The Fountain Overflows (31 page)

“Come in, children,” said Mamma, in accents hollow in bewilderment. “A friend of yours has called to see you.” A convulsive expression with which I was familiar passed over her face. She found Aunt Lily’s dress and ornament, which were girlish and frivolous, as repugnant as Miss Beevor’s attempts at the romantic, perhaps more so, for Aunt Lily offered more targets. If Miss Beevor wore a mosaic brooch representing doves drinking from a fountain, Aunt Lily wore a necklace of enamel violets to enliven her tight-waisted coat and skirt, secured her large fawn beaver hat with a number of hatpins that had enamel cupids as heads, and several charm bracelets jingled from her wrists. I prepared a defence for use afterwards on the ground that if Cordelia had a Miss Beevor there was no reason why I should not have an Aunt Lily.

“Miss Moon tells me,” said Mamma, “that there is some idea of your going round to Nancy Phillips’s house again this afternoon.” She spoke wearily. Obviously this visit had taken her from Richard Quin’s bedside, and she could hardly keep her patience. “But I think she must be mistaken, it is so very soon, she cannot really be wanting visitors the day after a big party.”

“I did say I would go,” I mumbled, “but I forgot.”

“Say you are sorry then,” said Mamma, “for it was rude of you to forget so kind an invitation. But there is another thing.” The expression in her eye reminded me of a picture I had seen of a hind caught in a thicket. She looked so when the conditions of our life trapped her in hideousness, when she could not send a cheque to Cousin Ralph on the right date, when she had to see a dun. “Mrs. Phillips has sent you and Rosamund both presents.”

I could see what had happened. Mrs. Phillips had been awake for a long time when they brought in her breakfast, and she had told them to fetch Aunt Lily at once; and when Aunt Lily had hurried in, blinking and yawning in her dressing-gown and curlers, she had told her to go out and get some presents for those horrible children and take them over to their house and be sure, sure, to get them to come along that afternoon.

“But really,” Mamma went on, very close to tears, “I cannot let you accept them. They are much too good.”

“Oh, come now,” chattered Aunt Lily, “they’re just some little things we thought your clever kiddies would like.”

“They are far too good,” persisted Mamma, and this time Aunt Lily, persisting on her side, said, “What’s the good of Mr. Phillips being fortunate in the City if we can’t do a thing like this when we want to?”

Mamma quivered and was still. “These things are most beautiful,” she said. She did her best, but no member of her family would not have known that Mrs. Phillips’s offerings struck her as the extreme of hideousness, ostentation, and grossly wasteful expenditure. She said, “But, you see, we are not at all fortunate, and we could not return your generosity in any form. I cannot let Mrs. Phillips give my daughter and my cousin’s child these valuable presents, when we could not give a present of any sort to Nancy. It would be—”

But Aunt Lily cut into Mamma’s wail, wailing herself. Her charms and bangles, her large beaver hat, were for a second agitated by fear. “My sister will be ever so upset if I have to take those presents back.”

My mother melted. “I will explain it to your sister myself, if you wish it, Miss Moon,” she said. Her great eyes blazed at me, inquiring: Why have you involved me with this vulgar and silly woman, to whom I cannot even be merciless, because she is so pitiful, who presses these idiot gifts on us and will not let me go back to Richard Quin’s bedside? Aloud she followed the same train of thought more temperately. “But, dear me, how has all this come about? How did you pick out these two girls at that large party?” A ray of understanding showed its light. “Oh, did Rose play the piano?”

“Oh, no!” said Aunt Lily, with the promptitude of one who, with the best will in the world, cannot help telling the truth. “It was more than that. Anyone can play the piano. I can myself. All by ear, I can’t read a note of music. I wouldn’t have thought so much of that, I’ve always been able to vamp ever since I was a kiddy,” she added, suddenly smiling at Rosamund and me, to revive the supposition of a sudden and strong mutual attraction between us.

“It was more than that!” repeated Mamma in bewilderment. “You wouldn’t have thought so much of that! Well, what was it that you thought so much of?”

I had a great awe and admiration for Mamma’s detective powers. I owned up. “I did a thought-reading trick.”

“Oh, Rose!” groaned Mamma.

“It was not much,” I said. “I put my hands on each side of a girl’s face, and I made her guess the number and say it just to herself, and then I told her what the number was.”

I had never had an unkindly look from Constance before, but she was now staring at me very coldly; and Mamma was sealed in her anger, motionless.

