The Edwardians

by Vita Sackville-West

  Sebastian would have resented this questioning from anyone else, but there was something in Mrs. Cheyne’s personality which made people not only endure but answer her questions. Besides, if one took her into one’s confidence, there was more chance of enlisting her discretion than if, thwarted, she had to fall back upon her imagination. She was, moreover, a woman of great experience, to whom few explanations were necessary. “Well,” said Sebastian, crumbling his bread, “George found out and turned rusty.” It was a relief to him to say it. After those seven words, he knew that Mrs. Cheyne would press him no further. They were seven words more than he had spoken to anybody else, but Mrs. Cheyne was a woman who could fill in every detail for herself from an outline of seven words.

  “So that’s that,” said “Mrs. Cheyne, but although she spoke briskly Sebastian felt that her briskness was neither unkindly nor unsympathetic.

  He derived a curious comfort and support from this brief interchange with Mrs. Cheyne. The bond between them had strengthened by fifty per cent—a purely platonic bond, between a middle-aged woman who had a difficult position to maintain, and a young man whose problems were created entirely by his own temperament. Still, Sebastian thought, as he walked away from her house that night, she had suggested no solution to him. He was still in the position of having to work out his own salvation. Perhaps there was no solution. Perhaps he had really been condemned from the start to this unsatisfactory, searching, makeshift life. He wondered what had become of Anquetil. Anquetil, that stranger, had spoken a great many disquieting truths.

  Moreover, Sebastian just then in that autumn of nineteen hundred and six was unhappy for other than personal reasons. Perhaps the excessive gaiety of his summer had disagreed with him. He had often envied Sylvia, who could take enjoyment frankly, and who, in her unanalytical way, assumed that he took it frankly also, despite her momentary anxieties as to a moodiness that she was quite incapable of understanding. Thus she would throw herself upon novelty in an uncritical spirit that was to Sebastian a source of mingled envy and disgust. Every craze of the moment rushed into her life like the waves of a tide filling her shallow pools; he remembered her many enthusiasms: her enthusiasm over the latest American millionaire—“But, darling, you don’t appreciate the freshness of his mind; we all appear to him like a lot of old waxworks; he told me so himself; such an amusing idea, I think; and he does so love our pictures and our houses; he’s going to buy Eadred Templecombe’s ‘Red Boy,’ the Sir Joshua, you know; and last time he came to Wymondham he wanted to buy the whole house and move it brick by brick to America;” her enthusiasm over the Pageant; her enthusiasm over the Boston, and the youthful energy with which she had gone to d’Egville every afternoon for lessons. He had marvelled at her, even while he pretended to accord. But underneath it all he had worried. This American invasion; this Radical Government so unexpectedly returned at the General Election; this much talked-of Labour vote; these cartoons of John Bull looking over a wall at a bull labeiled Labour; this new craze for publicity among the people he knew; this feverishness generally; this adulteration of society; this tendency on the part of young Wickenden to break away—what did it all mean? Did it mean that they were all riding for some smash? and would the smash, when it came, be constructive or destructive? But because such speculations were unsuitable, he had never imposed them upon Sylvia; he had never imposed them upon anybody; he had kept them to himself, and they had festered.

  At moments he was overcome by the futility of his life. Flirtation was scarcely an adequate outlet for the energy of one-and-twenty. His mother, when he once incautiously said something of the sort to her, looked at him in amazement and asked what on earth he meant? “I’m sure you do all that can be expected of you, darling. You run the estate; and then, think of all the time you spend in those tiresome barracks! Why, only the other day I heard Margot asking you to go to Cannes with her, and you said you couldn’t, because you had to be at Windsor. I felt quite cross, knowing how much you would enjoy Cannes with Margot. Really, I don’t see why you need reproach yourself.” But he continued to reproach himself. Every time he passed the two sentry-boxes in Whitehall and saw the two troopers sitting motionless on their motionless horses exposed to the silly admiring gaze of the passerby, he hated himself for the authority he might exercise over those men. Every time he met a detachment of his regiment, their red cloaks spread magnificently over the rumps of their horses, riding through the mist of London down St. James’s Street, he revolted against the connection which linked him with such picturesque foolery. He liked it, and he hated himself for liking it. He liked himself for hating it, and hated himself for submitting to it. He could not endure to look at the photograph of himself in uniform, with the great black boots and the great white gauntlets; yet at the same time, when Wacey, at his mother’s request, presented him with six copies of the photograph to sign for Mrs. Wickenden, Mrs. Vigeon, Mrs. Diggs, Mrs. Hodder, the other Mrs. Wickenden, and Wacey herself, he sat down obediently and signed them all with a suitable flourish.

