The Gypsy in the Parlour (2 page)

And it was indeed the fact that she not only unpacked her own sheets, and her own goose-feather pillows, but also gave the nuptial chamber a good turn-out, before her groom was allowed upstairs. Raging all the while—but she raged as the sun shone, from inexhaustible reserves of heat and power—my Aunt Charlotte drove the cross old serving-woman before her to sweep, thump, sluice and air, while in the kitchen below the four celibate Sylvesters sat in grimly humorous surveillance of the groom. They had cider enough to sustain them, but—“Don't you make 'un drunk, bors!” shouted the bride, down the stairs, from time to time. It was two in the morning before Tobias was admitted; but then, such was Charlotte's superabundant vitality, enjoyed a thoroughly successful bedding.

At precisely seven o'clock next morning, she served porridge, pork, eggs and hollow biscuits to all who had previously soused their heads under the pump. No sousing, no breakfast. All soused.

Thus the Sylvester men knew at once what they were in for. So did my Aunt Charlotte. The household she entered was as roughly bounteous, and almost as uncivilized, as a camp of successful robbers. She had five men to tame as she might have had five hawks. Half the rooms of her house were shut or mildewed, and her courtyard was infested with donkeys. But she had certain advantages. Like all primitive people, the Sylvesters admired first physical strength, then physical beauty: before the combination of both, and in such measure, as displayed by Tobias' wife, they were from the first ready to treat. Not to surrender: Charlotte never had it all her own way. She never, for example, got her father-in-law into a clean neckerchief, save on Sundays. She never got the dogs—though she got the donkeys—out of her court. Life at the farm became for years one long, pitched, enjoyable battle, in which each side found a certain satisfaction in the other's victories. My Aunt Charlotte was proud of her five wild men; so were the five wild men proud of my Aunt Charlotte's parlour.

It didn't immediately, of course, reach its later pitch of perfection. It had been so long disused that there was difficulty even in finding the key, and the sight that met Charlotte's eyes, when first the door groaned open, would have daunted Hercules. On the floor dust lay thicker than the carpet, at the windows hung cobwebs more substantial than the curtains: the harp careened like an unrigged ghostly skiff, and at some point a nestful of rooks must have fallen down the chimney, before which their mummified bodies still lay.

But the curtains were brocade. They went to Charlotte's head. In a matter of days she had rummaged through enough old account-books—unhandled by any Sylvester male—to pronounce them woven at Lyons, France. They had cost, those curtains, in the year 1760, no less than fifty pounds; and if this was but another proof of the extravagance that ruined their original owners, Charlotte saw no reason why she shouldn't profit by it. An ancient woman, skilled in the use of soapwort, was summoned to soak and cleanse them: the repairing, almost the re-weaving of them, went on for years. Meanwhile Charlotte polished at the floor, and at the marble of a high carved chimneypiece. From Norfolk there presently arrived furniture of some state—a mahogany gate-leg table, the glass-fronted china-cabinet, a wing-chair covered with needlework—to be set about the Turkey carpet; and if the whole was immediately declared forbidden ground to all in muddy boots, it says much for Charlotte's large-mindedness that she let any one in at all. Parlours less fine by half, in that community, were never entered from Christmas to Christmas. But Charlotte not only allowed her parlour to be used, she insisted on it—every Sunday. Every Sunday evening her five wild men had to clean up and present themselves for an hour of genteel slumber. Old Mr. Sylvester slept in the wing-chair. He actually preferred the familiar spokes of a wheel-back, but Charlotte decreed the other more fitting. She herself wasn't particularly comfortable on the piano-stool, but she felt it fitting that she should sit on
it
, after achieving such a crowning parlour-glory as a piano …

I wish I had known the house in those stirring, embattled days. When I came to it it was complete, ripe in its golden prime. Every room was open, and furnished, and aired; there was even a flower-bed—the farmer's last luxury—ablow under the parlour windows. I took it all for granted. That I was the first to
play
on the parlour piano meant at the time nothing to me; and if I still recall, as I tinkled out ‘Bluebells of Scotland', the enraptured faces of my three aunts, I re-savour chiefly my own conceit. I didn't realise that I was setting the gilded crown on an edifice twenty years a-building.—Indeed, that perhaps came later, when I taught all my aunts ‘Chopsticks', and we used to play it four-handed.…

What
I
longed for was to play upon the harp. It was an instrument already so out-of-date as to have become romantic. But there was no one to teach me, and I doubt if I should have made an apt pupil. I did sometimes, plucking at an unbroken string, draw forth a single melancholy twang; but no one played on the harp, it was never put in order, not even when my Uncle Stephen brought home his Welsh bride.

