Pepita

by Vita Sackville-West

  He and my mother were in many ways admirably matched. Both had been brought up in France, and both spoke French and English alternately as native languages. Then, his own long association with France gave him some understanding of the tempestuous and contradictory elements in her Latin temperament; and thus when she stormed at him he did not take it nearly so much to heart as the average quiet Englishman. Symbolically, his private name for her was Josée, an abbreviation of Josefa, for, as he often said affectionately, ‘You’re nothing but a little Spanish beggar’. She half-liked, and half didn’t like, that recurrent joke.

  Then, again, both their early lives had been unusual. True, he had been most respectably born, the son of a Scottish doctor in Boulogne, but as a young man in the early twenties he had become involved in a series of existences quite as romantic as her own. He had, indeed, become twisted as one of the strands in one of the most curious of English family histories. Beginning with the eccentric Marquis of Hertford, immortalised as the Marquis of Steyne in Vanity Fair, the Hertford fortune and collections of works of art had eventually passed to one Richard Wallace. Whence Richard Wallace sprang, nobody exactly knew. Some believed him to be the illegitimate son of Lady Hertford, who had won fame of her own as the beautiful Mimi Fagnani, daughter of the Duke of Queensbury and ward of George Selwyn, the wit. Others averred that he was not Lady Hertford’s son at all, but her grandson, in other words the bastard of her real son the fourth Marquis of Hertford. Whatever the truth may be, it was Wallace who, on Lord Hertford’s death, benefited by a codicil to his will which enraged the whole Seymour family and has become famous in legal and social history. In the fulness of time this Richard Wallace, with his great possessions, found it necessary to employ a secretary, and it was in this capacity that the young John Murray Scott entered his household. So greatly did he endear himself to his employers, that both Sir Richard and Lady Wallace came to regard him as their adopted son rather than as their secretary. Lady Wallace, indeed, as a widow, wished to bequeath the whole of the Hertford House collection to him, but with the disinterestedness that was characteristic of him he refused this stupendous legacy, insisting that it should go to the nation instead.

  His refusal was observed, but still his inheritance was princely. He had already been left £20,000 by Sir Richard Wallace; Lady Wallace left him over a million more; an estate in Ireland; another in Suffolk; house property in Paris worth about half a million, and the remainder of the lease of Hertford House.

  Besides a millionaire’s fortune in money, he came into possession of all the Hertford-Wallace treasures in Paris. To remember all those treasures now, as I remember them, is to look back into another age,—an age when culture and elegance seemed permanent, privileged, and secure; an age when a taste in fine books, furniture, and pictures formed part of a gentleman’s equipment, as much as a taste in good food and noble wines. It scarcely seems to belong to this uneasy century at all. The connoisseurship and splendid living which descended as the mantle of Elijah on the shoulders of John Murray Scott surrounded not only him but also his friends with an atmosphere of the eighteenth rather than the twentieth century.

  It was not so much in his London house as in Paris that one could savour this atmosphere to the full. In Paris he seemed to expand, as though the full flower of his jovial benevolence opened under the influence of its own congenial incarnation of benign hospitality, desirous only that everyone should be happy as his guest, dispensing, in his lavish way, all the store of courtesy, intellect, and fine fare at his disposal. For he was a great giver, and he had much to give. His vast apartment on the first floor, turning the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and the rue Lafitte, with twenty windows opening on either street (not so very far from the hotel where my grandfather had originally made Pepita’s acquaintance), was in itself a treasure-house which brought visitors from every part of Europe. I shall never forget the enchantment of that house. From the moment one had pulled the string and the big door had swung open, admitting one to the interior courtyard where grooms in wooden clogs seemed perpetually to be washing carriages, the whole house belonged to him, though he reserved only the first floor for himself and a number of odd and secret little apartments tucked away on various floors and in various corners. Thus in one corner, quite separate, were the rooms for the linen, under the charge of the lingère, such linen as I have never seen since, stacks and stacks of it, with lavender bags between each layer, and blue and pink ribbons tying it up; sheets as fine as a cambric handkerchief, towels that you could almost have threaded through a ring. The lingère used to sit there all day darning and ironing, with a canary singing in a cage at the open window.

