Family History

by Vita Sackville-West

  “And let me tell you,” he added fiercely, “you’ve got even your imitation wrong. There was something to be said for the Englishman of birth, once.—Oh, you may wince, you may think me an old snob; I am.—He looked after his lands and he wasn’t ashamed either of his feelings or his brains. Today he’s been taught to repress his feelings until he ceases to have any and the same is even truer of his brains. He wasn’t ashamed of his culture, once. Today he is. And he hasn’t replaced it by anything else. He keeps his superior manner and his respect for good form, but thatt’s all he has inherited from his ancestors and thatt’s all that you and your like have imitated from him. He’s a fake himself, and you’re doubly a fake. What use are you in a world which wants living people and not waxworks stuffed with straw?

  “You may say that I’m talking against everything I seem to have believed in. I daresay I am. I sent you and your brothers to a public school, and I sent Dan to Eton; everything I complain of, I’ve brought upon myself. There’s worse to come, but you don’t know it yet; you won’t know it until tomorrow. I thought I was doing the best by you and by the family, and it’s only when I see what a skunk you are that I realise my mistake. I ought to have sent you all into the shops. I’ve a good mind to do it even now.”

  Glaring round, he discovered the presence of Dan.

  “So you’re there, are you, boy? Well, and what about you,—the third generation, eh? Come, now, are you a softy or not? Your mother told me about your hunting and I gave her a piece of my mind, but if you’ve anything to say I’m prepared to hear it. It’s something that you should have a mind of your own, whether I approve of it or not. It’s something, that you shouldn’t allow yourself to be shaped altogether by Eton. I sent you there to be shaped, but dammit, I like you for holding out. Well?”

  He waited. Dan was speechless. He had no words to answer this sudden challenge; besides, this was Uncle Evan’s row, not his.

  “Tongue-tied, are you?” said Mr. Jarrold with surprising good humour. “Well, never mind. You’re young. I won’t bully you. But look here, young man, you’ve got to make good. Damned well got to make good. Skip thatt generation,”—he indicated Evan with a jerk of his thumb,—”pretend it hasn’t been. Either go right back, or go forward. There’s a possibility in both. Come to me in a year and tell me what you mean to do.”

  “Yes, Grandpapa,” said Dan, glad to take hold of something concrete; relieved; a year was something concrete.

  “You can go to Oxford if you like, or else you can go into the shops. I won’t make you a partner till you’re twenty-five. No. I could make you a partner now, if I liked. But I won’t. Not good for you. You’d better go into the shops when you leave Eton. Teach you things that Eton won’t teach you. However, you must choose for yourself. But you must be something, boy; not an imitation of something.”

  “Yes, Grandpapa,” said Dan, half understanding.

  “As for you,” said Mr. Jarrold, turning on Evan, “get out.”

  Evan went, thankfully; but he finished off his whisky and soda and strolled away with the air of one who remembers that it is time to have a bath before dinner.

  He secured Evelyn later in the evening; Dan was playing chess with Mr. Jarrold; Mrs. Jarrold was studying a list of Japanese lilies while she knitted a jersey for the Waifs and Strays; Geoffrey, Mrs. Geoffrey, Ruth, and Catherine were playing bridge. Evelyn and Evan had cut temporarily out of the bridge, thus they were reduced to one another’s society. Evan felt furious and humiliated at having been cursed like a schoolboy in Evelyn’s presence, yet he was sure she would sympathise: she was such a good sort. In any case, it was impossible to let such a scene pass without asserting his own position.

  His vocabulary was small; his training in the art of under-statement potent.

  “Pretty outrageous, what?” he said.

  “I shouldn’t have come in, Evan. I thought I might help.”

  “I didn’t mind your coming in,” he said grandly. “One has to humour the old man. No good flying out at him. Much better to let him say what he likes. Words break no bones, after all.—What a pretty frock.”

  “Never mind my frock, for once, Evan. Don’t waste time in pretence to me. What about this drinking? You’ve asked me to help you, before now. I thought you had made an effort?”

  “It’s hell,” said Evan gloomily.

  “My poor Evan, can’t you do anything about it?”

  “What, go into an inebriate’s home, you mean? No, thanks. The worst of it is, that I don’t really want to get the better of it. I only feel alive when I’ve got something in me. Otherwise things seem so flat. Why won’t you marry me, Evelyn? It’s legal, you know. I shouldn’t want to drink if I had you.”

  “Evan, you’ve told me thatt a dozen times, and I’ve told you a dozen times that nothing would induce me to marry you. Do become my brother-in-law again, please. How tiresome and complicated you all are.”

  “Only because you make us all depend upon you.”

  “You mean, everyone is tiresome and complicated when you know them well enough?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so. Me and my drinking, for instance.”

  “It really worries you?”

  “Worries me! I should think it did. I tell you, it’s hell. I think about it first thing when I wake up in the morning. I try to hold out, but I’ve never yet got beyond half-past eleven. And once I start, I can’t stop; I want more. And yet every morning when I wake up feeling like death, I make a resolution to drink nothing but water thatt day. And by half-past eleven I always break down.”

