Pepita

by Vita Sackville-West

  She was now a very rich woman, and she lost no time in letting her extravagant tastes run riot. How she flung money about, that year! (We are now in 1913.) It was almost terrifying to go out shopping with her, for one never knew what would take her fancy next. I was walking down Bond Street with her one day, when she saw a chain of emeralds and diamonds in a jeweller’s window. In she went.

  ‘How much are you asking for that chain?’

  ‘Two thousand pounds, my lady; the drop at the end is an especially fine carved emerald, as your ladyship will see….’

  ‘I will have it.—There,’ she said, handing these dripping gems over to me, ‘that’s for you.’

  A Socialist might not have approved, but there is no denying that my mother did things in style.

  Perhaps fortunately, the terms of her marriage settlement did not allow her to spend the £150,000 capital, of which she could enjoy the income only, but no restrictions were placed on the money she could obtain by the sale of the works of art in Paris. I seem always to be alluding to fabulous sums in connexion with my mother, but I cannot help it. The way in which she attracted money was equalled only by her capacity for getting rid of it. On this occasion she sold the collection en bloc to a Paris dealer for the sum of £270,000, which was entirely her own to do as she liked with. By any standards, it was a considerable amount, and the rate at which she contrived to spend it was correspondingly startling. For instance she met a Canadian gentleman in the train, who in the course of a forty-minutes journey managed to interest her in his gold mine to the extent of investing £60,000 in it. (I think she recovered a few hundred pounds from it, many years later. In the meantime, she grew very much annoyed with anyone who suggested that the speculation might possibly prove injudicious.)

  But an event was at hand, of such magnitude as to disconcert her completely; something of which she had no experience at all, something which she could neither control nor override nor even ignore, something against which neither charm nor beauty nor wealth nor personality could prevail, something which upset her world and disposed matters without consulting her convenience. There had been threats and rumours of course for the past month, growing in volume as the summer days went by, but up to the last moment she never believed,—she could not believe,—that they would ever materialise. And then one August evening at Knole my father was called to the telephone. He came back looking unusually stern and serious. ‘Mobilisation’, he said briefly, in answer to our unspoken enquiry. He left us, to reappear twenty minutes later in khaki,—that uniform which we had always been accustomed to associate with his happy three weeks of annual training. I wondered even then whether he intended any irony as he came up to my mother and spoke those familiar words which had so often irritated her in the past, ‘Well, dear, I am afraid I must be going now’. I do not think so; he was not a man ever to carry any irony in his soul.

  A quick kiss; and the headlights of his motor rushed him away into the darkness across the park.

  VI

  The war outraged and infuriated my mother. She did not know how to cope with it in the least, so took refuge in regarding it as a personal insult. One by one, she had to watch the men at Knole being called up: the carpenters, the painters, the blacksmiths, the footmen. Even an appeal which she addressed to Lord Kitchener—for she still believed in personal appeals, and Lord Kitchener was a friend of hers, such a charming man when you went over to Broome to have luncheon with him,—produced no helpful result. It was terrible, she wrote; couldn’t he, who was all-powerful, give Lionel a safe staff job, instead of sending him off to that awful France or that awful Gallipoli? Supposing Lionel got killed, that would mean renewed death-duties for Knole, and he, Lord Kitchener, who had such an appreciation of beautiful things, would realise what it would mean to the nation if more pictures, more tapestries, had to be sold to America? But Lord Kitchener, despite his artistic tastes, seemed to think that even more urgent catastrophes threatened the nation. He returned a very polite reply, dictated, typewritten on War Office paper, to the effect that much as he would deplore any accident to Lord Sackville, he much regretted that he was unable to interfere in the movements of any individual officer.fn1

