The Fountain Overflows Read online

  In the sitting room Papa was still explaining to Richard Quin all about the passages and chambers inside the fortress, and Mary had come downstairs in her eighteenth-century dress, with her dark hair piled on the top of her head, and was sitting in the only chair she could find with a high back, for she liked to do what our schoolmistresses angrily called “lolling on a chair,” reading a little volume of Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest which Papa had given her as a Christmas-tree present. I was alarmed because neither of them seemed to understand when Mamma introduced Miss Beevor that something was going to happen even worse than her being there, though this was a terrible breach of the family tradition that no stranger came into our house on Christmas Day. Papa was wearing the look of braked perception with which he regarded any scientific problem life might bring him, such as the breakdown of a paraffin stove, or whether the swelling we once all had on our throats was mumps. It was as if he thought that he might understand what was wrong if he could restrain the tendency of his mind to rush past the problem to something more interesting. He was in fact wondering, as I had done, why a woman should have such a yellow skin. Mary’s mouth had gone the way that made them say at school that they did not like to see a little girl looking like that.

  Mamma told them brightly that Miss Beevor had been kind enough to teach Cordelia a new solo, and had had the even greater kindness to break into her own Christmas Day to come and play her accompaniment. Mary, who had shut The Romance of the Forest out of politeness, opened it again and began to read again. But such a look of misery passed over my mother’s face that I myself took the book out of Mary’s hand. She went on looking at the place where the page had been. Mamma waved Miss Beevor to the piano, and sat down in a chair which she had moved so that her face would be hidden from the two performers. Then Miss Beevor ran her hands over the keys in a profusion of what Mary and I scornfully called collywobbles, and Cordelia stepped out into the space beside the piano, her eye running unhappily round the room. She was wishing that our dolls’ houses had been put away and hoping that Miss Beevor would not think her a baby for having one. I sank down on the floor, and Cordelia frowned at me and jerked her bow at me, to show that she wanted me to get up and sit in a chair, but I took no notice. She would have liked us to be tidied away as well as the toys.

  After Cordelia turned to the piano and got the note, she set her chin down and raised the bow, but, smiling as if at some intimate and ridiculous memory, lowered it again. Turning back to Miss Beevor, she said, with the simper she always assumed when talking to a teacher, “They all know this quite well, even the children, there was a poor old man who used to play it in the street in Edinburgh.”

  My mother leaned forward in her chair and said, “You do not mean the old man who always played outside our flat on Friday nights?”

  “Yes, Mamma.” Cordelia smiled.

  My mother turned her face away. The old man had been a violinist of great talent, who had once been second violin in the Scottish Orchestra, who had, as she delicately put it, “come to grief” and lost his position, and come down to the gutter. When he played under our windows Mamma would lean out into the darkness, nodding in sad joy as she sniffed up the music, muttering, “Poor wretch, his phrasing is as pure as ever,” and calling to our servant to take him out coffee and a sandwich. Cordelia began to play the composition he had never omitted from his serenade, Bach’s “Air on the G String.” That meant that she had heard it played exquisitely, time after time; she made it a juicy whine. My mother twisted round in her chair and glared at Mary and me, threatening us with her full rage if we, then or afterwards, mocked our sister’s musical idiocy, which was now plainer than ever before, for Miss Beevor had made her playing at once much better and much worse, by giving her resolute fingers greater power to express her misunderstanding of sound. We glared back, trying to convey to her how much we thought she was to blame for having been so weak with Cordelia, for not having forbidden her long ago to touch the violin. Then suddenly we were afraid, for she began to laugh. We watched in terror while she and her laughter contended like two desperate people wrestling on the edge of an abyss, for Cordelia and Miss Beevor really did not deserve that, nobody deserved that. She won just in time to be able to turn slowly as the last note sounded and say in an unhurried voice, “Cordelia, what a lovely Christmas present,” and meet Miss Beevor’s triumphant smile, while Cordelia clattered up to her for a kiss.

  “And that,” began Miss Beevor, only to break off to wipe her eyes. “And that,” she went on, choking, “isn’t all. She’s learned a lovely new piece called ‘Meditation’ from an opera called Thais, by a French composer called Massenet. She learned it so easily. Oh, it’s so wonderful to teach her. She is the pupil I have waited for all my life.”

  5

  THREE DAYS after Christmas my mother brought a letter into the sitting room, where I was sitting alone, playing with my dolls’ house. The others had gone with Papa to luncheon with the Langhams, and Mamma had thought three children were too many. She said, “Rose, my cousin Constance thanks me for our presents, but she still does not ask us to go and see her and does not say that she will come here, though God knows I asked her. There must be something wrong. I am going now. You can stay here with Kate if you like, but it would be nice if you would come. You will like Rosamund, I am sure.”