  But these things were not known to casual visitors, and the real glory of the house lay in the main apartment. Room after room opened one into the other, so that, standing in the middle, one could look down a vista of shining brown parquet floors and ivory-coloured boiseries on either side. Here, indeed, one had the eighteenth-century illusion at its height. The traffic might rumble down the boulevard outside and the cries of Paris echo muffled beyond the slatted shutters, but inside the rooms there was no hint, even in the smallest detail, of the modern world. No telephone, no electric light; nothing but wax candles in the heavy ormolu candelabra on the tables and in the sconces on the walls; no bells, save those that one could jangle by pulling a thick silken rope ending in an immense tassel. Even on the writing-tables the little sifters were always kept full of sand, and the pens were long quills, with a knife laid ready to sharpen them. All around, silent and sumptuous, stood the priceless furniture of the Wallace Collection. Chairs and sofas of brocade and petit point; tables and consoles with the voluptuous curves of Louis Quinze or the straight lines of Louis Seize; the bronze sphinxes of the early Regency; the tortoiseshell and buhl of Louis Quatorze; the marqueterie of rose-wood and lemon-wood; the ormolu mouldings of Caffieri, sporting into shells and cupids, into the horned heads of rams and cloven hoofs of satyrs; endless clocks, all ticking, and all exactly right, chiming the quarters together; the library full of rich bindings, all stamped with the Hertford crest; the faded gilt of the panellings; the tapestries where hirsute gods and rosy goddesses reclined on clouds; the heavy curtains,—all was untouched perfection of its kind, even to the exquisitely chased fastenings to the windows and differently modelled keys to every door.

  The servants of this enchanted refuge were all of a piece with their surroundings. Save for the cook, they were all men and they were all old. To my eyes they seemed so old that had I been told that they had assisted at the taking of the Bastille I should not have been in the least surprised. I forget how many there were, five or six, I think, and in the mornings before anyone else was up I used to watch them going about in green baize aprons and waistcoats striped black and yellow like a wasp, long feather dusters in their hands and clouts tied round their shoes to polish the shining floors. When they talked they growled like old bears, especially Jacques, who was like a very hairy old monkey and whose favourite expression was, ‘J’ai mes cent sous par jour et je me fiche du Pape’.

  It was from them that we derived the nickname by which Sir John was always known to us: Seery. The French servants called him Seer John, or, more simply, Seer, and the anglicised diminutive arose naturally. Everybody adopted it, my mother included; we never thought of him by any other name.

  The head of all the servants, M. Bénard, was far too grand to take any part in the housework and cleaning. He did not even supervise, but reserved himself for the dining-room, which was his particular province. There, with his superb white head and streaming white whiskers, directing his group of ancient acolytes by an imperious glance or a jerk of the head, he officiated as some high-priest conducting a holy rite. To see him set down some huge silver dish before Sir John, and remove the cover, and stand waiting for his master’s gesture of approval before bearing it away to carve, was to learn once and for ever how such things ought to be done. To watch him bring in some bottle of precious wine,
carrying it with all its cobwebs in his white-gloved hands as though some fragile and irreplaceable relic, followed by Jacques or Baptiste with the cork on a salver, to hear him murmur ‘Château neuf des Papes, dix-huit cent soixante-dix-huit, Château Lafitte, soixante-quatre’, or whatever it might be; to watch him pour, just so much and no more, was to realise that such wine was a gift to be received with respect and, if possible, in silence.

