Читать книгу Bricks and Flowers - Katherine Everett - Страница 9

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On a cold winter morning I was driven up in a carriage and pair to an enormous square brick house standing on rising ground and with a church on the other side of an immense circle of gravel. I was nervous. The footman rang the bell, and the door was opened by another footman with a powdered head and white silk stockings, and on his arm a silver horseshoe, which I was told later was in memory of the escape of Mary Queen of Scots from Chartley Castle, another Ferrers property, when she rode away on a horse shod with horseshoes mounted on three stilts to disguise the manner of her going. A butler in black stood on the other side of the door. I felt very insignificant.

When I got into the stone-flagged hall I was immediately met by the glass-eyed stare of an enormous bull, far more startling than the footman, although I had never before seen anyone dressed as gorgeously as he. The stuffed bull had wide horns and stood on a wooden platform, a perfect toy for giant children, but they would have had to be twenty feet high to have played with him. He was a specimen from the herd, descendants of Roman cattle who roamed the park at Chartley Castle.

I seemed to walk for a very long way in charge of a housekeeper wearing the traditional black silk dress with a gold chain round her neck and tucked into her belt. She took me up a wide staircase, down a long passage, round the corner, down another long passage, at last opening a door into a bedroom. Everything in this house seemed to be on outsize lines, and this room was too.

The housekeeper stood for a moment at the door and then said: “Her ladyship doesn’t come down before tea-time, and his lordship is out for luncheon, which will be served at two; I will send the maid with hot water and she can unpack for you if you give her the keys. And would you take a glass of wine and some biscuits?”

“No, thank you,” I answered, afterwards regretting this, for I was very hungry; “and I should rather unpack by myself, please.”

I felt I would prefer to see to my own modest possessions. Left alone, I looked round my room, and the most cheerful thing I could see in it was the large coal fire. The writing-table was wonderfully equipped with everything one could possibly use, even to sheets of various stamps. The walls were very high and papered in dull olive green, which the expanse of carpet matched, and all the furniture was large. The marble-topped washing-stand had a double set of jugs and basins on it. Three high sash windows looked over fields and some groups of bare, wind-bent trees which cut off the distance, and a grey sky hung over this neutral-coloured land.

I unpacked, feeling that no matter how I arranged them my things made very little impression on the huge wardrobe, chest of drawers, and dressing-table, and after fidgeting about for what seemed a long time I opened my door and, finding all dead still and quiet, I decided to take a look round. I went down the long passage, but did not venture to open any of the many doors, found the staircase, and looked at the stags’ horns that bristled from the stone walls, and when I reached the hall I saw it was bigger than I had realized, even the stuffed bull looking quite modest in the distance. Here, too, it was completely quiet except for my own footsteps, which seemed to echo on the stone floor, so I tried to see how far I could get by walking only on the many animal skins spread about, but when I nearly fell over a tiger’s head on one of them I quickly went across to examine the bull. Its glass eyes stared into mine and seemed to say, “What are you doing here?” so emphatically that I ran back up the stairs and down the long passages to my room.

A gong boomed through the house, and in the hall I found one of the gorgeous footmen waiting to show me the way. The dining-room, as I had expected, was a vast room with a round table in the middle and only one place laid at it, but covered with silver, fruit, and flowers. Realizing that three men were waiting on me, I was paralysed, and hardly knew what I ate, and I suppose I was tired and overwrought, for suddenly the orchids, the grapes, and the peaches seemed floating in a mist. I blew my nose. I refused a wine, only to be offered another kind and then another. That afternoon I went to sleep on the sofa in my room.

Tea was in the Long Room downstairs and not in the drawing-room, which was on the first floor. When my cousin Ina came in I was there alone, and I thought her quite lovely—tall, and very fair, and wearing a smoke-blue velvet dress. She was kind, welcoming, and charming, and said:

“I am so sorry Ferrers had to be out for your first day, poor little neglected Irish cousin—ah, here he comes.”

And a thin man arrived who, taking no notice of me, went eagerly up to Ina saying, “How are you, my darling?”

“Fairly well,” she answered, and was it my imagination that made me think she shrank away from him?

At that moment a procession arrived, consisting of the butler and three powdered footmen, one of whom put out a tea-table, while another laid a fine lace cloth on it, and a third put a silver tray with teapot and kettle on it. The ritual was perfect, one man replacing another automatically, while canary-coloured china appeared and a quantity of varied foods—rich cakes and plain cakes, scones and biscuits, thin bread and butter, white and brown—and when all was completed the butler announced: “Tea is served, my lady”—a fact we could scarcely have failed to know. This statement was the only active assistance he had given to the performance, and then the procession withdrew.

