Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  “I heard the voice of my fantastic Eve, of whom I once thought,” she added, fixing her eyes on Eve, “as the purest of beings, utterly removed from the sordid and the ugly.”

  Eve suddenly flung herself on her knees beside her. “Ah, Kato,” she said, “you throw me off my guard when you play to me. I’m not always hard and calculating, and your music melts me. It hurts me to be, as I constantly am, on the defensive. I’m too suspicious by nature to be very happy, Kato. There are always shadows, and … and tragedy. Please don’t judge me too harshly. Tell me what you mean by sordid and ugly—what is there sordid and ugly in love?”

  Kato dared much: she replied in a level voice, “Jealousy. Waste. Exorbitance. Suspicion. I am sometimes afraid of your turning Julian into another of those men who hoped to find their inspiration in a woman, but found only a hindrance.”

  She nodded sagely at Eve, and the gold wheat-ears trembled in her hair.

  Eve darkened at Julian’s name; she got up and stood by the door looking into the court. Kato went on, “You are so much of a woman, Eve, that it becomes a responsibility. It is a gift, like genius. And a great gift without a great soul is a curse, because such a gift is too strong to be disregarded. It’s a force, a danger. You think I am preaching to you,” Eve would never know what the words were costing her—“but I preach only because of my belief in Julian—and in you,” she hastened to add, and caught Eve’s hand; “don’t frown, you child. Look at me; I have no illusions and no sensitiveness on the score of my own appearance; look at me hard, and let me speak to you as a sexless creature.”

  Eve was touched in spite of her hostility. She was also shocked and distressed. There was to her, so young herself, so insolently vivid in her sex-pride, something wrong and painful in Kato’s renouncement of her right. She had a sense of betrayal.

  “Hush, Anastasia,” she whispered. They were both extremely moved, and the constant volleys of firing played upon their nerves and stripped reserve from them.

  “You don’t realise,” said Kato, who had, upon impulse, sacrificed her pride, and beaten down the feminine weakness she branded as unworthy, “how finely the balance, in love, falters between good and ill. You, Eve, are created for love; any one who saw you, even without speaking to you, across a room, could tell you that.” She smiled affectionately; she had, at that moment, risen so far above all personal vanity that she could bring herself to smile affectionately at Eve. “You said, just now, with truth I am sure, that shadows and tragedy were never far away from you; you’re too rare to be philosophical. I wish there were a word to express the antithesis of a philosopher; if I could call you by it, I should have said all that I could wish to say about you, Eve. I’m so much afraid of sorrow for you and Julian …

  “Yes, yes,” said Eve, forgetting to be resentful, “I am afraid, too; it overcomes me sometimes; it’s a presentiment.” She looked really haunted, and Kato was filled with an immense pity for her.

  “You mustn’t be weak,” she said gently. “Presentiment is only a high-sounding word for a weak thought.”

  “You are so strong and sane, Kato; it is easy for you to be—strong and sane.”

  They broke off, and listened in silence to an outburst of firing and shouts that rose from the village.

  * * *

  Grbits burst into the room early in the afternoon, his flat sallow face tinged with colour, his clothes torn, and his limbs swinging like the sails of a windmill. In one enormous hand he still brandished a revolver. He was triumphantly out of breath.

  “Driven off!” he cried. “They ran up a white flag. Not one succeeded in landing. Not one.” He panted between every phrase. “Julian—here in a moment. I ran. Negotiations now, we hope. Sea bobbing with dead.”

  “Our losses?” said Kato sharply.

  “Few. All under cover,” Grbits replied. He sat down, swinging his revolver loosely between his knees, and ran his fingers through his oily black hair, so that it separated into straight wisps across his forehead. He was hugely pleased and good-humoured and grinned widely upon Eve and Kato. “Good fighting—though too much at a distance. Julian was grazed on the temple—told me to tell you,” he added, with the tardy haste of a child who has forgotten to deliver a message. “We tied up his head, and it will be nothing of a scratch.—Driven off! They have tried and failed. The defence was excellent. They will scarcely try force again. I am sorry I missed the first fight. I could have thrown those little fat soldiers into the sea with one hand, two at a time.”

