All Passion Spent

by Vita Sackville-West

  Carrie felt that it was useless even to mention the word Estimate. Her mother seemed to have gone right away from her, into a world ruled not by sense but by sentiment. A world in which one took other people’s delicacy and nice feelings for granted. A world which, as Carrie knew very well, bore no relation to anything on this planet. It was all a part of the same thing as her mother’s extraordinary indifference and obtuseness about the jewels. Who, in their senses, would have handed over five, perhaps seven, thousand pounds’ worth of jewels like that? Who, with any proper perception, would have failed to realise that Carrie and Lavinia ought to have at least a share? Not to mention Edith. They would not have grudged poor Edith a brooch. After all, Edith was Father’s daughter. But her mother had given everything away, as though it were so much useless lumber, just as she had now delivered herself and her purse gaily into the hands of an old shark called Bucktrout.

  Carrie, however, found great consolation in talking the matter over at immense and repetitive length with her relations. Their solidarity was thereby increased. They all thoroughly enjoyed their gatherings over the tea-table – tea was their favourite, perhaps because the cheapest, meal – and nobody minded how often somebody else said the same thing, even framed in the same words. They listened each time with renewed approval, nodding their heads as though some new and illuminating discovery had just been made. Carrie and her relations found great reassurance in assertion and re-assertion. Say a thing often enough, and it becomes true; by hammering in sufficient stakes of similar pattern they erected a stockade between themselves and the wild dangers of life. The phrase ‘Mother is wonderful,’ so prevalent between the death and the funeral, was rapidly replaced by the phrase ‘Dear Mother – so hopeless over anything practical.’ But having said that – and having said it with commendable perseverance, in Queen’s Gate where William and Lavinia lived, in Lower Sloane Street where Carrie and Roland lived, in the Cromwell Road where Charles had his flat, in Cadogan Square where Herbert and Mabel lived – having said that, they were brought up short against their inability to cope with that softly hopeless Mother. So amenable, so malleable always, she had routed them completely – she, and her house at Hampstead, and her Mr Bucktrout. They had none of them seen Mr Bucktrout; they had none of them been allowed to see him; even Carrie had been rejected, and her offer of lifts in the motor; but his invisibility added only fuel to the fire of their mistrust. He became ‘This man who has Got Hold of Mother.’ If Lady Slane had not already given all the pearls, the jade, the rubies, and the emeralds in that haphazard fashion to Herbert and Mabel, they would have suspected her of handing them all over to Mr Bucktrout at Mr Bucktrout’s suggestion. This Mr Bucktrout, with his vagueness about the lease, with his helpfulness about carpenters, painters, plumbers, and upholsterers – what could he be but a shark? At the very best, his motive resolved itself for Carrie and her family into the ominous word Commission.

  Meanwhile, Mr Bucktrout had secured the services of Mr Gosheron.

  ‘You must understand,’ he said to this estimable tradesman, ‘that Lady Slane, despite her high position, is a lady of limited means. It is not always safe, Mr Gosheron, to assume affluence in the aristocracy. Because a gentleman has been Viceroy of India and Prime Minister of England it does not mean that his relict is left well-off. Our public services, Mr Gosheron, are conducted on very different principles. Therefore it becomes incumbent on you, Mr Gosheron, to keep your estimate as low as is compatible with your own reasonable profit. As an agent, and also as an owner of property, I have some experience in such matters. And I assure you that I shall make it my business to check your estimates on Lady Slane’s behalf as it were upon my own.’

  Mr Gosheron assured Mr Bucktrout in return that he would never dream of taking advantage of her ladyship.