Meanwhile I had been looking round the room. It was indeed a long room, all white and gold, with three cut-glass chandeliers hanging from the high ceiling. All down the length of the room were groups of palm-trees and flowering white lilac-trees in pots, flanked by primula and orchids.

So began my visit, which lasted through a long, cold winter, during which I grew very fond of Ina and got to know her as well as anyone could in those sad years of her life.

One evening when we were alone she asked me, “Can you remember Bantry? You used all to come there at Christmas, driving over the mountains from Killarney with relays of horses till my father got too old to have parties.”

“I never went there after I was five, but I remember the great terrace with all the steps and statues.”

“That was at the back of the house, and the front looked over the bay—that lovely bay.”

Her eyes seemed misted for a moment and she said no more.

Another time she talked of her home and said, “I loved it as I never can love any other place, and after my sisters had married and my father had died I lived there for ten years with my brother, and I do not think there ever was a happier partnership. We left each other perfectly free to go or come and to do exactly as we liked, and as we knew everyone and entertained a great deal in an easy and informal way, people liked coming to Bantry.”

“May I tell you something?” I interrupted. “Just before I left Ireland I met a Major Hewson who talked of you, saying you were the most enchanting person he had ever known and that every man in County Cork laid his heart at your feet, and that you were kind, but kept everyone at a friendly distance.”

She made no comment, but went on to tell me, “I was alone near Avignon, one of the quiet little French places I liked, when I heard quite by chance that my brother Berehaven was married. It was a cruel shock, coming like that and so unexpectedly, and I made a great mistake by writing a hasty, ill-considered letter of reproach about his marriage and his choosing a Roman Catholic to be his wife, and so I closed Bantry to myself for ever.”

“So then you married Ferrers?” I said, after a long pause.

“Yes; he had been devoted to me for many years.”

Ina was always loyal to her husband and never criticized him, but years later her sister, Olive Ardilaun, when talking to me said she thought it had been a disastrous marriage.

“You see,” she had said, “Ina had been mistress of Bantry for so long; her brother Berehaven was younger than she was, and she did anything she liked and entertained all sorts of people. With her unusual charm and considerable beauty, many men were in love with her, and she should have chosen an easy-going Irishman instead of Ferrers, who was possessive and never let her go anywhere without him, enforcing upon her the kind of life he approved of, which was dull and socially very formal. She realized almost at once that she could never escape, and that feeling and the climate shattered her health.”

I settled down at Staunton Harold, becoming indifferent to the presence of servants and accustomed to the ritual of meals, even the dinner, which was the most elaborate of them all, with its many courses and champagne every night.

The strangest ritual was the Sunday morning performance. I was told to be ready in the hall at five minutes to eleven, where I found two processions drawn up on either side of the stuffed bull, one headed by the housekeeper, with all the maids behind her, dressed in black with little black bonnets, and on the other side the butler and the menservants, no longer in their eighteenth-century dress, but all in dark suits. I stayed at the back of the hall, while a bell was ringing from the church across the gravel and everyone stood quite still. Then Ferrers came, looking slighter than ever, and wearing a tail coat and carrying a top hat. Deviating for the bull, he walked between the ranks of servants to the hall door, which at that moment was opened by an elderly man carrying a black velvet cushion on which was a large key, who came in and stood behind Ferrers. The housekeeper darted towards me whispering, “Walk beside his lordship and stay with him,” and then she led the maids to the church, followed by the men, and lastly by Ferrers, who put on his top hat as he crossed the gravel.

The church seemed fairly full, the women sitting on one side and the men on the other. Inside we paused for a moment while the man with the cushion locked the door and led us to the front pew, placing the key on a shelf in front of us, and as soon as this was done the bell stopped and an old clergyman came in and read the service in a slow, droning voice. It seemed dull till Ferrers whispered to me, “Stand up,” while everyone else was kneeling, and I heard the slow voice add to the prayers for the Royal Family, “And for Sewallis Edward, Earl Ferrers, Ina Maude, Countess Ferrers, the Lady Augusta Palmer, the Earl’s sister, and Katherine Herbert, the Countess’s cousin.” I felt horribly self-conscious, and when the prayer was over subsided on to my footstool uncertain if I was going to laugh or cry.

Everyone left the church before we did and then the door was locked and the key returned to its caretaker.

Later I asked Ina what happened to the clergyman.

