The Edwardians

by Vita Sackville-West

  Sebastian had exulted; he thought he had found the thing for which he had been searching ever since Sylvia first aroused him. He adopted Phil’s standards, Phil’s expressions; while their connection lasted, she really did something to break down his conventions, to loosen the inevitable rigidity of his creed. Things which he had thought important she swept aside as cobwebs. Any form of punctiliousness provoked her laughter; any sense of social obligation, her impatience and derision. Thus if Sebastian had an appointment, she would compel him to break it, so that telephone messages frequently went to various ladies, saying that Sebastian much regretted he was unable to come to luncheon, or tea, or dinner, after all; and instead of fulfilling his engagement he would picnic with Phil in her studio, or would take her in his car, down to Kew or Richmond. At first, such was his intoxication that he enjoyed these truancies, regarding them as an act of defiance, a snap of the fingers; he loved Phil the more for her power to make him do things which outraged all his upbringing. Sylvia had never been able to make him do anything he did not want, or to prevent him from doing anything he proposed to do. But after a while Phil’s laxness of conduct began to irritate him. The habit of courtesy was too deeply rooted in him; also he liked a certain order in his life; when he had made a plan he liked to adhere to it; Phil’s harum-scarum methods really went too sharply against his grain. Then the extreme disorder of her life began to jar upon him; he would arrive at her studio at four o’clock in the afternoon, to find her having breakfast, while the dirty plates of last night’s supper had not yet been cleared away and a thick film of dust layover everything. Phil was incapable of understanding his distaste. “You’re so correct,” she would sneer at him. According to her ideas, one ate when one was hungry, slept when one was drowsy, dressed when one felt inclined, sat up all night if so disposed, threw letters into the fire if not in the mood to answer them, turned people out of the house if one had had enough of them. “Get out now,” he had heard her say to her friends; “I’m sick of you.” When he remonstrated, she pointed out with perfect truth that her friends did not mind. They were “her sort,” and they were used to her. They knew that she meant no offence, and so took none. Her complete frankness as to her relations with himself also embarrassed him; he had been accustomed to people who, whatever their private lives, observed the decencies in public; no one seeing him and Sylvia together could have suspected anything but friendship between them, but Phil treated him quite openly as her lover when her friends had invaded the studio; she kissed him impetuously, lavished endearments on him, and came to nestle beside him on the divan, or to sit on his knee. Sebastian felt that, since she was not a prostitute, she should not behave like one. He could not be angry with her, for he knew that under this distressingly frank surface she owned the most honest soul he had ever known, save Leonard Anquetil’s, but gradually he was coming to the conclusion that his excursion into Bohemia had not been a success, Birds of a different feather had best remain apart. At any rate—even though she made him break his engagements—she would let him go as soon as he gave any indication of his wish to do so. It had always been understood that no obligation existed on either side. Phil would never seek to hold him against his will. She might grieve—he shrank from that thought—but she was gallant, she was proud; she would not whine; she would tell him to go, and get it over quickly. She would wave to him before shutting her door behind him, even though she might then throw herself down on the divan and weep, and tear the cushions with her teeth. It was this very conviction which held him and made him hesitate.

  Sebastian was scrupulous, and certain accepted conventions had forced him to satisfy his conscience. “Would you marry me, if I asked you to?” he had said one day. She had shouted with instant laughter. “Darling, precious Sebastian, I’ve been waiting for that very question. I knew you would feel obliged to ask it. You’re a gentleman, and you’ve seduced an innocent girl—isn’t that the position? Well, my answer is no, a thousand times no, thank you very much. What! me a duchess, and having to live in your horrible old house, and dress for dinner every night, and produce an heir, and kow-tow to all your old aunts and grandmothers, and give orders to a lot of servants, and never call my soul my own again? Not me! Besides, my dear, you wouldn’t like it any better than I should. I shouldn’t fit in. No; when the time comes you’ll marry some tidy miss who’ll do her duty by you. You can ask me to your wedding if you like. Where will it be? Westminster Abbey? I should like to see you in uniform, very handsome. Now we’ve got that over. Admit you’re relieved?”

