Читать книгу Farewell Victoria - T. H. White - Страница 4

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October 2nd, 1858, was to be a fine Saturday. The yews in front of Ambleden stood up out of a ground mist; looming and, if one might say so, luminous with darkness, in the silver light before dawn. It was cold. A rabbit hunched on the wet grass. It extended like a concertina, bounded a few paces, and shut up again into its browsing hump. The furry atomy seemed shaken from inside with a spasmodic pleasure. Either it was enjoying its breakfast or trembling from the cold. A shy woodland creature of the mist, it looked surprisingly solid at the same time. It was a landmark in the haze; once one had come near enough to distinguish it as a rabbit, rather than as a croquet ball left over from last night.

The rabbit’s movements became more brisk. It extended itself more often, sat up and listened in the traditional pose. Somebody was moving half a mile away, in the second keeper’s cottage. It was the keeper himself. He had come down the narrow stairs in his stockinged feet, had begun to put on his boots. He stirred over the embers which had been covered to keep them in the night before, and set a kettle on the hob with slow fingers. He lit no candle, but moved in the darkness with assurance. It was cold, he thought; but it would be a warm day. No rain with that dew, certainly. He put all four fingers of each hand in his mouth, one hand at a time, and breathed on them. Then, sitting down and leaning forward in the chair, he began to do up his gaiters. They were of stiff leather, buttoning on the ordinary hole and button system. It was a harsh job for those strong, cold, patient fingers.

The sun prepared to rise. Its pale pre-light began to filter into the keeper’s kitchen; informing it, translating it into fact. The keeper himself became visible, a grizzled figure, bearded, in a velvet coat. His hard cut-down hat stood on the table by his side. The kettle began to steam, grey also. Everything was grey or silver. The light ran along the barrels of the two guns. One was a muzzle-loader; the other fired pin-fire cartridges. Like all keepers’ guns, they were a little out of date.

As the light strengthened, the two great yew trees—they had been called Adam and Eve for centuries—began to have premonitions of shade. Their embryo shadows faintly, intermittently, hinted at the possibility of their existence. The rabbit nibbled on.

One realized suddenly that he was nibbling in daylight. Glancing quickly towards the yew tree, one realized that the shadows were really there. In two broad feelers they reached across the greensward, now pearly, far and away under the horizontal rays. One stripe fell below across the façade of the house, at the corner. Cold, but distinct and lambent, the sun was in the east. The day had dawned. October 2nd, 1858.

How impossible and extraordinary it now seems that a real day, an integral and definite day existing individually by itself, should have dawned so long ago. It seems beyond natural probability that a day in so many respects quite like the present one should have taken place a hundred years ago. There was a Today, a hundred years before Today. That bright mystery of the present leaps before us without the least pathos, but curious, but provocative and strange.

Meanwhile, they were stirring in the house. From the other side, at the back, came footsteps; the rattle of a pail. A spry voice cried to a horse, whose metal shoe rang again in answer on the stone, as the shutter of a loose-box banged the wall. They would be cubbing today. The stable was alive.

And then the house was alive also.

All these reincarnations were imperceptible. It was not possible to say: Now the house is coming back to life again. It was only possible to notice that it had come, and to wonder when the miracle had happened.

Little Augusta, waking in the night nursery, listened to the noise of stair-rods outside the door. Pleasant and comfortable noises on morning stairs, pledges of security, laborious antitheses of snug sheets, music for idle revivals, symbols of a passing age; Augusta listened to them with vexation. Soon there would be the bath. It was indeed cruel, was it not? Papa had decreed that they were both to have cold baths every morning. He considered that it was good for their health.

Standing together in the low tin circle, so that to modern eyes the ablution would seem impossibly top-heavy, the two pink frogs would pour the water in thin trickles over each other’s shoulders. These little cold bodies, which were to grow through girlhood into the splendid maturity of a Victorian chatelaine and then down into the common grave, would hop and squeal and argue. There was a pact between them, to pour the water down the front side only, where it was less cold. But Priscilla, who was the elder, insisted on the privilege of pouring last; and was inclined to allow a small rivulet, lacing like crystal on the skin, to run down Augusta’s back. It was impossible to retaliate, on account of the precedence, even in a tin tub, of primogeniture. If only Augusta could have been the last to pour! How she would have made her wriggle! But Priscilla always apologized and pretended it had been a mistake.