  She wrote again. Her letter was couched in the most conciliatory terms. She quite understood, she wrote, that he couldn’t do anything about an individual officer, but what about Knole? Knole was suffering from this horrible war. ‘I think perhaps you do not realise, my dear Lord K., that we employ five carpenters and four painters and two blacksmiths and two footmen, and you are taking them all from us! I do not complain about the footmen, although I must say that I had never thought I would see parlourmaids at Knole! I am putting up with them, because I know I must, but it really does offend me to see these women hovering round me in their starched aprons, which are not at all what Knole is used to, instead of liveries and even powdered hair! Dear Lord K., I am sure you will sympathise with me when I say that parlourmaids are so middle-class, not at all what you and me are used to. But as I said, that is not what I complain about. What I do mind, is your taking all our carpenters from us. I quite see that you must send my dear Lionel to Gallipoli; and he would be very cross with me if he knew I had written to you. Of course all the gentlemen must go. There is noblesse oblige, isn’t there? and you and I know that—we must give an example. You are at the War Office and have got to neglect your dear Broome, which you love so much. I think you love it as much as I love Knole? and of course you must love it even more because the world says you have never loved any woman—is that true? I shall ask you next time I come to luncheon with you. But talking about luncheon reminds me of parlourmaids, and I said I would not complain about them (because I am patriotic after all), but I do complain about the way you take our workmen from us. Do you not realise, my dear Lord K., that you are ruining houses like ours? After all, there is Hatfield where Queen Elizabeth spent her time as a young princess, and that is historic too, just like Knole, and I am sure Lord Salisbury would tell you he was having frightful difficulties in keeping Hatfield going, just as we are having in keeping Knole. What can you do about it? It seems to me a national duty, just as important for us as keeping up the army and our splendid troops. I do admire them so much. Do help me all you can.’

  To this letter Lord Kitchener returned an equally polite and evasive reply.

  Then the income-tax went up, and, undeterred by Lord Kitchener’s lack of response, she wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer: ‘… I do wish you could see the unfairness there is in this heavy taxation on historical places. There are so very few in England that it would apply to as it would to Knole, that it would not affect the revenue at all seriously. This tax is simply ruinous on the place, and if my husband who is fighting in Palestine is killed the Death-duties paid 3 times in 30 years will be the death-blow. Can you help me to save it? I should love to show it to you any time you could come down and see for yourself how fair and patriotic my intense request is. I live here alone and in the strictest economy.’

  Like Lord Kitchener, the Chancellor of the Exchequer returned a polite reply:

  DEAR LADY SACKVILLE,

  I have received your letter and appreciate your difficulties. But I am sure you will realise that it is impossible to modify the Income Tax system at the present time.

  Yours sincerely,

  A. BONAR LAW

  She could write to these gentlemen, and receive answers from them, however unsatisfactory, but not even she could hope to receive any redress or reply from the chief offender of all. ‘Ce sale Kaiser!’ she would exclaim whenever she could momentarily not think of anybody else to abuse. The evening paper announced a rise in milk prices, and she flung the paper in a rage to the ground. ‘Ce sale Kaiser,—voilà qu’il a upset le milk.’ We all laughed so much at this disproportionate grievance, as well as at the mixture of French and English in which it was expressed, that she looked quite puzzled.

  Having once realised that a European war was in progress and that she could d
o nothing to oppose it, she decided that she had better help. To this end she announced that she would turn the Great Hall at Knole into a hospital ward, and would be prepared to receive either English wounded or Belgian refugees. Arranging the hospital ward was almost as exciting as arranging for the Christmas sale at the now mercifully defunct Spealls, and she entered into the new adventure in very much the same spirit. So long as she had something to occupy her, it did not very much matter what it was. Her ideas as to the wants of injured soldiers or destitute Belgians were, however, dictated by her own experience rather than by any knowledge of suffering such as these men might have undergone: she thought they would each like a prettily decorated locker in which to keep their possessions, and a new tooth-brush each. These she provided, with a reading-lamp over each bed, and sat back to await the first arrivals.

  These happened to be five harmless and harassed though unprepossessing Belgians. My mother was pleased at first, because she could talk French to them and could tell us all how abominable their accents were, compared with her own. Which indeed was true. But then she proceeded to become really friendly with her refugees, and to show them all over the house, telling them where King James I had slept, and Queen Victoria, and similar things, until in their jocose innocence they started asking her which bedroom she would have given to the Kaiser had he chanced to visit Knole. She was already getting a little bored with them by that time, and conveniently decided that they must be spies. They were asking questions about Knole in order to send information to the Germans…. They were in German pay…. Knole would be bombed by the next Zeppelin, all because ces sales Boches thought the Kaiser had stayed there….