Aunt Lily broke the silence, saying, “Well, I’m sorry if I’ve spoken out of turn. And I’m sorry if I’ve got poor little Rose into trouble. But thought-reading. I don’t see nothing wrong in that. I mean, I don’t see anything wrong in that.”

The humility of that self-correction broke the ice of my mother’s anger. She explained gently, “Yes, there is no harm in thought-reading as a trick. But—”

“But it’s not a trick,” interrupted Aunt Lily. In her embarrassment she had been looking down on her black open-work stockings and her high-heeled shoes, wriggling her feet as if she wanted to get the effect from different angles. Now she raised her head and said with a certain shrewdness and obstinacy, “But it wasn’t a trick. I watched her. It wasn’t as if the two kiddies had done it together and had a code, like the people on the music-halls. She did it all herself, your daughter did. She’s got a gift, the gift, some people call it.”

My mother shuddered as at an unbearable vulgarity. “The trouble is that people who do such things go on to other things. To fortune-telling. To table-turning. To spirit-rapping.”

“Well, what’s the harm in that?” said Aunt Lily. “Fortune-telling I mean. The rest I don’t care about. I don’t want to have anything to do with spirits. But fortune-telling. If you don’t know what’s going to happen, and it might all come out one way, and then you’d be very happy all your life long, and on the other hand it would come so that you’d never have anything to live for. Well, what’s the harm in finding out which way it’s going to work out?”

Hope overlaid with brightness the other bright colours of her face. Mamma and Constance looked on her with a sort of tender horror, and Mamma said softly, “But it is wrong.”

“Oh, I grant you it may be wrong,” said Aunt Lily, “but you don’t really mean you think it’s so wrong that you shouldn’t do it? Don’t you ever read tea leaves?” Mamma and Constance shook their heads. “Well, you are funny. It does no harm. That and the cards, how can there be any harm? If ever there was anything that was just a bit of fun, surely it’s that?”

“If it is just a bit of fun,” asked Mamma, “then why are you so eager for it?”

At that Aunt Lily looked as if she were going to cry, and I turned my back on the room and looked out onto the road. I had heard Constance’s voice say with her peculiar large primness, “It is wrong. The Roman Catholics forbid any of their people to practise it and I think they are right,” and Mamma declared fierily, “If there is a wall between the present and the future it is not for us to pull it down,” when a hansom cab came jingling along the road. Mrs. Phillips got out. She had not been able to wait any longer. I wondered whether her arrival would make things worse or better. It would at any rate precipitate them, for she looked up at the driver on his perch behind the roof and spoke to him but did not hand him up his fare. Hansom cabs were so expensive by our family standards that I was unable to imagine anybody sane keeping one waiting for long, so I assumed that she and her sister would soon be gone. That meant I would have to face my mother’s naked anger. All the same I did not want Mrs. Phillips to make a lengthy visit.

After she had spoken to the driver she stood still on the pavement under the lamp-post opposite our gate, where the still unextinguished light was sallow and owlish, and stared hungrily at our house. I wanted to lean out of the window and call to her that it was our house, she should not stare at it so. The cab-driver gazed down on her with complacence and approval, twirling his moustache. Hansom drivers took themselves seriously as at once servants and arbiters of elegance. They were always smartly dressed, this one had a buttonhole though it was December, and they liked to have smart fares. In those days all tall women were admired, and Mrs. Phillips was very tall, and she was certainly elegant. She wore a wine-coloured beaver hat rising in a crest of darker plumes, and a wine-coloured coat and skirt. The skirt touched the ground and was immensely flared; it was a triangle with the apex at her sternly corseted waist. A dark fur stole fell from her shoulders to her knees and her arms were buried to the elbow in a muff of the same fur. The inner darkness in the colours of her dress and fur, the swarthiness of her skin, made her part of the disgrace of winter; not its cold, not its rain, but the rutted grease on the roadway, the discolouration left by the wet night on the pavement. The regard she was concentrating on our house was also drab. She wanted something here but her face shone as little as if she wanted nothing. Mamma, paying homage to a diamond in a jeweller’s window, gave out light like the jewel itself. Rosamund, wanting us all to go together to the seaside, was like a beach under noon. But Mrs. Phillips’s craving was tedious.

“Mrs. Phillips is here,” I said to Aunt Lily, and she made a frightened noise and jumped up, saying, “Let me open the door, it’ll save the girl, and I’ll explain.”

