I Capture the Castle

by Dodie Smith

When I got home, the castle was completely deserted, even Ab and Hel were out. I felt guilty, because they had had no dinner, and called and called them but they didn’t come. My voice sounded despairing and I suddenly felt lonelier than I ever remember feeling, and more deeply sad. Everything I looked at was grey — grey water in the moat, great grey towering walls, remote grey sky; even the wheat, which was between green and gold, seemed colourless.

I sat on the bedroom window-seat, staring woodenly at Miss Blossom. Suddenly her voice spoke, in my head: “You go to that picnic, dearie.” I heard myself ask her why. “Because little Miss Blinkeyes is right — it would take you out of yourself. And doing things for others gives you a lovely glow.” “So does port,” I said cynically. “That’s no way to talk, not at your age,” said Miss Blossom. “Though I must say you’d have made a cat laugh, walking about in your drawers with that cherry brandy. Fancy you having a taste for drink!”

I found myself saying: “Sacrifice is the secret — you have to sacrifice things for art and it’s the same with religion; and then the sacrifice turns out to be a gain.” Then I got confused and I couldn’t hold on to what I meant — until Miss Blossom remarked: “Nonsense, duckie — it’s perfectly simple. You lose yourself in something beyond yourself and it’s a lovely rest.”

Of course, what my mind’s eye was trying to tell me was that the Vicar and Miss Marcy had managed to by-pass the suffering that comes to most people — he by his religion, she by her kindness to others. And it came to me that if one does that, one is liable to miss too much along with the suffering — perhaps, in a way, life itself. Is that why Miss Marcy seems so young for her age — why the Vicar, in spite of all his cleverness, has that look of an elderly baby? I said aloud: “I don’t want to miss anything.” And then misery came rushing back like a river that has been dammed up. I tried to open my heart to it, to welcome it as a part of my life’s experience, and at first that made it easier to bear. Then it got worse than ever before — it was physical as well as mental, my heart and ribs and shoulders and chest, even my arms, ached.

Ugh. Teenagers.

Luckily, Heloïse came in then or I should have cried myself into a state beyond recovery before tea-time. You can’t cry on Heloïse; she thumps her tail sympathetically, but looks embarrassed and moves away. Anyhow, I had to get her long-overdue dinner.

But most of the time, I just thought. And what I thought about most was luxury. I had never realized before that it is more than just having things; it makes the very air feel different. And I felt different, breathing that air: relaxed, lazy, still sad but with the edge taken off the sadness. Perhaps the effect wears off in time, or perhaps you don’t notice it if you are born to it, but it does seem to me that the climate of richness must always be a little dulling to the senses. Perhaps it takes the edge off joy as well as off sorrow. And though I cannot honestly say I would ever turn my back on any luxury I could come by, I do feel there is something a bit wrong in it. Perhaps that makes it all the more enjoyable.

“It’s odd how that dress changes you. I don’t know that I approve of your growing up. Oh, I shall get used to it.” He smiled at me. “But you were perfect as you were.” It was the funny little girl he had liked — the comic child playing at Midsummer rites; she was the one he kissed. Though I don’t think I shall ever quite know why he did it.

Creepy.

Talk, talk, talk—and never did I see such vitality. I don’t believe it’s normal for a woman of her age to be so healthy. If you ask me, it’s glandular.” I began to laugh, then saw she was perfectly serious; “glandular” has always been a popular word with Topaz.

Men have either painted me, or been in love with me, or just plain ill-treated me — some men have to do a lot of ill-treating, you know, it’s good for their work; but one way or another, I’ve always been needed. I’ve got to inspire people, Cassandra — it’s my job in life.” I told her then that I had a faint hope that father was working. “Do you mean I’ve inspired him just by keeping away from him?” We both roared with laughter. Topaz’s sense of humor is intermittent, but good when it turns up. When we had calmed down, she said:

Topaz the muse.

Oh, darling Topaz! She calls Mrs. Cotton’s interest in father celebrity collecting, and never sees that her own desire to inspire men is just another form of it — and a far less sincere one. For Mrs. Cotton’s main interests really are intellectual — well, social-intellectual — while my dear beautiful stepmother’s intellectualism is very, very bogus. The real Topaz is the one who cooks and scrubs and sews for us all. How mixed people are — how mixed and nice!

