The Fountain Overflows (8 page)

When Sultan’s hooves had clop-clopped up the lane the boys had their laughter out aloud and then led the ponies to the top. There they found some uplands which they did not know, and they followed the gates and came to a farm. An old woman wearing a mob-cap threw open a window and called them by their names, and told them to tie up their ponies in the yard and sit down to the wedding feast. This was a farm called Pinchbeck Hall, and the farmer’s daughter was marrying a London milkman. The boys obeyed her and went into one of the barns and found a long table set out, covered with food, with people sitting round it who were comfortable, ordinary people, mixed with others who had come out of a fairy tale. There were men wearing queerly cut broadcloth suits and women wearing tall hats and plaid shawls. For the milkman, like most London milkmen then and for long after, was Welsh. Papa did not remember the bride and bridegroom at all, so entranced was he by these fairy-tale people and by the food. That had been coarser and more impressive than the refined dishes he was accustomed to eat at his widowed mother’s table, or the spiced dishes enjoyed by Grand-Aunt Willoughby, who had spent most of her life in India. Here there were huge joints of beef, marbled with broad veins of fat, pork with splendid crackling, shining moulds of brawn, and great tongues lolling back on themselves, golden-crusted pies, jewel-bright jellies, foamy syllabubs, pitchers of solid cream, cheeses big as millstones, of sorts not known today. There was a great deal of laughter: these people made more noise when they laughed than the boys could have believed possible, they used to practise in the stables afterwards. And after the food was eaten there was singing. The Surrey people sang comically, all but one very young, flat-chested girl with big eyes, out of whose bony little body there had come a strong, languid, rich voice. “I wonder,” said Papa, “what happened to her afterwards,” and for a moment he paused and brooded.

But then the Welsh guests stood up all together, stiff as soldiers, and sang like the sea, like the wind, like falling waters. Somebody asked if the two boys could sing. My father could not, he had from babyhood felt a fear that if he studied music he would grow up into a woman. But Richard Quin liked to sing, and was not shy, and he gave them “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth,” which he had been taught by his Aunt Florence, who afterwards broke the family’s heart by leaving the Low Church—like all Anglo-Irish, my father’s family were very Low Church—and joining Miss Sellon’s Sisterhood at Plymouth. He had a beautiful voice, and of course he was a most beautiful child, and the wedding party sat and dried their eyes. He was going to sing again, when a lad ran in shouting, and everybody poured out into the farmyard just as a russet streak flashed through it, throwing up before it a spray of squawking poultry. “It must be fun to be a fox,” said Papa dreamily. “To be a fox and kill poor things, and in the end be hunted.”

“Fun?” asked Mamma in wonder.

“Yes, in a way,” said Papa, but went on with his story. Then the horns were heard, while people hurried to open the gates on each side of the farmyard, and in a moment the hounds were through in a chanting white flood. Then came the thud of the hunt’s hooves, louder and louder, a fine sound, like thunder, and the sweating hunters brought along the sweating men in pink, but they did not turn into the farmyard, the horses had their heads so well set on the lane running past the farmyard and were going so hard that the riders could not turn aside, and looked over their shoulders with speed-glazed eyes as they were carried past the open gates. It struck Papa and Richard Quin as strange, as a little frightening that the people in the farmyard were shaken with their own huge kind of laughter because the hunt had lost their fox and their pack. These were the gentry. It served them right to have a bit of ill luck, for once.

They were all going back to the barn to sing and drink some more when another horse came up the lane. It was rolling stiffly backwards and forwards like a rocking-horse. It was Sultan. The boys shouted and ran forward to stop him, which was not difficult, and they found their tutor unable to dismount. He went on sitting in the saddle, his eyes closed, saying, “
Je meurs, je meurs, je meurs.
” While the poor man had been searching the lanes for his charges the hunt had crossed his track, and Sultan had suddenly remembered his youth and joined the field. Nothing would stop him and he had cleared several hedges and a water-jump. It was no wonder that the French tutor, who had never hunted before, could say nothing but “
Je meurs, je meurs, je meurs.
” But it all worked out well, for the farm people had never heard of such a joke as a Frenchman who had been caught up into a hunt, and they stuffed him with food and brought him flagons of drink, and he ended by singing too. He gave them “La Marseillaise” and “Ça ira,” and had the Welsh people la-la-ing a fine chorus to them.

