Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  “Madame Kato lives in this house?” asked Malteios, as one who has been following a train of thought.

  She shook her head, and he noticed that her eyes were turned slightly inwards, as with the effort of an immense concentration.

  “You have power,” he said with admiration.

  Bending towards her, he began to speak in a very low, rapid voice; she sat listening to him, by no word betraying her passionate attention, nodding only from time to time, and keeping her hands very still, linked in her lap. Only once she spoke, to ask a question, “He would leave Herakleion?” and Malteios replied, “Inevitably; the question of the Islands would be for ever closed for him”; then she said, producing the words from afar off, “He would be free,” and Malteios, working in the dark, following only one of the two processes of her thought, reverted to Kato; his skill could have been greater in playing upon the instrument, but even so it sufficed, so taut was the stringing of the cords. When he had finished speaking, she asked him another question, “He could never trace the thing to me?” and he reassured her with a laugh so natural and contemptuous that she, in her ingenuity, was convinced. All the while she had kept her eyes fastened on his face, on his rosy lips moving amongst his beard, that she might lose no detail of his meaning or his instructions, and at one moment he had thought, “There is something terrible in this child,” but immediately he had crushed the qualm, thinking “By this recovery, if indeed it is to be, I am a made man,” and thanking the fate that had cast this unforeseen chance across his path. Finally she heard his voice change from its earnest undertone to its customary platitudinous flattery, and turning round she saw that Julian had come into the room, his eyes already bent with brooding scorn upon the emissary.

  Six

  She was silent that evening, so silent that Grbits, the unobservant, commented to Kato; but after they had dined, all four, by the fountain in the court, she flung aside her preoccupation, laughed and sang, forced Kato to the piano, and danced with reckless inspiration to the accompaniment of Kato’s songs. Julian, leaning against a column, watched her bewildering gaiety. She had galvanised Grbits into movement—he who was usually bashful with women especially with Eve, reserving his enthusiasm for Julian—and as she passed and re-passed before Julian in the grasp of the giant she flung at him provocative glances charged with a special meaning he could not interpret; in the turn of her dance he caught her smile and the flash of her eyes, and smiled in response, but his smile was grave, for his mind ran now upon the crisis with Herakleion, and, moreover, he suffered to see Eve so held by Grbits, her turbulent head below the giant’s shoulder, and regretted that her gaiety should not be reserved for him alone. Across the court, through the open door of the drawing-room, he could see Kato at the piano, full of delight, her broad little fat hands and wrists racing above the keyboard, her short torso swaying to the rhythm, her rich voice humming, and the gold wheat-ears shaking in her hair. She called to him, and, drawing a chair close to the piano, he sat beside her, but through the door he continued to stare at Eve dancing in the court. Kato said as she played, her perception sharpened by the tormented watch she kept on him,—“Eve celebrates your victory of yesterday,” to which he replied, deceived by the kindly sympathy in her eyes, “Eve celebrates her own high spirits and the enjoyment of a new partner; my doings are of the least indifference to her.”

  Kato played louder; she bent towards him—

  “You love her so much, Julian?”

  He made an unexpected answer—

  “I believe in her.”

  Kato, a shrewd woman, observed him, thinking, “He does not; he wants to convince himself.”

  She said aloud, conscientiously wrenching out the truth as she saw it, “She loves you; she is capable of love such as is granted to few; that is the sublime in her.”

  He seized upon this, hungrily, missing meanwhile the sublime in the honesty of the singer—“Since I am given so much, I should not exact more. The Islands … She gives all to me. I ought not to force the Islands upon her.”

  “Grapes of thistles,” Kato said softly.

  “You understand,” he murmured with gratitude. “But why should she hamper me, Anastasia? are all women so irrational? What am I to believe?”

  “We are not so irrational as we appear,” Kato said, “because our wildest sophistry has always its roots in the truth of instinct.”

  Eve was near them, crying out, “A tarantella, Anastasia!”

