The Edwardians

by Vita Sackville-West

  But Viola left this indictment unspoken. She thought privately that Margaret was very well suited to the future that Lady Roehampton desired for her; as the wife of Tony Wexford she would do admirably. In twenty years time she would be setting nicely in the mould that had shaped Lady Wexford mère, Lady Porteviot, and her own aunts. Adrian was a freak that had somehow entered her life, and Viola moreover suspected that enterprising young painters were not unwilling to better their social position; for she could not imagine that an attractive young Bohemian like Adrian should really have fallen in love with Margaret. She had concealed from Margaret the fact that she had seen him at the Café Royal, a place which she frequented in the strictest incognito. No, they were not, Viola thought, made for each other.

  So she tried to repair the damage she had done, and Margaret went away disconsolate, having received some advice of which her mother would very heartily have approved, but feeling that Viola at the last moment had failed her. There was no hope in anybody. Viola had begun by criticising her parents—and in such terms, too, as Margaret had never heard before—but had ended by supporting them. What was poor Margaret to believe? She had never been so much aware of her own ignorance and inexperience. Her mother’s gaiety depressed her now, and the usual chatter tinkled falsely in her ears; she found herself analysing and judging, instead of accepting everything with a fascinated admiration.

  Leonard Anquetil would have been amused had he known how his leaven, transmitted through Viola, was working in the heavy girl he had seen at Chevron, but to whom he had not spoken a word. He knew it about six months later, for when Margaret had gone Viola sat down to her weekly letter; it reached him at Manaos, and diverted him greatly.

  True to his self-imposed schedule, Lord Roehampton presented himself in Sylvia’s room exactly as the week elapsed. That is to say, he had received the packet at three o’clock in the afternoon, and at three o’clock in the afternoon he tapped on Sylvia’s door. His train was due to leave for Newmarket at four-fifteen. Sylvia was sitting in front of her mirror preparing to go out. They had had half a dozen people to luncheon; it had been a successful party; she had recorded vaguely how nice George could be as a host, in his simple way; she was feeling well-disposed towards George, principally because she had persuaded him to keep his Newmarket appointment instead of accompanying her to the Opera that night, and partly also because Margaret, officially engaged to Tony Wexford, was now on a visit to her aunt Ernestine. George had been a great help to her over that business, and it all served to put her in a good temper. So she smiled at him in the mirror as he came up behind her. She was pinning on her hat at the moment, and her maid was standing by with the pins, wearing an anxious expression and making little darts and pounces which on a less propitious day might have annoyed Sylvia, but which now she accepted without much notice, simply because she felt free and happy and in a good humour with all the world. No George, no Margaret; she could be quite fond of them now she was rid of them. Dear George; a good sort, conveniently dense, but a good sort, none the less, even though his collars were always too high for him and his bowler hat too small. “Dear George,” she said aloud.

  “You can go, Sheldon,” he said to the maid. “Her ladyship will ring when she wants you.”

  Sylvia sat round and stared at him; he, so mild, had never behaved in so arbitrary a way before. “Dismissing my maid, George! but I’m getting ready to go out. Aren’t you starting yourself? What on earth is the matter?”

  She saw then that he looked very odd; he had taken off his London clothes and had changed into a tweed suit, but his face was flushed and he kept putting his hand up to his tie and taking it away again. He kept the other hand in the pocket of his jacket, fumbling with something in the pocket, half drawing it out and then thinking better of it and thrusting it back again. It seemed as though by his order to the maid he had temporarily emptied his cistern-full of determination, and was waiting, for it to fill up before he should draw off some more. Meanwhile, he fixed Sylvia very hard with his gaze, and kept swallowing, so that the Adam’s apple in his throat bulged uncomfortably against his collar and made him cough two or three times in a way which appeared to annoy him, as though he felt it to be foolish. An absurd idea occurred to Sylvia; “he is going to be sick,” she thought; and then she thought, “he has got some bad news to tell me,” and her mind flew to Margaret, for she knew that George would not waver thus over any bad news concerned with Sebastian. He would say straight out, “I have just heard that Sebastian was hurt today playing polo,” or whatever the accident might be, so she cast that terror from her mind as soon as it had entered it, and at the same time she felt the blood leave her body as though it had all been drained suddenly away, such was the fear that she had had and such the relief in realising that it was unfounded. “George?” she said, and going up to him she took hold of him by the coat lapels.