At that Papa suddenly left the past. The story stopped. He was sad, we knew it, we moved away. He sauntered about the stable, humming “La Marseillaise,” which insensibly turned into “The Wearing of the Green,” the only tune he was really sure of, and poking with the worn toe of his shoe at such evidence of decay as a rusted bucket without a bottom, a birch broom which had retained only a few of its twigs, but making no move to alter their position. He was always making such movements, which spoke of an intense but inactive fastidiousness. For a time we lost him, and Mamma found him in a little room where there were three saddles hanging on the wall, half transmuted into a blue-green mould.

My mother slipped her arm into his. “How lovely it will be, for you to work on this newspaper,” she said. “They have been so kind. They are sending a man to put up the beds this afternoon. The manager’s wife has found us a servant.” My father said nothing. He was often kind, but he was also ungrateful. My mother went on, “If this is a success it might lead to all sorts of things. The children,” she said after a pause, her voice rising bravely to hope, but muting its hope because she had known so much disappointment— “the children might have ponies. You would like that.”

My father did not answer. “Like Cream and Sugar,” she mildly persisted.

He pointed at the mouldy saddles. “That stuff is wonderful for cuts,” he said.

“What?” exclaimed my mother.

“Yes,” said my father. “There was an old saddle like this in the saddleroom at home, and whenever any of us boys cut ourselves Micky McGuire the groom used to take us in there, and rub the mould deep into the cut, and it always healed in no time.”

My mother sighed with impatience at what was not to sound a reasonable remark until half a century had passed, and turned away. “Children, children,” she called. “You must have some luncheon and we must find some way of getting poor Richard Quin a place to rest. Oh, how good he has been!”

All parts of the puzzle fell into place before nightfall. The man who came in the afternoon was, as Mamma put it in the language of the day, very civil, and he hammered up our beds and put up the dining-room table and moved the bookcases into Papa’s study, so Mamma was able to get him out of the way, for she told him that the best way he could help would be to unpack his books, though she knew he would only sit down and read them. But it was necessary to keep him in his study, for poor Mamma could not help groaning over the horrid furniture which was now all she had for the downstairs rooms. It was too shabby, even by our standards. There was a particularly dreadful set of chairs covered with red Spanish leather so worn that the surface was flaking off and leaving bare pinkish patches. We grieved with her, and we were surprised when she said that she had decided that the three copies of family portraits which had hung in our Edinburgh drawing room should go upstairs and that each of us girls should have one to hang over her bed. We could not imagine anything nicer, but we thought it a pity that, when she had to make a new drawing room without her good furniture, she should choose to do without these pictures too. But she said, speaking with some distaste, that she did not want to hang them where visitors could see them, lest it should appear that she was trying to make a grand impression by passing off as originals what were only copies.

That seemed strange, for they were really very pretty, and surely Mamma could have explained what they were to anybody who seemed specially impressed. They were very good copies. Indeed, when they had been left to Mamma by a relative of Papa’s who had come out to South Africa just before he died and had liked her very much, there had been some hope that they were originals, which had been dismissed forever by a dealer when we got to Edinburgh. The one that would have been most valuable had it been what it seemed was a portrait by Gainsborough of our great-great-grandmother, which made its reference to the mystery of that artist’s career. She looked out of the canvas with narrowed eyes; it would have seemed natural if fine feelers had grown from her pursed little mouth; a feather headdress gave the illusion that she had two high-pricked ears set very high; and she was dressed in the faint fawns and blues a persian cat would choose to wear if it were changed into a woman. How was a fashionable portrait-painter able to persuade his clients, in an age not given to fantasy, to let him represent all their women as looking like cats? He might have been telling the truth about our ancestress, since Papa looked so like a great cat, but really there cannot ever have existed all over England and Scotland at one time a number of women all feline in appearance and all so wealthy that they could commission Gainsborough. Mamma could never understand it. Mary and I at once proposed that Cordelia should have this portrait hanging over her bed because we knew that otherwise she would be given first choice because she was the eldest, and we always thought that was bad for her.

