The Fountain Overflows (46 page)

“I would have thought,” said my mother, “that you of all people would have known why you should not encourage this poor woman in this horrible way of making a living.”

“A nice wee flat above a fishermonger’s shop is where she bides,” pursued Cousin Jock. “Verra commodious, though the smell of the fish rises strong as Agag in his armour, towards the end of the day, when all things should rest, but it seems ye canna bring home the necessity to a herring. And up in a nice wee room in this nice wee flat sits Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, a decent widdy woman in her blacks, trussed up like a chicken and bound hand and foot so that there canna be any conjuring tricks, and the curtains are drawn, and the sitting begins. My, but the curtains have surely been dyed. The smell of the dye jines with the smell of the fish, very eloquent to the nose. But yon curtains sairve their purposes. They’re drawn close as if there was a corpse in the house, and they turn day into nicht, a black nicht of fish and dye and dust. And doon fall the walls between the quick and the dead.”

“It has been an exceptionally fine afternoon,” said Constance. “It was a pity to spend it in this way.”

“Woman, you lack a’ sense of the mysteries of time and space and our miserable being,” said Cousin Jock, piously rolling his eyes. “What better way to spend a fine afternoon than to hear the comfortable doctrine of the Lord? For there was Mrs. O’Shaughnessy’s Red Indian control roaring down a trumpet to tell us that death has no sting, the grave no victory, endeavouring to convey the same message as Corinthians First Fifteen Fifty-Five, but with a poorer command of language, no sae surprising in the offspring of a taciturn race. Ay, but there was better than doctrine. It did me guid to see how the mourning were comforted, even as it is promised in the best of buiks. There was a decent body who was assured by her father, passed on thirty years before, that her guid man would recover from his galloping consumption in six months’ time, ay, and very affecting, there was a puir soul whose face was stroked by the wee hand of the wean she lost last Christmas Day.”

“Yet I have heard you say yourself,” said Constance, “that such hands may be made of inflated balloon tissue.”

“Why Jock,” said Mamma coldly, “you know that someday there will be a horrible scene in that wretched flat, someone will tear down the dyed curtains, the light will stream in, and those poor idiots, God pity them, will see that they have been cheated. Will they blame themselves for their idiocy in thinking that Eternity has taken lodgings over a fishmonger opposite Lovegrove Station? You know they will not. They will turn on this unhappy woman, exposed there with the slipped knots hanging round her wrists and ankles—what indignity!—and they will find yards of balloon tissue—”

“Nae doot inside her corsets, saving your presence,” giggled Cousin Jock, “or inside the elastic of less mentionable garments. Oh, what a stromash, to shame the sacred ground on the verra frontiers of time and Etairnity!”

“You are not showing the good I would hope you might to a creature so much less fortunate than yourself,” Mamma remarked with distaste. “You know that Mrs. O’Shaughnessy may be a fraud, and then you should have nothing to do with her unless you can help her to be honest. But if she has real powers, she must be a worse fraud still. For if there be such powers, then one of the few things we know about them is that they come and go and are not at the command of those who possess them. This woman must be very poor if she lives in that sordid station square; though that fishmonger is a very decent man. So if she tells a woman that for a fee of five shillings she will show her dead child at three o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, she will be tempted to keep her engagement. It is all on a very low level indeed, and, children, I hope none of you will ever have anything to do with it. It is so low that, see, I have done the woman an injustice. She might as well be moved by pity as by the thought of the five shillings.”

“Rosamund and I have had our poltergeist,” said Constance, “and we want nothing more to do with the occult world.”

“Your poltergeist, Jock!” said my mother with sudden heat. “I have read very strange things about poltergeists. I have heard that many are caused by fraud. Malicious people who want to alarm their families decide, it seems, to play a trick on them by contriving it so that it seems as if evil spirits had taken possession of the house. They fix up curtains so that they are bound to fall when nobody is by them. They pay mischievous boys to steal into the house and rattle fire-irons and break furniture. But these malicious people sometimes get more than they bargain for. Curtains they never fixed fall down when nobody is by them; the fire-irons follow when the mischievous boys are in their beds. The malicious people end by fearing they have helpers they never hired.”

