Heritage

by Vita Sackville-West

  ‘My Arcady missed its lovers. I realised after they had gone that they had been real lovers, imperative to one another, and that they had not simply drifted into marriage as a result of upbringing and propinquity. Had their parents’ consent been for some reason refused, they would, I am convinced, have gone away together. Amos Pennistan, in one of his rare moments of expansion, told me as much himself. “Nancy,” he said, “it never did to cross Nancy. She was strong-willed from three months upward. Ruth, now, she’s a steady, tractable girl for all her dark looks. Of the two, give me Ruth as a daughter.”

  ‘You may imagine my profound interest in the study of this strain sprung from the stock of Concha and Oliver Pennistan. Here I had Nancy, with her slight English prettiness, and the fiery will which might never be crossed; and Ruth, who looked like a gipsy and was in fact steady and tractable. I could not help feeling that fate had her hand on these people, and mocked and pushed them hither and thither in the thin disguise of heredity. You remember Francis Galton and the waltzing mice, how he took the common mouse and the waltzing mouse, and mated them, and how among their progeny there were a common mouse, a black and white mouse, and a mouse that waltzed; and how in the subsequent generations the common brown house mouse predominated, but every now and then there came a mouse that waltzed and waltzed, restless and tormented, until in the endless pursuit of its tail it died, dazed, blinded, perplexed, by the relentless fate that had it in grip. Well, I had my mice in a cage, and Concha, the dancer, the waltzing mouse, sat mumbling by the fire.’

  I shuddered. I did not understand Malory. He had spoken of the violence of his feeling when he first caught sight of Ruth; I could not reconcile that mood with his present chill analysis.

  ‘You held a microscope over their emotions,’ I said.

  ‘I was afraid there would not be many emotions left now that Nancy was gone,’ he replied regretfully. ‘I missed her as a study, and I missed her as an intrinsic part of my Arcady. I turned naturally for compensation to Ruth and to Rawdon Westmacott, but here I realised at once that I must dissociate the figures from the landscape. They would not fit. No; contrive and compress them as I might, they would not fit. I am very sensitive to the relation of the picture to the frame, and I was troubled by their southern exuberance in the midst of English hay and cornfields. Now could I but have had them here . . .’ and again the cropping goats, the mountains, and the torrent rushed across the magic lantern screen in my mind.

  ‘I told you that I knew young Westmacott was there crazy for her; he had no reserve about his desire, but hung round the farm with a straw between his teeth, his whip smacking viciously at his riding-boots, and his eyes perpetually following the girl at her work. He would look at her with a hunger that was indecent. Me he considered with a dislike that amused while it annoyed me. I often left my work when I saw him looming up morosely in the distance, but old Amos dropped me a hint, very gently, in his magnificently grand manner, after which I no longer felt at liberty to leave the two alone. If they wanted private interviews they must arrange them when they knew my work would take me elsewhere.

  ‘I was not sorry, for I had no affection for Westmacott, and it amused me to watch Ruth’s manner towards him. I had heard of a woman treating a man like a dog, but I had never seen an expression put into practice as I now saw Ruth put this expression into practice towards her cousin. She seemed to have absolute confidence in her power over him. When it did not suit her to notice his presence, she utterly ignored him, busied her tongue with singing and her hands with the affair of the moment, never casting so much as a glance in his direction, never asking so much as his help with her work; and he would wait, lounging against the doorway or against a tree, silent, devouring her with that hungry look in his eyes. Often I have seen him wait in vain, returning at last to his home without a word from her to carry with him. His farm suffered from his continual absence, but he did not seem to care. And she? did she get much satisfaction out of her ill-treatment of his devotion? I never knew, for she never alluded to him, but I can only suppose that, in the devilish, inexplicable way of women, she did. In his presence she was certainly an altered being; all her gentleness and her undoubted sweetness left her, and she became hard, contemptuous, almost impudent. I disliked her at such moments; self-confidence was unbecoming to her.

  ‘Then, when she wanted him, she would whistle him up like a little puppy, and this also I disliked, because Westmacott, whatever his faults, wasn’t that sort of man, and it offended me to witness the slight put upon his dignity. He didn’t seem to resent it himself, but came always, obedient to her call. And he would do the most extraordinary things at her bidding. Mrs Pennistan told me one day that when the pair were children, or, rather, when Ruth was a child of ten and he was a young man of twenty-two, she would order him to perform the wildest feats of danger and difficulty.

