She had told herself after FitzGeorge’s death that no strange and lovely thing would ever enter her life again, a foolish prophecy. This unexpected confusion of her own life with that of her great-granddaughter was as strange and as lovely. FitzGeorge’s death had aged her; at her time of life people aged suddenly and alarmingly; her mind was, perhaps, no longer very clear; but at least it was clear enough for her to recognise its weakness, and to say, ‘Go on, my darling; you might be myself speaking.’ Deborah, in her young egoism, failed to pick up the significance of that remark, which Lady Slane, indeed, had inadvertently let slip. She had no intention of revealing herself to her great-granddaughter; her hand upon the latch of the door of death, she had no intention of troubling the young with a recital of her own past problems; enough for her, now to submerge herself into a listener, a pair of ears, though she might still keep her secrets running in and out of her mind according to her fancy – for it must be remembered that Lady Slane had always relished the privacy of her enjoyments. This enjoyment was especially private now, though not very sharp; it was hazy rather than sharp, her perceptions intensified and yet blurred, so that she could feel intensely without being able or obliged to reason. In the deepening twilight of her life, in the maturity of her years, she returned to the fluctuations of adolescence; she became once more the reed wavering in the river, the skiff reaching out towards the sea, yet blown back again and again into the safe waters of the estuary. Youth! youth! she thought; and she, so near to death, imagined that all the perils again awaited her, but this time she would face them more bravely, she would allow no concessions, she would be firm and certain. This child, this Deborah, this self, this other self, this projection of herself, was firm and certain. Her engagement, she said, was a mistake; she had drifted into it to please her grandfather; (Mother doesn’t count, she said, nor does Granny – poor Mabel!) her grandfather had ambitions for her, she said; he liked the idea of her being, some day, a duchess; but what was that, she said, compared with what she herself wanted to be, a musician?
When she said ‘a musician,’ Lady Slane received a little shock, so confidently had she expected Deborah to say ‘a painter.’ But it came to much the same thing, and her disappointment was quickly healed. The girl was talking as she herself would have talked. She had no prejudice against marriage with someone who measured his values against the same rod as herself. Understanding was impossible between people who did not agree as to the yard and the inch. To her grandfather and her late fiancé, wealth and so great a title measured a yard – two yards – a hundred yards – a mile. To her, they measured an inch – half an inch. Music, on the other hand, and all that it implied, could be measured by no terrestrial scale. Therefore she was grateful to her great-grandmother for reducing her value in the worldly market. ‘You see,’ she said amused, ‘for a week I was supposed to be an heiress, and when it was found that I wasn’t an heiress at all it became much easier for me to break off my engagement.’
‘When did you break it off?’ asked Lady Slane, thinking of her newspaper cuttings which had not mentioned the fact.
‘The day before yesterday.’
Genoux came in with the evening post, glad of a pretext to take another look at Deborah. Lady Slane slipped the green packet under her knitting. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said, ‘that you had broken it off.’
And such a relief it was, said Deborah, wriggling her shoulders. She would have no more to do, she said, with that crazy world. ‘Is it crazy, great-grandmother,’ she asked, ‘or am I? Or am I merely one of the people who can’t fit in? Am I just one of the people who think a different set of things important? Anyhow, why should I accept other people’s ideas? My own are just as likely to be right – right for me. I know one or two people who agree with me, but they are always people who don’t seem to get on with grandfather or great-aunt Carrie. And another thing’ – she paused.
‘Go on,’ said Lady Slane, moved to the heart by this stumbling and perplexed analysis.
‘Well,’ said Deborah, ‘there seems to be a kind of solidarity between grandfather and great-aunt Carrie and the people that grandfather and great-aunt Carrie approve of. As though cement had been poured over the whole lot. But the people I like always seem to be scattered, lonely people – only they recognise each other as soon as they come together. They seem to be aware of something more important than the things grandfather and great-aunt Carrie think important. I don’t yet know exactly what that something is. If it were religion – if I wanted to become a nun instead of a musician – I think that even grandfather would understand dimly what I was talking about. But it isn’t religion; and yet it seems to have something of the nature of religion. A chord of music, for instance, gives me more satisfaction than a prayer.’