She ran from the room before we could forestall her and Mamma whispered to Constance, “Oh, the poor thing!” and Constance whispered back, “Yes, indeed, to hope, at that age, with that appearance!” Wheeling about, Mamma hissed at me, “You put yourself into a position where you would have had to lie to that poor creature,” and Constance added in the same tone, “That, or break her heart.” Their whispers had enormous force and seemed more impersonal than the kind of rebuke I had ever received before. It was like being rebuked by the winds.

My first thought, when I saw how Mamma and Constance received Mrs. Phillips, was that they recognized her as somebody whom they already knew. So definite was their rejection of her that it seemed as if it must be fully informed and documented. But she had never seen them before. She showed it first by the half-amused knitting of her brows as she took in the odd Punch-and-Judy vehemence of my emaciated Mamma, the overhanging, sculptural quality of Constance, their shabby clothes, the poverty-stricken room; and then she too obviously thought that heaven help her if she failed to get her way, since this was all she was up against. Meanwhile Mamma and Constance paled and flinched, each stretched an arm to push her own child behind her. In an instant they recovered themselves, far too quickly for Mrs. Phillips, who was not one of those people whom Papa described as able to turn around in their own length, to be quite sure of what she had seen. But Mamma kept her hand on my arm as she said, “I am sorry to receive you in the dining room, Mrs. Phillips, but this is a small house and we are a large family, and I know that as these are the holidays what should be my drawing room will be strewn with toys and books and music.”

Mrs. Phillips replied that she knew what it was, that when her Nancy and Cecil were at home the place looked like a pigsty, and settled in the armchair where Aunt Lily had been sitting. She turned her large picturesque face towards Rosamund and me, gave us a shallow smile, and told Mamma that she hoped her sister was wrong in thinking they weren’t going to be able to borrow the kiddies for the afternoon. I heard Mamma sigh deeply. Winter her frailty could bear well enough, but not this extreme desolation, this universal lack. I felt very glad that hansoms were so expensive, that even Mrs. Phillips would not be able to keep one waiting forever.

Mamma said, “I must tell you that I am angry at the children for doing that thought-reading trick. You see, we are Scottish, and we take these things more seriously than the English.” And while she went on with her explanation Mrs. Phillips appeared to lose all interest. She was wearing only one glove, and she began examining the other, stretching and smoothing it. She could not bear it, that a shabby little woman like my mother should stand between her and what she had arranged to have. But she ceased to feel that resentment or anything else, for she suddenly went from us, passing into the cavern of her preoccupation. She stood up suddenly, and spared us just as much of her attention as was necessary to say, “Well, well, we must be going, and sometime the kiddies must come along and have tea with Nancy, and we won’t have any tricks, I promise you. Come on, Lily.” She needed to be out of this little room so full of people, she wanted to be alone, or with Lily, whom she could disregard, so that she could think of what she wanted. Mamma rose, eager to say good-bye, but as their hands went out to meet a look of duty came into her eyes, and she sat down again, as if she must refuse to let this pair go until she had settled something with them. Gazing up at Mrs. Phillips, who was taking no notice of her, and was putting on her other glove with absorbed interest, she said, in a voice so tense that it cracked, “You won’t go on with—with the idea?”

Mrs. Phillips answered drowsily, “Go on with the idea? With what idea? The thought-reading?” She laughed gently as if it were an absurd notion that she would pursue with assiduity anything connected with us. “No, I won’t think of it again. We’re not a spooky family.”

“Tea-leaves and cards we do try sometimes,” interjected Aunt Lily stoutly, both for the sake of honesty and to show Mamma that she would not be browbeaten.

“Yes, just for fun,” admitted Mrs. Phillips, “but I don’t suppose we think of it twice in a year, and I wouldn’t have thought of it now if it hadn’t been for your dear clever little girlies. Little, say I. I do believe the fair one’s as big as that great maypole, my Nancy. Well, good-bye for now.”

Mamma opened her mouth, but she was defeated by the tall woman’s indifference, which was nearly that of an inanimate object. It seemed as foolish to talk to her as it would have been to talk to a stove. At that moment Kate came in with the hot plates for luncheon, and Constance swooped down to pick up the cardboard box, which was lying on the hearthrug, and handed it to Aunt Lily, who said with a wry smile, “Well, if that’s not allowed, it’s not allowed.”