The Edwardians

by Vita Sackville-West

  Had not his own liaison with Sylvia been of that nature? He looked at her, standing by the fire, waiting for him to speak, so beautiful in her cherry cloak, so exquisitely in accordance with the refinement of her surroundings. Thus far at least he misread her as cruelly as Lady O.’s Alice and Teresa Spedding.

  “George has found out,” she said.

  She broke down then and wept, sinking on to the sofa and burying her face in her hands. For once in her life she forgot about her looks; her tiara went awry, most pitiable and grotesque; her tears dropped on to the velvet of her cloak. What would Lady O.’s Alice and Teresa Spedding have said, could they have seen her now! Sebastian himself was horrified; he had not thought her capable of such despair; he had so often upbraided her for her superficiality; had told her—cruelly enough—that in self-defence he would never give her all his heart. “You know nothing about love,” he had said; it had been a joke between them—though a joke with a bitter edge to it—and he had never seen how wistfully she sometimes looked at him after he had teased her. She had not wanted him to know how much she loved him, even though by withholding that knowledge she had forced him to misjudge her. She had been afraid of making him feel a prisoner. Now there was no longer any reason for concealment. She put out her hand and groped for his head; he was kneeling beside her, and she hugged his head to her breast, weeping over him.

  When she had recovered herself a little, they talked; Sebastian sprang up and walked about the room, for he could not endure to look at Sylvia in such ruin. “But if you really care like that,” he said, “tell George to go to hell; let him divorce you and come to me; we’ll travel, we’ll bury ourselves at Chevron; anything you like. Now that I’ve found out, I shall never doubt you again,” and he besought her, saying that happiness was not a thing to throw away for any consideration in the world. She sobbed again, even as she laughed at him; “Sebastian, my darling, what are you saying? I’m an old woman—are you proposing to marry me? or are we to live together in open sin? Don’t you see that marriage between us would be absurd? I could never face the ridicule . . .” “Then live with me,” he said; but she shook her head, “Sebastian, you’re young, you’re crazy, you don’t know the world; I couldn’t face that scandal.”

  “Well, but Sylvia,” he said, trying to be reasonable, “you disconcert me completely: at one moment you tell me that the whole of your life comes to an end if we give each other up, and the next moment you tell me that you can’t face the scandal. Is your reputation more precious to you than I am? Surely we have passed beyond social things. Life isn’t entirely made up of parties. If I don’t give a damn for the world, why should you?”

  “I don’t know, Sebastian,” she said miserably. “I’m made like that, I suppose. What would happen to us if I lived with you? Everybody would fight shy of us, and I couldn’t bear it. Despise me if you must. You have a great deal more courage than I have and you’re more independent. Look how angry you were with me over Margaret’s engagement. If I’d listened to you, I should have given her a cheque and told her to elope with Adrian. Oh, heavens,” she said, with a fresh burst of tears; “don’t tell me she loved that boy as I love you.”

  He tried again to persuade her; he told her that she was making herself the victim of a system she herself and her equals had created. There seemed to him something incongruous between her grief, which was obviously genuine, and the false creed which forced her to suffer it. “The moral aspect doesn’t exist for you,” he said; “if it did, I should have no right to urge you, I suppose, but you care nothing for George, you care only for the world. It’s incomprehensible to me, Sylvia. I always knew that we were different. What would anything matter, so long as we had each other?”

  “Sebastian, you talk like a boy.”

  “And you—you talk like the most cynical of women. You’ve been brought up on the principle of old Octavia Hull: Thou shalt not be found out.”

  “I have, I admit it, I’m not ashamed of it. People like us must not be found out. We owe it. . . .”

  “Oh, Sylvia, spare me those phrases.”

  “But they are true. Society is founded on them. We at the top. . . .”

  “I never knew there was so much solidarity between you and the old women,” he said sardonically.

  “I never knew it either—until it came to the point,” she replied. “You know that I was never very careful; not strictly careful. I did rash things, like that Pageant, which compromised my position to a certain extent, but I risked it because I wanted to do it.”

