The Edwardians

by Vita Sackville-West

  How dark they were, those minutes filled by the rumble of impending tragedy! A doom-laden ship,—strange, accepted convention upon the stage—when everybody knew that the tiers around the house were filled by the galaxy of London fashion, light-hearted and carefree people who took this in the natural course of the things they had to do. Little clerks, putting aside half a crown out of a weekly wage of five-and-twenty shillings, felt no grievance; they merely awaited the turning up of the lights to admire a spectacle which was as much part of their evening’s treat as the music itself. Dr. John Spedding, who had at last brought his wife Teresa to Covent Garden because she gave him no peace until he consented to do so, and who, being himself a sincere lover of music, had taken his seat full of prejudice against this elegant performance, now found himself infected by the general atmosphere of luxury and sophistication, and leant back in his seat definitely enjoying the sensation that around him were hundreds of spoilt, leisured people, soon to be on show like regal animals or plumaged birds, well-accustomed and seemingly indifferent to excited gaze.

  Teresa, at his side, could scarcely sit still, such was her impatience. She wriggled herself against him like a kitten, and whispered to know how soon the act would be over. She was terribly bored by King Mark. Hush, said the people behind them, and she subsided, giving herself up again to the warmth and the mysterious presence of all those men and women, nonchalant in their boxes between the dim pink lights of the sconces, which just permitted them to be seen, quiet, silent, and attentive. Teresa Spedding was frankly and childishly fascinated by high life. She had quite a collection of photographs which she had cut out of the newspapers and stuck into an album, so that she was confident she would be able to recognise many of these celebrities although she had never yet seen them in the flesh. She spent a great deal of her time wondering about them; had they any feelings, she wondered? did husbands and wives ever quarrel? did they know how many servants they had, or was all that left to a secretary? did they call the King sir or sire? And were they all dreadfully wicked? It excited her beyond measure to know that she was actually within reach of them: would brush against some of them as they left the building when the opera was over. If only one of them would slip and twist an ankle, so that John might push his way forward professionally—“Allow me, Lady Warwick, I am a doctor—” and then a few weeks later would come an invitation on paper with a gilt embossed coronet, “Dear Mrs. Spedding, it would give me so much pleasure if you and your husband would spend the following weekend with us at Warwick Castle.” Thus Teresa’s mind galloped along, until she became aware that the orchestra was playing the finale, and that in a few moments everyone would begin to clap and the lights would go up.

