Pepita

by Vita Sackville-West

  One of her most inconvenient ideas arose out of a charity which originally she had called the Knole Guild. Quickly perceiving that she could persuade her friends, in the interests of charity, to buy lampshades, waste-paper baskets, and little boxes at double their value, she leapt to the idea of establishing a shop in London. It was quite a good idea, and in someone else’s hands might have proved not only charitable but profitable. Unfortunately my mother was temperamentally incapable of distinguishing between charity and personal profit; friendship and business. With her, everything always conveniently merged, and she never could understand why other people failed to see things in the same way. Thus she was genuinely hurt when my father pointed out that she couldn’t continue to call it the Knole Guild once she had removed it to London and was running it for the benefit of her own private pocket. The arguments they each advanced were typical: his point of view was that you couldn’t use the name of Knole, let alone the implications of a Knole Guild, when you were setting up a shop in South Audley Street where frivolous fashionable women might buy their Christmas presents or the cushions for their drawing-rooms; her point of view was, why shouldn’t she use the name of Knole, when it would provide an attraction to the shop and thereby increase the turn-over? The difference between them was that my father had a sense of the true dignity of Knole, and my mother had none; that my father had a sense, the Englishman’s sense, of fair and decent dealing, and my mother had quite a different standard,—inherited, perhaps, from Catalina and Pepita. She simply couldn’t see why she shouldn’t set the words THE KNOLE GUILD over her shop in South Audley Street, although it no longer had anything to do with either Knole or a guild. It was not often that my father put his foot down, and I think it must have been torture to his gentle nature, but on this occasion he was firm, and my mother, genuinely puzzled and considerably aggrieved, had to give way. She was soon comforted by her own ingenuity in inventing the name Spealls, an anagram composed from the name of her first, but not last, manageress. Frankly, the Spealls period was one of the most trying we ever had to live through. For one thing, it was fertile in rows,—rows with her managers and assistants, all of whom in turn she accused of dishonesty and incompetence; rows with her friends, who either did not pay their bills promptly enough or were ‘tiresome’ enough to treat Spealls as an ordinary shop, where one could make complaints, ask for things on approval, or exchange unwanted goods; rows with ourselves, whenever she scented an atmosphere of disapproval or accused us of being ‘disobliging’. The truth was that if one once started being ‘obliging’ about Spealls, there was no time left for anything else in one’s life. My mother with her limitless enthusiasm for her own schemes could be an exceedingly encroaching person, and Spealls provided a glorious opportunity for her particular kind of fuss. Thus no one could leave Knole without being loaded with notes and parcels for distribution in London, ‘to save postage’; every piece of brown paper and string which came into the house had to be saved; and anyone who was suspected of any hidden talent was pressed into service. I thought myself safe enough over this, for I knew I had no such useful talents at all and the clumsiest set of fingers, but nevertheless I found myself set down with a pair of scissors, a pot of paste, and a pile of horrible little note-books which I was expected to cover in silk or chintz. When this proved a failure, and everything came unstuck, I was told I wasn’t trying to help; I was selfish, ungrateful, disobliging, hopeless, no use at all. My mother then unfortunately remembered that I had once written a verse on the death of a canary, so, as that seemed the only way in which I could make myself useful, I was set to compose mottoes suitable to decorate ash-trays and blotting-books. My mother was very fond of mottoes and epigrams; ‘Never complain, never explain’, was a favourite, and so was ‘A camel can go for nine days without water, but who wants to be a camel?’ ‘Do right, and fear no man; don’t write, and fear no woman’, was another which particularly pleased her. If I could write verses on the death of a canary, I could surely turn out such gems of neatness and wit by the dozen?

  ‘Mais voyons, tu passes tout ton temps à gribouiller, tu pourrais bien venir en aide à ta pauvre maman?’

  I tried, I really did. I spent anguished hours, trying. How I envied the artist who composed the mottoes for Tom Brown’s Christmas crackers! How I regretted that my own literary inclinations refused to bend themselves in that direction!