  “Oh, Sylvia!” he said, suddenly touched by her childishness.

  “Well, you see for yourself,” she continued more confidently, encouraged by the softening in his tone and feeling that she had at last hit upon something to say in self-justification. “I wasn’t exactly a coward always, was I? I did show a certain independence? I went against George, over that. He didn’t exactly forbid it, but he did say it was unbecoming, and I knew he was right. I knew a lot of people—people who mattered—would disapprove, but I did it all the same. And I suffered for it,” she added; “oh yes, I suffered for it.”

  He looked at her, gently, not scornfully, thinking that to her there was very little difference between one kind of suffering and another.

  “So you see, Sebastian.” She went on, “up to a point I have always been ready to take risks. But there comes a point beyond which one simply cannot go. It breaks my heart to lose you. I shall never be the same again.” She meant it.

  “But you will still be Lady Roehampton, and I daresay that in a few years’ time people will have forgotten all about the Pageant. Had I not better go now? The servants might see the light in the hall, and come down to find out who was here. They have never caught us yet, and it would be a pity if we were caught on the very night we were saying good-bye.”

  Chapter V

  Teresa

  Lucy poured out her heart to Miss Wace. She took Wacey’s loyalty and discretion absolutely as a matter of course, partly from years of habit, partly because it never occurred to her to regard Wacey as a human being at all, but rather as a repository for ill-temper, petty annoyance, temporary good-humour, or whatever mood she, Lucy, might happen to be in. Wacey in point of fact was entirely trustworthy. Her whole life was wrapped up in Chevron and in Lucy, for snobbish and emotional reasons, and Lucy’s indiscretions sufficiently replaced any baby that might under different circumstances have nuzzled at Wacey’s breast. Wacey had her friends, but it was not to them that she would repeat Lucy’s confidences. Not likely. She got quite enough satisfaction out of wagging her head, pursing her mouth, and putting on a general air of I-could-an-I-would. An internal pride compensated her for any external boasting that she might thus forgo. The tap at her door, the almost surreptitious stealing-in of Lucy, was reward enough. She felt then like an old Nannie to whom her charge repairs in moments of distress.

  Lucy sat at the schoolroom table—the schoolroom had long since been handed over to Wacey as her own domain—and twisted her pretty little hands unhappily on the dark-red, ink-stained cloth. “I wish I knew what had happened, Wacey”—that was her refrain. Wacey knew very well to what she referred. “He won’t let me talk to him, Wacey. He doesn’t see any of his friends. He comes here, and spends all his time with Wickenden and the estate people. You know that new circular saw that he has installed next to the forge? Well, he stands for hours with his hands in his pockets, watching the men cut up the wood as though it were human beings they were cutting. That’s what Mrs. Cheyne said last week. He didn’t know we were watching him. Yet in a way he seems quieter. He never does those mad things now—never arranges for those mad parties. In a way, I wish he would. It seemed normal for a young man with plenty of money. It worried me, but it didn’t really worry me, if you know what I mean. It only worried me because I felt he wasn’t really happy underneath. He wasn’t doing it because he liked it. I wish he would do
it again, and because he did like it, quite naturally,” said poor puzzled Lucy.

  “He won’t, though” said Miss Wace, sagely; “not now that he has had a Disappointment in Love.”

  “Don’t’ talk such nonsense, Wacey,” said Lucy, irritated; “what do you know about disappointments in love? You don’t imagine that he really cared about that baby-snatcher? Good gracious me, he was a year old when her daughter was born. I remember taking him with me when I went to see her in her cradle.” Lucy, by a queer unnecessary refinement of discretion, was becoming mixed as to her pronouns in her avoidance of proper names. The confusion deepened as she went on. “Her mother and I—her mother was still in bed—we used to make jokes about their marrying. I remember we used to discuss what church they should be married in. That was—oh dear,” Lucy sighed, “in eighty-six. We wore bustles,” and Lucy, suddenly amused, went off into peals of laughter. “What odd things one remembers! And how much more sensible we have become since those days! Would you believe it, Wacey, once I had a pair of sleeves of rainbow velvet with a white satin tight-fitting frock made by Worth, and a man seeing me struggling to go through a narrow doorway said, ‘Oh, duchess, surely you ought to wear only one sleeve at a time?’ And then after that the sleeves became so tight that one could not put on one’s little bonnet without undoing one’s bodice. Isn’t it incredible to think we could have suffered such things in the name of fashion?”

