The Fountain Overflows (20 page)

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.”