The Edwardians

by Vita Sackville-West

  Meanwhile, the pressure was too strong for him. He could attack Helleu as a symbol, but he could not shake himself wholly free.

  Teresa Spedding and Sebastian were brought together in the clumsy way that often marks such apparently improbable but indubitably fore-ordained happenings. Life, as the novelists would have it, makes no allowance for such accidents. Yet in real life, as we all have reason to know, they occur. Lady Roehampton had spoken truly when, in those early days, she had said that things happened in a quick, odd succession. Sebastian certainly, at this period, desired no adventures of the amorous or any other sort. If he wanted anything, he wanted to be left alone to think things out. But to be left alone was beyond the reasonable hopes of any young man of his attractions and weakness. Life shapes itself, callous of our control, but proves itself to have been wise in the end. No doubt Teresa was necessary to Sebastian’s development.

  It may be remembered that Teresa, during a performance of Tristan and Isolde, had wished that Lady Warwick—innocent and unconscious victim in this matter—might slip at the exit and twist an ankle; Lady Warwick, however, had emerged unscathed; it was reserved for Sebastian himself to suffer the slight accident which complicated his life at a dangerous moment and gave him so disillusioning an insight into the workings of a world different from his own. Speculations as to the powers which flung Sebastian down on Teresa’s very doorstep would be idle here and out of place; physical incidents are seldom worth dwelling on in fiction, however disagreeably large they may bulk in life; the sagacious novelist hurries on to the psychological situation thus adventitiously produced, skipping any explanation of an event which is indeed, by reasonable processes, inexplicable. Sebastian, then, alighting from a hansom which had not yet come completely to a standstill, tripped on the kerb and stumbled with a sprained ankle into the gutter. His impetuosity was no doubt to blame. He had espied a flower-seller with a basket of gardenias, and, poking up the trapdoor of his cab, had enjoined the driver to stop; but, even as the horse responding to the sudden rein brought all four feet together and slid to its haunches on a wet pavement, he leapt from the step with the result above related. The startled flower-seller, scenting a tip, advanced with helpful hand. Sebastian, however, was beyond such easy aid; in short, he, could not stand. Sitting helpless on the kerb, he produced two sovereigns and said he would take all the gardenias. Cabby and flower-girl, standing over him, contemplated him with a mixture of admiration and dismay. It was not everybody who could sprain an ankle and yet complete a purchase with such lavishness and coolness. The cabby exclaimed that the young toff had a nerve and no mistake. The flower-girl gasped, and hastily stuffed the sovereigns into the top of her boot. But clearly that was not an end of the matter: they could not leave the young toff sitting there. The street was not only wet, but empty; nothing but a brass plate beneath a doorbell promised relief. The flower-girl rang. Sebastian, with no premonitions as to what was being done to his life, felt himself being helped under the armpits into Dr. John Spedding’s waiting room.

  It was not usual for Teresa to interfere with her husband’s patients; it was, in fact, a point upon which John was firm. But on this occasion she decided that she might break the rule, for, gazing in boredom down from her drawing room window, she had observed the accident and was already in the act of rushing downstairs when the doorbell tinkled and she realised that the obvious solution had occurred to the two other witnesses. Thus it came about that Teresa herself opened the door to Sebastian, and with her native but cultivated talent for recognition instantly identified him with the dark. young man she had seen at the Opera in Lady Roehampton’s box.

  For the next half-hour Teresa was in torture. A friend of Lady Roehampton’s beneath her roof! A potential opening to that great, that desirable world!—for we have already seen how Teresa’s imagination could run on, and to what glittering visions it quickly led her. It mattered nothing that the young man’s black coat and trousers—“morning dress,” murmured Teresa—were stained with mud, or that his top hat had turned to a lamentable object, retrieved by the cabby from the gutter where it had rolled, and gingerly deposited by cabby on tiptoe upon the console in the Speddings’ little hall, among the visiting cards and the notice which said “IN” and “OUT.” The young man’s accoutrements might be soiled, but the young man within them was a member of Lady Roehampton’s world. That was enough for Teresa, who saw nothing ludicrous in his situation. He was a member of Lady Roehampton’s world. But she didn’t know his name.

