The Constant Nymph. Margaret Kennedy Kennedy
been stopping with ’im,’ piped Susan. ‘I heard her telling Tessa and Lina. Ah … oh … Mammy! Tessa pinched me!’
‘Oh, God! Will you leave the child alone!’ exclaimed Linda, angrily leaning forward to box Teresa’s ears. ‘Come here, Suzanne, and tell us what you heard.’
‘Tessa and Lina was eating cherries and they wouldn’t give me any and shut me out of the room. So I climbed up into the balcony and listened to everything they said to spite them. And Tony came in and said she’d been stopping at Ike’s flat …’
‘Yes? Be quiet, Lewis, please! I want to hear this. Kate! I wonder at you, interrupting in that rude way. You can tell Mr Trigorin about the landslide afterwards. Just all of you be quiet and let me hear this. Go on, lovey! What next?’
‘She’s a filthy little liar!’ burst out Antonia. ‘I never said anything of the sort, did I girls?’
‘No!’ asserted her sisters loyally.
‘Didn’t you? We’ll see. When Suzanne’s finished telling me all she heard she can repeat it over again to your father.’
At that moment Sanger appeared at the head of the stairs, an enormous, infirm figure. His son Caryl supported him. Jacob Birnbaum strolled thoughtfully along the passage behind them and peered over their shoulders at the scene going on in the hall below. Linda rose and pointed at Antonia.
‘Look at her, Albert!’ she bawled. ‘Just look at her. She’s come back, if you please. D’you want to know what she’s been up to?’
Sanger descended the stairs with difficulty, leaning heavily on Caryl’s arm and preceded by Gelert, his boarhound. Birnbaum, looking a trifle nervous, brought up the rear of this procession. Lewis and Trigorin forgot Antonia and her troubles in the shocked surprise with which they viewed their host. In the months that had elapsed since they saw him last, disease and decay had made rapid advances. His huge frame looked shrunken: the flesh sagged heavily on a face half hidden by grizzled hair. The splendid vitality of the man was gone, leaving this mountainous wreck, blinking at them with dim, bloodshot eyes.
When he reached the hall his mistress began to upbraid him and Antonia, calling them by every discreditable name in her very extensive vocabulary. Lewis and Birnbaum, used to these scenes, greeted each other with long faces and tried to create a diversion by announcing that the corkscrew had been lost. But Sanger paid no heed to any of them; he continued to stare at his daughter as if waiting for her to speak. She had gone very white, but was steadily drinking her soup as if nothing had happened.
‘Well, my girl,’ he said at last. ‘I had intended to beat you when you got home. But it’s too much trouble; too … much … trouble. Besides, I’m hungry.’
And he collapsed into his chair at the head of the table.
‘When I’m less busy,’ he promised Linda, ‘I’ll institute a disciplinary system. I’ll thrash all the girls for half an hour every morning, including Susan.’
And he shot a ferocious look at his youngest, who shivered in her chair, though, as a matter of fact, she was the only child in the house who escaped his blows.
‘Thrash all the girls every day?’ asked Sebastian, who had joined them in time to hear this remark. ‘What for?’
‘For their incontinent behaviour,’ replied their father. ‘Beating, Sebastian, is the only remedy. You can beat Susan if you like.’
‘I would like,’ said Sebastian.
‘If the men of this family co-operate, we may manage to introduce a little order into the household. Caryl shall beat Kate.’
‘Kate doesn’t need it,’ said Sebastian gravely.
‘I daresay not. But a little undeserved beating does them no harm. Kate will be all the better for it.’
And Sanger looked affectionately into Kate’s distressed face and asked her for some soup.
‘You’d better let Jacob beat Antonia,’ said Linda sourly. ‘He’s been keeping her this past week.’
‘Is that so?’ Sanger shifted his morose regard from his daughter to his friend. ‘Is that so, Jacob?’
‘I hope that you have no objection,’ said Birnbaum, with as much effrontery as he could muster. ‘Some day, perhaps, some more of the children will come down. We amused ourselves so much. But Tony was anxious to be at home for the birthday.’
Sanger sighed gustily and said:
‘Very friendly of you, Jacob!’
At which Birnbaum looked uncomfortable. Antonia, lifting her head for the first time, looked at her father and then at her lover with stony, scornful eyes. In the uneasy pause which ensued the voice of Trigorin was heard in a speech which had gone on, unheeded, ever since Sanger appeared on the stairs.
‘There is no privilege,’ he was saying,’ which I have more desired than to be a guest at this house.’
‘Bless my soul! Trigorin!’ exclaimed Sanger. ‘I’d forgotten you were here. I must apologise. But you’re a family man yourself, I believe, so you’re probably accustomed to this sort of thing. I hope Kate is making you comfortable. Look! Have you met Birnbaum?’
But Trigorin did not want to talk to Birnbaum, who was, obviously, no musician. And Birnbaum did not want to talk to anyone. He occupied himself sulkily in pulling corks and glancing furtively at Antonia. Sanger was very silent and ate little. He sat staring at his plate in such a moody abstraction, heaving such melancholy sighs, that nobody liked to speak to him. Lewis talked to Caryl in undertones, the children giggled at their end of the table, and Trigorin was thrown once more upon the melting glances of Linda.
The gloomy meal proceeded calmly enough save for a scene in which Paulina and Sebastian were ordered from the room for spitting at each other across the table. But even this was accomplished without the tumult and gusto of other days. Sanger had lost his love of life. He was a sick man, absorbed in his last desperate struggle; too ill to resent the conduct of his children and his friends. He saw the looks which Linda cast upon Trigorin; he guessed that Birnbaum had seduced his daughter, but he could not rouse himself to any protest. Towards the end of supper, however, having drunk a good deal of the cognac which Birnbaum had brought him, he brightened up a little. He began to tease Lewis about the ‘Revolutionary Songs’, and told how at an early rehearsal the tenors had taken their first lead a bar late and how they had remained a bar late throughout the piece, whereat Lewis determined that it sounded better that way. Later in the evening he became very good company indeed and told them funny stories about Brahms. For an hour he was himself again, and his friends forgot their gloom; they caught the old sense of space and heroic joviality – felt that they were assisting at something epic and earning a sort of immortality simply by listening to Sanger and laughing with him. But as the night advanced he became less intelligible, and when Caryl and Lewis took him up to bed he was speechless. Trigorin and Birnbaum, who did not find much to say to each other, retired to the spare bedroom which they were to share.
4
Jacob Birnbaum stood behind a screen which formed one of the wings in ‘a room in the Vatican’. His intelligent forehead was smothered beneath three tea cosies, placed one upon the other, to form a papal crown. The rest of his person was muffled in an ancient Spanish cope. He made a sufficiently impressive Borgia. Upon the stage the Dodd opera was in full swing and Trigorin was rattling away at the piano. Antonia was dying in as Latin a manner as she could compass, her long hair trailing over the shoulder of Roberto, who made a most polite little cardinal, in Kate’s red dressing-gown. He supported the poisoned lady as she swung through her final swift, suave, heart-rending air, and when she had breathed her last put her on the floor almost at Birnbaum’s feet. She lay there very pink and pleased with herself, her eyes tightly shut in an innocent attempt to look convincingly dead.
The man in the wings stared down at her sombrely,