The Edwardians

by Vita Sackville-West

  Moreover, Anquetil, who was sensitive in such things, had discerned in Sebastian that day something which he took to be a special wildness. Of course, he knew the boy so little that it was difficult for him to gauge the shade between his usual manner and some extra, suppressed excitement. Nevertheless, he could not rid himself of the idea that the boy had just passed through, or was actually passing through, some definite crisis. He speculated vaguely as to what this crisis might be, only to come in vexation to the conclusion that it could be nothing but a love affair. As Anquetil arrived at this conclusion, Sebastian dropped by several points in his eyes. Anquetil was not interested in love affairs. He had had too much experience of their deadly sameness. He could not forgive them for being, at one and the same time, so promising and then so monotonous. They were to him but an expense of spirit in a waste of boredom; and the sooner they were over the better; so he thought. By this time he was disposed to rate Sebastian as a commonplace young man. Poor Sebastian, he thought, condemned by the very circumstance of his situation to be nothing more, ever, than a commonplace young man; as commonplace as a king; for even his rebellions, were he to rebel, must be on ordained lines; there was nothing for him to rebel against, except his own good fortune, and that was a thing he never could evade. His wealth was secure—though Anquetil had but the vaguest ideas about entail—his house was secure, this mellow, majestic Chevron; and as for his great name he must carry it to the grave; all these things were tied on to him like so many tin cans to the tail of a poor cat. With them went the romance of his whole make-up. Poor Sebastian, condemned to be romantic; condemned always to be romantically commonplace! What were the wild oats of such a young man? An inevitable crop, sown by his bad godmother at his christening. Not sown even by his own hand, but anticipated on his behalf. Poor Sebastian, his traditions were not only inherited, they were also prophetic. They stretched both ways. It was an unfair handicap.

  Anquetil was not changing for dinner; he was merely washing. This state of affairs had been brought about by Sebastian, who, as they returned from their ride, had said, “Look here—don’t let’s change—it’s such a lovely evening—we’ll go out after dinner.” Viola had concurred. Anquetil had realised with amusement that in this suggestion lay a whole implication of daring innovation. He knew quite well that had Sebastian and Viola been dining alone together in their mother’s absence they would have changed for dinner in each other’s company as scrupulously as in the company of thirty guests. He knew also that in his own alien presence Sebastian found an incitement for such an act of unconventionality. And he was proportionately amused. But, unaccustomed to the ways of such houses as Chevron, he had not realised the full daring of Sebastian’s innovation until he met the butler in the library and detected the quick glance at his tweed jacket followed by a quick, almost imperceptible, glance at the clock. He gave a tribute of admiration to Vigeon’s tact. No one, he thought, but a butler reared in such Chevronesque traditions could have conveyed so subtly, so delicately, the suggestion that it was time for him to go and dress. An impulse of explanation rose in him, instantly and mischievously checked. “His Grace,” he felt impelled to say, “told me not to change,” but just for the pleasure of disconcerting Vigeon he refrained in time from saying it. He preferred to let Vigeon think that he, Anquetil, the scallywag adventurer that her Grace had been pleased to pick up somewhere, did not know how to behave. At that moment he heard the quick patter of Sarah and Henry on the boards, and Sebastian entered the library, still in his shirt and riding breeches.

  During dinner, Anquetil revised his view of Sebastian, reverting to his second impression. He suspended criticism; he allowed himself to fall under the spell of the boy’s charm. Vigeon and his trained myrmidons waited on them, and Anquetil had the pleasure of feeling Vigeon’s disapproval pricking at him through every nerve. Vigeon held him responsible; responsible not only for Sebastian’s unwonted attire—the outward and visible sign, thought Anquetil, of an inward and spiritual emancipation, for he had already, if almost unconsciously, arranged for himself the place of mentor in Sebastian’s spiritual life—but also for Sebastian’s unwonted discourse and lack of reserve. Not that Sebastian talked much himself, but that he forced him, Anquetil, to talk. Sebastian lounged there, at the top of the table, in the small dining room where his ancestors had entertained Drake and Frobisher, Pope and Dryden—as attested by the portraits that hung on the walls;—Sebastian lounged there, in his blue shirt, dallying with a glass of wine, ridiculously handsome and romantic, enticing Anquetil to talk of things he never talked of: his piercing up tropical rivers, his stagnation among ice-floes, until Anquetil (losing his head a little under the influence of wine and historical portraits, and also of Sebastian’s personality, lounging there, half callow boy and half patron), expanded as he never expanded either to his intimate friends or to flattering women. He could not explain, satisfactorily to himself, why he thus expanded to Sebastian’s drawing out. Was it something atavistic in himself, he wondered, that responded to the potential patron? By Gad, he said, looking at the silent portrait of Frobisher, is it possible that I want Sebastian to finance my next enterprise? His relation to Sebastian became suddenly too complicated for human disentanglement. Was it self-interested, or disinterested? Was it cynical, or impartial? Was it half-mischievous, or wholly benevolent? Did he want to confuse the boy, or to free him, or merely to make use of him? Were his motives pure, or mixed? Were motives not always mixed? Why, anyhow, had he become so preoccupied with Sebastian? Bah, he said to himself, he might be useful to me; and next he said to himself, It would serve his mother right if I coaxed him away from all this; and lastly he said to himself, I like the boy, and if I can save him from wasting himself I will.

