Sleep in peace, p.1
Sleep in Peace, page 1
SLEEP IN PEACE
PHYLLIS BENTLEY
“Sleep in Peace, father! I will be different from you.”
Feuchtwanger: The Ugly Duchess
All the figures in this panorama of a generation, as seen through the somewhat ironical eyes of one of its members, are composite portraits, intended to be typical of their place, their class, and especially their time, but in no sense derived from single originals. This generation (which was mine) made the transition from Victorian England—industrially expanding, pious, a Great Power and proud of it—to the confused revolts and uncertain loyalties of to-day. A transition so notable invites attention to the generation which made it; the conditioning of that generation—why it was what it was and did what it did—seemed to me especially inviting to the novelist’s probe.
PHYLLIS BENTLEY.
Halifax,
January-December, 1937
Contents
I. “Heaven Lies About Us in Our Infancy…”
II. Happy Families
III. The Importance of £500
IV. “Shades of the Prison-House…”
V. Majority
VI. “Those Friends Thou Hast…”
VII. “Lofty Designs …”
VIII. Marriage A La Mode
IX. Ordeal by Battle
X. Attempt to Build a New World on Old Foundations
XI. The Tents of Kedar
XII. The Attempt Fails
XIII. From Each According to his Ability
XIV. Other Artificers
XV. “Sleep in Peace …”
A Note on the Author
“Heaven Lies About Us in Our Infancy …”
It was a wild wet afternoon in the eighteen-nineties. The West Riding of Yorkshire lay harried beneath an Atlantic gale, which, however, it received not prostrate but battling, defiant. The hills of dark millstone grit, rising and falling in rhythmic succession like the surge and die of notes in some vast symphony, seemed now, as their slopes grew grey in the twilight, to link arms in a harsh chord, and stand staunch and stolid against the raging wind which howled across their massive heads, felted with tough-stemmed heather and rough grass, and shrieked savagely down the narrow intertwining valleys to their populous bases. The chains of small yellowish lights which wound about their lower folds, or, greatly daring, sparsely assailed their summits, seemed to sway and rock beneath the storm; grew dim behind the sudden sheets of icy rain, but were not extinguished. The long heavy clouds which drove powerfully across the darkening sky were matched by the tattered but flying plumes which streamed beneath them; for from the mills which forested the lower slopes, hundreds of tall slender chimneys were vigorously tossing their thick black smoke into the air. Windows rattled, doors banged, as the convulsed air moaned and shouted round them; but in the Hudley engine-rooms the great wheels whirred, in the weaving sheds the looms clattered, across the counters coins bearing the image of the great Queen were passed rapidly from hand to hand by a race as grimly tenacious as their own Pennines; the noise of the wind was disregarded.
2
Within the house everything was warm and cosy. Hot coal fires blazed in the nursery, the dining-room, and Mrs. Armistead’s bedroom; in the cellar kitchen the huge iron stove seemed ready to burst with glowing heat, in preparation for the cooking of a bird for Mr. Armistead’s high tea. Ada the housemaid was just drawing the Venetian blinds; the incandescent burners already shed their clear pale light from the walls of landing and hall.
In the nursery on the first floor old Mrs. Armistead and Gwen, her eldest grandchild, faced each other across the hearth. Mrs. Armistead, dressed for the afternoon in black silk dress with spotless white tucker, black silk apron, white silk shawl, a huge cameo brooch containing a lock of her late husband’s hair confining the strands of a thick gold chain looped about her neck, her white hair gathered into a knob under a lace cap trimmed with bows of mauve ribbon, was slowly turning the leaves of the morning newspaper in her thick hands, and talking to Gwen about what she read there. With her round cheeks withered but still plump, her grey eyes faded but still shrewd, her well-shaped ears scarcely at all deaf, her shoulders stooping but massive, she was still formidable; strong, self-willed, a factor in the house, not without influence on her son. But Gwen despised her. In a braided navy-blue frock covered by a clean starched pinafore, of whose gophered epaulets she was arrogantly conscious, Gwen, who was eight years old, thin, all arms and legs, sat very erect, putting extremely small stitches into one of the many tucks of a fine white cambric petticoat, on which her mother was teaching her to sew. The needle slipped and pricked her finger, a tiny spot of blood dyed the cambric; Gwen exclaimed in annoyance and bent more closely over her work. Her straight ash-blonde hair drooped over her pale oval face, her thin but well-shaped lips, her long fine nose.
