Making a Bolt for It: Being Some Rejected Pages From an Autobiography

by SIR OSBERT SITWELL

ON the 12th of July, 1937, my mother died in a nursing-home in London, and the following August my father left England for Switzerland, and thence, after a month’s visit, returned to Monlegufoni, his castle in Tuscany. For the long stay he proposed to make then, he had provided himself with some companions, and others we had found for him, in order that he should not be lonely — or rather not more lonely than the complete suit of “armor" he had grown for himself in the past half century, and in which he was now ever encased impenetrably, the visor down, so that he revealed his face only a little less seldom than his hand; no more, then, than this very individual steely envelopment rendered inevitable. In addition, I had told him that I would join him in Italy whenever he wished, but I became aware in talking to him that he was not really eager for me to do so, because he liked to be in a position of absolute command, with nobody to gainsay him, and since I, too, was accustomed to having my own way, this encroached on his prerogative. However, during the course of a few weeks he came to cherish a certain sense of grievance, most carefully nurtured by various of his acquaintances, at his children not being round him, and towards the end of November, some two months after his return to Italy, telegrams were suddenly shot at me from all sides with vigor and poignance. This barbed shower revealed behind the shafts a formidable power of organization. The missiles sped from people young and old, men and women, worldly and unworldly, Italian and English, prelates and laymen, but all united to tell me that my father was very ill and that it had now become my duty to be at his side. I at once took the train for Florence.

On arrival at the Castello I found arranged for my benefit a tableau, a deathbed-scene like one of those that occur in the paintings of the Italian Primitive Masters. My father lay in a four-poster — baroque in style, I must confess, rather than gothic receiv ing fruit, fresh eggs, game, and sympathy— but not flowers. These last he rejected outright because they were prone to give him hayfever. . . . As I entered the room, the figures relaxed and the tableau broke up. My father proceeded to dismiss the guests with a little ceremonial flutter of the hand, and went on to tell me at once of his serious illness, although there was little outward sign of it in his physical state. I therefore asked him to be allowed to talk to his doctor, (Giglioli. He gave me his permission, and accordingly I bumped into Florence in the large, heavy motorcar— known locally as the Ark — to interview this sympathetic and most intelligent Italian doctor. When J asked him if my father was very ill, he replied: “The disease which Sir George assumes he has developed, is a matter of X-ray plates and not of faith alone. He is an old man of seventyseven years of age, and of course if he gets a cold it may always turn to pneumonia: but probably he will outlive me and be with us for another twenty years.” (My father did in fact survive his doctor by some five.)

On my return from the city I found my father still in bed, and looking intensely depressed. As I opened the door of his room, he inquired in a drooping voice: “How long does the doctor give me?”

“About twenty years,” I replied.

At this, he suddenly jumped out of bed with an agility that would have done credit to a man half his age, and said, “I must dress now. That night he came down to dinner.

The long journey and change of climate had afflicted me with a bad attack of lumbago, and the next morning I had breakfast in bed, and was therefore rather late in making my appearance. First, from a small room above the Cardinal’s Garden, protected from the wind, and full of late November sunlight and of roses and stocks and of drowsy butterflies in the last florid stage before their hibernation, I had observed my father holding court in a deck-chair — or rather in the kind of long wicker-chair that he liked because he could put his feet up and thus rest the heart, and of which one was always reserved for him in any garden that he owned. He reclined on these hard openwork planes of wicker, at the top of a flight of steps commanding the view: the valley of vines, and nearer, climbing the castle hill in steep terraces, the long tank-like stone beds full of blue plumbago, leading up in turn to the surrounding box parterre, in which were growing the flowers he had chosen for it in pale, pastel colors. . . . Round him were grouped the courtiers. . . . There was Signor Bracciaforte, smiling as always, full of childish benevolence, easily moved to tears or laughter. There was a young girl, a student of history, her figure slightly foreshortened by fate and a-clink with the old paste jewelry with which my father delighted to hang it. Her eyes, I noticed, seemed to be perpetually full of tears and she had a sweet smile of sympathy showing from a head hung rather on one side. And then there was my friend Francis Bamford who had kindly offered to accompany my father to Italy and to look after him. (To him my father had in the past year uttered some of his more sudden, startling, and Delphic pieces of advice, such as “Never be kind to a Dowager,” and “One can see in my grandchildren how Nature is trying to reproduce Me!”)

