Family History

by Vita Sackville-West

  She hated them, but she must admit that they were frank and fresh and gay. She compared their dragon-fly chatter with the empty banter of the Jarrolds. This was a different England. They were frank, and even coarse, but they were real. They were clever, but they couldn’t help thatt,—the girl, especially, was horribly clever,—but through all their cleverness they wanted to arrive at something they really meant. They belonged, irrespective of age, to a generation living in a difficult world: the Anquetils, the girl, the young men, all of them. The security of the Jarrolds was entirely absent; and, with it was absent the pretence that the Jarrolds put up of all being right in a world ordained for Jarrolds. Evelyn felt that they would have liked the old man, but would have no use whatever for the old man’s children. And what would they have thought of Robin? Evelyn suddenly softened towards them, as she realised how violently they would dislike Robin, and how much they would like Dan. Then she became afraid that Miles would introduce Dan to the Anquetils, and that he would become absorbed by them.

  After dinner the women moved towards the fire. The studio was large enough for the two groups to be quite separate. Viola Anquetil sat on a low stool, stirring the fire with a poker; the firelight fell on her red dress and on her face with its curiously spiritual, unorthodox beauty.

  “Inez, you must play the piano because I want to talk to Mrs. Jarrold.”

  A Jarrold woman would never have said thatt. Evelyn could not imagine Hester or Catherine saying it. She was alarmed, being unused to frankness between women. Women played a game of their own, in both the worlds to which she was accustomed. She was afraid of Viola pulling out her heart, as it were, with a corkscrew. She stiffened as the girl went towards the piano and struck a few soft chords in the shadows of the room.

  “I am so glad Miles persuaded you to come, Mrs. Jarrold. He told me you might be reluctant,—and I don’t blame you,—it is very trying being introduced to the friends of one’s friends?’

  “It was charming of you to ask me.”

  “Now, shall we drop all thatt? It wasn’t charming of me; I was curious. You see, I have known Miles ever since he was a little boy; well, seventeen. Your own boy is seventeen, isn’t he? So naturally I take an interest in Miles’ concerns, and when he first talked to me about you, and when I first saw how important you were to him, I thought, I must see Evelyn Jarrold for myself. I hope you don’t mind? We are both very fond of Miles.”

  “Both?”

  “Leonard and myself.”

  “Oh,—yes, of course. And he is very fond of you.”

  Evelyn had to make an effort of generosity, to say thatt.

  “Miles is rather an exceptional person, Mrs. Jarrold,—but of course I needn’t tell you so. Exceptional,—and consequently, difficult; not nearly so amenable as he appears on the surface. He’s very amiable, but he has a rough, determined side to his nature. He’s very ambitious, of course.”

  (“Aha!” thought Evelyn, “she is telling me that I mustn’t hamper Miles,—mustn’t try to interfere with his career. Damn his career,” she thought, glancing across to the dinner-table where Miles was deep in talk with Leonard Anquetil, his head shining in the light of the four candles; “damn his career, why can’t he be mine, mine, mine?”)

  “I’m sure he has a great future,” she said aloud.

  “I don’t know about a great future,” said Viola; “thatt’s such a relative term anyway, isn’t it? But I do know that Miles is very energetic and lively. He will never keep quiet. And indeed one would never wish him to keep quiet, wasting himself.—I’ve sometimes thought,” she said, “that he was a little too detached to satisfy his friends. He hurts one, sometimes. One has to be patient with him. It takes years to understand him fully.”

  (“How transparent you are,” thought Evelyn; “transparent and rather impertinent.” But she could not really think Viola Anquetil impertinent, when she looked into those serene and level eyes.)

  “I think Miles is such an interesting study,” said Viola, and the tone in which she spoke redeemed the words from any suspicion of heaviness. “He really is, you know, Mrs. Jarrold. He’s a perpetual source of amusement to me. I don’t think you know his family, do you?”

