‘I really don’t know. They are very much in love at present; but Jane is terribly sensitive, and Albert so much wrapped up in his work that I can’t help feeling there will be trouble. So long as she understands his temperament – but I’m not sure how much she does. However, even if they’re happy for a year or two it’s more than lots of people get out of life.’
‘Yes, you’re perfectly right. I’ve lived through it and I know. I had two years of complete happiness with Cosmo, and about eighteen months with Campo Santo, and I can tell you that it makes all the rest of one’s life worth while. But I don’t really advise too much chopping and changing for most people: gets one into such restless habits. I couldn’t have stayed with Cosmo after … Well, never mind. So I thought if I can’t be happy I might as well be rich, and made off with Potts. Then, of course, I was bowled over by Campo Santo in ten minutes. Well, I always think that would have lasted, only the angel died on me quite suddenly: and there he was – Campo Santo in good earnest. It was dreadfully depressing. Still, there was little Bobs to cheer me up: quite the nicest of my children. Have you seen him? He’s still at Eton, the precious. He’s meeting me in Venice, too, when Héloïse leaves. They can’t endure each other. Not frightened about this baby, are you?’
‘Well, no, not really.’
‘You needn’t be; nobody dies in childbirth now, my dear. It’s considered quite vieux jeu. And it may be a consolation to you to hear that the medical profession makes an almost invariable rule of saving the mother’s life in preference to that of the child if there’s any doubt about it. Sick much?’
‘Yes, a whole lot.’
‘Excellent! A very good sign. Now can we go and collect Ralph? I think we should soon be making off.’
They found the others standing round the drawing-room fire, the ‘grown-ups’ having taken themselves off to the study to hear a talk on Timbuctoo. Walter had happened to be passing the door when it began, and declared that the opening words, delivered by the evidently nervous speaker in a sort of screech, had been:
‘People who take their holidays abroad seldom think of Timbuctoo …’
‘Very seldom, I should imagine,’ said Albert. ‘Loudie dear, I wonder if you would sing us this little song which I found in an album here? The words are by Selina Lady Craigdalloch (the genius who collected in this house so many art treasures), and the music is “By my dear friend, Lord Francis Watt”. It has been my greatest wish to hear it sung by somebody ever since I found it.’
‘I have often noticed,’ said Ralph languidly, ‘that all accompaniments between the years 1850 and 1890 were invariably written by the younger sons of dukes and marquesses. They seem to have had the monopoly – most peculiar.’
‘I should love to sing it,’ said Mrs Fairfax, settling herself at the piano, ‘and then we must go. Where is it – here? Oh, yes …’
To Bxxxxxxxxxxx
(Morte Poitrinaire)
She began to sing in a small, pretty voice:
‘When my dying eye is closing,
And my heart doth cease to beat;
Know that I in peace reposing,
Have but one, but one regret!
Leaving you, my only treasure,
Bitter is, and hard to bear,
For my love can know no measure;
Say then, say for me a prayer!
Lilies, darling, on me scatter,
And forget-me-nots, so blue;
What can this short parting matter?
We shall surely meet anew!
We shall meet where pain and sorrow,
Never more assail the breast;
Where there is nor night nor morrow
To disturb our endless rest.’
‘Beautiful!’ cried Albert. ‘And beautifully sung!’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Fairfax, ‘a very pretty little song. You know, Ralph dear, I think that we shall have to be going. Unfortunately we are still in the realm of night and morrow, and if we don’t soon push on to Gleneagles we shall get no rest at all.’
There was a perfect chorus of dismay, but Mrs Fairfax was adamant.
‘Your figure is a dream, Ralph!’ said Albert, as they followed her into the hall. ‘Are you on a diet?’
‘Yes, dear, most depressing. I got muscles from dancing too much, they turned into fat – et voilà! …’
‘Do muscles turn into fat?’
‘Of course they do. Haven’t you noticed that all athletes become immense in their old age?’