  Viola contributed very little to the conversation, and only once or twice did Anquetil turn aside to wonder what was going on in her head. He had not noticed Viola much, beyond registering briefly that she was at the slim, swaying age of girlhood, as tremulous as a plant in a stream. It was an age that had its own loveliness, but Anquetil’s appreciation was impersonal; his taste in women was for something more sophisticated. Not for women of fashion; no! remembering the duchess. But there were deep, wise women, with whom he could talk; women who knew life; those were the women that Anquetil liked.

  It was Sebastian’s suggestion that they should go up on to the roof.

  He shut Sarah and Henry into the library, and, taking a candle, led the way. Anquetil was moved by this vision of the boy passing, candle in hand, through the shadows and splendours of his inheritance. For the great rooms had lain in darkness till the candle disturbed them; the great rooms of state, that were never used now, but preserved their ancient furnishings, their gildings and velvets, and seemed in the light of the candle to flutter still with a life that had but barely departed from them. Such illumination was far more suggestive than the light of day, by which Anquetil had first seen them. Then, the silver tripods, the portraits, the tapestry, the long, polished floors, had stood out plainly visible, silent and motionless, with no mystery attaching to them—nothing except the very obvious interest of their age, their survival, their state of preservation; and their intrinsic beauty. As dead as a museum, Anquetil had thought, in the resistant mood that then possessed him. He had looked, he had admired, but it had been a dutiful admiration; he had not been touched. Now, he saw the old rooms quiver in the uncertain light thus unexpectedly imported, and learnt that some things gained through being indistinctly seen, things that were too delicate and frail to stand the full truth of day. For not seeing is half-believing. That he should make such an admission was a proof that he had travelled a long way since the morning, when he believed himself to be a matter-of-fact man, concerned only with the hard outlines (as he conceived them) of objects, relationships, and situations. Now, he perceived that aspects might alter, and that actuality was a fiction, dependent solely on the observer, his mood, and his prejudice. The old rooms, in the candlelight, in
spired him with a tenderness he would not by daylight have credited. Their beauty, which he had thought to be exterior, became significant; they were quickened by the breath of some existence which they had once enjoyed, when no eye regarded them as a museum, but took them for granted as the natural setting for daily life; and that applied to their furnishings too, to the mirrors into whose dim pools women had stolen many a frank or furtive glance; to the chairs whose now faded velvets had received the weight of limbs regardless of mud on the boots. Nevertheless, Anquetil still strove against them. He would not be deluded into sentimentality about things that were dead, merely because it was possible to convince oneself that they had once been alive. This dead beauty inspired him again almost with horror, as he reacted against his own momentary softening, and the resolution returned to him to save Sebastian if he possibly could. The boy, he thought, is already lying in state in a splendid tomb. We will see if we cannot make the effigy jump up and run.

  The gleam of the candle mounted the dark stairs and stirred the shadows of the long low attics. There was no colour up here, neither velvets nor gilding; nothing but plaster and grey oak the colour of ashes. Anquetil preferred this bareness to the sumptuous rooms downstairs; he thought he saw the bones of the house stripped of their flesh; and indeed these silvery galleries recalled the pallor of a skeleton. In certain tombs, he reflected—his mind still running on dissolution—in certain tombs, the skeleton lies exposed beneath the monument, a humble and yet terrible reminder; but here it is otherwise; the house is dying from the top; this uppermost floor is deserted wholly, and all the cheerful bustle has departed from it; it lies stretched in the ashen hues of mortality, immediately below the roof that thinly divides it from the sky. The tiles are no thicker than paper. And he thought that when he had come downstairs again, and was in the living rooms with their deep curtained windows and comfortable sofas, rooms a degree less dead than the state rooms on the middle floor, he would remember the attics at the top of the house, silent and blanched and empty, the shadow of the lattice faintly chequering the boards, attics, stretched horizontally beneath the roofline, like an old skeleton that has been laid to rest out of sight and whose presence everyone has conspired to ignore.

  It was evident that neither Sebastian nor Viola had any such feelings about their home. This frightened Anquetil, by now strung up to an unusual pitch of sensitiveness: he felt that they ought to rebel against the oppression of the past. According to his ideas, they were in no healthy condition if they did not so rebel. He himself was in a state of violent and alarmed resistance; warring emotions tore him; he was determined not to sink under enchantment, but in order to preserve his safety he must keep all his faculties critically on the alert—the only inhabitant of the palace of Sleeping Beauty able to stick pins into his flesh and startle himself from the overtaking sleep. In two days the spell had worked to this extent! and he recollected the mood that had passed over him at dinner, when he glanced up at the portrait of Frobisher, and saw himself in the light of the impecunious adventurer, and Sebastian in the light of the potential patron, whose capricious sympathy might be turned to good account. Such revolution had a bare two days worked in him! Such a spell was the spell of Chevron and the past! But Sebastian and Viola, they had had, respectively, nineteen and seventeen years of it, added to centuries of it in their blood: it was a wonder that they were still alive—awake—at all.