  The dining-room was large and quiet; the thick carpet muffled all footsteps; on the walls hung four large battle-pieces by Horace Vernet, representing the victories of Napoleon. Under these ferocious pictures full of struggling horses, dying men, and smoke spurting from a range of innumerable cannon, the big white circle of the dining-room tablecloth spread in luxury and peacefulness. It was a place where people might linger, delighting in the pleasures of the mind, the palate, and the eye. In the centre of that table, until my mother suppressed it as an unnecessary extravagance, an enormous silver bowl the size of a foot-bath was daily refilled with out-of-season flowers; it looked like a flower-painting, a wild improbable jumble by Fantin-Latour, lilac, tulips, carnations, roses, irises, lilies, all absurdly mixed together in profusion. Seery tried to protest against its suppression: it had always been like that, he said, and he saw no reason why it should be altered. They compromised finally on the understanding that the florist should come only three times a week instead of every day.

  My mother never cared for flowers; she liked them made of paper, or silk, or feathers, or sea-shells, or beads, or painted tin, but the real flower never appealed to her in the least. This may perhaps have been why she resented the extravagance at the rue Lafitte, for she had a certain Latin shrewdness about money running through her whole composition, and did not like to see it wasted on things in which she took no pleasure. On the other hand, she never tried to suppress the dishes of little cakes, chocolates, brandy cherries, dragées, and marrons glacés which also loaded the table daily, from the most expensive of all Parisian confectioners. I was glad of this, for I liked them too.

  Then apart from the rue Lafitte, Seery had inherited Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne. This most delicate little pavilion, standing in a garden of sixty acres, had been built for Marie Antoinette by the Comte d’Artois in a space of three months only, in obedience to her wish that she might have some resting-place between Paris and Versailles. ‘It shall be done’, he had said, and it was. And, when she thanked him, he replied in the grand eighteenth-century manner, ‘Madame, ce n’est qu’une bagatelle’.

  Bagatelle is now the property of the city of Paris, but when I first knew it in the hot summer of 1900, when the great Exhibition was being held and Paris was almost unbearable by reason of the heat and of the crowds, we had the run of it entirely to ourselves. Almost every afternoon we used to drive out there, in one of Seery’s big landaus, the fat horses clumping sedately up the Champs Elysées. He kept no servants there, except coachmen and gardeners, so that the expedition was always a picnic. In the shady garden I could wear an overall only and could run barefoot over the cool grasses. It was a garden which seemed inexhaustible in its surprises. However well I thought I had explored it, I always discovered something new. There were grottos with statues of nymphs round whose necks one could hang garlands of flowers; there were little lakes with boats and bridges and islands. There were caves which were always cool, and which dripped water from the roof, making mud of the sandy path beneath. There was a mound which one ascended by a long and winding path, and from the top of which one could overlook Paris. There were the deserted underground quarters of Marie Antoinette’s servants, down two long passages with eighteen rooms opening on either side. There were the stables and coach-houses, which Seery quite unnecessarily kept full of horses and carriages. There were gardeners’ sheds and bothies. And finally there was the pavilion itself, empty now, but still eloquent with the monogram M.A. under the crown, even on the espagnolettes of the windows. They certainly understood the art of charming finish and detail, at the time Bagatelle was built. Even then, when the spiders spun their webs across the corners, and the sunlight lay in slats across the dusty floor, you could see that it had been a present fit for a prince to offer to a queen.

  II

  This friendship with Seery formed an integral part of our lives. He was constantly at Knole; every spring we went for about two months to stay with him in Paris; every year from August to October my parents shared a shooting-lodge with him in Scotland. Whenever he and my mother were apart they wrote to one another every day, for they were conversant with every detail of one another’s existence. He got on admirably with my queer old grandfather, who became more and more silent as the years went on, until finally he was seldom heard to speak at all. Seery would refer to him as ‘the old man’ behind his back, and my grandfather would sometimes say, ‘Good fellow, Johnnie’, though to the end they never addressed each other as anything but Sir John and Lord Sackville, an old-fashioned formality which always amused us. What made it funnier to us, was that my grandfather should thus privately allude to him as Johnnie, a name we never used.