  The music ceased, applause broke out, and the curtain came magnificently down, but it must be raised again, and the singers must bow, twice, three times. “Don’t clap, John, don’t clap,” implored Teresa, in agonies lest her husband’s enthusiasm should swell the delaying noise; but like all evils it came to an end, the applause died away, the curtain remained finally lowered, and Covent Careen blazed suddenly into light. It was like the first day of Creation, let there be light, and there was light, thought Teresa, but hastily checked her irreverence. The whole house was full of movement; people were getting up in the stalls; conversation roared; the orchestra was creeping away through a trap-door. The great red velvet curtain alone hung motionless. But Teresa’s eyes were devouring the boxes; she clutched John’s arm, she pinched it; “Oh John, look, there’s Princess Patricia in the Royal box, and Lord Chesterfield talking to her—they say he’s the best dressed man in London—,” but Teresa had no time to linger over Lord Chesterfield; her eyes were roaming too greedily; like a child before a Christmas tree, she felt dazzled by the glitter and variety presented to her sight. Tier upon tier of boxes, those dark squares cut in a wall of light. Within them, visible to the waist, sat the queens of fashion and beauty—or so thought Teresa, undiscriminating between the rightful holder and the parvenue—dazzling in tiaras and rivières, resplendent in their satins and décolletés, they allowed their arms in long white gloves to repose on the velvet ledge, while a fan slowly waved, and their eyes slowly travelled over the house, to find and acknowledge a friend, many friends; and the well-bred minimum of attention was accorded to the men who with suitable gallantry leaned over the backs of their chairs. This, in truth, was the great world as Teresa had conceived it. She regretted only that the men were in ordinary evening dress; somehow she had imagined that they would all be in uniform. Still, the black and white was a good foil; and the ladies gave her no cause for complaint, so generously had they emptied the contents of their safes on to their persons: from head to waist they trickled in diamonds. But it was not so much the diamonds that dazzled Teresa, for those she had fully expected; what she had not foreseen was this coming and going, this interchange of groupings, this indication of familiarity; so that a young man but recently observed in one box appeared in another on the opposite side of the house, and lounged there in the same accepted way; and what delighted her almost beyond control was to see famous people stopping to chat together, Lord Curzon with Mr. Balfour down in the gangway, laughing together as they enjoyed a joke. Now her album of photographs served her well, for many were the personalities she could point out to John; “Do you see, John?” she said, still squeezing his arm, “there in the third box on the left, in the grand tier—there’s Mrs. Asquith with the Duchess of Rutland—and in the next box there’s Lady Savile and Sir Ernest Cassel,—look, they’re talking to Mrs. Asquith now, across the partition—what do you think they’re saying?—and there’s the Marquis de Soveral with his little imperial—and oh John, look! in the box opposite them, that’s Lady Roehampton surely? yes, it must be; I’ve seen her before, once in the Park—” and Teresa’s excitement reached its height, as she contemplated the beauty through her opera glasses and thought that nothing could ever be more exquisite than this apparition of the renowned Lady Roehampton in the framing of a grand tier box. What self-possession, she thought, was expressed in the set of the magnificent shoulders, emerging from clouds of tulle! how divinely her head was poised, under its crown of diamonds! how royally she sat, surveying the house while a faint smile played about her lips! how much Teresa envied her, so calm and languorous and queenly, without a care in the world ! Even the impassive John agreed that she was a handsome woman. And now a young man entered the box, a dark, slim young man, and sat beside her for a moment, speaking to her, but she seemed scarcely to take any notice of him, but turned to another man instead, a foreigner evidently, who came in and bowed very low over her hand; and the dark, slim young man got up and went away.

  After that moment in Sylvia’s box there were only two people in the opera house for Sebastian: himself and her. He had been flung abruptly into a storm of rage and revengefulness. He was very angry indeed, and deeply disturbed, more deeply disturbed than anything but intuition warranted. Sylvia had, after all, said very little; she might have been teasing him; but he knew it was not so. She had spoken in malice, not in jest. How mean of her, he thought, clenching his fists, to choose that moment, when he could not possibly ask for an explanation! But he would catch her; he would have it out with her; he would insist on knowing what she meant. He felt that he would kill her if necessary; despair possessed him, as though everything had begun to break up without any warning at all. He was seized with a passionate longing for Anquetil; Anquetil whom he had rejected for Sylvia. This recollection of Anquetil struck him as very queer, here at Covent Garden. Where was Anquetil now, at this instant?—Only Sebastian’s training and traditions saved him from betraying himself in public, but as he descended the stairs, and made his way back to the stalls, glancing up at Sylvia’s rosy clouds, no one suspected anything wrong. A familar figure, he looked much the same as usual: slender, charming, elegant, slightly aloof perhaps, save when he smiled down at a woman with a persuasiveness that was almost unconscious, but his acquaintances would have
experienced no small surprise had they been able to read his heart. For he was already visiting a complicated wrath on that lovely vision just above his head. He had been drugged—thus did he rage in his heart—he had wasted himself on her, she had fooled him, all his follies of the past year were due to her, she had transformed him into something that was not himself at all. Oh, she might elude him now; but let her wait till he had her to himself: he would revile her, he would tell her what he really thought of her and her like, then he would break away from her and she should never see him again. He would go back to Chevron; he would set out to look for Anquetil; he would make love to other women under her very nose. Such were the varying schemes that coursed through his mind. She had debased him already; very well, he would debase himself more. He knew, without undue conceit, that he could get any woman he wanted. Sylvia was jealous as he had reason to know: he would make her suffer all the tortures of jealousy. He would not care if she paid him back in the same coin; his love for her was dead, and nothing but the wish for revenge had taken its place.

