THE LILACS were fully out when Constance and Rosamund came to stay with us. Richard Quin and I took the luggage up to their room and then went down and sat on the iron steps that led from the sitting room into the garden, and waited for Rosamund. We supposed we would first go round the stables, and though we were now all too old to go on pretending with made-up animals, we thought we might recall the days when such play was possible by greeting Cream and Sugar, Caesar and Pompey. But when Rosamund came down there hung over her arm a billow of white taffeta, and she told us that she must finish making a petticoat. I exclaimed in distress, for it was the kind of female garment that my sisters and I bitterly resented and thought an insult to our native force. At that time schoolgirls were dressed sensibly enough and we were happy enough in blouses and skirts joined by petersham belts with silver buckles, but the adult costume of our sex waited for us round the next bend in the path, as a handicap and a humiliation, heavy, crippling, loaded with rows of buttons and hooks and eyes that were always coming off and had to be sewn on again, and boned in all sorts of places where bones break. I thought she had gone into slavery before she need.
“You’re not going to wear that?” I asked furiously.
Laughing, she shook her head. It was astonishing how her golden simplicity dispelled Queenie’s blackness. Then she stammered out that now she and her mother were sewing for a shop in Bond Street.
“But why? Your Papa has lots of money,” I raged.
“He does not like to spend it.” She smiled.
“But that is horrible,” I said. “Our Papa cannot give us enough money because he keeps on gambling it away, in the hope of making a lot more. But if he ever won anything he would give it all except what he kept to go on gambling. But do you mean to say your Papa has it and doesn’t gamble and doesn’t give you any?”
Richard Quin said, “Never mind. One Papa with another, it works out that we all have nothing, and we can break that into as many pieces as we like, you can do that with nothing, there will be a share for us all.”
“I will make my cakes of nothing, then everybody in the world can have a slice,” said Rosamund, beginning to sew.
“What does nothing taste like?”
She thought. “Nice nothing or horrid nothing?”
“Both.”
“Nice nothing is like lemon sponge. Horrid nothing is like a very thin dusty biscuit, I can’t think of its name.”
“It can’t have a name if it is nothing.”
“But then you can’t call it a biscuit.”
“I didn’t call it a biscuit, you did. It is your bit of nothing. You are giving me nothing and expecting me to find names for it, it is not fair.” He took some strands of her golden hair and pulled it, she threw back her head and laughed at him.
They were not serious-minded. I said, “But look here, about this money—”
“Oh, of course it is very silly,” said Rosamund, getting on with her sewing, “but Mamma says we would be worse off if he were a really poor man, or if he were dead. And we are both very fond of sewing, you know.”
They were indeed as tranquil as could be, though their situation was, as I afterwards came to realize, as exasperating as ever wife and daughter suffered. Cousin Jock was so able that his firm not only paid him a considerable salary as chief accountant but had made him a director of one of its subsidiary companies; but he refused to move from Knightlily Road and he could have been said to live like a poor man, had he not spent large sums on spiritualism. He passed half his evenings playing the flute and the other half taking part in séances; and he even imported mediums from the Continent and supported them for weeks while societies investigated their claims. So little did he give to Constance and Rosamund that, even though they were with us only at holidays or at weekends, they had to bring their sewing with them. But they explained in a good-tempered way that they needed to work continuously because they were so slow, and indeed by their industry they introduced an element of contented leisure into our household, they set an easier pace. They used to settle down on the lawn in two deep wicker chairs we had found in the house when we came, lay clean cloths on their laps, and bring out of bags the lengths of silk and batiste they had to prepare for women who were probably not richer than themselves but were not persecuted by their natural protectors; and very comfortably they would work for some hours. The scallops flowed round the hem of a petticoat under Constance’s fingers, very slowly, as the shadows of the grove behind them moved across the lawn; and Rosamund built stitches on the bosom of a nightdress till, as gradually as a bud changes to a flower, they made a monogram. In the afternoons we went walking, Richard Quin always at Rosamund’s side, going the round of the loved exceptional places children always find in their environment, remembering at the right season to peer through the railings at the house which had so long been empty that the rose-trees had all gone back to briars and were now bushes standing higher than the shuttered ground-floor windows, covered with flat coppery flowers. We had some new pleasures too. Richard Quin was very good at arithmetic and mathematics, and he had a liking for numbers as things in themselves. As we went up a long dull street he would pause in delight when we came to a house with a number that was one of those prime numbers which are four times something plus one and can always be expressed as the sum of two squares. About these he felt as somebody fond of roses might feel in a garden full of them when he came on one rose that was larger and brighter and more fragrant than the others; and of course they were the same to us. He wrote out a table of these prime numbers, and we took it about with us. We had a rapturous moment when, in an endless and horrid street with many shops, we found Number 281 before he noticed it.
