Free The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West Page A

which I could not travel, the waste of time before I was born and he already existed. I could not have been a child with him, I could not have been with him and his brother when they knelt on the dry red beech leaves, with their laughing faces pressed against the pulsing silken necks of their crouched and panting ponies, the tree trunks rising sharp silver above them to the blue October haze.
    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