Pepita

by Vita Sackville-West

  III

  That was the question. The papers were soon so full of it, that it became impossible to keep the facts from my knowledge. Besides, Knole was shut up, and all its revenues put into the hands of the trustees, until this question of the succession could be settled. They could not have pretended to me that all was well. It was as though a new character had joined our family life; a new character called ‘The Case’.

  I don’t think my parents ever had any real doubts as to what the outcome of ‘the case’ would be or any real anxiety so far as that went, but they did dread the exposure of all that ancient scandal, they did mind all the tiresome inconvenience entailed, and they did mind the enormous and unnecessary expense. Large sums of money had already been spent since 1896, in lawyers’ fees and in the examination of the Spanish witnesses, an expenditure which had been going on steadily for twelve years up to the date of my grandfather’s death. Of course the fact that many of the negotiations had to be carried on in Spain considerably increased the cost: it meant journeys, special envoys, the services of interpreters, the fees of Spanish consultant lawyers; altogether I believe that my parents’ share in the total cost of the case amounted to something like £40,000. In addition to this they saw themselves faced with the necessity of raising a similar sum to pay the death duties—always supposing, of course, that they were not dispossessed from Knole. Few estates could stand such a strain, and Knole, although provided with an income adequate in those days of low taxation, was by no means so rich as people perhaps imagined.

  My mother made herself genuinely unhappy over The Case. It was seldom that she touched reality, but I think she touched it here. Usually, she lived in an unreal world, a world of her own creation, but here she was brought up against facts which struck at very deep, real feelings in her early self. For one thing, she cherished a deep devotion to her mother’s memory, and could not bear the details of her mother’s most private, intimate life being dragged out into publicity. For another, she had an almost morbid shrinking from the fact of her own illegitimacy, and now here she was placed in the position of hearing her illegitimacy and that of her brothers and sisters insisted upon by the very men who were working to gain a superb inheritance for her husband. She could not look on the matter in an impersonal way; to her, it was all personal and vibrating; it was not merely ‘In the High Court of Justice (Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty Division), before the Rt. Hon. Sir John Bigham, West or Sackville-West (Ernest Henri Jean Baptiste), v. the Attorney-General (Lord Sackville and others cited)’. That sort of phraseology meant nothing to her at all. What it meant to her, was that her brother Henry was bringing a dreadful and indefensible case; and that, little as he might intend to do so, he must ultimately bring shame upon Mamma and Papa. She was torn between the most intimate ties that can humanly exist: her mother, her father, her brother, her husband, her home. For, of course, Knole was her home, the only real home she had ever known, and, to all of us, Knole meant as much as any human being.

  It was different from one’s love for any human being. It transcended it. I don’t think my mother ever felt like that about Knole; not quite; not as my father did. She never got its values right; one could not have expected that of her. She was too Latin, somehow; too unreal; too fantastic altogether; too un-English. She exploited it for the wrong reasons; invented stories which were really not necessary to enhance the authentic legend. But still, it was her home, and in her own way she added her own legend to its grey historic walls. I often think, looking back on my mother, as one does when people have passed away and one begins to get them into perspective, all the silly little irritations fading and the real quality emerging, that although she went wrong and got every possible value wrong and made my father and me clench our fists in silence whenever she talked about Knole, still, now I see that she contributed beauty to it in her own way, and influenced people, and showed them beauty in a way which mightn’t be truthful, and mightn’t be ours, but which was certainly her own, and was not the less gracious for that.

  And it was her home. As such, she was prepared to fight for it. It was exceedingly painful for her to hear this unpalatable squabble going on in the law-courts, and to see her own brother sitting there on the front bench as the Petitioner, but still she had given her evidence and would abide by it. Fortunately she was never called upon to go into the witness-box. I pass quickly over the six days’ hearing which decided the Romance of the Sackville Peerage (as the papers called it); it is not a subject upon which one would wish to dwell. It is enough to say that the petitioner’s case collapsed half-way through and my father’s case had won.