  Everything went very rapidly, as it always did once my mother had got an idea into her head one way or the other. With the same energy as she had displayed in providing the decorated lockers and new tooth-brushes for the victims of the war, she now set herself to get rid of her first contingent. They were spies; they had asked questions about the bedrooms. Worse than that, they had never used the tooth-brushes. They had been at Knole for four days, and the tooth-brushes were still as virgin as when they came out of the chemist’s shop. That was quite conclusive proof for my mother, who instantly got into touch with the local police, and commanded them to remove these dangerous spies without delay.

  That, so far as I know, was the beginning and end of her war service.

  fn1 The reason I am able to reproduce the text of her own letters, is that she was in the habit of getting her maid to copy them whenever they were specially ‘important’, and then of inserting them between the pages of her diary.

  6

  The Last Years

  I

  When the war did eventually come to an end, my mother emerged from it with far less loss than many other people. She had no son or sons to be killed; she was not ruined; and my father, the only man for whom she truly cared, survived his various campaigns at the cost only of one serious illness. The four years of the war, it might in one sense be said, to her meant only an interlude during which life became inconvenient, controlled, and restricted. There had been the time when she couldn’t get a license to buy petrol, and had fitted a gas-balloon to the roof of her Rolls-Royce sooner than give up using the car altogether. There had been the time when she couldn’t order what she wanted for lunch, and had to listen to talk about food-coupons. There had been days when expected guests had failed her, either because they were suddenly ordered off somewhere else or because they were detained at their work in London. There had been the unpleasant surprise of seeing the workmen taken away, one by one, from Knole. There had been frights, and scares, and a general sense of something going madly wrong, rather like what the French aristocracy must have experienced during the Revolution. But, on the whole, she might congratulate herself on having come through the world-ordeal comparatively unhurt.

  Yet the war had an effect on her life, more profound than she at the time supposed. At the time, she was thinking only of the worry entailed, and the diminution of income, and 237 the general incomprehensible upset of the order she was accustomed to, things which bulked very large in her mind, insignificant as they really were. What she did not see, was the psychological development which during those four years had been taking place both in herself and my father. Such developments can have effects quite as far-reaching as those which come about more dramatically and sensationally, through the accidents of life and death.

  I have done my work ill, if I have not shown my mother as an entirely dominating, triumphing, warm-hearted, frequently mistaken, generous, regardless character; and my father as a quiet, sensitive, retiring, light-hid-under-a-bushel one. I hope I have shown no prejudice on either side, for the truth is that I loved them both equally, though in different ways, my mother as the more brightly coloured figure, my father as the dear steady, yet wistfully poetic one.—It is odd: I wrote that word ‘poetic’ almost by mistake, as one does write things down when one is thinking very intensely and not worrying about the exact word to employ, but I will let it stand, because it really does express a certain quality in my father which might easily have been missed by those who saw him only superficially.—I have done my work ill, I say, if I have not made it clear that sooner or later these two natures were bound to come to an open breach. They had once been wildly in love, and then, after the first rapture had passed, that love had modified itself for many years into a tolerable marriage; but it now seems quite obvious, as the years went on, bringing the hardening of personality with them, that the accordance of that marriage could not last. The breach had begun even before the war, but the war was really responsible for the final disruption. Until then, they had divided their mandates at Knole fairly amicably, my mother ordering the indoor matters and my father the outdoor, but with my father away for four years of the war the entire direction of affairs devolved upon her. Autocratic as she was by nature, she now had no check upon her at all; no one to object, no one to disapprove. My father for his part had found a new authority: he had been called upon to take command of men in circumstances of danger, difficulty, and discomfort; his standards had of course altered; his habit of command had grown. For the first time in his life he had really found himself as a man among men, away from the sapping feminine influence. He had seen Gallipoli, Egypt, Palestine, France; he had suffered,—I saw him through nights of agony when he steadily refused to accept morphia until he had almost lost consciousness through pain,—and naturally all these experiences developed him. He came back from the war an increased and more authoritative man, and my mother, who had also grown more autocratic during her four years of grass-widowhood, couldn’t understand the change in him.