‘Go on,’ said Lady Slane.
‘Then,’ said Deborah, ‘among the people I like, I find something hard and concentrated in the middle of them, harsh, almost cruel. A sort of stone of honesty. As though they were determined at all costs to be true to the things that they think matter. Of course,’ said Deborah dutifully, remembering the comments of her grandfather and her great-aunt Carrie, ‘I know that they are, so to speak, very useless members of society.’ She said it with a childish gravity.
‘They have their uses,’ said Lady Slane; ‘they act as a leaven.’
‘I never know how to pronounce that word,’ said Deborah; ‘whether to rhyme with even or seven. I suppose you are right about them, great-grandmother. But the leaven takes a long time to work, and even then it only works among people who are more or less of the same mind.’
‘Yes,’ said Lady Slane, ‘but more people are really of the same mind than you would believe. They take a great deal of trouble to conceal it, and only a crisis calls it out. For instance, if you were to die,’ – but what she really meant was, If I were to die – ‘I daresay you would find that your grandfather had understood you (me) better than you (I) think.’
‘That’s mere sentimentality,’ said Deborah firmly; ‘naturally, death startles everybody, even grandfather and great-aunt Carrie – it reminds them of the things they prefer to ignore. My point about the people I like, is not that they dwell morbidly on death, but that they keep continually a sense of what, to them, matters in life. Death, after all, is an incident. Life is an incident too. The thing I mean lies outside both. And it doesn’t seem compatible with the sort of life grandfather and great-aunt Carrie think I ought to lead. Am I wrong, or are they?’
Lady Slane perceived one last opportunity for annoying Herbert and Carrie. Let them call her a wicked old woman! she knew that she was no such thing. The child was an artist, and must have her way. There were other people in plenty to carry on the work of the world, to earn and enjoy its rewards, to suffer its malice and return its wounds in kind; the small and rare fraternity to which Deborah belonged, indifferent to gilded lures, should be free to go obscurely but ardently about its business. In the long run, with the strange bedlam always in process of sorting itself out, as the present-day became history, the poets and the prophets counted for more than the conquerors. Christ himself was of their company.
She could form no estimate of Deborah’s talents; that was beside the point. Achievement was good, but the spirit was better. To reckon by achievements was to make a concession to the prevailing system of the world; it was a departure from the austere, disinterested, exacting standards that Lady Slane and her kindred recognised. Yet what she said was not at all in accordance with her thoughts; she said, ‘Oh dear, if I hadn’t given away that fortune I could have made you independent.’
Deborah laughed. She wanted advice, she said, not money. Lady Slane knew very well that she did not really want advice either; she wanted only to be strengthened and supported in her resolution. Very well, if she wanted approval, she should have it. ‘Of course you are right, my dear,’ she said quietly.