  My father had vetoed my going into the court, but my mother, always a rebel, smuggled me in for ten minutes. She showed me some of the witnesses sitting there, waiting to be called. ‘Look’, she said rather bitterly, ‘at your relations.’ I looked. They seemed to me very drab and black-suited and bowler-hatted,—not romantic at all. My Spanish relations! They looked like plumbers in their Sunday-best. Where, oh where, was Pepita, the source and origin of all this wild and inordinately expensive romance? There was nothing left of Pepita but a falsified marriage register and this gloomy troop of Spaniards perching on the uncomfortable benches of the High Court of Justice. And a lot of posters on the railings, and headlines in all the papers. It was all very strange and confusing, and I was too young to understand it rightly.

  IV

  Two days later my parents made their official return to Knole. They took me with them. From the moment we reached Sevenoaks, it became a triumphal progress. We had motored from London as far as Sevenoaks, knowing that at the foot of Tub’s Hill we should be expected to abandon the motor (with all its reinforcements on the back to support the weight of Seery whenever he happened to be a traveller in it), and to transfer ourselves into the victoria, that chic little victoria which my father had once given to my mother as a Christmas present, with its smart little pair of cobs, driven by our incomparable coachman Bond, who wore his top-hat at an angle a Regency dandy might envy and who had a figure that any Savile Row tailor might have been proud to dress. Where were the chulos of Madrid in their automobile caps, trying to bribe Don Ricardo Dorremocea in the taverns; trying to get him to tear leaves out of marriage-registers? The automobile cap of the chulos was very far removed from the shiny top-hat of Bond as he met us at the foot of Tub’s Hill on February 16th, 1910. Yet all that Spanish background did not seem very remote to me as I sat opposite to my mother and father on the strapontin of the victoria that day, driving up Tub’s Hill at Sevenoaks. It seemed to me as though things were linking up with other things; as though ‘the case’ were finding its natural sequence here…. I wished only that my Spanish relations hadn’t looked so like plumbers; I wished Pepita could have been in the victoria with us to share in the fun. She was very vivid to me just then, for her photographs had been in all the papers. She would, I felt, have enjoyed it.

  MY MOTHER IN 1910

  I enjoyed it myself. Never, before or since, have I felt so much like royalty,—only without the disadvantage of royalty, whose functions go on day after day, year after year. For once in one’s life it is quite an amusing and indeed instructive experience to arrive at the foot of a hill in a motor-car (especially in the days when motor-cars were still such rare objects as to cause people to come out from their houses to stare), and then at the foot of the hill to transfer oneself into a victoria, and then on arriving at the top of the hill to have the horses taken out of the traces, and to be pulled by the local fire-brigade through the main street of Sevenoaks and then right through the park up to Knole, with cheering crowds all the way and carefully coached children presenting bouquets at intervals. And then, finally, being pulled right through the first courtyard at Knole, when normally one had always drawn up outside. It seemed odd, and somehow wrong, to sit in the victoria, still drawn on ropes by the fire-brigade, passing between lines of boy-scouts, on rubber tyres, up the smooth-paved path of the Green Court. It wasn’t the natural w
ay to arrive at home. And Bond, the elegant Bond, looked so silly, sitting up there on his box with no horses to drive. He retained all his elegance and the smart tilt of his hat, but without any horses at the end of his reins he seemed temporarily to have lost all his justification in life. He seemed to be conscious of this himself, for every now and then during the fire-brigade progression he took the whip with a nervous and accustomed gesture out of its socket; but then, suddenly realising that he had no use for it, put it back and tried to resume his air of complete detachment.

