention to it, but they kept their eyes on the tablecloth and asked us questions about our schools. It may be that they knew more than we did, that in setting the salt to pour out quietly on the hearthstone the defeated presences had performed a rite which was sad for them, and that, therefore, it was ungenerous for us, the victors, to spy on them. I can never be sure.
When we rounded off the meal with some almonds and raisins and marzipan our mothers sat down by the fire to drink tea, and Rosamund and I went off by ourselves. First we gathered up the curtains in the garden, and then I helped Rosamund to drag a tin bath into the middle of the scullery and fill it with hot soapy water, and we dropped into it as many of the curtains as it would hold. The coal-dust and greasy earth rode off them in specks and smears like ants and the trail of snails, and that set Rosamund and me wondering why God had made insects. After she had left them all to soak, and had put some broken cutlery and kitchen utensils in a packet for the knife-grinder to take away to mend, we wandered about the house. It was the ugliest house I had ever visited. The walls just met the ceiling, at mean intervals. But there was lovely furniture from Scotland, made of mahogany that was really red, red as some cows are. There were wardrobes so big that we could both hide in them, dressing-tables with mirrors so large that they doubled the whole room, heavy cupboards in which very clean things lay strewn with lavender bags. But all the clean things lay awry; the wardrobes had chalk figures scrawled on them; a cake of wet soap lay on a dressing-table and its spume had drawn a cross within an O on the mirror; and underfoot there was often a hard frost of powdered glass or a fall of whittled wood.
“Tomorrow,” said Rosamund, “we will clear up, and when we have finished, it will stay cleared up, and it will be because you and your Mamma came.”
“But they may come back,” I said.
“No, no,” said Rosamund, peering through the soap O on the mirror, as through a window, “they have gone too far now for them ever to come back.” She opened a drawer and took a handkerchief with a fine needle sticking into it and, sighing with contentment, hemstitched for an inch or two, then laid it down, and said, “Let’s go into the garden and give the rabbits some cabbage leaves.”
Each helped the other into her coat. Rosamund said, “You have a pretty coat,” and I told her that it had been Cordelia’s and that as I was shorter than both Cordelia and Mary I never had anything new. She said, “I always have to have everything new, being the only one, but it’s lonely. All the same, Mamma and I have nice times. We bought this coat at Whiteley’s. We spent hours in the shop. There is a menagerie, and you can have tea there, and they give you meringues.” Her talk was colourless as water, she never said anything funny. But it was as pleasant to listen to her as to lean over a bridge and watch a clear stream running by.
I saw what she meant when she said that the rabbits Bert had given her were much the best. She said it was quite natural, as Bert had taken many prizes at shows, rabbits were his great interest, and after that the accordion. Mrs. Nichols had told Rosamund that she thought it a pity he was so wrapped up in them, she believed it was the reason he had not married, and neither the rabbits nor the accordion would give her grandchildren.
A train puffed through the cutting; we looked at it over the ears of the rabbits in our arms. Two boys hanging out of a carriage window waved at us but we took no notice, though we would have waved back if they had been girls.
“I make up animals,” said Rosamund. “I don’t suppose you do. I do it because these rabbits can’t talk, and I get lonely. But you have a brother and two sisters.”
I said that all the same we made up animals. Papa had told us about three little dogs Grand-Aunt Willoughby had had, a black-faced mushroom-coloured pug with asthma, a toy spaniel, and a lapdog of a kind Papa could not identify, which looked just like a fawn fur necklet. We were always pretending they were lying about on the chairs, or jumping up on the beds, or out in the garden, though they were all so pampered that you couldn’t even pretend that they would be out in the fresh air except on the finest days. Richard Quin was very fond of them, and they were really quite nice old things, considering how spoiled they had been.
I asked what animals she had made up, and she said, “The most important one is a hare. He has always been here. He was here before they made the railway, he stayed on when they built these houses all round him. He isn’t very clever, you see. But he is very nice, I am really fonder of him than I am of the mice or the bear, and he is beautiful, I have his picture in a book, I must show it to you.”
