Читать книгу Knole and the Sackvilles - V. Sackville-West - Страница 9

Table of Contents

There are other galleries, older and more austere than the Cartoon Gallery. They are not quite so long, they are narrower, lower, and darker, and not so exuberant in decoration; indeed, they are simply and soberly panelled in oak. They have the old, musty smell which, to me, whenever I met it, would bring back Knole. I suppose it is really the smell of all old houses—a mixture of woodwork, pot-pourri, leather, tapestry, and the little camphor bags which keep away the moth; the smell engendered by the shut windows of winter and the open windows of summer, with the breeze of summer blowing in from across the park. Bowls of lavender and dried rose-leaves stand on the window-sills; and if you stir them up you get the quintessence of the smell, a sort of dusty fragrance, sweeter in the under layers where it has held the damp of the spices. The pot-pourri at Knole is always made from the recipe of a prim-looking little old lady who lived there for many years as a guest in the reigns of George I and George II. Her two rooms open out of one of the galleries, two of the smallest rooms in the house, the bedroom hung with a pale landscape of blue-green tapestry, the sitting-room panelled in oak; and in the bedroom stands her small but pompous bed, with bunches of ostrich-plumes nodding at each of the four corners. Strangers usually seem to like these two little rooms best, coming to them as they do, rather overawed by the splendour of the galleries; they are amused by the smallness of the four-poster, square as a box, its creamy lining so beautifully quilted; by the spinning-wheel, with the shuttle still full of old flax; and by the ring-box, containing a number of plain-cut stones, which could be exchanged at will into the single gold setting provided. The windows of these rooms, furthermore, look out on to the garden; they are human, habitable little rooms, reassuring after the pomp of the Ball-room and the galleries. In the sitting-room there is a small portrait of the prim lady, Lady Betty Germaine, sitting very stiff in a blue brocaded dress; she looks as though she had been a martinet in a tight, narrow way.

The gallery leading to these rooms is called the Brown Gallery. It is well named—oak floor, oak walls, and barrelled ceiling, criss-crossed with oak slats in a pattern something like cat’s cradle. Some of the best pieces of the English furniture are ranged down each side of this gallery: portentously important chairs, Jacobean cross-legged or later love-seats in their original coverings, whether of plum and silver, or red brocade with heavy fringes, or green with silver fringes, or yellow silk sprigged in black, or powder-blue; and all have their attendant stool squatting beside them. They are lovely, silent rows, for ever holding out their arms, and for ever disappointed. At the end of this gallery is a tiny oratory, down two steps, for the use of the devout: this little, almost secret, place glows with colour like a jewel, but nobody ever notices it, and on the whole it probably prefers to hide itself away unobserved.

There is also the Leicester Gallery, which preserves in its name the sole trace of Lord Leicester’s brief ownership of Knole. The Leicester Gallery is very dark and mysterious, furnished with red velvet Cromwellian farthingale chairs and sofas, dark as wine; there are illuminated scrolls of two family pedigrees—Sackville and Curzon—richly emblazoned with coats of arms, drawn out in 1589 and 1623 respectively; and in the end window there is a small stained-glass portrait of “Herbrand de Sackville, a Norman notable, came into England with William the Conqueror, A.D. 1066.” (Herbrandus de Sackville, Praepotens Normanus, intravit Angliam cum Gulielmo Conquestore, Anno Domini MLXVI.) There is also a curious portrait hanging on one of the doors, of Catherine Fitzgerald Countess of Desmond, the portrait of a very old lady, in a black dress and a white ruff, with that strange far-away look in her dead blue eyes that comes with extreme age. For tradition says of her that she was born in the reign of Edward the Fourth and died in the reign of Charles the First, breaking her leg incidentally at the age of ninety by falling off a cherry tree; that is to say, she was a child when the princes were smothered in the Tower, a girl when Henry the Seventh came to the throne, and watched the pageant of all the Tudors and the accession of the Stuarts—the whole of English history enclosed between the Wars of the Roses and the Civil War. She must have been a truly legendary figure in the country by the time she had reached the age of a hundred and forty or thereabouts.

It is rather a frightening portrait, that portrait of Lady Desmond. If you go into the gallery after nightfall with a candle the pale, far-away eyes stare past you into the dark corners of the wainscot, eyes either over-charged or empty—which? The house is not haunted, but you require either an unimaginative nerve or else a complete certainty of the house’s benevolence before you can wander through the state-rooms after nightfall with a candle. The light gleams on the dull gilding of furniture and into the misty depths of mirrors, and startles up a sudden face out of the gloom; something creaks and sighs; the tapestry sways, and the figures on it undulate and seem to come alive. The recesses of the great beds, deep in shadow, might be inhabited, and you would not know it; eyes might watch you, unseen. The man with the candle is under a terrible disadvantage to the man in the dark.