WHEN WE WERE very small, out in South Africa, Papa and Mamma had been walking with us in a garden on a cold afternoon just before Midsummer’s Day, and Papa had told us to lay our hands on the trunk of a tree. He said that we would feel nothing but wood. But if we did it again, a week later, there would lie under our hands wood and something more, for now was the time when the world was swinging over from winter to summer, and it was suspended between life and death. We wondered, but obediently laid our hands on the tree-trunk and were of the opinion that it felt dead, while Mamma exclaimed, telling us that her own Papa and Mamma had made her do the same thing, and she had thought it a rite peculiar to her family, and here was Papa practising it also. A week later we laid our hands on the tree-trunk again and were of the opinion that it felt alive, and cried out at the miracle, and Mamma said we would find it easier to understand if we went home to England, where it happened at Christmastime. So we had. We saw the week between Christmas and New Year as a time of suspense, when the world made up its mind whether to change from dying to living and thus fall in with Christ’s promises, or to stand out and go its own way and spoil everything. In the night, in our bedroom, we had wondered whether there was anything to prevent the world from deciding that it would not wake up and have a spring, and then everybody would get colder and colder, and the days would go on getting shorter and shorter, and in the end there would be only darkness. We asked Papa and Mamma about this, and Papa said, “Well, it might happen, but not in your time.”
“But we don’t want it to happen at all,” said Cordelia.
“Do not frighten the children,” said Mamma. “Spring has always come, so we can take it that it will always come.”
“What an argument for a fellow-countrywoman of David Hume,” said Papa. “Nobody has ever upset his contention that though certain causes produce a certain effect on one occasion, this gives no logical proof that they are bound to produce it on another. We may yet see universal and eternal night.” He gave one of his grating laughs. “But I do not think you children need worry about it.” Yet we worried because we obscurely felt that he felt a certain delight in contemplating a never-ending winter, chill and darkness never to be dispelled. It did not matter that Mamma told us then, and often later, that day and spring were bound to come, for we sometimes suspected that he had the greater power.
So we thought of ourselves during this week between Christmas and New Year as a besieged army waiting to be relieved. This time the period had been broken into by the visit Mamma and I had paid to Constance and Rosamund. To me it was as if we two had gone on a foray out into enemy country and brought home some of our lost forces. I did not tell any of the others about the poltergeist, though Mamma had not forbidden me to do so. Cordelia would have hated it, she would have got cross, and scolded me for telling a story which was not true. Mary would have been indifferent to the horrors of the supernatural assault in a way which would have galled me in my desire to win admiration for Rosamund. Richard Quin was of course too little to understand. But I told them all how wonderful Rosamund was.
I must have talked about her incessantly, for I talked about her to myself when I could find no other listeners. I remember sitting on the hearthrug and looking at a spent fire of rosy coals and fine white ashes and repeating, “Rosamund, Rosamund,” and forgetting to put on fresh coal; and I remember running round the lawn calling her name as loudly as if she were in earshot and could be made to come to me. Soon Cordelia began to make a fuss about this. She had been very consequential about Christmas Day and was always either practising or carrying about her violin with an expression which indicated that she was vainly looking for a place where she could practise in peace. She now enacted the part of an eldest sister distracted by the prattle of a young sister who would go on and on about something childish; and because the part delighted her she went on performing it long after I had ceased to speak of Rosamund to her, and kept my tale for Mary.
There I found an interested listener, for Mary was sure she would like Rosamund if I did, but could not understand for what reason either of us should, as she seemed to do nothing interesting.
“Are you sure she doesn’t play any instrument?” she asked.
“Quite sure, she said she didn’t,” I replied.
“Are you sure that she didn’t simply say that she didn’t play the piano?” she pressed. “No? Well, I suppose it’s all right. But she sounds just like one of the girls at school, nothing interesting at all. But I think we’ll find out that she plays some instrument or other.”
Richard Quin too listened to all I had to say, because he liked the name of Rosamund as soon as he heard it, and liked it better when Mamma told him it meant Rose of the World. And Kate liked hearing about her, and said she was very glad of what she heard, for there were too few of us to keep ourselves company as we went through life.
Then, on the morning of New Year’s day, as we were running about the garden, touching the trees and the shrubs to feel the fresh life in them, Mamma flung open the french window and cried to us, “See who has come.” We three girls were in the grove of chestnuts at the end of the garden, and hurried out to see Rosamund and her mother standing at the top of the iron steps. Constance looked a little odd, not only because she was even shabbier than Mamma, but because her carved quality, when it did not appear statuesque, and just now it did not, partly because women then had to wear such silly hats, recalled Mrs. Noah. Rosamund was as fair as I had remembered her. She saw me and smiled, but did not call. She was as golden as a cloud facing the summer sun. I was so overcome by the sight of her that I could not find my voice or move. Before I could go to her, Richard Quin, who had been among some syringa bushes nearer the house, ran towards her across the lawn, crying, “Rosamund! Rosamund!” She came down the steps, and was on the path when he reached her; and he threw himself down before her, clasping her round the knees, looking up at her and laughing with joy. She bent over him, at a slower pace of delight, and they kissed and kissed.
They spent the whole day with us, and it passed like an hour or so. We had barely time to show her our dolls’ houses, and that not thoroughly. Even Cordelia liked her. She said in a patronizing way, for of course she was older than Rosamund too, “She is very well-behaved.” It was an inept tribute, because Rosamund possessed less behaviour than any other person I have ever known. She was simply there. Mary liked her, and asked her at once, “I say, hasn’t Rose got it wrong? You do play something, don’t you?”
