Читать книгу Bricks and Flowers - Katherine Everett - Страница 8

Table of Contents

Considered from our present-day standards it is difficult to estimate whether my parents’ taste was inherently bad or whether it was merely representative of the vandalism of their times, but certainly all they did was unfortunate, and neither of them on the score of æsthetics questioned whether they were acting rightly.

They had pulled down the old family house, one of the few remaining Queen Anne buildings in Ireland. Some years later Lady Kenmare told me she had tried to persuade my father to spare this charming period building, which for a comparatively small expenditure could have been modernized, and if necessary added to, but I fear that, owing to prejudice between our respective families and suspicion as to the motive for this advice, my father’s determination to destroy this gracious home was only hardened. He replaced it with a vast cube of grey cement which turned almost black in the constant rain, and around windows and the hall door adorned it with Bath stone which grew a moss-green mould. In character it was rather like the houses built by the local authorities (called the Congested District Board) all over Ireland, but these were small square boxes, while ours was a very large one.

The interior of the house had some dignity as regards the principal rooms, for the architect had observed the Georgian rule of two cubes, and they were large ones, but others were a single square or some even half a square, and were like high cells. The wood-work was all varnished pitch-pine, and glazed red and green tiles were laid round the hall stove.

My father devoted enormous energy to destroying the charming surroundings of the old house; blasting away rocks on which grew ancient yews, he made straight terraces with rigid, steep, cement steps where once peacocks walked the wandering paths between yew hedges, and he did away with the topiary work, some of which represented the peacocks in formal green. He was happy in destroying it all and pleased with his own creation, but Nemesis overtook him, for he spent so much on his building that he carried a burden of debt for the rest of his life, which became more harassing every year. He would sit alone in the large, bleak dining-room with an oil lamp giving too poor a light to read by, and brood over his financial worries, a glass of whisky and cold water by his side, from which I hope he got a little comfort. He was getting too old to hunt, and indeed could no longer afford to do so, and the lands he had loved and ridden over so often had become a burden.

He was a good and generous landlord, and his tenants were attached to him, but they belonged to the Land League, under whose edict they had to withhold their rents; he was so kindly that he could not bring himself to dismiss any of his employees when they and their fathers before them had worked on the place for so many years. I think he felt helpless to cope with his difficulties, and no whisky-and-water could relieve him from the constant fear that his bank would demand the reduction of his overdraft.

He had great energy and liked practical work. The grounds around the house had outcrops of rock everywhere, and my father decided to remove them—an absurd effort and quite useless, but blasting became a sport we all enjoyed. The selected limestone would have a deep hole bored in it and then be filled with gunpowder nearly to the top, the final inch being packed tight with sacking and a short twisted end left hanging out. I can see my father’s immense figure dominating the group of workmen as he superintended the carrying out of this primitive process, while behind him dogs barked and we jumped about, wild with excitement. Every now and then he would shout, “Get out of the way and take the dogs,” but we never went till everyone was ordered to a safe distance, except the man who was left to put a match to the end of sacking. Directly this was done my father’s loud voice would urge him to run, which he was already doing, while we waited breathlessly for the explosion.

If it was successful, the roar would be resounding and lumps of stone would be flung into the air; if a failure, only a dribble of small bits would be ejected on to the ground. Either way the process would start over again, while men were sent to gather the pieces scattered on the field, which would be used for mending the walls which during the famine years had been built all round our place, or for adding to the pig-sties. My father could always find some use for them.

I, too, liked making things and would collect bits of wood and broken mirror for dolls’ furniture, and I wanted to make pictures of the sky and lakes and mountains, but my earliest effort became a tragedy because it meant so much to me and I had dwelt so long on thinking how to do it. One evening I had seen a sunset over the lake, which made a glittering golden path across the water—the rest of the water, the mountains, and the islands remaining a dusky blue with deeper shadows, which made the golden path more wonderful. All this I had seen out of the nursery window and, seeing it, felt it to be so breath-takingly beautiful that I must make a picture of it, this seeming all the more essential because it had all faded and gone while I watched, though I was still quite clear about what it had looked like. I had no doubts of being able to do it, but I felt my paints were inadequate. I had a small box of water-colours, hard little cakes; and, of yellow, only ochre and a little gamboge, neither of which, I felt sure, would look right for the golden path, but I remembered where I had seen something like it: the bright tinfoil on a shirt-button card under the buttons, which I could get from the workroom. The blue was also a difficulty, for I had used all my cobalt, and I felt prussian blue might be wrong for the soft colour of the mountains, so I decided to do it on a sheet of the blue office paper, and for days I lived in the dream of my wonderful picture. I snipped out fish-like shapes from the tinfoil and tried to gum them on, and I painted the mountains, but the rather glossy paper rose in blisters with little streams of paint running from them; the gum went everywhere, and the gold fish shapes became unmanageable, some of them sticking in the mountains and some getting upside-down, and all got dirty and despair filled my heart, for in place of my vision I had made a disgusting, frightful mess.

I have made many failures since those days in trying to realize something in my mind, but I have never suffered such distress as over that first nursery effort.

When I was much older I enjoyed drawing and painting and became a good copyist, even my mother considering me to be an artist, and when I was nineteen I had my first view of real art and also of a way opening out to me for a permanent escape from my home. We had gone to English health resorts and abroad from time to time with my mother, and difficult pilgrimages these journeys were, but the real beginning of a new life happened in a most unexpected way.