Old Mrs. Armistead, in her heavy tones—so much thicker, so much more Yorkshire, thought Gwen with disgust, than her father’s or her own—was rambling on, as usual, about Gladstone and Disraeli and this new man, Chamberlain. Mrs. Armistead, unable to understand that whereas in her husband’s house she had always read the Liberal Yorkshire Observer she now in her son’s was offered the Conservative Yorkshire Post, was puzzled by the reversal in political opinion which seemed to have taken place in the last few years. “They seem to think a deal of this Chamberlain nowadays,” she grated out to Gwen, perplexed; and slid off into the same old anecdote which Gwen had heard so many times before, of how Thomas Armistead, her husband, “your grandfather, love,” had quarrelled with his brother Joshua in 1878 over the Congress of Berlin. Joshua, the traveller of the firm of Armistead Bros., Cloth Merchants, had been visiting Berlin on business at the time of Disraeli’s “Peace with Honour” triumph, and standing among the crowd as the great Prime Minister passed to the station amid resounding plaudits, carried away by the patriotic emotion which one feels when one meets a fellow-countryman in a strange land, though a lifelong Radical had cried out enthusiastically: “Here is an Englishman who is proud of you, sir!” and wrung Disraeli’s graciously proffered hand. “You shook his hand?” old Thomas in incredulous horror had thundered. “You shook Disraeli’s hand?” A quarrel had followed which resulted in the brothers never speaking to each other till Grandfather lay on his death-bed ten years after. Old Mrs. Armistead, chuckling, her faded eyes bright with reminiscences of hustings and speeches, blue and yellow rosettes, her husband’s quick eager tones, his glossy Dundreary whiskers so carefully brushed, told all this to Gwen for the second time that afternoon. “But they’re all gone, those older ones, now,” she concluded mournfully. “Gladstone’s retired, and the rest are gone. It’s all Lord Salisbury and that Chamberlain, now. Alfred—your father—seems to think a deal o’ that Chamberlain, now.”
Gwen, who knew nothing about Gladstone, Disraeli, Salisbury or Chamberlain, and felt impatient when their stupid names entered the conversation, nevertheless knew with certainty that her grandmother was a tiresome tedious old woman, hopelessly behind the times, that her Papa’s political views differed from Grandmamma’s, that he concealed them from her so as to avoid unpleasantness—anyway it was impossible to make Grandmamma understand anything—and that what Papa thought was obviously more fashionable and altogether proper than anything dull old Grandmamma could possibly think. Indeed Grandmamma was so irritating to Gwen this afternoon that the child took a bitter pleasure in observing the sheets of newspaper cascade from her elder’s lap to the floor. Gwen told herself how much her father disliked to find the newspaper thus deranged on his return from the mill, and her grey-blue eyes grew cold with virtuous anger as she watched her grandmother’s struggles to restore the paper to its pristine shape. Old Mrs. Armistead’s clumsy fingers could not follow the folds accurately; the creases diverged, the paper crumpled. It was exasperating, infuriating, to watch. Gwen laid down her work with a condescending sigh, slipped to her knees and began to help. “Look, Grandmamma!” she said in a high artificial tone of conscious patience. It was really very tedious sitting here keeping Grandmamma company, she reflected, nipping the sheets between her long, fine fingers. Her thought, rushing about the mental network which already in eight years was curiously and intricately meshed, at once produced the question: Where is Ludo? “He’s enjoying himself somewhere while I’m up here keeping Grandmamma company,” thought Gwen, and a look of cold offence crossed her handsome face.
Ada the pretty housemaid came in with the brass nursery coal-box, full of coal, and began to draw the blinds.
“How are things going yonder, Ada?” asked old Mrs. Armistead in a mysterious tone.
(What a vulgar way to speak, thought Gwen angrily, tossing her head.)
“Very well, Mrs. Armistead,” shouted Ada, panting a little from her climb up two flights of stairs from the cellar kitchen. “The nurse is in the kitchen now, washing a few things and getting Mrs. Armistead her tea.”
