The Constant Nymph. Margaret Kennedy Kennedy
course it is that,’ agreed Kate. ‘I’ll bring in Roberto’s chair and table. Come and help me fetch them.’
They went into the larger room next door which belonged to Roberto, the Italian manservant. It had a bed, a table, a chair and a yellow tin trunk. On the trunk lay Roberto’s bowler hat, and on the chair, a cherished testimony to his peasant blood, Roberto’s umbrella, which, on the finest Sundays, went to Mass with him.
‘I don’t see why we should take the poor fellow’s only chair,’ observed Lewis.
‘Oh, he doesn’t sit on it. He has no time to sit. He only uses it for keeping his umbrella on. We always take it if we want it.’
They carried the furniture next door and Kate made up the least rickety of the camp-beds, saying:
‘You can use the other for putting things down on. Is that all, Lewis? Then I’ll be off as I’ve a lot to do. Father often has his meals upstairs, which gives extra trouble. You’re quite fixed? Mittagsessen will be … when I’ve cooked it … soon …’
She gave him an amiable smile and ran off. She was the only person in the family who had no positive feelings, one way or the other, towards Lewis. She just regarded him as one of the many people who depended upon her for comfort. He, for his part, liked her very much, was grateful to her, and was generally both obliging and civil in his dealings with her. She let him alone, and that was a thing which very few women could do, seemingly, in spite of his plain face and unmannerly ways.
When she was gone he threw himself down upon the newly made bed and pulled from his knapsack the MS score of a one-act opera called ‘Breakfast with the Borgias’, which he had promised the Sanger children to write for their father’s birthday. It was to be acted by the family, who could most of them sing in tune, and by any guests who happened to be about. He began to read it through, correcting it in places with a stubby pencil, and writing in fragments of libretto as a guide to the performers, who were to compose their own words when they had learnt their tunes and got the hang of the plot.
Presently he let the music slip to the ground and lay back on the hard little bed, smoking and dreaming. Through the window he could see the cloudless sky and a piece of bright pink mountain. Very far off a cow bell tinkled drowsily and he meditated upon the peculiar, unearthly quality of a sound that comes up from below. He felt so tremendously high up; almost half-way to heaven. Turning his head to the wall he read:
‘My sister Teresa is a little …’
And a half-hearted attempt at erasure, as though even Antonia could occasionally feel ashamed of herself.
3
In spite of Sanger’s contempt for England, the mothers of the children at the Karindehütte had all been British. Vera Brady, his first wife, had been the leading lady of a third-rate opera company of which he was chef d’orchestre. He was then quite a young man and remarkably unsuccessful. They had gone on tour in the Antipodes, were married at Honolulu, and knocked about the world together for a good many years. She was an excellent woman, with a fine voice and extreme powers of endurance; her devotion to Sanger kept her beside him through misfortune, hardship and neglect. Of her children none survived their precarious infancy save the two youngest. These were born during a period of comparative prosperity when Sanger, who had begun to attract attention, held for a short time a permanent post in a German town with a famous Conservatorium. Vera was able to quit the stage and set up the respectable household for which she had always craved. All her instincts were domestic and she was very happy for a time, bustling round her little flat and passing the time of day with congenial housewives at church and market. Caryl was born and she was able to rear him in peace and decency. She believed that her other children had died because she had been forced to work so hard in those nightmare years when she had nursed her babies hastily, in draughty dressing-rooms, awaiting her call. Caryl lived, and grew plump and strong, and was a comfort to her. This interlude was brief; new troubles soon gathered round her. Sanger’s infidelities had become almost a commonplace in their wandering life, but she had always been able to fly from gossip and at least she was sure that each episode must be brief. Once or twice he had run away from her, but he always came back. Now that she was planted in one town she could no longer ignore the scandalous legends which collected round his name. It was hinted to her that the place would soon be too hot to hold him, and though she persistently shut her eyes and ears she could not help knowing all about Miss Evelyn Churchill. The entire district was ringing with it.
This young lady was Sanger’s pupil. She had come from England to study music and report had it that she was of very good family. She was talented, beautiful, and Sanger’s junior by twenty years, but she had lost her head and her heart and she was advertising the fact in the high-handed way peculiar to women of breeding who are bent upon flying in the face of accepted convention. The affair became an open scandal and the Churchill family threatened to come to Germany and stop it. The young lady replied by going to Venice, taking Sanger with her.
Poor Vera, brooding in the little home where she had expected to be so happy, began to decide that life was altogether too hard for her. She was not proof against this last blow. Sanger’s women were not, usually, of a calibre to occupy him for long, but Miss Churchill was a rival of a different order. She was exceptionally intelligent, her health and beauty were not impaired by long years of hardship, and she loved him to distraction. With such a mistress he had no further need for Vera, and the thought broke a heart which should by rights have cracked some fifteen years before.
Yet he did come back, upon the day that Kate was born. He had left a number of manuscripts in his wife’s keeping and wanted to collect them from her. She told him, not unkindly, that she was dying, and it soon became clear that she spoke the truth. Her constitution had been undermined by past privations; she had made up her mind, fatally, that she should not survive the birth of her baby. She spoke of Evelyn without rancour.
‘That young lady,’ she said, ‘will you marry her when I’m gone?’
Sanger, looking rather foolish, said he did not know.
‘Well, then don’t, Albert,’ whispered Vera. ‘Promise me that you won’t now!’
‘All right,’ he said agreeably.
‘I’ve never known you keep a promise yet,’ the tired voice toiled on, ‘but I’m glad to hear you say it. Not that she wouldn’t be good to my babies; I feel somehow that she would, which is more than I’d say of many women. But she’s no wife for you, Albert She’s been bred soft, poor thing! And I don’t wish her harm. I forgive her. I’d be sorry to think she should come to any harm. Mind you’re not to marry her, Albert.’
The good creature died and Albert immediately broke his promise. He married Miss Churchill in a very few weeks in consequence of a certain pressure from her brothers, who had come out to put an end to the affair and who stayed to pay Sanger’s debts and hurry up the wedding.
Evelyn, whose chief merit was a kind of reckless generosity, readily undertook the charge of Caryl and Kate and continued to love them when her own children came. She was indeed heard to regret that she could not pass off Antonia and Kate as twins; the six months which divided them made it just not possible, and strangers asked so many questions and were so stupidly slow in grasping things, that it would have been convenient. This was how she faced life in those early days – meeting her problems with an audacious levity. Sanger had lost his work, but they had not yet got through all her money.
In the course of time she stopped making jokes. Her lot was the harder because she had been, as Vera put it, bred soft. But she met odds with an uncomplaining courage and always recognised that she had only herself to blame for the dishonour, poverty and pain which were her fate. In a multitude of disasters she revealed a constant fortitude, and to the end, though a little battered by ill-fortune, she never quite lost the carriage of a gentlewoman. After bearing four children in six years she contracted heart disease and died rather suddenly upon the eve of her thirtieth birthday.
The household entered thereafter upon a period of storms and changes until