Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  “Oh,” she said, looking up at last, “do for goodness’ sake take off those horrid spectacles.”

  Lomax realised then the gulf between himself, dwelling in his strange world, and the rest of mankind in a wholesome day. But he knew that if he took them off, Miss Whitaker would immediately become intolerable.

  “The glare hurts my eyes,” he said. So do we lie. Miss Whitaker little knew what she gained. Looking at Lomax, she saw a man made absurd. Looking at Miss Whitaker, Lomax saw a woman in distress. All womanhood in distress; all womanhood pressed by catastrophe. His common sense was divinely in abeyance; and he kept it there. What else, indeed, was worth while?

  To Miss Whitaker, too, was communicated a certain imminence. Her own stories were marvellously coming true. Indeed, to her, they were always true; what else was worth while? But that the truth of fact should corroborate the truth of imagination! Her heart beat. She kept her eyes averted from Lomax; it was her only chance. He kept his eyes bent upon her; it was his. At all costs she must not see the glasses, and at all costs he must see through them, and through them alone. He gazed. The chair she sat in was a smoky cloud; her fragility was duskily tinged. Her tears were Ethiopian jewels; black pearls; grief in mourning. Yet Lomax had been, once, an ordinary man, getting through life; not more cynical than most. An ordinary man, with nothing in the world to keep him busy. Perhaps that had been his trouble. Anyway, that was, now extravagantly remedied.

  It took a long time to get a confession out of Miss Whitaker. She could write Ecuador on an envelope, and without comment allow it to be observed, but she could not bring herself to utter so precise a geographical statement. There were moments when it seemed to Lomax, even behind the black glasses, perfectly ridiculous that he should suggest marriage to Miss Whitaker. He did not even know her; but then, certainly, the idea of marriage with a woman one did not know had always appeared to him a degree less grotesque than the reverse. The only woman in his life being inaccessible, one reason for marriage with anybody else was as good as another. And what better reason than that one had found a lonely woman in tears, and had looked on her through coloured glasses?

  Miss Whitaker knew only that she must keep her head. She had not thought that the loose strands cast by her about Lomax could have hardened so suddenly into a knot. She had never known them so harden before. But what an extraordinary man! Having spent her life in the hopes of coming across somebody who would play up, she was astonished now that she had found him. He was too good to be believed in. Very rapidly—for he was pressing her—she must make up her mind. The situation could not be allowed to fritter out into the commonplace. It did not occur to her that the truth was as likely to increase his attention as any fiction. She was not alone in this; for who stands back to perceive the pattern made by their own lives? They plaster on every sort of colour, which in due time flakes off and discovers the design beneath. Miss Whitaker only plastered her colour a little thicker than most. She was finding, however, that Lomax had got hold of her paint-brush and was putting in every kind of chiaroscuro while she, helplessly, looked on. Now it was the grey of disillusion, now the high light of faith. The picture shaped itself under her eyes. She tried to direct him, but he had bolted with her. “Ten days ago,” she tried to say, “you didn’t know me.” And, to make matters more disconcerting, Lomax himself was evidently in some great distress. He seemed to be impelled by some inner fire to pronounce the words he was pronouncing; to be abandoning all egoism under the exaltation of self-sacrifice. The absurd creature believed in his mission. And Miss Whitaker was not slow to kindle at his flame. They were both caught up, now, in their own drama. Intent, he urged details from her, and with now a sigh escaping her, and now a little flare of pride, she hinted confirmation. It was really admirable, the background which between them they contrived to build up; personalities emerged, three-dimensional; Ecuador fell into its place with a click. Even the expedition to Egypt fitted in—Miss Whitaker had accepted Bellamy’s invitation in order to escape the vigilance of a brother. He had a hot temper, this brother—Robert; any affront to his sister, and he would be flying off to Ecuador. Robert was immensely wealthy; he owned an oil-field in Persia; he would spare no expense in searching Ecuador from end to end. He had already been known to scour Russia to avenge a woman. By this time Lomax was himself ready to scour Ecuador. Miss Whitaker wavered; she relished the idea of a Lomax with smoking nostrils ransacking Central America, but on second thoughts she dissuaded him; she didn’t want, she said, to send him to his death. Lomax had an idea that the man—still anonymous—would not prove so formidable. Miss Whitaker constructed him as very formidable indeed; one of the world’s bad lots, but in every sense of the word irresistible. Lomax scorned the adjective; he had no use, he said, for bad lots so callous as to lay the sole burden of consequences upon the woman. He used a strong word. Miss Whitaker blinked. The men she admired did not use such words in the presence of women. Still, under the circumstances, she made no comment; she overlooked the irregularity. She merely put up a chiding finger, not a word of blame was to be uttered in her hearing.