During these walks Rosamund was perfectly happy. She exercised a great influence on my sisters and myself, we looked up to her as our superior, but she was most at home talking with our younger brother, and now he was growing older it was apparent that she was lingering on another plane. He spoke of the facts and ideas he learned at school and from his precocious reading of books and magazines, and she answered him on a nursery-rhyme level. Yet no matter how much she was enjoying her walk with us she always and without complaint turned homeward in time for her to start work again at the proper hour. Indeed that was one of the ways she governed me. I was having difficulties with my playing: my mother’s teaching had brought me, perhaps prematurely, to a stage of technical advancement when the spirit flags and passes through a desert. Rosamund’s biddability, and the calm spectacle offered by her and her mother as they sat with their laps full of pale fine stuffs, their eyes bent on their unhurried hands, always made me conscious that I was apt to get into “states” and sent me back to my piano.
Rosamund’s power to make us calm and industrious was not perfect in its exercise. It included Cordelia in its scope; she played the violin no better, and incessantly. But it left Richard Quin untouched. He was doing well, in a way. We had been apprehensive when he had to move to a school for bigger boys, because he was so good-looking and rather like a girl, and he liked doing things his own way. But he was far more of a success at his school than we were at ours. For one thing, he was good at games. He could do anything he liked with a ball, if he threw one or hit it with a bat or kicked it, it did something which nobody expected but himself, and, laughing, he took advantage of everybody’s astonishment. He could run very quickly too. At his lessons he was good, arithmetic and mathematics were like another game to him, but he was naughty about his homework. He neglected it for his music, but that did not put the score right, for he was not industrious about that either. He was more interested in playing a number of instruments than in playing any of them really well. Like Cordelia, he had absolute pitch, which neither Mamma nor Mary nor I had, and he had a far better musical memory than any of us. He had a violin quite early, one of his teachers had given him one that was in the family. People were always giving him presents. The father of one of the boys gave him a flute, and he had always had a recorder, so with the piano that was four instruments to start with. But he would practise none of them properly. What he enjoyed most was playing the flute or the recorder in the stables or to Rosamund in the garden, making up variations on tunes, sometimes absurd ones, so that you had to laugh, and sometimes making up new tunes, which made Mamma very angry.
I remember her throwing up a bedroom window and leaning out to cry, “What is the use of pouring out that stuff if you will not sit down and learn about harmony and counterpoint?” Like all artists, she feared improvisation, though of course you are not really an artist unless you can improvise. “It is like—it is like—”
“Gargling?” suggested Richard Quin, looking up at her very gravely.
“Yes, that is it, gargling,” she agreed, and banged down the window when he laughed and waved his flute at her.
But it did not really matter. We knew he would be all right in the end. Things went very well for us at this time, for so long as a year, or perhaps even two. Papa enjoyed an unusual period of success and prosperity, as an unlooked-for consequence of his intervention in the Phillips case. About a fortnight later Mr. Pennington drove down in his carriage to see him, and burst into our house, the deep wave in his handsome brown hair quite loose and uncontrolled, so excited was he. As soon as I took him into the study he grasped both Papa’s hands and cried, “Really, I have to apologize to you! I see now that you came to the Commons that afternoon to do my uncle and me the greatest of kindnesses! I quite misunderstood you! You came to give me a warning and my uncle and I thought you were forcing our hands, and didn’t like you any better for it. But, upon my word, if you hadn’t told us what you did we should have been in a terrible mess today!”
“Down, Rover, down,” said my father.