  SIR JOHN MURRAY SCOTT, WITH A POLISH DWARF

  Seery, despite his enormous size and weight, was an ardent and determined sportsman, and, since it was his policy always to ignore the burden of flesh he was compelled to bear about with him, even to the extent of pretending that he was not really at all fat, nothing would deter him from taking his part in the active life led by younger men such as my father and his friends. This determination gave us many uneasy hours, for dear old Seery with his top-heavy clumsiness was frequently a source of danger both to himself and to others. How often I have seen him clambering over a loose stone wall, gun in hand, his weight bringing the whole thing down with him in a thunder of stone, and the gun going off as he rolled to the ground! How often have I seen him overbalance as he fished, and topple into the river! It took two ghillies to turn him the right way up again, while the water ran out of his waders.

  Yet he was never discouraged, never in anything but a beaming good-humour. He would only be at great pains to explain why none of these mishaps had been due to his own fault,—either the wall had been badly built, or else the riverbank had been slippery. He never got rattled except when my mother came and fussed him as he sat at his writing-table, for she was always wanting something and he was always unable to find it. ‘Go away, go away!’ he would shout, flapping at her with the handkerchief that was used to chase away the flies, and then he would start fumbling again with the huge bunch of keys which were supposed to, but never did, unlock his drawers.

  ‘If only you would leave the stamps out’, my mother would say.

  ‘Yes, and if I did’—winking at me—‘you’d take them all in one morning.’

  Or else she would want a shilling to give to the telegraph boy, interrupting Seery in the middle of a letter.

  ‘Ah, ce que tu m’embêtes,—why have you never got any change of your own?’ But he looked up at her with his kind loving eyes which showed so plainly that he was not really cross. Then he would start burrowing into his trouser-pocket for his purse. As his trousers were always much too tight, his hand much too fat, and his purse much too bulky, it always took a long time and much heaving and grunting to get it out, especially as he usually searched in the wrong pocket first. When produced, the purse matched the scale of its owner. Made of stout black leather, secured by a black elastic band an inch wide, it invariably contained forty or fifty pounds, many of them in golden sovereigns. Sometimes he spilt it,—for owing to their extreme podginess his fingers were muddling and clumsy, except when they most surprisingly roamed the piano with a delicate and sensitive touch,—and then I would go down on hands and knees to retrieve the sovereigns rolling into every corner of the room. My mother welcomed this golden shower, for she always got what she called ‘pickings’.

  ‘Seery, give me a pound.’

  ‘Go away, you little Spanish beggar!’

  III

  My mother was ad
orable at that time of her life. She was tiresome, of course, and wayward, and capricious, and thoroughly spoilt; but her charm and real inward gaiety enabled her to carry it all off. One forgave her everything when one heard her laugh and saw how frankly she was enjoying herself. As a child can be maddening at one moment and irresistible the next, so could my mother be maddening and irresistible by turns. For, like a child, she neither analysed nor controlled her moods: they simply blew across her, and she was first one thing, then the other, without exactly realising which side was uppermost. She never thought much; she merely lived. Whatever she was, she was with all her heart; there were no half-measures. Energy such as hers needed something to occupy it all the time, and it followed naturally that she conceived one disastrous idea after the other. Living with her was rather like living above a harbour where incoming ships would anchor for a time, stay just long enough to become familiar; then vanish, never to be seen again. There was craft of all kinds. Sometimes they were sailing-ships, light vessels, transitory visitors; sometimes great liners that made a big wash, swamped our lives, and occupied a whole quay for weeks. The difficulty was that we never knew whether the vessel meant to stay or swiftly disappear; whether it flew a respectable or a pirate flag; yet we had to adapt ourselves accordingly. Any amount of tact and adjustment was constantly needed.