The Fountain Overflows (3 page)

When Mamma said good night to us I noticed that since she had been talking to the farm people her Scots accent had become much broader than usual, the line of her sentences had only to be exaggerated for them to be like the phrases of a song. It sounded very pretty. She told us that if we wanted anything in the night we were to rouse her, and we need not even go out into the passage, the door by the window was not a cupboard door as we might think, it led into the room where she and Richard Quin were sleeping. She was always saying things like that, but we never wanted any help, we were so independent, so old for our age. But it was nice of her, we thought, as we sank into our sleep.

Suddenly we were all awake. I was as alert as if I had never slept. I put out my hand and I found that Mary was sitting erect with her back braced against the headboard; and the camp-bed creaked under Cordelia as she started up. It was quite dark, and there was a terrible noise. It was as if the night were frightened of itself. Someone or something was beating on a drum. The noise was not very loud, but the resonance was total, it was as if the drum were the earth itself. It made us feel as sad as Papa’s departure, as Mamma’s occasional tears. It meant nothing but sadness, it stated it again and again.

It stopped. Mary’s hand came into mine. I moistened my lips and breathed, “I wonder what that was.” After all, Cordelia was older than we were, she might know something we did not.

Cordelia said, “It is nothing. It can’t be anything. The farm people must hear it too. They would come and warn us if it were anything dangerous.”

“But it might be something that has never happened before,” said Mary.

“Yes, this may be part of the end of the world,” I said.

“Nonsense,” said Cordelia, “the world won’t come to an end in our time.”

“Why shouldn’t it?” I asked. “It will have to come to an end in somebody’s time.”

“And in a way it would be exciting to be there,” said Mary.

“Go to sleep,” said Cordelia.

“We will, if we want to,” said Mary, “but do not tell us to.”

“I am the eldest,” said Cordelia.

It started again, this beating on the huge drum.

“Mary, Mamma said there was a candle by your side,” I said. “Light it, and then we can get to the window and see if anything is happening.”

Through the darkness we heard the rasp of matches on the box, but no light came. “I cannot think,” said Cordelia, “why Mamma didn’t leave the candle with me.”

“Because there isn’t a table by you, you ass,” said Mary. “And I think the matches are wet, they won’t strike.”

“You are making excuses because you are clumsy,” said Cordelia.

“You are getting cross because you are frightened,” said Mary.

The noise swelled up to a wild proclamation of loss and doom; but suddenly the darkness melted into pale and wavering light, for the door in the wall opened and Mamma came in, holding a candlestick in one hand and rubbing her eyes with the other. “Children, what are you doing, talking so loud at this time of night?” she asked. “We are not alone as we are at home, you might waken the Weirs, and they work so hard.”

“Mamma, what is that terrible noise?”

“A terrible noise! What terrible noise?” she asked, her eyes and mouth stupid with sleep.

“Why, what we are hearing now,” said Mary.

Mamma murmured, “Can something else extraordinary be happening?” With an effort she set herself to listen, and her face lightened. “Why, children, that is the horses stamping in their stalls.”

We were astonished. “What, just those horses that we saw this afternoon?”

“Yes, those. Oh, why, now I listen, I do not wonder you were frightened. It is a tremendous noise to be made by horses’ hooves.”

“But why does it sound so sad?”

Yawning, she answered, “Well, so does thunder, sad as if everything had gone wrong for the last time. And the sea often sounds sad, and the wind in the trees nearly always. Go to sleep, my lambs.”

“But how can a horse’s hoof stamping down on a stable floor sound so sad?” I asked.

“Well, why should Mamma’s fingers coming down on ivory keys sometimes sound so very sad?” asked Mary.

“We will think of that tomorrow, please,” said Mamma, “though really I do not know why I should promise you that we will think to any purpose. If you ask me tomorrow or any other day why some sounds are sad and others glad I shall not be able to tell you. Not even your Papa could tell you that. Why, what a thing to ask, my pets! If you knew that, you would know everything. Good night, my dears, good night.”