  The annual three months in Scotland, however, were marred by nothing except the necessity of preparing for Spealls’ pre-Christmas season. Apart from Spealls, those months were perfect. My mother was very happy; the pure Highland air suited her, and whenever she liked she could go into Banchory or even to Aberdeen and buy anything she wanted, putting it down on Seery’s account. As she adored shops, and really did not mind much whether she bought sixpenny-worth of picture postcards or twenty pounds-worth of Harris tweed, this occupation satisfied her endlessly. Over money as over everything else she had no sense of proportion whatsoever. I know that many people thought her grasping, and said, what could you expect with an heredity such as hers? But it would be much truer to say she was merely acquisitive. Value meant nothing to her; the fun of shopping meant everything, and of course she loved getting something for nothing. She would quite shamelessly purloin the stationery from an hotel if she stopped there for luncheon, and came away convinced that she had effected a real economy if she could stuff half a dozen envelopes into her bag without anybody noticing, though at the same time she would readily give the waiter a five-pound note as a tip if she discovered that he had a sick wife or an ailing baby at home. On the same principle, it made very little difference to her if the five-pound note came out of Seery’s pocket or her own. Money was meant to be spent; it was gratifying to save a penny stamp if by chance a letter arrived with the postmark omitted; at one time she even took to cutting up used stamps and fitting the pieces neatly together so that no smudge of postmark appeared; it was satisfactory to sneak a pinch of bath-salts if one had been staying in a country house; it was infinitely preferable to use a piece of string off a parcel than to cut a length off a bought ball, even a ball presented in desperation as a birthday gift by one’s harassed daughter. ‘Je n’aime pas les dépenses inutiles; ma pauvre enfant, je vois que tu n’es pas du tout, thrifty.’ This reproach of not being at all thrifty puzzled me, for, being young and ill-informed, I was incapable of reconciling my mother’s extraordinary extravagances with her equally extraordinary economies. I couldn’t see why a person ready to spend hundreds of pounds should be equally ready to stinge over a stamp or a ball of string. I had not yet reached the age when one is able to accept all idiosyncrasies, however queer, as part of a person’s make-up.

  It was perhaps over anything connected with stationery that she displayed her most characteristic inconsistencies. Thus although she would cheerfully buy writing-paper at £1 a quire, patronising Macmichael, who in those Edwardian days was the fashionable stationer of Mayfair, and would get the most elaborate dies cut to go with it, she would seldom write her letters on anything but the backs of catalogues or the half-sheets torn off letters she had received. One was lucky, indeed, if one got the half-sheet, for sometimes it was a puzzle to make out what she had written, all mixed up with the printing on an advertisement. I think she touched the peak when she wrote to me on the toilet-paper she had found in the Ladies Cloak-room at Harrods. She was immensely pleased by this discovery. ‘Regarde,’ she wrote triumphantly, ‘comme ce papier prend beaucoup mieux l’encre que le Bromo.’ A stranger recommendation for a toilet-roll was surely never devised.

  How my mother puzzled me, and how I loved her! She wounded and dazzled and fascinated and charmed me by turns. Sometimes she was downright unjust, and accused me of things I had never done, lies I had never told (not that I was by any means an exemplary child, only she always seemed to get my offences wrong, blaming me for those I hadn’t committed, and ignoring those I had), but how she could always win me round, however unjust she had been, just by looking at
me and saying: ‘Perhaps we have had a little misunderstanding’. I remember her saying that to me once; she had been really unjust to me, accusing me of telling a lie which I happened not to have told; children are sensitive about such things, and at the bottom of their hearts they know the difference between truth and untruth; on this occasion I knew I had told the truth, but my mother made me kneel at her feet, which humiliated me and hurt my pride, and said I must ask God to forgive me, and then as I hesitated she suddenly put her fingers under my chin and turned my face upwards towards her own lovely face and said, ‘Never mind, darling, perhaps we have had a little misunderstanding’. I never forgot that; she had let me off my supreme humiliation; I felt that she had conferred an inestimable grace upon me. Never had forgiveness for an uncommitted crime been so graciously granted. I loved her the more for it; my love for her mounted even higher and higher, as one mounts the rungs upon an endless ladder.