Meanwhile the woods had woken. There were four keepers for the birds, and three more for the river. The former were on their day-long circles already. They thanked the Almighty that it was not the breeding season; when, what with the rearing of pheasants and the killing of vermin, sleep became occasional and eating a matter of chance. Yet they had enough to do. Sir William would be shooting the pheasants this afternoon, and there were the dispositions to make. He liked to line a hedge or a ridge in the new way, to have the birds driven for him; and this meant getting them where they were needed. Then there were the traps to see to (it meant a six-mile walk for each of them) and there were the rides to be cut if only the time could be found.

So they circled through the early woods, disturbing the late-staying rabbits, which sat up at the edge of the fields and skipped undecidedly and thumped and scuttered; starting the silly pheasants, which ran for safety in undignified straight sprints.

The stable was getting forward too. The saddles and leathers had been soaped and the stirrups scoured the night before: only the horses remained. The men, who had taken nothing so far but a hot drink, hissed and smacked vigorously, feeling faint on their empty stomachs, but at the same time hardy and joyful of the morning. They cried out to each other, and to the horses. Water ran from a cold pump and buckets clashed on the pebbles. As each horse was finished, with the faintest illicit gloss of paraffin, the saddles were put on and the girths loosely fastened. Then a blanket, mustard coloured in the acute light, came over the saddle. The horses that had been finished differed from those that were yet to come by this sweet bulge of the saddle under the blanket.

The house was alive. In the lower parts, whose noises were inaudible to Augusta upstairs, the maids had lighted the fires and finished the essential dusting for the day. Smoke came out of the chimneys. Sir William had his own valet, but the footmen had been looking after the guests; so they were in their coats already. Jarvis issued from the housekeeper’s room, where he had his own breakfast with the upper servants, and went into the pantry to change his brown coat for the full fig. He made a critical inspection of the breakfast table and ordered the fish forks to be changed. The footmen were silent and deferential beneath the butler’s eye.

Upstairs, the children were fed in the nursery. There were three nurses. The whole place was a layer of hierarchies, in which all the gradations were nicely calculated. The head nurse, for instance (who had been born well in the eighteenth century), would eat with the housekeeper. So would the head cook and the valet, either because he was the only one of his kind, like the mate of the Nancy Brig, and, therefore, might be considered as a head valet—the captain as well as the crew—or because his propinquity to Sir William in the private levée lent him an aura. The gradations of service formed a regular social service, which was of the greatest importance to the servants, giving them dignity and ambition. They possessed hopes of feasible advancement and relished their ranks to the full. Each lieutenant lorded it over his inferiors and exacted the respect which he gave willingly to those above. The caste-ladder was polite and gentlemanly. It gave pleasure to all, for even the boot-boy could snub the cowman, and he, presumably, could kick the cows. Not that there were any kicks; only a superiority, abetted by both parties. It was a system of manners, which had been the discovery of the preceding century.

Master Harry was allowed downstairs to breakfast. He was at school already, but a frail child who had been too ill to go this term. Scorning the nursery, he had risen early and gone down to the stable. Now, since breakfast was approaching, he went into the dining-room to confer with Jarvis and the footmen. He begged permission to take the flasks out for the saddles. Cubbing was still early, but late enough for Sir William to take a quick breakfast before it. On such days as this he required no sandwiches, but would be in again at about twelve for a substantial luncheon. That gave him a good afternoon for the pheasants. Still, he liked to take his flask.

His foot was heard upon the stairs. He came down, rosy from cold water, pinkly shaved, cheerfully humming.

‘Such a gettin’ up stairs and playin’ on the fiddle,

Such a gettin’ up stairs I ne’er did see.

There was Mr Smith with his mackintosh

And his hair frizzled up like a pumpkin squash ...’

He repeated the first two lines (perhaps the stairs had suggested them to him) and came into the dining-room, turning over in his mind the merits of Westphalian ham and kidneys. Seeing his son, who had come back from the stables, he spoke kindly to him, with a small pompous joke.