They talked for a while longer, but Deborah, feeling herself folded into peace and sympathy, noticed that he
r great-grandmother’s mind wandered a little into some maze of confusion to which Deborah held no guiding thread. It was natural at Lady Slane’s age. At moments she appeared to be talking about herself, then recalled her wits, and with pathetic clumsiness tried to cover up the slip, rousing herself to speak eagerly of the girl’s future, not of some event which had gone wrong in the distant past. Deborah was too profoundly lulled and happy to wonder much what that event could be. This hour of union with the old woman soothed her like music, like chords lightly touched in the evening, with the shadows closing and the moths bruising beyond an open window. She leaned against the old woman’s knee as a support, a prop, drowned, enfolded, in warmth, dimness, and soft harmonious sounds. The hurly-burly receded; the clangour was stilled; her grandfather and her great-aunt Carrie lost their angular importance and shrivelled to little gesticulating puppets with parchment faces and silly wavering hands; other values rose up like great archangels in the room, and towered and spread their wings. Inexplicable associations floated into Deborah’s mind; she remembered how once she had seen a young woman in a white dress leading a white borzoi across the darkness of a southern port. This physical and mental contact with her great-grandmother – so far removed in years, so closely attuned in spirit – stripped off the coverings from the small treasure of short experience that she had jealously stored away. She caught herself wondering whether she could afterwards recapture the incantation of this hour sufficiently to render it into terms of music. Her desire to render an experience in terms of music transcended even her interest in her great-grandmother as a human being; a form of egoism which she knew her great-grandmother would neither resent nor misunderstand. The impulse which had led her to her great-grandmother was a right impulse. The sense of enveloping music proved that. On some remote piano the chords were struck, and they were chords which had no meaning, no existence, in the world inhabited by her grandfather and her great-aunt Carrie; but in her great-grandmother’s world they had their value and their significance. But she must not tire her great-grandmother, thought Deborah, suddenly realising that the old voice had ceased its maunderings and that the spell of an hour was broken. Her great-grandmother was asleep. Her chin had fallen forward on to the laces at her breast. Her lovely hands were limp in their repose. As Deborah rose silently, and silently let herself out into the street, being careful not to slam the door behind her, the chords of her imagination died away.
Genoux, bringing in the tray an hour later, announcing ‘Miladi est servie,’ altered her formula to a sudden, ‘Mon Dieu, mais qu’est-ce que c’est ça – Miladi est morte.’
‘It was to be expected,’ said Carrie, mopping her eyes as she had not mopped them over the death of her father; ‘it was to be expected, Mr Bucktrout. Yet it comes as a shock. My poor mother was such a very exceptional woman, as you know – though I’m sure I don’t see how you should have known it, for she was, of course, only your tenant. A correspondent in The Times described her this morning as a rare spirit. Just what I always said myself: a rare spirit.’ Carrie had forgotten the many other things she had said. ‘A little difficult to manage sometimes,’ she added, stung by a sudden thought of FitzGeorge’s fortune; ‘unpractical to a degree, but practical things are not the only things that count, are they, Mr Bucktrout?’ The Times had said that too. ‘My poor mother had a beautiful nature. I don’t say that I should always have acted myself as she sometimes acted. Her motives were sometimes a little difficult to follow. Quixotic, you know, and – shall we say? – injudicious. Besides, she could be very stubborn. There were times when she wouldn’t be guided, which was unfortunate, considering how unpractical she was. We should all be in a very different position now had she been willing to listen to us. However, it’s no good crying over spilt milk, is it?’ said Carrie, giving Mr Bucktrout what was meant to be a brave smile.
Mr Bucktrout made no answer. He disliked Carrie. He wondered how anyone so hard and so hypocritical could be the daughter of someone so sensitive and so honest as his old friend. He was determined to reveal to Carrie by no word or look how deeply he felt the loss of Lady Slane.
‘There is a man downstairs who can take the measurements for the coffin, should you wish,’ he said.
Carrie stared. So they had been right about this Mr Bucktrout: a heartless old man, lacking the decency to find one suitable phrase about poor Mother; Carrie herself had been generous enough to repeat those words about the rare spirit; really, on the whole, she considered her little oration over her mother to be a very generous tribute, when one remembered the tricks her mother had played on them all. She had felt extremely righteous as she pronounced it, and according to her code Mr Bucktrout ought to have said something graceful in reply. No doubt he had expected to pull some plums out of the pudding himself, and had been embittered by his failure. The thought of the old shark’s discomfiture was Carrie’s great consolation. Mr Bucktrout was just the sort of man who tried to hook an unsuspecting old lady. And now, full of revengefulness, he fell back on bringing a man to make the coffin.