  “It’s that,” he said, moving away from her and throwing the packet of letters down upon the dressing table.

  A glance was enough for her.

  “How long have you had these?”

  “A week.”

  “A week? And you said nothing?—Where did you get them, may I ask?”

  “Post. Anonymous.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  “That depends upon you.”

  “Upon me? Do you want me to tell you that they’re a forgery?”

  “No. They’re not a forgery.” The Chevron writing paper lay open on the table, and the hot words spilt out in Sebastian’s writing.

  “Are you going to divorce me, George?” Absurdly her mind flew to the Templecombes.

  “I’ve been thinking it over. At first I thought I must divorce you, but that would mean a terrible scandal. I don’t think I could face it. Besides, I dislike the idea of exposing these things to publicity, it gives such a shocking example. I have decided that I shall not divorce you if you will do what I say.”

  “And that is?”

  “You must know what it is.”

  “Give up Sebastian?”

  “Naturally.”

  “But, George,” she said, frightened of his hard look, appalled by this sudden catastrophe, desperately trying to find a way out, “how can I—it isn’t practicable—I shall meet him everywhere—and what should I say to Lucy? I could promise you that there shouldn’t be anything more of . . . of that sort, but how can I give up seeing him altogether?”

  “I have thought of that. We shall shut up this house and go down to Wymondham. You have had twenty years of this kind of life. I put up with it to please you; now you shall put up with Wymondham to please me.”

  “Oh God, you’ve given me no time to think—won’t it satisfy you if I swear to give him up as my lover?”

  Lord Roehampton did not answer; he looked at her with an expression of hatred and contempt.

  “George? You would be punishing me quite enough: I love him.”

  “Leave that out, please; I don’t want to know anything about your feelings.”

  “Don’t you even want to know what I shall feel “about you if you break my heart and shut me up in the country? What sort of life do you suppose we shall have together? We shall be civil to each other in front of the servants, and in front of Margaret, but underneath I shall hate you. Be generous to me, George, and you shan’t regret it. Let me keep him as a friend.”

  “Sylvia, how can you make such a childish proposal? It only shows me how vain and irresponsible you are. You might be my daughter, not my wife. I see,” he continued, his grievance rising, “that you have no appreciation of my generosity,” and now indeed he began to see himself as a man full of magnanimity which has been overlooked and tossed on one side, instead of being acknowledged with instant tears of remorse and gratitude. All the pompous solemnity latent in him was suddenly called out when Sylvia, as he conceived it, attempted to put him in t
he wrong. “No other man,” he went on, “would have given you a second chance. Another man would have turned you straight out of the house. And instead of thanking me—instead of going on your knees to me almost—you dare to plead with me, you dare to ask for further favours.”

  “You might be a Victorian husband,” she cried, getting angry in her turn.

  “Oh, my standards differ from yours, I daresay,” he answered; “I’ve never been very up-to-date, I’ve only been content to let you enjoy yourself without noticing that you were fooling me, and now that I find you out and make you the most generous offer that any man in my position could make, you turn on me and imply that I am treating you harshly.”

  “You are making an absurd fuss,” she said, trying to change the tone of the conversation; “to hear you talk, one would think you had spent all your life in a cathedral close. Don’t you know how people live? Of course you do. You don’t refuse to go to Chevron because you know that Harry Tremaine is Lucy’s lover, or refuse to dine with . . .” but here again the name is so august that out of respect for the printer it must again pass unrecorded. “So why, when I’m concerned, behave as though we were living in eighteen-fifty? Because I’m your wife, I suppose,” she scoffed, feeling meanwhile as though she were squealing with terror in a trap.

