Family History

by Vita Sackville-West

  “Did Miles leave any message?”

  “Oh yes, I forgot, he said you could ring him up if you liked. He said he was dining with Princess somebody or other. I forget. Some Russian name.”

  She did not ring him up.

  But she was glad that old Mrs. Jarrold,—Lady Orlestone,—had liked Miles.

  Life in London was more complicated than life at Miles’ castle. Miles was much in request in London. She soon realised that if she played these tricks on him, she would not see him at all. Yet, perversely, she continued to play them. He was not patient under such treatment. He retaliated always and instantly. People ran after him, and if Evelyn chose to leave him to his own devices he had plenty of devices to be left to. He made this unambiguously clear. Battle was joined between them. She would not yield; neither would he.

  In the end she yielded.

  She looked back on the days spent at his castle. Occasional and very significant battles they had had, but, in the main, every day had drawn to its proper conclusion. Though they might have quarrelled as lovers during the day, every night had joined them as lovers again. Viewed in retrospect, the days at Miles’ castle were idyllic, perfect. She had never been so happy as at Miles’ castle. She was wise enough to recognise that upon her and upon her alone depended the continuance of their happiness transferred to London.

  She must make concessions. Miles was proud and restive. She herself was vain and spoilt. But her vanity and her spoiltness were of a cheap and superficial kind. She was insignificant, compared with Miles. She must buckle under. He was a full man, and she but an empty woman,—empty of all save the power to please him in his leisure hours. She must make concessions, she must subordinate her own vanities to his needs.

  She no longer minded about the Jarrolds’ criticism. She was determined only to recapture the days when she and Miles had been so happy.

  He was happy too,—she could see it. He expanded and flowered; he no longer tormented her, when she no longer tormented him. She told Mason quite frankly to say that she was not at home, when Mr. Vane-Merrick was there. They heard the doorbell ring, and laughed together to hear Mason shut the door behind the intruder. They were happier, shut into Evelyn’s flat, even than they had been at his castle.

  It was warm; it was private. Dan had gone back to school. Evelyn had suffered torments of conscience when she saw him go off; and not of conscience only, which is a jejune thing, but also torments of love. She loved Dan. She loved him in an animal way. His young and adolescent beauty moved her; his young, perplexed mind moved her; he was her own creation. The fact that his father was dead made him more exclusively hers; the fact that his father hail had no part at all in the making of Dan, save for a short, distasteful and essentially uncontributive episode. Dan was no Jarrold.

  All the evening she and Dan had watched the clock. They had had buttered toast for tea. Dan, like Miles, liked buttered toast, and, though Evelyn might forget, Privett always remembered. There was always buttered toast for tea on the day that Dan went back to Eton. (Privett was annoyed when Mr. Vane-Merrick brought a toasting-fork with him one day.) And there were always two jars of honey and two pots of jam packed up ready in the hall, for him to take back. They were packed up by Privett, in neat parcels of stiff brown paper.

  Dan and his mother watched the clock, each pretending that they were not watching it. They made conversation; they talked about Newlands; they did not talk about Miles or Miles’ castle or any of the things that interested them most. They avoided such things. They did not even talk about Dan’s next half at Eton or Dan’s unhappiness there. They were both feeling too keenly to mention the things that had real importance for them.

  At seven o’clock Evelyn stirred.

  “Dan, darling, I think you ought to start.”

  She had ordered the motor for him. He was going in the most luxurious way possible to the most luxurious school in England. Yet she pitied him. Miles had said that Dan at school was like a bird of Paradise in an aviary full of sparrows.

  “Dan, darling, I hope you have a good half. This is a short half, remember. The Easter holidays come quite soon.”

  “Will we go to stay with Miles again in the Easter holidays, Mummy?”

  “Yes, I expect so. Bless you, Dan. Bless you. Have you got all your things? Your paint box? Your suitcase? Your overcoat?”

  “Yes, Mummy, I put them all ready for Mason to take down.—Oh, Mummy, my skates!”

  “Well, where are they, darling? It’s getting late,—you ought to go.”

