All Passion Spent

by Vita Sackville-West

  ‘And when did you give up these principles of ruthlessness, Mr Bucktrout?’ asked Lady Slane.

  ‘You do not suspect me of boasting, Lady Slane, do you?’ asked Mr Bucktrout, eyeing her. ‘I am telling you all this so that you should realise that naïveté is not my weakness. As I said, you must not be allowed to think me a simpleton. – When did I give up these principles? Well, I set a term upon them; I determined that at sixty-five business properly speaking should know me no more. On my sixty-fifth birthday – or, to put it more correctly, on my sixty-sixth – I woke a free man. For my practice had always been a discipline rather than an inclination.’

  ‘But what about this house?’ asked Lady Slane. ‘You told me that for thirty years you had refused tenants if you didn’t like them. Surely that was inclination, wasn’t it? It could hardly be described as business?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Bucktrout, putting his finger to his nose, ‘you are too shrewd, Lady Slane; you have too good a memory. But don’t be too hard on me: this house was always my one little patch of folly. Or, should I say, my one little patch of sanity? I like to be exact in my expressions. I see, Lady Slane, that you are something of a tease. I mean no impertinence. If ladies did not tease, we should be in danger of taking ourselves too seriously. I always had a fancy, you see, that I should like to end my days in this house, so naturally I did not wish its atmosphere contaminated by any unsympathetic influence. You may have noticed – of course you have noticed – that its atmosphere is curiously ripened and detached. I have preserved that atmosphere with the greatest care, for although one cannot create an atmosphere, one can at least safeguard it against disturbance.’

  ‘But if you want to live here yourself – very well, die here yourself,’ said Lady Slane, seeing that he had raised a hand and was about to correct her, ‘why have you let it to me?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mr Bucktrout easily and consolingly, ‘your tenancy, Lady Slane, is not likely to interfere with my intentions.’

  For courteous though he was, Mr Bucktrout in this respect remained firmly unsentimental, making no bones about the fact that Lady Slane would require the house for a short period only. Whenever he discouraged her from unnecessary expenditure, he did so on the grounds that it was scarcely worth her while. When she mentioned central heating, he reminded her that she would spend but few winters, if any, in this her last abode. ‘Though to be sure,’ he added sympathetically, ‘there is no reason why one should not be comfortable while one may.’ Genoux, overhearing this remark, summoned her religion to the support of her indignation. ‘Monsieur pense donc qu’il n’y a pas de radiateurs au paradis? Il se fait une idée bien mièvre d’un Bon Dieu peu up-to-date.’ Still, Mr Bucktrout persisted in his idea that oil lamps would suffice to warm the rooms. He worked out the amount of gallons of paraffin they would consume in one winter, and balanced them against the cost of a furnace and pipes to pierce the walls. ‘But, Mr Bucktrout,’ said Lady Slane, not without malice, ‘as owner and agent you ought to encourage me to put in central heating. Think how strongly it would appeal to your next tenant.’ ‘Lady Slane,’ replied Mr Bucktrout, ‘consideration of my next tenant remains in a separate compartment from consideration of my present tenant. That has always been my rule in life; and thanks to it I have always been able to keep my relationships distinct. I am a great believer in sharp outline. I dislike a fuzz. Most people fell into the error of making their whole life a fuzz, pleasing nobody, least of all themselves. Compromise is the very breath of negation. My principle has been, that it is better to please one person a great deal than to please a number of persons a little, no matter how much offence you give. I have given a great deal of offence in my life, but of not one offensive instance do I repent. I believe in taking the interest of the moment. Life is so transitory, Lady Slane, that one must grab it by the tail as it flies past. No good in thinking of yesterday or to-morrow. Yesterday is gone, and to-morrow problematical. Even to-day is precarious enough, God knows. Therefore I say unto you,’ said Mr Bucktrout, relapsing into Biblical language and pointing his foot as though to point his words, ‘do not put in central heating, for you know not how long you may live to enjoy it. My next tenant is welcome to warm himself in hell. I am here to advise you; and my advice is, buy an oil-lamp – several oil-lamps. They will warm you and see you out, however often you may have to renew the wicks.’ He changed his foot, and frisked his coat-tails in a little perorative flourish. Mr Gosheron, rather embarrassed, tilted his hat.