After a minute or two, she stopped roaring into the pillow and began to fish round for her handkerchief. You can’t see a person do that without helping, however angry you are, so I gave it to her — it had fallen on the floor.

Oh, I’ll explain it all later. All that matters now is that I’m stranded here and if you don’t come along quickly I shall get arrested.” “I’ll start at once ——” he sounded terribly upset. “Don’t be frightened. Go back to your table and order something else — that will stop them suspecting you. And don’t let any men talk to you — or any women either, especially hospital nurses.” “All right — but do be as quick as you can.”

Hospital nurses?

It was funny how nice and interesting almost everyone looked once my panic was over—before, there had been just a sea of noisy faces.

While I was having my ice-cream soda (it was glorious), a hospital nurse came in and sat at the very next table. I almost choked through my straw—because I knew what poor Stephen had been driving at. Miss Marcy had a story that fake nurses rush about drugging girls and shipping them to the Argentine to be what she calls, “Well—daughters of joy, dear.”

Ahh okay

He had an odd, strained look, which I put down to his having been so frightened about me. I made him have a long, cold lemonade.

Ivy had on a pale grey suit, tight white gloves, and the brightest blue hat I ever saw, which accentuated the red in her cheeks. She is a good-looking girl. Enormous feet, though.

I worked on my journal most of Monday, finishing in floods of tears too late to get my face right before Thomas came home. He said: “You’ve been howling, haven’t you? I suppose the castle’s depressing after being in London” — which made things nice and easy for me. I said yes, that was it, and that it had been sad seeing Stephen go and wondering what would happen to him. “I wouldn’t worry about Stephen,” said Thomas. “He’s sure to be a riot on the pictures. All the girls in the village are in love with him — they used to hang about on the Godsend road trying to waylay him. One of these days you’re going to find out what you’ve missed.”

Thomas said he would find out, though that now Rose was going to marry Simon, it didn’t matter so much whether father wrote or not. “Oh, Thomas, it does!” I cried. “It matters most terribly to father. And to us, too — because if all the eccentric things he’s been doing, on and off for months now, aren’t leading somewhere, well, then he is going crazy. And a crazy father’s not a good idea, quite apart from our tender feelings towards him.” “Have you tender feelings towards him? I don’t know that I have — not that I dislike him.”

But Harry’s father wasn’t in the least helpful. “He says he’s not a psycho-analyst or a psychiatrist or a psycho-anything, thank God,” Thomas told me, when he got back in the evening. “And he couldn’t think why we wanted to make father write again, because he once had a look at Jacob Wrestling and didn’t understand a word of it. Harry was quite embarrassed.” “Does Harry understand it, then?” “Yes, of course he does — it’s the first I’ve heard about its being hard to understand. Anyway, what’s double-Dutch to one generation’s just ‘The cat sat on the mat’ to the next.”

He began to walk about, talking more to himself than to me. “I believe I could make a start now if I could get a scaffolding that really satisfied me. I need a backbone —” “Was that why you took the haddock’s?” I said involuntarily. He turned on me at once. “Don’t be facetious!” Then I think he saw from my face that I hadn’t meant to be, because he gave a snort of laughter and went on: “No, the haddock may be said to have turned into a red herring across the trail — lots of things do. I don’t know, though — the ladderlike pattern was interesting. I must study the fishes of the world — and whales — and the forerunners of whales ——” He was talking to himself again, moving about the room. I kept dead quiet. He went on, “Primeval, antediluvian — the ark? No, not the Bible again. Prehistoric — from the smallest bone of the mammoth? Is there a way there?” He hurried to his desk and made a note; then sat there, still talking to himself. I could only make out broken phrases and disjointed words — things like: “Design, deduction, reconstruction — symbol — pattern and problem — search for ever unfolding — enigma eternal…” His voice got quieter and quieter until at last he was silent.

I said, “Of course I believe it. And I believe you’re going to start very soon now.” “I hope so.” He laughed a little, in an odd, nervous kind of way. “Because if I don’t get going soon, the whole impetus may die — and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.

Perhaps he really has something up his sleeve. Though I don’t like the sound of all those lists he’s making — it’s like taking too many notes at school; you feel you’ve achieved something when you haven’t.”