  That was on the occasion of his coming-of-age. His grandmother, and all his uncles with their wives, gathered at Chevron. Sebastian liked his grandmother. He had sufficient discrimination to respect in her a reality of which his mother and her friends achieved only a thin imitation by the greatest effort. His mother and her friends might be more amusing, more up-to-date; they were certainly more fashionable; but the Dowager Duchess carried an air of solid assurance which belonged to a less uneasy age. That slightly raucous note of defiance was absent from her pronouncements. She did not protest; she merely ignored. Nothing unpleasant ever ruffled her serenity, because she simply failed to notice it. Darwin and the Labour Party alike had passed unnoticed under the bulwark of her mighty nose; the one in eighteen seventy-one, the other in nineteen-six. She remained unaware that the Americans were discovering Europe far more rapidly than the Europeans had discovered America. The only event that had ever been known to arouse her indignation was the death duty imposed by Sir William Harcourt in the Radical Budget of eighteen-ninety-four. She had been forced to take notice of that; because her son, Sebastian’s father, had been killed in the South African war in nineteen-hundred when Sebastian was fourteen years old; and she had read in the Morning Post that the duty payable on the Chevron estates would amount to one hundred thousand pounds’ benefit to the Treasury. On that occasion the Dowager Duchess had startingly and alarmingly emerged from her trance, had sent for her man of affairs, and had dictated a letter of protest to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was a dignified protest, but still it was a protest. It expounded the fallacy of impoverishing the great estates, and pointed out the increase of unemployment which must necessarily arise as a result of such taxation. It drew attention to the number of pensioners supported by the Chevron estate. It hinted that such pensions might in future be discontinued, reduced, or even thrown upon the charge of the Government. It indicated the necessity for the continuance of good relations between landowners, such as the lords of Chevron, and their people. It suggested that any disintegration of such good relations might be attended by the most disastrous consequences.

  The Dowager Duchess was pleased with this composition. She sent for her surviving sons, Lord Geoffrey, Lord John, and Lord Richard, and commanded her man of affairs to read it aloud to them. The man of affairs, who in the solitary presence of the Dowager Duchess was the meekest and most sycophantic of mortals, recovered some degree of masculine self-esteem when confronted with these three male representatives of the House of Chevron. He was uncertain as to how they would regard his part in the affair of the letter; they might even consider that he had had no business to write it. But he was a poor man, with three children to support, and he could not be expected to go against the wishes of the Dowager Duchess. Thus he argued to himself, and hoped that Lord Geoffrey, Lord John, and Lord Richard would sympathise with his position. If the Dowager Duchess chose to make a fool of herself, it was no affair of his;
he was there to do what he was told. To his surprise, and also to his relief, neither Lord Geoffrey, nor Lord John, nor Lord Richard, questioned his part for a moment. On the contrary, they entirely approved their mother’s action. They applauded it as most timely and proper. With her, they settled down to await a satisfactory reply. With her, they exploded into a momentary indignation when a formal acknowledgement was returned by the Treasury saying that her Grace’s communication had been received and would be passed on to the proper quarter. With her, they renewed their optimism. With her, they established a perennial grievance after a polite note came from the Treasury saying that the Chancellor quite understood her Grace’s anxiety, but much regretted that no exception could be made for individual cases.