  This was the mood in which Miss Wace adored Lucy; she could have listened for hours to such reminiscences. They evoked a dashing past which Miss Wace knew only by hearsay, since it had occurred long before Miss Wace’s advent at Chevron; they indicated a period in which the great scandals, such as the Tranby Croft scandal, had taken place, and when the fashionable pastime had been bicycling round Battersea Park; a period when Miss Wace’s father was still alive, and she had not been obliged to go out and earn her living. She adored Lucy for having led, at that time, much the same life as she was leading now. Of late, Miss Wace had observed, the duchess was much more readily inclined to such recollections of the past. I t was as though she groped after something which was vanishing, something which had vanished—something which was already history.

  “Fancy,” said Lucy, “Sylvia and me in bustles! But how lovely she was! All the old men were mad about her. And all the young ones too. Whenever she appeared in a ballroom, there was a rush for her.”

  “And for you, too, duchess,” said Miss Wace, loyally.

  “Ah, well,” said Lucy, who did not altogether relish that ‘too.’ “We used to go about a good deal together, certainly. And to think,” she reverted, “that she should end by playing that trick on him! What do you think of that, Wacey? What do you think of that? When I remember him in his pelisse and Margaret sucking a comforter in her cradle!”

  “I call it a Breach of Friendship,” Miss Wace pronounced.

  “Rubbish,” said Lucy, turning on her; “if a woman of her age can catch a young man of his, she has every right to do so. Not that I should care about it myself; I should think it undignified. But these women who have been beauties all their lives—they die hard, you know, Wacey. They can’t resist it. They remember their old triumphs. But still, we don’t know what has really happened, Wacey, do we? We only know that they don’t see each other anymore, and that she has gone off to Norfolk, and that he seems completely at a loose end. And now I hear that Lord Roehampton has got himself appointed governor of some province in Australia—or Africa perhaps it is—and that they are going off directly after their daughter’s wedding.”

  “Let me see—Lady Margaret is marrying Lord Wexford in the first week of November, I think,” murmured Miss Wace succulently; “St. George’s, Hanover Square; and that reminds me,” she added professionally, putting on a voice like an engagement block, “Viola has an appointment next Thursday to try on her bridesmaid’s frock.”

  “Well, you’d better go with her, Wacey; I know you like that sort of thing. The procreation of children and all that. A wedding is nothing but an excuse for indulging in indecency under respectable guise. Oh, you needn’t look down your nose. You know perfectly well that you would like to see a nursery at Chevron full of Sebastian’s children. You know that when you come to Sebastian’s wedding in the chapel, you will be thinking of the nursery all the time.”