  He heard the bell ringing outside in the foyer; everybody stirred, irritated at being interrupted in their chatter and at the prospect of giving a more or less polite attention once more to the music; a general movement took place, as people sought their seats; the lights began to fade out, apologetically as it were, not suddenly and dictatorially, but so as to give the audience plenty of time (if they desired it) to re-enter the other mood. Sebastian was grateful for the darkness. He rejoined young Ambermere; the last whisperings and rustlings died away; the conductor rose up before his desk; glared menacingly over the heads of the orchestra; gave two sharp taps with his baton, and the intolerable sweetness of the violins took up the opening of the second act.

  Sebastian had been grateful for the darkness, but he had reckoned without the music he was about to hear. The second act of Tristan is no fit fare for a young man unhappily in love.

  In the shades of the grand tier, Sylvia sat appalled by what she had done. She had not intended to introduce her breach with Sebastian at all in that manner. She had on the contrary made up her mind—at the end of those dreadful hours after George had left her—to go to the opera as though nothing had happened, to force herself to forget, to give Sebastian no inkling that anything was wrong, but to invite him into her box and spend one last, brilliant evening with him, and on parting to tell him that she must see him alone on an urgent matter next day. With her sense of style, the notion could not fail to appeal to her; she had driven to the Opera with the real swagger of the aristocrat to the scaffold. She had been determined that if anybody could carry off such a feat, she could. And then, at her first sight of Sebastian, she had broken down, she had lashed out at him with the first words that came into her head, simply because she herself was suffering. He was dear to her, too dear; she could be cruel to herself only by being cruel to him.

  What a reckless fool she had been! Not only had she fallen short of her own standards, but she had accomplished nothing save to set an inexorable Sebastian on her tracks. Should she slip out under cover of the music and the darkness? No, she was too proud to do that; she was not Lady Roehampton for nothing. She would see it through. If only this music would let her reflect for a moment, she desperately thought, while trying to steer amongst the seething waters and crashing rocks of her mind within; but far from allowing her to reflect, its insistence grew until it swelled into an echo of all her past joys with Sebastian, and tragically sounded the despair of her present misery. Dared she press her hands over her ears, to shut out this crescendo that like a wave gathered itself together and heaped itself curling higher and higher until the intolerable moment when it should break? Dared she? The lights were low—but still she might be seen. The instinct to preserve her dignity before the world was in her blood, in her bones: she might suffer, but she must endure.

  He waylaid her as she was coming down the steps, enveloped in her cherry cloak, superb even amongst the decorative crowd that surged round her; and despite his anger some lines from Cyrano came into his head:

  Elle fait de la grâce avec rien, elle fait

  T’enir tout le divin dans un geste quelconque,

  Et tu ne saurais pas, Vénus, monter en conque,

  Ni toi, Diane, marcher dans les grands bois fleuris,

  Comme elle monte en chaise et marche dans Paris!

  but even as he identified the quotation, he scored an additional mark against her, that she should suggest the sugared voluptuousness of Cyrano after the rich and passionate fire of Tristan. He presented himself before her with perfect decorum, a young man preparing to see a lady to her carriage, most correct. “Let me get your carriage for you,” he said, and helped her with her cloak, which was slipping from her shoulders. “Lady Roehampton’s carriage,” he said to the functionary at the door.

  “Just one minute, your Grace,” and the name was taken up and bawled by the linkmen out into the street: “Lady Roe’ampton’s kerridge! Lady Roe’ampton’s kerridge!” and there was a flutter among the little crowd of footmen, as Lady Roehampton’s James detached himself from the group and ran away in his top hat and hollow-sounding top-boots to look for the carriage round the corner.

  Other people were waiting for their carriages under the portico; amongst them, though Sylvia and Sebastian were unaware of it, Lord and Lady O. and their Alice. Lady O. drew her train aside and made signs to Alice, which Alice did not in the least understand. For the first time in her life she paid the minimum of attention to her mother and her signs. Lady Roehampton and the duke were so much more worth looking at! They epitomised for her all the life of the great and brilliant world; they had nothing upon earth to do except to enjoy themselves and be ornamental. How beautiful Lady Roehampton looked in the swirls of that cherry velvet! She envied them both from the bottom of her heart.