Mr. Pennington cast a puzzled glance about the floor.
“I thought my dog was in here,” explained my father. We had no dog, nor ever had had one. “What exactly has happened?”
“Ludost went mad this morning.”
“Now what does your uncle say about the establishment of a Court of Appeal?” inquired my father.
But Mr. Pennington wanted to tell his story and would not be denied. “And in such a public place too, God knows what we would have done if that poor woman had been hanged, this thing can’t be hushed up, but, if you’ll excuse me, I don’t think what I have to say will much amuse young Miss Rose here, if it is Miss Rose, isn’t it?”
That was all I was to see of him that afternoon, but he was to visit us on many other occasions. He insisted on regarding my father as a benevolent oracle and came to consult him whenever he was troubled by a political perplexity. My father liked his devotion, for he had now few enough disciples, and he also liked the young man’s health and handsomeness, and the candour with which he gaped when he heard something he had never known before. But Papa would have been better pleased if Mr. Pennington had not consulted him about so many matters which Papa thought that a Member of Parliament should understand fairly well before he offered himself for election.
Once, when I went to tell Papa that supper was ready, at the end of such a visit, he said to me, “I understand that you and your sisters think very badly of Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare.”
“Of course we do,” I said. “Who wants to read all that without the poetry?”
“Believe me,” he sighed, “Lambs’ Tales from Edmund Burke is a far more lamentable production.”
“Did they do that? I never heard of it.”
“Oh, this abridgment of Burke’s doctrines is not prepared by the Lambs, but for the use of a lamb.” He suddenly shot up into vigour. “Come now, I should write that pamphlet he wants from me. There is an immense sheep population in this country. Why should they not know the conditions of the field they graze? It is only kind to tell them.”
He wrote several pamphlets on the elements of political theory and on contemporary problems at the instigation of Mr. Pennington, and they were much admired, and he made some money out of them. It very fortunately happened that at this time Mr. Langham brought Papa a scheme for making money out of hitherto unexploited minerals in Australia, which was so vague that Mr. Langham himself had to go out to Ballarat to find out the mere name and address of the waiting fortune; and this meant that though Papa and Mr. Langham lost their money, they lost it at a much slower rate than usual, and anyway it was nearly all what Papa made out of the pamphlets, and that left his salary untouched. Mamma said sometimes, stretching out her long, narrow, bony hands to touch the nearest wood, that she had never been so well satisfied. Papa was busy and happy, and there was no doubt at all now that we were going to be professional pianists. Mamma became apparently more and more anguished about our playing: Jeremiah spoke no more kindly about the tribes of Israel than she did concerning our powers of technique and interpretation. This distress was quite genuine, she knew we were very far from being fit to play Beethoven to Beethoven and Mozart to Mozart in the courts of heaven, which is the impossible aim that all pianists must hold before themselves, but what she thought of us by the standards of earth we gathered from certain lamentations which my father would quite suddenly utter as he went for walks with us or we sat with him in his study. He would express despair at the problem of how we were to make our return from the evening concerts that we were going to give, as we had no lady’s maid to accompany us, and Mamma would not be strong enough to go out so often at night. As he grew older he spoke more and more as from the eighteenth-century enclave that Ireland had been in the nineteenth century, and to him the streets after dark had not yet been cleared of the Mohocks, and were full of open ditches exhaling miasma specially dangerous by night. But for the rest he too seemed content.