  John, fetched by the parlour-maid, who arrived with tardy dignity to answer the bell, came in his best bored professional manner from his consulting room. Teresa ran to intercept him in the hall. It was necessary, it was essential, she tried to explain in a hot whisper—restrained because cabby and flower- girl were both still hovering about—that he should ascertain the name of his client. But John could be exasperating on such occasions. He merely put Teresa aside, in benign but dismissive fashion, and disappeared into the waiting room, closing the door firmly and finally behind him. There was nothing left for Teresa to do but to go upstairs, and, twisting the lace curtains of her drawing room windows, to spy upon the departure of their guest. John, she reflected, so solid, so comforting, in most emergencies of life, was in such matters not wholly reliable. He could not be made to realise their importance. When she tried to explain their importance to him, he was apt to laugh and to fondle her. “You dear little snob,” he had said once; and Teresa had never forgotten it. I t had shown her how little he appreciated the ambitions she nourished for his sake. Not for her own sake, of course; but just for the sake of transforming John from a humble South Kensington practitioner into London’s fashionable doctor, the Mainstay of Mayfair. If John became the Mainstay of Mayfair, then Teresa would be willing to go to Mayfair parties, the helpmate of John Spedding—Sir John Spedding—“such a help his splendid little wife has been to him in his career.” Teresa had mapped it all out, but for some reason John would not play up. That young man with his sprained ankle in the waiting room—John would be sure to let him slip through his fingers. With sudden determination, Teresa ran downstairs again and listened at the keyhole till the men were ready to come out. Then she was discovered, as they say on the stage, putting the sporting prints straight in the hall.

  That marked the beginning of Sebastian’s friendship with the Speddings. The flower-girl with surprising honesty, before she left, dumped the gardenias on to the waiting room table among the out-of-date Punches and Illustrated London News, and Sebastian gave them all to the doctor’s pretty, sympathetic, fluttering little wife. After he had gone, Teresa, who knew what gardenias cost, totted them up with appraising and dazzled eyes. In her excitement and suspense she could do no more than put the gardenias in water—but two of them she pinned into her frock—for the young man had gone off with John in a four-wheeler, and so far, for all Teresa could make out, had given nothing but his address, 120 Grosvenor Square; no name; John, at any rate, had addressed him by no name, no title; just a curt “I’ll see you home,” and off they had gone together, in the growler, the young man hopping to it on one foot, unable to pretend that he could dispense with John’s proffered hand. Teresa waited, not knowing—so little do we know ourselves, and Teresa being at best a self-deceptive young woman—whether it was the young man’s anonymity or his personality that most allured her.

  But when John returned, alone, she was not much wiser. She besieged John with questions, as John in his slyness had fully anticipated. He now took a mischievous delight in disappointing her. Where, he asked with a bland innocence, was the point in asking for the name of a casual client who paid for one’s services in cash? A client who was helped into one’s house by a cabby and a flower-girl, having sprained his ankle practically on one’s doorstep, was not likely to become a regular patient should he chance to catch the mumps or the measles or to grow feverish with a common cold. Arrived at 120 Grosvenor Square, the young man had with suitab
le diffidence plunged his hand into his pocket, rattled the coins, and asked the doctor what he owed him. He had then limped into his house, supported by two footmen and followed by a butler, all in an appropriate state of concern at the mishap befallen their master; the door had closed behind him, and John had turned away. Teresa shook her small fists in her husband’s face. Was he mad, was he mad, she demanded, to lose sight of such a patient without even ascertaining his name?

  There was, however, such a thing as a Red Book, and Teresa, after she had exhausted her rage against an amused and unrepentant John, rushed to consult it. Running her finger down the page—“here comes Brook Street,” “here comes Carlos Place,” she discovered the owner of number 120. Then indeed her indignation against John mounted to the highest note. Chevron House! he had stood on the threshold of Chevron House, and had neglected even to see the duke to a sofa! Teresa wrung her hands, and her despair was sincere. She minded for John’s sake as much as for her own—or so she thought, and what we think is, at least partially, what we are. If John would not help himself, then, she declared, she would abandon the uphill task of helping John. She was nearly in tears, but John only pulled at his pipe and smiled to himself as at a private joke. He loved Teresa, and in his eyes Teresa’s foibles only added to her charms. It amused him to think that Teresa had briefly harboured a duke in her own house, and, outwitted, had let him go. John himself, all the time, had had a shrewd idea of Sebastian’s identity. But he was not the man to press for the name of a patient who seemed reluctant to reveal it.