‘But this is very serious!’ cried Albert, in a voice of horror. ‘It should be brought to the notice of public schoolmasters. I myself shall give up walking and buy a little car. I sometimes walk quite a distance in Paris.’
‘Nothing,’ said Ralph mournfully, ‘develops the muscles so much as driving. Good-bye, Albert. I hope to see you in London, dear.’
16
That night Jane found herself unable to go to sleep. Her brain was in a particularly lively condition and she tossed and turned thinking first of one thing and then of another until she felt she would go mad. ‘Albert! Albert! Albert!’ was the refrain.
‘Shall I be happy with him in Paris? Will he be the same after we’re married? Shall I interfere with his work? That, never,’ she thought; ‘I am far more ambitious even than he is and will help him in every possible way to achieve fame.
‘If I lie quite still and breathe deeply I might manage to drop off to sleep. What shall I put on tomorrow? Not that jumper suit again. I wasn’t looking so pretty today. I shan’t look pretty tomorrow if I have no sleep. Perhaps if I get out of bed and walk up and down … Yes, now I’m feeling quite drowsy. I must write to mamma tomorrow, I haven’t written for over a week. What shall I tell her? Oh, yes! the games would amuse her.’
Jane began to compose a letter in her head and was soon even more wide awake than before. She had hardly ever in her life experienced any difficulty in going to sleep and it made her furious.
‘I’ll stay in bed till lunch-time tomorrow to make up for this,’ she thought.
After about two hours of painful wakefulness she at last fell asleep, soothed, as it were, by a delicious smell of burning which was floating in at her bedroom window and of which she was only half conscious.
Hardly, it seemed to her, had she been dozing for five minutes when she was suddenly awakened by a tremendous banging on her door, which opened a moment afterwards. The electric light blazed into her eyes as she was struggling to open them.
‘What is it?’ she said, very angry at being awakened in this abrupt manner when she had only just gone to sleep with so much difficulty.
The butler was standing just inside the room.
‘House on fire, miss. Will you please come downstairs immediately?’
Jane sat up in bed and collected her wits about her.
‘Have I time to dress?’ she asked.
‘No, I think not, miss; the flames are spreading very rapidly to this part of the house, and Mr Buggins wants everyone in the hall at once; he is holding a roll-call there.’
Jane leapt out of bed, put on some shoes and a coat, and taking her jewel-case from the dressing-table she ran along to Albert’s room. She noticed that it was just after five o’clock.
The butler was still talking to Walter as she passed and Albert had not yet been awakened. Jane put on the light and looked at him for a moment as he lay asleep, his head on one arm, his hair in his eyes.
‘How beautiful he is,’ she thought as she shook him by the shoulder.
‘Wake up, darling, quick! The house is on fire. We’ve no time even to dress; so come with me now to the hall.’
Albert stretched and got out of bed. He was wide awake and perfectly calm.
‘Go back to your room,’ he said, ‘and throw your clothes out of the window, or you’ll h
ave nothing to go home in. I’ll do the same and come along for you when I’ve finished.’
‘What a brilliant idea!’
Jane flew back to her room and in a very short time had thrown all her possessions on to the gravel outside. Presently Albert came running down the passage and they went, hand in hand, to join the others in the hall.
‘Here they are! That’s everybody, then.’
Mr Buggins was cool and collected; it seemed perfectly natural that he, and not General Murgatroyd, should be taking charge of everything.
‘Now,’ he said in a firm voice. ‘This part of the house is quite safe for the present, so as we are all here I think we might begin to save what we can.
‘I must beg you all not to go upstairs again. The wing in which your bedrooms are situated is in a very dangerous position and will be the next to go. The dining-room must also, of course, be left to its fate, but we can safely collect things from the drawing-room, billiard- and smoking-rooms. I telephoned some time ago for the fire brigade, but I’m afraid it will be at least an hour before they can possibly arrive. When they come they will naturally decide for themselves where they can go; we must be on the safe side. The servants are all engaged with a chain of buckets in trying to prevent the garages and outhouses from catching, in which I think they may succeed. It would be useless for amateurs to attempt saving the house, the fire has much too firm a hold.’