  Sebastian was relieved. He loved her with redoubled ardour.

  Still, the day came when he could bear it no longer. As he had foreseen, she made no fuss. She accepted his going as she had accepted his coming. She refused his suggestion that he should settle a thousand a year upon her; and made him feel that thereby, though not by his desertion, he had offered her an insult. Just before their parting, a lot of things came out and found the air. He discovered that his orderliness had irked her just as much as her disorder had irked him. “We could never have hit it off for long. There was never anything but love to keep us together.” In those two sad, wise little phrases she summed up the tragedy of much striving towards happiness.

  For a time he was very miserable. Nothing but common sense restrained him from going back to her. Then, true to his temperament, he pulled himself out of his slough and went to the opposite extreme. He looked round for his tidy miss. He pitched upon the dullest, nicest, and plainest girl he could find; he pitched upon Lord and Lady O.’s Alice.

  He did not like Lord and Lady O.’s Alice; he almost hated her. He hated her for being so exactly what she ought to have been. Familiar with the family joke of Miss Wace’s habit of neat labels, he lacerated himself by labelling her as Miss Wace would have labelled. “The Perfect Wife,” he said; “Eminently Suitable.” There was no denying that Alice was very suitable indeed; she had a profound understanding of Chevron—which Sebastian bitterly resented, even while he conceded it;—she had a real genius for gaining the confidence of people like the man Bassett; she understood Sebastian, the fundamental Sebastian, as neither Sylvia, nor Teresa, nor Phil, had ever understood him. Yet such was his perversity, that the greater her understanding and the sharper his recognition of her advantages, the more he disliked her. Several times she was nearly responsible for sending him back to Phil and her slipshod ways, when it seemed to him preferable that Phil should turn the whole of Chevron upside down rather than that Alice should carry on its orderly and hierarchical government. Alice, for him, symbolised defeat; she symbolised the final renunciation of his independence, the admission that he had found no way of escape, the fulfilment of all Anquetil’s predictions. If he married Alice, he would be able to foresee what he would be doing on any given date for the remaining years of his life. Thus he thought, taking a grim pleasure in the intolerable prospect. Sebastian was very grim in those months after his parting with Phil. Sullenly, he made everything as bad for himself as possible. With his own hands he was weaving the sacrificial wreaths for the altar.

  Possibly he had been affected by the opening of the new régime, feeling, like everybody else, that with the death of the King a definite era had closed down and that the future was big with excitement and uncertainty. Possibly it affected him contrariwise, driving him to seek security at the very moment when his adventurous spirit might have welcomed the offer of a fresh opportunity. In order to comfort himself, as much as to disquiet his mother, he advertised his democratic theories; announced his intention of ranging himself with the Socialists; denounced Privilege in all its forms; swore loudly that nothing would induce him to take part in the mumbo-jumbo of the imminent Coronation. Yet all the time—such was his weakness—his actions betrayed his words. Alice alone was evidence of that. Sebastian, as Anquetil had said, had been born a prisoner; and his chains were dear to him, although he might pretend to strive against them.

  “Excuse me, your Gr
ace. Should I send your Grace’s robes to the cleaners?”

  “Robes? What robes?”

  “The Coronation robes, your Grace.”

  “Why, has the moth got into the ermine?”

  The valet looked shocked. He reprovingly corrected Sebastian’s inaccurate nomenclature.

  “Certainly not, your Grace. The miniver is kept in camphor, and aired twice a year.”

  “About all it deserves. Then why send it to the cleaners?”

  “The lining seems a bit soiled, your Grace, round the neck. Your Grace’s grandfather, the tenth duke, used it at the Coronation of Queen Victoria. “

  “I’m not going to the Coronation.”

  “No, your Grace. But should I send the robes all the same?”

