Pepita

by Vita Sackville-West

  Pepita must indeed have been very sweet at that last period of her life. She had given up all the struggle of a professional career, and had found herself at last in the happy fulfilment of a woman’s life. She was, I think, no feminist. Even her sister-in-law described her as ‘not dominating, but docile’. She might have flown as a bird in the air at Malaga, but her real happiness came among her five or six babies at Bordeaux and Arcachon and Paris, with Countess West printed on her visiting-cards and Grandpapa coming as often as he could to see her from Madrid.

  He had no business to desert his post. He says so himself: ‘I ought not to have left Spain without leave, but it was constantly done and whenever I went away without leave I took the opportunity of visiting Arcachon’. For Pepita was now installed with the children at Arcachon, in the house he had bought for her at a cost of 100,000 francs. It was known as the Villa Pepa, and true to her family tradition Pepita amused herself by entirely remodelling it. First she added two storeys, then she built two pavilions near the seashore, then a stable and a house for the gardener, then a front wall, then added wrought-iron gates and railings. The gates had a coronet and initials on the top. She evidently got on very well with her builder, M. Desombres, for she told him that she had danced in all the capitals of Europe including London and Paris, showed him her collection of photographs, mentioned that Max’s father was the King of Bavaria, told him her Christian name and her age, took him out driving with her and the children in her carriage, sent him in to Bordeaux on messages, made my grandfather give him cigars, and invited him to dinner. It is perhaps natural that M. Desombres should have added: ‘She was not reserved at all. She used to speak of anything that came into her mind.’ At the same time, there is a little tribute to her personal dignity, for although ‘extremely pleasant and friendly, she could still continue to keep one at a distance’.

  Pepita infallibly rings true to herself. There is another account of her, referring to approximately the same period of her life, an account given by a solicitor (abogado) of Malaga. She had apparently been having some trouble connected with an alleged right-of-way over her property at Buena Vista. I can’t quite make out what the trouble was, but I suspect it to have been in some way due to an aggression on the part of Catalina, or perhaps Lopez, for an interdict was served to prevent her (Pepita, in whose name the property stood) from obstructing the said right of way. It all sounds to me very like one of the usual rows between Catalina and her neighbours. Anyhow, Pepita had to deal with it. She dealt with it by going to this particular solicitor, telling him that she had consulted him because she was a native of Malaga and had heard that he was a native of Malaga likewise, which flattered him; telling him also that she had been a dancer, and was now living under the protection of an English gentleman to whom she was not married, and whose photograph she showed him; introducing him to Max, who was then five or six years old, and who took a particular fancy to some lozenges which the solicitor was using for an affection of the throat; and finally by giving him, from time to time, presents of boxes of cigars, and, on one occasion, a whip with his initials on it. It is not surprising, after this, to learn that when the proceedings came to a head the solicitor was able to obtain a decision in her favour. Nor is it surprising to find him adding, somewhat gratuitously, that she could overcome the well-known prejudices of the Granadinos and that the best society in Granada went to her house (which was certainly not true).

  XI

  Arcachon was a small place at that time, of not more than seven or eight hundred inhabitants, and the building activities at Villa Pepa were observed with the greatest interest. Everybody knew Pepita at least by sight, and would watch her strolling about her garden, her hair loosely tied back by a ribbon, her dress often with a train several yards long. Her beauty, her generosity, and her reputation made her the general topic of conversation. It was known of course that she was a Spaniard and had been a dancer, but whether she was married or not to the foreign Count was a subject of endless speculation. On the whole, public opinion decided that they were not married. It was observed that she did not consort at all with those whose equal in social rank she might be considered, and that her children were never to be seen playing with some other English children who lived in the next villa. ‘She was better known to the poor than to the rich, for although she was not connected with any charitable society in Arcachon (no doubt on account of her dubious reputation), anybody could go to her house and ask for what they wanted and she would give it.’ She made use of her butcher’s wife to discover what was needed, saying that if clothes or linen were wanted she would give them; they had only to come and ask her. In fact her kindness and gracious manners made her generally beloved, and the smile which so many of the witnesses mention. At the same time, it was known that she changed her servants very frequently, for she would dismiss them for the slightest thing, when they used to go away saying that they could not live with such a lady.

  Anyone who had penetrated into the interior of Villa Pepa was closely questioned as to what they had seen there. There were the hairdressers Jean Lagarde and his wife; M. Lagarde used to cut the Count’s hair whenever he was at the villa, and described him as a gentleman who did not talk much. Mme Lagarde had quite lost her heart to Pepita at their first interview, when Pepita received her in her bedroom overlooking the sea and told her she had heard she was a real artist who could dress her hair like the other ladies in that part of the country. Her laundress records that she was fond of changing the style of her hairdressing very often, but that she always remained faithful to the little curl on the cheek. The laundress said she had so much jewellery she couldn’t remember a single article, and used to dress like a queen. ‘She was such a pretty lady that everyone used to stop and look at her.’