  Julian sprang up; he caught her by the wrist, “Gipsy!”

  “Come with the gipsy?” she whispered.

  Her scented hair blew near him, and her face was upturned, with its soft, sweet mouth.

  “Away from Aphros?” he said, losing his head.

  “All over the world!”

  He was suddenly swept away by the full force of her wild, irresponsible seduction.

  “Anywhere you choose, Eve.”

  She triumphed, close to him, and wanton. “You’d sacrifice Aphros to me?” “Anything you asked for,” he said desperately.

  She laughed, and danced away, stretching out her hands towards him—“Join in the saraband, Julian?”

  * * *

  She was alone in her room. Her emotions and excitement were so intense that they drained her of physical strength, leaving her faint and cold; her eyes closed now and then as under the pressure of pain; she yawned, and her breath came shortly between her lips; she sat by the open window, rose to move about the room, sat again, rose again, passed her hand constantly over her forehead, or pressed it against the base of her throat. The room was in darkness; there was no moon, only the stars hung over the black gulf of the sea. She could see the long, low lights of Herakleion, and the bright red light of the pier. She could hear distant shouting, and an occasional shot. In the room behind her, her bed was disordered. She wore only her Spanish shawl thrown over her long nightgown; her hair hung in its thick plait. Sometimes she formed, in a whisper, the single word, “Julian!”

  She thought of Julian. Julian’s rough head and angry eyes. Julian when he said, “I shall break you,” like a man speaking to a wild young supple tree. (Her laugh of derision, and her rejoicing in her secret fear!) Julian in his lazy ownership of her beauty. Julian when he allowed her to coax him from his moroseness. Julian when she was afraid of him and of the storm she had herself aroused: Julian passionate.…

  Julian whom she blindly wanted for herself alone.

  That desire had risen to its climax. The light of no other consideration filtered through into her closely shuttered heart. She had waited for Julian, schemed for Julian, battled for Julian; this was the final battle. She had not foreseen it. She had tolerated and even welcomed the existence of the Islands until she began to realise that they took part of Julian from her. Then she hated them insanely, implacably; including Kato, whom Julian had called their tutelary deity, in that hatred. Had Julian possessed a dog, she would have hated that too.

  The ambitions she had vaguely cherished for him had not survived the test of surrendering a portion of her own inordinate claim.

  She had joined battle with the Islands as with a malignant personality. She was fighting them for the possession of Julian as she might have fought a woman she thought more beautiful, more unscrupulous, more appealing than herself, but with very little doubt of ultimate victory. Julian would be hers, at last; more completely hers than he had been even in those ideal, uninterrupted days before Grbits and Kato came, the days when he forgot his obligations, almost his life’s dream for her. Love all-eclipsing.… She stood at the window, oppressed and tense, but in the soft silken swaying of her loose garments against her limbs she still found a delicately luxurious comfort.

  Julian had been called away, called by the violent hammering on the house-door; it had then been after midnight. Two hours had passed since then. No one had come to her, but she had heard the tumult of many voices in the streets, and by leaning far out of the window she could see a great flare burning up from the ma
rket-place. She had thought a house might be on fire. She could not look back over her dispositions; they had been completed in a dream, as though under direct dictation. It did not occur to her to be concerned as to their possible miscarriage; she was too ignorant of such matters, too unpractical, to be troubled by any such anxiety. She had carried out Malteios’s instructions with intense concentration; there her part had ended. The fuse which she had fired was burning.… If Julian would return, to put an end to her impatience!