“He’s locked in the church, but we feed him—if you look out of the window you will see his luncheon going in. Also,” she added with a smile, “what the French call a chaise percée, and at three he takes a children’s service, and the evening service at four, after which he is let out. Ferrers doesn’t like him, for he neglects the people and doesn’t trouble if anyone is ill, but although it’s our private chapel and not under the Bishop’s jurisdiction, we can’t get rid of him, as he won’t resign.”

I did look out of the window, and saw a procession going to the church, headed by the man with the key, followed by objects held on poles. It looked like an old illustration of the Ark of the Covenant.

The days took on a regular routine for me. I painted in the morning, having asked Ina if I might copy the Romney in the big upstairs drawing-room and she having answered after a moment’s pause, “I really think you might if you don’t move it, for you couldn’t do it any harm, and Ferrers never goes in there.”

This delighted me, and I said, “I must get a canvas and some paints.”

“I wish I could do more to amuse you, but order the side-car and drive into the town—that might amuse you,” she added.

I was familiar with Irish side-cars, which were always shabby and you lolled across the seat and rested your elbow in the middle and had jokes with the driver while the horse got along with a sort of smooth run, the whole affair being casual and easy-going; but here, standing on the immense sweep of gravel, was such a side-car as I had never seen. It gleamed with yellow varnish, and the seats were covered with crimson velvet. On the driving-seat, sitting stiffly upright, was a coachman in cockaded top hat, white breeches, and polished high boots, and between the shafts was a very large, handsome black horse with silver-mounted harness. I got on the side seat feeling that lolling was not possible, but when the high-stepping horse started and we rocked away down the avenue I nearly fell off. The cold was piercing, and jokes with the coachman were unthinkable.

Later when Ida asked me how I had enjoyed my drive I answered that I thought these Midlands too cold for a side-car, but that I had never seen such a smart one.

“Of course not; it’s a complete misfit here, as I am.” Then, as if correcting herself, “Ferrers most kindly had it built for me, thinking I would like an Irish vehicle; but I am caged, if only by this climate.”

Although she suffered from bronchitis and threatened lung trouble and constant asthma, which strained her heart, she was unfailingly kind and never complained. She asked the estate nurse to show me anything that might interest me on the place, and the latter, who had a pony cart and a stout pony, took me first to see the gardens, where we found the head gardener in a very heated orchid house. Then the nurse went off on her round, while the gardener showed me these astonishing flowers, after which we went through the vineries, a melon house, a carnation house, and a mixed greenhouse, gay with primulas and cyclamens. He also showed me a perfectly appointed potting-shed and a tool-shed where the tools were all clean and polished, and then pointed out the bothy.

“How many men have you?” I asked.

“Eight men and six boys. I like to start them young and take them right through from plain weeding and digging to pruning, budding, grafting, and propagating, and then through the glass work, and I make them study, too, and master names; then when they know their job it’s a satisfaction to find them a good place.”

“Just when they are trained and useful?”

“Yes, certainly. His lordship and his father before him always held it our duty to train and then place our people, and I feel the same; coming from here they mostly have good prospects. One boy of mine is well up at Kew, while another is head at the Duke of D——’s.”

We then went into his attractive house overlooking the garden to see his prizes. The walls of the sitting-room were hung with framed certificates, first prize here and first prize there; on the mantelpiece and chiffonier were silver cups of all sizes, all with inscriptions of past successes, and his pride and pleasure in them were very attractive. All the time he talked of “my orchids” or “my grapes”, and I felt when I left him that he was a completely happy man.

One afternoon the elderly agent took me out to see the Home Farm, the prosperous look and perfect order of which made it unlike any farm I had ever seen. “The finest shorthorn herd in the country,” he stated as he took me through the sweet, clean cow-house. “All bred here, for his lordship’s father was a real farmer and did everything regardless of cost, but on good common-sense lines. He would try experiments; whether it was cows, pigs, fowl, or wheat, we must improve them, and it was the same with the land, for which he bought new machinery and used mole-drains on the hillside and drained marsh lands.”

I was shown the stables, with heavy, hairy-hoofed horses, calves, and pigs all housed so well, and I thought how much better their buildings were than the cabins people lived in at home. It all seemed on such lavish lines, and I asked the agent, “But does this pay?”

