Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  Lomax was in the deck-house. There, he was dry, and could prop himself to resist the rearing and plunging; and could almost enjoy, moreover, the drench of water flung against the little hutch, invisible, but mighty and audible, streaming away after sweeping the ship from end to end. A funny lot they would be to drown, he reflected; and he remembered their departure from Southampton, all a little shy and constrained, with Miss Whitaker sprightly but on the defensive. How long ago that was, he failed to calculate. They had drifted down to Calshot, anchoring there on a washed April evening, between a liquid sky and oily lagoon-like reaches, gulls and sea-planes skimming sea and heaven, in the immense primrose peace of sunset. And they had known nothing of one another, and Miss Whitaker had written letters after dinner in the saloon. Well, well! thought Lomax.

  There came a fumbling at the deck-house door, a sudden blast of wind, a shower of spray, and Bellamy, in glistening oilskins, scrambled into the shelter, slamming the door behind him. A pool began to gather immediately round him on the floor. Lomax thought that he looked strangely triumphant, as though this were his hour. “Glad to have got us all into this mess,” he thought meanly. It aggravated him that he should never yet have found the key to Bellamy.

  “I want to talk to you,” cried Bellamy, rocking on his feet as he stood.

  He wanted to talk. External danger, then, gave him internal courage.

  “Come into my cabin,” he cried to Lomax over his shoulder as he began to make his way down the companion.

  But Lomax, really, knew nothing of all this. The storm, really, had not entered his consciousness at all; Bellamy, and Bellamy alone, had occupied it all the while. All that he knew, really, was that he found himself in Bellamy’s cabin. In Bellamy’s cabin, everything loose had been stowed away, so that it was bare of personal possessions; the narrow bunk, the swinging lamp, the closed cupboards alone remained untouched in the cabin that had sheltered the privacy of Bellamy’s midnight hours. Lomax, as he lurched in through the door and was violently thrown against the bunk, reflected that he had never before set foot in the owner’s quarters. They were small, low, and seamanlike; no luxury of chintz softened the plain wooden fittings; Lomax forgot the delicate yacht, and saw himself only in the presence of a sailor aboard his vessel, for Bellamy in his sou’wester and streaming oilskins, straddling in sea-boots beneath the lamp, had more the aspect of a captain newly descended from the bridge than of the millionaire owner of a pleasure yawl. He kept his feet, too, in spite of the violent motion, while Lomax, clinging to the side of the bunk, could barely save himself from being flung again across the cabin. But Bellamy stood there full of triumph, fully alive for the first time since Lomax had known him; his courteous languor dropped from him, he looked like a happy man. “This weather suits you,” Lomax shouted above the din.

  The yacht strained and creaked; now she lifted high on a wave, now fell sickeningly down into the trough. Water dashed against the closed port-hole and streamed past as the ship rose again to take the wave. Cast about in all directions, now dipping with her bows, now rolling heavily from furrow to furrow, she floundered with no direction and with no purpose other than to keep afloat; govern herself she could not, but maintain her hold on life she would. Lomax, who in the cabin down below could see nothing of the action of the sea, felt only the ship shaken in an angry hand, and heard the crash of tumult as the seas struck down upon the deck. “Will she live through it?” he screamed.

  “If she isn’t driven ashore,” cried Bellamy with perfect indifference. “Come nearer, we can’t make ourselves heard in this infernal noise.”

  It did not occur to him to move nearer to Lomax; perhaps he took pride in standing in the middle of the cabin, under the lamp now madly swaying in its gimbals, with the water still dripping from his oilskins into a pool on the floor. Lomax staggered towards him, clinging on to the edge of the bunk. It crossed his mind that this was a strange occasion to choose for conversation, but his standard of strangeness being now somewhat high he did not pause for long to consider that.

  “I want to have a talk with you,” said Bellamy again.

  An enormous shock of water struck the ship overhead, and for a moment she quivered through all her timbers—a moment of stillness almost, while she ceased to roll, and nothing but that shudder ran through her. “Stood that well,” said Bellamy, listening. Then she plunged; plunged as though never to rise any more, falling down as though a trap in the waters had opened to receive her; but she came up, lifted as rapidly as she had fallen, with a tremendous list over on to her side; righted herself, and took again to her rolling. The mate appeared in the doorway.