Old Mrs. Armistead nodded her old head slowly, satisfied.
“Where is Master Ludovic, Ada?” demanded Gwen sharply.
“Master Ludo? He’s somewhere about with Mildred, I reckon,” evaded Ada, letting a blind down with a prolonged crash.
It was an evasion because she was well aware that little Ludo, whose warm smooth round black head was very dear to her, was sitting on a three-legged stool on the kitchen hearthrug, a piece of teacake hot from the oven in his small red hand. The tears were scarcely dry on his face, and neither Ada, nor Cook, nor even Mildred, who was the children’s nurse and very supercilious, wanted Miss Gwen to come downsta
An hour or so later the child was born, and Ada ran downstairs to tell Ludo that he had a little sister. Ludo received the news without much enthusiasm. “Gwen is my sister,” he said. After a pause, his full underlip drooping and trembling a little, he added: “I don’t want another sister, Ada.” “Oh, but she’s a dear little baby,” urged Ada soothingly; “she has little hands and feet, and ever such tiny fingers, much smaller than yours.” At this Ludo spread out his little red hands and surveyed them thoughtfully. “She’s a dear little girl and you’ll be her big brother and look after her, and she’ll be very fond of you,” continued Ada, explaining that she had four brothers and three sisters herself, and doted on them all. Ludo seemed interested in Ada’s family, carefully enquiring all their names, and remained cheerful until Gwen, coming in from her morning walk with Mildred, and being met by Ludo in the hall (at Ada’s suggestion) with the news, cried out in a voice of triumph:
“Ludo won’t be the youngest any more.”
Ludo’s brown eyes, so quick to show alarm, at once widened and clouded, and he replied on instinct, without understanding what was meant, but affronted:
“I shall!”
“No, you won’t! You won’t be the youngest any more!” sang Gwen, dancing up and down the hall and round the hat-stand.
“Now, Miss Gwen,” Mildred reproved her, “don’t be unkind to your brother. Come along now and take off your things.”
Don’t be unkind—then if it was unkind to say you wouldn’t be the youngest, it must be something horrid, argued Ludo. He fell silent, saying nothing but what was conventionally necessary for good manners until, while the two children were seated at the dinner table in the nursery, their father came in. Ludo was holding a spoon full of treacle poised over his rice pudding at the time, and watching the thin golden stream trace lovely delicate patterns on the sticky creamy mound. Mildred had already objected to this proceeding as unmannerly, but she would not, he thought, rebuke him for it while Papa was in the room. While the treacle gently and slowly and silently curled through the air, then, Ludo suddenly spoke.
“I shan’t be the youngest any more,” he said: “Shall I?”
He put it in this way, as a statement not a question, very characteristically, in order to assure everybody that he knew already and did not mind and they were not to mind. Mr. Armistead, dark, dapper, in his own estimation handsome, with abundant pointed moustaches and a fashionable touch of neat side whisker on his cheek-bones, smartly dressed in a suit of fine cloth made by himself and London tailored, leaning against the mantelpiece jingling the coins in his pocket, worried about his wife, worried about the new gas-engines at Blackshaw Mills, replied rather inattentively in his light, facile tones:
“What’s that? No. Baby will be the youngest.”
“I shall be the eldest and Baby will be the youngest,” chanted Gwen. “Ludo will just be in the middle, won’t he?”
Her tone disparaged the middle so profoundly that Ludo’s heart quite failed him. He put his spoon down quietly, without making any more patterns, and began to eat. Somehow the pudding had no taste, but there would be too much fuss if he didn’t eat it, so he slowly and solemnly shovelled it in.
Later, in the afternoon, after his rest, when Papa had gone back to the mill and Gwen and he were doing lessons with Mildred in the nursery—Gwen reading aloud, Ludo gravely drawing pothooks—suddenly Ludo began to cry again. It was clear to him from Gwen’s air and tone that when one was not the youngest any more one was no longer important. He was not allowed to see his mother. She held another child on her knee, thought Ludo, its head rested against her breast, her arms surrounded it, her soft, delicate, gentle hands warmed its little fingers. The sky was black, the wind howled and roared, the smoke was beaten down from the chimney out into the room, the rain hissed, the windows rattled; the whole world seemed dissolving, cracking, shaken. Afternoon was a sad, desolate, tearful time in any case. Ludo wept. He wept so steadily, so un-childishly, that Mildred was alarmed and even Gwen was rather impressed. A gush of pity rose in her heart; she impulsively offered him half a cherished red india-rubber. Ludo accepted the rubber without enthusiasm, feeling sure that she would take it back again, as she had often done before. His indifference to a gift which had demanded real sacrifice on her part angered Gwen.