It also made for a more placid home that Mary and Richard Quin and I were much easier in our minds about Cordelia. That dated from one summer afternoon, when we went with her and Miss Beevor to a Thames Valley suburb. Cordelia was going to play at a concert in the town hall, and we wanted an hour on the river, for though Papa was grieved by our bad rowing we could now handle a boat well enough to go out by ourselves, and somehow or other we had got hold of money enough to give us a dinghy for an hour and a tip for the man. Of course Cordelia’s concert lasted much longer than an hour, and after we had returned the boat we went and sat in a square outside the town hall, which overlooked the river. It was very pretty. Old people and mothers with prams were sitting on benches, and children were bowling their hoops, and there was a balloon-seller, and the sunlight poured down on these people, and beds of flowers rose between them, dividing them by banks of blue delphiniums, crescents of rosy geraniums, lozenges of lilies. Running alongside the town hall, below a terrace, were beds full of pale pink peonies, at the stage when they are loose swirls held in by bands of curiously prim outer petals. We went to look at them, and saw that along the terrace were tubs of fuchsias, which were a flower dear to us for a family reason. Because the flowers look so like little ballet-dancers Mamma never could remember their name, and she always called them “Taglionis—Vestris—what do I mean?” We thought we would like a closer look at them, and we found a brick staircase beside a toolshed, hidden behind a hedge, which looked as if it would take us up to the terrace, but it made a sharp turn and mounted to a locked doorway at some height in the town hall tower. Mary and I went down again, but Richard Quin called us back. There was an œil-de-bœuf window beside the doorway and he was leaning on the ledge. “I say, come and see Cordelia!” he said.
We looked down into the concert-hall. There was the audience, the backs of their heads towards us, all very still, not a bob or stir out of the flowery hats and brilliantined male scalps; and there on the platform at the end was our sister fiddling away, and keeping them so still. The sight of her was a revelation to us. Till that moment we really had not noticed what she was like, or, rather, what she had come to look like in the last year or so. If one sees people every day one never sees them at all. Now we were viewing her through a lens that made her appear as a stranger. To a degree to be comprehended only by the musical, our eldest sister was to all the rest of the family first and foremost a pervert who insisted on drawing deplorable sounds from the violin. But we were now seeing her in circumstances which presented quite another aspect of her. For the window was closed, it was not made to open. Not the faintest sound penetrated the thick glass and the heavy imperforate metal casing. What we saw had its disadvantageous musical significance. We could see her bowing horribly, but not a rasp reached us. We could see her faulty stance waver and knew her tone must do worse than waver, it must wobble, but we did not hear it. We could see a phrase slide to sheer grease, we could see her resort to a sledge-hammer pizzicato, but for us the silence was unbroken. However, we saw clearly enough that though Cordelia’s violin-playing was a blot on the family name, Cordelia playing the violin was an occasion for pride and glory.
She was, of course, deliciously pretty. We had always known that, and I think we knew too, though we could not then have put it into words, that any sensible female would rather be pretty than beautiful. Cordelia had her tight red-gold curls, her white skin, her large eyes, set just the right distance apart, her neatly incised features, so definitely drawn that as we looked down into the hall we could recognize, even at that distance, the amusing character of her face, its delicate stubbornness, its solemn, innocently contentious simplicity. Also she was exquisite in detail, her wrists and ankles were slender, and her throat was long, but there was a trick in her proportions which suggested that she was really as sturdy as a little pony; and this was a teasing, challenging contradiction. She was now, however, much more than just this pretty girl. When she came to the end of whatever it was that she was playing, she lowered her bow and curtsied. At the beginning of her career she had affected a foolish surprise because the audience was clapping her, though obviously what would have surprised her would have been if they had booed. But now she was incapable of that or any other vulgarity, her body lacked the necessary resources. To this applauding audience she merely continued to present her loveliness, clouded with a tender smile. They would not forget her. They were flailing their hands together, which might have have been made of cotton-wool as far as our ears were concerned, but must have been raising far more noise than one would have expected to hear in a suburban town hall at an afternoon concert.
Certainly Cordelia had not given these people music. But she had given them something, something, something which reminded me of the hour we had just spent on the Thames, watching the glassy river run past our plunging oars, the water netted like cracked glass, watching the network spread and break and broaden the green images of the trees on the banks, till we floated on the greenness of green, on the glassiness of glass. She reminded me of the pink peonies in the beds outside, and I was not wide of the mark. Then, and all through the years to come, Cordelia was to be one of those women whose flesh betrays nothing of the human trouble that is within, and who refreshes the eye like water, trees, and flowers.
“I tell you what,” exclaimed Mary, “we needn’t worry about Cordelia. She’ll get married.”
“Get married!” I repeated. “Of course, she would, like a shot, if we were an ordinary family. But you know quite well none of us will ever get married. We don’t know anybody we could marry.”