  “Tell me about them,” said Evelyn. She was profoundly resentful, but she capitulated, partly because Viola charmed her and partly because she greedily welcomed any sidelight on Miles. It was an odd experience, this unforeseen discussion of Miles with another woman, while Miles sat in the same room, and the piano accompanied the two separate groups of talk with its unobtrusive chords. The girl Inez played well; her hands strayed idly on the keyboard. The evening was full of reality and of unreality mixed.

  “Well, he has several brothers and an old father,” began Viola as though she were telling a story to a small child. “His father was a governor of some colony, once,—several colonies,—I forget which. He sacrificed himself to the public service because he conceived it to be his duty, when what he really enjoyed was tramping about after partridges on his estates at home. He had the colonising spirit, you see,—a real old Empire-builder in the old tradition that believes in governing reluctant people who can’t peaceably govern themselves. A dear old man, on the whole, according to his own lights, just as I imagine your father-in-law, Mrs. Jarrold, to have been a dear old man? Miles has told me about him.”

  “Yes,” said Evelyn, “he was a dear old man.”

  “They belonged to the same generation,” said Viola, “only their activities happened to lie in different spheres. Your father-in-law built up a business; Miles’ father helped to go on building up an Empire. Both very honourable. Both strictly limited by their own boundaries. Now, what happens to their descendants? I don’t know your relations-in-law, Mrs. Jarrold, but I know enough about them to imagine them. They haven’t advanced at all. They have merely fulfilled the cosy comfortable ideal that was expected of them, as the prosperous descendants of the people who did the work. They reap the benefit, if benefit it is. So do Miles’ brothers. Miles’ brothers, today, grumble about the taxes they have to pay,—but they worry about very little else. They grumble about the world that has gone, and they cling on to its poor remnants while they may. I dare say the remnants may last out their lifetime. Miles, on the other hand, looks forward.—His father doesn’t approve of him.”

  “But I should have thought, Miles in the country. . . .”

  “Oh, Mrs. Jarrold, I’ve seen Miles in the country! At his castle, you mean. Yes, of course, Miles at his castle is all that his father would most approve. Miles the squire, Miles the farmer. But what about Miles in his constituency? Would his father approve of thatt?”

  “I’ve never seen him in his constituency,” said Evelyn coldly.

  “I have. I went down to canvass for him at the last election.—But this is taking us away from what we were talking about: Miles and his family. Miles comes from the sort of family which is very difficult to break away from. (“Yes,” thought Evelyn, “you know it, because you come from the same sort of family yourself.”) Miles, you know, was sent to Eton. You can imagine the future his father foresaw for him,—the future of a younger son,—Miles was his favourite son too,—Miles should have the ruined castle and the big farm,—Miles should run the farm and be a landlord,—he showed no inclination for the Army or the Foreign Office or the Indian Civil Service, or, heaven help him, the Church, so the land remained, and the family estates could provide: Miles should go on the land. Well, Miles likes being on the land. There’s a good landlordly Tory tradition in Miles. But it isn’t enough. He disputes; he questions. He breaks away from the public school tradition. He goes back to what England used to be.”

  “How do you mean,” said Evelyn, “what England used to be?” She was interested in spite of herself. She wanted to dislike Viola Anquetil, but she could not dislike her.

  “I have a theory,” said Viola, as though amused at her o
wn thoughts; “I don’t know if you’d like to hear it?”

  “Please.”

  “It may be all wrong.”

  “Never mind. Please tell me.”

  “Well, I have a theory that Miles is a reversion to type. Your Englishman of birth and education wasn’t always the cautious, repressed creature he is today. There was a time when he was ashamed neither of his feelings nor of his culture. He was cruder and coarser then, in some ways,—less gentlemanly, according to modern ideas, but more gentlemanly, as I see it.—I don’t know if you’ve ever studied the Italian Renaissance?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Evelyn, with vague ideas of Leonardo da Vinci.

