Family History

by Vita Sackville-West

  “Look at the way he marks his books, Mummy! You always told me not to scribble in books, you said it spoilt them. But look here,—he’s left a shoe-horn in this one, to mark the page, and he takes notes at the end,—q.v. page 44-46, Milton and Marvell. If I did thatt, there might be some chance of my remembering the books I read. Books aren’t meant to be looked at, surely? And what a lot of different things he must be interested in! How does he find the time? Just think of Uncle Geoffrey and Uncle Evan, who never think of anything so far as I can make out, and do nothing, nothing, nothing all day long! But now look here, there’s politics, poetry, farming, philosophy, architecture, music,—he’s got a piano,—and books in French and German. And a Greek play,—Aristophanes,—why on earth should he want to read Aristophanes when he needn’t? Grandpapa said he was a full man; I begin to see what he meant.”

  “Did Grandpapa say thatt?”

  “One day when Uncle Geoffrey was running him down. Uncle Geoffrey said he posed. I nearly hit him. But Grandpapa said, ‘No, my dear Geoffrey, m-m-m, he’s a full man as you will never be.” Dan could imitate his grandfather to perfection.

  “Did they say anything else?”

  “Yes. Grandpapa said something about his being a reversion to type. I didn’t understand thatt. What did he mean?”

  His mother had been unable to explain, because Mr. Vane-Merrick had returned just as she seemed to be making up her mind what to say.

  Then they had dined in the sitting-room. There was no dining-room, apparently, and both Mr. Vane-Merrick and Mrs. Munday had called it supper. Dan, who in spite of his independent spirit, was accustomed to the punctiliousness of Newlands, had been surprised. He was still childish enough to accept his family’s standard of values in such minor matters. He was still more surprised to find that Mr. Vane-Merrick did not change for dinner, but contented himself with pulling on an old blue jersey stead of his leather jacket. Such unconventionality startled Dan, and caused him to lie awake trying to accommodate conflicting ideas in his mind. Uncle Geoffrey, who would have put on a boiled shirt in the middle of Arabia, would certainly have dismissed Mr. Vane-Merrick as an outsider. So would all Dan’s acquaintances at Eton; including his adored Mr. Meiklejohn.

  Dinner, or supper, had been a simple meal, cooked and brought in by Mrs. Munday. One could not pretend that it was well-cooked. The chicken, although nominally roasted, appeared to have been boiled in water, with a little flour and gelatine added to the sauce to give it a taste. The cabbage had undergone the same process. Dan had wondered whether he might refuse the chocolate-shape in favour of black currants (“bottled from the garden last year,” said Mrs. Munday as she set them down) and cream, which at any rate was thick and plentiful; he had ended by eating both. The shape had been particularly nasty. But all that Mr. Vane-Merrick had said, smiling up at Mrs. Munday, was “Mrs. Munday is excelling herself. Usually she is only allowed to give me eggs and cheese for supper.”

  Mrs. Munday had stopped to talk to them whenever she came in. She volunteered information, such as that the wild geese had again been seen flying over the lake. She did like to see wild birds on a piece of water, she said, and Mr. Vane-Merrick must be careful not to scare them away with his gun. She stood talking comfortably and easily before saying that she must go and see that her saucepan wasn’t boiling over. She said this with an air of polite excuse, as though they would be sorry to lose her but must really allow her to go. Her dallying, also, was a surprise to Dan. Mason at Portman Square or Paterson at Newlands would as soon have thought of taking off all their clothes in the dining room as of entering into conversation after they had handed a dish. Dan, lying alone in bed, laughed aloud at the very idea.

  Mrs. Munday reminded him of the padrona at the little restaurant at Portofino, where his mother and he had spent the summer holidays.

  What did anything matter, though,—watery chicken or nasty shape,—when one had Mr. Vane-Merrick as a companion? Dan loved him to the further side of idolatry. He threw out sixty ideas a minute, all new, all disturbing; and although he seemed too quick and impatient to pause of his own accord, in order to enlarge and develop, he would linger willingly in response to Dan’s questions, giving his whole attention, explaining, illuminating, taking trouble, so that the brilliant jet ceased to be a firework and became a fire; he could justify his aphorisms, in fact, by solid reasoning if he chose. Other people might shake their heads over Miles Vane-Merrick; Dan in his inexperience was dazzled.

