The Saga of the Century by Rebecca West

Author:Rebecca West [West, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Autobiographical, Fiction, Literary, Retail
ISBN: 9781453276471
Amazon: B0090WRZYS
Barnesnoble: B0090WRZYS
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-09-11T04:00:00+00:00

IV

OUR HAPPINESS at the Dog and Duck was so great that it was the first place where Mary and I felt any prolonged twinge of rebellion against our destinies. Usually we accepted the knowledge that we were pianists, not in the sense that we chose to play the piano, for that implied that we could have stopped if we had wished, but because we had been born so, as Hindus are born Brahmins or Untouchables, so we made no fuss about it. But at the Dog and Duck, when we had to sit practising at the piano Mamma had hired from Reading, we often sulked. I would rather have been on a bench in the garden, shelling peas or stringing beans into one of those big china bowls, white inside, dark cream and fluted outside, which are surely among the handsomest of household objects, until the ferry-bell rang and I put down my bowl on the grass and slipped on my padded gloves, and took the punt over, hearing first the lovely gush of the water as the pole parted it and went down to the one right place where it should strike the river-bottom, and then the delicate spit-spit-spit of the drops it scattered as it came up between my twirling hands. That was another grievance. Even in padded gloves, that was all the boating we were allowed to do. Richard Quin and Rosamund were good about taking us out on the river, but that was not quite what we wanted. They often took us into the arcade of some backwater they had discovered, not to be seen from the bank, nosing the boat in slowly so that the green crystal pavement was not shattered more than need be, until we came to the inner reach, which seemed sealed by greenness at each end, and we sat as quietly as if we were in church, nobody knowing that we were there, and the ruffled water settling to crystal again around us. But Mary and I could never be the showmen.

Our resentment really went deeper than that. Mary and I would have liked to have a life together on the river which would have proved us as close companions, sharing as many secrets, as Rosamund and Richard Quin. Also it irritated us that even the restriction on our rowing was not quite our own. Cordelia was infringing our rights in our grievance, by a fantasy which ignored the absolute certainty that she would never be a violinist. The great teacher who had heard her play had dispersed her hopes so brutally that even her iron resolution was convinced and broken, and she never touched her violin now. It was even shut up in one of Mamma’s old trunks; we could not think why Mamma did not give it away. But when she was asked if she would like to take out a boat she would assume her white, worried stare, which suggested that she was bearing in mind some important

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