We could not stay out long, it was so cold. On the way back along the path Rosamund stopped and gathered me some sprigs of mint and sage. Her Mamma had bought the plants at the greengrocers and she herself had planted them. They had done well, they were still growing, the winter had not killed them. I said, “We are not good at gardening. Papa and Mamma do not know anything about it, and sometimes we have tried to put in seeds, but nothing happened.”
She was puzzled. “Is there anything to know about gardening? Mamma and I put plants in, and they come up. We had some nice plants here, very nice roses, until those things tore them up.”
Indoors she showed me her dolls. She was at the same stage that we were, she was too old to play with dolls but she still liked having them about. Hers were not very pretty, though they were nicely dressed, and their names were not very interesting, but they all had pleasant characters. The things in the house had injured every one of them, but they had all been mended. There were a lady and her husband who lived near Clapham Common and were dolls’ doctors, Rosamund said. They had got interested in the case and had charged almost nothing for the repairs. Then Constance called us because it was teatime. It was good that she was Scottish, it meant that she gave us a good tea. Our family was still shocked by the nullity of Lovegrove bakeries compared to what we had become accustomed to in Edinburgh. Constance gave us hot oatmeal scones, which we spread with butter and golden syrup, and she had some homemade Scotch bun, the rich cake in a pastry case which is known as “black death.”
While we were still eating I heard noises which made me frightened in case the horrible things had come back. There was a slam which seemed to come from the front door, and someone wiped his feet on the mat, but with an insane amount of noise. There were two thuds, like an exaggeration of the sound people make when they take off their shoes and drop them on the floor; all these noises were not merely the sounds made by a person performing these actions; they were that and something more. They were meant to be heard and to distress. I looked at Rosamund with anxious eyes, and she answered, “It is Papa.” She did not show any surprise, or any distress, like mine, or any pleasure. Heavy steps clumped along the passage towards us, and finally the door was thrown open and a man put his head round the door. Rosamund did not look up at him. I was startled by the suspicion that though she was so calm a child she might have real trouble to bear. I did not consider the invasion of her home by demons to fall under the heading of real trouble, particularly now that it seemed to have been repelled. Real troubles were things like Cordelia’s being so cross and insisting on playing the violin when she could not, and Papa’s selling Aunt Clara’s furniture when Mamma wanted to keep it.
I at once saw that Rosamund’s papa was real trouble. His head, so long as he kept it sticking round the door, was very nice. His face was long and fair, and his temples were delicately indented; his nostrils were thin as paper and his lips were pursed as if he were keeping a secret. If there had been a fourth real poet at the time of Byron and Shelley and Keats, he might have looked like that. But as soon as he saw who was in the kitchen and brought his body round the doorpost he changed. He canted his head on one side and surveyed us with a wide-eyed leer, while his mouth gaped open, the lips drawn close to his teeth and lifted at the corners, as if he would have said something impudent and amusing but was prevented by a flow of saliva.
He drawled, “Well, well, who have we here?” and shook hands with Mamma, but stared at me without shaking hands when she told him which one of her three daughters I was. Children are used to rudeness from grownups, but this man was ruder than most. His Scottish accent was horrid, not like Mamma’s or Constance’s, but like the Edinburgh keelies you heard hawking at one another when you went down the Canongate to Holyrood. But Scottish people, if they were horrid, did do that. It was part of a determination to be funny though they could not think of anything really funny to say, and that was part of a determination to be better than other people, though they were not. They were educated, nearly everybody is in Scotland, it is not like England, but to get the better of other educated people they pretended to be simpletons who were somehow much cleverer than educated people and were laughing at them all the time. I could hardly sit in my chair, I hated Cousin Jock so much. I did not like to think that he was related to Mamma and was married to Constance and was Rosamund’s papa. I also did not like to think that he was related to me. But of course it was worse for Rosamund. I saw that there were great advantages about our Papa, although of course there were disadvantages.
Constance let Cousin Jock get out something he wanted to say, which was not serious but not funny either, about being sorry that he had changed into carpet slippers in the lobby, but that anyway he was no ladies’ man, and we must forgive him, though no doubt we were used to more refined ways in the la-di-da district of Lovegrove. Then she told him that the things were gone, there had been no sign of them for the last six hours, and she thought we had done it. At first he said he thought she was wrong, he was certain he had heard something go bump upstairs in one of the bedrooms as he came in; when Constance and Rosamund made him listen he had to admit that the house was quiet and he thanked us and said that he had always known that Mamma was a wonderful character. But I could see that really he was sorry the things had gone. He was on their side. You could tell that because the noises he made just coming into the house and changing his outdoor shoes were the same sort of noises that they would have made if they had been human and had not special advantages in being horrible.
