My Father and Myself (5 page)

Whatever the truth of the matter, finding at The Hermitage handsome young Mr. Ackerley, Louise engaged herself to him. It was quickly done. They announced their engagement before the turn of the year and expressed their desire to leave. The Count was said by everyone who knew him to be an extremely jealous man; he was deeply upset and I expect he behaved badly. However, whether he was upset at losing Louise or at losing my father the reader must decide for himself. I can provide no details of the sequence of events, but I can provide a letter from which the emotional atmosphere, at least, may be gauged. It is from Mme. de Gallatin to Stockley in Grand Canary. It is undated, but internal evidence shows that it was written after the New Year. Dashed off (one can see whence the Count derived his punctuation) in an overwrought state of mind, it is not easy to decipher, but I give it, at something of an occasional guess, in full:

This letter does not read to me like the indignation of a devoted mother who has had a prospective daughter-in-law filched away; the loss the Count suffered was not the loss of a bride. The sequence of events is obscure, but it would appear that after leaving Old Windsor with his fiancée, my father returned at some moment later, perhaps surreptitiously, and cleared his belongings out of The Cell Farm. His subsequent movements are not known to me. An aunt of his by marriage, Aunt Maggie as we knew her as children, the widow of his father's brother Charles, who had been a successful skin-and-hide merchant in Buenos Aires, came to settle in Hampstead in 1886; she is said to have been very fond of my father and it may be that the runaway couple took refuge with her. He certainly brought Louise up to Cheshire to meet his family, for I have a photograph of them together taken in New Brighton. And doubtless she took him to Paris to meet her parents. They were married, nearly a year later, in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Avenue de l'Alma, on September 25, 1889. Then they honeymooned through Europe. From the Hotel la Luna, Venice, my father wrote to Arthur Stockley on October 13 of that year:

Not long afterwards Louise was taken ill—some tubercular trouble, I think—and eighteen months later, early in 1892, she died.

1
. There are two photographs. In the one I have selected Mr. Sykes' eyes are invisible.

1892: WE RETURN to that year which was to be of such consequence to myself and was also, I suppose, one of the most momentous in my father's life, containing as it did so many of the major events that were to shape his destiny. He lost a wife at the beginning of it and met a mistress, my mother, towards the end. In it too Stockley reappeared and engaged him in the fruit trade in which he was to make his fortune. And in it occurred a somber episode which I find both puzzling and distasteful: Mr. Ashmore's legacy reared its ugly head. In July a civil action between my father and the Count de Gallatin was tried in the Law Courts before Mr. Justice Collins.

When I first projected this memoir some thirty years ago and was seeking information about my father's early life, I applied to Arthur Stockley, his partner and lifelong friend, then a man of seventy-three. One of his letters to me contains the following sentence: “I suppose he [de Gallatin] could not help his intensely jealous nature, but there was no cause for him bringing an action against your father over The Cell Farm just because of the Louise incident; however he lost the action and had to pay the costs, which made him quite frantic.” But the case, I afterwards discovered, is reported at some length in
The Times
of July 21, 1892; my father was the plaintiff and must therefore have brought the action and judgment was given for the defendant (the Count). It is true he was saddled with the costs; it seems the only accuracy in Stockley's statement.

The action was brought by my father to recover the £500 which he had lent to de Gallatin eight years previously. The Count admitted the loan but asserted that the suggestion to start the pony farm had come from my father, who had proposed that the £500 should be used for running and stocking it. He himself had agreed to this and to transact the business on my father's behalf. He had had no share in the profits of the farm and claimed that he had told my father, when the latter left him in November, 1888, that he had spent more than £500 on it, that they had better cry quits, and that my father had agreed. Some unpleasantness then arose: after the marriage my father's relatives began to enquire what had become of his legacy. The Count said that he then proposed to treat the losses at the pony farm as his own and to repay the £500. A correspondence ensued in which he wrote to my father to ask what should be done with the remaining ponies. My father instructed him to send them to Tattersall's. Two of them fetched £42, the unbroken ones £14. Complaints kept coming from my father's relatives and he, the Count, had then decided not to repay the £500. Instead he counter-claimed for over £600 as representing his own expenses over the farm. He did not now insist upon his counter-claim. No accounts had been kept, but cheques paid by him to my father were available and the correspondence showed that my father had looked upon the farm as his own.