There was no question which picture could hang over Mary’s bed. Sir Thomas Lawrence had painted my grandfather’s eldest sister, Arabella, in a high-waisted gown of white satin, and with her smooth black hair, her oval face, her arched eyebrows, her undisturbed mouth, her long neck, and her air of being coolly herself within her clothes, she was exactly like Mary. She was said to have had a sad life, and it was true that she had early been left a widow, childless except for one daughter, from whom she was divided by one of those quarrels that were so frequent in my father’s family. There was no wrangling in these quarrels, they were merely silent and final separations. It was as if the people involved had looked into each other’s faces and been appalled at what they saw, and had turned away to walk in opposite directions. But there was no sign of sadness, no threat that she ever could be sad, she just looked like Mary, who never laughed aloud and rarely wept. That left for me Sir Martin Archer Shee’s portrait of our grand-aunt, who had been a clergyman’s wife, though that would not have been guessed from her costume. She wore a classical robe which left bare one arm and shoulder and shoulderblade, and she held a gold cup of antique design, to show off the beauty of her hands. Papa said she had been a mischievous woman. She had persuaded her foolish husband, who was much older than herself, to press an imaginary claim to an extinct barony, which had been warmly supported by one of the royal dukes, for reasons that made Papa and Mamma shake their heads. But you could see how it all happened. The cup she held, and the bracelet she wore around her upper arm, and the fillet binding her short golden curls, were studded with enormous jewels like crystallized fruits. An extinct barony, a royal duke, would be to her something she might find in Aladdin’s cave, and therefore hers by licence derived from a magic lamp or magic ring.

In the course of the afternoon the new servant came, a tall girl named Kate, who walked with a roll, like a sailor dressed up in skirts, and she unpacked all the kitchen things, so we had tea at the usual time. We said we were not tired, and got our toys and books out of our special trunk and arranged them in our rooms, and by the time we had finished we found that it was suppertime, but we were so tired we could hardly eat anything, and we were very glad to go to bed. I was half asleep when Papa came in to kiss us good night, I could not open my eyes, he made a bright rent on the darkness behind my lids and became a person in a dream. I thought, as I sank with him into the dream: I should get up early tomorrow and get to my practice, we have missed a day, but I am very tired, I think I will be very late—for we were a great family for sleep. But in the middle of the night I was surprised to find I had been awakened by a sound to which I had, during the previous few weeks, grown accustomed. The farm horses were stamping in the stables: boom, and then, after a pause, boom again went the hesitating, shifting, irregular hammer of their hooves.

What a noise they are making tonight, I thought. I wonder if Mr. Weir will go out and quiet them. Then I started up, for I remembered that I was not at the farm. I was in a London house, and the stables were empty. I was not frightened. All the same it was as if a great door were swinging on its hinges, and the wind of its swinging blew on my face. I was not frightened, even when I sat up in bed and looked across at Mary, sleeping with her still smooth head on the crook of her arm, and Cordelia, lying face down between her clenched fists, and realized that I was awake, was where there were no horses, and was listening to the sound of horses sleeping in their stalls, and presently I did not even feel lonely. Footsteps went past my closed door and creaked on the staircase. I heard the french window in the room below open after some fretting of the bolt, and there was a twang from each iron step in turn. Papa had gone out to the stables and would protect us from any danger that might be there.

I dropped back in my bed, rolled the sheets and blankets about me, and, rejoicing, told myself that I was safe, I could sleep. Then I longed to see him, and I kicked off the clothes and ran over to the window and pulled aside the curtains. But it was not Papa who was in the garden, it was Mamma. She was walking slowly, as she did when she was worried about money, across the lawn, which glistened white under a flood of moonlight so strong that the lantern she carried gave out no rays but was a calm yellow flame, self-contained within the pervading brightness. The trees beyond the lawn cast an inky lace of pattern on the lawn, and seemed part of a landscape other than was to be seen by day. Now our garden was the edge of a great park running to low wooded hills, which were furred with distant moonlight and mounted one upon another until there was only a handspan of clear pale black sky between them and the lowest star. I thought I heard the horn of the hunt that had gone by that morning in my father’s story. I liked this changed world but I did not want my mother to be out in it alone.