A Hero for His Bed: Episodes From "The Scarlet Tree"

by SIR OSBERT SITWELL

1

MY and FATHER he and showed my mother symptoms and a of friend being went unwell, to Germany for a holiday, hoping that a sojourn in the ancient sites of Nuremberg and Rothenburg, with their gothic character, their toys and torture chambers, would soon put him right. For a while after their return he seemed better, but the improvement did not last, and gradually a theme developed that became the central fact of our family life: he was not himself. He was ill. . . .

At the moment of which I am writing, my father had brought over to Renishaw from the office of the local Scarborough paper, which he owned, his chief printer, Stubble. Stubble printed books; therefore books were his territory, and my father accordingly set him to the uncongenial task of cataloguing the books in the library. I liked the man, for, since he did no work at all, he spent much time in talking to me, and he was, indeed, a lively companion. I remember when I said one day to my mother, “I like Stubble. He seems to enjoy himself so much,” she laughed and replied, “Yes, that’s just his trouble.”

My father, however, observing Stubble’s idleness, would grow very angry at finding himself obliged to pay him for doing nothing, and would decide to send him away. Accordingly he would give him his journey money and tell him to go home to Scarborough. But it was obvious that Stubble regarded his journey money, literally, as pourboire. He would catch the local train to Sheffield, where he was obliged to change, and in that black but riotous city would spend on drink every single shilling he possessed, and would then proceed to roar his way back to Renishaw on foot — eight miles at least — in the early hours. The look of him, back in the library again the next day, plainly suffering from what we have since learned to call a “hang-over,” always enraged his patron. And so he would be there for another two days, until once more my father dismissed him, and the whole jolly process would repeat itself. In short, it was apparently impossible to get rid of the man.

Last night had been the sixth time it had happened. There he was, in the library again! Better not to look at him, my father thought, it would only annoy one. Where were the carpenters? And where was the subagent? There was a lot to do, such a lot, things that had to be done. All the furniture from the ballroom at the far end of the house must be taken to the upper drawing room, and all the furniture from the upper drawing room moved down to the ballroom, and then, if it did not look right, — and he was by no means convinced that it would look right, — back again.

It was not only the intense activity of my father’s mind, and the amount and variety of tasks that he set himself, which rendered him just at this time in a peculiarly exacerbated condition of irritability. These traits were his, as they are mine, by heredity and nature, but ordinarily his temperament could cope with them. Now, however, he was unhappy in his own life. The great political career for which, conscious of his own remarkable talents, he had hoped, did not materialize of itself, and he seemed unable to command it. He saw, instead, fools preferred.

In addition, he was crushed, he felt, by a mountain of debts for which there was nothing to show, neither reason nor result, since my mother bought objects because she liked them, or, at any rate, liked buying them; then she would give them away — or she would buy them in order to give them away. With her, spending money was an expression both of the enjoyment of life and of its opposite: if she felt well and happy, she would order every sort of thing — that neither she nor anyone else could want. If she felt miserable, then she chose things at random in order to cheer herself up.

I do not know how long my father and mother had been married before he realized the extravagance of her nature. Perhaps the episode of The Learned Pig may have put him wise to it. Certainly this had been one of her earliest and most ill-fated purchases. A few months after her marriage, when she was not yet eighteen, she had been asked to open a Conservative bazaar at Scarborough. There she had seen an animal known as The Learned Pig, which told fortunes, and had been greatly impressed by its uncanny knowledge of character and grasp of the future.

I am not sure by what method, whether by horoscope, tea leaves, palmistry, clairvoyance, or rapping on tables with its cloven hoof, the creature made its prognostications, nor how it published them to its clients or the world. At any rate my mother had been unable to resist bidding for the remarkable creature when it was offered for auction at the end of the bazaar. Sure enough, she obtained it, but for a very considerable amount of money. This was bad enough, but once the erudite porker was on her hands, its psychic gifts deserted it, and at the same time she realized she dare not tell my father what she had bought. Nor did she mention it to her father; but since she could not let the poor brute starve, she arranged for it to be boarded at one of his farms, and told the farmer on no account to divulge the animal’s existence.

After a year or two, however, the farmer, finding that he was not paid, rendered to my grandfather an enormous account for feeding and grooming the beast. Though he was furious at having to pay, my mother succeeded in persuading him not to mention the matter to my father. My mother agreed that the pig must be killed, but the idea of killing such an unusual animal — or, as for that, killing any animal at all — upset her so much that secretly she contrived to have it sent, instead, by rail to Renishaw. Here she took steps for it to be farmed out again — on this occasion, of course, on one of my father’s farms, and again it refused to tell fortunes.