  Then after supper, when Mrs. Munday had cleared away, saying a great deal about hot-water bottles and enough blankets on the beds, Mr. Vane-Merrick had sat down at the piano. Dan hated music; he could make neither head nor tail of it. He liked tunes, but other sorts of music made him angry and argumentative. This evening, however, the music had pleased him, although he was longing to talk; he had sat on the floor by the fire, his mother had played with his ear, and the green lamp had made patterns in rings on the ceiling. It was very different from Newlands. Besides, the music had not gone on for very long; he had been almost sorry when Mr. Vane-Merrick got up from the piano, lit a cigarette over the green lamp, and dropped into the opposite armchair with his legs swinging. Then he had said that Dan was quite wrong about Aristophanes.

  Dan was sure that he would never get to sleep. He recalled a phrase he had read in a novel, about “His brain was seething with ideas.” Dan had a sense of words. Seethe: it meant boil and hiss and bubble. A cauldron; a frothy liquid; he had seen his Uncle Geoffrey beat up his champagne with a fork. It had seethed, then subsided; but he, Dan, would never subside so long as he knew Mr. Vane-Merrick. He had never known anyone before, not even Mr. Meiklejohn, who could stir one up and suggest a hundred things, without being for an instant didactic. Christ, thought Dan, applying his own limited experience, what a tutor he would have made!

  He turned his pillow over and settled the bed-clothes more comfortably under his chin in the hope of coaxing sleep. He had pulled his curtains back, as he always did, and could see the stars outside his open window. The ducks cried, and an owl. This was the country, as Newlands was not the country. This was a strange little cottage to be in, alone with his mother,—for the Mundays slept in the long, half-ruined building and Mr. Vane-Merrick slept in the tower. He had said so. He had said, “Evelyn, I’m giving you my bedroom, do you mind? Mrs. Munday said it would be more comfortable for you. I’ve moved across to the tower, where I always sleep in summer.” She had protested a little against the suggestion of turning him out. Dan, being in high spirits, had said, “I expect he likes the tower, Mummy,—it’s so romantic,” and then he had blushed miserably, thinking they would not see that he had intended a joke. It was perhaps not in good taste to make jokes about people’s characters. But Mr. Vane-Merrick had said, “Quite right, Dan, you’ve put your finger on my weakness.” He seemed amused, not offended.

  The cooler side of the pillow became warm also, and still sleep did not come. Dan slipped from his bed and leant out of the window, breathing the cold air. A golden light was burning high up in the tower So Mr. Vane-Merrick was awake too? reading? working? Dan was curiously comforted by this evidence of another’s wakefulness. As he gazed, the light went out. He could now see the tower very dimly drawn against the stars. He pattered back to bed, and fell instantly into his usual sleep.

  It was “Miles, Miles! where are you?” all day long. Evelyn heard the boy calling, or, looking out of the window, saw him following Miles about everywhere, eager and devoted. This association produced mixed feelings in her: it lifted half the responsibility of Dan off her shoulders, it pleased her to see the boy’s adoration of Miles, yet it failed her also with a double jealousy, and it complicated matters still further, in so far as she never got Miles to herself until Dan had gone to bed. And Dan was reluctant to go to bed. He and Miles always became involved in some discussion as they sat over supper, prolonging it into endless ramifications while Evelyn stirred restlessl
y with impatience as she lay in her arm-chair by the fire. It exasperated her the more, that Miles would not let the argument drop; would not create a pause in which she might say, “Now, Dan . . .”. Yet, the moment they were left alone together, he would come towards her saying “At last!” in a tone that repaired the hurt.

  She was behaving with great circumspection; too great to allow her to expostulate with Miles. She must not make him feel bound in any way. He told her repeatedly that he loved the freedom she gave him; she never worried him; she was unlike other women. (Thatt phrase made her wince, but, true to her determination, she made no comment.)