The second gong sounded with circumstance, and punctually the guests appeared. It would be easy to describe them by their plaids, their waistcoats, their Dundreary or other forms of whisker. But they were human like ourselves, and a great deal more admirable. Convention was not dead with them, but living; their formal quips, their durable clothes and standards, were of a justifiable complacency. They enjoyed being alive. Manners, etiquette, regulation; these were a recognition of the pleasures of life, which they respected enough to order it.

The servants came in after the guests, moving in a procession of precedence which was as regular as the precedence of a dinner party. They sat down demurely on the edges of the red leather chairs, whilst Sir William opened his Bible. They sat still, thinking about the day’s future, in a frame of red wallpaper, bright mahogany, sanguine portraits and dishes steaming on the sideboard. Sir William and his guests came hungry to this new fashion of family prayers. Their nostrils were titivated by the prospect of possible foods, still shrouded under covers, and by the expectation of a hardy day. So they prayed with pleasure, thanking God fervently upon sound occasion. They turned round and knelt, leaning their elbows upon the leather, with a decent movement. The maids presented their backsides to the Almighty rather shyly, for they were plump. But they knew that the heavenly birch would not be malevolent, that their lines would fall in pleasant places. They made their responses in low voices, deferential to Sir William and to God; perhaps, since they had broken their fasts and were already well launched upon the day’s work, with more deference to the former than the latter. They peeped between their fingers, conscious that they were sticking out behind.

When they had filed out, Mama began to dispense from the silver teapot. She was older than Sir William, more magnificent, more old-fashioned. He had married above his station and she was the daughter of an earl. As she sat in stately presidency among the cups, speaking seldom and with the faintest Georgian accent, one was reminded of the stories about her natural greatness. She was a woman for whom footmen carried prayer books to church, a potentate in spiritual as well as in temporal matters. She treated her Maker humbly, only because humility was the proper custom of the hierarchy. She stood in relation to her God in the same way as her upper servants stood towards herself. Her breakfast table was God’s housekeeper’s room, in which she conducted herself with dignity or subservience, according to the rules of precedence in earth or heaven. It was not with the least regret, or with the least doubt, or with the least lick-spittle ambition, that she recognized the natural priority enjoyed by an angel over the daughter of an earl. If there was a thunderstorm when she was staying in the London house, whither Sir William seldom accompanied her, she would ring a silver bell. Preceded by the butler and a footman carrying a chair, and followed by her ladies’ maid carrying a Bible, she would adjourn solemnly to the cellar; and there, upright in her chair, pale, composed, faintly nasal, she would read the psalms out loud until the danger had been passed. The butler, but not the footman, would reply ‘Amen.’

Now the horses were at the door. They stamped the gravel of the drive, in front of the yellow stone façade. It was a classical frontage, with steps, pillars and a pediment. The grooms, neat in their green uniforms, tested the girths and altered the stirrup leathers. One of them led a bay mare apart from the others, round and round in wide, uneasy circles. It was a crisp, bright morning. Nine o’clock.

Beautiful England! There was still something medieval about it, something feudal. ‘Sir William rides out today.’ The serfs were absent; the filth and horrible starvation of the normal beggars who should have thronged his outset had disappeared; the servile courtiers and dependent priests of the eighteenth century had faded, but still, as Sir William paused upon the steps among his guests, there was opulence and order and serviceable gear; there was colour and fine horseflesh; national property.

October 2nd was memorable for no reason, except that it occurred in 1858. The child Mundy, who was the son of a groom, was then eight years old. He passed it, like other holidays, in the placid pleasures which are not nowadays achieved.

Sir William’s hunt came by him and he saw it from the black-padding cub to the tootle of a horn in the vicarage spinney. He remembered afterwards, but without remembering when he remembered them, a pink coat and grey mare; also, a stout man and a stouter horse, rising at a low hedge, in juxtaposition, but not in contact. There was an admiral, dismounting upside down.