  (Down in the market-place the wooden school-buildings flamed and crackled, redly lighting up the night, and fountains of sparks flew upward against the sky. The lurid market-place was thronged with sullen groups of islanders, under the guard of the soldiers of Herakleion. In the centre, on the cobbles, lay the body of Tsigaridis, on his back, arms flung open, still, in the enormous pool of blood that crept and stained the edges of his spread white fustanella. Many of the islanders were not fully dressed, but had run out half-naked from their houses, only to be captured and disarmed by the troops; the weapons which had been taken from them lay heaped near the body of Tsigaridis, the light of the flames gleaming along the blades of knives and the barrels of rifles, and on the bare bronzed chests of men, and limbs streaked with tricklets of bright red blood. They stood proudly, contemptuous of their wounds, arms folded, some with rough bandages about their heads. Panaioannou, leaning both hands on the hilt of his sword, and grinning sardonically beneath his fierce moustaches, surveyed the place from the steps of the assembly-room.)

  Eve in her now silent room realised that all sounds of tumult had died away. A shivering came over her, and, impelled by a suddenly understood necessity, she lit the candles on her dressing-table and, as the room sprang into light, began flinging the clothes out of the drawers into a heap in the middle of the floor. They fluttered softly from her hands, falling together in all their diverse loveliness of colour and fragility of texture. She paused to smile to them, friends and allies. She remembered now, with the fidelity of a child over a well-learnt lesson, the final words of Malteios, “A boat ready for you both tonight, secret and without delay,” as earlier in the evening she had remembered his other words, “Midnight, at the creek at the back of the islands…”; she had acted upon her lesson mechanically, and in its due sequence, conscientious, trustful.

  She stood amongst her clothes, the long red sari which she had worn on the evening of Julian’s first triumph drooping from her hand. They foamed about her feet as she stood doubtfully above them, strangely brilliant herself in her Spanish shawl. They lay in a pool of rich delicacy upon the floor. They hung over the backs of chairs, and across the tumbled bed. They pleased her; she thought them pretty. Stooping, she raised them one by one, and allowed them to drop back on to the heap, aware that she must pack them and must also dress herself. But she liked their butterfly colours and gentle rustle, and, remembering that Julian liked them too, smiled to them again. He found her standing there amongst them when after a knock at her door he came slowly into her room.

  He remained by the door for a long while looking at her in silence. She had made a sudden, happy movement towards him, but inexplicably had stopped, and with the sari still in her hand gazed back at him, waiting for him to speak. He looked above all, mortally tired. She discovered no anger in his face, not even sorrow; only that mortal weariness. She was touched; she to whom those gentler emotions were usually foreign.

  “Julian?” she said, seized with doubt.

  “It is all over,” he began, quite quietly, and he put his hand against his forehead, which was still bandaged, raising his arm with the same lassitude; “they landed where young Zapantiotis was on guard, and he let them through; they were almost at the village before they were discovered. There was very little fighting. They have allowed me to come here. They are waiting for me downstairs. I am to leave.”

  “Yes,” she said, and looked down at her heap of clothes.

  He did not speak again, and gradually she realised the implications of his words.

  “Zapantiotis.…” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, raising his eyes again to her face, “yes, you see, Zapantiotis confessed it all to me when he saw me. He was standing amongst a group of prisoners, in the market-place, but when I came by he broke away from the guards and screamed out to me that he had betrayed us. Betrayed us. He said he was tempted, bribed. He said he would cut his own throat. But I told him not to do that.”

  She began to tremble, wondering how much he knew.

  He added, in the saddest voice she had ever heard, “Zapantiotis, an islander, could not be faithful.”

  Then she was terrified; she did not know what was coming next, what would be the outcome of this quietness. She wanted to come towards him, but she could only remain motionless, holding the sari up to her breast as a means of protection.

  “At least,” he said, “old Zapantiotis is dead, and will never know about his son. Where can one look for fidelity? Tsigaridis is dead too, and Grbits. I am ashamed of being alive.”

  She noticed then that he was disarmed.

  “Why do you stand over there, Julian?” she said timidly.

  “I wonder how much you promised Zapantiotis?” he said in a speculative voice; and next, stating a fact, “You were, of course, acting on Malteios’s suggestion.”

  “You know?” she breathed. She was quite sure now that he was going to kill her.

  “Zapantiotis tried to tell me that too—in a strange jumble of confessions. But they dragged him away before he could say more than your bare name. That was enough for me. So I know, Eve.”