“Ah, young lady, it would take me too long to make you understand that. If you mean could a working farmer do it as we do, he couldn’t, for he has to take the short view and can’t afford risks. But it pays a fine dividend in other ways than making money, for every tenant on this estate and many an outsider have benefited by what we have done. It is people who have the will and the means who have raised the level of British farming. We show our beasts, we publish our milk results from good breeding, and our blood has spread far and wide. We lend our machines to our tenants and buy good seed in bulk and sell it to them in small lots for no more than they would pay for poorer quality. Some years we make a loss, and others not, but we keep accounts. Everything that goes to the house is charged at market rates, and at the Estate Office the accounts are analysed, and by doing this over a number of years we know what outlay has paid and what has made a loss. Suppose we give five hundred pounds for a bull; it may take several years to see if it has paid us in the quality of the calves we got by him—but there, I shouldn’t be talking to you of such things.”

His interest seemed so profound that I felt he might go on indefinitely, and it was time to get home for tea.

Another day I went with the nurse to see the head game-keeper on his large settlement with hundreds of coops in a field, long rows of kennels, and a substantial house.

“The spring’s the time to see the place,” said the keeper when he met us; “then maybe I shall have a thousand chicks running round.”

“Chickens?”

“Young pheasants, miss; and a hundred hens to mother them.”

I was taken into the house, where there were antlers on the walls and stuffed birds in glass cases and many photographs of shooting groups.

“That was the best day we ever had,” he said, pointing to a group surveying dead birds. “And it was published, too.”

He showed me the same picture in The Field. There were photographs of dogs pointing, dogs retrieving, and men firing. After talking of good seasons and wet seasons, of good shots and outstandingly good shots, he finally announced, “There’s not many can beat us in the way of sport, for his lordship gives me a free hand, and I can show as pretty a day’s sport as you’d find anywhere.”

As we went out he pointed to an unpleasant sight, though it seemed to gratify him: on a long wire hung bedraggled feathered corpses of magpies and hawks, and the skins of stoats and weasels were nailed on boards.

“Vermin,” he said with scorn; “that’s the place for them.”

The nurse, a cheerful, talkative woman, told me of her work as we drove home.

“You see, I nurse them all, from the babies to the older people, when they need it. You should ask her ladyship to let you go through the house with Mrs. Mellish, the housekeeper.”

This I did, and I was shown the kitchens, the stillroom, the pantry, and the strong-room, and the locked door of the muniment room, the laundry, the linen room, and the sewing room, and everywhere I saw young women at work wearing gay print dresses and pretty mob caps.

“I take a great interest in my girls,” the housekeeper told me. “When they apply for a vacant place I let them take it, but I watch them, and if I see they are not getting on well, I advise them to change when they get the chance to another department, better fitted to their taste. If we don’t promote them here when they are trained we find them good places, but most of them get married after they have been with us a few years, and they make good wives, for they know how their homes and children should be kept. When they marry from here his lordship gives them two leather-covered armchairs. It was his father who started that, for the old gentleman used to say, ‘Make them comfortable after the day’s work and there is more chance they will agree’. Her ladyship gives a nice china breakfast and tea service.”

My days settled into fairly regular ways, painting in the mornings and after luncheon going for walks, often visiting the gardens, where the head gardener always welcomed me and was always interesting. Tea in the long room was followed by Ferrers telling us how well or how badly he had played golf. He had a private course and kept a professional, and he would describe his fortune at every hole, and then produce several little books bound in red leather and look up what he had done on the same day twenty years ago, then do the same for ten years ago. I would be embroidering a bedspread and scarcely listening to reading out of so many putting strokes, so many drives, and sometimes the measurement of these drives, and Ina, lying on the sofa knitting some white garment, would patiently assent with sympathy or commendation as a pause demanded, but it was an automatic response.

This quiet, regular life would go on for weeks, and then there would be a shooting party.

“No one to amuse you, dear, I’m afraid,” Ina said. “They are all elderly and Ferrers’ contemporaries, but you can go out with the guns if you like.”

They were elderly: Lord and Lady this, Mr. and Mrs. that. I joined them for the first day’s shooting, which was all taken very seriously, Ferrers, his keepers and beaters having everything planned to the last minutia. These stout men in their tweeds and heavy boots were expert shots. Each guest was given a particular stand, with an attendant behind to load his guns, the wood was encircled, and we could hear the cries of the beaters and the crack of their sticks on the undergrowth, then a shout of “Mark!” and the whirr of wings above us. Guns would be flung up, each barrel fired, and the gun changed with swift precision of movement. Few birds got away; most of them would be one moment living things, flashing across the sky, and the next falling, fluttering masses of feathers, which would hit the earth with a dull thud. There were so many of them that the guns would get hot and the air vibrate with the sound of firing, but it would be over quickly, and men and dogs would collect the birds before a move was made to another stand and quick death repeated.