After that it was only a question of how soon we could get home. We had to wait while he had tea. He chose himself an oatmeal scone and cut himself a slice of Scotch bun as if he were doing something sly and clever, and when he wanted more tea he passed his cup to Constance with the remark that he didna expect there was any mair tea for a puir man in this housefu’ o’ women. There was no possible reason why he should talk like that. Nobody else in the family talked like that. In fact very few Scottish people talked like that. I could not think of ever having heard anyone speak quite so broadly before except a disgusting man in kilts we had seen in a pantomime, who went round the stage on a scooter, making skirling noises and smoothing his kilts down when they blew up as if he were ashamed, and was much the worst thing in the show. You could not think how Constance, who was so still and dignified, could have married Cousin Jock. You could not think how Rosamund, whom you could not imagine doing anything that people would want to laugh at, could be his daughter. You could see at once why my Papa and Mamma had married, they had the same eagle look about them, and my trouble was that people must always be surprised because I had so little in me, considering I was their daughter. Mamma was being very clever about Cousin Jock, pretending to be amused by his jokes, but not going over to his side. I was able to sit quiet because it occurred to me that he might die soon and leave Rosamund free, and then Constance and she could come and live near us.
When we had finished he pushed his cup and saucer right into the middle of the table, wiped his mouth, slowly and much more than you would need to unless you were an animal and had eaten something on the floor, and said to Mamma, “Now we’ve satisfied the inner man, may I ask if ye’ve kept up with your pianoforty playing?” Mamma said that, though of course she had had to give up practising now that she had all the children, she still played a little. “Awa’ into the next room,” he said, “and ye’ll have the preevilege of making music with your Cousin Jock, who’s thrown awa’ his immortal heritage and gone into the marts of trade.”
We all went into the drawing room, which was in the front of the house, and I felt very sorry for Rosamund, because I felt sure that her father would not be able to play. The piano was an upright Broadwood, and though the candle brackets on it had been twisted till they hung upside down and the panels had been scratched, the keyboard and strings and hammers seemed to have suffered no damage. I found this out by running my hand over the treble keys, and Cousin Jock took my wrist and put my arm down by my side. It was a gentle movement yet extremely brutal. It told me that I had no rights, that I was a child, and children are slaves, and that I was a fool besides; I knew that I hated him and would hate him all my life. I also knew that he had wanted me to hate him, and had cleverly made it worse for me by seeing to it that I could never feel easy in hating him, because he had been so rude to me that I must always suspect my hatred of springing from hurt vanity.
I backed away from him into a corner and leaned against the wall, and Rosamund joined me. We could not sit down; there was not an undamaged chair in the room except the music stool. Cousin Jock fumbled among the music in a Canterbury. None of the sheets were torn. The things that had been driven out had evidently respected music. My mother stood watching him with an air of reserve quite unlike her. It would have been hard for a stranger to tell whether she liked him or not. With exaggerated uncouthness he poked a sheet of music at her, saying, “Ye ken this weel. The auld arrangements. Mose-are’s Flute Concerto in G major, or ate ye so grand these days that ye maun call him Mozart?”
“I know it well,” Mamma answered, in quite an English accent. She often talked Scots to us at home, but she would not have it used as a silly joke. “And I’ve never unlearned to call him Mozart, as you apparently have since we were both young.” She sat down at the piano and softly tried over the music, while he took his flute out of its case and put it together, with ugly movements, full of mean conceit in technique, which made the instrument seem as if it were something horrid from a chemist’s shop, like the thing they would use to give one an enema when one was ill. I looked down at the points of my boots and waited hungrily for the music to begin, so that I could enjoy despising him. But I was to have no such pleasure, only a new fear.