  Meanwhile, when she could control her exasperation enough to listen, instead of brooding silently over her very feminine grievance, she was astonished by the cataract of confidences that poured from Dan. The boy had thought more deeply than she had suspected. Ill-organised, childish, crude, his opinions might be, floating in the air, unrelated, without reasoned basis; but from them emerged a definite attitude which he had reached by some short-cut of his own. The originality was surprising, coming from a schoolboy. He might be alarmed by his grandfather, he might suffer unduly from the solecism of some unmanageable situation, but the mind that was in process of evolving so firm a doctrine was not the mind of a weakling. Miles said as much. “Thatt boy of yours,” he said, “reacts violently against nearly everything he is taught at school. It takes some courage and initiative to do thatt.”

  “You encourage him, Miles. What about his after-life?”

  “When he leaves school? Well, he must fight.”

  “You are permanently embattled yourself, I believe. If you had lived in the time when men wore swords, yours would never have been in its scabbard.”

  “Nonsense,” said Miles laughing. “I’m a Tory squire.”

  It was hard indeed to visualise him as the young Labour member, when she saw him surveying his meadows or heard him talking to Munday. He loved the people, though he loathed and mistrusted democracy. With the people of the soil he was as much at his ease as they with him. He understood everything about them,—their sensibly practical outlook, their innate suspicion, their shrewdness, their limitations, their artfulness, their loyalty, and their endurance. He did not romanticise them in the least. “Munday is an old fox,” he said, “so he thinks everybody else a fox too.”

  Evelyn would gladly have talked to Munday, if only in order to hear what he had to say about Miles, but owing to his strong accent she could not understand half he said. She therefore avoided his friendliness rather shyly. It was a new experience for her, to feel shy.

  This country life was quite strange to her. She had scarcely realised that it still went on. “My dear!” said Miles when she told him this, “two-thirds of the population of this country is engaged in agriculture.” Miles managed his own farm of a thousand acres (his father had made it over to him during his life-time as the younger son’s portion, with the castle standing in the middle); but, he said, he could not have run it without loss if he had had to pay rent for it. Munday maintained that foreign grain and butter were allowed to be dumped in England to the ruin of English farmers because Members of Parliament owned property abroad. “And Munday has a vote!” said Miles, half in amusement, half in despair.

  Evelyn had a great deal to put up with, for Miles still assumed that her familiarity with country life was as natural as his own. She wondered whether he assumed it deliberately, in order to break and humiliate her,—for he must surely realise, especially after what she had said, that she was incorrigibly urban? The most that she could muster, was a pair of crocodile shoes quite suitable to the sedate afternoon walk on the gravelled drives at Newlands, but wholly inadequate to the tramps over ploughed fields which Miles expected her to undertake with him and Dan. Considering her shoes in her austere bedroom, where she could scarcely see her face in the mirror, she laughed ruefully at this incongruous choice of a lover. What joke of fate had thrown Miles across her path? He strode ahead, leaving her to climb gates, to be scratched by brambles, to extricate herself from mud,—she, the spoilt, the pampered, the exquisite and yet the virtuous woman, who but for Miles Vane-Merrick would shortly be at Luxor or at Caux or on the Riviera, dressed in the appropriate creations of Messrs. Rivers & Roberts. He took it quite for granted that she should dispense with the services of Privett. Yet he was sensitive enough, in all conscience; he was neither an oaf nor a bumpkin; his culture was both wide and deep; his mind was lively and amusing.

  Miles, ranging over a dozen topics as he drank his wine, was a different person from Miles ranging over his fields on a winter afternoon. Yet they were the same person really, and Evelyn, whose intellect might be underdeveloped but whose intelligence was acute though untrained, recognised the truth of William Jarrold’s epithet: a full man.

  Thatt was what held her to Miles. He was vital; he grasped life. Whether he talked to Dan, or dragged Evelyn across the fields, or awaited her in his tower, he brought the same full energy into play. The sense of futility was unknown to him.

  He was only twenty-five.

