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Rebecca West The Fountain Overflows

We passed from games to accomplishments, greatly to my pleasure. Then and now I can enjoy almost any performance in any sphere except my own; if any musician plays to me I am precipitated back into my particular combat with the angels, but if anybody acts or recites or dances I am there on my knees, there is isolated for me another specimen of the hopeless and idiotic and divine desire of imperfect beings to achieve perfection. That afternoon I was irritated when a girl played Chopin’s “Nocturne in F,” and indeed with some reason, for she had been taught an old-fashioned aberrant practice of giving the last note in every slurred phrase half its value; also the piano was slightly out of tune. On the other hand, I enjoyed the accompaniments and voluntaries which Aunt Lily zestfully proffered. She played so badly that her performance was not within the scope of criticism, nor could evoke any emotion except amusement. She made the instrument sound like a barrel-organ; her trills and runs had a Cockney accent; and when she had sounded a volley of chords it was her habit to wink at her audience and say, “Hi tiddly pom pom,” absently, as if obeying some recognized convention. And I certainly enjoyed it when a fat girl called Elsie Biglow recited “Lasca,” a poem we had learned in elocution class, about a man who had been in love with a girl on a ranch out in South America, and one day the cattle stampeded, and she saved his life by shielding him with her body and was killed. Papa was very fond of this poem, and said that if Lasca really performed this feat she must have been a yard or two wide and made of some substance like corrugated iron, but all the same as a man he was glad to hear that such self-sacrifice was held up to young girls as exemplary conduct. But Elsie believed in “Lasca” and for the moment I was glad to share her belief. Then somebody danced an Irish jig and somebody else danced a skirt dance. But after that the tide of talent ebbed.

            In a half-hearted way somebody asked, “Doesn’t Rose play the piano?” All heads were turned towards me but I shook my head. They would never hear me play. <…>  Yet I was a little troubled by my failure to be sociable, and I turned to Rosamund and murmured, “I really can’t play here.”

            “No, indeed,” she answered softly, “you could not be expected to, as the piano is out of tune.”

            This astonished me. The piano was only slightly out of tune, and I had thought Rosamund quite unmusical. I felt as if someone understood to be stone-deaf had suddenly joined in a general conversation.

            <…>

            I said to Rosamund in an excited whisper, “I am going to do a thought-reading trick.”

            She whispered back, “Oh, but the Mammas would not like it.” She was convulsed with a painful attack of stammering, but I had no mercy on her. Though it was largely my recognition that she knew more than other people which give me confidence in the extraordinary character of my family, I at once told myself that she did not do nearly as well at school as I did and I need pay no attention to what she said.

            I stood up and said, “Please, I can do a trick,” and Aunt Lily said, “There’s a clever kiddy. Come out here and do it, I’m sure we’ll all enjoy it.”

            The tigerskin in front of the fireplace had been lifted so that the two girls could do their dances, and I stood myself in the cleared space. Aunt Lily asked, “It isn’t a rough trick, is it?” and looked up at the curios on the mantelpiece. Without using my thought-reading powers I knew that if I broke anything she would be terribly blamed, and I liked the people in this house even less.

            “No,” I said. “Let me put my hands on each side of your face. Now think of a number. Think of it hard.” Up it came, slowly and clumsily, like a wheelbarrow being trundled out of a dark stable, fifty-three. She squealed, “But that’s the very number I was thinking of,” and everybody in the room gasped as if they were watching fireworks.