I had thought that Cousin Jock would play like Cordelia, and in a sense I was right. Both he and she removed all effort from music. It did not seem hard any more. But his playing was as good as hers was bad. It was in a sense as good as any playing I have ever heard before or since, on any instrument, indeed it was better, for reasons I was to spend all my later life in learning to understand. I, and any other player, think how we should play a phrase, and take a vow that we shall play it in a certain way, but never succeed in keeping our vow. Our fingers are not clever enough to carry out the orders issued by our wills; also our wills themselves, when it comes to the point, flinch from even so much of perfection as they can conceive. But Cousin Jock played the music as he had heard it in his mind. His fingers had all the skill which could conceivably be demanded by any music written for the flute, and his will was not disconcerted by the idea of perfection. So the clean line of melody drew a delightful design on the silence, which faded and was replaced by another which was different yet belonged to the same order of delight as the first, and the listening mind at once clung to the phrase it had first heard, yet was refreshed by change.
But a long sigh shook the tall body of Rosamund, leaning against the wall beside me. Constance, who had seated herself on the side of an armchair that had its back torn out, was grave as an angel on a tomb. I thought this strange, for surely there could be no greater joy than seeing one of one’s own family doing something really well. But as I listened it came to me that Cousin Jock was not playing really well at all. I think I understand now the dissatisfaction that was then only a strong but vague repulsion. When Mamma played well she was making clear something which the composer had found out and which nobody had known before him. It might even be that by the emphasis she placed on the different parts of his discovery she could add something to it of which nobody, not even the composer, had before been conscious. In her playing there was a gospel and an evangelist who preached it, and that implied a church which worshipped a God not yet fully revealed but in the course of revelation. But when Cousin Jock played he created about him a world in which all was known, and in which art was not a discovery but a decoration. All was then trivial, and there was no meaning in art or in life. His playing was perfect yet it was a part of the same destruction that had defaced the room where we sat. I hated it, and Rosamund put out her hand and stroked my skirt.
At the end Mamma rose and closed the piano and said, “Well, Jock, you certainly play better than you did when you were a young man. Far better,” she added with desperate justice.
“I’m no sae bad,” he said, putting his flute away. It had been obvious from the way she rose from the piano that she was not going to play for him again; and I think he had known that she would not. “But I’m no one to pay compliments for the sake of paying compliments, and I’ll no say the same of you. I wouldna say ye hadna slipped a wheen.”
A tremor ran through Mamma’s body. “I have the four of them,” she said, “and there is a great deal to do.”
“Ay, it’s bound to tell,” said Cousin Jock. “No use shutting the eyes on hard facts, it’s bound to tell.”
My mother looked round the defaced room and its smashed furniture, as if she were thinking that she and it were wrecked alike. When her eyes fell on Rosamund they moved no farther, and she said, smiling, “Your girl is tall.”
“So she is,” agreed Constance placidly, her hands folded in front of her over her spreading skirts.
“Ay, a great maypole,” grumbled Cousin Jock, going on packing up his flute. But he could not hurt us any more when we were all looking at Rosamund. Her shining golden curls, her solid white flesh that was full over her eyebrows and deeply cleft between her mouth and chin, her straight body, which even when she was at rest suggested the idea of leisurely movement, made us forget the horrid perfection of her father’s flute-playing and the cruelty of his attempt to hurt Mamma. She did not mind us all staring at her, and made it easy for us by smiling vaguely, as if she had gone away in her own thoughts. I noticed that Mamma was looking at her as I had never seen her look at anybody except us children, and it was strange, I was not angry, though usually I was very jealous of Mamma’s affection.
“She must come over and play with the children,” said Mamma.
“How’s your husband?” asked Cousin Jock. “Will he keep this job?”
I hated the room with the smears on the walls, the twisted candlesticks on the piano, the stinted gaslight, and Cousin Jock. Papa and Mamma and my sisters and my brother and I, Constance, and Rosamund were all living in a more dangerous way than the children I knew at school and their fathers and mothers and teachers; and in this house somebody, and I supposed it was Cousin Jock, was trying to push us over the edge of the abyss to which we clung. I said violently, “Can’t Rosamund come back with us tonight?”
Rosamund slowly shook her head, smiling slightly.
“We’d love to take her,” said Mamma.
“Would you like to go?” asked Constance. “Say if you would like it.”