“No.” Rosamund smiled. “I cannot do anything.”
“Well, I’m sure you could, I’m sure you could play anything,” said Mary.
When we took her down to see Kate in the kitchen Kate very soon asked her when her birthday was and wrote it down with ours in the Bible she kept on the dresser, and that was an important ratification of the relationship. And when Papa came back from the newspaper office for luncheon he looked at Rosamund with astonishment, the extent of which we did not guess till he returned home in the evening, and Mamma and I took the evening paper into the study.
“That child,” he said, “is amazing. She ought to make a great marriage.”
“Make a great marriage?” Mamma repeated in some astonishment. “Why, my dear, how could she make a great marriage? I often wonder,” she said with quiet desperation, “how any of the girls are to marry.”
“But why not? They have not the tremendous air of this girl, but they are none of them ill-looking.”
“But we do not know any families into which they can marry,” said Mamma. “We are not part of any world.”
My father was more taken aback than I have ever seen him. “Well, when we have settled down here we will make more friends,” he said weakly; and then forced himself to say with sad honesty, “though I know there are not many people in Lovegrove of the sort we would wish our daughters to marry. But there must be some solution. I must see.”
“Anyway we do not want to marry,” I said. “Oh, you need not laugh! We have often talked it over.”
After that Rosamund came to us quite often, at weekends, and during the holidays. She knew we had to practise and did not think it was rude of us to keep to our usual hours at the piano as if she were not there. Either she was in the room, the ghost dogs in a circle round her, and played with Richard Quin so silently that we could not have told they were there, at curious games unknown to us, with circles and squares of coloured paper, or with his soldiers and the figures Papa carved for us, deployed in a new way; or they went into the garden, making so pleasant a picture that I remember it as much transposed from reality as if I had seen them on a tapestry, the walls annulled, the trees melting into distances as different from the actual neighbourhood as the landscape I had seen when, as I had perhaps dreamed, I went to the stables to find Mamma on the first night we ever spent in this house. Soon Rosamund was as familiar with our made-up animals as we were. She recognized that they were such awful little dogs, such pampered, purseproud, conventional little dogs, that they had to be called Ponto and Fido and Tray, and she brought us the book that had in it the portrait of her made-up hare, drawn by Dürer. Docile he sat, with his paws laid neat before him, resigned to what might be his portion here on earth; but his two tall ears, standing oddly erect considering that they were soft as velvet ribbon, and the nervous circle-sweep of feelers from his muzzle and his eyes showed that all the same he was resigned to nothing, he still feared. All the same, the deep banks of fur ruffling his breast, his back, his haunches, showed him a natural fop, committed by his pelt to an effeminate timidity. This made us feel better about him. What he feared for was not his life but the unspotted condition of his lovely clothes. Gathered round him on the lawn, as well aware as if we really saw him that he sat there contented in our notice, his eyes shining like warm crystal, his tawny fur giving off a rainbow lustre, we jeered at him tenderly.
“He says he wants to travel,” said Rosamund.
“But he’d be frightened to travel in a railway carriage alone,” I said.
“Yes,” said Mary, “he would insist on putting on his best clothes for travelling, because he would want everyone to see them, and then he’d get into a carriage and hide under the seat because he’d be afraid of everybody and he’d sit there seeing nothing and being terribly frightened, so he might just as well have stayed at home.”
“But, after all,” I said, anxious not to do the hare injustice, “people do get murdered on the railway, like the poor man in the tunnel.”
“Yes, but he’d feel he was going to be murdered when he wasn’t,” said Rosamund. She was not being unkind, she understood him and knew that he did not mind being teased.
Together we met a lot more made-up animals, or rather discovered that a lot of real animals were made-up ones too. Once we went as far as Richmond Park and found a vast empire of rabbits who had odd political troubles, and a small and aristocratic community of deer who were terrible snobs. Papa overheard us talking about them, and explained that the older deer were evidently trying to preserve the Habsburg system of protocol, while the young ones wanted to introduce the easier German and English system. We instantly recognized that was true. Mamma took us several times to the botanical gardens at Kew, which was also a long way off, and we might have tired had not her ingenuity in finding cross-country routes taken us through a landscape which we found grimly entertaining. We took a ten-minute ride in the train, and alighted in one of those suburban areas where the open country has been first invaded by public institutions, and other dwellings have never been built near their unkindliness. We walked down a poplar avenue, on our right a plain of harsh grass dotted with red brick buildings which other people supposed to be an isolation hospital, a workhouse, and a sewage farm, but which we knew to be the tombs of ogres which had been found lying here after a rout of ogre forces in a battle. The long-storied wings of the workhouse had been built round the taller ogres as they lay prostrate on the field, and the tubbier bungalow and towers of the isolation hospital had been built round small squat ogres, who, though transfixed by the lances of the angels, had not fallen down, because they were broader than they were long. The question was whether, behind the brick, their eyes were open or shut, and whether the forces of light had been as thorough as they thought. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came,” Mamma used to say as she led us down the gravel path under the poplar trees. On the left rose a hill, and over it spilled what might have been thought by adults to be the graves of an expanding cemetery. We knew however that a young doctor who had taken his degree in Baghdad at a university recently founded by Haroun-al-Raschid had settled in the district and now nobody ever died, so that there had been a revolt of the tombstones in the yards of monumental masons, they had taken to the hills and were indulging in what, like all children, we believed to be called gorilla warfare.