Other things contributed to October 2nd, as they contributed to his memory of Ambleden. There was Master Harry fishing in his special stream. He possessed no gum-boots or luxuries, but with his tight old-fashioned trousers rucked above a thin brown knee, he waded patiently upstream, casting a crucified worm before him. There was something lovely about the absorption of the small boy, which caught the other boy and made him feel it. Time was passing over without a touch. Patient like the stork whose red legs are said to fascinate and attract his luncheon, a leggy bird-fisher in attentive concentration, the toilsome angler seemed immobilized and remained so in memory. It would have been odd to think that this slender creature, with its Shelley features and untroubled heart, was to grow and set in bulk and opinions; was to be shot dead from a distance in the Boer War, a hidebound colonel of cavalry who had not thought or felt for thirty years.

Mundy remembered also the cattle in the park, yellow and hot-seeming, who browsed, straight-backed, and flicked their tails. He remembered rather oddly in the same picture the instrument with which Miss Augusta made holes for embroidery. It was an ivory spike, rather like a spillikin, with a glass eye at the thicker apex. If one held this to one’s own eye, as close as possible, and almost closed one’s eyelashes, one was rewarded with a dizzy view of the Taj Mahal, shimmering in a complicated mist of eye-film, eyelashes and refractions. It was a great treasure. He remembered Miss Augusta holding it up for him.

Then there was the noise of shooting in the woods, as Sir William discharged his piece upon the plethoric October pheasants. This noise made a background to the façade of Ambleden, and to a beech tree of which he was fond. The oaks were crocodiles, but this, the beech, was definitely an Indian elephant. Wise, old, trustworthy unlike the elm; its bulging muscular stems seemed fitted to carry logs of teak under the guidance of affectionate mahouts. With ancient elephantine might, to make them mirth, it wreathed its lithe proboscis. (Augusta once sketched it, with an incredible scrupulosity of detail, and the sketch survived to provoke the irreverent astonishment of her grandchildren. It survived along with an album full of flowers treated in the same way; of pansies and poppies defined with the histrionic exactitude of a virtuoso who draws pound notes on a sham blotting pad, so realistically that one tries to pick them off. The tendrils and pistils and little hairy stalks of her loving depictions were microscopically exact, so that one was provoked almost to dismember them; pollen, vein and petal.) Round the beech there was a circular seat; just such a seat as used to be successfully treated in pictures called ‘The Betrayal’ or ‘The Lovers’ Quarrel’. It was of six parallel green slats, nailed to eight supports octagonally disposed. He remembered Mylady sitting there with a tray, whilst her guests surrounded her in garden chairs. There were also two of those hooded wicker chairs, then fashionable at watering-places, which reminded one of beehives and of coracles, and of perambulators in the rain.

The carriages arrived for the Pic-Nic; the grooms held the horses’ heads and lowered the steps; the butler appeared processionally with the refreshments, followed by the flunkeys.

The October sun shone on the tree, whose turning leaves, secretly rustling, threw a dappled shade upon the tinkle of the cups. Voices were moderated by the open air, so that they fitted the natural noises of the afternoon: of leaves, bees, birds, and growing autumn. The full skirts rustled with the branches, soft and laundered. It was a congeries of plumy birds almost, in that arboreal setting.

Mundy knew that children were not allowed at such parties. (They were, indeed, very reasonably excluded from all polite activities. Augusta, for instance, was never allowed to enter a room which harboured her elders without first curtseying at the door. ‘And as,’ she remarked sixty-eight years later, ‘to going to the fire to warm myself on a cold winter’s day, the thing was unheard of. The hearth-rug was named “puppy-dog’s corner” and we were not allowed to stand upon it.’) He remembered, however, a game of Blindman’s Buff with the gardener’s son Teddy, and a strange game in the stables with Master Albert. Then there was Miss Augusta pretending to be a butterfly, and the youngest Miss Louisa imitating her. The smaller figure fell, cutting her knee; and was taken indoors, with her screams muffled in an apron. (That was also to remain for Miss Louisa her earliest recollection, of sitting still in the nursery with wet bandages over her cuts. Augusta relished the position of consoler at a sick-bed, and read to her out of Mangnall’s Queries. There was the position of important immobility, and the cold bandages trickling down her legs, and the sunlight on the unvarnished rocking-horse; all mixed up inextricably with the profound mystery of Mangnall’s—what was Mangnall? Queries—what were Queries?)