  “By the way,” said Lomax, as they finally parted to dress for dinner, “perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me your Christian name?”

  The hotel facade was a concrete wall pierced with windows; the rooms were square compartments enclosing single individuals. Sometimes they enclosed couples, linked together by convention or by lust. In either case the persons concerned were really quite separate, whether they wanted to be or whether they didn’t. They had no choice in the matter. Boots and shoes stood outside the doors, in a row down the passage. The riding-boots of soldiers, tanned and spurred. High-heeled, strapped shoes of women. Sometimes two pairs stood side by side, right and proper, masculine and feminine; and this made the single pairs look forlorn. Surely, if they could have walked without feet in them, they would have edged together? The little Anglo-Egyptian wife of the colonel, carefully creaming her nose before powdering it, wished that that Mr. Bellamy, who looked so distinguished, would ask them down to his yacht at Alexandria.

  The colonel, in his shirt sleeves, wished only that his stud would go into his collar. Artivale, bending over a dead chameleon, slit up its belly neatly with his nail scissors. The little Swiss waiter in his cupboard of a bedroom saw the sweat from his forehead drip upon the floor as he pared away the corn upon his toe. He sat, unconsciously, in the attitude of the Tireur d’Epines. But Lomax and Miss Whitaker, on reaching their bedrooms, paused appalled at their own madness as the blessing of solitude enclosed them with the shutting of the door.

  * * *

  It is not really difficult to get a marriage licence. Besides, once one has committed oneself to a thing, pride forbids that one should draw back. Nevertheless, Lomax was married in his spectacles—the blue ones. Without them, he could not have gone through the ceremony. They walked home, when it was over, via the bazaars. They had to flatten themselves against the wall to let a string of camels go by. The din and shouting of the bazaar rose round them; Achmed Ali, with cheap carpets over his arm, displayed to Miss Whitaker his excellent teeth and his bad Assiout shawls; some one smashed a bottle of scent and its perfume rose up under their feet, like incense before a sacrifice. Still they made no reference to what had just taken place. It was in their covenant that no reference should be made, neither between one another, nor to any one else. Time enough for that, thought Lomax, an indeterminate number of months hence. That was Miss Whitaker’s business. When she needed him, she had only to send him a message. In the meantime, Bellamy met them on the steps of the hotel, more genial than usual, for he had been talking to the colonel’s wife and she had amused him—a transient amusement, but better than nothing to that sad man.

  “Been sight-seeing?” he inquired; and then, as Miss Whitaker passed into the hotel, “It’s really noble of you, my dear Lomax,” he said, “to have taken Miss Whitaker off like that for a whole morning.”

  * * *

  Marion Vane’s
husband died that afternoon. She had sat by his bedside trying loyally not to think that now she would be free to marry Lomax. She did not know where Lomax was, for they had long since settled that it was better for them not to communicate. He would see the death in the papers, of course, and perhaps he would write her a formal letter of condolence, but she knew she could trust him not to come near her until she sent for him. This was April; in October she would send. Then she was startled by a faint throaty sound, and saw that the fingers which had been picking the blankets were once convulsed, and then lay still.

  * * *

  The Nereid set sail from Alexandria two days later. Bellamy did not seem able to make up his mind where he wanted to go. Sicily was talked of, the Dalmatian coast, the Piraeus, and Constantinople. The others were quite passive under his vacillations. Now they were afloat, and had re-entered that self-contained little world which is in every ship at sea; temporary, but with so convincing an illusion of permanence; a world weighing so many tons, confined within a measure of so many paces, limited to a population of so many souls, a world at the same time restricted and limitless, here closely bound by the tiny compass of the ship, and there subject to no frontiers but those of the watery globe itself. In a ship at sea our land life slips away, and our existence fills with the new conditions. Moreover in a sailing ship the governing laws are few and simple; a mere question of elements. Bellamy was sailor enough—eccentric enough, said some—to despise auxiliary steam. Appreciative of caprice, in the wind he found a spirit capricious enough to satisfy his taste. In a calm he was patient, and in a storm amused, and for the rest he comported himself in this matter, as in all others (according to his set and general principle), as though he had the whole leisure of life before him.