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.
I remember Mamma’s being closeted with one such crank for hours, so long that a second visitor arrived and would not be denied. He got his foot in the door, which we knew was a sign of danger. I went in to tell Mamma and found her sitting with glazed eyes while a man with a cleft white beard laboured for her salvation. When she heard what I said, she sprang to her feet and said to her tormenter with a surprised and delighted expression, “Ah, at last, stupid though I am, I understand what you mean, you have explained it so well. But I assure you you need not trouble about converting my husband, what you have been saying is exactly what he believes. Good-bye, good-bye.” She showed him out and then went to interview the dun, who would not leave until she had emptied into his hands the contents of her purse, which she had hoped to spend on some such essential expenditure as the gas account.
When Papa returned that evening Mamma spent some time with him in his study. Later she sat with us children in the sitting room, too tired to talk, too tired to read. Presently Papa came out with a visiting-card in his hand and said, “My dear, this afternoon must have been quite terrible for you. I see it was Carlyon Maude who was here. I have heard him speak and lived to read his pamphlets, he is the greatest bore in the world. How did you get rid of him?”
“I forget now,” said Mamma. “Oh, I know. I told him he need not trouble to convert you, you were of his way of thinking already.”
“What!” exclaimed Papa. “You told him I agreed with him! My dear, you should not have done that!”
“Why not?” asked Mamma faintly.
“He is a bimetallist,” said Papa.
“Well, I had to get rid of him somehow,” said Mamma, blinking her eyes as if the light were too strong.
“Yes, but this is serious!” Papa protested. “Now this wretched fellow will go about saying I am a bimetallist.”
Mamma said faintly, “He may go about saying you are a bimetallist, but nobody will go about listening to him saying you are a bimetallist. It will remain a secret between him and his beard.” She shut her eyes altogether. “I do not think I have done you much harm.”
Papa turned to go out of the room, then halted and said, “Yes, you are right. Nobody listens to old Maude. And of course you have a lot on your mind just now. Don’t think I fail to realize that.”
“Oh, I know, dear,” said Mamma.
She continued to sit with her eyes closed after he had left the room. At length she said, “It is funny to think that all that sort of thing matters as much to them as music does to us.”
“Yes, isn’t it strange?” cried Cordelia, and at the sound of her voice Mamma opened her eyes to make sure that it was she who had spoken, and sighed deeply.
Cordelia had pleased the audience so much at that first concert given in aid of the missionary society that she had received a number of invitations to play on similar occasions, of which, it appeared, there were a vast number. All the rest of us, except Papa and Richard Quin, had been to hear her, and we had all been shocked. We were, indeed, really her victims. We were exposed to those inconveniences which must be suffered by any family which finds a public performer among its members. Often we had another timetable imposed on ours, Cordelia had to be taken to a concert or fetched from one. At this terrible time of financial anguish, her appearances involved some expenditure. Mamma had to buy her a concert dress, for which she paid by selling one of her last pieces of jewellery. It was painful to see the anxiety with which Cordelia chose that dress. Of necessity it had to be white, so that she could vary it with green and blue sashes and hair-ribbons, and this made the choice more difficult, as white stuff betrays its quality more candidly than coloured. When after long search Mamma found her a passable dress in the children’s department of Lovegrove Bon Marche, Cordelia put it on and went to a cheval glass and looked at herself and grew pale, pointing a finger, as if indicating a wound, at the line where the pleats were joined to the smooth yoke with a certain clumsiness. In her face was all the misery of a hunted animal; and indeed she had reached the stage through which many artists pass, when they feel themselves lone beasts persecuted by the herd and take such fierce defensive measures that presently the herd itself feels like a lone beast persecuted by a monster.
But she was not an artist. She knew a certain anxiety before all her performances. When she was getting ready for a concert she would examine her dress to see if Kate had ironed it properly, for it seemed to her that we were all waiting to fail her. But once she had got to the hall she lost all anxiety, she had no cause to worry, because she gave no performance. She was so confident that she was able to mimic that horrible malady, which has destroyed so many real musicians, stage-fright. She crept on the stage with wide eyes and parted lips, as if she had not known till she got to the hall that there was any question of giving a public performance. Then a faint smile would pass over those parted lips, her timid stare would soften, she would raise her bow and turn to the piano for her note as if she were putting herself in charge of her dear old Nanny, the spirit of music. Had the spirit of music appeared before her, it would have spanked her, for there was nothing, absolutely nothing, in her performance except the desire to please. She would deform any sound or any group of sounds if she thought she could thereby please her audience’s ear and so bribe it to give her its attention and see how pretty she looked as she played her violin. And she was not presenting herself as the pretty schoolgirl she really was, she was affecting to be mindless and will-less as grown-ups like pretty little girls to be.