  A ray of hope, a manifestation of Providence, however, gleamed for Teresa. She discovered that Sebastian’s top hat had been left in the hall.

  On receipt of Mrs. Spedding’s note—for Chevron House was not yet on the telephone—Sebastian came in person to fetch his hat. Why he came in person, instead of sending a servant, he scarcely knew; he knew only that he was bored at the moment; that he had met Mrs. Spedding’s eyes; that they were full of query, excitement; that he was mortally sick of all the people of his acquaintance; that he wanted above all things to bury himself at Chevron; and that, failing that luxury which his regimental duties forbade, he must occupy his mind somehow, in order to forget Sylvia and the catastrophe which he had brought upon her. He was, indeed, in that unhappy frame of mind which succeeds upon an unfortunate love affair unfortunately terminated. He did not like to think about Sylvia. His reason told him that he had been in no way to blame; but no one except a cad likes to reflect that he has been loved more than he has loved. It produces an uneasy though quite unreasonable sense of guilt. So Sebastian went himself to fetch his hat.

  That second meeting between Sebastian and Teresa was unpropitious. He had given her no warning of his coming, but had caused himself to be announced by a flustered parlour-maid just as Teresa was settling down to pour out tea for her sister-in-law, up for the day by the cheap train from Dorking. Teresa, expecting her sister-in-law, had taken no pains with her appearance, but had dedicated herself—not altogether unwillingly—to a comfortable hour of gossip about John’s family and of comparison between the prices at Whiteley’s and John Barker’s in the Winter White Sales—matters in which Mrs. Spedding and Mrs. Tolputt were equally interested. Sebastian’s arrival, to say the least of it, was disconcerting; Teresa was pitiably at a loss to reconcile these two contradictory elements. Yet the balance was definitely on the triumphant side. How could it be otherwise? A duke dropping in to tea! So Teresa phrased it to her self—comme si de rien n’était, she added, having once passed an exam in French, and having retained a few colloquialisms although she could not have sustained a conversation in French for more than one minute with any safety. A duke dropping in to tea!—and a frantic scramble ensued in her mind, while she introduced Sebastian to Mrs. Tolputt, as to how she could prevent Mrs. Tolputt from talking about pillow-cases, and at the same time could prevent Sebastian from betraying the extremely slight and distressingly accidental character of their acquaintance.

  The opening was good. Teresa, agitated as she was, could see that. Mrs. Tolputt, as she herself would have expressed it, was knocked all of a heap. She had had no idea that Teresa carried on that sort of a life. Dukes, indeed! That would be a tidbit to tell Mother tomorrow. Or should she catch an earlier train and go round to Mother’s that evening? Mrs., Tolputt surreptitiously looked at her watch; it hung heavily, weighing down her keys, on her chatelaine. Teresa noted the glance, and, not wishing to press a precarious safety too far, suggested that Maud mustn’t risk missing her train. Mrs. Tolputt was indignant. “Surely, Teresa, you know that a cheap Day Ticket carries one up to the Theatre Train—eleven-forty, that is—why, you ought to know that, considering how often you and John, when you lived at Dorking. . . .”