  Genoux, from the first time that she saw him, took a fancy to Mr Gosheron. ‘Voilà un monsieur,’ she said, ‘qui connaît son travail. II sait par exemple,’ she added, ‘quels weights il faut mettre dans les rideaux. Et il sait faire de la peinture pour que ça ne stick pas. J’aime,’ she added, ‘le bon travail – pas trop cher, mais pas de pacotille.’ Genoux and Lady Slane, liberated from Carrie, spent very happy days with Mr Bucktrout and Mr Gosheron. Lady Slane liked everything about Mr Gosheron, even to his appearance. He looked most respectable, and invariably wore an old bowler hat, green with age, which he never removed even in the house, but which, in order to show some respect to Lady Slane, he would tilt forward by the back brim, and would then resettle into place. His hair, which had once been brown, but now was grey and stringy, invariably became disarranged by this tilting of the hat, so that after the tilting a strand stuck out at the back, fascinating Lady Slane, but unnoticed by its owner. He carried a pencil always behind his ear, a pencil so broad and of so soft a lead that it could serve for nothing except making a mark across a plank of wood, but which Lady Slane never saw used for any other purpose than scratching his head. In him she quickly recognised one of those craftsmen who find fault with all work not carried out under their own auspices. ‘That’s a poor sort of contraption,’ Mr Gosheron would mutter, examining the damper of the kitchen range. He contrived to imply always that, had the job been left to him, he would have managed it a great deal better. Nevertheless, he implied at the same time, a man of his experience could put it right; could improve, though not quite satisfactorily, on a thoroughly bad job. Silent as a rule, and subdued in the presence of Mr Bucktrout, he occasionally indulged in an outburst of his own. Lady Slane was especially delighted when he indulged in outbursts, such as his outbursts against asbestos-roofed sectional bungalows. These outbursts were the more valuable for their rarity. ‘I can’t understand, my lady,’ he said, ‘how people can live without beauty.’ Mr Gosheron could see beauty in a deal board, if it were well-fitted, though naturally he preferred an oak one. ‘And to think,’ he said, ‘that some people cover up the grain with paint!’ Mr Gosheron was not a young man; he was seventy if a day, but his traditions went back a hundred years or more. ‘These lorries,’ he said, ‘shaking down the walls!’ Henry Slane, always progressive, had seen beauty in lorries even as Mr Gosheron saw it in a well-carpentered board; but Lady Slane, who for years had striven loyally to keep up with the beauty of lorries, now found herself released back into a far more congenial set of values. She could dally for hours with Mr Bucktrout and Mr Gosheron, with Genoux following them about as a solid and stocky chorus. Planted squarely on her two feet, creaking within her brown paper linings, Genoux who had spent her life disapproving on principle of nearly everybody, regarded Mr Bucktrout and Mr Gosheron with an approval amounting almost to love. How different they were, how puzzlingly, pleasingly different, from the children of miladi! – for whom, nevertheless, Genoux nourished an awed respect. The two old gentlemen seemed so genuinely anxious that Lady Slane should have everything just as she liked it, yet should be spared all possible expense; when she made tentative suggestions, as to the inclusion of a glass shelf in the bathroom, or whatever it might be, they looked at each other with a glance of confederacy, almost a wink, and invariably said they thought that could be managed. That was the way Genoux liked to see miladi treated – as though she were something precious, and fragile, and unselfish, needing a protective insistence on the rights she would never claim for herself. No one had ever treated her quite like that before. Milord had loved her, of course, and had guarded her always from trouble (milord who always had such beautiful manners with everyone), but he himself was so dominating a personality that other people fell naturally into his shadow. Her children loved her too, or so Genoux supposed, for it was unthinkable to Genoux that a child should not love its mother, even after the age of sixty, but there had been times when Genoux could not at all approve of their manner towards their mother; Lady Charlotte, for instance, was really too tyrannical, arriving at Elm Park Gardens at all hours of the day, her very aspect enough to make a timid old lady tremble. Very often one could detect a veiled impatience behind her wo
rds. And they were all too energetic, in Genoux’s opinion, except for Lady Edith and Mr Kay; they bustled their poor mother about, talking loudly and taking it for granted that her powers were equal with their own. Once, when Lady Slane was going out with Mr William, she had proposed taking a taxi; but Mr William had said no, they could quite well go in a bus, and Genoux, who was holding the front door open for them, had nearly produced her purse to offer Mr William eighteen-pence. She wished now that she had indulged in that piece of irony. It was not reasonable to treat a lady of eighty-eight as though she were only sixty-five. Genoux, who herself was only two years younger than Lady Slane, waxed indignant whenever she put on Lady Slane’s galoshes in the hall of Elm Park Gardens and handed her an umbrella to go out into the rain. It was not right, especially when one considered the state Lady Slane had been accustomed to, sitting up on an elephant with a mahout behind her holding a parasol over her head. Genoux had preferred Calcutta to Elm Park Gardens.