After Cordelia had been giving such performances for a year or so Miss Beevor paid another call on my mother. She had been to our home on several occasions, often enough for us to notice that the sage-green outfit had passed into decline and been replaced by similar garments of peacock-blue. But this was a solemn call, previously announced by letter. It fell on a bad day, for Mamma had found that a sum of money on which she had relied to pay our school fees, which she had believed to be safely in my father’s banking account, was not available; and when she had suggested that now was the time to draw on certain miserable payments which Papa still drew from his family estate, it turned out that they also were mysteriously out of reach. I remember a mysterious ejaculation of Mamma’s, “Garnishee, that sounds like a man who has been crowned with parsley, but I am beginning to talk like Ophelia,” which remained incomprehensible to me until, many years later, I turned the pages of a dictionary and read the words: “Garnishee, one in whose hands money belonging to a debtor or defendant is attached at the suit of creditor or plaintiff.” So oppressive was the financial preoccupation of my parents that once Papa broke a silence which had fallen on the dinner table by saying to Mamma, very patiently, as if he were trying to break her of extravagance, “But you cannot stretch money, you know, my dear,” at which Mamma stared, afterwards bursting into laughter.
Kate was out the day Miss Beevor came to tea, so I let her in. She had gone back to her violet purple outfit, and this time she wore the mosaic brooch of the doves drinking at a fountain. Doubtless this was still her festal attire, and she had assumed it because she wished to use every possible means of asserting authority over my mother, but I could have told her that her intention was going to fail. Mamma had not liked that brooch when she first saw it, and she was now so much more tired than she had been when she saw it before that this time she not only made a grimace, she uttered a faint cry. I could not think that the visit was going to pass off smoothly. But I was not prepared for the speed with which it went wrong. Miss Beevor had brought, as usual, her white leather handbag tooled with the word “Bayreuth,” and after the first conventional greetings had been exchanged she took from it a number of letters which she proceeded to read aloud. My mother at first listened without paying too much attention, from time to time saying, “Yes, yes,” in a high, impatient voice. From her face I knew that had she been asked what Miss Beevor was doing, she would have replied that the poor thing was relaying the praises bestowed by her friends, as uninstructed as herself, on the deplorable performances given by Cordelia as the result of her unsolicited intervention. I am bound to say that Mamma’s expression passed a final verdict on Miss Beevor which might have been left to the Judgment Day and other hands.
Suddenly Mamma’s face was convulsed by comprehension, and she exclaimed, “No! You are not really asking me to allow Cordelia to accept professional engagements?”
“Yes, yes,” cried Miss Beevor, archly shaking her long forefinger, “that is just what I am asking you. All these people would be willing to pay our dear little Cordelia fees which may seem small, but would be a beginning.” She could start next week, it appeared, at a ballad concert which was to be given by a promising young tenor of the district, who had been let down by his violinist, and was most anxious that Cordelia should play the “Meditation” from Thais and Gounod’s “Ave Maria” and a little thing, Miss Beevor could not remember the name at the minute but it went la-la-la-la-la, between the vocal numbers; and then she paused, while my mother brought down her eyes from the ceiling.
In a flat tone which told Miss Beevor nothing, she said, “I suppose he will sing Isidore de Lara’s ‘Garden of Sleep.’”
Poor Miss Beevor said, “I hope so, he sings it very nicely.”
My mother cried out in a tone which could not be misunderstood, “I am sure he does. Miss Beevor, I cannot have this. Cordelia should not play at this sort of concert. She should not play at any concert. She cannot play the violin.” She checked herself. Cordelia could not hear her, but she could not bear to say the words which she thought, did Cordelia hear them, would break her heart. “She cannot play the violin well enough yet to make a public performance anything but a farce. Of course she may improve, oh, yes, we hope she will improve,” she went on, in a tone which would have been recognized by the most complete stranger as proceeding from the extremity of despair. “And what we must do is to raise her standards. If she is to be carted about to concerts and banquets where people who know nothing about music clap their hands because she is a beautiful little girl, she will never learn. She will wear herself out with the excitement, instead of working quietly and developing her technique, and what is more important still, her taste. Surely you have noticed,” asked my mother piteously, “that she has no taste?”
“But I am teaching her all the time,” said Miss Beevor sturdily.
My mother looked like Medusa, but Miss Beevor knew enough to have already lowered her eyes to the carpet. “I am teaching her all the time,” she repeated. She was not without dignity. “As for the excitement, I think the child can stand it. She is a wonderful child. I do not think you appreciate what a privileged mother you are, what a wonderful child you have brought into the world. There are some people,” she said, clasping her hands, “who are different from all other people. They are born to shine, to go on platforms and give the audiences who come to see them a new life, they pour out refreshment and they are never tired. Cordelia is one of those people. You are her mother, and I know it is difficult for people to understand it sometimes when their own family has produced an exceptional person—Oh, let’s not beat about the bush, she’s a genius, little Cordelia is a genius and you are standing in her way. I don’t know why you do it, but that’s all you do, you stand in her way. Let me have her, let me do what I can for her, I promise you I will make her famous and happy and, oh, yes, rich, very rich. She will have everything, if only you let me handle her.”
She was crying, and my mother was looking at her in sympathetic horror. “The trouble is, you have let yourself get too fond of Cordelia,” she said.
“Of course I love the child,” sobbed Miss Beevor in her handkerchief. “Who would not, except you?”
“Oh, I love her,” said my mother grimly.
“You don’t, you don’t,” cried Miss Beevor. “You show you don’t in everything you do.”
“Sit down,” said my mother. “I don’t know why we both stood up just now. Let’s sit down.”