  Something in her imitation of his pompous manner provoked a physical anger in him, an exasperation such as is aroused by a blow on the elbow; he took her by the wrists and shook her backwards and forwards, casting her finally down upon her bed. Gasping, shaken, she gazed at him in speechless terror; violence was an element that had never entered into her conception of life. The luxurious room, the soft bed, the silken coverlet, all gave the lie to such primitive conduct. In a world where manners were everything, what was left to cling to, once manners had gone by the board? once men began to treat their women as women, not as ladies? George himself was almost immediately as horrified as she. He stood over her for a moment, trembling with passion and frightened by his desire to murder; then as his training reasserted itself he awoke to a sense of shame and astonishment that such a scene could occur between people like himself and Sylvia. “See what you’ve done,” he said; “you turn me into a beast, you make me forget the decencies of ordinary behaviour. But I won’t apologise. This is probably the first time there has ever been any honesty between us. We lived on the surface, we never knew anything about each other. You were nice enough to me, and God knows I wasn’t difficult to manage. Don’t cry like that,” he said roughly, for Sylvia had broken down and was sobbing into her pillows; “I shan’t take back a word I have said, for all your tears. You may be thankful that I spare you. I don’t spare you for your own sake, or even for my own; you know my reasons. And there is Margaret. We must keep up the farce; we owe it to the child.”

  He paused. His rage had sustained him, but now everything seemed to have become fiat.

  “What would Clemmie say, if she knew!” he said, wretchedly and absurdly.

  He looked at his watch.

  “Sylvia, I am going now. Try to pull yourself together. Don’t let Sheldon see that you have been crying. Sylvia!” he said, touching her on the shoulder.

  He got no reply but an inarticulate murmur. “I shall expect you to be ready to leave London by the end of this week. Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you,” she answered.

  George had gone; she walked about her room, smiting herself with her fists on the forehead; she looked at the appointments of her dressing table, wishing that her hair-brushes might be made of wood, instead of chased silver, so that she herself, conformably, might be a woman of humble birth, able to run away with her lover, obscurely, without a gong of scandal reverberating through the drawing rooms of high society and echoing in a thousand suburban homes. She even paused in her pacing, to lift the hand glass; she considered it, as in moments of the acutest tension one concentrates on a material object irrelevant to the true preoccupation; it was of Queen Anne design, of octagonal back—she noted the obtuse angles (rubbed smooth by age)—chased with a pattern of Chinese pagodas; she cast it down on the ground in the desire to smash it; but it failed to break, by reason of the thickness of the pile carpet. Mechanically she stooped to pick it up and turned it over, more dismayed by its failure to break than another woman equally superstitious would have been by the shattering of a mirror on a harsher floor. The glass, the carpet, swelled themselves out into symbols of a life she could not escape. Their respective solidity and thickness conquered her. She sank down on her bed and took her head between her hands.

  This is the end, she thought, rocking backwards and forwards—for, from the first moment when George had thrown the packet down upon her dressing table, she had known that the game was up. The lovely, delirious game played with Sebastian; in which her passions had been involved; and not only her passions, but also her last challenge to the encroaching years. She had loved Sebastian; she would never again have a lover. In those first moments after George’s departure, she scarcely knew whether it was for Sebastian or her finished youth that she mourned. She had been beautiful since the age of seventeen. Since the age of seventeen she had been a Toast. Now for the first time she envisaged the years in which she would be merely Lord Roehampton’s Wife. Norfolk, and the tenants’ Christmas tree—her imagination, rushing, painted her future in the most, to her, repellent colours. But, as she sat rocking backwards and forwards, her clenched fists pressed against her head, everything reduced itself eventually to the fact that Sebastian was lost to her.

