Ivy Compton-Burnett: A God and His Gifts

Henry took the sheet of paper in both his hands, looked at it for a long moment, and displayed it.

“So you have made a picture,” said Joanna. “What is it meant to be?”

“It is still raining, my lady. It is meant to be a horse. I hardly think it will stop to-day,” said Nurse, in an even, incidental tone, without turning her head.

“Why, it is a horse!” said Hereward. “Why, so it is.”

“Yes,” said Henry, smiling. “It has legs.”

“And is that the tail?”

“No tail,” said Henry, who had not thought to put one.

“Well, we will give him one. There it is.”

“Yes,” said Henry, smiling again. “Henry did it.”

“Oh, what would Nurse say? You know it was Father.”

Henry turned and showed the picture to Joanna.

“Horse and tail,” he said, choosing words that did not commit him.

“Oh, how clever you are!”

“Yes,” said her grandson.

“And where is the horse’s mane?”

Henry attempted to depict it, regarded the result, and suddenly tore the paper across.

“The despair of the creator!” said Merton.

“A feeling known to Merton,” said Reuben.

“It is,” said his brother. “It will never be known to you. And it can be beyond us.”

“Oh, what a waste of your work!” said Hereward to Henry.

“The feeling is not known to Father,” said Salomon.

“No, it is not,” said Merton, and was silent.

“Would you like to be destroyed?” said Zillah to Henry. “Perhaps the horse did not like it.”

“He did,” said Henry, looking away. “And Henry made him.”

“The god-like spirit,” said Salomon. “He creates life and destroys it. His father’s son.”

“Draw again,” said Henry to Joanna, and receiving another piece of paper, began to do so.

“You will learn to draw when you are older,” said Hereward.

“Yes, to-morrow,” said Henry, not looking up.

“He will have to learn other things,” said Merton to his brothers. “Things of another kind. Who he is, who we all are, and what some of us might be. There may be breakers ahead.”

“That is enough,” said Salomon. “What a thing to talk about to-day! Father is looking at you.”

“And hearing him,” said Hereward, quietly. “And it is true that the time is ill-chosen.”

“The truth is in our minds,” said Merton. “It is one that should never leave them. It may bear on coming lives.”

“Not to their harm, if we have a care.”

“Some things are out of our hands.”

“This one will be in mine.”

“It is time for us to go,” said Hetty, who, as always, had been watching Henry. “Maud and her nurse are calling for us. I hear them in the hall.”

“They can come in for a moment,” said Hereward. “And we can see if there are signs of danger.”

Merton’s daughter entered, glanced at Henry and stood in silence. Henry returned the glance and looked away.

“Say good-morning to Great-Grandma,” said Merton.

Maud remained silent.

“Come, surely you can say a word.”

“Pencil,” said Maud, looking at Henry’s occupation.

The latter did not raise his eyes, and Maud’s also maintained their direction.

“Let her have the pencil, Henry,” said Ada. “She is younger than you, and she is your guest.”

Henry put it smoothly behind his back.

“Come, the house must be full of pencils,” said Hereward, glancing at his son.

Maud looked round for signs of this, and seeing none, made an advance on the pencil and acquired it.

Her host broke down.

“Come, what a way to behave!” said Ada.

“Paper,” said Maud.

Zillah produced a sheet and another pencil; the nurses assigned them to their charges; and the latter turned their backs on each other and gave themselves to their art.

“Well, there seems no need for anxiety,” said Hereward.

“None at this moment,” said Merton. “It is one that has no meaning.”

“It bears on others. I shall watch them as they come.”

“Don’t you want to see Henry’s picture?” said Hetty to Maud, feeling that egotism should have its limits.

“No, see Maud’s,” said the latter, in whom it had none.

“Look at Maud’s picture, Henry,” said Ada.

Henry gave a glance in its direction and returned to his own.

“We should be going, ma’am,” said Maud’s nurse. “Maud come home to her pretty toys.”

Maud pursued what she felt to be her calling.

“We must take your picture home or Henry will want it,” said the nurse, putting the virtue of necessity before any other.

Maud accepted this likelihood, gathered up her acquisitions and was borne away.

“We don’t make enough of Maud,” said Ada.

“You don’t make anything of her,” said Merton. “Henry fills your eyes.”

“Not mine. Maud is my own grandchild. It has been an effort to make no difference.”

“You have failed in a sense you do not mean.”

“Well, Henry is in the house,” said Hereward.

“He is, at all times and in all parts of it,”

“Merton, you are a father yourself.”

“I am, and I am reminding you of it.”

“Would you like to have Maud to tea?” said Ada, bending to Henry.

“No,” said the latter, keeping his eyes on his work.

“But you always like to see her.”

“Take Henry’s pencil,” said Henry, after a pause.

“But you were glad for her to have it.”

“No,” said Henry, looking up.

“Henry has a future,” said Merton. “Do you ever give a thought to it?”

“Oh, surely the time is not yet,” said Hereward.

“The early steps lead to others. They would be better on the right path. He will have to grow up and marry like everyone else.”

“Marry,” murmured Henry to himself.

“Have a wife to live with you,” said Hereward. “Whom would you like to have?”

“Dear little Maud,” said Henry, in a tone of ending the matter to everyone’s content.

Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in Middlesex in 1884. Compton-Burnett was encouraged by her liberal and unorthodox father, homeopath Dr Burnett, to prepare to read classics at London university (neither Oxford nor Cambridge gave degrees to women at this time). She had dearly loved her father, who died without warning from a heart attack in 1901 when she was sixteen. Her closest brother died three years later, and Ivy Compton-Burnett went on to lose three more of her younger siblings and her mother by the time she was 35, something she could hardly bear to speak about, but constantly explored in her novels.

Compton-Burnett published twenty novels, the first while she was in her twenties, in 1911. However, the first of her works to use her mature and startlingly original style was published when she was forty, in 1925. Compton-Burnett’s fiction deals with domestic situations in large households which, to all intents and purposes, invariably seem Edwardian. The description of human weaknesses and foibles of all sorts pervades her work, and the family that emerges from each of her novels must be seen as dysfunctional in one way or another.

She was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1967, two years before her death in 1969.