  Teresa made a quick face at her sister-in-law, which Mrs. Tolputt, who prided herself upon being sharp at the uptake, was prompt to recognise. “Ah, of course, it’s so long since you and John lived at Dorking, you’ve forgotten. But would you believe me.” . . . She turned to Sebastian, and her eloquence was suddenly arrested because she was not sure whether she ought to address him as “Your Grace” or “Duke” ; “would you believe me,” she resumed, entering on a fresh lap and resolving that he should remain anonymous, “would you believe me, I can get up to Town and back for one-and-thruppence. From Dorking on Wednesdays, that is. And believe me, Juke,” she cried, forgetting herself as her enthusiasm waxed, “that’s no mean consideration when the sales are on. I assure you, I make the price of my ticket over and over again. Those country shops, it’s something dreadful, the way they stick it on. Believe me or not,” she said, excitedly, turning to Teresa and reverting to the tone of their conversation before Sebastian entered, “Judd’s would charge me ten shillings a pair for servants’ sheets, where at Barker’s I could get the same thing for seven-and-six. That’s half-a-crown difference,” she said, turning to Sebastian, and emphasising her remark by striking the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other; “half-a-crown difference! it may not sound much, I grant you, but repeated over and over again it comes to something in the year’s budget, and that’s a thing no man will ever realise—though you, Juke,” she said, suddenly recollecting herself, “I daresay have never had to think of such things.—I expect, Teresa,” she said, turning to her dismayed sister-in-law, “the juke has a housekeeper to think of such things for him—eh?—but I dare say you know more about his household affairs than I do, eh?” and she giggled, and buried her nose in a cup of tea.

  The tea-drinking at any rate stemmed the flow of Mrs. Tolputt’s volubility for the moment, but the consolation to Teresa was small, for she knew that Maud would be off again, no sooner than she had taken her nose out of the cup. She writhed as she thought that Sebastian might have come on any other day, when Maud was not there. And now he would certainly never come again. She kept glancing at him as he sat there, so sleek in his black London clothes—“his hair is like patent leather,” she thought—his ebony stick laid on the ground beside him, his manner interested and deferential as he listened to Maud’s outpourings. How beautifully grave he was! yet he must be bored, horrified, thought the agonised Teresa as she looked at her sister-in-law, so stout and homely and voluble, buttoned into her plum velvet bodice like the wife of any British tradesman. She noticed Maud’s string bag, which, stuffed with bulky parcels, was reposing on the floor beside her, and contrasted its ungainliness with the elegance of Sebastian’s stick. This contrast in the adjuncts they carried seemed to epitomise the difference between them. Oh, she thought, if only she could cover her eyes and stuff her fingers into her ears, that the misery of this scene might be excluded! No, he would certainly never come again.

  But he did come again. When he took his leave, helping himself up by the back of his chair, leaning on his stick, he asked Teresa for permission to return. True, he made the excuse of wanting to thank the doctor. “I am so sorry to have missed your husband . . .” but Teresa knew very well that the doctor
had nothing to do with it. It was she herself whom Sebastian wanted to see; she knew that by the way he looked at her, an unsmiling look, but intent, searching; the look, in fact, which Sebastian was apt to bend on all woman, whether he meant anything by it or not. This time he did mean something by it. No one ever knew where the wind of Sebastian’s caprice would blow next, though it was certainly very odd that it should have veered in the direction of Mrs. John Spedding. But he was bored; he had known too many different kinds of women and could appraise them all—women of fashion, prostitutes, dubious aspirants to social heights, fortune hunters, sharks, toadies, and the light-mannered ladies of the stage—none of them held any more interest for him than the A.B.C.; but this pretty, silly little Teresa, who gazed at him with such puzzled admiring eyes, and who was evidently so much ashamed of her nice vulgar sister-in-law, might amuse him for a week, and at all events she would be a new experience, a type he had never learned before. It was perhaps a somewhat languid impulse, and not very complimentary to Teresa; but Sebastian was not in the humour for anything more creditable. Nor did he intend to do Teresa any harm. Sebastian was one of those charming but dangerous people who never do harm except by accident; such discontent as internally ate him away, remained his private knowledge; he never gave anything of himself beyond the things he could not help giving—his looks, his gravity, his slow smile, his caressing manner which, in conjunction with his aloofness, made him especially attractive and exasperating to women. In some complicated way, this sense of his own detachment persuaded him of their immunity. He was playing a game with a soft ball; a game in which nobody had any business to get hurt. The fact that they returned the ball at all, after his first preliminary throw, convinced him that they knew the game and its rules; after that, he settled down to play in earnest.