  Whenever a telegram came from the Count, the Countess would start putting everything in order. With the children to help her, she would decorate little trees by tying red cherries in amongst the dark branches. She would take a great deal of trouble about ordering meals, and the butcher noticed that his account was always higher when ‘the Count of West’ came to stay, because they lived so much better when he was at home. Then when all preparations had been made, she would take the children with her to meet him at the station.

  Sometimes there were odd little interludes when she would take a house at Bordeaux in order to go to the theatre there. It seems as though, in spite of all her happy domesticity, she was not able always to keep away from the absorptions of her youth. The theatre called to her. She would take the house at Bordeaux for a month, and, being Pepita, ‘it was a splendid house with a garden’. She never stinted herself. M. Desombres went there to see her once; he enjoyed his visit. It did not affect him in the least that some people said she could not be properly married to the Count, because she had been married before. ‘The good-natured people said they were married, and the bad-natured people said they were not married.’ In this case, alas, the bad-natured people had hit on the right truth.

  XII

  This was the situation as the outside observers saw it, but on looking at it more closely from the inside it is apparent that Pepita had her sorrows as well as her joys. She minded terribly about the irregularity of her position. For instance she greatly wanted to go to a semi-official party at the Préfecture at Bordeaux, had much difficulty in securing an invitation, and then when she got there found that she knew nobody except two or three young men. On another occasion, in Paris, my grandfather was going officially to a fête at the Tuileries and ‘Pepita cried bitterly because she could not go with me on account of her not being recognised in society’. These difficulties affected the children too. My mother in her evidence gives a pathetic account; ‘I and my sisters never had any children friends at all. Two little girls named Minna and Bella Johnston lived next door, but we saw them very rarely and then always surreptitiously because they were forbidden by their parents to associate with us. The gardens of the two houses adjoined with a low wall between the two.
They used to tell us their parents said they were not to speak to us. We went once to a children’s ball at the Casino at Arcachon, and I remember no one danced with us and we felt very much out of it. We stood by ourselves and nobody spoke to us. It made such an impression on me that I cried. We were never allowed to go again although these dances constantly took place. At the time of course I did not understand the reason for this.’ When they were in Paris it was the same story: ‘It is usual for children to play together in the Champs Elysées. It is the place where children of good families play. We played there but were forbidden to speak to other children. If other children offered to play with us we had to decline.’ And again: ‘I can recollect walking with my father to the British Embassy often, but he always made me turn back before getting there.’

  And there was worse than all this. Pepita of course was a Roman Catholic, but owing to the fact that she was living in adultery she could neither receive absolution nor go to communion. Nor would her conscience permit her to attend Mass, and she was never to be seen at services in the main church at Arcachon. All this was naturally a source of very deep distress to her. It was a source of equal distress when her beloved daughter, on attaining the age of seven (which is the ordinary age for a child brought up in the Roman Catholic faith to go to confession), asked to go and had to be told she could not. ‘I wanted to go, but my mother would not let me. When I asked her to prepare me, she said she could not. I did not know at the time what all this meant.’fn2

  Unwilling, however, wholly to forego the consolations of her religion, although she might only benefit by them as it were furtively, Pepita used often to drive out to the little church at Mouleau beyond the forest, a tiny chapel frequented by a few pilgrims; it was a very small building, and when she went there in the afternoon she could usually count on having it to herself. She went only to pray, and sometimes to see one of the fathers; she always took my mother with her, and the child used to hear the priest telling her he could not give her communion because she could not be given absolution, although she wanted it.

  The priest of course was not to blame: he was only doing his duty according to his precepts, and could not have done otherwise. He could not condone adultery. But when I think of the self-righteous society which rejected Pepita as an improper woman, the words I quoted a few pages back echo in my mind, as I see that lovely, lonely figure kneeling, almost an outcast, in prayer in the deserted chapel: she was better known to the poor than to the rich, for anybody could go to her house and ask for what they wanted, and she would give it.

  It is only in association with the complete background that these dry words of legal evidence assume their almost Biblical austerity and significance.

  fn1 Juan Antonio himself, as a matter of fact, was in Granada at the time. The witness was quite sure of this, for he remembered that it was the year of the triumphal entry of the troops into Madrid after the great battle of Tetuan. What he didn’t know, was that Pepita herself had driven through the streets of Granada during the feasts held in celebration of that victory, in an open carriage decorated with the portrait of Queen Isabel. ‘She was the sight of the day in Granada. She went to the theatre every night in the stage box and attracted universal attention on account of her beauty and splendid dresses and jewellery.’

  fn2 This, at least, is my mother’s version, but I think that somehow she must have got it wrong, for surely the sins of the parents would not thus have been visited upon the children? It seems more likely that Pepita merely thought the child too young and immature. Probably the priest had advised her to this effect.