This conviction of my parents had increased with the years, and we were well acquainted with it. They had matched the circumstances of their youths with our situation, and felt despair. When Papa was young he had seen that the young women of his family married as soon as young men of equally distinguished families looked round for handsome and agreeable and not destitute wives, and when their fathers could agree about settlements. Mamma, brought up in the less elegant but still lively and prosperous world of Edinburgh professional and musical society, regarded marriage as the result of shaking up a number of young men and women at such festivities as dances, musical evenings, picnics, and parties given on such occasions as New Year’s Eve, or Halloween, or Midsummer’s Night, at which natural attractions would declare themselves with some slight financial bias. Papa, as I knew, was capable of forgetting the fact of our existence at moments when he should have been most careful to remember it, but from time to time suffered agonies because he realized that we were never going to be presented at court and that the Irish landowners who might have been our husbands could in all probability never hear of our existence; and Mamma often surveyed the social stagnation of Lovegrove and never at any time saw a professor of Greek improvising iambic pentameters as he ladled out egg-nog at midnight, or Hans von Bülow dropping in for supper. They had thought we had better realize the worst. We thought it not bad at all. How, Mary had impatiently asked me more than once, did they think that we could run a big house and look after a husband and children and travel all over the world giving concerts? But we took their word for it that the occasion was not going to arise.
“No, Rose,” said Richard Quin, “Mary is right. Someone will come along and insist on marrying Cordelia.”
“If people fall in love at all,” said Mary, “and novels and poetry seem to be about almost nothing else, far too much, really, and they can’t have suddenly stopped doing it, some stranger will see Cordelia in the street, and arrange to get to know us, and will ask Papa’s permission to marry her, and there we are, she will be happy, and there will be no more nonsense about playing the violin.”
We watched her give her encore. At the end she spread out her arms as she curtsied, and she made such a charming, symmetrical emblem of prettiness that I could imagine some absent-minded woman of the future calling some flower a Cordelia as my mother called a fuchsia a Taglioni.
“I tell you she’s sure, absolutely sure to get married,” said Mary. “I shouldn’t be surprised if it happened quite soon. After all we are nearly old enough.”
“Yes, she is absolutely lovely,” said Richard Quin. At once he added, with his usual anxiety that nobody should be hurt, “It isn’t that you two aren’t pretty too. You’re just as pretty, really. But somehow it’s more noticeable in her.”
“It would be grand, it would stop all this nonsense with Miss Beevor,” I said, “and she would probably have a lovely big house, and she could give concerts, and we could play for her for nothing.”
At the end of the concert we sought her out in the artist’s room, and we were so full of our new admiration and goodwill that we did not really mind finding her impersonating a genius exhausted by having given her all. She was sitting limp before the mirror, breathing languidly while Miss Beevor applied pads soaked in eau de cologne to her temples, and she was playing for an unseen audience as well, by giving tiny indications that Miss Beevor was not being as neat-handed as she might have been, and that she herself was exhibiting the possession of moral as well as artistic gifts of a high order by not expressing impatience. Because she did not want to spoil her concert finery by wearing it on the bus and train she was about to change into a cotton dress, but instead of just changing from one to the other, she had brought a wrapper and was sitting in it, as if to give this least of all artist’s rooms the glamour of a dressing room in a theatre. When we came in she gave us a glazed look, intended to suggest that, lost in art, she had forgotten all earthly ties. This was succeeded by a smile of too celestial sweetness, with overtones of courage and gravity, of refusal to show panic before the appalling responsibilities had thought fit to burden one who might well have been left free like the nightingale or firefly. But who knows, did not this quiet acceptance of duty lift her far above those who were merely beautiful, merely brilliant, merely gifted? I have never known anybody whose secret thoughts had such carrying-power as Cordelia’s. We did not care a bit. We now knew that if she could not play the violin she had another attribute that was rare and splendid; and we had always known that she was really all right. She did not always join in the same fights that we did, but when she did she was very good indeed. She had been splendidly rude to all the girls at school who were horrid about the Phillipses.