  Sebastian went to the Coronation. He was called at seven o’clock on the morning of June the twenty-second; clouds hung about, and in spite of the mild softness of the summer morning, the hour seemed bleak. Looking out of the window, pulling on the white breeches of his uniform, Sebastian thought how much better such a morning would have suited the isles of Western Scotland than the iron railings of Grosvenor Square. But it was vain to think of the isles of Western Scotland, and the good days that he had enjoyed there, when he was hemmed in by such paraphernalia of pomp and circumstance. His robes spread their red velvet and miniver over the back of a chair; his coronet and gloves stood ready on a neighbouring table. His valet, attaining the apotheosis of a valet’s life, hovered round him with tunic and boots, ready to pull, to adjust, to button. His coach waited at the door—the old family coach, which had conveyed its owner to the coronation of Queen Anne, all the Georges, William the Fourth, and Queen Victoria; the family coach, with a huge coat of arms emblazoned on the panels, silver handles, and silver springs coiled in the shape of a snake. On the high, fringed box sat the old coachman who had taught Sebastian to ride, happy to be re-established in his natural function if only for one day—for, recently, he had been parted from his horses and trained as a chauffeur. Sebastian looked down on the coach, and imagined it rumbling up from Chevron on the previous day, an incongruous object, provoking a derisive curiosity in the suburbs of Bromley, even as his motor had provoked a derisive curiosity not many years before. Lord! he thought, have I really got to drive in that hearse? and incredulously he looked down upon the two footmen, who in their state liveries were now standing upon the pavement, sheepish yet self-important, mistrustfully eyeing the rumble into which they must presently spring. Sebastian suddenly became aware of his own body. He saw it, he felt it, as a bolster stuffed with straw, a Guy, which must be hung with velvet robes and put into that grotesque survival of a conveyance, there to comport itself with such dignity as it might muster, and eventually to take part in an organised performance with hundreds of other similar bodies, all moving in a solemn, rehearsed, and empty ritual. No doubt, thought Sebastian, in his room at Buckingham Palace the King is waking too.

  But, since his valet was taking the matter seriously, Sebastian must likewise treat it with becoming decorum. He allowed the crimson cloak to be hung about his shoulders; he received his gloves and his coronet with a suitable gravity. The valet surveyed his master, not only with satisfaction but also with admiration. The smug and healthy snobbishness of the British race was rampant. His Grace was a master whom it was a pleasure to dress. His natural elegance made buttons shine more brightly, breeches appear more dazzlingly white, the polish on boots rival the sheen on his hair. Plate-powder, pipe clay, and blacking had found a worthy ally. So thought the valet; but Sebastian, glancing at himself in the long mirror before he left the room, thought that the mirror returned the reflection of a character in the pantomime. He was bored, he was disgusted; he wished that he might be casting a Jock Scott into the Tay.

  Down on the landing he was confronted by a group of women; the housemaids, the kitchenmaids, had all assembled to see him start. Perforce, Sebastian had to smile, while in his awkwardness he gathered up his robes as a girl gathered up her first long dress. A whisper of appreciation ran over the group; eyes bulged; the housemaids and the kitchenmaids felt that they had been associated with the fringe of some unattainable mystery. The entire collection, at that moment, was more or less in love with his Grace; some of them, denizens of the basement, had never set eyes on him before, and now seeing him in full panoply, vaguely imagined that that was his ordinary appearance. It would have been no surprise to them to learn that his Grace strode over the golf links in coronation robes. Unwittingly, Sebastian misled several hearts; he knew nothing of the regrets eating at the heart of Mrs. Wickenden, and even of Miss Wace, marooned down at Chevron. After his shy and deprecatory smile of acknowledgement he rapidly continued his descent of the stairs, unaware of the billowing of his crimson robes behind him or of the corresponding emotion in the breast of his dependents. What a fool he must look—that was his only thought, so far as he had a thought about himself at all.