  ‘ “And he’d do what she told him, what’s more,” said Mrs Pennistan, to whom these reminiscences were obviously a source of delight and pride, as though she, poor honest woman, shone a little with the reflected glory of her daughter’s ten-year-old ascendancy over the daring young man. “Lord, you would have laughed to see her standing there, stamping her little foot, and defying him to go down Bailey’s Hill on his bicycle without any brakes, and him doing it, with that twist in the road and all . . . One day she wanted him to jump into the pond with all his clothes on, and when he wouldn’t do that she got into such a rage, and stalked away, and wouldn’t speak to him, enough to make a cat laugh,” and Mrs Pennistan with a great chuckle doubled herself up, rubbing her fat hands in enjoyment up and down her thighs, straightening herself again to say, “Oh, comical!” and to wipe her eye with the corner of her apron.

  ‘ “Well, now I declare!” she said suddenly, craning her neck to see over the hedge. “If she isn’t at her old tricks again!”

  ‘I followed her with a thrill to a gap in the hedge whither she had darted — if any one so portly may be said to dart. There, across the field, by the gate, stood the pair we had been discussing, and I was actually surprised to find that the little ten-year-old girl whom I had half expected to see was a well-grown and extremely good-looking young woman. She was sitting on the gate, and Westmacott was lounging in his usual attitude beside her; even at that distance his singular grace was apparent.

  ‘They seemed to be looking at the two carthorses which were grazing, loose in the field.

  ‘ “She’s up to something, you mark my words,” said Mrs Pennistan to me.

  ‘I agreed with her. Ruth was pointing, and the imperious tones of her voice floated across to us in the still evening; Rawdon was following the direction of her finger, and now and then he turned in his languid, easy way that covered — with how thin a veneer! — the fierceness beneath, to say something to his companion. I saw his hand drop the switch he carried, and fall upon her knee. Her manner became more wilful, more imperative; had she been standing on the ground, she would have stamped. I heard Rawdon laugh at her, but that seemed to make her angry, and with a resigned shrug he pushed himself away from the gate and began to walk across the field.

  ‘ “Lord sakes,” said Mrs Pennistan anxiously, “whatever is he going to do?”

  ‘I begged her to keep quiet, because I wanted to see any fun that might be going.

  ‘Mrs Pennistan was not happy; she grunted.

  ‘Ruth was perched on the gate, watching her cousin. I was delighted to have an opportunity of observing them when they thought themselves alone. Besides, I intensely wanted to see what Rawdon was going to do. He walked up to one of the horses, hand outstretched and fingers moving invitingly, but the horse snorted, threw up its head, and cantered lumberingly away to another part of the field. Rawdon followed it, pulling a wisp of grass by means of which he enticed the great clumsy beast until he was able, after some stroking and patting, to lay his hand upon its mane. Ruth, on the gate, clapped her hands and called out
gaily —

  ‘ “Now up with you!”

  ‘ “Lord sakes!” said Mrs Pennistan again.

  ‘I saw Westmacott getting ready to spring; he was agile as a cat, and with a leap and a good hold on the mane he hoisted himself on to the horse’s back. The horse galloped madly round the field, but Westmacott sat him easily – not a very wonderful feat for a farm-trained boy to accomplish. As he passed Ruth he waved his hand to her.

  ‘She wasn’t satisfied yet; she called out something, and, the horse having come to a standstill, I saw Rawdon cautiously turning himself round till he sat with his face to the tail. Then he drummed with his heels to put the horse once more into its lumbering gallop.

  ‘I saw the scene as something barbaric, or, rather, as something that ought to have been barbaric and only succeeded in being grotesque. Ruth ought to have been, of course, an Arab girl daring her lover in the desert to feats of horsemanship upon a slim unbroken thoroughbred colt. Instead of that, Westmacott was just making himself look rather ridiculous upon a cart-horse. But the intention was there; yes, by Jove! it was; the intention, the instinct; he was wooing her in a way an English suitor wouldn’t have chosen, nor an English girl have approved. Mrs Pennistan, however, saw the matter in a different light, as a foolish and unbecoming escapade on the part of her daughter; so, thrusting herself between the loose staves of the fence and waving her hands angrily, she called out to Westmacott to have done with his dangerous nonsense.