  Then there were more speeches, with everyone in the most amiable humour, and as the doors shut behind us and we laid down our heavy bouquets in the familiar library we felt with relief that we had really come home. Now we could go and have dinner quietly and comfortably in the dining-room, with the oil-lamp in the middle of the table as it had always been. It must have been a very old-fashioned oil-lamp, because I remember it had a boot-button hanging from a string from its key, and whenever one of us saw the button creeping upwards towards the key we would hurriedly reach forward to wind the key, and the button on its string would descend again. If we didn’t do this, it spluttered, stank, and went out. It was a very ugly lamp, with a pink china shade, more suited to a boarding-house than to the splendour of Knole. We loved it, though, as a symbol, because it appeared only when there was no party; its appearance on the table meant that no strangers were present, no intruders, no one to whom one had to be falsely polite. The hideous pink china shade meant that one could be completely at one’s ease.

  fn1 It may be objected here by a puzzled reader with a retentive memory that Maximilian was the eldest son, not Henry. This is perfectly true, but as Maximilian had been officially registered as the son of Oliva and Pepita, he was out of the running. All the other children, on the other hand, with the exception of my mother (fille de père inconnu), had been registered as the legitimate offspring of Lionel Sackville-West and Pepita. My grandfather declared that he had consented to this deception merely in order to please Pepita.

  fn2 This Enrique Rophon was a cousin of Pepita.

  5

  More Trouble

  I

  My impressions of my mother naturally became more vivid as I grew older. It never occurred to me to analyse her character as a whole,—my home was a completely unintellectual one, where analysis wasn’t the fashion,—but as I gradually acquired a certain skill in avoiding rows we got on very happily together. She taught me the most deplorable principles,—‘One must always tell the truth, darling, if one can, but not all the truth; toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire’; ‘Never refuse a good offer, my child; I have refused many good offers in my life, and always regretted it’,—but although I was sometimes faintly puzzled I never took very much notice, and anyhow my father in his quiet way used to put me right with little axioms of his own. I fancy that my father, discreet and loyal as he was, watched with a far shrewder eye than I ever gave him credit for.

  I am sure that it was not my mother’s intention to instil cynical principles in me. I see now that owing to the difficult beginnings of her life, and to the stigma which had lain over her birth, making everything delicate and doubtful, she had unconsciously absorbed the idea that the world was a hard place where one must fight one’s own battle for one’s own best advantage. It is not an uncommon idea, and it may with justice be observed that many people have considerably more reason for holding it than my mother, who, from the age of nineteen onwards had had everything very much her own way. 215 But if there is any truth in the contention that the foundations of character are laid in childhood, the faint and disturbing mystery must also be remembered,—why didn’t Mamma receive visitors like other ladies? Why was one forbidden to play with other children at Arcachon and in Paris? Why wouldn’t Papa let Mamma accompany him to parties when she so badly wanted to go? Why did the servants look at one pityingly and sometimes say ‘Pauvre petite!’? Why couldn’t Mamma, who was so good and charitable and beloved, go to church? Then came the harshness of the convent, and why didn’t one go home for the holidays like the other girls? Why did M. de Béon warn one solemnly that one must never go out alone into the street because there was a man who wanted to kidnap one? Why was one always sent out of the room at Mme de Béon’s whenever visitors were announced? So far, all had been obscure, but then came the shock of Mrs Mulhall’s revelation on the cross-Channel boat: ‘She told me our father and mother had never been married’. How lucky that she had her teaching certificate in her bag! She could be independent; she could earn her living as a governess. Meanwhile, there was the renewed habit of leaving Aunt Mary Derby’s drawing-room, as at Mme de Béon’s, when callers came….

  Then everything had been startlingly reversed. Instead of anxiety, there was security; instead of being the unwanted little foreigner, hustled away at a stranger’s approach, she had become the spoilt young hostess at Washington, the autocratic young mistress of Knole. My father, with his boyish worship, had come into her life; then Seery, who gave her his entire devotion and could refuse her nothing,—at least, not for long. Yet none of this, I think, ever succeeded in obliterating those early impressions: life had treated her harshly once, and might at any moment do so again; therefore one must make the most of the opportunity when it offered, and one must, in fairness, teach one’s child the same lesson as a possible safeguard when needed.