  The change, had she but realised it, was very slight and very right. It meant only that as he had commanded in the field he intended now to resume command over such part of his own possessions as he had hitherto controlled. I remember very distinctly the occasion which decided the final separation of my parents. My father was home again at last. We were all three alone in the library at Knole, after dinner, talking as people do talk after months and months of separation, about the things which have happened in the interval,—not world-things, not important things, but just the things which have happened in their own home. It all seemed very friendly, in that familiar room with its comfortable sofa and armchairs and blazing fire. I looked at each of my parents in turn, thinking with some relief how well they seemed to be getting on together, when the final storm burst.

  It burst very quietly, with a sort of muffled detonation which gave no hint of the effects to follow.

  My father just said, ‘Oh, look here, dear, would you mind telling Saer (the bailiff) when you want any work done in the house? Because, if you don’t give warning, it upsets all the men’s work-sheets for the week on the estate, and then Saer doesn’t know how he stands. He is short-handed enough already, and he doesn’t know what men he can have, if you suddenly take them off on to another job.’

  That seemed, to me, reas
onable enough, and I was all on my father’s side; but then my mother suddenly lost her temper and said he had insulted her, and burst into tears and left the room, never to return.

  II

  I spent a miserable week-end, going up and down stairs, carrying messages between my parents. I could not really believe that my mother meant finally to leave Knole which she had so loved in her own odd way, and my father whom she had loved also; but so it turned out. I had evidently underrated my mother’s power of decision. She was, I think, almost heartbroken, but having taken her decision was resolved to stick to it, whatever it might cost her. She spent the whole of that week-end shut away into her own rooms, doing her packing, and occasionally sending me downstairs with those practical, heart-breaking messages to my father, to which he returned coldly courteous replies to the effect that if she wanted to change her mind at any time the door would never be shut against her. This coldness and correctness of attitude was the last thing she could be expected to understand. Had he rushed upstairs, battered at her door, and flung himself at her feet imploring her not to desert him, she would have understood that, and, I think, stayed. But those were methods suited to Albolote and Buena Vista and the Villa Pepa, not to Knole.

  Fortunately for herself, she already had her own refuge ready and waiting for her. For some years past, it had become abundantly clear that Catalina and Pepita’s taste for acquiring properties and for ‘improvements and renovations’ had been lavishly transmitted. But Albolote and Buena Vista and the German houses and the Italian villas and Villa Pepa itself were innocent and economical amusements compared with the follies on which my mother gaily embarked. It makes my head reel to try and remember the various schemes she at one time or another had on hand, some of which materialised and some of which luckily did not. Among those which materialised was a large meadow overlooking Rome, for which she paid (I think) £10,000, and on which she proposed to build herself a house; a flat in a Roman palace which she refused at the last moment to occupy,—and when I say ‘at the last moment’, I mean that her Rolls-Royce was actually on its way to Dover when she suddenly decided that she wouldn’t go to Rome at all; several houses in London, on which she spent fantastic sums enlarging basements, putting in passenger-lifts, building out dining-rooms, and so on. Then there were also the schemes which for one reason or another never came to fruition. There were the houses she meant to build at Hampstead or in Brook Street, and for which she caused endless plans to be drawn, discussed, altered, and finally scrapped…. At last an ill-chance led her to Brighton, where she espied a ‘To Be Sold’ board displayed on a large and unattractive house in an unattractive square. For my mother, ‘to be sold’ was synonymous with ‘I can buy it’. She bought it. In order to justify the purchase to herself and to everybody else she evolved the formula that she had finally settled on Brighton ‘because it is so nice for my little grandsons to go to the seaside’. It was quite in vain that I suggested that her little grandsons could go into lodgings if necessary, and that in any case Brighton with its shingle beach and crowds was the very last place to amuse two little boys who wanted to paddle and build sand-castles; no, she had seen a house for sale and had set her heart on it. It was a huge house, a great echoing mausoleum of a house, with vast naked staircases and still vaster drawing-rooms, large enough to accommodate four generations of descendants. I could not help reflecting that she had the whole country in which to make her choice; she could have bought some exquisite old house, with lovely matured gardens, a river, a lake, the Downs, the sea,—anything she wanted; she could have built herself a new house on some ideal site; a dream house, there was nothing to prevent her; but instead of that she must determine to acquire this impossible barrack at the corner of a Brighton square. I was dismayed, but she was enchanted. So enchanted was she, indeed, that before very long she had also purchased the two flanking houses, equally large, equally resounding, equally intractable….