  “But, Evan,” said Evelyn, seized by a sudden practical

  curiosity, “how do you get it, here? This isn’t the sort of house where bottles stand about, handy on every table.”

  “Oh, Paterson is a good chap,” said Evan carelessly.

  “Then Paterson knows? Oh, Evan!”

  “Don’t you curse me too, for God’s sake. It’s quite bad enough without thatt. Yes, Paterson brings it to me in my room, if you want to know. I don’t have to ask for it, he just brings it.”

  “Evan, I do feel so sorry for you,—I wish I could help.”

  “You could help, in the way I’ve told you.”

  “Thatt’s out of the question. I’ll do anything else.”

  “Anything?”

  “Well, no, not quite anything. Anything within reason. I can see that you’re wretched.”

  “Oh, no,” said Evan, getting up, “I have a very good time. Look, they’ve finished the rubber.”

  Only one more day, thought Evelyn, waking on New Year’s morning. She must go down to breakfast for once, to watch the effect of Mr. Jarrold’s surprise on the assembled family. It would be amusing to see how he reconciled his attitude with his diatribes of the day before. Most probably, in a magnificently British way, he would conveniently forget that the diatribes had ever been uttered. He would sit there, modestly beaming and receiving congratulations, delighted at the success of the joke he had played on his family.

  When Evelyn came into the dining-room he was already in his place, a huge cup of tea steaming beside him. He looked at her with a twinkle in his old eye.

  “You don’t usually honour us, my dear.”

  “Perhaps I’ve made a New Year resolution, always to get up for breakfast.”

  “M-m-m, I don’t think it. Come and sit here. Dan, get your mother some coffee. What will you have to eat, my dear? Sausage, egg, porridge, kidneys, haddock, kedgeree? Or pie? Very good game pie over there.”

  “Nothing, thanks, Papa,—some coffee and an apple:”

  “Continental habits,” said Mr. Jarrold disapprovingly. “Very bad for you. Always start the day with a good breakfast. Always make a good breakfast myself, even abroad, where it’s difficult.”

  He was in a serenely good humour as he sat
stirring his tea, looking down the length of his table towards his wife at the farther end. The members of his family were ranged down either side, not talking much, but eating. Knives and forks were put down with a little clatter. Scones, rolls, toast, jam, honey, marmalade, and fruit, covered the white cloth. On the sideboard a row of silver dishes sizzled over little lamps. Cups stood grouped round the teapot and the urn. The long French windows revealed the Surrey view in the bright, cold winter sunshine. Dogs lay stretched in front of the fire. So the Jarrolds sat at breakfast, and William Jarrold felt himself at peace with the world.

  Paterson came in with the papers. It was a rule that the papers should be laid beside the master of the house, who could then distribute them, keeping back what he wanted for himself. His eye met Evelyn’s. Then he sorted the papers out, pretending to be grumpy.

  “Daily Mirror, Evelyn? Geoffrey, The Express? Dan, give your grandmother the Morning Post.”

  He buried himself behind the full width of The Times. A moment later, the exclamations began . . .

  Evelyn had foreseen truly: no allusion was made to the day before. Mr. Jarrold himself seemed perfectly unconscious of any incongruity. He was bland and pleased, though he affected to treat the matter lightly. He grunted amiably when his wife came round and kissed him. He pretended not to look at the photograph of himself among the four new barons, but Evelyn caught him squinting sideways at the front page of the Daily Mirror. And when Paterson came back on some pretext, and paused to say respectfully, “May I be allowed to offer congratulations on behalf of the household to your lordship,” William Jarrold was a very well pleased man indeed.

  PART TWO

  Portrait of

  Miles Vane-Merrick

  Evelyn found it hard to believe that such remote depths of country could still exist within fifty miles of London. She was better accustomed to Surrey than to Kent. She and Dan had changed at a junction, and now the little local train carried them between the woods and orchards of Kent. It stopped at every station, gathering no speed in the intervals, so that Evelyn had ample opportunity to look out of the window and to familiarise herself with Miles’ country. She tried to imagine it under its spring aspect, when the orchards would float in low clouds of white and pink above the earth; when the woods would belly out into vast acres of green; when the travelling heaven would heap itself in white sails above the North Downs. Now, the orchards were ghostly under their winter wash; they stretched out their lime-whitened branches in little avenues as the train went by. The woods were brown wedges in the blue Weald. The long vistas of poles in the hop-gardens opened and shut in perspectives, bare of the bine. Winter brought its particular beauty, though it was perhaps not the beauty sentimentally and traditionally associated with Kent in spring.