Again Rosamund shook her head. Stammering, she thanked Mamma and said that she would come for the whole day sometime soon, but not that night.
After that Mamma and I went and got our hats and coats, and the others dressed too, to take us to the station. Cousin Jock said that we had come the wrong way, and he would send us off from another station. When we got out into the dark street we all halted and stood looking at the house and listening. There was no sound. Cousin Jock turned round and spoke rudely to a child who was bowling a hoop along the pavement, telling it to be quiet, though it was really not making much noise. He grumbled, “Well, I expect that the morn will find them all the worse.”
“No,” said Constance in her prim, hollow voice.
“What gars ye say that?” he asked crossly.
“I can feel that they have gone for good,” she answered with composure. “There is a difference between feeling that a tooth has stopped aching and that it has been taken out.”
The three grown-ups moved ahead, and we children followed. “Are you sure they’ve gone?” I asked Rosamund. She answered, stammering a little and looking on the ground, “Oh yes; quite far away. Besides, there was—” I knew we were both thinking of the stream of salt dripping from the kitchen mantelpiece and falling in a spray on the hearthstone. We walked through the darkness in silence for some minutes and then I said, “I’ll never tell.”
She murmured, “It’s better not,” still looking down.
We slackened our pace to be alone with our secrets, our sense of mystery and power, until the three in front turned round and called on us to hurry. As we obeyed, Rosamund said, “I never showed you the picture of my hare.”
I said, “I’ll see it another time.”
“I would have liked you to see him,” said Rosamund. “I told you how lovely he was, but I don’t believe I told you how really beautiful he is.”
“Oh, I know how you feel,” I said. “One does get so fond of made-up animals. But I quite understand he’s beautiful.”
The grown-ups called to us again, for they had reached the corner of a high street, where there were lighted shops and crowds, and they were always frightened of us children’s being in crowds, though actually nobody ever took any notice of us.
But grown-ups had all the power and we had to follow on our parents’ heels more quickly than we liked past shops lit by naphtha flares, a form of street-lighting much more exciting than anything that has superseded it. Loose red and yellow flames burned on suspended plates, open to the wind, which sometimes blew them to a bunch of streaming ribbons and jerked all the shadows askew. “I love these lights,” said Rosamund. “Do you like fireworks?”
“They are the loveliest things in the world,” I said.
“I once heard, or I read it somewhere in a book,” she went on dreamily, “that sometimes people light bonfires on the top of mountains, I should like that too.”
“I’ve heard about that too, I can’t think where,” I said, “but it must be gorgeous. We’ll probably see it sometime. We’re lucky, don’t you think? We know more than the other girls at school. We have mothers that are wonderful. I can see your mother is like mine, better than anyone else’s. And we have a great advantage over the other girls at school, we know all sorts of things they don’t. They don’t have demons in the house, and so long as you can get rid of them it gives you a great advantage to know there are such things. I think we’ll always be lucky. Don’t you? Don’t you?”
We came to a stop to watch some very fine flares outside a butcher’s shop, where a big red-faced man in a blue smock was shouting out long things about meat, as if he were making a speech in a historical play by Shakespeare, “Attend me, lords, the proud insulting queen, with Clifford and the haughty Northumberland and of their feather many more proud birds, have wrought the easy melting kind like wax.” As we watched, my mind clung onto what it was saying, and I persisted, “Don’t you think we’re lucky?” The lights and shadows wavered on her face without disturbing her look of being soft but immovable. Then as I repeated my question again a spasm convulsed her face. I realized that she could not answer, that her inability was giving her acute physical pain. I stood in an agony of sympathy, and presently she said, “I stammer. Didn’t you know? I sometimes stammer. You must forgive me. It is just a way of being stupid.”