The party dispersed into the various sitting-rooms leading out of the hall and began to work with a will.
Albert, at great personal danger, put a damp handkerchief over his mouth and dashed into the dining-room which was dense with smoke. Cutting them out of their frames with some difficulty he managed to save the portraits by Winterhalter of Selina, Lady Craigdalloch and her husband, the fourth Earl.
(The present Lady Craigdalloch was never able to forgive him this when she heard about it afterwards. It became her pet grievance.
‘The dining-room,’ she would say, ‘was full of beautiful Raeburns, and what must the young idiot do but risk his life to save the two ugliest pictures in the house. It drives me mad.’)
As he ran out of the castle to bestow the Winterhalters in a place of safety, Albert was amused to observe General Murgatroyd carrying with great care an enormous coloured print which had hung in a place of honour over the smoking-room mantelpiece. It was entitled ‘The Grandest View in Europe’, thus leading one to expect a view of Mont Blanc, the Doge’s Palace, Chartres Cathedral or some such popular beauty spot, instead of which it depicted the back of a horse’s head as it would appear to the rider, with two large grey ears sticking up in the immediate foreground. Beyond the ears could be seen a stone wall which was being negotiated with success by two horses and with no success at all by a third. Hounds running across an adjacent field gave the clue to the whole thing; a hunt was evidently in progress. ‘The Grandest View in Europe’ having been reverently deposited among the rapidly growing collection of objects on the lawn, its saviour trotted back to the house, bent upon rescuing the head of a moose which hung in the hall.
Admiral Wenceslaus now staggered forth with a load of miscellaneous objects, including a chronometer, a model of the Victory in silver, a book entitled The Triumph of Unarmed Forces, which he had been trying for some time to lend to various members of the party, and several whisky bottles. Mr Buggins followed him with Prince Charlie’s boot, several old family miniatures and a lock of Bothwell’s hair.
Sally, looking rather green, sat tucked up on a sofa and watched these proceedings with some amusement. Albert stopped for a moment to ask her how she felt.
‘Oh, quite all right, longing to help, but Walter made me promise I’d stay here.’
‘D’you know how the fire started?’
‘No; Haddock, the butler, says he has no idea at all. He discovered it, you know. The smoke was pouring in at his window and he says he only got some of the maids out just in time.’
When Albert went back to the house he noticed that flames were already beginning to envelop his own bedroom. Meeting Jane in the hall he kissed her hurriedly and said, ‘Take care of yourself, my precious, won’t you?’ She was carrying the Jacob’s Ladder.
He then saved his portrait of Sally and several albums containing water-colours from the billiard-room. Lady Prague was busy showing two men how to take the billiard table to pieces. They had been managing far better before she came along.
Albert and Jane made many journeys and succeeded in saving all the plush chairs, bead stools, straw boxes, wax flowers, shell photograph-frames and other nineteenth-century objects which they had collected together from various parts of the house.
(When Lady Craigdalloch, far away in Africa, had recovered from the first shock of hearing that Dalloch Castle was razed to the ground, she said that, at any rate, all the Victorian rubbish there would now have vanished for ever and that this was a slight consolation. Her horror and amazement when, on her return, she was confronted by every scrap of that ‘Victorian rubbish’ which had always been such a thorn in her flesh, knew no bounds.)
At last all the furniture that it was possible to move reposed on the lawn in safety, and there was nothing left to do but sit ‘like Lady Airlie in the ballad’, as Mr Buggins remarked, and watch the house burn down.
A ghastly early morning light illuminated the faces of Lord Craigdalloch’s unfortunate guests as they sat surrounded by the salvage from his home, which looked like nothing so much as the remains of an auction sale before the buyers have removed their purchases.
Lot 1. – Fine old Jacobean oak table suitable for entrance hall. Two assegais and a waste-paper basket.
Lot 2. – Bust of the younger Pitt. Large sofa upholstered in Heal Chintz. Gong of Benares brass-work.