  ‘He slipped off the horse’s back, and Ruth slipped down off the gate, the man looking annoyed, and, in a slight degree, sheepish, the girl perfectly self-possessed. Mrs Pennistan rated them both. Westmacott kicked sulkily at the toe of one boot with the heel of the other. I glanced at Ruth. She had her hands in the big pockets of her apron and was looking away into the sky, with her lips pursed for an inaudible whistle. Her mother stormed at her.

  ‘ “You’re getting too old for such nonsense. It was all very well when you were a chit with pig-tails down your back. And you, Rawdon, I should ha’ thought you’d ha’ known better. What’d Pennistan say if he knew of your larking with his horses? I’ve a good mind to tell him.”

  ‘ “I’ve done the brute no harm,” he muttered.

  ‘ “Well, I’ll tell him next time, see if I don’t. What did you do it for, anyway?”

  ‘ “A bit of fun . . .” he muttered again, and, his smouldering eyes resting resentfully upon her, he added something about Ruth.

  ‘Ruth brought her gaze slowly down from the clouds to bend it upon her cousin. Their eyes met in that furnace of passion and hatred with which I was to become so familiar.

  ‘ “Ay, Ruth told me,” stormed Ruth’s mother. “An old tale. You let Ruth alone and she’ll let you alone, and we’ll all be better pleased. Now be off with you, Rawdon, and you, Ruth, come in to your tea.”

  ‘Her excitement had grown as it beat in vain against the rock of Ruth’s indifference.

  ‘Ruth,’ said Malory after a long pause, and paused again. ‘She is a problem by which I am still baffled. I do not know how to speak of her, lest you should misunderstand me. That first impression of which I have already told you never wore off. Do not think that I was in love with her. I was not. I am not that sort of man. But I was always conscious of her, and I cannot imagine the man who, seeing her, would not be conscious of her.

  ‘She on her part was, I am certain, unaware of the effect she produced. Before I had been very long on the farm I had come to the conclusion that she was a slow, gentle, rather stupid girl, obedient to her parents in all things, less from the virtue of obedience than from her natural apathy. She and I were thrown a good deal together by reason of my work. I tried to draw her into conversation, but no sooner had I enticed her, however laboriously, into the regions of speculation than she dragged me back into the regions of fact. “Ruth,” I would say, “does a woman cling more to her children or to her husband?” and she would stare at me and reply, “What things you do say, Mr Malory! and if you’ll excuse me I have the dairy to wash down yet.”

  ‘I am a lover of experiments by nature, and having no aptitude for science it is necessarily with human elements that I conjure in my crucible. You said I held a microscope over emotions. I say, rather, that I hold my subject, my human being, like a piece of cut glass in the sunlight, and let the colours play varyingly through the facets.

  ‘Sunday afternoon was our holiday on the farm, and to the worker alone a holiday is passionately precious. It is all a matter of contrast. On Sunday afternoon I would take Ruth for a walk; the sheep-dog came with us, and we would go through shaw and spinney and young coppice, and along high-hedged lanes. One spot I loved, called Baker’s Rough, where the trees and undergrowth had been cleared, and wild flowers had consequently gathered in their millions: anemones, wood-violets, bluebells, cuckoo-flowers, primroses, and later the wild strawberry, and later still the scarlet hips of the briar. I never saw a piece of ground so starred. Here we often passed, and we would climb the hill-ridge behind, and look down over the Weald, and fancy that we could see as far as Romney Marsh, where Rye and Winchelsea keep guard over the melancholy waste like little foreign towns. We stood over the Weald, seeing both fair weather and foul in the wide sweep of sky; there a storm, and there a patch of sun on the squares of meadow. On fine days great pillows of white cloud drifted across the blue, painted by a bold artist in generous sweeps on a broad canvas, and those great clouds were repeated below in the great rounded cushions of trees. We looked over perhaps fifty miles of country, yet scarcely one house could we distinguish, but when we looked for a long time we made out, here and there, a roof or an oasthouse, and I used to think that, like certain animals, these dwellings had taken on the colour of the land. For the most part, a clump of trees would be our nearest land-mark.