  No shore was visible, for Bellamy liked to keep the shore out of sight. It increased, he explained, not only the sense of space but also the sense of time. So they lounged along, having the coasts of Barbary somewhere over the horizon, and being pleasantly independent of century; indeed, the hours of their meals were of greater import to them than the interval elapsed since the birth of Christ. This, Bellamy said, was the wholesome attitude. Bellamy, in his courteous, sophisticated, and ironical way, was ever so slightly a tyrant. He did not dictate to them, but he suggested, not only where they should go, but also what they should think. It was very subtly done. There was not enough, not nearly enough, for them to resent; there was only enough to make them, sometimes, for a skimming moment, uneasy. What if Bellamy, when they wanted to go home, wouldn’t go home? What if, from being a host, he should slide into being a jailer?

  But in the meantime it was pleasant enough to cruise in the Nereid, lying in deck-chairs, while Bellamy, with his hand on the helm and the great blade of the mainsail above him, watched from under the peak of his cap, not them, but the sea.

  Very blue it was too, and the Nereid, when she was not running before a fair wind on an even keel, lay over to the water, so low that now and then she shipped a gobbet of sea, only a thin little runnel that escaped at once through the open scuppers of the lee runner, in a hurry to get back to its element. Bellamy was bored by a fair wind; he hated the monotony of a day with the sheet out and the beautiful scooped shape of the spinnaker, and the crew asleep for’ard, since there was no handling of gear to keep them on the run. What he liked was a day with plenty of tacking, and then he would turn the mate or the captain off and take the wheel himself, and cry “Lee-o!” to the crew. And what pleased him even better was to catch the eye of the mate and give the order with only a nod of the head, so that his unwarned guests slithered across the deck as the ship went about, when he would laugh and apologise with perfect urbanity; but they noticed that next time he had the chance he did precisely the same thing again. “Bellamy likes teasing us,” said Lomax, with a good deal of meaning in his tone. Bellamy did, even by so slight an irritation. And once he brought off a Dutchman’s gybe, which nearly shot Lomax, who was lying asleep under the mizzen-boom, into the sea.

  One sleeps a great part of the time on a yacht. Artivale fished, and dissected the fish he caught, so that a section of the deck was strewn with little ribs and spines. Lomax surveyed these through his spectacles. Artivale had long slim fingers, and he took up and set down the little bones, fitting them together, with the dexterity of a lace-maker among her bobbins. Tailor-wise he sat, his hair lifted by the wind, and sometimes he looked up with a full smile into the disapproving face of Miss Whitaker. “Play spillikins, Miss Whitaker?” he asked, jumbling his fish bones all together into a heap.

  Very blue and white it all was. Soft, immense white clouds floated, and the sails were white, and Artivale’s tiny graveyard, but the scrubbed deck, which in Southampton Water had looked white, here appeared pale yellow by contrast. The sails threw blue shadows. The crew ran noiselessly on bare feet. “When shall we get there?” Lomax wondered, but since he did not know where “there” was, and since all the blueness and whiteness were to him overlaid as with the angry cloud of an impending storm, he was content to hammock himself passively in the amplitude of enveloping time, He was, indeed, in no hurry, for his land-life, now withdrawn, had been merely a thing to be got through; he had an idle curiosity to see what was going to happen in these changed aeons that stretched before him; nor did he know that Marion Vane’s husband was dead. So he lay in his deck-chair, speculating about Bellamy, watching Artivale, aware of the parallel proximity of Miss Whitaker—who was his wife—in her deck-chair, and occasionally, by way of refreshment, turning his eyes behind their owlish spectacles over the expanse of his lurid sea and sky.