We said we had seen the concert from an unusual viewpoint, and Richard Quin said, “Yes, through a window, high up. You looked lovely, and the people all thought so, the ladies in their flowery hats all knew they were none of them as lovely as you.” She was pleased; but her desire to provide another appealing scene for her imaginary audience made her assume the expression of one in the last stage of fatigue, who wanted nothing less than a noisy tribute from a boisterous young brother, but who would rather have died than let any trace of her suffering be detected. Our possession of our new discovery about her future kept us benevolent, but we left after a moment or two, pleading that we must get back to do our homework and our practice, because Miss Beevor asked us with a certain archness whether we had liked the encore, and we guessed there was a salient point on which she expected we would have a comment. It had probably been some adaptation of a classical composition signally unsuited to the violin, the poor creature, as Mamma had once sighed, having a weakness for that kind of thing. We were in no hurry to explain that the window through which we viewed the concert had been closed, so we were soon on our way to a bus-stop.
“Oh, how I wish we were going back to practice and not to homework,” sighed Mary. “How I should like to work and work on Schumann’s Carnaval.”
“I say, are you ready for that yet?” I asked. “I’m not. I have had a go at it, but I’m not there.”
“No, I can’t really play it, not as Mamma does,” said Mary. “But that’s an absurd way of putting it, if we studied for a hundred years we should never play like her. But I can’t play it even by lower standards, but I think I would have got there by now if only I could give all my time to my work.”
“But what fun it will be when you are great concert pianists,” said Richard Quin, “everybody liking you everywhere.”
“Yes,” I said, “fancy having a full orchestra to play with.”
“Or the pick of the violinists to play all the sonatas for piano and violin.”
“It will be heaven.”
“That was our bus that went by and stopped lower down,” said Mary. “How stupid of us, we are like something in that old beast La Fontaine, not getting our bus because we are talking of the time when we will be great. He was horrid, the way he liked ants better than grasshoppers, and frogs that wanted to be big, though surely that’s harmless enough, and wretched dairymaids who break jugs of milk, he was always kicking what’s down.”
“Yes, he was awful,” said Richard Quin. “We are just learning ‘Le Corbeau et le Fromage.’ He’s positively pleased because a poor wretched bird does itself out of a bit of cheese.”
“Ruskin was a beast too,” I said. “Sesame and Lilies has made this term disgusting. It’s all about how every woman ought to behave like a queen. Why should she, when there are such lots of exciting things to do?”
“Think of spoiling our minds with all this sort of rubbish when we might be playing the piano,” said Mary.
Indeed, the family was getting on very well. Mary and I were in the state of monomania proper to our destiny, and our relations with Cordelia were much improved by our certainty, which was as absolute as if we had read the news in The Times, that Cordelia would shortly stop playing the violin and get married, Mamma was quite pleased with us all, though Richard Quin did not always make her wholly happy. I remember her once passing her hand over her brow and saying apprehensively, “He is like quicksilver.” But often he made her supremely happy, more ecstatically happy than any of the rest of us could do, particularly when he consented to show what he could do if he worked at his music. The social restrictions of Lovegrove never cramped Richard Quin, who would by mysterious means discover the existence of interesting groups in the dreariest social landscape, and though they were total strangers would establish connection with them by means that never struck them as odd. He unearthed some amateur musicians who practised chamber music in their homes and though they were adult and he was still a schoolboy, became their flautist. My mother went to hear one of their practices and we jeered at her because she came home and said, quite indignantly, “I wish Mozart could have heard Richard Quin play the flute.” It seemed that Mozart had once complained (as others among the great have done) that flautists are never in tune; and it seemed to her for one idiotic maternal moment as if he had shown gross carelessness in not being prophetically aware of her son’s perfect ear and astonishing, idle, gay technique.
But the ground cracked under our feet again. Papa at last set himself the task of writing a book: not just a pamphlet but a full-length book. At first he was very happy in this enterprise and wondered why he had left it so long. He reread many old books and read many new ones, and talked them over with himself as he paced the garden; and on his desk a pile of manuscript grew higher through the weeks. But after a certain time it grew no higher, and though reading was a function he could no more abandon than breathing, he read much less than before. Then a change came over him which we recognized with alarm. He became self-confident and worldly in manner, he dressed with a perfunctory effort at care, he took to going out a great deal, and he brought home a number of strangers. It was quite clear to us that our father had once again fallen into despair at the state of the world, and had once again resolved to set aside the useless tool of the intellect and trust himself to blind chance, which he imagined was the presiding genius responsible for the successes of those who had another sort of intelligence than his.