My father in his evidence stated that before they went to Ireland nothing had been said about buying ponies. They were bought, he said, simply to give him something to do in looking after them. All the arrangements were made by the Count. He himself broke and sold the ponies as they came along, paid wages out of the money received, kept some himself and, if the settlement was by check, paid it into the Count's banking account. The latter had never put forward any claim for expenses and it was untrue to say that they had agreed to cry quits. My father had made repeated application for the repayment of his £500.

Mr. Justice Collins, delivering judgment, said that the plaintiff was a person for whom the defendant had strong feelings of affection, giving him free quarters and providing him with money for some years, at a time also when he was paying interest on the loan. It was clear that at one time the defendant had wished to pay off the loan, for which he was giving heavy interest. On the one hand the plaintiff had lent £500, on the other he had free quarters and pocket money from the defendant. The question was whether the ponies were the property of the plaintiff or the defendant: the admission of counsel had narrowed the case down to that issue. After looking at the correspondence between the parties there could be only one answer. The defendant wrote to the plaintiff asking for instructions about the unsold ponies, and the plaintiff provided those instructions. How could it be said that it was necessary for the plaintiff to authorize the defendant to sell the ponies unless they were his? The plaintiff also admitted that when he sold the ponies he applied the proceeds to his own purposes. Judgment must be given for the defendant with costs.

I confess to finding almost every aspect of this wretched dispute obscure and can only hazard a guess at the truth of the matter. From my own experience of life and my knowledge of my father's character in later years, I would say that his version was substantially true. During his four-year association with de Gallatin he was in his early twenties, and if it occurs to readers of this memoir that even when Banana King he seemed somewhat lacking in business sense, he was unlikely to have had much then. Though easy-going, as I knew him, he was also of an independent and obstinate nature, and he had two favorite words of contempt for idle and parasitic people: “loafer” and “sponger.” We have already noted the Count's failure to detain him in idleness in New Brighton. The pony farm was not much of a job, but it had the appearance of one and the extra attraction of being the only kind of work which this young ex-cavalryman understood and enjoyed. Disguised as a profitable enterprise, it was little more than a toy for him to play with; behind the scene the Count was virtually keeping him: in his letters his reference to him as a pony-farmer is the same as his reference to him as a failing wine-salesman, “poor old Roger”—an affectionate, somewhat patronizing phrase. In later life my father would not have cared to be patronized, and if patronage did not irk him a little then, it was, I believe, simply because of his legacy. This legacy, invested in the Count, must have stood for him as a symbol of prime importance, a symbol of independence and self-esteem; it enabled him to loaf and sponge in a dignified manner, it saved his face. Whatever proposals or suggestions he may have made in the initial transactions for the application of this nest-egg towards the costs of the farm were probably more formal and graceful than sincere; how could he suppose that his devoted and generous friend, who always paid for everything for everyone and had ample means to do so, would take his pretty offer seriously? Nor do I believe that the Count did take it seriously, until the bust-up; he did not need or want my father's money (he got through three fortunes in a lifetime, Stockley says), he wanted only my father; it must surely have been plain to him that his own best interest lay not in spending his young friend's capital but in preserving it; doubtless he eagerly agreed to whatever proposals were made, so long as they gained him my father's company.

That obtained, I imagine that expenses were seldom discussed between them; from the doting Count's point of view the less said about them the better; unbusinesslike himself (“The truth is I don't bother myself much about my affairs,” he had said in that letter to Stockley) but a lavish spender, he paid readily and unobtrusively for everything without counting the cost, and far from wishing to break into his young friend's nest-egg, he had at one time tried, it seems—I wonder when and why—to pay the loan of it off. All this while the sun shone and “We jog along here in our own quiet way—and I think it suits us all”; when the clouds gathered, the scene changed, and the word most stressed in Mme. de Gallatin's charges against my father is “ingratitude,” saddest of words.

If my father's capital sum was important to him for the preservation of his dignity in Old Windsor, its monetary value could never have been greater than when he wished to leave with Louise. It must have been humiliating for him to be paid for all along the line by his fiancée (as I assume happened, unless Aunt Maggie or some other friend lent him money), rich though her parents might be, and be presented penniless to them. In the days when I knew him one could not take a lady out to dine, even a relative, without giving her champagne; it wasn't “done.” It was now, however, that the mortified Count totted up a bill that had never existed. I find it hard to believe that in such a situation my father would have agreed to cry quits —unless in the kind of proud and angry way in which one might say, “Put it where the monkey put the nuts!” Cash was then too important to him. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if he behaved ruthlessly, the Count behaved spitefully; had he restored to my father at their parting even a portion of the loan the dreary suit might never have been brought.