“Oh, no, it isn’t,” I said. “One of the cleverest girls at school with us in Edinburgh stammered. But I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
We found ourselves waiting with our parents on the curb till the traffic gave us a chance to cross. A string of tall scarlet trams loaded with light jerked past, making a nice rhythmic noise on the points. A coster and his family drove by in a cart drawn by two ash-coloured donkeys, he and his boys dressed in whitish corduroys sewn all over with pearl buttons, the women wearing huge hats trimmed with green and red and blue ostrich feathers, all made mysterious, like what you would think the people in the masque at the end of The Tempest would be, by the night and the cross-hatchings of light and the street-lamps. A hansom jingled by, with a man wearing a top hat all askew and a lady swathed in a feather boa behind its wooden apron, and the grown-ups all exclaimed at the cost of taking such a vehicle down from the West End. At this talk of money I reflected on the financial position of Rosamund’s family and my own, and felt a moment of terror. It seemed not nearly impossible enough that an unlucky happening would send us to the workhouse. But of course it would be all right when I was grown up, I would be rich, I would be able to take hansoms anywhere. The traffic dwindled and we all ran across the cobbled road and walked beside a patch of common, along a row of bright stalls where people were selling things to eat, and then we two lagged again.
“This coffee smells nearly like coffee at home, but not quite,” I said.
“Yes, it’s a little like something burned in the garden,” said Rosamund.
We made these remarks with great distinctness, having no malice, just in front of the man who kept the coffee stall, and when he looked angrily at us we thought placidly and critically that he was one of the many grown-ups who were cross by nature, and strolled on to the next stall.
“Could you eat jellied eels?” I asked.
Hesitantly she answered, “If I were dared.”
“Do they dare much at your school?” I asked. “They do at ours, and I think it’s so silly.”
“They dare all the time,” she said wearily, “and such stupid little things.”
“They don’t like us at our school,” I said. “Do they like you at yours?”
“No,” she answered.
We walked on in silence for a minute and I felt a desire to be honest about this. “It’s awful, I think they’re horrid and silly, but I wish they liked me.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I don’t think there’s anything I should rather have than that they should like me,” and she spoke with such a quiet, candid admission of pain that I felt no longer lonely in my exclusion, and was certain that if she shared it it could not be a shame to me. Just when I got back my voice we passed a stall where they were selling roast chestnuts, and she said, “That is the nicest smell of all.”
“When we have our hair washed,” I said, “we all sit round the fire in our dressing-gowns and we roast chestnuts in a wire thing among the coals and eat them and drink milk.”
“Mamma and I do that, too,” she said. “I think your Mamma and mine did it together when they were little.”
“And I’ll tell you one thing,” I said, “I like keeping a chestnut in my mouth and then taking a drink of milk. But Mamma says it’s a horrid trick.”
“So does my Mamma,” said Rosamund.
“I can’t think why,” I complained. “People would have to look hard at you before they could see that you were doing it, so hard that they’d be in the wrong because they were being rude, and anyway there’s nobody there but us.”
“And sucking chocolate, that’s another thing,” said Rosamund. “Mamma says you must eat it, not suck it, and surely nobody could see that without staring either.”
“Yet they let you cut your bread and butter into fingers and dip it in your egg,” I said, “and I would have thought that if the other things were wrong that was too.”
“Yes,” said Rosamund, “those are the things I call really queer.”
Now we had come to one of those South London stations which have taken to the air. The beautiful rubies and emeralds of the signals shone up in the dark sky, above the sloping slate roofs of the houses, which in the night shone like water. The platforms and the waiting rooms were a vague pavilion between these tilted slate ponds and the stars. We thought it so lovely that we stood stock still in a dream, and the grown-ups had to call us again. “Don’t you like the night far better than the day?” I asked Rosamund, as we ran up the steep wooden staircase.
“Yes,” she answered, “it is more—” Her mouth again became a struggling hole as her stammer seized her. She had not found her voice by the time the handsome train came in, spitting fire from its engine, and Mamma and I got into one of its golden compartments. But it did not matter that my conversation with Rosamund was not finished, for I would see her again and again, we would go through life together, she would never go over to the side of the enemy. I waved to her through the shut glass of the window with a fervour which I at once regretted, lest she should have thought me silly. But she took a step nearer the train when she waved to me, as if she mistrusted the hesitant motion of her hand, the blind softness of her smile, to tell me how little silly she thought me. The train puffed off, then stopped before it got out of the station, and backed, so that Mamma and I saw the three of them again, going along the platform to the exit. Cousin Jock was looking canny in his horrid Scots comedian way; what on earth was there for him to look canny about on a railway platform in the dark? But he was not putting on ‘that expression very hard, because he did not know there was anybody looking at him very closely. You could pierce through it and see how easily he did things, how easily he played the flute, with the ease of a snake gliding, casting its skin. Constance was stately beside him, taking no notice of him, though not looking cross with him; it was as if they had been told to walk side by side in a procession, and that was all she knew of him. Rosamund was a pace behind them, making no sign, yet eloquent, like a tree before its leaves have come out.