  Kato rushed up to Grbits and kissed him; they were like children in their large, clumsy excitement.

  Julian came in, his head bandaged; his unconcern deserted him as he saw Kato hanging over the giant’s chair. He laughed out loud.

  “A miscellaneous fleet!” he cried. “Coastal steamers, fort tugs, old chirkets from the Bosphorous—who was the admiral, I wonder?”

  “Panaioannou,” cried Grbits, “his uniform military down one side, and naval down the other.”

  “Their white flag!” said Julian.

  “Sterghiou’s handkerchief!” said Grbits.

  “Coaling steamers, mounting machine-guns,” Julian continued.

  “Stavridis must have imagined that,” said Kato.

  “Play us a triumphal march, Anastasia!” said Grbits.

  Kato crashed some chords on the piano; they all laughed and sang, but Eve, who had taken no part at all, remained in the window-seat staring at the ground and her lips trembling. She heard Julian’s voice calling her, but she obstinately shook her head. He was lost to her between Kato and Grbits. She heard them eagerly talking now, all three, of the negotiations likely to follow. She heard the occasional shout with which Grbits recalled some incident in the fighting, and Julian’s response. She felt that her ardent hatred of the Islands rose in proportion to their ardent love. “He cares nothing for me,” she kept repeating to herself, “he cares for me as a toy, a pastime, nothing more; he forgets me for Kato and the Islands. The Islands hold his true heart. I am the ornament to his life, not life itself. And he is all my life. He forgets me.…” Pride alone conquered her tears.

  * * *

  Later, under cover of a white flag, the ex-Premier Malteios was landed at the port of Aphros, and was conducted—since he insisted that his visit was unofficial—to the Davenant house.

  Peace and silence reigned. Grbits and Kato had gone together to look at the wreckage, and Eve, having watched their extraordinary progress down the street until they turned into the market-place, was alone in the drawing-room. Julian slept heavily, his arms flung wide, on his bed upstairs. Zapantiotis, who had expected to find him in the court or in the drawing-room, paused perplexed. He spoke to Eve in a low voice.

  “No,” she said, “do not wake Mr. Davenant,” and, raising her voice, she added, “His Excellency can remain with me.”

  She was alone in the room with Malteios, as she had desired.

  “But why remain thus, as it were, at bay?” he said pleasantly, observing her attitude, shrunk against the wall, her hand pressed to her heart. “You and I were friends once, mademoiselle. Madame?” he substituted.

  “Mademoiselle,” she replied levelly.

  “Ah? Other rumours, perhaps—no matter. Here upon your island, no doubt, different codes obtain. Far be it from me to suggest.… An agreeable room,” he said, looking round, linking his fingers behind his back, and humming a little tune; “you have a piano, I see; have you played much during your leisure? But, of course, I was forgetting: Madame Kato is your companion here, is she not? and to her skill a piano is a grateful ornament. Ah, I could envy you your evenings, with Kato to make your music. Paris cries for her; but no, she is upon a revolutionary island in the heart of the Aegean! Paris cries the more. Her portrait appears in every paper. Madame Kato, when she emerges, will find her fame carried to its summit. And you, Mademoiselle Eve, likewise something of a heroine.”

  “I am here in the place of my cousin,” Eve said, looking across at the ex-Premie
r.

  He raised his eyebrows, and in a familiar gesture, smoothed away his beard from his rosy lips with the tips of his fingers.

  Is that indeed so? A surprising race, you English. Very surprising. You assume or bequeath very lightly the mantle of government, do you not? Am I to understand that you have permanently replaced your cousin in the—ah!—presidency of Hagios Zacharie?”

  “My cousin is asleep; there is no reason why you should not speak to me in his absence.”

  “Asleep? but I must see him, mademoiselle.”

  “If you will wait until he wakes.”

  “Hours, possibly!”

  “We will send to wake him in an hour’s time. Can I not entertain you until then?” she suggested, her natural coquetry returning.

  She left the wall against which she had been leaning, and, coming across to Malteios, gave him her fingers with a smile. The ex-Premier had always figured picturesquely in her world.

  “Mademoiselle,” he said, kissing the fingers she gave him, “you are as delightful as ever, I am assured.”