  He moved between them, Sebastian with his candle going on ahead, Viola gliding behind. They were the two natural inhabitants of this exquisite sepulchre, moving amongst its shadows as freely as nocturnal visitants amongst gravestones, and Anquetil revolted against their assumption of franchise, their ease, in these (to him) suffocating surroundings, lethal for all their beauty.

  Sebastian blew out the candle as they emerged on to the roof. The night-breeze ruffled their hair. The stars were thickly sown overhead in a black sky. Anquetil, as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, made out the square crenellation of the battlements and the shapes of the towers rising square across the chasm of the courtyards. It was not possible to see anything very distinctly, but he had the impression of a vast, broken roofline, and of being at a great height above the lawns and tree-tops of the sleeping garden. He saw that the short ridges of the battlements and the longer ridges of the roofs were outlined in a clarity that could not be called light, yet sufficed to distinguish them from the mass of darkness that suggested, without entirely revealing, the intricacies and bulk of the structure. His resentment against the house again vanished, now that it had become part of the night air which cooled him and which was a thing he could understand. He liked Sebastian better, and with less complication, for having brought them up here. But ardently, ardently he wished Viola away.

  They stood upon the leaded flats, but with a gesture Sebastian invited him to climb; he was himself already springing up the pent of the roof like a young feline animal. Anquetil followed. He liked Sebastian for having forgotten the twenty-odd years of difference in their ages. He liked this roof adventure, with the possibilities involved in a false step. He liked Sebastian’s boyishness, freed from his mother. So up they went, the two of them, Anquetil not willing to admit that he was less agile than the boy or less practised in this kind of exercise, for Sebastian’s personality had so inspired him with romantic notions that he now knew that as a sailor and an adventurer he would be expected to display an agility acquired amongst the rigging. Over the roofs he went, scrambling up and sliding down, under the guidance of one who was intimately acquainted with the house’s intricate geography, until Anquetil had completely lost his bearings among the chimney-stacks, the battlements, and the gables, and would have been incapable of finding his way back had Sebastian elected to disappear and to leave him up there, waiting for the dawn. Never once did Sebastian look back to see if his companion still followed him, but climbed and leapt and ran as one possessed by genius, or as one that puts another man to the test, mischievous, unmerciful, and mocking. Anquetil was hard put to it to keep up with him, but he would sooner have broken his neck than cried out. It was a duel between them; from a mere prank, it had turned into an affair of honour. Or was it flight and pursuit?—for the most fanciful ideas now crowded into Anquetil’s head, under the stars—was Sebastian flying from him, conscious of some conspiracy? was he making an ally of his house, using its jumble of roofs as a protection against his pursuer? And as though Anquetil had spoken his thoughts aloud, he cried suddenly over his shoulder, “You haven’t caught me yet.”

  He was invisible in the darkness as he spoke, but next moment he appeared, sitting astride a long ridge of roof, gaily waving his hand to Anquetil below. Thus defied, Anquetil went up, hand over hand; creeping on his knees up the sloping tiles. Cautiously he got astride the ridge and began edging his way along, but Sebastian with a ringing laugh receded from him, enticing him on. Anquetil was now seized with the determination to triumph; he felt that something extremely important depended upon it. But to his horror, Sebastian, seeing himself overtaken, rose to his feet, swayed for one moment against the stars, and fell.

  Anquetil caught him, though how he did it he never knew. He caught and held him, hanging above the black pit of the courtyard below. “Well,” he said, looking down into the boy’s upturned face, “now, at any rate, I have you at my mercy. What if I let you go?” “I shall crash, that’s all,” said Sebastian; “pull me up. How long are you going to keep me dangling here?” “That depends,” said Anquetil, settling himself more firmly. He was holding Sebastian by both wrists. “You have had your fun with me, my young friend; now I think it’s my turn. You look very foolish, let me tell you, lying there spread-eagle on the tiles of your ancestral home. Pride has had a fall—very nearly a nasty fall. But you seem quite calm. I see that the patrician can face death with dignity—even a ludicrous death. I congratulate you.”

  “Well, you are a queer sort of fellow, to be sure,” said Sebastian.

  “Do
I seem queer to you? I assure you, you seem equally queer to me. There are several things I have been wanting to say to you. Shall we talk?”

  “Like this?” said Sebastian.

  “No, not like this,” said Anquetil, and pulled Sebastian up so that they sat facing one another. “But we will remain here, if you please. After all, consider: the accident of birth has given you a great many advantages over me, it’s only fair that I should make the most of the only occasion when I am likely to be in an equal position. Your personal safety is assured, and my personal vanity is satisfied. You shall not be bored. I will entertain you with some remarks about your life and mine.”