“Well, you haven’t made much of a start to-night,” said Thomas, “you’ve just driven him to bed with a detective novel. Anyway, I’m going in. Whether father’s sane or off his rocker, I’ve still got to do my algebra.”

She moved towards the kitchen stairs, but I got in front of her. “It’s no use going up,” I said. “What, is he in London again?” “No —” I shot a look at Thomas, hoping he would help me out. “You see, Topaz —” “What is it? What are you hiding from me?” She was so scared that she forgot to be a contralto.

Is Topaz like Elizabeth Holmes?

“Now don’t go yelling that you’re coming to rescue him,” I said to Topaz. “You know what it’s like being wakened up suddenly.” “If he ever does wake!” I could have slapped her — partly for being at her most bogus and partly because I was nervous myself. I certainly didn’t think that father would be dead, but I did have a slight fear that we might have unhinged him — the state of his hinges being a bit in doubt even before we started.

Thomas and I lowered the ladder quietly — Topaz was behind us simply panting to descend. She had to go down backwards, of course, which was most unlike a ministering angel, but she made up for that when she got to the bottom. Holding the lantern as high as she could, she cried: “Mortmain, I’ve come to rescue you! It’s Topaz, Mortmain! You’re safe!” Father shot up into a sitting position, gasping: “Great God! What’s happened?” Then she swooped on to him and the bed went down wallop, its head and foot very nearly meeting over them.

Lol forever at his reaction.

There was no colour anywhere; the cottages were chalk drawings on grey paper. It felt more like dusk than dawn, but not really like any time of day or night. When I said that to Simon, he told me that he always thought of the strange light before dawn as limbo-light.

The mist grew brighter and brighter. I could have looked at it for ever, but Simon hid the sandwich paper neatly down the ditch and we drove on.

Simon the litterer.

In May, the village had seemed just like an inland village; now, children’s buckets and spades and shrimping nets were standing outside doors, bathing-suits were hanging over window ledges. I had a sudden fancy to be a child waking up in a strange bedroom, with a day on the sands ahead of me — though, goodness knows, I wouldn’t have changed places with anyone in the world just then.

Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.

Apparently I was all wrong about father. Apparently it is very clever to start a book by writing THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT nineteen times. Now stop it, Cassandra Mortmain. You are still piqued because Thomas was the one to guess that what we found in the tower wasn’t just nonsense. You are trying to justify your stupidity — and it was stupidity, considering father had told you plainly that all his eccentricities meant something. And it isn’t true that the book starts with nineteen cats on mats; in the revised version there are only seven of them. And there is a perfectly logical explanation of them, according to that bright boy Thomas. They are supposed to be in the mind of a child learning to read and write.

I treated that homing pigeon with the greatest respect (it is the hero of a kind of comic strip called “Pigeon’s Progress”).

Ha!

But none of it meant anything to me — and it did to Thomas, though he admitted he couldn’t get his feelings into words. Father said: “If you could, my boy, I’d go out and drown myself.” Then he roared with laughter because Topaz said Section A had “overtones of eternity.” As far as I am concerned, it all has overtones of lunacy —— NO. I am jeering again. I am DENSE. If Simon says father’s Enigmatism is wonderful, then it is. (It was Simon who christened it “Enigmatism” — and a very good name for it.)

Why can’t he say what he means plainly?” “Because there’s so much that just can’t be said plainly. Try describing what beauty is — plainly — and you’ll see what I mean.” Then he said that art could state very little — that its whole business was to evoke responses. And that without innovations and experiments — such as father’s — all art would stagnate.

But why, oh why, must Simon still love Rose? When she has so little in common with him and I have so much? Part of me longs to run after him to Scoatney and cry “Yes, yes, yes!” A few hours ago, when I wrote that I could never mean anything to him, such a chance would have seemed heaven on earth. And surely I could give him — a sort of contentment? That isn’t enough to give. Not for the giver.

A mist is rolling over the fields. Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?

She wrote “Autumn,” “Crocus,” and “Dear Octopus,” among other plays, but her first novel, I Capture the Castle (Little Brown, 1948) was written when she lived in America during the ’40s and marked her crossover debut from playwright to novelist.

This explains her knowledge of both places and wording they used, which I was curious about.