  “Is that all you were going to say?”

  He raised his arms and let them fall.

  “What is there to say?”

  Knowing him very well, she saw that his quietness was dropping from him; she was aware of it perhaps before he was aware of it himself. His eyes were losing their dead apathy, and were travelling round the room; they rested on the heap of clothes, on her own drawing of himself hanging on the wall, on the disordered bed. They flamed suddenly, and he made a step towards her.

  “Why? why? why?” he cried out with the utmost anguish and vehemence, but stopped himself, and stood with clenched fists. She shrank away. “All gone—in an hour!” he said, and striding towards her he stood over her, shaken with a tempest of passion. She shrank farther from him, retreating against the wall, but first she stooped and gathered her clothes around her again, pressing her back against the wall and cowering with the clothes as a rampart round her feet. But as yet full realisation was denied her; she knew that he was angry, she thought indeed that he might kill her, but to other thoughts of finality she was, in all innocence, a stranger.

  He spoke incoherently, saying, “All gone! All gone!” in accents of blind pain, and once he said, “I thought you loved me,” putting his hands to his head as though walls were crumbling. He made no further reproach, save to repeat, “I thought the men were faithful, and that you loved me,” and all the while he trembled with the effort of his self-control, and his twitching hands reached out towards her once or twice, but he forced them back. She thought, “How angry he is! but he will forget, and I shall make up to him for what he has lost.” So, between them, they remained almost silent, breathing hard, and staring at one another.

  “Come, put up your clothes quickly,” he said at last, pointing; “they want us off the island, and if we do not go of our own accord they will tie our hands and feet and carry us to the boat. Let us spare ourselves that ludicrous scene. We can marry in Athens tomorrow.”

  “Marry?” she repeated.

  “Naturally. What else did you suppose? That I should leave you? now? Put up your clothes. Shall I help you? Come!”

  “But—marry, Julian?”

  “Clearly: marry,” he replied, in a harsh voice and added, “Let us go. For God’s sake, let us go now! I feel stunned, I mustn’t begin to think. Let us go.” He urged her towards the door.

  “But we had nothing to do with m
arriage,” she whispered.

  He cried, so loudly and so bitterly that she was startled—

  “No, we had to do only with love—love and rebellion! And both have failed me. Now, instead of love, we must have marriage; and instead of rebellion, law. I shall help on authority, instead of opposing it.” He broke down and buried his face in his hands.

  “You no longer love me,” she said slowly, and her eyes narrowed and turned slightly inwards in the way Malteios had noticed. “Then the Islands.…”

  He pressed both hands against his temples and screamed like one possessed, “But they were all in all in all! It isn’t the thing, it’s the soul behind the thing. In robbing me of them you’ve robbed me of more than them—you’ve robbed me of all the meaning that lay behind them.” He retained just sufficient self-possession to realise this. “I knew you were hostile, how could I fail to know it? but I persuaded myself that you were part of Aphros, part of all my beliefs, even something beyond all my beliefs. I loved you, so you and they had to be reconciled. I reconciled you in secret. I gave up mentioning the Islands to you because it stabbed me to see your indifference. It destroyed the illusion I was cherishing. So I built up fresh, separate illusions about you. I have been living on illusions, now I have nothing left but facts. I owe this to you, to you, to you!”

  “You no longer love me,” she said again. She could think of nothing else. She had not listened to his bitter and broken phrases. “You no longer love me, Julian.”

  “I was so determined that I would be deceived by no woman, and like every one else I have fallen into the trap. Because you were you, I ceased to be on my guard. Oh, you never pretended to care for Aphros; I grant you that honesty; but I wanted to delude myself and so I was deluded. I told myself marvellous tales of your rarity; I thought you were above even Aphros. I am punished for my weakness in bringing you here. Why hadn’t I the strength to remain solitary? I reproach myself; I had not the right to expose my Islands to such a danger. But how could I have known? how could I have known?”