Mamma and I were alone in the carriage. Mamma took off her shoe to see what had been hurting her all day. We had to buy very cheap boots and shoes and they were always going wrong one way or another. “There must be a nail coming through,” she muttered. “Oh, it was good to have Constance back. We’ve had a grand day, have we not, my wee lamb?”
“Yes,” I said, “and I do like Cousin Constance and Cousin Rosamund.”
“It is funny that I called you Rose and she called her Rosamund,” Mamma said, feeling inside the shoe. “It was chance, we were far away from each other at the time.”
“But those horrible things,” I said, “that were there when we first got there.”
“I doubt the heel of a hammer will take out that nail,” she mourned. “If it doesn’t I’ll have to send it to the cobbler, and my other good pair is there already. Yes, they were horrible things.”
“I was frightened at first,” I said. Thinking of the day, I felt quite frightened.
“Yes, yes,” she said. Being very brave, she sometimes failed in tenderness to us when fear was our trouble.
I felt lost for a moment, then, remembering something I had read in a book, I said, “Oughtn’t we to have said the Lord’s Prayer?”
She sighed. “It’s not so easy as all that. How should it be?” And put her shoe on again, murmuring, “Poor Constance, poor Constance.”
Our train slowed down at a station. Somebody got out of another carriage playing a mouth-organ, and as he went farther away the sound became sad, and saddened the silence that followed. The guard’s whistle sounded sad too. I thought of Constance and Rosamund going back to their dark and ravaged house with that fair, smooth, baldish man, and I could not stand it, I bounced on my seat with anger. I asked furiously, “Why did Cousin Constance marry Cousin Jock?”
My mother repeated the question, and, with a thinness of voice which meant that she was very tired, gave me an answer to which I listened attentively, for I had noticed that when she spoke so she was not at all like a grown-up talking to a child, and was therefore telling the truth. “I doubt if anybody else wanted her,” she said. There was no belittlement in her tone. She was making a statement of fact, and it perplexed me.
“But wasn’t she nice-looking when she was young?” I asked. “She looks as if she must have been.”
“Oh, yes, Constance was very handsome,” said Mamma, glowing generously, “like a Roman woman, you could imagine her driving a chariot.”
“But then,” I asked, “didn’t lots of men want to marry her?” I was alarmed. Up till then I had thought it was all quite simple. If you were nice-looking men wanted to marry you, and if you were not you saw it for yourself in the mirror and decided to do something else.
“No,” said Mamma, “the men were afraid of her.” She took the pinching shoe off again and picked away at the nail inside, her nose looking very thin and sharp. “Indeed,” she added, “they were afraid of me, too.”
I was appalled. I had known that many people were unfriendly to my mother when they first met her because she was so thin and wild-looking and badly dressed, and I had seen that it hurt her. She must have been far more hurt if they had disliked her when they had no cause, before she was ill and unhappy and poor. But at any rate she had married Papa and not Cousin Jock. “Why,” I said, “did Cousin Constance have to marry at all, if she couldn’t get anybody better than Cousin Jock?”
“Why,” said my mother, her voice thin as a wisp of mist, “how could she have got Rosamund if she hadn’t married someone?” Her eyelids dropped, she fell into a doze. I looked out of the train at the dark rows of houses striped vertically with the lives of families, showing yellow through the windows, and was interested at my new knowledge of what a family was. It was as if Mamma, my Mamma, or Rosamund’s Mamma, or anybody’s Mamma, were in a place like the Zoo or Kew Gardens, and were waiting for her little girl and finally saw her standing outside the entrance, on the other side of the gate, and said to the attendant in charge of the gate, “My little girl is outside, would you mind if I went outside and fetched her in?” She would have to be polite to the attendant who could let her through the gate, no matter what he might be like.