All of us were happy at that farm for the first ten days or so. We children were drunk on the hill air, for till then we had never spent more than a few hours above sea-level. “And it is better still in the real mountains,” Mamma told us. “Oh, children, when you have made your way in the world, you must go to Switzerland. Up there at Davos, the air was so clear that everything looks as if it had been polished with a soft cloth.” We said doubtfully, “Switzerland?” and declared it our intention to go farther, to Kilimanjaro, to Popocatepetl, to Mount Everest. Yes, we would wait until Richard Quin was old enough, and we would be the first party to climb Mount Everest. “No, no,” said Mamma, not at all pleased, “not Everest. Once you are doing well, you will find you have enough on your hands with your concerts, and indeed too much.” That answer, given gravely, was of a kind commonly made by her, which caused one of the main inconveniences of our lives. Ordinary people often spoke to Mamma for a short time and then went away, thinking her silly and even mad, because of just such remarks. But she was showing the most splendid sense. She knew she would have climbed Mount Everest if she had had the chance, and she supposed, with the world changing as quickly as it was, that the chance might come to us; she had nearly become a famous pianist and she thought it probable that with our talents we might succeed where only ill luck had given her failure; and in any case she was talking to children, and so she talked as a child, as one played Bach in the manner of Bach, and Brahms in the manner of Brahms.

We made this holiday a rehearsal for Everest, a trial of strength, and again she was sympathetic but applied a principle of moderation. We had supposed we would spend the part of the day left over from our practising in taking long walks over the moors, but we found it more amusing to help on the farm, doing things that the farmer and his wife would not have thought we were strong enough or grown-up enough to do. We would take a forgotten basket of bannocks down to the men working on the farthest field, away beyond the pass; we would polish the horse-brasses the day before the cart was to go down to the market; we stripped the lavender flowers from the bushes in the garden and laid them on boards to dry in the sun under muslin. Mamma let us do what we liked, provided we got in our proper hours at the piano; and that was no hardship, for we always played better during the holidays, when there was not all that idiotic homework, and now that we were so well our fingers were twice as intelligent as usual. But as soon as we had all had our lessons Mamma joined us in this lovely, boastful, new, exciting work on the farm, though at first the farmer and his wife had kept her at a distance. We had seen her make another of those mistakes that made people think her odd, the morning after we got there. Gaily she had spilled on the kitchen table, in a jumble of Bank of Scotland notes and sovereigns, the whole amount she had contracted to pay for the six weeks of our holiday. The Weirs, bony, sandy, grave people, had looked at her with narrow and imbecile glances of suspicion. They could not understand why anybody should want to pay in advance when there was no need; and still less could they understand why a middle-aged woman should laugh like a young girl going to a ball when she did this uncalled-for thing. We understood. It was a delight for her to snatch this money from the mysterious force that acted on all money in our family, annulling it as if it had never been; it was such an indulgence as she had not enjoyed for years to make a payment and prevent it from being even for a moment a debt. But that could not be explained. We could see the Weirs thinking that she was probably a silly, feckless woman, who had only herself to blame for being so shabby. Soon it was all right. She helped Mrs. Weir one day in the dairy, she had learned to make butter when she was a child and it came back to her; and the rightness of her hands, which was as remarkable anywhere else as it was on the keyboard, proved to the countrywoman that she had been wrong. They began to like her even better than they liked us, and every day she seemed younger, and ate more, and her eyes did not stare so much.

But it did not last. Soon she looked ill again, and did not enjoy her food, and was milder with us when she gave us our lessons.

“What do you think is worrying her?” Mary asked me one day when we were picking runner beans in the kitchen-garden. Mamma had passed us with Richard Quin in her arms; I did not say so, but she had made me think of the new mare and its foal though she was still fierce and quick.

“Well, Papa has not written,” I said.

“I feel it’s that too,” said Mary. “But what I can’t understand is, why she ever thought he would.”

“Did you know he wouldn’t?” I asked.

“I thought he would probably forget.”

I did not like her having known better than myself what he was going to do.