“You are awful to her,” wept Miss Beevor, settling down on the sofa. “You won’t admit she’s a born violinist, and you stand in her way all you can, and you can give her nothing, everybody knows you may have the bailiffs in at any moment, and you seem to care only for the other children, who are nothing, you even let this one stay in the room while I discuss Cordelia—”
Mamma put her hand to her head and explained that she was very tired and had forgotten that I was there, and told me to go away. I was determined not to leave her for long, for there had been something ghastly about her appearance ever since Miss Beevor had arrived.
I said, “Yes, I will go and get tea.”
Miss Beevor blew her nose and said into her handkerchief, “I do not want any tea.”
I said, “That is not really to the point. Mamma looks as if she would be better for some tea, and of course we always have it about this time.”
Mamma groaned, “Hush, dear,” and told me to go away at once.
I went up to our room and found Mary, who was copying out some harmony lessons from a book we had got out of the public library, and asked her to come and help me to get tea. The kitchen was full of white glass-cloths and tray-towels hanging on the line to dry, and we moved under these dejected flags in a state of apprehension which was not despair, because we both believed that whatever happened we would be all right. Certainly we would be all right. But it might be some time before we could get things settled.
“It is too awful that Miss Beevor should come to bother Mamma today of all days,” I said, “when she has had that bother about money.”
“I wonder,” said Mary, “how bad the bother is. I am not putting out the best china, why should we? If she wears that brooch and those colours she cannot care how things look. Our school fees don’t matter much. Some of those Irish relatives would pay them, they are always afraid that we will not be able to earn our livings when we grow up, they always inquire about us very nervously in that Christmas letter. But I do sometimes worry in case Cousin Ralph gets tired of the way we don’t pay the rent. And I like this house, I should not like to leave it.”
“And where could we go if we had to leave it?” I pondered. “I think you have to give landlords references.”
“We will have to go somewhere far away and pretend that we have just come from South Africa,” said Mary. “I do not see how anybody could tell that was not true, and you and I and Richard Quin could tell everybody that we do so miss seeing a lot of black people.”
“That would be what Mamma calls falling lower and lower,” I said.
“Of course it would,” said Mary. “I am only trying to be funny. But really I believe that whatever happens we will get through it without anything worse than people not seeing when we are funny.”
“You are burning the toast,” I said.
“You are letting the kettle boil over,” she answered. “We are two silly sisters.” And we kissed each other and laughed.
When we carried in the two tea trays we saw that we need not have troubled to make enough toast for Miss Beevor and bring an extra cup. She would be going any moment now. As we went in Mamma, who was sitting beside her on the sofa, reared up like a striking cobra and said savagely, “You evidently do not understand the true nature of tempo rubato.”
Miss Beevor rose to her feet, crying in a high, tremulous voice, “I will leave this house this very instant.” But the letters offering Cordelia engagements had been lying in her lap, and as she rose they flew about the floor. She went down on her knees to pick them up, but she was confused by tears and rage, and we had to kneel down beside her and help.
Over our heads Mamma’s voice sounded remorseful, pitiful, piteous, and yet constrained to uphold the truth as she knew it. “I did not mean to be rude, but hardly anybody nowadays understands what tempo rubato really is, I did not myself fully grasp it till I was over twenty and had played in public many times, and one day my brother Ian said to me—”
We picked up all the letters, and the white kid handbag with the word “Bayreuth,” and we took Miss Beevor out into the hall, found her umbrella in the stand, put it up for her in the porch, and stood watching her while she went unsteadily down the path through a fine rain. We had always been told by Mamma that it was terrible to shut the door on departing visitors till they had got outside the gate; it was like saying you had not liked them coming. We felt that we had a special duty not to shut the door prematurely in this case.
“I wish Rosamund were here,” said Mary when she had shut the door.
“Where is Richard Quin?” I asked.
“He is in the stables, playing his flageolet to the horses. He says they like it.”
“I will go and fetch him,” I said. “He will know what to do with Mamma.”
When we went into the sitting room we found Mamma crying. “I didn’t mean to be rude,” she kept on saying, “but I was rude, I hurt the poor creature’s feelings. Oh, it is a dreadful thing never to know the effect you are making on people, and you are all like me in that.” We put our arms round her neck and kissed her and told her that nobody but horrible old Miss Beevor would have thought that she was rude, though about that we had thoughts we would not have shared with her. We could not ourselves understand anybody who, when told they had misunderstood the true nature of tempo rubato, felt any emotion except intellectual curiosity; but we had to admit that when Mamma was rejecting anybody on musical grounds her aspect was pretty murderous. But in any case she was, if not absolutely in the right, righter than anybody else. I poured her out a cup of tea and Mary buttered her some toast, and I hurried through the french windows out into the garden to fetch Richard Quin. The late spring rain was bringing a lovely scent out of the earth, and in the chestnut trees the furled candles were little and grey and downy. Mamma had said she would take us to Hampton Court to see the avenue in Bushey Park when the candles were all out. People said it was going to be a wet summer, but that would not matter, we would put up umbrellas and look at the candle-lit trees through the rain, Mamma was much more sensible than most grown-ups, she could enjoy things although the weather might not be fine.