The shooting was carefully timed and planned to meet the luncheon brake. Trestle tables would be put out in some sheltered spot and an excellent hot meal served, but not lingered over, for the days were short and there was more killing to be done. The shooting would end again on a pre-arranged spot, where the hundreds of birds were laid out for inspection and the total given, which total would be posted that night to the sporting papers.

The evening was soporific.

I went out each day, for in spite of the horrible side of it there was excitement and interest in watching an exhibition of brilliant skill, but I broke down and left them on the rabbit-shooting day.

The kind of rabbit-shooting which meant walking several miles or scrambling up a mountain-side to get half a dozen, which would be thought quite good, was familiar to me: rabbits turned out by half-trained dogs and often escaping into the thick cover I was accustomed to seeing. With this idea, I wondered at these people condescending to rabbits, but was told it takes more judgment and quicker shooting than any rocketing pheasant, and you mustn’t poach the next man’s ground.

The guns were standing at intervals at the side of a wide grass ride, and an army of beaters was in the wood behind us with the dogs, the rabbits having been previously driven into it for days and their holes stopped. They broke cover in hundreds, and attempted to cross the ride in a flash, but most were killed, a few were wounded, and a very occasional one escaped. At the height of the shooting nothing could be done about the writhing, wounded creatures trying to drag themselves to safety, and it was so horrible that I left and made my way home. No doubt it was over quickly, for soon the fusillade stopped, and before long I heard it begin further off.

At night we sat in the big drawing-room upstairs, never used except for parties. It was interesting in this house to see the evidence of the taste of various generations. The old gentleman who had valued comfort had furnished the bedrooms with sound, ugly mid-Victorian furniture, no doubt discarding pieces we should value to-day, and the tiger skins in the hall and other sporting trophies had been sent home by his uncles, who had held positions in India. His great-grandfather, who had furnished this splendid room, had been a man of taste who had travelled and had bought pictures and furniture and the carved Italian mantelpiece. There were Italian primitives and Dutch interiors. The furniture was mellow and beautiful, little having been added since his day, and even the curtains of Genoese velvet and the Aubusson carpet were as he had left them; the room being so little used and so well cared for, they looked as if time had hardly touched them.

Here the women of our party would be knitting or doing cross stitch. They admired my bedspread, and when I told them I was doing it for an order, I was at once given orders to do two more.

“Show them your copy of the Romney,” Ina said.

I brought it from the corner of the room, framed in an old swept frame I had found in an antique shop, and at that moment the men came in and Ferrers, seeing me steadying the picture on the floor, said, “When did you take that down?”

I realized from his voice that he was angry.

Ina interposed quickly, “The picture hasn’t been touched; that’s her copy.”

“Shows how good it is, for the owner to mistake it for the original,” one of the men said with a loud laugh.

“Is it for sale, too?” a woman asked, and the man who had laughed said:

“If it is I’m a buyer. I always liked that little lady.”

“Copies of my pictures are not for sale.”

There was an uncomfortable moment after Ferrers’ statement till Ina started talking about the day’s sport and I went away, taking my copy to my room.

I was in bed and nearly asleep when Ina came in carrying a candle and looking startlingly pale and tired, with dark shadows under her eyes. I sat up and held her hand.

“Have you been worried about the Romney?” I asked.

“Ferrers was vexed, and he has asked me to make you promise never to part with it.”

She stopped and kissed me, saying, “Dear child, you are in no way to blame. Good-night.”

I never saw her again, and I have still got that copy.

The next morning I heard she was ill. She became worse, doctors arrived and nurses were sent for, and I thought perhaps I ought to go away, so I said something of the kind to Ferrers.

“It would be best as soon as you can arrange to do so,” he told me.

I clearly had to, though I longed to see Ina once more.

She died some years afterwards, and during those last years Ferrers allowed no visitors, wanting to be everything to her himself. I heard that after her death he was utterly desolate, but he never relaxed in doing what he believed to be his duty, and continued his county work, keeping everything going on the place right up to his own death.

I think I understand why Ferrers did not let Ina go abroad: he could not let her go alone—he could not have endured that—and he would not leave his post.

Our life in that great house was dull and may have been a little absurd, with its pomp and formality, but there was a fine side to the tradition that was unbroken for generations—a tradition of mutual obligations and service recognized by all, from the owner down to the humblest dependant. There existed a bond of pride and love of the place among them all, pride perhaps more actively felt by the employees in their various departments than by the owner, and everyone was assured of comfort and security.

Such places have almost ceased to exist in England, yet I can think of no group of human beings in any present-day setting to compare with this estate, where, as in many others, the mutual feeling was so kindly and where there existed an almost communal enjoyment of the expenditure of wealth.