Mundy remembered Albert leading them round a corner of the house, and a white lady sitting beautifully among the cushions of a carriage. She was about to leave the Pic-Nic. He remembered that he had never seen a strange lady so close before, and that she, summing the situation and the children’s dirty faces at a glance, had prodded her coachman in the back. The two women (the other was Mylady) smiled and waved their little handkerchiefs. The carriage with its vision grumbled on the crisp gravel, and Mylady glanced at the urchins in perplexity. They looked filthy and ought not to have been there. ‘Well,’ she said at last, speaking between them, ‘what are you doing here?’ And then her distance melted, she began to laugh. The small respectful face of little Mundy was so surprised, was so attentive; his eyes followed the carriage with such a look of wonder. ‘Well, Mundy,’ he remembered, ‘take a good look.’ She touched his yellow mop with her white fingers. ‘That was Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and mind you don’t forget her.’

They were at dinner. The grand, endless, Victorian celebration was proceeding through its score of courses. The décolleté busts and shoulders of the ladies shone under the chandelier with a pearly lustre, rising from the foamy tulle and fichus like Aphrodites born among the waves. The champagne bottles yielded their corks with a discreet pop; Sir William took a glass with the Marquis of Bute; the servants moved silently over the carpet, threading upon their prudent errands of mercy between the shoulders and the whiskers. The épergnes and the silver plate flashed with a magnificent and lordly gleam.

Augusta was in bed. Priscilla and Albert would be called to the superior mysteries of dessert, but Augusta was too young. She lay upon her back, thinking of everything in particular.

Dessert and the great world, she would very much like to be a part of them. She would wear a gown like Mama’s, and take a sip of champagne, and play billiards with the Marquis of Bute, dressed in tartans and Dundrearies. They would go to London together and have a ball. The great advantage of going to London with the marquis would be that one would escape from the nursery.

Augusta moved her head restlessly on the hard pillow, and ran over a few subjects for speculation, which would relieve the tedium of her aching curls. They were in papers.

Tomorrow would be Sunday. When one said ‘Tomorrow is Sunday,’ Miss Bown pounced at once. ‘Tomorrow will be Sunday.’ Evidently it was an important point.

Tomorrow would be Sunday, and no doubt poor Mr Newcome would have a bothering time as usual. Papa very much objected to the Lord’s Prayer being read so often during the church service, and he constantly made a practice of telling the vicar so. The vicar was Mr Newcome. Papa would count over the number of times on his fingers, and hold them up in church. One would see Mr Newcome looking anxiously towards him as the prayer became due, and one would hear his sigh of relief if it passed off without a demonstration.

One day the poor fellow had broken the fact to Papa that the bishop had ordered him to wear a white surplice in the pulpit, while he was preaching the sermon. He had always worn a black gown before. Papa had exploded in wrath, saying that the white surplice was a sign that the clergyman was reading the word of God. The black gown made the people understand that all the words which they were hearing had only been composed by the clergyman, and might be believed or not as they thought fit.

Yes, Augusta was afraid that the poor vicar had rather a troublesome congregation. Papa would not open his mouth during the Athanasian creed, and forbade the family to do so; whilst Mr Cobb, who lived at Arrick, would only read the responses to a certain distance in it. Then the vicar, after waiting vainly for the voices which never came, would have to finish it by himself. His tone was low and trembling.

Something in that monotonous voice recalled the sea to Augusta. Broadstairs, the donkey rides ... the gallop ... At Margate they had bathed, had seen the Great Eastern pass—the largest ship in the world! They had gazed at her in awe. There also, brother Albert had been promoted to trousers, a fact which had equalled in importance the apparition of Leviathan. On the great occasion of his wearing them for the first time he had walked ahead with Priscilla and the governess, the others all following discreetly in the rear, their eyes glued upon him, hardly able to breathe from excitement. ‘I wish,’ the poor child had said to Miss Bown, ‘they all would not look at me so.’ He imagined, dear boy, that all the passers-by knew about the great event. His face was red!

And then the bathing. Men and women bathed separately, and men wore only a short pair of drawers—big boys were as Nature made them. So it was considered most immodest to go anywhere near the gentlemen’s bathing place, and Augusta had been told to keep her eyes away.