Once again we foresaw distress for our mother, and privation for all of us, no holidays, no new clothes, no concerts, and we had not long to wait for that catastrophe. But it struck us in an even fiercer form than we had yet experienced. For about a week half a dozen angry men kept on driving up in cabs and going away and coming back still angry. Not for one moment do I think my father had done anything criminal or illegal. He had simply done something infuriating. But he had never before infuriated so many people at the same time. One night they all came together, and did not go till all all of us children were in bed. At last the front door banged and we heard for hours, from the room below ours, Mamma’s astonished voice asking questions, many questions, and when Papa had answered them with his sneering laugh, pressing for another answer. Then Papa’s voice swept up and down the scale, an assurance that a fuss was being made about nothing. We knew he was not telling the truth, for when we lied it was in those very cadences. Suddenly it was daylight, and Mamma was standing at the door, telling us that we must hurry or we would be late for school, somehow everybody had overslept.
That crisis passed. Our crises always passed. Mary and I nodded wisely at each other and said, “You see, in the end it turned out all right.” In those days, when the Navy led a more leisured life, a certain number of naval officers read enormously when they were afloat and picked up some very strange notions; and as soon as they retired became evangelists for some religious or political movement of the more eccentric kind. An old admiral who had formed an admiration of my father’s writings on the high seas came to his rescue. We felt gratitude to the admiral but were not much interested, for the rescue was incomplete. As usual, Papa immediately effaced from his mind the memory of this skirmish with ruin, he was unembarrassed, he felt the contempt for the world natural in one who, so far as he remembered, had never known failure. But the ruin he refused to acknowledge would not consent to leave him and was visible. It was his hands which distressed me. They were beautiful in shape, and had always been alive and busy, even when he was reading, for then they twisted and turned according to the course of his argument with the writer. One had only to look at them to see that he could carve and paint and chisel. But now they were immobile and dirty, not as if he had failed to wash them but as if some internal dinginess were working outward. He had always some dark hairs on the back of his hands, now they were longer and thicker and greyish. Now, too, his wrists were thin, they looked worn like the cuffs of his old suit, and his sleeves hung loose.
But more had altered than his body. Whenever I read the word “estrangement” I think of my father’s relations with us at this time. It is a word misused as a synonym for hostility; its pure meaning describes our situation. My father had no enmity towards any of us, but he had become a stranger. There was no warmth between us. He would still approve of us, tell us that we were walking well and had straight backs, and warn us that whatever looks we had would go for nothing if we stooped or poked our chins, he would bowl to Richard Quin in the garden and would note how his batting was coming on, but it was as if what he had found to praise in us was the only recommendation we had to his favour. We felt ourselves obliged to suspect that he would have passed us by if we had been plain and clumsy. He still had some interest in Richard Quin and in Rosamund, but we were not jealous. We knew that among a crowd of adolescents who meant nothing to him, he could pick these out most easily, for Richard was his only son and good at games, and Rosamund was tall and fair—he liked women to be. They were themselves aware that there was no stronger reason for his preference, and were careful not to confuse him by too warm a response.
But sometimes Rosamund was of special use for him. In the evening she and her mother always brought their sewing down to the sitting room, and settled down on the sofa and worked on the lapfuls of delicate stuff without making a sound while Mamma gave Mary and me our lessons. Sometimes, as one or other of us played, Mamma would suddenly say, “Stop, dear.” However intent on the music she had seemed, she knew at once when Papa had come into the room. He would stand in the doorway, his quill pen a long pale feather in his hands, and would say in a tired voice that he could not go on with his writing, and would be glad if Rosamund could play a game of chess with him. Constance would answer in her prim voice that it would be a pleasure for Rosamund, who would gather up the pale garments from her lap, roll them in a woollen cloth, lay them on the table, and, rising carefully, so that no pins fell on the carpet, and follow him into the study. If I had finished all my lessons, I would go with them, though my father’s study, like everything else about him, was no longer as pleasant as it had been. It had always been apparently disordered. When he was writing an article there were papers and open books spread out on his desk and the deep window-ledge and even on the floor. But when the article was finished the papers were gathered up and the books closed and put back in the shelves, and though their place was immediately taken by others, there was real order there, we would have known that anybody who thought Papa’s study untidy was uneducated. But now the disorder of the room was real. The books and papers were never cleared up nor replaced by others. They lay one on the other, overlapping under dust, and in the shelves they were treated with a new and shocking disrespect. A Blue Book, something about South Africa, had been thrust into the case back upwards, the pages crushed down in a roll on the shelf. I watched it day by day and noted that though Papa sometimes took books from the same shelf, he never set this maltreated volume to rights.