  “I left them at Miles’ castle. Would you,—could you,—ask Miles to tell Mrs. Munday to send them? You’ll be seeing Miles, won’t you?—You see, I thought the lake would freeze.—I’m so sorry to be such a bore.”

  “Darling, you aren’t being a bore.” She was well-accustomed to such last-minute forgetfulness.

  “Mummy,—promise to arrange with Miles for us to go there again for Easter.”

  “Yes, darling, yes,—but now you must go.”

  “I’ll get into a row if I don’t go.”

  Still he lingered.

  “Dan, it’s silly to be unnecessarily late,—isn’t it?”

  “Mummy,—come down in the motor with me to Eton?”

  She was torn in half: Miles was coming to dinner with her. For the first time since the beginning of the holidays, they would be alone.

  “Darling! three-quarters of an hour more?”

  “Oh, yes, it’s silly, I know. Well, good-bye, Mummy. See you at Long Leave, anyhow.—What the hell has Mason done with my things? Mummy, you ought to sack thatt man.—Oh, there you are, Mason. Where’s my coat? Well, good-bye, Mummy. See you at Long Leave. Goodbye!”

  He went, tumbling hurriedly down the stairs.

  Evelyn turned back into the flat, alone. These partings with Dan always shook her. She felt that she was condemning him to another three months of unnecessary and yet necessary suffering. She felt especially guilty towards him this time, because for the past three weeks she had been using him as an unconscious shield against the world. Poor little Dan, so generous, so naïf, so excitable, so affectionate! Her heart followed him, as the motor carried him through the dark streets of Hammersmith and along the Great West Road.

  But it was warm and private in the flat. Miles and she were alone. She had resolved privately that Miles should stay in London thatt night. She would make him stay. She told Mason that he might go to bed.

  Dan, meanwhile, having arrived at Eton, hauled his paint-box up the wooden stairs and flung it down in his bleak little room.

  After dinner, she thought that Miles was in a propitious mood. He had seemed glad to find her alone, after the long interruption of the holidays, and although her heart still ached for Dan she was happy to find that Miles shared her relief in their solitude. “I thought you enjoyed talking to Dan,” she said, jealously, wanting to hear his contradiction. “I do enjoy talking to Dan,” he said instantly and honestly, “but I prefer being alone with you.” She was satisfied by thatt. She let Miles sit at her feet, and, while she rested her hand on his hair, she laid her schemes for keeping him in London for the night. She knew that he had his book to write; she knew that he was working hard; but she could not see that twenty-four hours made much difference.

  “Miles, stay with me; stay with me just this once. Give me this evening; it can’t make much difference if you get back to your work tonight or tomorrow morning! You won’t do any work tonight; you’ll reach the castle much too late.”

  “But I shall start working tomorrow morning directly after breakfast.”

  “Yes, I know, but if you take the nine-fifteen tomorrow morning you’ll be home by a quarter to eleven. You’ll lose only an hour or so. Miles, please! just this once.”

  He could hardly resist her pleading eyes. Yet he said, “But it isn’t just this once. It�
��s nine times out of ten,—no, thatt isn’t fair,—it’s three times out of ten.”

  “If you count the hours against me like thatt,” she said, releasing him, “you had better go.”

  Then, of course, he stayed.

  But he loved her the less for it. He liked to organise his life according to timetable: a time for work, a time for walks, a time for reading, a time for love. Evelyn interfered with this system; to her, all times were the time for love.