  Then James ran up and touched his hat and said her ladyship’s carriage was the next but one. Sylvia, gathering up her skirts, stepped delicately out as the horses drew up, tossing their heads against the bearing-reins, and James sprang forward, the rug over his arm, to open the door. It was a warm night and the window of the brougham was lowered. Sebastian leant in at it. He was bare-headed and extremely pale.

  “Sylvia, I must see you.”

  “Come to luncheon tomorrow.”

  “No, tonight.”

  “Really, Sebastian! George . . .”

  “Nonsense, George is at Newmarket. I shall follow you, in a quarter of an hour.”

  “Lady Roe’ampton’s kerridge stops the way!” shouted the linkman.

  “You won’t get in,” said Sylvia; “I shall send the servants to bed.”

  “You forget; I’ve got the key.”

  “I shall put up the chain.”

  “Then I shall ring the bell.”

  “Lady Roe’ampton’s kerridge stops the way!”

  “Well, if you must—but for heaven’s sake don’t let anyone see you.”

  “That’s all you think of.—All right, James,” he said, stepping back.

  It was a sight to see how James could twist himself up on to the box when the carriage was already in motion.

  Half an hour later Sebastian let himself into the hall of Roehampton House. He heard the jingle of his hansom die away and the quick trot of the horse on the wooden pavement of Curzon Street. He felt cold and hot by turns, and a sharp pain kept stabbing through his head. Sylvia came out of the library as she heard him softly shut the door, and with a finger to her lips beckoned him into the room. A fire was burning, and one shaded lamp on a table. They both stood, facing one another. Sylvia still wore her cherry cloak flung about her, her beauty rising out of it as a painted portrait out of its drapery, but Sebastian noted with satisfaction that she was extremely nervous. She had taken up a paper cutter and was tapping it on her nails. “Are you quite crazy, Sebastian, to come here at this hour of the nigh
t?”

  “It’s not the first time,” he said, looking at her.

  “Please say what you have got to say, and go away quickly. Don’t speak too loudly; I think the servants have all gone to bed, but one can never be sure. However touchy and ridiculous you are, you can still show me a little consideration. What is the matter? Why don’t you speak?”

  But Sebastian remained silent. The words were strangled as they came to his lips. He was feeling so strongly that words were no use to him. Instead, his mind, concentrated on a small, irrelevant object, so that it seemed that object was the only thing of importance to him in the world: a crystal rabbit of Chinese carving, standing on the table immediately beneath the lamp. The rays fell upon it, touching the crystal into little points of highlight; the nose, the ears, and one paw became little prisms, at which Sebastian stared. He had seen the rabbit a thousand times before he had, in fact, given it to Sylvia himself; it was as familiar to him as the many other objects which stood about upon the tables—the Celadon bowls, the jade ash trays, the Faberge cigarette boxes, or the little jewelled clocks from Cartier. From the rabbit his eyes travelled over the rest of the room, that room in which he had been a constant visitor, and which resembled so many other London rooms that he frequented, beautiful in their own way, but all equally impersonal, conventional, correct, with the grey pile carpet, the petit point chairs, the Romneys and the Raeburns, the big Coromandel screen, the mahogany doors, and all those objects disposed upon the tables—Christmas presents mostly, exchanged between so-called friends who in reality cared nothing for one another, but who unquestioningly followed the expensive fashion, giving one another these trinkets that were either cut in stone as hard as their own hearts, or mounted in enamel or ormolu as vain as their own protestations. Romola Cheyne, he remembered, boasted that she had gone round the world commissioning Leygon to do up her new house for her, and had given a dinner party and a ball in it on the night of her return. He remembered this, staring again at the innocent crystal rabbit. He had almost forgotten what had brought him there; he was thinking only that the people he knew resembled the rooms they lived in—not vulgar, not showy; no; restrained rather, and in admirable taste, but hard, stereotyped, and meaningless.