  The Dowager Duchess never quite recovered from that outrage. It had, however, one definite effect upon her: it caused her to take Sebastian under her protection. She persisted in regarding him ever after as a victim of ill-treatment. In vain did Lucy explain that Sebastian—especially after a long minority—would have a more than adequate income; the Dowager Duchess continued to shake her snow-white head, and to console Lucy with the assurance that at her death her jointure of five thousand a year would revert to supplement Sebastian’s budget. “We useless old women,” she would say remorsefully. On Sebastian’s birthday, and at the beginning of each school-term, she would send him a golden pound in a pillbox; and the pound, every time, would be accompanied by two separate notes; one to Sebastian, saying that, having had four sons of her own, she knew how school-boys liked tips; the other to Lucy, saying she did not send more, because it was bad for boys to have too much pocket-money, but that she could not bear the idea of poor Sebastian going short. “He must be able to keep up his position,” she wrote, “among his schoolfellows.”

  Sebastian, then, liked and appreciated his grandmother, and never treated her to any of his exhibitions of moodiness or ill-temper. His manner towards her was always full of consideration and courtesy. Lucy scoffed and called it his Little-Lord-Fauntleroy manner; but Sebastian only smiled and remained unmoved. The servants said that it was pretty to see them together. Sebastian’s arm, indeed, was the only arm that the Dowager Duchess would accept on her annual peregrinations round the garden. Then she would stop frequently, because she was out of breath and would not admit it, in order to croak critically at some arrangement in the borders which she did not approve. “Diggs never had any taste beyond begonias,” she croaked, pointing with her rubber-tipped stick at some grouping of tulips and forget-me-not; but Sebastian, in patient escort, knew that she was thinking of Diggs’ father, and not of the present Diggs. He never pointed this out. He liked to encourage his grandmother in her memories of fifty years ago, when she had quarrelled with an earlier Diggs over the begonias. Lucy watched him, and told Wacey how odd he was. “As sweet as honey with that old woman, and as cross as two sticks with the rest of us.” Wacey wagged her head, and said there was no Accounting for the Present Generation.

  The presence of his grandmother alone reconciled Sebastian to his coming-of-age. He liked her rudeness, her interference, and her limitations. She was a rough, downright old woman, who said what she meant and meant what she said, and who had no pretty or even civilised affectations of opinion or behaviour. She said quite frankly that she regretted the abolition of slavery. It irritated her to know that an offending servant could give notice. Her personal habits were equally primitive, and by virtue of her position she assumed an equal right to them: if she wanted to spit, she spat; and since she suffered cruelly from eczema, she scratched her back quite frankly with an ivory hand on the end of a long stick, plunging it down the opening of her bodice after dinner; or, in the daytime, rubbed her shoulders against the back of her chair, performing both gestures with equal can dour and vigour. A streak of coarseness in Sebastian’s nature delighted in these displays and in the embarrassment which they produced in his mother. “Really, Sebastian—she adores you—couldn’t you suggest to her. . . .” “But I don’t want to suggest anything to her, Mother; don’t you see that she lives in the eighteenth century?” “No, I don’t,” said Lucy tartly; “I see only that she’s extremely unpleasant and I’m glad I didn’t ask anybody here outside the family to meet her.”

  Sebastian talked to his grandmother about his distress. He knew that she would not sympathise, but he knew also that her lack of sympathy would come from deeper causes than that of his mother or his friends. Where, for instance, was the good in talking to Ambermere, who was in the same position as himself, but who was untroubled by anything save the preoccupation of having as good a time as he possibly could? Where was the good of talking even to Mrs. Cheyne, who would simply tell him not to be silly? His grandmother would not dismiss him with such light evasions; she would hit him over the head with a bludgeon. That was exactly what Sebastian wanted; he wanted to be stunned. But he wanted to be stunned by a real out-of-date conviction; not by a half-conviction shored up by desperate underpinning on a threatened refuge. He wanted to be left lying, stunned, on the last rock, and hoped that he might die before he revived enough to feel the trembling of the foundations. His grandmother, to do her justice, gave him the hardest blows within her powers. “Rubbish!” she said, when he had finished; “I never heard such rubbish in all my life. Young men in my day didn’t talk like that. Young men in my day were men. They hunted and they drank and they made love, and they didn’t worry about doing their duty. They weren’t so squeamish.” She scratched her back with the ivory hand. “Don’t you be so niminy-piminy, my boy. If you were born to certain rights, take ’em, and be thankful. Not that I approve of your mother and her ways. King or no King, I don’t like those Jews; I saw a lot of their horrid names today, when I was looking through the Visitors’ Book. She ought to have put the book away before I came, if she didn’t want me to find out. They’re no fit company for her or for you. I daresay they’ve been putting ideas into your head—perhaps they want you to go into business with them? A name like yours would be the making of them. Don’t you listen. And don’t have ideas. Ideas upset everything. Things are still quite pleasant, even today. Let ’em alone. Don’t have ideas.”