  Really, nobody could have failed to love her as she was then, in her middle youth, so gay, so vital, so amused, so absolutely herself with all her faults, all her tiresomenesses and all her charm. At twelve o’clock in the morning I would be saying to myself that I couldn’t bear this life any longer, that I couldn’t hear the word Spealls once again without screaming, stopping my ears, and running away; then an hour later, having escaped, from the top of a hill would see my mother pounding up and down the lane, back and forth to an old derelict farmhouse called Manallan, singing at the top of her pure clear voice, draped in an old tweed cape with a scarf over her head,—which she wore always in a manner curiously reminiscent of the Spanish mantilla,—singing the most incongruous songs of the most sentimental description, ‘Ange pur, ange radieux,’ from Gounod’s Faust, ‘Porte mon âme, Au sein des cieux’ or else ‘Si mes vers avaient des ailes’, or else ‘Le jour où Sylvain m’a parlé….’ She loved these French songs, and they rang out over the Scotch hills as she tramped up and down, always over the same road, setting a pebble each time she reached her bourn. One pebble marked one stretch; ten pebbles meant a mile. When ten pebbles had accumulated, they were replaced by a larger stone; a proud moment. From the distant hills would come the rattle of stone walls collapsing under Seery’s weight, and the subsequent explosion of his gun.

  On the way up to Manallan, my mother would pass the farmer’s cottage. The farmer’s wife worshipped her, with an adoration approaching idolatry. It is no exaggeration to say that that starved and suffering woman lived for the annual three months my mother spent on that Highland hill-top. She was the first and only person to introduce romance into that harsh and difficult existence. I don’t know how she did it; I suppose it must have been by her sheer loveliness, under the old tweed cape and the scarf over her head, and by the sympathetic smile in her eyes, and the tones of her foreign voice. She would pause outside the little granite cottage every day on her way up to Manallan. ‘Meeses Meelné?’ she would call outside the window, in a voice as soft as a cooing dove, and Mrs Milne would appear, beaming, her Hinde’s curlers stiff and rigid under her cloth cap. Every day, regularly, Mrs Milne would ask her to come in, and every day, regularly, my mother would say, ‘No thank you, it smells much too bad inside your cottage’. An insulting remark, one would think; but somehow my mother managed to say it in such a way that Mrs Milne took it as a joke and almost as a compliment. My mother, of course, was quite right: the Milnes’ cottage did smell atrociously of cooking cabbage and unchanged air. Living as they did in the purest air that anyone could wish to breathe, their one idea was to keep their windows as closely sealed as possible. My mother tried to defeat this scheme by opening their windows from the outside whenever Mrs Milne wasn’t looking; Mrs Milne attributed all her neuralgia to this, but, having shut the window again, continued to worship my mother none the less. I think she would have died for her, and she would certainly have laid out anyone that said a word against her. Mrs Milne was very fond of me too; she accepted me as one of ‘the bairns’, meaning her own children, with whom I was allowed to run wild; but often she would shake her head and say I would never be a patch on my mother. It never occurred to me to take this as anything but a tribute to my mother, not as a reproach to myself.

  One of the things which shocked me most, was when my mother quarrelled with Mrs Milne. She accused Mrs Milne’s son of stealing a mackintosh, and when Mrs Milne very rightly resented this imputation and defended her son, she incurred my mother’s wrath. It was the first time I ever realised consciously that my mother would not tolerate being contradicted or criticised in any way, and that she could be ruthlessly cruel to the person who had thus crossed her. It seemed to me horrible that she could cast a poor all-lacking woman out into the uttermost darkness for no fault at all; it seemed like kicking a dog who has become accustomed to scraps of kindness at one’s hands. It was incomprehensible to me, because I had not yet estimated how much my mother liked power.

  She left Mrs Milne in misery for a year, and then, after repeated pleading letters, forgave her. How she could enrich! And how she could take away!

  But, after all, it was all quite consistent. There was very little difference between my mother saying that Mrs Milne’s son had stolen a mackintosh, and Catalina saying that Felix Gomez Carrera had stolen a peacock. I had been accustomed since my earliest days to such sudden accusations, which no amount of contrary evidence could affect. At the age of four or five I had seen my own loved Nannie torn from me because three dozen quails having failed to arrive in time for a dinner-party my mother insisted that Nannie had eaten them. After that I took such things more or less for granted.