  6

  End of the Dancer

  I

  From the material point of view Pepita was prosperous and even happy. And it is not to be denied that the material advantages of this world did count for her. By 1870 she had almost everything she could desire; a villa in Arcachon for the summer, a house in Paris for the winter, a generous lover, and as many children as her very maternal heart could comfortably embrace. Moreover after the births of the two eldest children she had prevailed upon my grandfather to let her register the subsequent children as legitimately his and hers,—a most unfortunate and expensive deception, as it turned out later on, but one which my grandfather weakly accorded, as he could refuse her nothing. There was Max, now a tall boy of twelve; the little girl, my mother, called Mademoiselle Pepita by the servants, aged eight; another little girl aged four, who had been registered as Lydia Eleanor Graciosa, but whose name was subsequently changed to Maria Flor Sophia, called Fleur de Marie; another little girl, Amalia Albertina, aged two, whose godfather was Prince Adalbert of Bavaria and godmother Princess Adalbert, Infanta of Spain; and a little boy, aged one year, Ernest Henri Jean Baptiste, known as Henri. Pepita thus had five children living and two establishments. The house in Paris was in a most fashionable quarter; it was No. 200 avenue d’Eylau, near the Champs Elysées, and it had cost my grandfather 195,000 francs. He, meanwhile, had been transferred from Madrid and appointed First 125 Secretary to the British Embassy in Paris. He does not appear to have lived openly in the house with them, and, as we have seen, reduced Pepita to tears by refusing to let her accompany him to the Tuileries; but beyond these slight concessions to social opinion he was able to see as much as he chose of his happy, illegitimate Spanish family living round the corner. It has always seemed very strange to me that the Foreign Office (and in Victorian days too) should thus have turned so blind an eye towards the private life of their First Secretary, but so it was. He was either very lucky or very skilful at managing his own affairs. And a further piece of good luck was awaiting him, for in 1870 the British Embassy, in fear of the Prussian advance, transferred itself from Paris to Bordeaux, which was quite near Arcachon.

  Local gossip said that if the Prussians got as far as Arcachon, the Countess West had everything ready to welcome them. The local gossips slightly confused their facts: the Countess’s eldest son, they said, was the son of the King of Bavaria, therefore he was a Prussian, and moreover the Countess had a portrait of the King of Bavaria hanging up in her villa, so whatever happened she would be quite safe. It confused them even more when the Countess started receiving wounded French soldiers into her house, and caring for them personally, until they either died or recovered from their wounds.

  II

  Pepita’s existence, in fact, seemed settled, permanent, and contented, if we except the two sorrows of the social and the religious ostracism, and as we shall presently see she took steps to minimise both these drawbacks as far as she was able. It seemed scarcely likely that Lionel Sackville-West would break now with a woman with whom he had had such intimate and continuous relations for eighteen years, and by whom he had already had six children, five of whom were living. There were bound to be complications, of course, inevitable in so anomalous a situation,—what would happen, for instance, when the children grew up, or when the Secretary rose in the service, becoming a Minister and even an Ambassador?—but on the whole it looked as though they would always be able to find some way of life, not wholly satisfactory perhaps, but tolerable. Money was no anxiety to them, and as for age they were both in the prime of life, he forty-three, she just forty. True, she was getting a little stout, but that was natural to her Spanish race, and in a photograph taken of her at about this time there is a certain mellow serenity about the beautiful brow which speaks of a heart at peace and a life roundly fulfilled. Her hair was as black as it had been in her youth. She often sang as she went about the house, and in the afternoons she would drive out to the sand-dunes with the children and laugh when they filled their drawers with the silvery sand, standing up to let it trickle out at their ankles, for of course according to the fashion of the second Empire they wore the frilly drawers which reached far below their short little skirts.

  It is rather alarming to learn that on all these expeditions she carried a fat purse full of gold and notes. The proletarian in Pepita distrusted all banks and all investments, preferring to keep her mone
y in ready cash. This little idiosyncrasy specially amuses me, for my mother inherited it and to the end of her life infinitely preferred to pay her bills by bank-note rather than by cheque. And, like Pepita, she always carried a bulging purse in a pocket let into her petticoat. So long as she could feel it knocking against her leg as she walked, she told me, she knew it was safe.

  Pepita spared Max to go to a day school, but the little girls and the baby Henri were always with her, especially my mother, who even slept in her bed.

  Nor did she lack for grown-up companionship. Defrauded of the society of those from whom the self-styled Countess West might have expected a welcome, she fell back upon such society as she could provide for herself. We have already seen that she took M. Desombres the builder driving in her carriage, showed him her collection of photographs, and invited him to dinner; but the way in which she acquired the friendship of Henri de Béon was far odder and completely characteristic.

  Henri de Béon is a new character, but M. Desombres comes into the story again. The long-suffering M. Desombres is sent into Bordeaux to fetch ‘a very nice gentleman who was second station-master at Bordeaux’. This very nice gentleman had been so kind as to stop the train for Prince and Princess Adalbert of Bavaria on their way to Arcachon, and to see the Prince and Princess and Lionel Sackville-West and Pepita all safely into an empty compartment. Pepita told Desombres that she was very glad to have made de Béon’s acquaintance, and sent him to Bordeaux to invite Béon to dinner. Desombres obediently went, found de Béon at the station, and brought him back. The following day de Béon was still to be seen at the villa, so Desombres assumed that he must have stayed there all night.