Before I passed through the blue-grey door in the wall I could hear the piping of Richard Quin’s flageolet. He was playing, “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,” at least he was playing half of it, that was all he had got. I was sorry to hear that he had come to that tiresome time which happens when one is little. He had got past the stage of being contented with the things that are easy and natural because one was really born able to do them, and learning them was only a matter of teaching one’s fingers what they knew they ought to do, and he had come to the stage when one realizes how difficult playing is going to be, but one cannot go back and not be musical, that is how one hears things and there is no help for it. I could tell that he was feeling like that, partly because he sounded as if he were pushing against each note, in a fit of obstinacy, and partly because Mary and Richard Quin and I were not really separate beings. I passed through the yard, which was a little tidier than it had been when we came, but not much, for we were all so terribly busy, and I found him just inside the stable door, close by Sultan’s loose-box and facing Pompey and Caesar and Cream and Sugar. He was looking very little, his baby fingers solemnly busy on the stops, a frown of concentration on his baby brow. In this faded and dusty place his fairness was of another world. He was right in thinking the horses liked his music.
The horses had become made-up animals. I could nearly hear them stirring lightly on their hooves and munching their fodder in quiet content. Richard Quin finished the phrase he was playing, turned to me and nodded, then went from stall to stall, saying good-bye to the horses and patting them with that tactful touch necessary for caressing made-up animals, one has to touch them enough to show one is fond of them but one must not press so hard that it has to be admitted all round that they are insubstantial. When he was rubbing his head against Sugar’s neck and Sugar whinnied, he turned his eyes on me and laughed, as if to say this seeing what is not to be seen and hearing sounds not uttered in this world was a lovely game, like finding the dyed eggs that Papa and Mamma always hid in the garden on Easter Day. I told him that Mamma was unhappy, and we wanted him to make her forget what was bothering her. He took my hand and we went back through the garden, putting our tongues out to taste the rain.
In the sitting room Mamma was saying, “So you see, Mary dear, even you did not realize what tempo rubato is and what it is not, and though I don’t want you to think that your playing is anything more than elementary as yet, you probably know as much about the fine points of playing as Miss Beevor, so there was no harm in telling her what tempo rubato really means, though you must respect her, you must all respect her, she is doing her best, see what she has done for Cordelia.” Tears were running down each side of her long, thin nose.
Richard Quin carefully laid down his flageolet in a place where he thought it would not be touched, and then ran to Mamma and hugged her knees and kissed her, boisterously, as if he felt compelled to do it by love, but not so much that it was difficult for her to go on holding her teacup. “I want a treat,” he said, nuzzling into her.
“What does my bad lamb want?” she asked, looking down at him in adoration. Of course she loved him more than the rest of us, anybody who ever saw him would know it had to be so.
“I want not to sit up during tea and behave properly,” he begged. “I want to drink my milk on the floor and have the sisters read ‘The City of Brass’ to me.”
“But you can learn to read,” Mamma chided him. “All your sisters were reading long books at your age.”
“Yes,” he answered with a shout of laughter great for his little body, “they learned to read, so I needn’t, it was kind of them.”
“But we shall have to work harder and harder at our playing, and then we don’t have time to read to you,” said Mary, and I said, “Besides, it’s faster, you like things to go fast, you could read things to yourself far quicker than we can read them aloud.”
But as we spoke Mary was getting the Arabian Nights out of the bookcase and was finding the place, while I filled his mug with milk and buttered him some toast and put the mug and the plate on the tray he used when he ate sitting on the floor. It was a small eighteenth-century tray we had bought him one Christmas from a rag-and-bone shop, and it was painted with a Turkish scene of mosques and palaces and willow-hung canals. It was so pretty that he let us keep it in the sitting room, leaning against the wall on the top of the bookcase. With the made-up dogs, Ponto and Fido and Tray, lying in a semicircle round him, he ate and drank earnestly, for he was always very hungry, pausing sometimes to trace the minarets of the mosques and the domes of the palaces with the end of a crust. People who did not know him would have thought that he was not listening, but if one left out anything he cried out at once. If one skipped any of the marvels on which the moonlight was shining when the travellers came on the City of Brass, he would put it in, and to tease him we would sometimes leave out some of the languages in which the old sheikh spoke to the motionless sentinels when they did not answer Arabic greetings. “Greek you said, and the language of Hind, and Hebrew and Persian and Ethiopian, but you have not said Sudanese,” he would shrill. “It spoils it all if you do not say Sudanese.”
And he would get restless, sentences before we came to the bit about the travellers finding the beautiful princess sleeping on the bed spread with silken carpets on the ivory dais supported by golden pillars, with two statues of slaves, one black and one white, standing at the head of the bed. Then when we actually got to the sentence which tells how one of the travellers climbed on the dais and tried to kiss the sleeping princess, he would whisper loudly and urgently, “Leave out, leave out.” For he could not bear it when the two statues moved and pierced the traveller’s head and heart with their pikes. He hated all violence. So Mary left that bit out and we went on to the best part, where the travellers went down to the seashore and found the black fishermen mending their nets. Mamma liked that bit very much, particularly when the eldest fisherman was asked to explain the mystery of the City of Brass and he answered, “The people of the City of Brass have been enchanted since the beginning of time and will remain as they are until the Judgment Day.” She told us that it was a very good thing to say about almost anybody. She also liked the bit about the copper jars in which the Jinns who rebelled against King Solomon were imprisoned, and how they were sealed with his seal (Papa drew it for us) and thrown into the depths of the boiling sea, and how the fishermen used to unseal the jars because they wanted them to cook fish in, and told the travellers it was all right if one slapped the jars with one’s hand before unsealing them and made the Jinns inside confess that there was but one Allah and Mohammed was his prophet. When Kate made jelly we also used to slap the mould and force the jelly to acknowledge Allah and Mohammed before we turned it out.