After one had entered the bathing machine and closed the door, a man would ride up on a horse and attach it to the machine by two ropes with hooks at the ends. Then he would gaily trot the structure into the sea. Sometimes the shore was very uneven and one had to hang on for all one was worth; sometimes the waves would bang against the floor, often wetting one’s clothes if the planks were at all defective. Then one heard the man unfasten the ropes, and was left to the mercy of the swirling sea. Augusta had always hoped that they had not been taken very far in. She had felt she could be brave, if the water did not come above her knees.

The ladies’ machines differed from the men’s. A huge hood was let down seawards from each machine so that no naughty man would be able to see the women and girls as they disported themselves in the water. It would have been a difficult matter for them to see anything, even if there had not been the canvas hood, for all the women wore long serge bathing gowns which reached to the ankles. They had long sleeves, and were tied round the waist.

Augusta remembered how Miss Bown and Nurse had robed her for the first dip, how presently a loud knock had been heard on the seaward door; which Nurse had immediately opened. There, up to her waist in water inside the hood, had stood a stout figure with a weather-beaten face. It was the bathing woman, clad in a serge costume, a shawl over her shoulders, a dark sun-bonnet upon her head. She had stretched out her arms towards Augusta (how they had all hastily backed!) and in a harsh voice had exclaimed: ‘Now my little dear, come along. Betsy will take care of you. Don’t make me wait!’

Augusta had been chosen to go first. Terror-stricken, she had clambered down the ladder towards the Ogress, to be promptly seized. Augusta had clung to her, frantically entreating that she should not be dipped. But it was of no avail; Betsy was too strong. With her mouth open in a last petition she had been plunged backwards into the horrible and tugging medium. The green sea had closed over her face, cold, swirling and filmy above the smarting eyes, rushing with a salty gurgle into the protesting mouth. The Last Trump had been repeated three times. A stout rope which hung from the top of the awning had then been put into her hand, and she had been left to look after herself.

Behind all this reminiscence and speculation a cross-current was troubling Augusta. Something about society, something analogous to Priscilla’s dessert and billiards with the marquis ... Could it have been old Miss Lydekker, driving up in her coach, with four postilions riding on the horses? She thought that when it reached the lodge a horn must have been blown, for the gates flew open at once. Or was that an exaggeration of childhood? It must have been quite two years ago that Miss Lydekker arrived with the postilions. In any case, they had looked so gay, coming up the drive. Augusta wished that she would come more often.

But no, it was not Miss Lydekker. It was Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who had been seen by Albert. Now why was one expected to remember having seen her? Was it because she was a fast lady, or so very great, or so very good? Why, like Donati’s comet, had she streamed across the firmament with such portentous signs?

There was another small head in Ambleden which was troubled with the same matter. Mundy was awake, though without curl papers to keep him so. He was awake, without knowing it, because he was hungry; an infant craving, an appeal for funds to build the little body, kept him sleepless with a vague disorder.

He lacked Augusta’s poetical acumen, her fancy and wide interest in living. He was not bothered by any reason for the importance of the person. For him it was a simple though a vital matter. Mylady had told him to remember the encounter; a tip straight from the horse’s mouth. He had seen Lady Catherine de Bourgh (as one might see the Great Pyramid, or the aloe’s centenarian bloom, or a man whose grandfather had met Ben Jonson; and with as little comprehension of the phenomenon); he had been told to remember her; he must prove himself worthy of the trust.

The small creature lay in bed with his three brothers; his credulous kind face staring up into the darkness, with something of the wisdom of the monkey’s.

It was dark. Adam and Eve, solemnly in darkness shrouding themselves, had slowly vanished. The timid rabbit was nibbling on the bowling green, betrayed now only by the crisp plucking of his teeth. The keeper in his cottage had taken off his boots, was warm beside his wife, satisfied with a good bag; the first pheasants of the season.

The men drank their port round the log fire, whilst the clear shoulders of the women hung over the albums in the drawing-room, or poised their ringlets over needlework.

Inside the bright room the lamplight shone on red tablecloth, on sociables, on the grand piano which would soon be played. Outside, in the darkness of Ambleden, the beech tree waited faithfully for its mahout. Upstairs Augusta herself had gone to sleep, to dream of bathing machines, and in the room above the horse-boxes little Mundy was sleeping too. He slept with a rag doll clutched tightly to his bosom. It was called the Duke of Wellington.