  No one, certainly, could deny the loveliness of this southern country. It owed its loveliness, in part, to the fact that it was so true to itself. The line of hills, the expanse of the Weald, the rosy cottages, the distant spires, the narrow lanes, composed themselves into a character belonging there and nowhere else. Anyone sensitive to the character of landscape would have said instantly that he looked out of the train windows on to Kent,—fruit-growing Kent, hop-growing Kent, Kent unreached by the tentacles of London. Miles had not said much about the place where he lived; he had said only that he wanted her to see it. Did she regret that she had not come there first in spring or summer? She hesitated, thinking of the Queen Anne’s Lace in the lanes and the dog-roses along the hedgerows. On the whole she did not regret it. The trees were austere, the water in the pools was frozen; this severity imposed upon a subversive softness might help her, also, to the courage which she needed.

  Meanwhile she was moved almost to the point of pain at the prospect of seeing Miles in his own home. She could form no idea of what it would be like; she knew only that she would see him striding about in surroundings, which to him were familiar, but whose geography to her would be entirely strange. She had never seen him anywhere but in London; she had never seen him in country clothes. It was even possible that she might suffer from a sense of exclusion, when she heard him talking to his people, saying that this field must be ploughed or thatt tree chopped down for firewood. Did he suffer from the same sense of exclusion when he heard her in her flat, answering the telephone to unknown friends, or giving an order to Mason or Privett? He had come to her, after all, as a completely isolated figure, simply himself, associated with no background, while she had continued to exist against the background which was her own. Now the position was reversed; she was arriving into his life, instead of he into hers, bringing none of her own anchors with her; for even Privett had been left behind. She brought nothing with her out of her own life but Dan, who would be as strange and ignorant as she herself.

  Strange? Ignorant? How much more strange! How much more ignorant! For she, at least, knew Miles and loved him; whereas Dan had seen him once only.

  If she must lock away her agitation and apprehension, Dan needed no such caution. He was too much excited to read. He fidgeted up and down the compartment, and looked at his watch a dozen times in five minutes. He asked her repeatedly what time the train was due, and swore every time it stopped at a station. He examined the Southern Railway map over the seat.

  “Two more stations now,” he said.

  He sat down again with his legs outstretched before him and stared at his mother. How composed she looked; flicking the ash off the cigarette in her long holder, her belongings disposed on the seat beside her,—for they had the carriage to themselves,—dressing case, travelling-rug, hand-bag, magazine. In order to pass the time he tried to imagine that he had never seen his mother before; that she was just a strange lady travelling in the same carriage as himself. He decided that everything about her was remarkably neat and right, from her close fur cap to the dressing-case with E. J. stamped upon it. She looked like a person who would never be in a scramble or a hurry, and would never have mislaid the thing she needed just at the moment she needed it. She looked quiet and composed, yet full of secrets and experience. It reassured Dan to look at her. She had fine, smooth hands which she used very well, and just the right number of rings. Dan remembered how, as a very little boy, he had amused himself with pulling off her rings and trying them on his own fingers. There was one in particular, a large cabochon sapphire, which reminded him now of the sky at Portofino at night. (They had gone to Portofino together, during the summer holidays.) She had always let him play with her hands and her rings.

  Perhaps it was easy to be so composed when one was so well accustomed to going to stay with people.

  He leant across the compartment and took her hand because he liked the big sapphire and the smooth whiteness of her hand.

  “Hullo, Mummy, you’ve got a new ring.”

  “Oh, no, Dan; you’ve seen thatt before.”

  “Well, I don’t remember it. Is thatt what they call an eternity ring? Stones all the way round?”

  “I don’t know, Dan; it may be.”

  “Mummy, do you suppose Mr. Vane-Merrick will meet us at the station?”

  “Yes, darling, he said he would. He hasn’t got a chauffeur.”

  “Is he poor?”

  “Rather poor, I think. You mustn’t expect a second Newlands.”

  “Good Lord, I don’t. I’m sorry he’s poor; what a bore for him.”

  “I don’t think he minds.” She thought privately that it would do Dan good to know someone who did not take wealth absolutely for granted.

  “What sort of a car has he got?”

  “A funny old car all tied up with dusters and bits of string. He drives very fast, and you expect the car to come to pieces at any moment.”

  “Oh, you’ve been in it already?”

  “Yes, I’ve been in it already.”

  “Another station!” cried Dan, jumping up again and rushing to the window. “It’s t
he next station now, Mummy,” he said, relapsing into his seat once more. “Aren’t these stations like toys, set down at intervals? And listen to them banging the milk-cans. I do hope it won’t be dark before we get there.”

  In the summer, Evelyn thought, these little platforms would be heaped with the round bushel-baskets of fruit, those lanes would be blocked by a great lorry lurching along under a load of hop-pockets; the hay-carts would pass, leaving their trail on the overhanging trees. She seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper towards the essential Miles. Terror overcame her; she felt herself committed to a danger beyond her strength. She felt suddenly convinced that something disastrous would be the outcome. The banging of the milk-cans reverberated down the platform; it was no longer a pleasant country noise, eloquent of pasture and dairy, but a daemonic din.

  “Shut the windows again, Dan,” she said, shrinking into her furs; “it’s too cold.”