  I said I would go with her, because I was really so unhappy about her. She did not seem able to stop worrying about Cordelia, who ever since that disgusting invasion of our house on Christmas Day had been playing the violin all over the house with the air of somebody who is being photographed. We started off at once, and very soon we both forgot Cordelia, it was such an exciting journey. First we went in a train, there was a Lancer sitting opposite us, one of those lovely soldiers who wore scarlet jackets to the waist, very tight trousers with braid down the outer seams, and little round pill-box caps on the side of the head, and were said to be very brave. Then we went up iron steps that clanked under one’s feet to a station right up in the air on a level with the treetops and took a train which ran high above parks in which boys were playing football, a sight which almost made me glad I was a girl and could do really interesting and adventurous things. Then the train ran nearer earth between dark, close-pressed houses with bits built out behind like ladies’ bustles, and thin strips of garden, each as different as people are, some tidy, some riotous, some lovely, some nothing, and at last we came to our station. A subway was damp and echoing and as there was nobody else going through it I was allowed to halloo there for a moment or two, and then we came up beside a grey public house called the King of Prussia. To our right and left stretched a grey road, never getting any better, though one could see quite a long way down it.

  “Please,” said Mamma to a passer-by, “could you tell us the way to Knightlily Road? What, this is it? Oh, no. Oh, surely no. Oh, I beg your pardon, I did not mean that you were wrong. I am sure you are right. But it is such a disappointment to us.”

  But we were standing outside Number 250, and Constance lived at Number 475. We had to ask which way to turn of a baker’s boy, who was carrying a wicker basket full of smoking and sweet-smelling loaves from a van to a shop, and when he heard the number he pointed to the right, and stood still and followed us with his eyes when we started to go there. “Why did he stare?” asked Mamma. “Am I looking very funny?” I told her that she did not, though of course she always looked queerly thin and nerve-ridden and shabby. She did not believe me, she paused for a minute to straighten her shoulders and cock her hat and assume the character of a smart and undefeated woman. Then we started off, while I realized without emotion that Constance lived among the kind of people which in those days were called “common.” More fortunate children than ourselves might have called them poor, but we knew better, for most of them were no poorer than we were. They were people who live in ugly houses in ugly streets among neighbours who got drunk on Saturday nights, and who did not read books or play music or go t
o picture galleries and who were unnecessarily rude to one another, and, what was specially degrading, “made faces,” as well as not having baths every day. We did not despise these people, we simply felt that they did not have as amusing a time as we did, and we had understood, almost as soon as we could understand anything, that we had to rely on our own efforts if we were not to find ourselves living on that level, and I was not surprised, therefore, to find that a relative of mine had sunk to that level; I was only anxious to find out whether she found life there supportable. But I noticed that my mother was of a different mind. She was dismayed by the discovery, and though she invented a distraction from the dreariness of the road by noting the patterns of the Nottingham lace curtains in the window, some of which were indeed very pretty, she could not keep her attention on them. At last she exclaimed, “To make Constance live here is like keeping the crown jewels in an old tin trunk.”

  By then she was getting impatient, as she easily did at all times, for when we reached the four hundred and seventies we found that the figures on the transoms were so indistinct that we could not be sure which house was Number 475. We halted in front of one which we thought must be right, and immediately there came to me the feeling that we were being watched. On the other side of the road, winter though it was, a couple of window-sashes went up. A woman putting a latchkey into the door of the next house became oddly slow in her movements and twisted herself towards us, dipping her head but surely throwing a sideways glance at us. Suddenly there broke through the overcast sky a shaft of lemon-yellow, year’s-end sunshine. Everything in the street, the cornices and window-frames and porches, the railings, the lamp-posts, stood out bright and sharp and unlikeable, and so too did these furtive signs of vigilance.

  “I think this must be it,” said Mamma. “But I wonder if we might ask the lady who is just going into the next house …” She made a step in that direction, and the lady at once brought her face down to her latchkey and the lock, and would have been sheltered from us by the thickness of her front door in another second, had she not been, like us, suddenly frozen by shock. A poker flew straight through the glass of the ground-floor window of the house we were facing and fell at our feet. After a second the front door banged behind this woman. I pushed aside my mother’s hand, which she had clapped over my face a second before the poker came arrowing through the air towards us. We both stared at the window. There was a round hole in one of the panes and no other sign of damage. On the other side of the road several more sashes were thrown up.

  “I am going into the house,” said Mamma, like a splendid eagle, “but you must stay outside.”

  At all times when my mother and I were together in the presence of anything that looked like danger I had the fantasy that I was a big, tall man who was protecting her. I picked up the poker and said, “I am going in with you.”

  She did not argue with me. She often did seem to look to her daughters for protection, which was not unnatural in a very feminine woman who had not only no masculine protection but was threatened by its negative. Moreover she understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them. Also I think she knew that if she and I did not go into that house something terrible would happen to the people in it.

  As it was we went to the door and Mamma let the knocker fall on it twice. We then heard a crash inside the house; it was as if a heavy piece of furniture had been thrown over and smashed at the same time. This frightened us much more than the poker coming through the window. My grip tightened on the poker and Mamma drew a deep breath. Shortly afterwards we heard footsteps and the door was opened by a woman who made one think of a Roman statue. She had large, regular features and was pale as stone, and where her fingers gripped her apron it fell into sculptural folds. In a remote, composed voice she spoke my mother’s name, and my mother cried, “Constance,” and they embraced.