‘My brother, Lord Slane, will be here shortly to make all the necessary arrangements,’ she replied haughtily.
Mr Gosheron, however, was already at the door. He came in tilting his bowler hat, but whether he tilted it towards the silent presence of Lady Slane in her bed, or towards Carrie standing at the foot, was questionable. Mr Gosheron in his capacity as an undertaker was well accustomed to death; still, his feeling for Lady Slane had always been much warmer than for a mere client. He had already tried to give some private expression to his emotion by determining to sacrifice his most treasured piece of wood as the lid for her coffin.
‘Her ladyship makes a lovely corpse,’ he said to Mr Bucktrout.
They both ignored Carrie.
‘Lovely in life, lovely in death, is what I always say,’ said Mr Gosheron. ‘It’s astonishing, the beauty that death brings out. My old grandfather told me that, who was in the same line of business, and for fifty years I’ve watched to see if his words were true. “Beauty in life,” he used to say, “may come from good dressing and what-not, but for beauty in death you have to fall back on character.” Now look at her ladyship, Mr Bucktrout. Is it true, or isn’t it? To tell you the truth,’ he added confidentially, ‘if I want to size a person up, I look at them and picture them dead. That always gives it away, especially as they don’t know you’re doing it. The first time I ever set eyes on her ladyship, I said, yes, she’ll do; and now that I see her as I pictured her then I still say it. She wasn’t never but half in this world, anyhow.’
‘No, she wasn’t,’ said Mr Bucktrout, who, now that Mr Gosheron had arrived, was willing to talk about Lady Slane, ‘and she never came to terms with it either. She had the best that it could give her – all the things she didn’t want. She considered the lilies of the field, Mr Gosheron.’
‘She did, Mr Bucktrout; many a phrase out of the Bible have I applied to her ladyship. But people will stand things in the Bible that they won’t stand in common life. They don’t seem to see the sense of it when they meet it in their own homes, although they’ll put on a reverent face when they hear it read out from a lectern.’
Oh goodness, thought Carrie, will these two old men never stop talking across Mother like a Greek chorus? She had arrived at Hampstead in a determined frame of mind: she would be generous, she would be forgiving – and some genuine emotion had come to her aid – but now her self-possession cracked and her ill-temper and grievances came boiling up. This agent and this undertaker, who talked so securely and so sagaciously, what could they know of her mother?
‘Perhaps,’ she snapped, ‘you had better leave my mother’s funeral oration to be pronounced by one of her own family.’
Mr Bucktrout and Mr Gosheron both turned gravely towards her. She saw them suddenly as detached figures; figures of fun certainly, yet also figures of justice. Their eyes stripped away the protection of her decent hypocrisy. She felt that they judged her; that Mr Gosheron, according to
his use and principle, was imagining her as a corpse; was narrowing his eyes to help the effort of his imagination; was laying her out upon a bed, examining her without the defences she could no longer control. That phrase about the rare spirit shrivelled to a cinder. Mr Bucktrout and Mr Gosheron were in league with her mother, and no phrases could cover up the truth from such an alliance.
‘In the presence of death,’ she said to Mr Gosheron, taking refuge in a last convention, ‘you might at least take off your hat.’
THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE
The famous American publisher Alfred A. Knopf (1892–1984) founded Vintage Books in the United States in 1954 as a paperback home for the authors published by his company. Vintage was launched in the United Kingdom in 1990 and works independently from the American imprint although both are part of the international publishing group, Random House.
Vintage in the United Kingdom was initially created to publish paperback editions of books bought by the prestigious literary hardback imprints in the Random House Group such as Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Hutchinson and later William Heinemann, Secker & Warburg and The Harvill Press. There are many Booker and Nobel Prize-winning authors on the Vintage list and the imprint publishes a huge variety of fiction and non-fiction. Over the years Vintage has expanded and the list now includes both great authors of the past – who are published under the Vintage Classics imprint – as well as many of the most influential authors of the present.
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