Free The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West

of our mother’s ball-gowns. This is where Cream and Sugar were. I rode Cream, Richard Quin rode Sugar, so did my brother Barry when he was here, but he hardly ever came. He had left Harrow by then and gone to the India Office. It was usually Richard Quin and I that were here by ourselves, and that was the way I liked it, we always ran well together in double harness. We had some wonderful times here. Those were the days when we had that French tutor I have told you about, my dear. . . .”
    He was gone from us again, but not, as so often happened, on a dangerous journey, from which he would come back not simply empty-handed, but bearing a loss that was positive. This time he had gone back to his childhood. We listened, our mouths open as if we were singing a hymn in his praise. Mamma was watching him as people watch fireworks. About us another autumn morning was hazy, a little later in another year. My father and his brother had not been able to go back to Harrow at the beginning of term because they had had measles and were being allowed some convalescent weeks. They had ridden a lot with their French tutor, who had to ride Sultan. This was not the hardship that might be imagined, when it was said that a French tutor had to take the mount that belonged to the son of an English household. For this French tutor was a man of mark, member of a gentlemanly Belgian family, who had become a geographer and held a lectureship in Paris when he was expelled from France as an atheist and an anarchist by Louis Napoleon after the coup d’état of 1851. My grandmother met him some years later, when she was travelling to forget the pain of her widowhood, and engaged him as tutor to her orphaned sons in the mistaken belief that he had been exiled from France as a Protestant rebel against Catholicism. He had discovered her error shortly after he arrived at her home in County Kerry, and had handled the situation sensitively and honourably, for he gave no hint of his real beliefs while he was under her roof, and taught her boys the elements of the classics and the French language and scientific method, without giving his instruction any peculiar character except a certain mid-nineteenth-century humanitarianism. My father, though very cruel, was very kind.
    All this I learned later. That morning Papa simply explained that the tutor knew how to ride, though he was a scholar and not a passionate horseman, and that George Willoughby, like many another naval officer, had his reasons for liking a quiet mount, and Sultan got very little exercise when his master was at sea and had grown thoroughly lazy. He waddled along, and the tutor had no trouble except when his charges got out of sight, for Cream and Sugar were very fast, they were fine spirited creatures and were well exercised during the boys’ term time when they went back to their owners’ stables. That day the tutor had angered the two boys by making them deal more scrupulously with their daily ten lines of Virgil than they thought fair on their holidays, so they lost him in the first few minutes of their ride, where there was a bridge and then a sharp turn and a canter up a hill. Not only were Cream and Sugar neat on their feet as ballet-dancers, they understood every word you said to them. So the two boys were able to dismount and get the two ponies to leave the road and scramble up a steep wooded bank, and keep dead quiet, at a word’s command, when the tutor jogged along the lane beneath, calling his charges’ names.
    I have seen miniatures of my father and his brother at that age; they were very lovely with their olive skins, and their light eyes fiery under long lashes, their dark hair streaked with gold, and their air of proud incompatibility with any sort of defeat. Human relations are essentially imperfect. Supposing that Papa had been the best of fathers, I would still have been hungry. Because I was his daughter I could not have known all of him, there was that continent in