Pepita

by Vita Sackville-West

  The Persian Room was not really Persian at all: it was Turkish. It originated, quite unmistakably, from Damascus. My mother did not like one to say this; she had bought the room for a large sum and had decided that it was Persian; therefore Persian it must be. After that, no one took the risk of contradicting her. In any case it was a singularly beautiful room, very romantic, like something out of the Arabian Nights, with painted panelling and views of improbably spiky cities and vases of improbably luscious flowers; there were some latticed windows too, and a pair of wide sliding-doors, painted green and orange, which suggested admission to some concealed harem.

  My mother put this up in the back drawing-room of her London house. Anything less suited to the back drawing-room of a London house can scarcely be imagined: it demanded the hot and shuttered sunlight of the east. It needed a dusty street outside, with the slippered feet of Syrians shuffling past, not the fogs and hooting taxis of Hill Street, Berkeley Square. But my mother was delighted with it; she possessed, more than anybody I have ever known, the faculty of delusion. When once she went into her Persian Room she ceased to see the fog or to hear the taxis. She entered the only world she knew, the world of unreality which she made real to herself, and into which she persuaded other people by the sheer strength of her own personality and conviction to enter. It was only when they got out into the street again that their critical faculty returned.

  Lady Sackville…. Had they been mesmerised? Was it something like the Indian rope-trick, which everybody had heard of and nobody had ever seen? They rubbed their eyes, trying to get back to normality. Lady Sackville was said to have taste and knowledge. Yet in that Persian Room of hers,—which wasn’t Persian, only one couldn’t say so,—she had made the most incredible muddle. She had got hold of a truly lovely thing in that room, with its strange painted views of cities and its stylised lilies and tulips in vases and its sliding-doors and suggestive lattices; and yet although she seemed to understand it in a way, she had muddled it all up by hanging cheap reproductions of Persian houris by Edmond Dulac against the panelling, and by strewing well-bound editions of FitzGerald’s translation of Omar Khayyám on little mouch-arabiyeh tables. Where was the connexion, in her mind? Did she really believe that obviously Turkish room to be Persian? Did she really think that Dulac’s pretty drawings bore any relation to the real Persia? or the Christmas-present editions of FitzGerald’s Omar either? Yet, so long as one had stayed in there with her, one had almost been tempted to believe in all the fables she told one. The world into which she led one was matched in fantasy and in contradictions only by her Persian Room itself.

  She herself was quite unaware of contradiction or incongruities. She just went gaily on her way, taking everything as it came, suffering when circumstances forced her to suffer, enjoying herself when she could, which was often. I never knew anybody who got more desperately or unnecessarily into despair or, next moment, enjoyed herself more heartily than she. It was rather confusing to anyone who took moods too seriously: one moment she would be in tears saying that my father wanted to kill her with worry because the electric lighting at Knole had broken down, and next moment she would be mopping her eyes with laughter because a gardener had stumbled over a flower-pot.