This time, after a long period, the farmer wrote to the agent to demand payment, the agent, not understanding at all what had happened, forwarded the letter to my father, and the true story came out. My father paid the bill, not with the best of grace, and ordered the animal destroyed. But The Learned Pig could never be mentioned in front of him, for not only was he annoyed at having to find the money for it, but in addition he was angry because, hating superstition as he did, he found that he had become a vicarious victim of it.

I do not know whether this episode opened his eyes at all, but, in any case, in spite of his strength of character, he appeared incapable of preventing or putting a stop to such expenditure. He would never recognize any fact which he did not want to recognize, neither the tendencies of the time, nor even the more visible processes of nature, least of all the actions of human beings.

And here, too, I must stretch again for a moment to a period some twenty years later, for in a symbolic sense the fragment of conversation I wish to record sums up the respective attitudes of my mother and father. We were having luncheon one hot August day at Renishaw, and there had been a silence of some minutes, when my mother suddenly said, across the table: —

“George! The mountain-ash berries have turned already. It means an early autumn.”

“Well, I haven’t seen them.”

“That doesn’t prevent their being there, George.”

To which my father replied finally, and with an air of triumphant virtue: —

“I don’t allow myself to see things like that!”

This last remark was particularly true. He had learned to mask his sensitiveness and to barricade himself behind the multiplicity of his interests, so that he would only see the end of a process, when it naturally, by the appearance of violent change that it offered, since he had noticed none of the intermediate steps, forced itself upon his attention. Then, when he could no longer avoid seeing, he would still nevertheless avoid comprehending; and, further, what he now saw, suddenly, he perceived far too large — an exaggerated vista of ruin, of empty, desolate houses and penniless children. “If it were not for me,” he would sometimes remark, with an air suitable to the pathos of the situation, “we should all be living in lodgings on three thousand a year!”

2

NOTWITHSTANDING, it was true that my father exhibited in his character streaks of intense foresight and was undoubtedly a clever businessman, though apt to want to strike too hard a bargain. Immensely extravagant after his own fashion, he knew the value of money, but he could never understand or excuse extravagance in others. You see, it was not necessary for them to spend money or buy things: he could do it for them so much better. He noticed that Miss KingChurch, admirable in so many ways, had bought the wrong kind of sponge for Edith. If only people would come to him for his advice!

If only, if only, Ida would consult him about her clothes, instead of getting those expensive fashionable dresses! He could put her on to something interesting at a tenth of the price! Or he could order a dress himself, — she should make more use of his taste, — pay for it, and then deduct the money every other fortnight from her quarterly allowance (it was called an allowance, but was, in fact, the income from her own small capital). Or he might give it to her; let her pay for it, and then let her have the money back, so much every ten days. Or again he might set off part of the cost of it against what she had paid for his share in that bazaar — though he felt sure it could not come to so much as she made out. There were lot s of ways of ringing the changes.

He had a passion for rather complicated transactions of this kind. Such a mistake to leave him out of it, he could so easily run her up one of those charming medieval things. It would be original and friends would want to copy it. He had lots of notes somewhere, for the reformation of clothes. It was only necessary to get back to the old lines (they understood these things so much better in the Middle Ages!). There was, for example, that delightful old leper’s gown at Naples, a thing anyone would be glad to wear! Probably if he asked him, the curator, Professor Roselli, would be only too pleased to lend one a piece of it, so as to have the pattern copied.

And he would give her a necklace or pendant to go with it; perhaps one of those beautiful old bits of lead jewelry. He could easily have it imitated, if he could find the right person to do it. It was just as beautiful in design as any piece decorated with emeralds or diamonds, and far less expensive; and it would look splendid with a sackcloth jerkin! If he decided on a pendant, he could have it copied from one of the examples in the Musée Cluny in Paris. He had made full notes on them when he was there, with little drawings, rough but serviceable enough. (He drew such things on the spot, with a stump of pencil on the back of an old envelope, and then, when he got home, entered a facsimile of them inscribed with one of the special pens he always used and constructed for himself out of three long holders and fine nibs, nib and holder being made in one piece, dovetailed together into the right — or, it might be, the wrong — notebook.)

By this time he had worked himself up and was growing really excited about the idea (though underneath, somewhere deep inside him, lay the haunting, bitter certainty that his advice was not wanted, would not be asked for, and, if it were, most certainly would not be taken; but he did not allow this knowledge to come to the surface). Where was that book? The Beauty of Dress at the Time of the Black Death: it bore its name on its back in large letters. . . . No, that was not it! Where could it be? (These housemaids would tidy everything up! Or it might be the butler, Henry, though he pretended never to move anything.) It was annoying that he could not find it at the moment, but the real beauty of the system he had evolved for keeping such things was that, though you might not find a particular note when you looked for it, you would be sure to find it some other time.