  4

  Trouble

  I

  Life must have been extremely pleasant in the first decade of the twentieth century for those who were blessed with money and possessions, and whose ears were not tuned to catch any sound of ominous cracking going on around them. One spent the winter months in London (Mayfair, of course), then a few weeks in Paris with the chestnut trees coming out and the spring sunshine sparkling on the river, then the deep summer beauty of Knole, with week-end parties and the adulation of stray ingratiating people who wanted to ‘see the house’, then the freedom of Scotland and plenty of time to read,—a nice book of memoirs, or the latest novel by Mr E. F. Benson, who was so amusing, or Mr Robert Hichens, who understood so well the workings of a woman’s heart,—not that horrid H. G. Wells, who was a Socialist and wrote about things which were much better left unsaid. It was all extremely agreeable. One had an enormous motor, one of the very first, reinforced at the back by three iron bands to support Seery’s weight; plenty of servants, a lady’s-maid and a valet who always went ahead by train and had everything laid ready for one’s arrival; one had a chef, and as much pâté de foie gras and plovers’ eggs as one wanted. My mother was not a person who cared to look beneath the surface. So long as she had her luxuries, more than enough money,—though always convinced that she was to be pitied for being so hard-up,—Seery to bully, and Spealls to think about, she was quite content to sing her little 196 songs and to persuade herself that life would always continue exactly as it was.

  Yet there were clouds massing low down on the horizon, if ever she allowed herself to examine them. Not the clouds of social or political unrest, for those held no interest for her, but the clouds of more personal troubles threatening her life. Seery was ageing, and really by now his bulk had become alarming; though he retained his almost babyish freshness of complexion, he had already had one or two little attacks which nobody liked to call strokes. They were referred to as fainting-fits, but there was no denying that in spite of his gallant efforts to keep up with the younger generation he was getting less and less able to do so. He would droop off to sleep after meals without warning; the big head would sink gradually, the big chins would pile themselves over the collar, the ash on the cigar would lengthen, the fat hand holding the cigar would sink lower and lower towards the table-cloth, the kind booming voice would trail away into incoherent syllables which soon turned into an un
mistakable snore. Then it was time to interfere. ‘Seery! Seery, wake up. You’re burning the table-cloth.’ A snort; a grunt; a great heave; the cigar hastily carried back to the mouth; the waistcoat hastily brushed in case of crumbs. ‘Eh? Eh, what was that? Asleep? no, of course I wasn’t asleep, I heard every word you were saying,’—and then two minutes later he would be drooping off to sleep again. ‘Seery! Seery, wake up.’

  My grandfather was ageing too. Unlike Seery, he was a slender old man, rather frail on the whole; and then he was really old, approaching eighty. It was obvious that the term of human life could not be extended very much longer. And when the term of that frail life ran out, the most distressing troubles would inevitably ensue. In other words, it had been known now for many years that Pepita’s son Henry, tired of farming in South Africa, was determined to establish his legitimacy and lay claim both to the peerage and to Knole on his father’s death. Far away in Spain an unfortunate gentleman named Mr Brain was trying to disentangle the strands of truth from the appalling muddle of lies and contradictions, and to send home some clarifying reports to the family solicitor. Mr Brain was working in circumstances of extreme difficulty and discomfort and was manifestly not enjoying his job in the least; he knew scarcely any Spanish and yet spent most of his time consulting Spanish lawyers with the help of an interpreter; their highly technical language and the unfamiliar complications of Spanish legal procedure worried Mr Brain, who was conscientiously anxious not to mislead his employers at home. ‘I am in the position of a Spanish procurador’, he writes piteously, ‘who has arrived in London to investigate a crime which has baffled the Public Prosecutor and Scotland Yard for more than a year’. He found that he was expected to do work ‘quite outside the work of any sort of lawyer’; to go, for instance, to a certain modest tavern where a certain person might be heard of, and dine there in order to make friends with the tavern keeper. He could not even procure the ordinary materials for his correspondence in Madrid, and terminates a letter which had begun by stating: ‘I am writing this in bed; I can’t get up to write because there is no one to light the fire’, with a plaintive appeal for more foolscap envelopes, some paper-fasteners, and some Relief nibs.