  Heredity entered into it too. Although on one side of her lineage she had the opulent Sackvilles aligned behind her, on the other she had all that rapscallion Spanish background, that chaos of the underworld, tohu-bohu, struggling and scheming and bargaining and even thieving for a living. It was the descendant of all those people,—the old-clothes pedlars, the smugglers, the fruit-sellers, the gypsies, the rascals,—that her critics expected to behave as an ordinary English lady.

  Whatever the ethical outlook she endeavoured to present to me, she was a very gay companion and great fun to do things with. When she was in a good temper, we did enjoy ourselves together. Of course she always put me to acute embarrassment by the unconventionality of her behaviour wherever she was; thus she always remained convinced that no one understood French except herself and me, and would make personal remarks at the top of her voice in that language. ‘Mais regarde donc cette vieille horreur, ma chérie: qu’est ce qu’elle a L’air, avec cette perruque-là? Peut-on s’affubler ainsi!’ It was quite in vain that I tried to stem the flow of such comments whenever we went to a shop or to a matinée together (she rather liked going to matinées and would weep generously whenever the situation became in the least emotional). Oh yes, she was fun, she was enchanting, she was embarrassing, she made me feel hot with shame,—and then, seeing her visibly charm the tired shop-assistant behind the counter, or watching her lovely profile beside me in the darkened theatre as she fanned herself with that unmistakably Spanish gesture, wafting her very personal scent of white heliotrope towards me, I would have died for her, I would have murdered anyone that breathed a word against her, I would have suffered any injustice at her hands. But at the same time I did wish that she wouldn’t make such audible and personal remarks in French.

  It was odd, her mixture of unconventionality and conventionality. In some ways she took the absolutely conventional point of view about what was correct or not correct; she was the complete Edwardian lady at times, bringing me up with truly Edwardian social principles about what was ‘done’ or ‘not done’; she sent me to Ascot very much against my will; she had a sort of aristocratic arrogance about her, which in her later years crystallised itself into the phrase ‘I am very 1792’, and carried such expressions with it as très grand seigneur or très talon rouge (she liked the neat ready-made phrase, just because she was so unable to synthesise anything for herself); yet although she esteemed these qualities theoretically, she was, thank goodness, temperamentally quite incapable of living up to them. Here, again, her dual nature, the Spanish and the English, was at war. The gypsy and the Sackville came into conflict. No wonder I lov
ed, and wondered. No wonder my father loved, and got hurt.

  Then, as though it were not enough to have the disreputable Spanish and the (more or less) respectable English strains mixed in her, she must needs go and add idiosyncrasies all her own. I daresay I might trace some of them to her grandmother Catalina, if only I knew more details about Catalina. As it is, I suspect that my mother’s tastes and Catalina’s might have met at many points, allowing for the difference in their circumstances, fortunes, and period. Catalina would, of course, have been the ideal supporter of Spealls: she would have approved of its money-making possibilities, of its taste, and moreover would have eagerly adopted all the fuss which it entailed, the parcels, the notes, the endless daily occupation, the rows, the quarrels, the grievances,—if only Catalina had been alive at that time, what a lot of unwelcome bother could have been pushed into her ready hands! I am sure, again, that Catalina would have appreciated the collection of china birds assembled on an imitation tree of mahogany in one corner of my mother’s London drawing-room. Catalina would have loved the bedroom at Knole entirely papered with postage-stamps. She would have loved the idea of a different book-plate drawn for every ‘well-bound’ book. (There was a book-plate with a sundial for the book on sundials, a book-plate with a view of Chenonceaux for the book about the chateaux of the Loire, and so on; so, a hundred times on.) She would have loved the books with pictures you could discern only when you slid the gilt-edged pages sideways,—hidden pictures, secret concealed pictures, which didn’t show at all when the book was closed. She would have adored the collection of little tables with human legs,—buckled shoes, or naked feet with the toes showing. She would have exclaimed in delight over the tiny Fabergé plants made of jade and precious stones. She would have liked the washing-stand-set specially made from silhouettes cut by a stall-holder at Earl’s Court (my mother got these cut for a shilling each to go with the really exquisite silhouettes in her collection at Knole). Above all, she would have liked the Persian Room.