There was silence in the room. Cousin Jock said, “Aweel, aweel!” and then demanded, in an aggrieved tone, “Ma sawndwich. Wisna there great talk about cuttin’ me a sawndwich?”

“It is here, Papa,” said Rosamund.

“The ham’s awfu’ thick.”

“It is thin in the other one, Papa.”

“Thick or thin, I doot I can manage it with ma dentures,” grieved Cousin Jock. “It’s awfu’ thing to have ill-fitting dentures. They roll about like a ship on the sea, and if I was to tell ye what I found under them at nicht—”

He might, we feared, have taken them out to exhibit their defects, had not Richard Quin at that very moment come back with a bottle of beer and a glass. He said, “The old man had a spare bottle. But he was having supper, and he had a bottle, and he let me taste it, and it was beastly, why do you like it?”

As he filled the glass he looked very handsome, for his skin was flushed with hurry and his features clear-cut with scorn. Cousin Jock looked up at him, and let his own beauty come back to him. He ceased to leer, again he might have been a young poet when a great poetical age was young. He asked, “You play the flute yourself, don’t you, laddy?”

Richard Quin shocked us all by answering, “Not a note.”

Cousin Jock opened his mouth as if he were going to protest that he had often been told otherwise. But he closed it again. He recognized that Richard Quin was playing his own game, he was being insolent and letting it be seen that he knew he was seen to be insolent. At last Cousin Jock said slowly, and with no comedian accent, “No? Then I was wrong. But I play the flute. I will play it for you now.”

He rose, paused for an instant. He was taller than we thought, when he stretched up his long delicate hand and turned out the lights in the gas chandelier he looked very tall. While the last whiteness turned to rose in the incandescent mantles, he went out and got his flute from the hall. While he was gone we were all silent. Mamma’s eyes went to the windows, which were still uncurtained though the darkness had fallen. There was an oblong of light on the lawn, which meant Papa was working in his study. Constance filled her chair with her usual monumental calm, but Rosamund went and sat at her feet, bending her head back so that her golden hair flowed onto her mother’s lap; I had seen her do this before when she thought her mother sad, it was a remote form of caress. Cousin Jock came back into the room, quiet as a spectre, and took his stand at the fireplace. We could see nothing of him through the gloom but his fair hair and the whiteness of his shirt.

A note from a flute is like the call of a young owl through the summer night. It is extraordinary that the flute should make what seems so like a simple, natural sound and should be so subtle in its work, with the paradoxical power of lingering on the ear, and yet responding to the player’s fingers and tongue and breath with a readiness that makes it one of the most agile of instruments. When I had heard Cousin Jock play before it had seemed to me he played too perfectly; it was as if he had sold his soul to the devil for power of performance and naturally enough performed without a soul. But now his playing failed in transmitting no part of the triple mystery in the music he chose, which was the famous flute solo from Gluck’s
Orpheus
and the familiar variations on it. That passage is sublime as pure sound; the mere relationship between the notes must cause delight. It is also a perfect description of the situation of Orpheus and Eurydice at that particular moment in the opera. It also states what is felt by all human beings when they have suffered a deep grief which is still, because they are not barbarians, within control, but is yet irreparable, even if its consequences should be afterwards annulled. Gluck described what filled my mother’s heart when her eyes looked through the window into the dark garden and saw the square of light on the lawn. He described what Constance must have felt within her large marmoreal body as she was confronted with the grotesque disturber of her peace. That was another mystery, that the man who disturbed her peace should transmit Gluck’s restoration of it.

When he came to an end we sat silent in the darkness. So I was not prepared for it when my mother burst out, in the full flood of impatience, “Jock, nobody could play the flute like that with ill-fitting dentures. I do not believe you have false teeth at all.”

“So far as I know he has not,” said Constance.

“He would not have them, since he is so young for his age,” my mother angrily pursued. “Jock, why must you play the clown? Mrs. O’Shaughnessy! That way of talking Scotch! When you can play the flute like that! Why must you try to spoil everything?”

He answered with no more accent than herself, “Life is so terrible. There is nothing to do with it but break it down into nonsense.”

