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courtesan.’ ‘During the last thirty years she has dropped through destiny like a stone.’ The shadowy narrator (three of these stories are recounted by an almost transparently neutral woman) accompanies Ruby to consult a seedily implausible fortune-teller, ‘clammy with failure’. But Ruby ‘is uniquely good, … she performs an act of charity which others cannot achieve’. This redemptive act is almost twin to the one performed by Theodora for the magician of Pell Street. The character of Ruby also has strong affinities with Evelyn in an unfinished short story, ‘The Truth of Fiction’, found among the writer’s papers after her death. Evelyn formerly ‘had a golden beauty brighter than any I have seen since, and a matching kindness and generosity’. Her kinship with these heroines is manifest. But ‘some deep part of her had made a tryst with disgrace, and she kept it faithfully. Her love affairs were at first spectacular and in the end ridiculous; she was at first extravagant and in the end dishonest; at first she drank a great deal of champagne and in the end, quite simply, she drank.’ What she sees as her mortal sin, however, is that though a devout Roman Catholic she seeks through spiritualism the adopted daughter who had died after a bitter estrangement.
    Spiritualism, and its fraudulent practices, are the background to the next story, ‘They That Sit in Darkness’. Its touching hero, George Manisty, ‘had never known any but those who communed with the dead, or who desired to do so’. Son of a father who is a medium and a mother who drinks and contrives ‘raps’, he finds himself after their death trapped in the deceptions of the successful fraud while longing for his way of life to have truth: ‘He was hungry not only for the immortality of his dear ones, but for honour.’ When he encounters another medium, ‘the most fairylike person he had ever seen’, he believes in her powers and ‘might have been her husband and her servant if he had not been cursed with this heritage of fraud and trickery’. As in ‘The Magician of Pell Street’ the supernatural element is redemptive love, but there are strong hints that ‘there is in fact a magical transfusion of matter, a sieve-like quality of this world that lets in siftings from eternity’. Certainly in The Fountain Overflows we are to take some of the supernatural events which cluster round Rosamund, and Rose’s fatal clairvoyance, as being ‘true’, and Rebecca West was convinced that she had access to the paranormal, even engaging in correspondence with Arthur Koestler. ‘The supernatural keeps pounding at my door’, she wrote in 1962. Her sense that she was sometimes clairvoyant and the hallucinatory visions to which she was prone during illness seem to have convinced her that the world did indeed have a sieve-like quality. Moreover, just as West’s theory of opposing but interdependent polarities of gender is reminiscent of Aristophanes’ famous argument in The Symposium of Plato, ‘They That Sit in Darkness’ echoes his allegory of the cave in The Republic. But such portentous comparisons should not distract us from the fact that in the main these stories are comedies – that the characters, seen as part of a given social fabric, move through dislocations and discord to a more or less harmonious happy ending.
    As war approaches, the mood alters. The tone of ‘Madame Sara’s Magic Crystal’ may be comic, but it is the comedy of bitter lampoon. In the three visits to Yugoslavia which were to form the backbone of the monumental and comprehensive Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West conceived an impassioned admiration for that troubled country and its courageous people. In that book she writes: ‘it is sometimes very difficult to tell the difference between history and the smell of