  But at Hampstead, thanks to Mr Bucktrout and Mr Gosheron, the proper atmosphere had been at last achieved. It was modest; there were no aides-de-camp, no princes, but though modest it was warm, and affectionate, and respectful, and vigilant, and generous, just as it should be. Mr Bucktrout expressed himself in a style which Genoux thought extremely distinguished. He was odd, certainly, but he was a gentleman – un vrai monsieur. He had strange and beautiful ideas; he was never in a hurry; he would break off in the middle of business to talk about Descartes or the satisfying quality of pattern. And when he said pattern, he did not mean the pattern on a wallpaper; he meant the pattern of life. Mr Gosheron was never in a hurry either. Sometimes, by way of comment, he lifted his bowler hat at the back and scratched his head with his pencil. He spoke very little, and always in a low voice. He deplored the decay of craftsmanship in the modern world; refused to employ trades-union men, and had assembled a troop of workmen most of whom he had trained himself, and who were consequently so old that Genoux was sometimes afraid they would fall off their ladders. The workmen, too, had entered into the conspiracy to please Lady Slane; they greeted her arrival always with beaming smiles, took off their caps, and hastened to move the paint-pots out of her way. Yet for all this leisurely manner pervading the house, the work seemed to proceed quite fast, and there was always some little surprise prepared for Lady Slane every time she came up to Hampstead.

  Mr Bucktrout even gave her little presents, though his delicacy restrained them to a nature so modest and inexpensive that she could accept them without embarrassment. Sometimes it was a plant for her garden, sometimes a vase of flowers set with a curious effect of brilliance on a window-sill in an empty room. He was compelled to set them on a window-sill, he explained, since there were as yet no tables or other furniture, but Lady Slane suspected that he really preferred the window-sill, where he could so dispose his gift that the rays of the sun would fall upon it at the very hour when he expected his tenant. She teased him sometimes by arriving half-an-hour late, but he was undefeated; and once a ring of wet three inches away betrayed him: seeing that she was late, he had gone upstairs again to shift his flowers along into the sun. Old age, thought Lady Slane, must surely content itself with very small pleasures, judging by the pleasure she experienced at this confirmation of her suspicions. Weary, enfeebled, ready to go, she still could amuse herself by playing a tiny game in miniature with Mr Bucktrout and Mr Gosheron, a sort of minuet stepped out to a fading music, artificial perhaps, yet symbolic of some reality she had never achieved with her own children. The artificiality lay in the manner, the reality in the heart which invented it. Courtesy ceased to be blankly artificial, when prompted by real esteem; it became, simply, one of the decent, veiling graces; a formula by which a profounder feeling might be conveyed.

  They were too old, all three of them, to feel keenly; to compete and circumvent and score. They must fall back upon the old measure of the minuet, in which the gentleman’s bow expressed all his appreciative gallantry towards women, and the lady’s fan raised a breeze insufficient to flutter her hair. That was old age, when people knew everything so well that they could no longer afford to express it save in symbols. Those days were gone when feeling burst its bounds and poured hot from the foundry, when the heart seemed likely to split with complex and contradictory desires; now there was nothing left but a landscape in monochrome, the features identical but all the colours gone from them, and nothing but a gesture left in the place of speech.

  Meanwhile Mr Bucktrout brought his little offerings, and Lady Slane liked them best when they took the form of flowers. Mr Bucktrout, as she began to discover him, revealed many little talents, among which a gift for arranging a bunch was not the least. He would make daring and surprising combinations of colour and form, till the result was more like a still-life painting than like a bunch of living flowers, yet informed with a life that no paint could rival. Set upon their window-sill, luminous in the sun, more luminous for the bare boards and plaster surrounding them, their texture appeared lit from within rather than from without. Nor did his inventiveness ever falter, for this week he would produce a bunch as garish as a gipsy, all blue and purple and orange, but next week a bunch discreet as a pastel, all rose and grey with a dash of yellow, and some feathery spray lightly touched with cream. Lady Slane, who might have been a painter, could appreciate his effects. Mr Bucktrout was an artist, said Lady Slane; and even Genoux, who did not care for flowers in the house because they dropped their petals over tables, and eventually had to be thrown away, making a damp mess in the waste-paper basket, even Genoux commented one day that ‘Monsieur aurait dû se faire floriste.’