  She, unlike him, had nothing to do with her time except to wring pleasure out of it. Moreover, she was very violently and painfully in love, never having been really in love before. When she had married Tommy Jarrold she had believed herself to be in love, because it was the orthodox thing to be when one became engaged; but she now discovered the difference. The difference was so great, that she must needs make herself a nuisance to Miles, who was an active man; and the more she saw that she was making herself a nuisance, the more of a nuisance she made herself. The more he resisted, the more she insisted. Her motives were mixed: partly, she wanted to defeat him; partly, she genuinely craved for his presence. Vanity and passion, between them, wrecked Miles’ timetable and led to countless quarrels and reconciliations,—the quarrels of opposed wills, the reconciliations of passionate lovers. It was all very destructive, although when once she had gained her point she made him feel that his lost time was well lost in her arms. But he knew that these temporary intoxications, however persuasive, bore very little relation to reality. Reality was a different thing: it was represented by his castle, his farm, his new gates; by his ideas, by the book he was writing, by Bretton, even by the House of Commons; by his interchange with the various people he knew; by his books, by poetry, by his love of music, by his interest in a hundred things,—not solely by Evelyn and love. Love and the woman were insufficient for an active mind. Love and the man, however, were all-too-sufficient for a starved heart and unoccupied mind. Miles learnt it, to his cost; Evelyn never learnt it, to hers.

  He stayed, but to stay resentfully is worse than not staying at all.

  Then there were other ways in which she irritated him. She expected him to write to her every day, when they were not together, but at the same time she shrank from her servants seeing his letters arrive every morning by the early post. They must know his handwriting, she said; they must recognise it; and they must draw their own conclusions. Well, said Miles patiently, I’ll type my envelopes. This satisfied her for a time; then she suggested he should vary the pattern of his envelopes. “Really,” he said, “one would think you were spied on by a jealous husband,” and although he laughed as he said it, he would not give in to her, but continued to enclose his letters in the blue envelopes he used at his castle. “My dear,” he said sensibly, when she reproached him with having no care for her feelings, “Mason and Privett can see the postmark, whatever the colour of the envelope.” “But they wouldn’t always look at the postmark,” she objected, “and thatt bright blue paper of yours can be recognised a mile off.” “Yes,” he said; “the colour of a summer sky.”

  Thatt was always the end of her arguments with Miles: he worsted her by a phrase.

  He was irritated, but he was enamoured enough to persuade himself that her absurd qualms were charming. They were part of her make-up, and he would not have her otherwise,—so he told himself. His regard for truth was obscured by this new experience of being in love. He had always thought that he valued clear-thinking above all things; now he perceived that love was its very enemy. Either he must resist, or he must allow himself to be defeated. Up to a point, he would allow himself to be defeated. But only up to a point.

  Dan came back from Eton before Long Leave. He came back, because his grandfather died. A very strong man, William Jarrold went suddenly. On the tenth of February he caught a chill, and by the twenty-fifth he was dead. Evelyn was sent for, and witnessed his last hours. He put up a strong fight, against double pneumonia. Dr. Gregory was hopeful, Dr. Gregory, the family doctor, who had been summoned from London because the old man was accustomed to him and would take his physic when he refused to take anyone else’s. But then Dr. Gregory was always hopeful; listening to Dr. Gregory, you might believe that there were no such things as death and danger in the world. The other doctor, a stranger, from London also, was less hopeful; he said quite frankly that when people of Lord Orlestone’s age got double pneumonia there was no denying that it became a serious matter. In short, the other doctor, the stranger, gave him twenty-four hours, but William Jarrold defeated him by nearly a week.

  To the last moment of consciousness he insisted on signing his letters. Evelyn respected the old man for his tenacity, though she could not quite understand her respect for such physical tenacity and vigour. It seemed to be an adventitious blessing, conferred at birth by some fairy god-father, irrespective of the personality thus blessed. There was no real reason why she should respect her father-in-law more for refusing (for a week) to die. The only explanation she could give to herself, was a respect for the life-force that kept him going. A week more or less in seventy-five years, was a detail. But she had always loved Mr. Jarrold, and her love for him was increased by his refusal to die. Bretton might have sneered, but she felt that a bit of Victorian England died with him, and died hard.