  They sat, Malteios impatient and ill at ease, unwilling to forego his urbanity, yet tenacious of his purpose. In the midst of the compliments he perfunctorily proffered, he broke out,—“Children! Ces gosses.… Mais il est fou, voyons, votre cousin. What is he thinking about? He has created a ridiculous disturbance; well, let that pass; we overlook it, but this persistence.… Where is it all to end? Obstinacy feeds and grows fat upon obstinacy; submission grows daily more impossible, more remote. His pride is at stake. A threat, well and good; let him make his threat; he might then have arrived at some compromise. I, possibly, might myself have acted as mediator between him and my friend and rival, Gregori Stavridis. In fact, I am here today in the hope that my effort will not come too late. But after so much fighting! Tempers run high no doubt in the Islands, and I can testify that they run high in Herakleion. Anastasia—probably you know this already—Madame Kato’s flat is wrecked. Yes, the mob. We are obliged to keep a cordon of police always before your uncle’s house. Neither he nor your father and mother dare to show themselves at the windows. It is a truly terrible state of affairs.”

  He reverted to the deeper cause of his resentment—

  “I could have mediated, in the early days, so well between your cousin and Gregori Stavridis. “Pity, pity, pity!” he said, shaking his head and smiling his benign, regretful smile that today was tinged with a barely concealed bitterness, “a thousand pities, mademoiselle.”

  He began again, his mind on Herakleion—

  “I have seen your father and mother, also your uncle. They are very angry and impotent. Because the people threw stones at their windows and even, I regret to say, fired shots into the house from the platia, the windows are all boarded over and they live by artificial light. I have seen them breakfasting by candles. Yes. Your father, your mother, and your uncle, breakfasting together in the drawing-room with lighted candles on the table. I entered the house from the back. Your father said to me apprehensively, “I am told Madame Kato’s flat was wrecked last night?” and your mother said, “Outrageous! She is infatuated, either with those Islands or with that boy. She will not care. All her possessions, littering the quays! An outrage.” Your uncle said to me, “See the boy, Malteios! Talk to him. We are hopeless.” Indeed they appeared hopeless, although not resigned, and sat with their hands hanging by their sides instead of eating their eggs; your mother, even, had lost her determination.

  “I tried to reassure them, but a rattle of stones on the boarded windows interrupted me. Your uncle got up and flung away his napkin. ‘One cannot breakfast in peace,’ he said petulantly, as though that constituted his most serious grievance. He went out of the room, but the door had scarcely closed behind him before it reopened and he came back. He was quite altered, very irritable, and all his courteous gravity gone from him. ‘See the inconvenience,’ he said to me, jerking his hands, ‘all the servants have gone with my son, all damned islanders.’ I found nothing to say.”

  “Kato may return to Herakleion with you?” Eve suggested after a pause during which Malteios recollected himself, and tried to indicate by shrugs and rueful smiles that he considered the bewilderment of the Davenants a deplorable but nevertheless entertaining joke. At the name of Kato, a change came over his face.

  “A fanatic, that woman,” he replied; “a martyr who will rejoice in her martyrdom. She will never leave Aphros while the cause remains.—A heroic woman,” he said, with unexpected reverence.

  He looked at Eve, his manner veering again to the insinuating and the crafty; his worse and his better natures were perpetually betraying themselves.

  “Would she leave Aphros? no! Would your cousin leave Aphros? no! They have between them the bond of a common cause. I know your cousin. He is young enough to be an idealist. I know Madame Kato. She is old enough to applaud skilfully. Hou!” He spread his hands. “I have said enough.”

  Eve revealed but little interest, though for the first time during their interview her interest was passionately aroused. Malteios watched her, new schemes germinating in his brain; they played against one another, their hands undeclared, a blind, tentative game. This conversation, which had begun as it were accidentally, fortuitously, turned to a grave significance along a road whose end lay hidden far behind the hills of the future. It led, perhaps, nowhere. It led, perhaps …

  Eve said lightly, “I am outdistanced by Kato and my cousin; I don’t understand politics, or those impersonal friendships.”