  This conviction of the transcience of her tenure arose, Lady Slane discovered, from two causes: Mr Bucktrout’s estimate of her own age, and his prophetic views as to the imminent end of the world. He discoursed gravely on this subject, undeterred by the presence of Genoux and Mr Gosheron, who preferred to avoid such topics and wanted respectively to talk of linen-cupboards and distemper. Genoux’s sheets must wait, and Mr Gosheron’s little discs of colour, miniature full-moons, called Pompeian-red, Stone-grey, Olive-green, Shrimp-pink. Mr Bucktrout’s attention was too closely engaged with eternity for linen-cupboards and distemper to catch him in more than a perfunctory interest. He could bear with them for five minutes; not longer. After that he would stick his sarcasm into Mr Gosheron, saying such things as that his yard-measure varied in length from room to room, according as it ran north and south, or east and west, and that Genoux’s shelves could never be truly level, seeing that the whole universe was based upon a curve, all of which disconcerted Genoux and Mr Gosheron, but made Genoux respect Mr Bucktrout the more for his learning, and made Mr Gosheron’s hat tilt nearly on to the tip of his nose. Mr Bucktrout, observing this confusion, enlarged with sadistic pleasure. He knew that he had an appreciative audience in Lady Slane, even while he kept his feet on the ground sufficiently for her protection. ‘As you may know,’ he said, standing in an unfinished room while painters suspended their brushes in order to listen, ‘there are at least four theories presaging the end of the world. Flame, flood, frost, and collision. There are others, but they are so unscientific and so improbable as to be negligible. Then there are, of course, the prophetic numbers. In so far as I believe numbers to be a basic part of the eternal harmonies, I am a convinced Pythagorean. Numbers exist in the void; it is impossible to imagine the destruction of numbers, even though you imagine the destruction of the universe. I do not mean by this that I hold with such ingenuities as the great sacred number of the Babylonians, twelve million nine hundred and sixty thousand, as you remember, nor yet in such calculations as William Miller’s, who, by a system of additions and deductions, decided that the world would end on March 21, 1843. No. I have worked out my own system, Lady Slane, and I can assure you that, though distressing, it is irrefutable. The great annihilation is close at hand.’ Mr Bucktrout was launched; he tiptoed across to the wall, and very carefully wrote up PΩMH with a bit of chalk. A painter came after him, and as carefully obliterated it with his brush.

  ‘Mais en attendant, miladi,’ said Genoux, ‘mes draps?’

  *

  Lady Slane had never taken so much pleasure in anybody’s company. She had never been so happy as with her two old gentlemen. She had played her part among brilliant people, important people, she had accommodated herself to their conversation, and, during the years of her association with worldly affairs, she had learnt to put together the scattered bits of information which to her were so difficult to collate or even to remember; thus she was always reminded of the days of her girlhood, when vast gaps seemed to exist in her knowledge, and when she was at a loss to know what people meant when they referred to the Irish Question or the Woman’s Movement, or to Free Trade and Protection, two especial stumbling-blocks between which she could never distinguish instinctively, although she had had them explained to her a dozen times. She had always taken an enormous amount of trouble to disguise her ignorance from Henry. In the end she had learnt to succeed quite well, and he would disburden himself of his political perplexities without the slightest suspicion that his wife had long since
lost the basis of his argument. She was secretly and bitterly ashamed of her insufficiency. But what was to be done about it? She could not, no, she simply could not, remember why Mr Asquith disliked Mr Lloyd George, or what exactly were the aims of Labour, that new and alarming Party. The most that she could do was to conceal her ignorance, while she scrambled round frenziedly in her brain for some recollected scrap of associated information which would enable her to make some adequate reply. During their years in Paris she had suffered especially, for the cleverness of French conversation (which she greatly admired) always made her feel outwitted; and though she could sit listening for hours in rapture to the spitting pyrotechnics of epigram and summary, marvelling at the ability of other people to compress into a phrase some aspect of life which, to her, from its very importance, demanded a lifetime of reflection, yet her quiescent pleasure was always spoilt by the dread that at a given moment some guest in mistaken politeness would turn to her, throwing her the ball she would be unable to catch, saying, ‘Et Madame l’Ambassadrice, qu’en pense-t-elle?’ And though she knew that inwardly she had understood what they were saying far better than they had understood it themselves – for the conversation of the French always seemed to turn upon the subjects which interested her most deeply, and about which she felt that she really knew something, could she but have expressed it – she remained stupidly inarticulate, saying something non-committal or something that she did not in the least mean, conscious meanwhile that Henry, sitting by, must be suffering wretchedly from the poor figure his wife cut. Yet, in private, he was apt to say, though rarely, that she was the most intelligent woman he knew because, although often inarticulate, she never made a foolish remark.