  She picked up the letters and looked at them, putting them down again quickly as a few words here and there recalled the precious days and incidents of the past year. She wondered who was responsible for this disaster—what jealous or envious woman, rifling her writing table, bribing a servant perhaps, to get an impression of her keys? All the great scandals were familiar to her; the scandal of the Templecombes, of course, and other stories—stories of angry women risking all their reputation to explore the pockets of a coat thrown down in too great haste; stories of ruthlessness, and of broken liaisons; stories of illegitimacy brutally revealed; stories of terrible scenes between unfaithful lovers, or between husbands and wives. Everybody in society knew of these dark patches on brilliant lives; everybody knew of the sacrifices made in the sacred name of tenue, and of the smiles amiably exchanged in public between mortal enemies. They prided themselves upon a social if not a moral conscience. And now the same tragedy had befallen her, and she must meet it in the same way as others had met it.

  No alternative offered itself to her mind. She was too well-trained. People in their position—hers, Sebastian’s, and George’s—did not make an open scandal. It was, simply, unthinkable. Just as the populace knew nothing of the discreet, one-horse brougham that waited outside a certain door, just as the populace knew nothing of the breach that had existed for thirty years between Lord and Lady Templecombe, so must the populace know nothing of the triangular complication between Sebastian and Lord and Lady Roehampton. Each class was bound by different obligations. Sylvia, rocking on her bed and seeking to resolve the stone of desperation that had hardened until within the space of half an hour it petrified her whole mind, recollected the recent case of a man and a married woman who had plotted murder rather than escape together without sufficient financial provision. “Sufficient financial provision”—that was the phrase used by the prosecuting counsel. Sylvia was surprised to find herself laughing aloud. How paltry a thing was money! how could lovers let such a thing stand in their way? How gladly would she endure privations for Sebastian’s sake (or so she thought at the moment; but privation to Sylvia meant three instead of fifty thousand a year). But she was bound by far more rigorous a necessity: the creed of her class, of her code. Even Sheldon—in spite of the special, the quite particular, intimacy that existed between mistress and personal maid—‘body-servant,’ didn’t they call it?—must not know that anything was amiss.
She stood up, replaced the unbroken mirror on the dressing table, carefully repaired with powder and rouge any damage that her face had suffered, tidied her hair, and rang the bell.

  Sheldon appeared; was informed that her mistress would not, after all, be going out till the evening; was dining early before the Opera and would dress at six; had a headache and would lie down till then; did not wish to be disturbed.

  And if his Grace should call?

  Lady Roehampton looked at Sheldon as though she had intended an impertinence; as indeed she had.

  “I am not at home to anybody. Please draw the blinds. Turn down the bed. Put out a handkerchief dipped in eau de cologne. Take those lilies out of the room—they make my headache worse. Don’t come back till six.”

  Sheldon obeyed her instructions, then ran upstairs, jammed on her bonnet, and hurried off to Grosvenor Square, in the hopes of finding Miss Button at Chevron House. There had been a bust-up between her ladyship and his lordship; that was evident; and Sheldon meant to be the first in with the news.

  At eight o’clock the curtain went up on Tristan and Isolde, before a house hushed into the proper frame of mind already by the Overture.

  A house—the expression is inaccurate. Upper circles and gallery were full; the stalls and boxes but sparsely occupied. Into the stalls, people trickled in parties of two and four, tiptoeing in the semi-darkness; into the boxes, parties came with less circumspection, having no resentful feet to stumble over, no whispered apologies to make; they came in, with a gleam of light as the door opened, and took their places amid scarcely suppressed chatter and laughter. Sh-sh-sh, came from the circles and gallery, but the disturbers glanced round, although unseen, into the dim amphitheatre as though chidden by an intruder in their own home. As the first act wore on, these gleamings and rustlings diminished and subsided; the stalls filled up; and the house began to await the final chords of the orchestra and the turning-up of the lights, when the full splendour of Covent Garden in mid-season should be revealed.