  On the pavement a small crowd had collected; coronations happened but seldom, and the spectacle of a coach in Grosvenor Square was not of common occurrence. Sebastian, holding his coronet under his arm, making it seem as much like an umbrella as possible, had to endure the curious stare while the footmen bungled clumsily with the unfamiliar step, pinching their fingers on its many hinges, before the step was let down and he could enter the coach and be shut into the privacy of the strange and musty upholstering. He sat back with a sigh, not of relief, but of respite. For half an hour at least he was shut, alone, into this dark, swaying box; half an hour at least must elapse before he was called upon to continue his part in this fantastic pageant. The sense of unreality had never oppressed him so strongly since Sylvia had included him as a herald in the pageant at Earl’s Court.

  But Sebastian was young enough for his boyhood to be real to him. The coach had not lumbered into Berkeley Square before he was leaning forward, examining the fittings, trying the window blinds to see if they would pull—but the silk was rotten; his finger went through it—sniffing the camphor, touching the old seats, opening the flap of the pockets, turning this way and that to look out at the familiar streets slowly passing the window. He had often climbed into the coach as a little boy, enjoying the musty smell, jumping up and down to make the coach rock upon its exaggerated springs; had often been reproved by his nurse for so doing—“Now come along, Sebastian; if you don’t come along at once I’ll tell her Grace—dawdling in that nasty old carriage”—but in those forbidden games he had never foreseen the day when he would actually drive in the coach to the trot of his own horses, with the old coachman on the box, and two footmen hanging uneasily on to the straps of the rumble. Even as he peered, and pulled, and explored, and sniffed, he wondered what the coachman and the footmen thought of it. He decided, and rightly, that they probably rejoiced in the possession of a coach and a master who drove in it to the Coronation. They certainly esteemed such privileges much more than he. He could well imagine the polishings and furbishings and brushings and boastings that had gone on down there, at Chevron, and the ceremony of departure when the coach finally rumbled away on the cobbles of the stable-yard; he wondered whether Sarah and Henry had attended and had barked; he could well imagine the gathering of the estate people, headed by Diggs and Wickenden, and probably reinforced by all those stolid and unattractive children who came to the Christmas tree. Dear Chevron! thought Sebastian, suddenly and sentimentally overcome by the smell of the camphor. He put his hand into an unexplored pocket, half expecting to find there the forgotten mask of his great-grandmother.

  Then he sat back again, reclined, and gave himself up to the rhythm of his progress. It seemed very slow, and stately, after the accustomed speed of his motor. Life seemed suddenly to have slowed up again. This drive in the coach was an experience; a strange experience, in that the whole timing of life seemed to have altered and to have gone back to what once it was. There was no hurry; he knew that when he drew near to Westminster Abb
ey a way would be made for him. He thought of Phil. Would she have taken a campstool, and waited for hours among the crowd? Crowds, so the papers told him, had been waiting all night, though the crowds were not so great as had been expected, a fact which was gravely explained by the Times as owing to the popularity of picture-palaces; why, asked the Times, should people wait in the streets when they could see the sights that evening for threepence? But Phil would not be there; Kings, coaches, and coronations meant nothing to her. She would be slopping round her studio in that tattered old Chinese coat, forgetful of any coronation; entertaining Sebastian’s successor, perhaps; frying bacon for breakfast, and filling the studio with the reek of burnt lard. She might even be sitting down to strike a chord or two on her guitar. Her invincible gaiety was as liable to break out at seven in the morning as at any other time. Teresa, on the other hand, would give anything—save her virtue—to get a good view. He regretted, ironically, that Chevron House was not in Carlton House Terrace; he might have offered Teresa a window with a balcony. Her cheap little soul would not have arisen to the gesture of refusal. Then he came to the others. Alice? Alice would be in the Abbey, bearing the Queen’s train. Before long he would have to decide whether he intended to marry Alice or not. Sylvia?—he found, unexpectedly, that he shrank from seeing Sylvia again. He had not seen her for five years. But he knew that Lord Roehampton was back from his five-years term of service as Governor, and so, he supposed, he would see Sylvia among the ranks of the peeresses.