  That these agonies should remain private to herself was her constant prayer; neither Henry nor the guests at her table must ever find her out. There were other allied weaknesses of which she was also ashamed, though in a slightly less degree: her inability, for instance, to write out a cheque correctly, putting the same amount in figures as in words, remembering to cross it, remembering to sign her name; her inability to understand what a debenture was, or the difference between ordinary and deferred stock; and as for that extraordinary menagerie of bulls, bears, stags, and contango, she might as well have found herself in a circus of wild animals. She supposed dutifully that these things were of major importance, since they were clearly the things which kept the world on the move; she supposed that party politics and war and industry, and a high birth-rate (which she had learned to call manpower), and competition and secret diplomacy and suspicion, were all part of a necessary game, necessary since the cleverest people she knew made it their business, though to her, as a game, unintelligible; she supposed it must be so, though the feeling more frequently seized her of watching figures moving in the delusion of a terrible and ridiculous dream. The whole tragic system seemed to be based upon an extraordinary convention, as incomprehensible as the theory of money, which (so she had been told) bore no relation to the actual supply of gold. It was chance which had made men turn gold into their symbol, rather than stones; it was chance which had made men turn strife into their principle, rather than amity. That the planet might have got on better with stones and amity – a simple solution – had apparently never occurred to its inhabitants.

  Her own children, do what she might, had grown up in the same traditions. Naturally. There they were, trying and striving, not content merely to be. Herbert, so sententious always, so ambitious in his stupid way; Carrie with her committees and her harsh managing voice, interfering with people who did not want to be interfered with, all for the love of interference, her mother felt sure; Charles with his perpetual grievances; William and Lavinia, always scraping and saving and paring, an occupation in itself. There was no true kindliness, no grace, no privacy in any of them. For Edith and Kay alone their mother could feel some sympathy: Edith, always in a muddle, trying to get things straight and only getting them more tangled, trying to stand back and take a look at life, the whole of it, an impossibility accepted by most people, but which really bothered Edith and made her unhappy (still, the uneasiness did her credit); Kay – well, of all her children, perhaps Kay, messing about among his compasses and astrolabes, was the one who strove and struggled least; the one who had, without knowing it, the strongest sense of his own entity, when he shut his door behind him and took out his duster to potter with it along the alignment of his shelves. Yes, Kay and Edith were nearest to her; that would be one of the secrets, one of the jokes, she would take away with her into the grave.

  For the rest, she had been a lonely woman, always at variance with the creeds to which she apparently conformed. Every now and then she had known some delicious encounter with a spirit attuned to her own. There had been the young man who accompanied them to Fatihpur Sikhri; a young man whose name she had forgotten, or had never known; but into whose eyes she had looked for one moment, and then, disturbed, had dismissed by her very gesture of strolling off to rejoin the Viceroy and his group of sun-helmeted officials. Such encounters had been rare, and, thanks to the circumstances of her life, brief. (She retained, however, a conviction that many spirits were fundamentally attuned, but so thickly overlaid by the formulas of the world that the clear requisite note could no longer be struck.) With Mr Bucktrout and Mr Gosheron she found herself entirely at ease. She could tell Mr Bucktrout without embarrassment that she was unable to distinguish rates from taxes. She could tell Mr Gosheron that she was unable to distinguish between a volt and an ampère. Neither of them tried to explain. They gave up at once, and simply said, leave it to me. She left it, and knew that her trust would not be misplaced.

  Strange, the relief and release that this companionship brought her! Was it due to the weariness of old age, or to the long-awaited return to childhood, when all decisions and responsibilities might again be left in the hands of others, and one might be free to dream in a world of whose sunshine and benignity one was convinced? And she thought, if only I were young once more I would stand for all that was calm and contemplative, opposed to the active, the scheming, the striving, the false – yes! the false, she exclaimed, striking her fist into the palm of the other hand with unaccustomed energy; and then, trying to correct herself, she wondered whether this were not merely a negative creed, a negation of life; perhaps even a confession of insufficient vitality; and came to the conclusion that it was not so, for in contemplation (and also in the pursuit of the one chosen avocation which she had had to renounce) she could pierce to a happier life more truly than her children who reckoned things by their results and activities.