  II

  Seery fitted into all this crowded and agitated style of living far better than my father, who was a sober man, at heart requiring nothing of life but that it should be peaceful at home and that he should have leisure to occupy himself with his public services, his yeomanry, and the management of his estate. Passionately in love as he and my mother had been, and convinced though I am that my father was the only man my mother ever really cared for, it is idle to deny that they were ludicrously ill-matched. My father was the best type of the English country gentleman; just, courteous, and conscientious, he was truly loved and respected by all. Five days a week he devoted to the service of his county; Saturday he would give to his duties as owner of Knole and as a landlord,—not a tile came off a cottage without his knowing all about it;—Sunday he would play a round of golf or some strenuous racquets or tennis, for he believed in physical fitness, and then unobtrusively would disappear to deal with accumulations of business, for his responsibilities were many, he never employed a secretary, and wrote all his letters with his own hand. There was never any fuss or fluster; he always seemed to have plenty of time for everything and everybody, and I have often wondered since how he managed it. I was indeed astonished when I had to go through his papers after his death to find how accurately everything was filed and docketed; copies kept of all important letters,—no typed carbons, but all in the same neat handwriting; records of infinite trouble taken over any appeal that might come to him; yet nothing superfluous retained; all was methodical, intelligent, competent. The Education Committee; the Roads and Bridges Committee; the grammar-school; the hospital; the West Kent Yeomanry, which he commanded; receipted bills; letters of enquiry,—he must have been able to lay his hand on anything he wanted at any moment. Such a man, of course, ought to have had a smoothly running home; lots of children; sons whom he could teach to shoot and fish and ride and accept responsibility against the day when it should be theirs; a woman to understand his sensitive and simple nature. My mother’s eccentricities must at moments have driven him mad, though never by word or gesture did he allow it to appear. Her consistent unpunctuality, the extraordinary disorder of her bedroom, the endless fuss over insignificant matters, the vindictive grievances, the storms,—all this was far better suited to Albolote than to Knole. On the whole a conventional man, though far too intelligent to be narrow-minded, he was irritated by her inability to do the simplest thing like other people. There was, for instance, the question of fresh air. My father was by nature an outdoor man, and any odd half-hour which he could spare was spent in the open; my mother had never thought about it one way or the other, until suddenly one of those great liners of a new idea came to anchor in the harbour of her mind, this time, unfortunately, to remain. Having once adopted the theory that you ought to get as much fresh air as you can, she pursued it with a vengeance. Door-stoppers miraculously appeared for every door in Knole,—and, being my mother’s, they were not ordinary door-stoppers, but were created out of every imaginable object which had never been intended for that purpose, statues of Nelson or the Duke of Wellington, Cupid or Hercules, sham-books artificially weighted, regimental drums filled with sand, all the ingenuity which delighted her and which ran riot at Spealls. I myself was given a door-stopper for my sitting-room: it was a wooden figure representing Shakespeare. ‘You like poetry, darling, so you will like to have Shakespeare holding the door for you. N’est-ce-pas que c’est bien trouvé?’

  My father, who liked real fresh air but hated draughts, did not appreciate this new idea in the very least. He could be seen surreptitiously shutting the doors whenever he thought it safe. (My mother, when she discovered this, took up the line that it ‘was a pity dear Lionel was so frowsty’.) But he endured it, as he endured many other things. My mother, however, who was not a static person, and whose ideas were apt to grow as fast as Jack’s beanstalk unless, indeed, they were most mercifully dropped and forgotten altogether, improved rapidly upon her original inventiveness. Regular meals in the dining-room had always bored her, and she now hit on the double solution of having her own meals brought to her out-of-doors on a tray. My father could just understand people liking to have luncheon out-of-doors in very warm weather, but the spectacle of somebody cheerfully eating her dinner by artificial light while large snowflakes drifted on to her plate moved him to nothing but repressed exasperation. He was not even amused. I could manage to be amused so long as I was not asked to share the experience, but I must admit that the memory of such evenings as I was compelled to spend in the wintry garden is one of acute misery. The arrangement entailed heavy fur-coats which prevented any free movement of the arms; hot water-bottles piled on one’s knees; a horrible fur rug terminating in a foot-muff which gave me claustrophobia; and a variety of
tickly woollen things, like mufflers and mittens, which my mother knitted herself (out of odd scraps of wool) and insisted on my wearing in spite of my protests. ‘Now aren’t you deliciously warm?’ she would say, when she had turned me into something resembling a reluctant Arctic explorer. I was not deliciously warm at all; I merely felt weighted down, with my fingers like ten icicles and my nose like an eleventh one; but such was her delight that I never had the heart to say so. However uncomfortable, however cold, I never lost the sense that no ordinary mother could introduce such fairy-tales into life. And indeed the scene before me was one of an unusual and unintentional loveliness: the brightly lit table, my mother opposite me with her dark glowing beauty, the surrounding pallor of the snowy lawns under the starlight, fading away into the darkness of the encircling trees beyond.