Of course it might be in one of the boxes upstairs in his study, together with the loose notes. He went up to search for it. The boxes of notes, all with their names pasted on the front, were arranged in a wooden case he had designed for them. He ran through the list of names: Schedules for Resettlement (no, it would scarcely be in that), Reresby and Normanville, The Young Pretender’s Court in Rome, Sacheverell Miscellaneous, Design in Brocades, The Origin of Surnames, Rotherham in the Dark Ages, Lepers’ Squints (could it have got in there by mistake?), The Romances, Sweet Preserves in the Fourteenth Century, Wool-Gathering in Medieval Times and Since, The Eckington Dump, Court Life in Byzantium, Estate Miscellaneous, Heraldry, Introduction of the Peacock into Western Gardens, John Brown & Co., The History of the Fork, Landscape Notes, On the Colors of Flowers, Sheffield in the Eighteenth Century, Nottingham Guilds (1328-1384), Trust Accounts, Heber-Hiccock-Hely-Hutchinson.

No, it could be in none of those. He would look for it again tomorrow. Disappointed, his mind reverted to what had originally started the trail of thought. What a pity Ida did not consult him! It was especially difficult to curb these outbreaks of extravagance in London, for, when there, he worked much at the British Museum, had business to do with lawyers and banks, and so he only saw her in the evenings. The source of all this trouble, he deduced, — and in this perhaps he was right, — was to be traced to having friends.

3

Now, however, all these various interests and worries and troubles came together and coalesced to overwhelm him, and by their timing appeared to quadruple their power. And the final touch was added, I was always given to understand, by the literary strain imposed upon him by the writing of an essay, entitled “The Origin of the Word Gentleman,” for a quarterly of luxurious format called the Ancestor. His serious illness came on with great suddenness.

At the end of May, he felt he would like to return to Scarborough, though previously he had just decided to leave it. Accordingly, having given up his old house a few months before, he took from his brother-in-law a lease on Londesborough Lodge. There, in the following month, he fell alarmingly ill; presumably with a nervous breakdown, though people scarcely knew the term then, and certainly did not understand the misery that it connotes.

Whatever the nature of his affliction, it entirely prostrated him, so that he could attend to no business. He became convinced that he was a dying man, and the knowledge that his father had died at precisely the same age — a fact of which his mother kept reminding him by implication, saying to him, for example, “You look just like your poor father today” — persuaded him of it still more surely. And members of the medical profession could do — or at any rate did — little to help him.

As his illness grew more severe, doctors multiplied. Of a now extinct species, impressive and momentous men, who wore frock coats and who carried top hats as though in homage to the undertakers with whom they were in league, would drive around at all hours of the day and night in broughams that resembled abbreviated, one-horse hearses; family doctors, other people’s family doctors, specialists from Leeds, Liverpool, and London, fashionable doctors, and doctors of whom no one had ever heard, all these different healers would be summoned and appear — but always at different houses, for my father could not sleep and would move from the Lodge to some other house he had taken in the town, and then back again.

Often he would sleep in a new house every night in the week. A letter from my grandmother Sitwell to my father’s agent, Turnbull, dated the twentysecond of July, 1902, says: “Thank you also for your kind enquiries after our poor Patient. I think he is a little better in spite of adverse circumstances. He went on Monday to the very pretty house which had been lent him in Fulford Road, and left it the same evening, as he could not sleep. The doctors then said that if I put in a hundred workmen, I must get Wood End ready the following night. We just got his, Lady Ida’s, the nurses’, and the valet’s rooms ready. In spite of his not having had a good night, he seems calmer and more at rest.”

Two days later, in a letter to Turnbull, Henry Moat, the butler, writes: “I am rather confused and have spoilt this page as we have moved twice in three days.”

The nurses changed as often and as rapidly as the doctors and the houses: sometimes of their own accord, after my father had asked them not to stare at him for long together — a trick, out of a rather limited repertory, which many nurses like to test upon their patients — but, instead, to sit with their backs to him; sometimes, not of their own volition.

The doctors continued to arrive, and each of them recommended at least one new cure, and more probably returned, after its failure, to prescribe a further experiment. The invalid tried them all, one after the other, in good faith and in swift rotation: continual fresh air (he was sent lumbering round the woods in heavy old cabs), no fresh air, to lay his head on hop pillows, to take exercise, to give up exercise, to stop smoking, to smoke special cigarettes, to live on meat, to touch no meat, to give up alcohol, to drink champagne and port, to walk, to run, to sing, to lie down for long periods without moving, never to keep still, to take up golf, and to abandon it, “not to use his mind,” and to “think of other things.” For all these pieces of advice the doctors charged ample fees, and his payment of them aggravated the financial worry which had largely caused his illness, and so rendered his condition yet graver.

4

NOBODY seemed, even now, to know what was the matter with him or just how ill he was. Finally, as he showed no sign of mending, the general practitioner who had first attended him asserted himself, and got him away from the other doctors. He advised change. He must travel with a friend. But where was the friend to be found?