  What of it, anyway? There were quite a number of other communities in the world beside this little community, microscopic on the Mediterranean. Lomax saw the blue as it was not, the others saw or thought they saw the blue as it was, but unless and until our means of communication become more subtle than they at present are, we cannot even be sure that our eyes see colours alike. How, then, should we know one another? Lomax lived alone with his secret, Bellamy with his; and as for Miss Whitaker, if Truth be indeed accustomed to dwell at the bottom of a well, at the bottom of Miss Whitaker’s heart she must surely have found a dwelling suited to her taste. Artivale, being a scientist intent upon a clue, probably knew more of the secrets of life than the seamen who begot their offspring in the rude old fashion, but it is to be doubted whether even Artivale knew much that was worth knowing. He claimed to have produced a tadpole by ectogenetic birth, but, having produced it, he was quite unable to tell that tadpole whither it was going when it inconsiderately died, and, moreover, as he himself observed, there were tadpoles enough in the world already.

  Volcanic islands began, pitting the sea; white towns and golden temples clung to a violet coast. Bellamy suggested to them that they did not want to land, a suggestion in which they acquiesced. They shared a strange disinclination to cross Bellamy. They were sailing now within a stone’s throw of a wild, precipitous coast, their nights and their days boundaried by magnificent sunsets and splendid dawns. But for those, time did not exist. Geography did not exist either; Bellamy referred to Illyria, and they were content to leave it at that. It fitted in with the unreality of their voyage. There are paintings of ships setting sail into a haze of sunlight, ships full-rigged, broad-beamed, with tracery of rope, pushing off for the unknown, voyages to Cythera, misty and romantic; Lomax wore the amber spectacles, and saw a golden ship evanescent in golden air. Morning and evening flamed upon the sea; each day was a lagoon of blue. Islets and rocks stained the shield of water; mountains swept down and trod the sea; cities of Illyria rose upon the breast of the coastline; rose; drew near; and faded past. Venice and Byzantium in spire and cupola clashed the arms of peace for ever on the scene of their exploits. But towns were rare; they passed not more than one in every four-and-twenty hours. For the rest, they were alone with that piratical seaboard descending barbarously to the sea; never a hut, never a road, never a goat to hint at life, but caves and creeks running between the headl
ands, and sullen mountains like a barrier between the water and the inland tracts. The little ship sailed lonely beneath the peaks. Day after day she sailed, idly coasting Illyria, and Bellamy waited for the storm. “Treacherous waters,” he had observed on entering them. Indeed it seemed incongruous that the sea should be so calm and the shore so wild. Day after day unbroken, with that angry coast always on their right hand and the placid sea on their left; day after day of leisure, with a wall of disaster banking higher and higher against them.

  Those paintings of ships show the ship setting sail in fair weather; they never follow her into the turbulence of her adventure. Friends speed her with waving handkerchiefs, and turn away, and know nothing of her till a letter comes saying that she has arrived at her place of port. And, for the matter of that, the lives of friends touch here and there in the same fashion, and the gap over the interval is never bridged, knowledge being but a splintered mirror which shall never gather to a smooth and even surface.

  The Nereid then, with her living freight, saw the serenity of Illyria broken up into a night of anger, but the wives of the crew, lighting their lamps in brick cottages at Brightlingsea, knew nothing of it, and the wife of the captain writing to her aunt said, “Joe has a nice job with a gentleman name of Bellamy on a yorl in the Mediterranean,” and Marion Vane with an edging of white lawn to her mourning at neck and cuffs was vague to her trustee at dinner regarding the disposal of her country house, for she believed that this time next year she would be married to Lomax. The Nereid was not broad-beamed; she was slim as a hound, and it was not with a plebeian solidity but with an aristocratic mettle that she took the storm. Her canvas rapidly furled, she rode with bare masts crazily sawing the sky. Black ragged night enveloped her; the coast, although invisible, contributed to the tempest, throwing its boulders against the waves as the waves hurled themselves against its boulders. The little boat, a thing of naught, was battered at that meeting-place of enemies. Rain and spray drove together across the deck, as momently the storm increased and the wind tore howling through the naked spars. The men were black figures clinging to stays for support, going down with the ship when she swooped from the crest down into the trough, rising again with her, thankful to find the deck still there beneath their feet, lashed by the rain, blinded by the darkness, unable to see, able only to feel, whether with their hands that, wet and frozen, clung to rail and stanchion, or with their bodies that sank and rose, enduring the tremendous buffeting of the tossing ship, and the shock of water that, as it broke over the deck, knocked the breath from their lungs and all but swept them from their refuge into the hopeless broiling of the sea.