  Love was a new discovery for him. He treated it as an enormous new region of life for him to explore, rushing into it with tremendous excitement. Yet he could keep it quite separate from other things; which annoyed Evelyn. She would have liked him to be aware of her all the time. As it was, he seemed capable of forgetting her for hours together, and she had to find what comfort she could in hearing him say that she was a good listener. When he did turn to her as a lover she had nothing to complain of, for he brought the same intensity and concentration to bear on love, as on other things. Her spirits went down and up, as she alternately believed that he cared for her not at all, or that she absorbed him to the exclusion of everything else. And she was persuaded of either with the greatest ease, one after the other.

  She was unhappy at times. Passionately and exclusively as she loved Miles, both mentally and physically, she was aware of the gravest differences between them. She was full of premonitions which she tried to hide from herself. She did succeed in hiding them. But they were there, like a black cloud at which she refused to look.

  Miles himself was so youthfully light-hearted, so exultantly in love, that he lived only for the rapture of the moment. He had discovered Evelyn, he had got her for himself, and thatt was a miracle. In his exuberance he laughed from morning to night. It amused him to go away from her, to give his attention to other things, and then to come back to her, doubly ardent and refreshed. He was quite unaware how much she resented this system. He felt vaguely that love was cloying, unless one deliberately imposed periods of intermission. It amused him to pretend, for hours on end, that there were other things in life, equally important, even more important. Indeed, it was not wholly pretence. He was much too energetic to allow himself to be entirely absorbed by the Lethean sweets of love.

  Besides, he was writing a book, a stiff book on the economic situation, and had no intention of allowing Evelyn to distract him from this. He very quickly saw that she would regard his work as her enemy, and would quite unscrupulously divert his attention to herself whenever she got the chance. She would do it subtly at first, but as time went on and as she grew less cautious, she would encroach more and more. The undeclared battle between them amused him; and he was determined to win.

  Still, he had his sense of responsibility. He was young, and, under his gaiety, fundamentally serious. His seriousness seemed to Evelyn rather touching; it made her feel decades older than he. In some ways he was so entirely her master that she felt quite humble before him; in other ways he appeared to her as an inexperienced adolescent. She did not know which aspect made her love him the more.

  He got it into his head that she would worry about their relationship. For his own part, he never cared in the least what people thought or said, but he was quite shrewd enough to know that Evelyn came of a different tradition. He teased her about it once or twice, and she a
dmitted sadly that he was right.

  “I can’t help it, Miles; you may despise me if you like. But,” she added rather pathetically, “you are doing a lot to startle me out of my old-fashioned ideas.”

  “It’s an odd contrast, to look at you dressed in the height of fashion, and then to hear you talking about old-fashioned ideas! Thatt’s what gives such a charming twist to your personality. The Victorian, and the chic. The quarrel between your inside and your outside. You ought to be dowdy. Thank God, you aren’t.”

  Then he became more sober, stopped making phrases, and again asked her to marry him.

  “You would be much happier. You wouldn’t need to worry about the Jarrolds. You wouldn’t need to worry about Dan. You know quite well that you live in terror of Dan finding out.”

  “Dan is a child, Miles; he can’t judge the right or wrong of such things. Thatt is our business; not his.”

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t believe that Dan would judge us harshly. Dan is a sensible boy,—but one never knows, with the very young. He might rake up some strange primitive feeling about his mother. Thatt’s the worst of the conventions: they usually have their root in some useful, protective, racial taboo.”

  “I won’t marry you, Miles.”

  “But why not?”

  “Miles, I’ve told you already twice,—don’t make me say it again. I don’t enjoy saying it.”

  “What,—that I’m younger than you?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  It always ended there. He expostulated, and she was adamant. He was really sincere in his expostulations, being so young that the thought of age could not trouble him. Besides, he could not think of Evelyn as much older than himself. She betrayed no signs of age; her hair was glossy, her skin clear, her body firm and white. True, ‘forty’ had an ominous sound, and she would be forty on her next birthday; if she had told him so once, she had told him twenty times. He set thatt aside. He was rash, impetuous, and unaccustomed to resistance. It angered him to be thwarted so calmly and consistently. He little knew what her firmness cost her.