4

The brides of my Uncles Matthew and Luke (who are still waiting in the parlour), were brought home by Charlotte.

Her motive was at once practical and altruistic. She had more on her hands than any one female could manage, and she also thought it shame to leave any able-bodied male unbadgered into matrimony. “What's us women to do, if 'ee toads won't wed us?” demanded my Aunt Charlotte vigorously—but without ever receiving a satisfactory answer. The Sylvester men had simply settled down under her energetic and beneficent sway: openly enjoying their increased comforts, calling Tobias to his face a lucky hero, but showing not the least disposition to follow his example. Great handsome chaps as they were, too! “What's the matter with 'ee?” railed my Aunt Charlotte. “What's lacking, that 'ee don't bring me home some women?” The old man said nothing; the three bachelors grinned. Charlotte knew as well as they where they went after market, though convention forbade her admitting it. What was the matter with them was that they were bone-selfish, they didn't want to be bothered with the ritual of proper courting. It was less demanding to take what they needed, pay for it fair and square, and let Tobias do respectable for all.…

Charlotte therefore took matters into her own hands, looked about as she'd have looked about for a dairy-maid—though naturally with stricter requirements—and pitched on my Aunt Grace.

Her nature was essentially big. She was big all round, big in her high-coloured handsomeness, her untiring energy, her unfailing good-humour. Other women in her position might have looked for sisters-in-law creep-mouse, docile, unpretending. Not so my Aunt Charlotte. She already saw herself thoroughly a Sylvester, matriarch of a tribe that had all big and handsome about them. So she pitched on Grace Beer, daughter of a farmer the other side of Frampton—strapping almost as herself, even blonder as to high-piled coiffure, and equally famous with poultry. The two women had been on visiting-terms for some months: Miss Beer, unlike Charlotte, (here we refer to one of my Aunt Charlotte's defeats), commanded her own pony-trap, in which she spanked through the lanes like a female Phaeton. As a rule she appeared only at an hour when the men were afield; around four in the afternoon, for instance, when Charlotte elegantly refreshed her with gooseberry-wine. On a certain Sunday, however, she arrived, obviously by prearrangement, to partake of a particularly recherché supper, and afterwards to sit in the parlour, genteelly conversing with her friend before the conscript audience of Sylvester men. As soon as she left, Charlotte delivered an ultimatum.

“Well, there she is, bors,” said my Aunt Charlotte. “Her father'll give her a hundred pounds, and I've seen her linen myself. Which is it to be, Matthew or Luke?”

After a short but pregnant pause, Matthew enquired, Why not Stephen?

“Because she doesn't fancy a youngest. She'll take you or Luke—and I tell 'ee all now, I mean to have another female along wi' me before my time.”

She was expecting her first child in two months. She must have looked, as she faced her menfolk, a very Ceres, a very Venus Genetrix indeed. They knew she hadn't so far ailed a day; they also recognized the validity of her claim. Not a word was said, but all eyes turned on Matthew; seniority has duties as well as rights. To do him justice, he went through his courting like a man. The next three Sundays in succession saw him driving doggedly over beyond Frampton in best coat, clean shirt, brushed hat; he heard the banns called without flinching, and in due course was got to church on time. The Sylvester defences thus doubly breached, my Uncle Luke, when Charlotte a year later produced my future Aunt Rachel, went to the slaughter like a lamb.

Rachel's chief (and complementary) talent was for dairy-work. She also was exceedingly handsome, built on the same lavish scale as her sisters-in-law, fair, kind, and gentle in her ways; so my Uncle Luke had no bad bargain.

