Fountain Overflows, The by West Rebecca

Author:West, Rebecca [West, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Novel, Modern Classics
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1957-01-15T03:00:00+00:00

11

WHEN Aunt Lily came in at teatime she did not notice Mamma’s disturbed face, she was so eager to know if there was a letter for her. This was always the first thing she asked when she came down in the morning, and when she returned to the house after even the briefest absence. We had told her the times of the posts quite often, but she did not seem to take them in. This afternoon some letters had come for her but not, it appeared, the one she wanted. She was very tired, and this time she could not bear it that the letter had not come. Her face crumpled, and as soon as she heard that Nancy had been taken away she wept without shame, and it could be seen that she was lamenting both her griefs at once, the letter which had not come, the lost girl. But she was inordinately pleased because Nancy had left her the completed nightdress case, her “work,” as a present. Aunt Lily sat down and drank several cups of tea with the nightdress case spread out on the arm of her chair, breaking off every now and then to say, “It’s the thought that I appreciate, she’s such a thoughtful kiddy,” and, again, “All she had, and she left it as a keepsake for her poor old auntie,” and, yet again, “Well, like my own I always felt towards her, and like my own she feels towards me.” It did not escape us that there was a certain falsity, a greasy and posing self-consciousness, about these expressions. We had very often been sharply warned against sentimentality, and though we might have been able to define it only vaguely as the way one should not play Bach, we recognized it. But there was never any doubt that here the false merely overlaid the true. We had got accustomed to the idea that Aunt Lily had formed the vulgarest image of herself as having a heart of gold, and often wrote herself atrocious lines to be said in that character, and delivered them like the worst of actresses, yet had in fact a heart of gold. It is not unlikely that she owed this pollution to her pure self to her origins, for there had never been a population so doomed to excessive relish of themselves and their own emotions as the Southern English who dropped their h’s in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The music-hall comedians and the funny papers never left them alone for a moment. But we had pierced her affectations and knew she mourned Nancy as poignantly as our austere Mamma would mourn for us, were we taken from her.

Aunt Lily told us what luck she had had in the day’s business. They had been very nice at Jay’s, saying that the musquash cape had indeed been started but in the circumstances (she repeated that they used that word) they would put it in stock and say no more about it; and Peter Robinson’s had been as good about two garments of the sort Mrs.

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