When I got downstairs — with some difficulty —and appeared in the garden under that cloud of awkwardness that always overshadows the latecomer, I said, “Good morning, Father.” He greeted me in return and then gave a significant, rather ominous glance at those round him from under eyelids that seemed to work sideways rather than up and down; a signal which the court knew from experience was calculated to convey dismissal. Watching in silence till his guests were out of earshot, he remarked to me in a voice of unusual dignity: “Osbert, I wish to speak to you alone.”

I replied somewhat carelessly: “Then I’ll get a chair and sit by you. How delicious it is out here, Father! This is the first sun I have seen for months.”

To my surprise, for he usually liked to warm himself in the winter sunshine, he answered: “No, I would prefer to speak to you in the Gothic Library.”

He proceeded to lead the way to a small, cold, high room on the north side of the house. On the faking of it he had for some years been engaged, spending on the process a very considerable sum of money. It was, of course, a library without books — I say “of course” for it could always be noticed that, though he loved books and lived surrounded by them, none the less in any room which he called a library no single volume was ever to be found. At Scarborough, similarly, his library had been bookless; though each of his several sitting-rooms even had books piled up all over the floor. But this library was, its very appearance proclaimed, a State Apartment, to be used solely for giving audiences and making special pronouncements. No book had ever been brought into it or was ever likely to be, and people, it was plain, as seldom entered it. A recess was lined with cypress-wood cupboards. Too shallow to hold books, they were crowned with a flat, gothic fretting as cornice, and their panels were edged with a margin of leaves, rabbits, and human figures cut in very flat relief, expertly carved.

Below them, attached to their base, were seats that resembled medieval instruments of torture; although, as if in mockery, they were thinly padded in places with flat cushions. Herein and hereon, we sat, the two of us facing each other. We bore our discomfort manfully, pretending not to notice it. I can see my father now, as he sat there, very upright, with the sun through the barred window catching the gold glint of his red but graying beard. He was wearing a gray suit and one hand rested on a cushion. In his manner could be perceived, by one familiar with his ways, both a certain air of tension and a wish to surprise. Thus I was prepared for something portentous — and sure enough it came.

He gave a slight bow and said: “I thought I ought to inform you, Osbert, that Mrs. FitzDudley Gudgeon wishes to marry me.”

This unusual announcement winded me. I had seen Mrs. FitzDudley Gudgeon. Without background but with a past, she was a widow of peculiarly unpleasant character, who had for half a century and more trailed behind her a long train of unsavory financial transactions merging into love affairs, and vice versa. . . . She had contrived to cultivate my father’s society for some years. Once at a concert at the Queen’s Hall, she had come cringing up to me, in the interval, and had said, “I know your father” — to which I had replied, “Yes. Better than I do, I believe.”

But most clearly, I remember an earlier occasion on which I had seen her. It was at a party, and I recall it vividly because a friend of mine, much older than myself, who had been standing by my side, had turned to me as she entered the room, and had said: “Here comes the wickedest woman in Europe.”

This had naturally focused my attention on the neatly dressed, discreet-looking gray-haired woman who entered. What he said might be true: but hers was, I found out, an unaudacious, flat, mousy, moneygrubbing kind of wickedness without any endowment of wit or wits, and lacking in the fun that sometimes attends and makes lively the company of sinners. It demanded a guaranteed sound return, and constituted a real four-per-cent-preference-share brand of evil.

Naturally, I had noticed my father’s unusual choice of words. So now I asked him: “Do you wish to marry her?”

He replied: “I am not certain, but she has written to me to say that she would like to come here for a long stay.”

“Well,” I inquired, “what will you do if she insists on marrying you, and you still don’t want to?”

“Make a bolt for it, I suppose, as I had to once before. . .