Lot 3. – Case of stuffed grouse in summer and winter plumage. Chippendale writing-table. Large print of Flora McDonald (etc., etc.).
Albert and Jane looked round with some amusement at the different varieties of bedroom attire displayed upon other members of the party. Sally looked lovely in crêpe-de-chine pyjamas, over which she wore a tweed coat lined with fur. Lady Prague was also wrapped in a tweed coat over a linen nightdress and a Shetland wool cardigan. She wore galoshes over her bedroom slippers. Lord Prague, who had collapsed into an armchair, was shivering in a Jaeger dressing-gown which had a sort of cape elaborately trimmed with pale blue braid, and the general stood near him in khaki pyjamas and a manly overcoat. The admiral wore a mackintosh. His bare, white and skinny legs sticking out from beneath it bore witness to the fact that Admiral Wenceslaus was a devotee of the old-fashioned, but convenient, night-shirt.
Albert went to the other side of the castle and picked up the clothes which he and Jane had thrown out of their bedroom windows. Jane and Sally, on seeing them, gave high cries of delight, and retiring behind an adjacent wardrobe they began to dress. Walter and Albert did likewise, and Albert was also able to lend a jumper and a pair of grey flannel trousers to Mr Buggins. Everybody else secretly wished that they had had sufficient forethought to throw some clothes out of the windows; the morning air was distinctly chilly.
‘I’ve still two pairs of trousers left,’ said Albert, holding in one hand the orange tartan ones he had worn upon the moor, and in the other his bright blue pair. ‘Won’t somebody wear them? General, can I tempt you? Lady Prague, come now! No?’
‘Will you lend them to me, young man?’
‘Admiral – but, of course, how very kind of you, and how lucky that I have the matelot ones. You will feel quite at home in them. Here is a real fisherman’s jersey, too, why, you’ll be thinking you are back on the dear old flagship – with “Yo! ho! ho! and a bottle of rum.”’
The admiral, who seemed rather overwhelmed by the foregoing events, retired behind a zebra-skin screen to put on the trousers. He stayed there for some time, and when he finally emerged, carried his eye in his hand. Creeping up behind Lady Prague, he sudden
ly thrust it into her face, yelling out:
‘Peep-uck-bo!’
Lady Prague uttered a piercing scream and ran away as fast as the clinging draperies of her night-dress would allow until, tripping up over her galoshes, she fell heavily on the gravel and grazed her knees rather badly. General Murgatroyd and Mr Buggins assisted her to a chair. After this she became more acid than ever.
Meanwhile the admiral again withdrew behind his screen, where he was found much later by Mr Buggins and Sally, fast asleep on the ground.
‘Poor old boy,’ said Sally kindly, ‘it’s been too much for him.’
‘Humph! I think I can guess what has been too much for him.’ And Mr Buggins produced from under the cast-off night-shirt three empty whisky bottles. ‘Might as well leave him there,’ he said. ‘Got a head like a horse; he’ll be all right soon.’
The whole castle was now enveloped in flames, which rose to almost double its height – a terrifying spectacle. Even more alarming was the noise, a deafening roar like the sound of huge waterfalls, broken every now and then by the crash of falling masonry. Birds and bats, fascinated by the glare, were to be seen flying to their doom; and two huge beech trees which stood near the house were completely blackened.
The little party on the lawn sat in a dazed silence, over-awed by the sight of this catastrophe.
When the firemen arrived they were far too late to save anything but some outhouses. Not to be deprived of their fun, however, they were soon playing the hose indiscriminately upon the huge flames, the beech trees and the general, who unobserved had strolled up towards the house in order to have a better view. Dripping wet and speechless with rage he rushed back to the others, and was obliged to swallow his pride and borrow Albert’s tartan trousers and orange sweater. The sight of him thus attired was too much for Sally and Walter, who became perfectly hysterical with laughter which they were unable to control, and finally they had to go for a long walk in order to regain their composure.
‘I wonder what the effect of all this will be on Morris-Minerva?’ said Sally.
The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford Page 14