  III

  Seery, as I have said, accepted my mother’s peculiarities far more philosophically than my father, who most righteously and mistakenly (though silently) continued to apply his own standards to each new development of her behaviour. Seery just took everything for granted as it came; he either enjoyed, or endured, or tolerated, or disputed, but in the end always accepted and was then lovingly amused. Seery was perhaps more accommodating than my father, a softer, more elastic man altogether, and therefore suited my mother better than a man with his own austere standards always stable at the back of his mind. In spite of all their rows and quarrels, she could always rely on Seery to give his kindly laugh in the end, and this, I think, gave her the sense of support and approval which she missed in her own home. She exacted approval, and resented disapproval, even when negatively expressed. Rows she could understand, and indeed provoke, and indeed enjoy; what she couldn’t understand was the silent continuous unexpressed commentary of someone whose standards she dimly felt to be completely opposed to her own. Seery, in spite of their frequent rows, was on the whole easier to manage than my father; Seery had time to deal with rows; he had time to write long letters in answer to hers; he never seemed to be too busy with other things; he didn’t go off to Maidstone on county business; he didn’t say, as my father frequently and patiently said, ‘Well, dear, I am afraid I must be going now’. My mother could not understand that attitude at all. She took it as a slight when my father bounded upstairs from his breakfast to say goodbye to her in the morning. She would have liked to detain him with endless personal chatter, and took it amiss when he was finally obliged to say that he really couldn’t keep his committee waiting. She never could visualise a committee waiting, twenty miles away. He, of course, could. And so they both hurt one another, who had started by loving each other so much.

  MY MOTHER IN 1917 (SITTING OUT IN THE SNOW)

  Seery had no complications in his life such as a regiment or a County Council. He had certain responsibilities,—for instance, he was a trustee of the National Gallery and, I believe, of the British Museum also,—but on the whole he was very free to be at my mother’s beck and call. His days, in fact, would have been very empty without her. She amused and occupied and annoyed him, all in turn. My father was not nearly so accessible or amenable, so she fell back on Seery: Seery was always ready to come clumping along in the old one-horse brougham he maintained in London, to fetch her at any hour and at any place.

  She was waiting for him at Spealls one day to fetch her before luncheon. He had been instructed to bring a bottle of port-wine with him, to give to one of her workers who was ill. It was very unlike him to be late, but she knew he had an appointment with the Keeper of the Wallace Collection that morning, so did not think much about it, when she got a telephone message to say he had collapsed and died in a chair at Hertford House.

  IV

  There was a peculiar rightness in the place of his death, among the treasures which his self-denial had secured for the nation, and by the manner of his death also he had been spared a painful old age, enfeebled by the strokes which would have been bound to recur. He himself had written in his diary years before that he hoped ‘to pass away without pain and suffering, even as my darling mother did’. His wish was mercifully granted. But my mother missed him dreadfully; he had been by far her most intimate friend, and their companionship had been unbroken for over thirteen years. A tribute on the grand scale was paid to that friendship in his will: he bequeathed to her the sum of £150,000 and the contents of his house in Paris.

  I cannot pass in complete silence over the storm which arose as a consequence of that legacy, for the ‘Million-pound lawsuit’, as the newspapers liked to call it, is still fresh in many people’s memory. (Actually, the newspapers were under-stating the fortune involved, for Seery died worth £1,180,000, but I suppose they preferred the round figure for their headlines.) Apart from the bequest to my mother, the bulk of this enormous fortune was to be divided amongst his brothers and sisters, with some minor legacies to other relations and personal friends.

  It is not for me to judge whether his relations were justified or not in their resentment of this legacy, or in trying to upset it on a charge of undue influence; not for me to judge whether my mother was right or wrong in allowing the case to come into the courts at all, instead of offering a private compromise. Compromise was not in her nature; as the judge himself with rueful admiration observed in his summing-up, ‘Lady Sackville is a lady of high mettle,—very high mettle indeed’.