  Constance drew back with large, regular tears running down her face. “You see,” she said, “I couldn’t ask you to come here.”

  “Why, Constance,” said Mamma, “as if I of all people wouldn’t have understood. And you could have come to me.”

  “And run the risk of bringing this trouble with me into your house? Oh, you don’t know what it has been like.” Though she spoke urgently, the speed and level of her voice never varied, and I cannot now remember how it was that the effect of urgency was conveyed. “It had been going on for eighteen months, the neighbours talked, I suppose you cannot blame them. So there were reporters and photographers until I nearly went mad, apart from the inconvenience of the thing itself. But come in. Come in. Is this Rose?” She drew us into the hall with her large gentle arm, and gave me an abstracted kiss. As she bowed over me it seemed that her eyes were blank, like the eyes of a statue. “Come in and talk to me,” she said, taking off my mother’s hat, “while I make luncheon for you.”

  “Make nothing for us,” said Mamma, whose eyes were wet. “I’ll take the child out for a bun. Oh, if I had only known.”

  “Nonsense, I must make a meal for Rosamund and me anyway,” said Constance. “I am so glad that you have come. I didn’t want to make you share this awful thing, perhaps I am wicked to be glad that you are here.”

  By now she had led us into the kitchen at the back of the house, and there she and my mother stood together on the coconut mat in front of the range and clung together in a curiously calm yet passionate embrace. I was very much puzzled by their imprudence. Surely the person who had thrown the poker through the window and overturned the wardrobe, or whatever it was, must still be in the house, and presumably at large. I was thinking that it was extraordinary of them to take no precautions for their defense, but to stand there crying and vulnerable, when a movement outside the window caught my eye. A few yards from the house there was a clothesline, on which there were hanging four dishcloths. Three heavy iron saucepans sailed through the air, hit the dishcloths, and fell on the ground. I put down the poker, for I realized the nature of the violence raging through this house.

  “Is this what you call a poltergeist?” I asked Mamma. We had read about them in books by that early psychical researcher, Andrew Lang.

  “Yes, Rose,” said Mamma, her voice quivering with indignation, “you see I am right, supernatural things are horrible.”

  I was a little frightened, but not much; and I tried to remain imperturbable, because I assumed that the supernatural took this coarse form in Constance’s house because she lived among common people, and I had no desire to be impolite by drawing attention to her circumstances.

  “If you are old-fashioned enough to eat soup in the middle of the day,” said Constance, “I have still some of the turkey broth, and I was thinking of frying some Christmas pudding, and there are tangerines. Oh, my dear, it has been so dreadful. There is a thing called the Society of Psychical Research—Oh, listen, it’s starting again.”

  Out in the pantry a jug fell off a hook on the top shelf and was smashed to pieces on the floor. Small pieces of coal were showered on us through the open door, and out there a tattoo was banged on the side of a flour-bin, louder and louder, so that for the time being it was useless to talk.

  When the din had died away my mother breathed indignantly, looking about her with a curled lip, “The lowest of the low.”

  “The dregs,” agreed Constance. “But this society, it made everything so much worse. They seemed to think poor Rosamund had something to do with it. They followed her about as if she were a pickpocket, they questioned me about her as if she were a bad child, though it happens just as much when she is not in the house or anywhere near it, and though the wretched things are harder on her than on anyone, they drag the clothes off her bed at night.”

  “It is always terribly hard on the children,” sighed Mamma.

  “Well, it was hard on us,” said Constance calmly, “and we are here.”

  My mother made a tragic gesture. But Constance ignored it and continued. “The
trouble is to arrange for her to have friends. You are lucky in having four, they can find company among themselves. But as Rosamund is the only one she must find friends outside and she could have done it if these people had not come bothering us, for she can keep her own secrets, but now everyone knows.” Her eyes moved from my mother to me and were benignant. “But now you have come, Rose, she has at least one friend. Go out and fetch her. She is in the garden.”

  “Do I have to go out past that clothesline?” I asked.

  She looked out of the window and saw what I meant. A large cooking pot, tied up in newspaper, had sailed through the air, just as the saucepans had done.

  “My preserving pan, which I packed away in the attic for the winter!” she said primly, as if it were a housemaid’s fault that it had taken this journey through the air. “Come with me, I will show you the other way out.” She took me into the dining room, which looked as if a lunatic had been laying about him with a hatchet, and opened the french windows, which gave onto a neatly kept strip of garden running down to a railway cutting. At the very end were some hutches, and by these was kneeling a little girl of my sort of age. She was too far away for me to be sure of anything except that she was wearing a blue coat, but the sight of her filled me with a sudden desire to turn round and go straight home. I waited with a heavy heart while Constance called in her clear, hollow, unhurried voice, “Rosamund, Rosamund.”

  The little girl slowly raised her head, slowly straightened herself to her feet, and stood quite still, turning her face towards us but making no other sign that she had heard her mother.