Recollecting previous conversations with my father, I seized immediately the implications of this gallant reply: because, when I was younger and he had been fond of warning me of the dangers of everyday life, he had often related to me how, when just down from Christ Church, he had arrived to stay in a famous country-house for a ball. The two daughters of his hostess would be great heiresses; but unfortunately, though he liked them, and they, so he claimed, entertained feelings deeper than friendship for him, yet my father disapproved of both the young ladies: for he considered that they were overfond of pleasure, and feared, moreover, that they might like to spend money too freely. Another motive influenced him even more profoundly. He held very strict views on eugenics, and their noses too nearly resembled his own in shape (so he had told me), and this, if he had married either of them, might have tended to accentuate the aquiline profiles of his offspring, and so have deprived his children of the classical mold of feature for which he hoped, and which indeed he was determined to secure for them.

It was difficult to follow precisely what happened. Howbeit, so far as I could make out, on his entering the hall a footman had as usual taken the heavy leather portmanteau with which a man then always traveled — when to his surprise, my father had discovered that the heiress who was his particular friend was waiting for him there as well. Her presence at once convinced him that the young lady expected him immediately to propose to her; indeed, beyond the hall lay a vista of rooms, and at the end of it the conservatory door could be seen open. He had felt it imperative, if his children were to avoid nasal catastrophe, to act at once. Therefore, hastily snatching back his luggage from the footman’s arms, he had pelted back down the drive and through the park without offering to anyone a word of explanation or apology, either at the time or subsequently. . . . This — though I may have gathered some of the details incorrectly — I could have no doubt was the first time he had been obliged to “make a bolt for it.” . . . But that was nearly sixty years ago, and at the moment I was concerned with stopping the threatened alliance.

To take the most obvious of present difficulties first, plainly he would not be able to run so fast at his present age, while Mrs. FitzDudley Gudgeon was quite capable of running after and catching him! The best way, I concluded, of preventing the marriage was to find for him a rival attraction to Mrs. FitzDudley Gudgeon, because obviously he felt a need for feminine sympathy and of presenting himself in a new light and as a center of interest. What could be done? Fortunately my mind lighted on Mrs. Rippon; a woman of character and humor and formerly a celebrated beauty; a pirate, but kind and audacious, and of quite a different sort. . . . He liked her, and her husband was rumored to be dying. Accordingly I improvised.

“Well, I must admit I always saw a different future for you,” I remarked.

He said: “What do you mean?”

I replied: “After Colonel Rippon’s death, I thought Ethel Rippon would marry you.”

At this he looked very pleased with himself, and I realized that I had defeated Mrs. FitzDudley Gudgeon’s scheme once and for all.

There is little more to add, except that after my father’s death, when I returned to Montegufoni at the end of the war, I found among his papers all the correspondence that had passed between him and Mrs. FitzDudley Gudgeon;—for he kept and filed copies of letters he wrote, as well as preserving those he received. Just as the letters quoted in the Bardell v. Pickwick Trial were said by Serjeant Buzfuz to have been written in code, so that an order for cutlets and tomatoes “Chops and Tomata Sauce. Yours Pickwick” conveyed the declaration “I love you,” so these unusual billets-doux were couched, it was easily to be deduced, in the current technical terms of the English, European, but especially of the American and Canadian Stock Exchanges. The tenderness of Mrs. FitzDudley Gudgeon’s requests for information about Abitibi Shares and the prospects of Brazilian Traction, spelled ardent and everlasting devotion for my father and the respect she cherished for his wisdom — still more for his wealth: while his affectionate response to these demonstrations took the form of such phrases as “I hear Beralts may pay a bonus” or “ I advise you to stick to Chinese Customs 1882.” Alas, I am bound to conclude that the counsel he gave her in his final communication, to avoid further “flutters” and to invest “all her loose money” in Consols, constituted both a reproof and a call to order, equivalent in the language of love which they had evolved for themselves to the words, “Let us part on terms of friendship; I wish to be let alone, and have no intention of marrying you.” After that, there came no more letters.