We were just getting to this bit when Cordelia came in and banged the door and threw her satchel down on the sofa and stood and looked at Mamma and stamped.
She said, “I have seen Miss Beevor and she has told me what you have done. Why do you hate me so? Why are you so cruel to me?”
Mamma said, “Go and take off your school dress and we will talk of this quietly.” She put down her cup because her hand was trembling.
Cordelia screamed, “How can I talk quietly about this? You are ruining my life.”
Mamma said, “You mean because I have told Miss Beevor that you must not take professional engagements? That is not ruining your life. It is making sure that it will not be ruined. There is nothing worse for a musician, any sort of musician, than to perform in public too soon. It fixes a player at the stage she is at the time of her first appearance, and it is very hard to struggle on to the next stage.”
Mary and I looked at each other in bewilderment. Mamma got terribly angry with us when we made mistakes, and the whole of Cordelia’s playing was a mistake. But she was speaking to her quite gently about this horrible proposal. This was another instance of Mamma’s curious tenderness towards her, which we could not understand.
Cordelia screamed again. “It would not hurt my playing. Miss Beevor says she would go on teaching me all the time. It is not fair. You are only doing this because you cannot bear me to have more than the others.”
From the floor Richard cried, his light eyes on fire with anger, “Go on with the story. The mermaids come next.”
Mamma said, “But why do you want to play at these concerts? Wait, and if you are good enough you will play to audiences who really know what good music is, it will help you to have them listening to you. But these are second-rate affairs, it is impossible to think why you want to appear at them.”
Cordelia was still screaming when she answered, “Why do I want to play at these concerts? Because I want the money.”
“But they will pay you very little,” said Mamma.
“Have we so much money that I can afford to refuse any?” asked Cordelia bitterly. She spoke so like a grown-up that we stared at her; she had the bitterness of grown-ups, the sort of shrewdness which never gets them anywhere. “Mamma,” she said more gently but desperately, “what is to happen to us all? We haven’t any money. We children know that, we know there isn’t the money to pay the gas and the school fees, and even if you get the money from somewhere this time there will come a time when you won’t.” Her face became a blue-white triangle, because of her intense fear. “How can it possibly happen that the time won’t come when Papa gambles everything away on the Stock Exchange and we won’t have anywhere to go, anything to eat?”
Mamma stood up, then dropped back into her chair, her eyes staring stupidly, her jaw dropping. Mary and I drew nearer to her, to protect her, to dissociate ourselves from Cordelia. We were very much shocked. Of course we talked about our parents’ affairs among ourselves; a child has a right to wonder what is going to become of it. But for children to speak of their parents’ affairs in front of them was like going into the bathroom and finding either of them having a bath. We could not stop Cordelia with our angry looks. She went on, “It isn’t only the rent and the school fees, even as it is. We have horrible clothes, my boots are worn out, and I should not have been expected to wear them anyway, they are cheap and clumsy. Everybody laughs at us at school because we are so badly dressed. Mary and Rose do not notice it, there is only me to worry about us.”
“We do notice it,” I said, “but we do not care.”
Cordelia waved at me impatiently. Her face was getting whiter and whiter. I thought she might faint as some of the girls at school did at prayers, and despised her. In our family we did not faint. “We have nothing, nothing,” she said, “and now that I have a chance to make something you will not let me take it because you love the others best. I want to make money and save it so that I can get a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music or the Guildhall and have something to live on— “I do not think she had heard our mother’s cry, she paused only because her desire for fame was like a winnowing fan in her throat— “then I will make some money and study at Prague and then I will really make a lot of money and if I hurry up before the others get too old I will be able to help them. If I don’t,” she cried, “who will? Mary and Rose,” she said, after a pause, staring sadly at us, “must do something to earn their living, they must teach or go into the post office, I will be able to pay for their trainings, and Richard Quin, something must, it must, be done for him.” With a tragic gesture of her whole arm she pointed at him as he sat on the floor by his tray. “It’s worse for him, because he’s a boy. He must go to a good school, he’s so dreadfully spoiled, he must go to a proper school,” she said, looking at him with her upper lip curled in worried distaste, “or he will be worse than Papa.”
Richard Quin brought his spoon down on his plate with a bang, and cried happily, trying to echo a phrase that my mother often used in argumentative crises, “Change a subject. Change a subject. Silly Cordelia, change a subject.”
“See how he speaks to me,” said Cordelia hotly, “and I am the eldest.” Suddenly she began to scream again. “Oh, Mamma,” she shrieked, “we are being so badly brought up.”
Mamma moved her lips, but we could not hear any words.
“I do not mean to be rude, Mamma,” said Cordelia, her voice dropping suddenly to a murmur. “It is not your fault, it is Papa’s”—again Mamma’s lips moved, but she was still inaudible— “but we are being so very badly brought up. Everybody at school,” she said, shivering, “thinks Mary and Rose so odd.”
“Change a subject, change a subject,” advised Richard Quin robustly from the floor.
“We must be more like other people,” she went on frantically, “we must fit in better, and you will not let me do anything to help, and if we only had ordinary clothes it would be better. If I made anything, anything at all, it would be something. Oh, let me earn what I can”—she wept— “I am so miserable, and I am the only one that can do anything for us.”