  “Miles would have fitted into the Italian Renaissance. He would have been quite happy at Urbino. He would have appreciated a great doorway with swags of marble fruit and flowers, yet at the same time he would have enjoyed hours spent in empirical argument and he would have liked Alberti who could build a temple at Rimini or jump into the saddle without putting a hand on his horse. Do you see what I mean? The imaginary Miles of the sixteenth century, whether in Italy or in England, had no limitations. He drank life greedily. He would have been happy at Urbino, at Rimini, or in Elizabethan England. He was a cosmopolitan then, a citizen of the world, he wasn’t merely and dully an Englishman. But now something has gone wrong.”

  “What went wrong, according to you?”

  “I don’t quite know,” said Viola; “I fancy it was a mixture of Dr. Arnold and Victorianism. Anyhow, take better bred you were, and the more expensively educated, the tighter you learnt to shut your mind. You were taught to be less and less of an individual, and more and more of a type. And our extraordinary theory about Character came in, as though character and brain and imagination were incompatible. The only kind of brain we tolerate at all, in this country, is the political brain or the administrative brain. We don’t jeer at our statesmen or at our administrators as we jeer at our artists. Our statesmen are even allowed to wear their hair rather long, without any comment being made in Punch or the popular press.”

  “How pleased my boy would be to hear you say thatt.”

  “You must bring him here one day; will you? Miles says he is delightful. He is at Eton still, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” said Evelyn, feeling, for the first time in her life, slightly ashamed that Dan should be at Eton.

  “I am afraid that you would think that we gave Paul,—my boy,—rather a freak education. We sent him to Germany instead of sending him to a public school. You see, he is a musician and we thought it better for him to be happy at Munich than wretched at Eton. Both Leonard and my brother were very much against sending him to a public school. My brother was at Eton himself, but in spite of Eton he managed to grow up into quite a definite character,” said Viola smiling, “and as for Miles, you must have heard of his Eton career. His brothers were so scandalised, they would hardly speak to him for five years. They tried to explain it away by saying that Miles was hopelessly affected. His father was much more sympathetic about it, but even his father has found it hard to swallow Miles’ political views, nor can he bear his son being a prominent pacifist. The old man still believes that all foreigners are rogues and that most non-Europeans are niggers. And as such, of course, they ought to be shot down.—I’m talking too much,” said Viola, and seeing that the men were moving she called out to Inez to come across to the fire.

  Miles tried to meet Evelyn’s eyes, but she would not look at him; she knew that he was full of an anxious curiosity, but she would not own to him even by a glance that she liked Viola Anquetil.

  He took her home, rather late, and they quarrelled. It was the first time they had ever quarrelled openly. She had always foreseen and dreaded their first quarrel, but had staved it off by strangling her own feelings or her own temper,—but now perversely, it was she who provoked it. Thus, when emotions run too high, do things happen. Miles himself was in a good mood; he was always in a good mood when he had been with the Anquetils, and this evening his cup of pleasure had been especially full, because of Evelyn’s presence. He had enjoyed seeing her sitting amongst his friends. He was rather touchingly naïf about it, but although she was touched somewhere in her heart that loved him, she remained on the surface disagreeably obdurate and sarcastic.

  He came upstairs to the flat with her. In the motor, on the way, he had ventured nothing more than “Doesn’t Paul play well?” Paul had played after dinner.

  “I suppose so, Miles, but then I am no judge of music.” It was a chilling answer, promising badly.

  But in the flat, flinging off his overcoat, he plunged recklessly.

  “Well, how did you like them?”

  “Is it really necessary to be so dirty or so boorish as Mr. Anquetil?”

  Miles laughed.

  “Oh, didn’t you like Leonard? Most women find him very attractive. Wouldn’t he respond? I admit, he’s not at his best with strangers. But Viola,—how did you get on with her?”

  “I don’t think she liked me much, Miles,—I’m not nearly clever enough for her.”