  “Mademoiselle,” Malteios replied, choosing his words and infusing into them an air of confidence, “I tell you an open secret, but one to which I would never refer save with a sympathetic listener like yourself, when I tell you that for many years a friendship existed between myself and Madame Kato, political indeed, but not impersonal. Madame Kato,” he said, drawing his chair a little nearer and lowering his voice, “is not of the impersonal type.”

  Eve violently rebelled from his nearness; fastidious, she loathed his goatish smile, his beard, his rosy lips, but she continued to smile to him, a man who held, perhaps, one of Julian’s secrets. She was aware of the necessity of obtaining that secret. Of the dishonour towards Julian, sleeping away his fatigue and his hurts in the room above, she was blindly unaware. Love to her was a battle, not a fellowship. She must know! Already her soul, eagerly receptive and bared to the dreaded blow, had adopted the theory of betrayal. In the chaos of her resentments and suspicions, she remembered how Kato had spoken to her in the morning, and without further reflection branded that conversation as a blind. She even felt a passing admiration for the other woman’s superior cleverness. She, Eve, had been completely taken in.… So she must contend, not only against the Islands, but against Kato also? Anguish and terror rushed over her. She scarcely knew what she believed or did not believe, only that her mind was one seething and surging tumult of mistrust and all-devouring jealousy. She was on the point of abandoning her temperamentally indirect methods, of stretching out her hands to Malteios, and crying to him for the agonising, the fiercely welcome truth, when he said—

  “Impersonal? Do you, mademoiselle, know anything of your sex? An, charming! disturbing, precious, indispensable, even heroic, tant que vous voudrez, but impersonal, no! Man, yes, sometimes. Woman, never. Never.” He took her hand, patted it, kissed the wrist, and murmured, “Chère enfant, these are not ideas for your pretty head.”

  She knew from experience that his preoccupation with such theories, if no more sinister motive, would urge him towards a resumption of the subject, and after a pause full of cogitation he continued,—

  “Follow my advice, mademoiselle: never give your heart to a man concerned in other affairs. You may love, both of you, but you will strive in opposite directions. Your cousin, for example.… And yet,” he mused, “you are a woman to charm the leisure of a man of action. The toy of a conqueror.” He laughed. “Fortunately, conquerors are rare.” But she knew he hovered round the image of Julian. “Be
lieve me, leave such men to such women as Kato; they are more truly kin. You—I discover you—are too exorbitant; love would play too absorbing a role. You would tolerate no rival, neither a person nor a fact. Your eyes smoulder; I am near the truth?”

  “One could steal a man from his affairs,” she said almost inaudibly.

  “The only hope,” he replied.

  A long silence fell, and his evil benevolence gained on her; on her aroused sensitiveness his unspoken suggestions fell one by one as definitely as the formulated word. He watched her; she trembled, half compelled by his gaze. At length, under the necessity of breaking the silence, she said,

  “Kato is not such a woman; she would resent no obstacle.”

  “Wiser,” he added, “she would identify herself with it.” He began to banter horribly—

  “Ah, child, Eve, child made for love, daily bless your cousinship! Bless its contemptuous security. Smile over the confabulations of Kato and your cousin. Smile to think that he, she, and the Islands are bound in an indissoluble trilogy. If there be jealousy to suffer, rejoice in that it falls, not to your share, but to mine, who am old and sufficiently philosophical. Age and experience harden, you know. Else, I could not see Anastasia Kato pass to another with so negligible a pang. Yet the imagination makes its own trouble. A jealous imagination.… Very vivid. Pictures of Anastasia Kato in your cousin’s arms—ah, crude, crude, I know, but the crudity of the jealous imagination is unequalled. Not a detail escapes. That is why I say, bless your cousinship and its security.” He glanced up and met her tortured eyes. “As I bless my philosophy of the inevitable,” he finished softly, caressing her hand which he had retained all the while.

  No effort at “Impossible!” escaped her; almost from the first she had blindly adopted his insinuations. She even felt a perverse gratitude towards him, and a certain fellowship. They were allies. Her mind was now set solely upon one object. That self-destruction might be involved did not occur to her, nor would she have been deterred thereby. Like Samson, she had her hands upon the columns.…