  Little by little, seeing that his efforts were appreciated, his offerings became more personal. The vase of flowers was supplemented by a bunch for Lady Slane to pin against her shoulder. The first occasion having given rise to a difficulty, because, searching under her laces and ruffles, anxious not to disappoint the old gentleman, she could discover no pin, he thereafter always provided a large black safety pin pushed securely through the silver paper wrapped round the stalks, and Lady Slane dutifully used it, though she had been presciently careful to bring one with her. Of such small, tacit, and mutual courtesies was their relationship compact.

  One day she asked him why he took so much trouble on her behalf. Why had he made it his business to find Mr Gosheron for her, to supervise his estimates, to look into every detail of the work? That, surely, was not customary in an agent, even in an owner-agent? Mr Bucktrout instantly became very serious. ‘I have been wondering, Lady Slane,’ he said, ‘whether you would ask me that question. I am glad that you should have asked it, for I am always in favour of letting the daylight into the thickets of misunderstanding. You are right: it is not customary. Let us say that I do it because I have very little else to do, and that so long as you do not object, I am grateful to you for affording me the occupation.’

  ‘No,’ said Lady Slane, shy but determined; ‘that is not the reason. Why do you take my interests in this way? You see, Mr Bucktrout, not only do you control Mr Gosheron – who, as a matter of fact, needs less controlling than any tradesman I ever met – but from the first you have been anxious to spare me as much as possible. I may not be very well versed in practical matters,’ she said with her charming smile, ‘but I have seen enough of the world to realise that business is not usually conducted on your system. Besides, my daughter Charlotte … well, never mind about my daughter Charlotte. The fact remains that I am puzzled, and also rather curious.’

  ‘I should not like you to think me a simpleton, Lady Slane,’ said Mr Bucktrout very gravely. He hesitated, as though wondering whether he should take her into his confidence, then went off with a rush on another little speech. ‘I am not a simpleton,’ he said, ‘nor am I a childish old man. I dislike childishness and all such rubbish. I feel nothing but impatience with the people who pretend that the world is other than it is. The world, Lady Slane, is pitiably horrible. It is horrible because it is based upon competitive struggl
e – and really one does not know whether to call the basis of that struggle a convention or a necessity. Is it some extraordinary delusion, or is it a law of life? Is it perhaps an animal law from which civilisation may eventually free us? At present it seems to me, Lady Slane, that man has founded all his calculations upon a mathematical system fundamentally false. His sums work out right for his own purposes, because he has crammed and constrained his planet into accepting his premises. Judged by other laws, though the answers would remain correct, the premises would appear merely crazy; ingenious enough, but crazy. Perhaps some day a true civilisation may supervene and write a big W against all our answers. But we have a long road to travel yet – a long road to travel.’ He shook his head, pointed his foot, and became sunk in his musings.

  ‘Then you think,’ said Lady Slane, seeing that she must recall him from his abstractions, ‘that anyone who goes against this extraordinary delusion is helping civilisation on?’

  ‘I do, Lady Slane; most certainly I do. But in a world as at present constituted, it is a luxury that only poets can afford, or people advanced in age. I assure you that when I first went into business, after I had resigned my commission, I was fierce. It is really the only word. Fierce. No one could get the better of me. And the more severe my conduct, the more respect I earned. Nothing earns respect so quickly as letting your fellows see that you are a match for them. Other methods may earn you respect in the long run, but for a short-cut there is nothing like setting a high valuation on yourself and forcing others to accept it. Modesty, moderation, consideration, nicety – no good; they don’t pay. If you were to meet one of my earlier colleagues, Lady Slane, he would tell you that in my day I had been a regular Juggernaut.’