The Gypsy in the Parlour

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  Praise for the Writing of Margery Sharp

  “A highly gifted woman … a wonderful entertainer.” —The New Yorker

  “One of the most gifted writers of comedy in the civilized world today.” —Chicago Daily News

  “[Sharp’s] dialogue is brilliant, uncannily true. Her taste is excellent; she is an excellent storyteller.” —Elizabeth Bowen

  Britannia Mews

  “As an artistic achievement … first-class, as entertainment … tops.” —The Boston Globe

  The Eye of Love

  “A double-plotted … masterpiece.” —John Bayley, Guardian Books of the Year

  Martha, Eric, and George

  “Amusing, enjoyable, Miss Sharp is a born storyteller.” —The Times (London)

  The Gypsy in the Parlour

  “Unforgettable … There is humor, mystery, good narrative.” —Library Journal

  The Nutmeg Tree

  “A sheer delight.” —New York Herald Tribune

  Something Light

  “Margery Sharp has done it again! Witty, clever, delightful, entertaining.” —The Denver Post

  The Gypsy in the Parlour

  A Novel

  Margery Sharp

  TO

  GEOFFREY CASTLE

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER I

  1

  In the heat of a spacious August noon, in the heart of the great summer of 1870, the three famous Sylvester women waited in their parlour to receive and make welcome the fourth.

  Themselves matched the day. The parlour was hot as a hothouse, not a window was open, all three women were big, strongly-corsetted, amply-petticoated, layered chin to toe in flannel, cambric, and silk at a guinea a yard. Their broad, handsome faces were scarlet, their temples moist. But they stood up to the heat of the parlour as they stood up to the heat of the kitchen or the heat of a harvest-field: as the sun poured in upon them so their own strong good-humour flowed out to meet it—to refract and multiply it, like the prisms of their candlesticks, the brass about their hearth. Nature had so cheerfully designed them that even wash-day left them fair-tempered: before the high festivity of a marriage their spirits rose, expanded, and bloomed to a solar pitch of stately jollification.

  Everything in the parlour shone. After the prisms and the andirons the two most striking points of brillance were a chinacabinet, its panes so diamond-like that light must merely have bounced back, but for the attraction of the lustre-ware within, and the gilding of a tall, scroll-worked harp. The floor reflected the furniture: a pair of water-clear mirrors reflected each other. The grandfather-clock was a column of amber. (A smaller, dimmer sun ornamenting its face.) At the windows, long curtains, of very old brocade, showed their original bright crimson at each turn of a fold: a square of Turkey carpet, equally ancient, equally proclaimed the excellence of old dyes.—It was a room, in short, worth the sun’s while to shine on; and that it was so, and that it was also the heart of the great sprawling house, half-manor and half-farm, was the Sylvester women’s triumph.

  They had won no easy victory. The men they wedded were masterful as themselves: black as they were golden, strong-willed and strong-backed: apt to eat in the kitchen, and without (till the first bride came home) sluicing themselves. This original Amazon was my Aunt Charlotte, wife of the eldest son Tobias; her two sisters-in-law were of her own choosing—equally high-coloured, equally high-handed, equally apt to civilize the black Sylvester males. The fourth Sylvester woman, the awaited betrothed, my youngest Uncle Stephen chose for himself; and until that morning only he had set eyes on her.

  2

  One must go back. I go back—how willingly!—to the night some four years earlier when I first arrived, a small sickly girl-child, in my Aunt Charlotte’s kitchen. My parents were Londoners: I had coughed all a smoky winter, a chill spring: with the summer I was sent down to these half-known connections to try the benefit of West Country air. I was then seven years old, and obviously did not travel alone; I remember adult (though unfamiliar) company in the train; but towards the end of the journey some arrangement must have broken down, for I made its last stage, by carrier’s cart, in charge solely of the carrier, and when I arrived it was quite dark. My Aunt Charlotte unwrapped me from my shawls, set me up on the great kitchen table, and with a loud cry of distress instantly gave me a honey-comb. I hadn’t a spoon, I couldn’t, for cold and weariness, have eaten if I had; but the impetuous welcoming gesture—I still see the upward sweep of a great creamy arm—gave me an extraordinary sensation of happiness.

  I felt, for my mind then fed on fairy-tales, like the girl in the story whom an enormous kindly cat popped into a jug of magic milk, which turned her golden.