“Poor Ludo,” she said sharply: “He’s crying because he won’t be the youngest any more.”
Ludo drooped his head in anguish, ashamed that the cause of his tears should be known. Ada, coming into the nursery to fetch the brass coal-scuttle, tossed her head and implied in a mutter that some folk didn’t know how to treat children, they were that hard. There was a brief clash between Mildred and Ada; Ada won, and Ludo gratefully trotted away at her side, down to the kitchen once more. The kitchen seemed so safe; the black cloth rug with its red patterns, the high steel fender, the tea-caddy on the mantelpiece with the picture of the Golden Jubilee, the silvery dish-covers hanging on the wall in a row of decreasing ovals, the old brown flour bin, the yellow bowls, Ada in her afternoon black, Cook in her neat striped print—they were all as usual; the world seemed firm and solid here. Even when Mildred came down to prepare nursery tea, and the nurse (a fearsome person, old and very starched) hurried through to the wash-kitchen with a pile of soiled linen in her hands, and a little chilly air from the harsh outer world shook life again, it settled after a moment into stability. The wind could not be heard down here. There was the huge red fire, the warm breath of the ovens, his sailor suit with the white cord and the whistle, the teacake snug in his hand, Cook’s black cat purring a his feet. Mamma would be better to-morrow—better perhaps than she had been for a long time, Ada seemed to think, and Ludo was glad, for of late she had been looking very ugly, and it distressed him deeply, though of course he did not mention it to anybody. But she would be better tomorrow and the new baby would probably not be at all like Gwen. Pity, mused Ludo, biting comfortably, that she was not a boy; a boy would have been real fun.
The thought found an echo in the mind of his mother, who, exhausted though deeply satisfied by having given birth, lay drowsing in the twilight, her newborn child beside her, her hazel eyes closed, her long brown hair, still damp with sweat at the roots, descending over her shoulders in neat twin braids. Her arm curved protectively about her little daughter, but she could not help feeling that it would have been good to have another boy like darling little Ludovic—whose high-sounding name, chosen by her and given to the child somewhat against her husband’s wish, fed her cravings for romance and her ambition. Dear Alfred! he could deny her nothing, thought his wife fondly, remembering the quizzical but yielding look he had given her across the font at Ludo’s baptism. The carved font, the dim old church, the stately sonorous ring of the Prayer Book phrases. High and mighty, King of kings, Lord of lords. How splendid it was that Alfred and she belonged now to the Church of England! They had both been brought up to go to Chapel, of course, but one of the things which attracted them to each other was their dislike for Nonconformity. Liberalism, the Nonconformist conscience—they were such old-fashioned ideas, thought Mrs. Armistead, tossing her pretty head scornfully; tedious, prosy, smug, discredited. So loud and commercial, too, so sordidly mercenary, so opposed to all that was noble and splendidly traditional and grand, so ungentlemanly, so lacking in all style and air. It seemed impossible for Liberal Nonconformists, even good ones, like Henry Hinchliffe, to understand the might and majesty of England, the bright clear flame, the silver spear, which it was England’s high mission to carry through the world, bringing to dark places the inestimable boon of rule by the Great White Queen. Behold our most gracious Sovereign Lady, Queen Victoria: Endue her plenteously with heavenly gifts; grant her in health and wealth long to live; strengthen her that she may vanquish and overcome all her enemies; and finally, after this life… No Liberal Nonconformist could ever understand how one’s blood thrilled all down one’s spine at words like those. What a fine thing it was that Disraeli had made the Queen Empress of India. It was because of the Tsar’s daughter marrying the Duke of Edinburgh, you know, Ludo; she wanted to take precedence of the Princess of Wales, because her father was an Emperor and the Queen was only a Queen, and of course that couldn’t be allowed.