“What I can’t understand,” Mary went on, “is that they never seem to get used to each other. Mamma is always surprised when Papa does things like not writing. And Papa is always surprised when Mamma wants to pay bills.”

“Yes, and Mamma minds so,” I said.

“That’s extraordinary,” said Mary.

But we were touching on a long-standing perplexity. We could see that Papa would take an intense interest in us, and that we would take an intense interest in him, because we belonged to the same family. And we could see that Mamma would take another sort of intense interest in us, and that we would give it to her back. But we could not see that Mamma and Papa could matter very much to each other, because they were not related.

“But, Mary, I have been rather wondering. What happens if Papa never writes?”

“If he doesn’t come back?”

“Yes.”

“I should die,” said Mary.

“So would I,” I said. I stood back from the beans and looked at the circle of green hills, which fused and wavered glassily through my tears. But they were there, they remained solid when I wiped away my tears. “But what would we do?” I asked.

“Oh, we could work, we could go into factories or shops or offices, or we could be servants, and between us we could make enough to keep Mamma and Richard Quin till he grows up,” said Mary.

“But I rather think there is a law forbidding people as young as us from working,” I said.

“We could cheat and say we were older than we are,” said Mary. “Everybody is always surprised when they hear our ages.”

“There is that,” I said.

“Anyway it will be all right,” said Mary. “Really all right. You see, we would go on working at the piano in the evenings and someday we would switch to being pianists, and after that it is going to be all right.”

“Oh, yes, of course, I’m not worrying,” I said, “and I think we have enough beans.”

Mamma had not seen us at work in the bean-row when she passed through the kitchen-garden, or she would not have looked desolate. Instead she would have looked as if she were a sick woman, posing for a photograph she meant to send to someone whom she intended to deceive concerning her health. She was thinking and staring again, but she smiled perpetually, she called out cheerful greetings to everybody she met as she went about the farm— “Another bright day again,” or, “Not so sunny, but we can do with a little coolness for a change”—often greeting the same person twice. The weather was calm around us; it was an unusually fine summer. The hills were calm around us; this was the highest farm on that spur of the Pentlands, nobody climbed to us, the August ramblers took a footpath that cut south of us to the main range, we saw them no nearer than the skyline. This calm made an unkindly frame to my mother’s restlessness, the people about the farm began to scrutinize her doubtfully again.

One afternoon I came out of the stable, a polished horse-brass blazing bright in my hand, and found her sitting on the stone dike that separated the paddock from the garden. The postman was due in about a quarter of an hour, and she was rocking backwards and forwards, not much, but more than would be natural unless she would feel herself abandoned if a letter did not come; I looked across the garden to the farm-house and thought I saw someone watching behind the lace curtains of the Weirs’ room. It was probably Mrs. Weir, who I had hoped would praise me for the brightness of the horse-brass. I was in part distracted by pity for Mamma, in part annoyed that things did not go easy with us as they did for other children and that I would not claim the thanks that I deserved. The great thing and the little thing were together in my mind, I wondered if I ought to be ashamed of that. I put the horse-brass down on the dike, and then, remembering how apt I was to lose things, picked it up and slipped it inside one of the knee-elastics of my knickers. I put my arms round Mamma’s neck and kissed her wild hair and whispered, “If you are worried because Papa has not written, why do you not telegraph to the newspaper offices in Lovegrove or to his uncles and people in Ireland? He must be at one of those two places.”

She whispered her answer. It was easier for us to pretend that none of this was happening if we did not speak aloud. “Rose, you are a thoughtful child.”

“Do you mean,” I asked bravely, “that we have not got the sixpence?”

“Oh, yes, we have the sixpence, thank God. But, you see, I do not want to let them know that Papa has not let us know where he is. They would think it strange.”

“Well, so it is,” I said.

“But not,” she contended hopefully, “strange in the way they would think it. Oh, there is nothing we can do, we must wait. And give him time, he will write. A letter may come this very afternoon.”

We kissed. She drew her lips away from mine to say, still whispering, “Do not tell the others.”