“Terrible?” asked Mamma in surprise.

“What’s the good of music,” he asked, “if there’s all this cancer in the world?”

There came a voice out of the darkness, speaking so earnestly that it was shaken with tears. “What’s the harm in cancer, if there’s all this music in the world?”

I knew that Mamma and Mary and Richard Quin would be as disconcerted as I was by this brave answer, for it was Cordelia who had given it, Cordelia who would never know what music was. It was as if Cousin Jock had not gone far enough, it was as if life were breaking itself down into nonsense. Mamma said, “Light the gas, please, Richard Quin,” and we were all suddenly visible, blinking under the brightness, still pleased and startled by the beautiful music we had heard, and confused by the interchange that had followed it. Mamma looked tenderly at Cordelia and said, “We must leave those poor souls who have cancer, please God we all may be spared, to work out that argument.” Then she turned her eyes to Cousin Jock, who had gone back to his chair and was sitting with his face in his hands. “Why, Jock!” she said. Of course she felt kindly to him now, nobody could dislike a man who played the flute like that, no matter what he was like. “We all love you when you are reasonable. And from today you can ask my children for anything you want. None of them will forget your playing till the last day of their lives. Drink your beer, eat your sandwich.”

He answered into his hands, “Oh, thank you, my dear, but I want nothing. I never want anything now. I cannot bear this ugly world we live in.”

“Do you want us to come back with you?” asked Constance.

“I would be very grateful,” said Cousin Jock, humbly. “I hoped you would. I have the brougham outside.”

“We have only to pack, dear,” said Constance, “and we will not take long.”

“God bless you,” said Cousin Jock.

“Is there anything that you would like better than that ham sandwich?” asked Mamma. “We could heat some soup. I have an idea you have not eaten all day. Oh, why did you not take up the flute professionally?”

“I will do the packing, Mamma,” said Rosamund. “We did not bring many clothes. We have not many clothes to bring.”

I went up to help her. In the intoxication of listening to the Gluck music I had quite forgotten our disaccord in the kitchen. Now I was merely sorry that she was going away, but I no longer saw her as showing cowardly submission to a tyrannous and repulsive parent. Cousin Jock had established himself in my mind as the possessor of a unique talent, and if he showed strange and inconvenient preferences I was willing to admit that Rosamund might know something else about him which justified her in gratifying them. But this time it was she who seemed reluctant to go. Leisurely as she always was in her movements, she was now almost provoking in her refusal to hurry over her packing; and when we went into the bedroom I shared with my sisters, in order to see if one of her nightdresses had been put among ours, she sat down on my bed, and looked about her, and shuffled her feet on the floor as if she were practising a dance-step, and showed every sign of defiant loitering.

It was unlike her, she was always so dutiful. I was surprised too when she pointed her finger at each of the three copies of family portraits which hung over our beds: at the Gainsborough cat-woman crowned with a sugar-loaf of plumes and gauze; at the Lawrence calm woman, so like Mary, who though her tight Empire bodice was cut so low seemed fully clothed in her reserve; at our mischievous great-grand-aunt, with her bright curls, her bright eyes, the bright jewels on her head and on her hands and arms, her bright gold cup. For it was with such sharp irony that my cousin said, “What sensible Papas those ladies must have had.”

“Why, how can you tell that?” I asked.

“They could not have had all those lovely dresses and those jewels and feathers and cloaks, or looked so smooth and content, if their Papas had not stayed quiet and got on with what they had to do.”

This was a new idea to me, and I was shocked. Temperamentally I was born to acquiesce in patriarchy.

“But they have so much to think about,” I said vaguely.

“Have they?” she asked. “They leave themselves little time to think, they make such a fuss about everything. Oh, really,” she said, laughing, “I get very tired of it all. It is like bulls. Why should a bull roar and stamp the ground and blow out of his nostrils and chase poor people that cross the field where he is, just because he is a bull? It can’t be any more difficult to be a bull than to be a cow.” She swung up her feet and lay flat on the bed, her gold curls spilling over my pillow, and laughed up at me. “Silly Papas, silly Papas.”