She could speak no longer, and we all watched her in silence. We had to respect her tears because she had been painfully wounded by her destiny. But it was also true that she had inflicted wounds, which would never completely heal, on everybody in that room, except Richard, who was, for a particular reason of which neither she nor any of the rest of us was aware, proof against such injury. Mary slipped her left hand into my right. We had known the people at school did not like us, and we had wished it was not so; I had spoken of that very misery to Rosamund. But we had thought that some of the dislike felt against us was to our credit. Because of Papa and Mamma we knew the meaning of long words and were forward in our French and tried to speak it with a proper accent, and we recognized the pictures the art mistress put up on the walls, and of course the people who were good at gymnastics and hockey thought we were silly, and many teachers are irredeemably cross by nature. Some of our unpopularity was our own fault, we knew that. We were often awkward and bumped up against things, and we often came out of our thoughts and found that something was expected of us and we had no idea what, and then everybody laughed. And of course it is funny when everybody has sat down and only two people are left standing up, though perhaps they laughed rather a long time over it, for it is funny but not very funny. But now Cordelia had suggested to us that if people did not like us it was a sentence passed on our serious faults, and we were not merely absent-minded, there was a real flaw, a censurable unpleasantness, in our behaviour.
We did not quite believe her. We knew that she had always been silly and always would be. She was showing that by talking such nonsense about money. She would never be able to help us very much about that, and there would be no need, because we would earn all we needed as soon as we were grown up. But we could not quite disbelieve her, for we knew that she was far nearer to the people at school than we were, and perhaps it is true that numbers count, it is not quite natural that two people should be right and hundreds of people wrong. So it happened that from this hour Mary and I had less power than before to make friends. Till that day we had supposed that the coldness strangers showed us could be broken down if we were nice to them, but forever after we were impeded in our dealings with any but our familiars by the suspicion that the more they saw of us the more they were bound to dislike us.
I thought, Really Cordelia should not have done this to us, and returned the pressure of Mary’s hand. But we forgot our pain when Mamma rose to her feet. She seemed to have grown even thinner during the last few moments and her eyes were protruding. We wished she did not look so ugly when she was distressed, we knew that Cordelia would be feeling as horrid about it as if she were a stranger. But mercifully Mamma’s voice was always much more beautiful when she was distressed. It became a thin, silver thread, rather high, spinning from behind her high forehead. The sound was quite lovely when she turned her face towards Cordelia and said, her eyes looking blank as if she did not see her, “I will put on my bonnet and go and make my peace with Miss Beevor and she can accept all the professional engagements for you that you like.”
Cordelia cried, “Oh, Mamma, thank you, thank you.” She glowed at having scored a point. But we were not sure. We knew that Mamma had been so hurt that she was astonished at her own pain, yet she looked also as if she were inflicting pain. When she went to the door her fingers came down on the handle as if she were reluctantly going out to perform some agonizing mystery. She seemed very tired.
After she had gone Cordelia sighed with satisfaction and began to take off her gloves. Mary said, “Come, Richard Quin, pick up your cup and plate.”
“It is not his bedtime,” said Cordelia.
“We are going down to sit in the kitchen till Mamma comes back,” said Mary.
After a moment’s silence Cordelia said with an air of thrift, “It will mean burning two gases.”
“I will give Mamma the half-crown Mr. Langham gave me last time he was here,” said Mary. “That will pay for a great deal of gas.”
“The book, the Brass City,” said Richard Quin. “You did not get to the mermaids, you must read me the bit about the mermaids, I will have mermaids, lots and lots of mermaids, when I am grown up.”
We three went down the steep stairs to the kitchen and I stood on the chair and lit the gas. It was more poetic than electric light, and I am sorry that so many children of today never see it. Over the gas-jet, inside the inverted glass bell, was a thing called an incandescent mantle, which, when you delicately turned on the tap in the gas-bracket and held a lit match over it, glimmered with a pale unsteady whiteness, like a little man risen from the dead whose cerements partook in the light of his immortality. There was also a faint pop as if a spirit were bursting its material bonds. Then you turned the tap full on and the shrouded man shone with the steady light of the angels, and you did not notice him any more, eternity had set in. Kate had left the kitchen looking very nice, she always did. The fire in the range was out because it was early summer and we did most of our cooking on a gas stove, but she had blackleaded it so that it gave out brightness from its highlights. It was a huge range, but coal was so cheap in those days that we could afford to use it though we were so very poor. On the clean straw-coloured wooden table there were some folded sheets which Kate had been ironing before she went out, the strong, businesslike smell of the iron still rising from them. On the dresser there were the plates of our dinner service, which was a Mason Ironstone set, with three red and orange and gold Chinamen against a primrose background with little bits of deep blue scattered over it. On the top of the dresser were the polished copper moulds in which the blancmanges and jellies were made, we sometimes used them as castles in a game on the kitchen table. By gaslight it could not be seen that we had not had enough money to have the place properly done up since we moved into it, and coal ranges made kitchens very dirty. Mary sat down at the table and rested the Arabian Nights on the folded sheets, and turned over the leaves to find “The City of Brass,” while Richard Quin took a piece of kitchen paper out of a dresser drawer and a pencil out of his pocket. He enjoyed drawing while he was being read to; he always liked to do two things at once. I got some of our stockings out of Kate’s workbasket and sat in the creaky wicker armchair on the rag hearthrug and mended them. We all wished very much that this had not happened when both Rosamund and Kate were out. We would not have told either of them exactly what was wrong, but they would have understood, and the time would have passed more quickly while we were waiting for our Mamma to come back.