  This image quite remarkably persisted. To me, a cockney of cockneys, living at the farm was like living amongst great kindly creatures not quite of my own race. Every object, from the huge horses in the stables to the huge cream-pans in the dairy, was so astoundingly large. My four uncles and their sire moved particularly enormous. I didn’t see much of them, I was kept mewed like a parlour-boarder from all mucky farm-activity; but my Aunt Charlotte loomed almost as gigantic. To me she was tall as a sunflower—and like a sunflower wore a great golden crown, that unplaited fell to her knees. Her hands were mansize and brown, but her arms and shoulders milk-white; her eyes, like her mouth, smiled easily, but her lightest love-tap—I was often underfoot—sent me half across the kitchen. It was easy to comprehend how she had made the first breach in the bachelorhood of the Sylvester men.

  The tale was legendary, and deserved to be: until her coming the old widower and his four sons having lived like so many Orsons or savages, with for all female influence one old witch in the kitchen. Yet they owned their land and wheat stood at over forty shillings: old Mr. Sylvester could have been churchwarden—save that he never went to church. (They none of them went to church.) Their dwelling-house, originally a manor, was not only commodious, but handsome. (Or might have been, had they spent the least pains on it; which they never did.) The older portion was so picturesque that summer-visitors came to sketch it: there are contemporary water-colours without number, of the broad, sodded court lying between the manor’s two wings.

  It was formerly infested, this court, by donkeys. When old Mr. Sylvester bought all and for a peppercorn, he was forced to turn out a great number of gypsies who through the winter roosted there: so much had the estate decayed, by death, extravagance and misfortune. The greensward was invaded by thistles, upon which natural pasture fed the gypsies’ donkeys, the space bounded by the two crumbling wings and the main bulk of the house forming a sort of corral for them. Old Mr. Sylvester rigorously turned both gypsies and donkeys out, and moved in with his growing four sons. They were Tobias, Matthew, Luke and Stephen; who with their sire took root and flourished.

  They were savages, but they didn’t neglect the land. Where land was concerned they were even progressive. They brought in the first mechanical thresher their neighbours had ever seen. They sent to Plymouth for guano, buying it straight from the ship. As farmers, and as a team of five strong men, they waxed, for farmers, rich. Old Mr. Sylvester could have been a Justice—save that he wasn’t able, or pretended not to be able, to spell his name.

  His four sons remained bachelors, but notoriously assuaged, after market-day, and in the lowest quarters, their natural masculine powers. Fortunately they weren’t quarrelsome, and had heads like rocks, for they drank enough for eight. Whatever they did there was no one to check them, no one to say them nay—until Tobias the eldest, foraying into Norfolk after a ram
, was himself brought to market by my Aunt Charlotte.

  She was quite simply the finest woman he’d ever seen. She stood five-foot-nine in her stockings, and her head was Ceres’—gold-braided, high-coloured, smiling abundance. My Aunt Charlotte saw a black, six-footer eldest son. Her father owned the ram Tobias had his eye on; she, looking queen-like over the best Norfolk could offer, signalled her acceptance of an alliance which Tobias willingly allowed himself to have proposed. He had to wait in Norfolk four weeks longer, while the banns were called; and employed the interval to write a letter home.

  Dear father, dear brothers (wrote Tobias),

  I’m to be wed Tuesday two weeks. Wednesday two weeks expect me home. The young woman sends her respects, and I have got a ram.

  I have said that my Aunt Charlotte’s home-coming was legendary; like a legend, it lost nothing in the re-telling. The first object that met her eyes, on her arrival at her new home, was a donkey in the kitchen. This was explicable, if at the time disconcerting; one or two strays of the race still remembered their old haunt in the courtyard, and the kitchen-door, which abutted it, swung on a broken hinge. Tobias should properly have set down his bride at the great main door, but there was the ram, under a net, in the back of their cart: he drove straight round into the court, it was mizzling with rain, and Charlotte ran for the nearest shelter. The donkey and she met head-on: without the slightest hesitation she snatched up a broom, thwacked it across the quarters, and drove it out. Immediately over the threshold a morass of poached mud sucked at her new shoes. She turned back into the kitchen, spied a pair of pattens, put them on and returned to the attack. The braying of the beast she so harried rose like a gypsy’s warning: still my Aunt Charlotte thwacked. When Tobias returned from the byre he found his bride, in pattens, already beating the bounds of her new demesne.

  3

  “Dear souls, but I was wrathful!” related my Aunt Charlotte. “So wrathful was I, I’d hardly let ’un bed me!”

  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 tak
e 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.”