  She remembered how, crossing the Persian desert with Henry, their cart had been escorted by flocks of butterflies, white and yellow, which danced on either side and overhead and all around them, now flying ahead in a concerted movement, now returning to accompany them, amused as it were to restrain their swift frivolity to a flitting round this lumbering conveyance, but still unable to suit their pace to such sobriety, so, to relieve their impatience, soaring up into the air or dipping between the very axles, coming out on the other side before the horses had had time to put down another hoof; making, all the while, little smuts of shadow on the sand, like little black anchors dropped, tethering them by invisible cables to earth, but dragged about with the same capricious swiftness, obliged to follow; and she remembered thinking, lulled by the monotonous progression that trailed after the sun from dawn to dusk, like a plough that should pursue the sun in one straight slow furrow round and round the world – she remembered thinking that this was something like her own life, following Henry Holland like the sun, but every now and then moving into a cloud of butterflies which were her own irreverent, irrelevant thoughts, darting and dancing, but altering the pace of the progression not by one tittle; never brushing the carriage with their wings; flickering always, and evading; sometimes rushing on ahead, but returning again to tease and to show off, darting between the axles; having an independent and a lovely life; a flock of ragamuffins skimmi
ng above the surface of the desert and around the trundling waggon; but Henry, who was travelling on a tour of investigation, could only say, ‘Terrible, the ophthalmia among these people – I must really do something about it,’ and, knowing that he was right and would speak to the missionaries, she had withdrawn her attention from the butterflies and had transferred it to her duty, determining that when they reached Yezd or Shiraz, or wherever it might be, she also would take the missionaries’ wives to task about the ophthalmia in the villages and would make arrangements for a further supply of boracic to be sent out from England.

  But, perversely, the flittering of the butterflies had always remained more important.

  Part Two

  Her heart sat silent through the noise

  And concourse of the street;

  There was no hurry in her hands,

  No hurry in her feet.

  CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

  Sitting there in the sun at Hampstead, in the late summer, under the south wall and the ripened peaches, doing nothing with her hands, she remembered the day she had become engaged to Henry. She had plenty of leisure now, day in, day out, to survey her life as a tract of country traversed, and at last become a landscape instead of separate fields or separate years and days, so that it became a unity and she could see the whole view, and could even pick out a particular field and wander round it again in spirit, though seeing it all the while as it were from a height, fallen into its proper place, with the exact pattern drawn round it by the hedge, and the next field into which the gap in the hedge would lead. So, she thought, could she at last put circles round her life. Slowly she crossed that day, as one crosses a field by a little path through the grasses, with the sorrel and the buttercups waving on either side; she crossed it again slowly, from breakfast to bed-time, and each hour, as one hand of the clock passed over the other, regained for her its separate character: this was the hour, she thought, when I first came downstairs that day, swinging my hat by its ribbons; and this was the hour when he persuaded me into the garden, and sat with me on the seat beside the lake, and told me it was not true that with one blow of its wing a swan could break the leg of a man. She had listened to him, paying dutiful attention to the swan which had actually drifted up to them by the bank, dipping its beak and then curving to probe irritably into the snowy tuft of feathers on its breast; but she was thinking less of the swan than of the young whiskers on Henry’s cheek, only her thoughts had merged, so that she wondered whether Henry’s brown curls were as soft as the feathers on the breast of the swan, and all but reached out an idle hand to feel them. Then he passed from the swan, as though that had been but a gambit to cover his hesitation, and the next thing she knew was that he was speaking earnestly, bending forward and even fingering a flounce of her dress, as though anxious, although unaware of his anxiety, to establish some kind of contact between himself and her; but for her all true contact had been severed from the moment he began to speak so earnestly, and she felt no longer even the slight tug of desire to put out her hand and touch the curly whiskers on his cheek. Those words which he must utter so earnestly, in order that his tone might carry their full weight; those words which he seemed to produce from some serious and secret place, hauling them up from the bottom of the well of his personality; those words which belonged to the region of weighty and adult things – those words removed him from her more rapidly than an eagle catching him up in its talons to the sky. He had gone. He had left her. Even while she conscientiously gazed at him and listened, she knew that he was already miles and miles away. He had passed into the sphere where people marry, beget and bear children, bring them up, give orders to servants, pay income-tax, understand about dividends, speak mysteriously in the presence of the young, take decisions for themselves, eat what they like, and go to bed at the hour which pleases them. Mr Holland was asking her to accompany him into that sphere. He was asking her to be his wife.