  Miss Wace did not appreciate such remarks, but Lucy was correct in her diagnosis all the same. The anticipation of Sebastian’s marriage and its results were constant factors at the back of the minds of all the feminine population of Chevron. Miss Wace, Mrs. Wickenden, the housemaids, the scullery-maids, the still-room maid, the laundresses, and the wives of the men-servants all looked forward secretly and lasciviously to the day when his Grace’s engagement should be announced. The essential secretiveness of their anticipation did not deter them from open discussion. But their discussion was based on other than the real grounds. It took the advertised form of an altruistic interest in Sebastian’s welfare. Miss Wace, of course, held herself aloof from it, yet to her own friends she confided her dread lest Sebastian should become a Confirmed Bachelor. Mrs. Wickenden, of course, repaired to the sympathetic ear of her sister-in-law. The housemaids, scullery-maids, and laundresses chattered amongst themselves, unaware that each one of them projected herself into the position of his Grace’s bride; turned over the trousseau as though it were her own; stood before the chapel altar and the white lilies in the great golden pots; imagined herself in a first-class carriage alone with Sebastian, en route for Spain or Egypt; lived through the intoxicating strangeness of the first night in the Paris Rite. Anyone of the housemaids, scullery-maids, or laundresses would have been sincerely and properly shocked by any suggestion of the kind. Their visions were all of a young lady, fair, innocent, and well-bred, who, shyly yielding to his Grace’s pleading, involved herself deliciously and inextricably in the consequences of her murmured “Yes”; for such was their ignorance and humility, that they were content to savour their own dreams through the medium of another. Their simple minds dwelt exclusively upon matrimony. Wacey and Mrs. Wickenden, certainly, were better advised, and derived a dangerous but agreeable titillation from their knowledge of Sebastian’s affair with Lady Roehampton; they tasted their superiority, initiated as they were into the goings-on of the great world; nevertheless they shared the simple cravings of the lesser fry, the craving for romance, the feminine fulfilment of a wedding, the feudal desire for an, heir—and, pushing their primitive sentimentality a step further, would willingly have wept over Sebastian’s funeral and worshipped a baby master of Chevron in his cradle. Sebastian himself, unconscious of this stirring in the ant-heap of Chevron, went his own way and failed to gratify the visions of his mother and his dependents.

  He had had one unfortunate experience; he did not want another. (But lions lie in wait for us round the corner of our path.) He was not broken by the loss of Sylvia, but he was made unhappy, uneasy; what worried him most was the knowledge that Sylvia was somewhere in the world, far harder hit than he himself. Whenever he could get to Chevron, he enjoyed hours of complete forgetfulness. His mother distressed herself unnecessari1y. When he stood watching his new saw-mill, he was thinking simply of how cleanly the circular saw cut through the wood, knots and all; he was not thinking of Sylvia, who had never been associated with such things as saw-mills in his mind. Chevron and Sylvia had always been kept quite separate. Only when he was in London did the uncomfortable thought of Sylvia return; he was always aware of the proximity of Curzon Street, even though he knew the blinds of Roehampton House were down—down, as for a death. Poor Sylvia! how much she must be hating her enforced retirement in Norfolk! How intolerably rural George would become! He wondered what Sylvia did all day. Sylvia’s friends wondered too, and tried to sound Sebastian, but only Mrs. Cheyne dared to tackle him outright. Mrs. Cheyne was a woman of strong personality and vigorous courage; Sebastian admired and respected her, and she for her part entertained
an almost maternal interest in the young man, an interest which was not lessened by the fact that he was rich, handsome, discontented, a duke, and the owner of Chevron. They understood each other very well. Mrs. Cheyne appeared to him as one of the few women of his acquaintance who had a real spaciousness in her nature; a woman who erred and aspired with a certain magnificence. She brought to everything the quality of the superlative. When she was worldly, it was on the grand scale. When she was mercenary, she challenged the richest fortunes. When she loved, it was in the highest quarters. When she admitted ambition, it was for the highest power. When she suffered, it would be on the plane of tragedy. Romola Cheyne, for all her hardness, all her materialism, was no mean soul.

  She had, however, one weakness: she could not allow anyone to be better informed than herself. Whether it was politics, finance, or merely the affairs of her friends, the last word, the eventual bombshell of information, must proceed from her and no other. On the whole she preferred her information to be good; and although she was quite prepared to invent where she could not ascertain, she would first make an assault on the main and most reliable source of knowledge. Thus if she wanted to know exactly what had happened between Sylvia and Sebastian, she would ask either Sylvia or Sebastian; and Sylvia not being available it was on Sebastian that her attack was directed one evening, when he took her into dinner at her own house; “Now tell me, Sebastian,” she said at once, “what’s this about Sylvia going off to the country in the middle of the season? She told me she needed a rest, but that’s clearly nonsense; I never saw her looking better in her life. Sylvia would never coop herself up like that with old George, unless she had a good reason for it. What is it all about?”