Moments of Being Read Online

He began to take a regular and unthinking satisfaction in being with her, without I suppose, for I was sometimes jealous, perceiving a single one of the multitude of fine adjustments that composed her presence. But that was proof, like a healthy sleep, that the healing process was well begun. We went to Corby and spent there one of the most acutely miserable weeks of our lives; and perhaps something of our misery came from the suspicion that Jack did not see all our efforts, and the outer world was grossly ignorant of them. Now and again I rebelled in the old way against him, but with an instant sense of treason, when I realized with what silence, as of one possessed of incommunicable knowledge, Vanessa met my plaints.fn2

fn1 George was married to Lady Margaret Herbert on 10 September 1904.

fn2 Jack Hills was elected to Parliament in 1906. In 1931 he married Mary Grace Ashton.

The Memoir Club Contributions

22 Hyde Park Gate

AS I HAVE said, the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate was divided by black folding doors picked out with thin lines of raspberry red. We were still much under the influence of Titian. Mounds of plush, Watts’ portraits, busts shrined in crimson velvet, enriched the gloom of a room naturally dark and thickly shaded in summer by showers of Virginia Creeper.

But it is of the folding doors that I wish to speak. How could family life have been carried on without them? As soon dispense with water-closets or bathrooms as with folding doors in a family of nine men and women, one of whom into the bargain was an idiot. Suddenly there would be a crisis – a servant dismissed, a lover rejected, pass books opened, or poor Mrs Tyndall who had lately poisoned her husband by mistake come for consolation. On one side of the door Cousin Adeline, Duchess of Bedford, perhaps would be on her knees – the Duke had died tragically at Woburn; Mrs Dolmetsch would be telling how she had found her husband in bed with the parlourmaid or Lisa Stillman would be sobbing that Walter Headlam had chalked her nose with a billiard cue – “which”, she cried, “is what comes of smoking a pipe before gentlemen” – and my mother had much ado to persuade her that life had still to be faced, and the flower of virginity was still unplucked in spite of a chalk mark on the nose.

Though dark and agitated on one side, the other side of the door, especially on Sunday afternoons, was cheerful enough. There round the oval tea table with its pink china shell full of spice buns would be found old General Beadle, talking of the Indian Mutiny; or Mr Haldane, or Sir Frederick Pollock – talking of all things under the sun; or old C. B. Clarke, whose name is given to three excessively rare Himalayan ferns; and Professor Wolstenholme, capable, if you interrupted him, of spouting two columns of tea not unmixed with sultanas through his nostrils; after which he would relapse into a drowsy ursine torpor, the result of eating opium to which he had been driven by the unkindness of his wife and the untimely death of his son Oliver who was eaten, somewhere off the coast of Coromandel, by a shark. These gentlemen came and came again; and they were often reinforced by Mr Frederick Gibbs, sometime tutor to the Prince of Wales, whose imperturbable common sense and fund of information about the colonies in general and Canada in particular were a perpetual irritation to my father who used to wonder whether a brain fever at college in the year 1863 had not something to do with it. These old gentlemen were generally to be found, eating very slowly, staying very late and making themselves agreeable at Christmas-time with curious presents of Indian silver work, and hand bags made from the skin of the ornithorhynchus – as I seem to remember.

The tea table however was also fertilized by a ravishing stream of female beauty – the three Miss Lushingtons, the three Miss Stillmans, and the three Miss Montgomeries – all triplets, all ravishing, but of the nine the paragon for wit, grace, charm and distinction was undoubtedly the lovely Kitty Lushington – now Mrs Leo Maxse. (Their engagement under the jackmanii in the Love Corner at St Ives was my first introduction to the passion of love.)fn1 At the time I speak of she was in process of disengaging herself from Lord Morpeth, and had, I suspect, to explain her motives to my mother, a martinet in such matters, for first promising to marry a man and then breaking it off. My mother believed that all men required an infinity of care. She laid all the blame, I feel sure, upon Kitty. At any rate I have a picture of her as she issued from the secret side of the folding doors bearing on her delicate pink cheeks two perfectly formed pear-shaped crystal tears. They neither fell nor in the least dimmed the lustre of her eyes. She at once became the life and soul of the tea table – perhaps Leo Maxse was there – perhaps Ronny Norman – perhaps Esmé Howard – perhaps Arthur Studd, for the gentlemen were not all old, or all professors by any means – and when my father groaned beneath his breath but very audibly, “Oh Gibbs, what a bore you are!” it was Kitty whom my mother instantly threw back into the breach. “Kitty wants to tell you how much she loved your lecture”, my mother would cry, and Kitty still with the tears on her cheeks would improvise with the utmost gallantry some compliment or opinion which pacified my father who was extremely sensitive to female charm and largely depended upon female praise. Repenting of his irritation he would press poor Gibbs warmly by the hand and beg him to come soon again – which needless to say, poor Gibbs did.

And then there would come dancing into the room rubbing his hands, wrinkling his forehead, the most remarkable figure, as I sometimes think, that our household contained. I have alluded to a grisly relic of another age which we used to disinter from the nursery wardrobe – Herbert Duckworth’s wig. (Herbert Duckworth had been a barrister.) Herbert Duckworth’s son – George Herbert – was by no means grisly. His hair curled naturally in dark crisp ringlets; he was six foot high; he had been in the Eton Eleven; he was now cramming at Scoones’ in the hope of passing the Foreign Office examination. When Miss Willett of Brighton saw him ‘throwing off his ulster’ in the middle of her drawing room she was moved to write an Ode Comparing George Duckworth to the Hermes of Praxiteles – which Ode my mother kept in her writing table drawer, along with a little Italian medal that George had won for saving a peasant from drowning. Miss Willett was reminded of the Hermes; but if you looked at him closely you noticed that one of his ears was pointed; and the other round; you also noticed that though he had the curls of a God and the ears of a faun he had unmistakably the eyes of a pig. So strange a compound can seldom have existed. And in the days I speak of, God, faun and pig were all in all alive, all in opposition, and in their conflicts producing the most astonishing eruptions.

To begin with the God – well, he was only a plaster cast perhaps of Miss Willett’s Hermes, but I cannot deny that the benign figure of George Duckworth teaching his small half-brothers and sisters by the hour on a strip of coco-nut matting to play forward with a perfectly straight bat had something Christlike about it.