We had neighbours, Lord and Lady Kenmare, always referred to by my parents with an oblique note of dislike. They were far richer and more important than we were, and they, too, had built a house, a very different one from ours, which my father used to refer to as “that institution” or that “town-hall full of a lot of foreign stuff”, though perhaps envy and jealousy had something to do with this prejudice. There had also been prolonged feuds with intermittent lawsuits between the families, disputes about properties and boundaries, with the permanent basic contention about the possession of various portions of the bottom of the lake, since we had one shore and they another, and our family usually seemed to have been on the losing side. With the ownership of the much-contested bottom of the lake went that of the islands, little rocks a few feet out of the water, with fern-fringed edges reflected so gently that one would not have thought such pretty, peaceful places could have stirred so much embittered feeling—which feeling, incidentally, when discussed in the Chancery Courts with every available appeal applied for by the loser, was very costly.

It was to the head of this rival family that I owed my escape from home. At that time my mother had become increasingly unbalanced and was constantly under the influence of morphia; she had relays of maids and nurses who never stayed long. I think our kindly old doctor must have told Lady Kenmare something about us and our difficulties, for she came to call—a thing she had not done for years, and on a day when my mother was well enough to be downstairs lying on the drawing-room sofa while I read to her. Lady Kenmare, who had been a daughter of Lord Charles Thynne, was splendid-looking, white-haired, very upright, and wore beautiful pearls.

“I have come to ask you a favour,” she said, after the first greetings had been gone through. “Will you let your girl come and stay with me? I hear she is so clever at drawing and needlework, and I have started a school of crafts for the boys and girls of the town, and she could help me so much with it.”

I could hardly believe it when my mother meekly agreed. Perhaps she was flattered, and Lady Kenmare, with her beauty, rank, charm, and dignity, was a person people did agree with.

It was like being whirled away to another planet to find myself in that lovely setting. The house stood on a hill, and the gardens fell away towards the park and lake and mountains—gardens of which I was subsequently reminded in Italy, for there were fine wrought-iron gates, carved well-heads, vistas with statuary in the distance, fountains, and lead vases; but there were far more flowers than you would ever find in any Italian garden. Lady Kenmare was a pioneer in this as in other things and an early follower of Mr. Robinson’s revolutionary ideas, but she combined them with a well-thought-out architectural setting.

The treatment of the large rooms was equally impressive, for each contained a collection of antique furniture, both English and foreign. The windows had brocaded curtains, Persian carpets were spread on the parquet floors, and the dining-room walls looked rich and glowing, being hung with Cordova leather. The contrast with my home was painful, for my poor father, frightened at the cost of his building, which had been far more than he had meant to spend, had cried a sudden halt over furnishing, so that some of the high plate-glass windows had no curtains, but only striped linen blinds and pitch-pine varnished shutters which closed with an iron bar across them, and much of the house had an unfinished, bleak look. Here everything was luxurious and lovely.

Lady Kenmare took me to see the school of crafts she had started and we saw the Carrickmacross and Limerick lace the girls were working at. They were all doing shamrock leaves, while the boys, who were learning wood-carving, had patterns of intertwined snakes.

“You must go to the convent where they teach needlework,” my hostess told me, “and learn the limitations imposed by this sort of lace, and then you will have a good chance of improving it.”

I spent several mornings with cheerful nuns who kissed me on both cheeks and showed me what they were doing. The library provided me with illustrated books, from which I set to work to make designs for the needlework and the wood-carving. We were planning a four-poster bed which the boys were to carve and for which the girls were to make the hangings of white silk embroidered in gold and silver thread from an old Spanish pattern I had copied. Lady Kenmare would come to the library where I worked and would say, “Clever child! that is just what I wanted.” It was wonderful to be praised and encouraged, and an antidote to the non compos treatment. Then she would add, “You must study art, as you are so interested in it,” and as I could not explain how hopeless the idea was with my home background, I only said, “I haven’t any money.”

“Well, you must earn some,” she said, and secured me an order to copy miniatures, from which more orders followed.

My visit was prolonged, and as week followed week I gradually began to feel that I could not go home again to face the aimless life, my mother’s terrifying anger and clouded mind, and my father’s unhappy melancholy. The more I thought of it the more sure I felt that I must escape somehow, yet I couldn’t stay with Lady Kenmare indefinitely, and anyhow she was soon going to London.

On a visit to my mother she told me she had heard from Ina Ferrers. “Poor thing!” she said, “she is always so ill—that cold climate doesn’t suit her, and she is so much shut up she even thinks of getting a companion.”

Ina Ferrers was my mother’s first cousin, as a glance at the family tree will show. She married Lord Ferrers, who owned Staunton Harold, a large house in Leicestershire.

Hearing about this letter from my mother, I decided to write to my cousin saying that if she would let me come as a companion I would do all I possibly could for her, read to her, or do anything she wished. The answer came on very thick paper with a coronet and a quantity of information about posts and stations engraved on it, and the first sentence dashed my hopes, for it began:

“No, I have given up all idea of having a companion, and I don’t care either for being read to.”

But it then went on to suggest a long visit.

I went to see my mother, agonized as to whether she would let me go. She seemed indifferent, and I found in subsequent years that once away I hardly existed for her; I suppose this came from the self-centredness natural to the neurasthenic. Her mind seemed incapable of taking an interest in anyone or anything that did not affect her own comfort and, as the inevitable result of such a point of view, she was a lonely, unhappy woman.