  The normally cheerful atmosphere of Newlands underwent a change as soon as it was recognised that its master lay within the shadow of death. The belief in a passing indisposition soon gave way to a more disturbing anxiety. The spirit of danger suddenly walked into a stronghold. Death,—the thing which one pretended would never happen,—had suddenly become a presence. Hester telephoned to Evelyn and suggested that she might come down for the week-end, “just to cheer us up.” So far, no admission that her presence was urgently required. Evelyn went, of course, by the next train, and found them all maintaining the fiction that everything was as it should be. The library was as bright as ever, under the remorseless electric light; they sat round the tea-table, and chaffed and bantered as usual; only, every now and then glances were exchanged, and some member of the family rose and slipped out of the room, to be absent ten minutes or more, and then returned to resume the vacated place, and after a moment someone would say “Well?” and the reply came, “Nurse doesn’t seem quite so satisfied tonight . . . he’s rather restless”; and then would come questions about temperature and pulse, uttered in a different voice.

  There was some discussion as to whether Evelyn should be allowed to see him or not. On the one hand her arrival might distress him; might suggest to him that he was iller than he knew; on the other hand Evelyn had always had a good effect upon him: the sight of her might cheer him up. One day he seemed slightly better, and spirits revived; next morning he seemed definitely better, and the doctor gave his opinion that she might with advantage be admitted to his room. Only for a moment, though. She was taken upstairs by Hester, although she knew the way perfectly; Hester turned the door-handle, holding it tight and pulling the door towards her as she turned, then gave the door a quick little push so that it opened three or four inches without a sound. “Go in,” she whispered to Evelyn; “I’ll shut it behind you.”

  The room was in semi-darkness; an uncertain pink light came through the drawn curtains. There was a screen round the fire, and within the cubicle thus created was the nurse in her armchair and a little table on which stood some bottles, jugs, a drinking-cup, a fountain-pen, and a medical chart lying open. Evelyn could see the zig-zag of the temperature record, going up and down into peaks and chasms, like the geographical elevation of a mountain range. Beyond the screen was the bed, with someone lying very quiet in it. The nurse got up quickly and quietly, laying down the novel she was reading. She smiled at Evelyn, and nodded in a silent conspiratorial way.

  “Lord Orlestone,” she said in a clear voice, going over to the bed, “here’s Mrs. Jarrold come to see you.” And she motioned to Evelyn to come forward.

  “Papa?
” said Evelyn, going right up to the bed, in the brave way one uses towards those who are very ill.

  She could hardly see him, in the pink half-light. She could just see his head denting the pillow and his hands lying out on the folded sheet.

  “Papa,” she said again, “I’m so glad you’re better.”

  “Who’s thatt?” he said, stirring a little; “Evelyn? You all right, my dear? Nice of you to come. Dan here too, eh?”

  “No, Papa, Dan isn’t here, Dan’s at school.”

  “Not sent for the heir yet, then, haven’t they?” He cackled a little, very feebly, at his own joke. “Well, they don’t tell me much, my dear,—thatt damned nurse, eh?—but so long as they don’t send for the heir,—what?”

  He was very weak, but quite in his right mind, Evelyn thought.

  “You’ll be downstairs again in a fortnight, Papa.”

  He tried to wag his finger at her, but the effort to raise his arm was too much for him, and his hand fell back upon the sheet.

  “Nice to see you, my dear,” he murmured; “nice of you to come.”

  The nurse beckoned her away.

  The funeral took place at Orlestone, not at Newlands. The old man had left a letter, clearly stating his wishes as they were to be carried out. On no account, he said, was his body to be burned. He did not hold with such new-fangled ideas. Buried he would be, and decently, near the pits which had made the fortune of his family. He would be buried near his father and his grandfather, and he hoped that his grandson (though of course he could lay no obligation on him) would when his time came be buried in the same place and in like fashion.

  The whole family came to see him buried. Distant cousins, of whom Evelyn had scarcely heard, turned up, proud of their association with the Jarrolds. They gave their names distinctly to the representatives of the Press, hoping to read them next day in The Times, the Morning Post, or the Daily Telegraph. (Actually, the Press reported: Lady Orlestone, widow; Mr. Daniel Jarrold, grandson; Mr. Geoffrey Jarrold, son, and Mrs. Geoffrey Jarrold; Mr. Evan Jarrold, son; Mrs. Thomas Jarrold, daughter-in-law; Miss Ruth and Miss Minnie Jarrold, granddaughters; Mr. Robin Jarrold, grandson.)