  “Things are all right for us, Grandmother.”

  “Bless the boy! what else matters? We lead the country, don’t we? People who lead deserve their privileges. What would happen to the country, I should like to know, if people at the top enjoyed no leisure? What would happen to the dressmakers, if your mother had no more pretty frocks? Besides, the country likes it. Don’t you make any mistake about that. People must have something to look up to. It’s good for ’em; gives ’em an ideal. They don’t like to see a gentleman degrading himself.”

  Well, thought Sebastian, that’s honest! No qualms there! He liked his grandmother for being so uncompromising. He knew now what made him uneasy in the society of his mother and her friends. They were clinging on, with a sort of feverish obstinacy, to something they no longer quite believed in. The difference between them and the Dowager Duchess was that the Dowager Duchess admitted no flaw in her creed. They admitted none either, but were aware that rude, rough voices grumbled in the background. They tried therefore to disguise their insecurity with flash. Compared with that solid old monument, they were ever so slightly vulgar. She was less vulgar than they, for all her spitting and scratching.

  Lucy frankly proclaimed her relief when the family party went away. She sank down on to a sofa, fanned herself, and said “Ouf!” She said she could not have endured another day of Geoffrey’s anecdotes, or of her mother-in-law’s carping and barking, or of Lady John’s crochet. Thank goodness, she said, they need never be invited all in a bunch again until Sebastian married. “Or Viola,” said Sebastian, pulling at Sarah’s ears. Lucy, in an access of dejection, said that she sometimes thought Viola would never marry. She was so odd. Meanwhile, the coming-of-age had been got over, and had passed, leaving no trace but a few charred marks where the fireworks had sputtered on the lawn�
��much to Diggs’s disgust—a new piece of plate in the strong room, and a Sargent drawing of Sebastian with an open shirt, a muscular throat, springing hair, and a fearless gaze. This drawing had been presented to Lucy by the tenants, and now hung in her sitting room, balancing the Helleu etching of Viola, slightly tinted, in which long rounded curls descended to her shoulders and little tendrils of curl clustered about her ears. Sebastian had pointed out that Viola’s hair was naturally straight, and that curling-tongs produced only a shapeless frizz, not a luxuriant and tender curve. Lucy had been annoyed by this remark, vaguely feeling in her un analytical way that it threatened the pretence which she so greatly preferred to an unpleasant reality. She was always disquieted by her children’s preference for truth. She had not sufficient intelligence to cope with it, or to argue; she simply registered her dislike, lost her temper, and dismissed their foible as a modern affectation, on a par with the works of Mr. H. G. Wells, whose novels, after one experience, she would no longer consent to read. What, she demanded, looking with affection at the Helleu, was the use of artists, if not to make people more beautiful than God had seen fit to make them? Did Sebastian suppose that Gainsborough’s ladies had invariably possessed wavy hair and a perfect bust? No, said Sebastian; and dared to say, that Vandyck’s Cavaliers certainly came home after a wet day’s hunting with their love-locks pitifully straight and dank. But then, cried Lucy triumphantly, how much the greater artist was Vandyck, in that he gave us his Cavaliers always perfectly curled! No, said Sebastian again; how much more interesting, how much more true, how much more intimate, would be a portrait of Charles the First taken off his guard, as he was revealed to no one but to his hunting companions or his valet, before he offered himself, again restored to his official appearance. These arguments made Lucy cross, and only on rare occasions was Sebastian unwise enough to indulge in them. He knew that they served only to expose the unbridgeable gulf between his own generation and his mother’s. Truth was a germ that should only surreptitiously be let loose on an unvaccinated world. Then, it might usefully breed, and kill.