  “Damn cleverness,—Viola isn’t clever, she’s only intelligent. I hate clever women.”

  “I don’t see much difference, I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t you? So much the worse for you.” A note of irritation was coming into his voice. He was not a long-suffering or patient person. He blundered on. “Very beautiful, anyhow, don’t you think?”

  “In her own untidy way, yes. I suppose so.”

  “Untidy? Oh, I suppose you mean she’s not dressed in the latest fashion, nor made up with the latest Dover Street cosmetics. No, she isn’t. She doesn’t go to race-meetings, to be photographed sitting on a shooting-stick, ‘with friend,’ whether the friend be a man or a Pekingese. Neither she nor Sebastian ever lent themselves to thatt kind of thing.”

  “Sebastian?”

  “Her brother.”

  “Yes, of course. She mentioned him.”

  “She adores him. But he spends only half the year in England, and when he is here he buries himself in the country.”

  “At Chevron?”

  “Yes, at Chevron. Do you blame him? It isn’t his fault that he’s an English duke, and he takes the line that the best he can do is to be a good landlord on his estates. He’s an unhappy man.”

  “I suppose he would rather be like Bretton.”

  “The son of a greengrocer in Rotherham? I dare say he thinks so. But you know, Evelyn, all thatt is rather rot: anybody would rather be born an English duke than the son of a greengrocer in Rotherham.”

  “You surprise me, Miles; I thought you hated privilege.”

  “I do hate it,—theoretically,—but I enjoy it, and so does Sebastian. Let’s be honest.”

  “Honest,—honest,—you talk a lot of rubbish about being honest. Bretton . . .”

  “How you hate Bretton!”

  “He’s so rude, Miles.”

  “Rude,—you mean he doesn’t pick up your handkerchief when you drop it. No, he’s thinking of other things. And if you women want equality, you can’t have it both ways.”

  “But you, Miles, would pick up my handkerchief, or any other woman’s.”

  “Thatt’s because I was partially educated at Eton. I wasn’t taught to pick up women’s handkerchiefs there, but I was taught to cap my tutor.—This is a silly discussion. The long and short of it is, you didn’t like the Anquetils.”

  “I didn’t dislike Viola,” said Evelyn after a pause.

  “Thatt means that you disliked everybody else.”

  “Well, take them separately, Miles. Leonard Anquetil has no manners at all. Bretton,—you’ve guessed what I think about Bretton. The boy Paul,—although I dare say he played well,—seemed to me uncouth and odd. Thatt young man,—was Allen his name?—talked too much, and about things he shoul
dn’t have mentioned in front of a girl . . .”

  Miles laughed uproariously.

  “Do you mean Inez? My dear, she’s been Allen’s mistress for years.”

  “Indeed? I thought she might possibly be Bretton’s.”

  “Why? because she was talking to him on the sofa? No, Bretton holds quite different views.—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken you to the Anquetils.”

  “I go back to what I said, Miles: I’m not clever enough. You’d better take Dan there instead.”

  She turned away, and he saw that she was trying to swallow her tears.

  “Evelyn, darling!”

  “For God’s sake, leave me alone. Keep your friends, and leave me to mine. I’m too old for you, I belong to a different generation, I belong to the Jarrolds.”

  “Viola is years older than you.”

  “Well, then, she’s more adaptable than I am. I don’t know. I’m out of the picture, Miles, and the sooner you realise it the better. She talked a lot about you, and I realised how far you and I were apart. I expect she did it on purpose.”

  “Viola? Never! She’s not thatt kind of woman.”

  “All women are thatt kind of woman.”

  “There’s another of your traditional ideas. Can’t you discard them and start with a fresh mind? Those ideas are so hampering, if only you’d admit it.”

  “Some things remain true, however much other things change and shift.”

  “Well, I suppose you know more about women than I do, but I protest that you misjudge Viola.”