  ‘I could evoke for you many of those hours when, with the girl beside me, I explored the recesses of that tender country. Without sharing my enthusiasm, she was yet singularly companionable, happy and contented wherever our footsteps led us, with the reposeful quality of content essential to a true comrade.’

  He was silent, and I considered him covertly as he sat hugging his knees and staring into the distance with a faraway look on his face. He was, I thought, a queer chap; queer, lonely, alien; intensely, damnably analytical. As I watched him, his head moved slightly, in a distressed, unconscious manner, and his brow contracted into a frown that emphasised the slight negative movement of the head. Yet he did not share his difficulties with me. He dismissed them with a sigh, and a gesture of the hand, and resumed,—

  ‘I mentioned just now the place called Baker’s Rough. Ruth came to me one morning with glowing eyes.

  ‘ “There’s flowers such as you never saw on Baker’s Rough today,” she said mysteriously.

  ‘I tried to guess: mulleins? ragged robins? periwinkles? but it was none of those. She would not tell me. I must come and see for myself.

  ‘We set out after tea for Baker’s Rough, walking quickly, for we had only an hour to spare. As we drew near, the sheep-dog, who had run on ahead, set up a tremendous barking at the gate. I cried,—

  ‘ “Gipsies!”

  ‘There was a real gipsy encampment, caravans hung with shining pots and pans, gaudy washing strung out on a line, a camp fire, lean dogs, curly-headed children. Ruth had guessed aright when she guessed that I would be pleased. Amos hated gipsies, but I loved them. I’ve never outgrown the love of gipsies that lurks in every boy. Have you?’

  His eyes were actually sparkling as he asked the question, and I was overcome by a feeling of guilt. Often I had thought this man a prig. He was not one, but simply an odd compound of philosopher and vagrant, poet and child. I resolved not to be hard on him again. I was uncomfortably suspicious that it was I who had been the prig.

  ‘As we stood looking,’ he went on, ‘a woman came down the steps of a caravan, and, seeing
us, invited us with a flashing smile to come into the camp. Ruth was delighted; she followed the woman, looking like a gipsy herself, I thought, and the children came round her, little impudent beggars, staring up into her face and even touching her clothes. She only laughed, curiously at home; I felt, despite my love of the roaming people, over-educated and sophisticated. I was loving the camp self-consciously, almost voluntarily, aware that I was loving it and rather pleased with myself for doing so.’

  ‘Your mind twists,’ I interrupted, ‘like the point of a corkscrew.’

  He laughed, but he looked a little hurt, taken aback, checked on his course.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘you are right to snub me for it. Well, Ruth at any rate was thoroughly at home, and I could see that the gipsy was sizing her up with her shrewd eyes, and wondering whether I should be good for half-a-crown or only a shilling.

  ‘She let Ruth sit on a stool and stir the pot over the fire; it smelt very good, though it probably contained rabbits, which of all foods in the world is the one I most dislike. Then she offered, inevitably, to tell our fortunes, and Ruth, as inevitably, accepted with alacrity. She stretched out her little brown hand, strong and hard with work.

  ‘Of course the gipsy told her a lot of nonsense, and I stood by, acutely apprehensive that I should be drawn in an embarrassing role into the prognostications. I had come there with Ruth; therefore, in the gipsy’s eyes, I must be Ruth’s young man. I took off my cap to let the gipsy see that my hair was going gray on the temples. But it wasn’t any use; I found myself appearing as the middle-aged man whose heart was younger than his years, and who would finally carry off the young lady as his bride.

  ‘I tried, of course, to laugh it off, but to my surprise I saw Ruth growing very red and her mouth quivering, so I told the gipsy we had heard enough and that we had no more time to spare. Ruth rose, the pleasure all died away from her face. Then, to add to the misfortunes of the evening, I heard a scream and an outburst of laughter from a neighbouring caravan, and, looking round, I saw Rawdon Westmacott jump to the ground in pursuit of a young gipsy woman, whom he caught in his arms and kissed.