  So the case was allowed to come on, and was decided in a blare of publicity before Sir Samuel Evans and a special jury, after a battle extending over a fortnight. Great counsel were involved: F. E. Smith on the one side, Sir Edward Carson on the other. My mother spent two half-days and one whole day in the witness-box, and F. E. Smith freely admitted afterwards that he had never had to cross-examine a witness who gave him more trouble. Her methods as a witness, I need hardly say, were completely irregular. The ingenuity she displayed in evading any question she didn’t want to answer was a triumph of femineity at its best and worst. She was disconcerting, maddening, witty. At moments she had the whole court in roars of laughter, when even the judge permitted himself a smile. For one thing, she insisted on treating the opposing counsel as a person she knew socially, as indeed she did: ‘You would have said just the same thing yourself, Mr Smith. We meet at dinners, so I know you would.’—‘We will not argue that, Lady Sackville.’

  Then he was unwise enough to tackle her on the subject of having arranged Seery’s dinner-parties. The accusation was that she had usurped the function of hostess in his house, to the exclusion of his sisters. ‘The order of entrance was not always determined by ceremonial precedence? Peers, Knights, Privy Councillors, and large numbers of other people, but apart from those?’—‘King’s Counsel too, Mr Smith!’

  At other times she seemed to be taking him into her confidence. He was trying to get her to admit that she had been disappointed when Sir John threatened, as he frequently did, to cut her out of his will:

  ‘You say you did not mind?’

  ‘No, I did not. It is funny, but I did not. I got so sick of it. You know, Mr Smith, you do get sick when you are told five or six times a day that you are going to be cut out of a will.’

  When in real difficulties,—as any witness under fire from a brilliant cross-examiner must sometimes be,—she appealed direct to the Judge and the jury:

  ‘My lord, may I ask you something? … My lord, you may remember, and the gentlemen of the jury….’

  MR F. E. SMITH (wearily): ‘I will sit down.’

  At times he remonstrated:

  THE JUDGE: ‘You are fencing with each other prettily, but these are all speeches to the jury.’

  MR F. E. SMITH: ‘My lord, the lady puts it on me.’

  THE JUDGE: ‘Your experience ought to enable you to cast it off.’

  MR F. E. SMITH: ‘If I do, my lord, I shall get no answer, because the lady answers another question every time, which I have not asked.’

  At other times, her evasiveness setting their nerves on edge, the opposing counsel got cross with one another, when the Judg
e made peace between them:

  SIR EDWARD CARSON: ‘You really misinterpret every answer she gives.’

  MR F. E. SMITH: ‘That is a statement without warrant of any kind. If you think so, you can object before my lord.’

  SIR EDWARD CARSON: ‘My lord, I do object. Over and over again my friend when she says one thing pretends to think she said another.’

  MR F. E. SMITH: ‘That is a grossly improper statement without warrant.’

  SIR EDWARD CARSON: ‘I will not take any notice of ill-temper. I have been too long at the Bar to do so. What I object to is this——’

  THE JUDGE: ‘What is the next question?’

  MR F. E. SMITH: ‘My friend ought not to have said what he said.’

  THE JUDGE: ‘It is much more agreeable to go on to the question.’

  SIR EDWARD CARSON: ‘I am not in the least inclined to be bullied.’

  THE JUDGE: ‘Now the next question?’

  There were moments, however, when even the conciliatory judge grew impatient:

  SIR EDWARD CARSON: ‘I think everybody will agree.’

  MR F. E. SMITH: ‘I would rather you spoke for yourself.’

  THE JUDGE: ‘I wish you would neither speak for yourselves nor to one another, but would ask a question of the witness.’

  V

  If I have taken the more humorous incidents in the case,—and there were many which consideration for others prevents me from recording here,—it is only because I have no wish to dwell on an episode which was naturally deplorable, sordid, and painful to all concerned. The spectacle of a group of people squabbling over money is not edifying, and the less said about it the better. All that need be said is that the case was decided in my mother’s favour.