When Rosamund had seated herself he would sweep clear his desk, open the chess-board, and take the pieces out of the dark lacquer box, faintly patterned with gold figures, which his own father had given him when he was a boy. I do not like the game; all such exercises of ingenuity make me feel as though the mind is being treated like a performing animal and forced to do tricks. But to watch these players was to consider a mystery peculiar to themselves. Usually my father’s speech and movements were swift to the point of fierceness. But now he moved more slowly than slow Rosamund. There would be long periods when he sat staring at the chess-board in silence, so long that my thoughts would settle in a standing pool. I would not think or feel, I would be aware of the sound of the wind, of Cordelia playing the violin upstairs, or Mary playing the piano across the hall, and it would seem as if they were all the sounds I should ever hear, and they would become charged with significance. I would expect a revelation, until my father’s stained and wasted hand shot forward from his frayed cuff and contentiously moved a piece. Then it would be Rosamund’s turn for deliberation, but hers was of a different character from his. He plainly thought out every move. When my sisters and I were little we had noticed that grownups’ foreheads were often hot and dry, and were sure it had something to do with the way they worried. It seemed certain that my father’s forehead must have been hotter and drier when he played chess.
But when it was time for Rosamund to make a move it was as if the game already existed, and she was waiting for her senses to tell her not what the next move should be, but what it unalterably was. She would stretch out her hand to the board, and her loose sleeve would fall back and show her milky wrist and forearm; she had nice arms and a nice neck, and always looked well in her petticoat when she was dressing. She and her mother were like statues, we had often remarked it. Now she was like one of the Greek statues in the British Museum, she was like stone that dreamed. Her hand had a sleeping look as it travelled across the board and moved the piece that was foreordained to move.
Then, if the game were drawing near to the close, Papa would throw himself back in his chair with an exclamation of bewilderment, for she was always right. He never won now. He would try. I could see him consciously reviving his fires, commanding his mind to be acute and powerful, and prophetic about little things, as it had been before; but Rosamund, firm behind the veil of trance, would establish the fact of her game, and it would be other than the game he tried to enforce. Sooner or later he would scatter the pieces and close the board, saying that she had grown far too clever for him. He said it in many ways, all of them kind and well-mannered, but she nearly always answered in the same words: “No, I am not clever.” Then they would together put the chessmen back in the box, and we would sit together for a little time longer, as if the game were still going on, Papa black and lean, Rosamund giving out light from her fairness.
I could not understand it at all. What they had been playing was stranger than a game, for here was Papa thinking out each move, obviously often choosing between two or three alternatives and altering his mind at the last minute, yet here was Rosamund, not using her reason at all, simply knowing what moves succeeded each other in a game that existed somewhere in full completion, even before they had sat down to play it. How could there be one game which Papa made up as he went along, and another which existed before it began, and how could they both be the same game? I would ask myself that question, and various passages of music would come into my mind, until Papa would begin to mutter phrases and feel for his quill pen, though he dropped it as soon as he had found it, and Rosamund’s hand would twitch as if she missed her needle. Papa would rise and thank her for having given him such a good game, and force himself to find some action which would assure me that I also meant something to him, running his hand through my hair and telling me that I was like some relative of whom I had never heard. When we returned to the sitting room Mamma always asked, “Did you have a nice game with Papa?” It was her habit now to question us whenever we had been with him, as if he lived a long way away from her, and she wished for news of him.