I am told that for the next few years one couldn't set foot in the farm without treading an infant. They were all—as though the tamed Sylvester men in this reasserted themselves—males. Loudly as my aunts complained, religiously as they followed every local rite of girl-producing birth-magic, boy after boy swarmed from his cradle. (At one time there were no less than three a-rock together: in due course no fewer than seven urchins made a bedlam of the farmyard.) I think now this was partly the reason why I myself was made so welcome. I should have been made welcome in any case, from sheer goodness of heart, because I looked so small and sickly; but I was also a girl-child, such as those three fecund women had never been able to produce.… Moreover, by the time I appeared not even a son was left to them; it being a characteristic of the Sylvester male that he needed plenty of room. The farm couldn't hold them, and their Dads—no Sylvester minced words—seeming so solid as rocks, the young ones scattered—as far off as Canada and Australia, there to set up, on opposite sides of the globe, new robber-households of their own. Thus I was doubly welcome; and though I was ever the young lady, the bird of passage, my aunts loved me as a last child of the house. What their love meant to me is something I cannot yet assess.

I had never before encountered love. In London, at home, I was being well brought up, and well educated; but I wasn't being loved. Ours was a cold household, in London; though my mother loved both my brothers, so well that in due course both their wives left them. My father I think loved no one. What I found at the farm was something so new, so excellent, that my summers there now appear to me like summers in a golden age. Yet how would I have described, at the time, that honey-gold warmth of love?—I should have said merely that my aunts were very kind to me, and got on together very well.

That of course is the clue. They got on together, the three big women, so famously. They liked each other. All through the day their loud cheerful talk ran in one long triple conversation, shouted, if necessary, between room and room, so that no one missed anything. Charlotte always and naturally held rather the upper hand. She was the
first
of the Sylvester women. It was she who drove out the donkeys. Proper marriage-feasts, proper marriage-chambers, welcomed first Grace, then Rachel: if they didn't realise, she soon enough told them what barbarity they'd been spared. But she never played the despot; it was essentially as equals that they presented a solid front to their five wild men, it was essentially as equals that they now enjoyed such pride in their house and their husbands and their parlour.—Rachel contributed the lustre-ware: Grace, the furniture for the hearth. When they'd burnished the place for Sunday they used to stand so proud as three peacocks. And when, once a month, they'd stood prouder still, nudging their three big husbands into the Sylvester
pew
—“Only us could have tamed 'em!” triumphed my Aunt Charlotte. “Us three Sylvester women!”

5

She didn't bother to marry Stephen. There seemed no point in it. Stephen was left in peace, at thirty-five still the solitary bachelor, the perpetual youngest brother—and my favourite uncle.

This was inevitable, since none of the others took the least notice of me. I think they regarded me much as they would have regarded a pet lamb, brought in by the women and to be brought up by them. I regarded
them
with awe: to me they were like forces of nature—huge, silent, unarguable. Certainly I shouldn't have described them as particularly tame; on the other hand, they had stopped being wild as hawks. (Their father, eighty-odd, was like a little old falcon: white with age, blinking on his perch by the fire.) They had come to partake, under their wives' influence and with their own maturity, more of the nature of tors, or rocks. I suppose my Uncle Tobias, when I first knew him, wasn't much over fifty; to me he was old as the hills. My Uncle Stephen, on the other hand, partly because he wasn't married, partly because he hadn't a beard, I regarded almost as a contemporary. But undoubtedly I loved him best for the one simple reason, that he noticed me.

He used sometimes to set me to ride home on a haywain. He quite often used to take me to see birds'-nests. Once he even took me fishing—when I disgraced myself by falling in, and he plunged after, and we returned in equal disgrace to the scoldings of Aunt Charlotte. She instantly flung me into a boiling-hot bath before the kitchen-fire, then hurled me into bed with a cup of black-currant tea. I do not imagine she personally soused my Uncle Stephen also, but when I asked him, next day, whether he'd been made to drink the tea, he admitted that he had.

As he was the youngest of the brothers, so he was the smallest: by Sylvester standards, small absolutely. His black thatch of hair came to Tobias' shoulder, Matthew's chin, Luke's ear; that they were all exceptionally tall, giants even in a countryside of giants, did not make Stephen's lack of stature, among his kindred, any less noticeable. He was the lightweight Sylvester—lanky as his brothers were ponderous, sallow rather than swarthy, narrower as to skull and cheekbone, less voluntary as to mouth and eye. I secretly considered his appearance interesting; my aunts openly lamented he'd never got his full growth. They loved him and laughed at him and spoiled him; and when he at last, all on his own, found himself a wife, thought it the greatest joke in the world.