Thus it was that my father began to spend so much of his life abroad in France and Germany and Italy, but chiefly in Italy, and that we children came to hear so much of it, of Italian houses and gardens and ways of life. At first, my mother would only occasionally, or for part of the time, go abroad with him, and in her absence an acquaintance of his mother’s, or “somebody suitable” of whom she or my mother had heard, was chartered to keep him company; but Henry Moat, of course, was always in attendance as well, and soon learned to talk Italian, though with a broad Yorkshire accent. He was much struck, I recollect his confiding in me, by the palpable resemblance between the languages of Whitby and Italy, respectively: for example, in Whitby, the ordinary greeting in the streets, when you passed a friend, was “’Ow ist tha?” while in Italy the counterpart was “Come sta?”

In various stages of severity, my father’s illness continued for several years, and left its mark upon him for life, making him realize how insubstantial a division existed between apparently good health and complete misery. From this period, too, started his custom of resting every day for many hours; a habit which amazed Sacheverell and me, to whom no torture was comparable with the drag of that single hour after luncheon in which we were compelled to lie down. Yet here was a man, master of his fate, who rested voluntarily, and at shorter and shorter intervals; a habit that continued and intensified.

In a typically robust but disrespectful letter, written to me, in answer to one that I had sent him from Hyeres, and dated January, 1938, Henry Moat alludes to this idiosyncrasy of his master’s, and also to his sojourns abroad with him: —

“Poor Sir George, he really is an hero for his bed. I have known him often being tired of laying in bed, get up to have a rest., and after he had rested get back again into bed like a martyr. . . .

“Curious the first, time I went abroad with Sir George we stayed at the Costabelle Hotel Hyères, about 1900 I suppose. . . . Sir George would send me out to buy fresh butter and eggs for breakfast which I had to boil and cakes for tea I sometimes had to walk miles all to save him about I franc on the hotel bill a Mr. Peyron kept the hotel then. ... I remain Your obedient servant Henry Moat.

“P.S. I once told Sir George when he complained he was seeing things before his eyes that he eat too many eggs per day and gave him the number 5. He fairly bit my head off. — H. M.”

In spite of my mother’s real concern for my father, I think that at the same time she rather appreciated the immunity from criticism that her expenditures enjoyed, now that his constant wish to economize had brought on a costly illness which necessitated complete rest from all business. Scarborough would be more full than ever of visitors this year. Lawyers could not — though they did — argue with her about household bills, so there were many parties at the Lodge, until she moved to the new house my grandmother was preparing for us. “No wonder,” a correspondent states, in a letter to Turnbull, “that Sir George’s expenses are heavy. I hear of Lady Ida providing luncheon for forty, unknown to him!”

But the worst domestic effects of his illness were to be experienced in the future; although his direct influence on my mother, headstrong and impulsive, had always been small, his indirect influence had been considerable. By his preoccupation with the gothic age and consequent aloofness from the day, by his formal, frosted manner, he always, hitherto, even perhaps without wishing it, exercised a chilling restraint upon those friends of hers who sought to live upon her. Her many genuine and devoted friends, it was to be noticed, liked my father; but the others were frightened of him, for, besides his alleged “cleverness,” of which they were not in a position to judge, their sense of guilt, their inner knowledge that they were out for all they could get, made them mistake his remoteness for percipience, and his unsureness of himself, caused by his ignorance of the times in which he lived, for a thoroughly justified mistrust of themselves.

Now that he was temporarily no longer to be reckoned with, now that there were even some doubts existing in their minds concerning the likelihood of his recovery, this control was removed. They behaved just as they liked. They encouraged my mother in every folly. They led her in any direction that could harm her, by flattering her in every way possible, by urging her on to lose her temper, telling her that she had been “splendid,” and by trying to make her do it again, by persuading her to insult some of my father’s relations who disapproved of them, by leading her on to find fault with my sister in public and to mortify her, — because Edith’s interests, even when she was a child, were in poetry, painting, and music, the enemies of the frivolous and dull-minded, — but, above all, by plundering my mother and sponging upon her. They would be gay — for they were not dull personally, only in their minds—and silly, and “such fun they would induce her to take them on shopping expeditions, single out a dress or a piece of jewelry, a hat or a fur coat, and then, remembering dramatically of a sudden that they could not afford it, owing to a husband’s stinginess or a father’s cruelty, they would begin to pout and look wistful.

My mother hated to see anyone in distress and would at once want to help them. She would give them the objects they had admired, and, in all probability, would add several other presents as well. A pound or a hundred pounds, it was all the same to her. At once they would recover their lost spirits and be wreathed in winning smiles. The world was bright again. But they must not tell George, she would remind them; it was better not to worry him.