  “Dinghy’s gone, sir.”

  The man poured with water; in his black oilskins, his black sou’wester, he was a part of the black, wet night made tangible. Bellamy turned to Lomax. “So we’re isolated. Not that a boat could have lived in a sea like this.”

  “What are you really thinking?” cried Lomax. “Not of the dinghy, or the sea, but something you’ve had in your mind all these weeks. And why tell it to me? You don’t know me,” but he remembered that he did not know Miss Whitaker, yet he had married her.

  “Know you! Know you!” said Bellamy impatiently. “What’s knowing, at best? I want you to do me a favour. I want a promise from you. I know you enough to know you won’t refuse it.”

  “Why do you wear those glasses here?” cried Bellamy, staring at his guest.

  Lomax, contriving to seat himself on the edge of the bunk, and holding on to the rod, shouted back, “If I took them off I might refuse any promise.”

  “I like you,” said Bellamy. “I want you to come to me any day I should send for you—in England.”

  “So we are going back to England, are we?” said Lomax. He remembered their speculations about Bellamy. And so accustomed had he grown to the close limitation of the yacht and their four selves inhabiting it, that the prospect of disintegration was not only unconvincing, but positively distasteful. “We had,” he said, “an idea that you wouldn’t allow us to go back,” but he wondered as he said it why men should take pleasure in bringing pain upon one another.

  “Was I so sinister a figure?” said Bellamy. He took off his helmet, shining from the wet, and the lamp over his head gleamed upon his thick white hair and carved the shadows of weariness on his face, shadows that moved and shifted with the swinging of the lamp. “I was inconsiderate, doubtless—exasperating—wouldn’t make plans—I owe you all an apology. I am an egoist, you see, Lomax. I was thinking of myself. There were certain things I wanted to allow myself the luxury of forgetting.”

  It was intolerable that Bellamy should heap this blame upon himself.

  “You teased us,” muttered Lomax in shamed justification.

  “Yes, I teased you,” said Bellamy. “I apologise again, I disturbed your comfort. But knowing myself to be a dying man, I indulged myself in that mischief. I had moods, I confess, when the sight of your comfort and your security irritated me even into the desire to drown you all. It’s bad thinking, of a very elementary sort, and the foundation of most cynicism. I accept your rebuke.”

  “Damn you,” said Lomax, twisting his hands.

  “Nevertheless,” Bellamy continued, “I shan’t scruple to ask of you the favour I was going to ask. I am a coward, Lomax. I am afraid of pain. I am afraid of disease—of long, slow, disgusting disease—you understand me? And I have long been looking for some one who, when the moment came, would put me out of it.”

  “You can count on me,” said Lomax. At the same time he could not help hoping that the moment had not come there and then. Procastination and a carefully chosen pair of spectacles would make him a very giant of decision.

  Lomax went up on deck; he wanted a storm outside his head as well as a storm within it. The rain had ceased, and the tall spars swayed across a cloudy sky, rent between the clouds to show the moon. The sea was very rough and beautiful beneath the moon. It was good to see the storm at last, to see as well as to feel. Stars
appeared, among the rack of the clouds, and vaguely astronomical phrases came into Lomax’s mind: Nebulae, Inter-planetary space, Asteroids, Eighty thousand miles a second; he supposed that there were men to whom trillions were a workable reality, just as there were men who could diagnose Bellamy’s disease and give him his sentence of death for the sum of two guineas. Two guineas was a contemptible sum to Bellamy, who was so rich a man. To Artivale, what did two guineas mean? A new retort? A supply of chemical? And to Lomax himself—a new pair of glasses? Tossed on Illyrian billows, he saw a lunar rainbow standing suddenly upon the waves, amazingly coloured in the night of black and silver. Life jumbled madly in his brain. There was Marion, too, lost to him from the moment he had stepped out of that system in which existence was simply a thing to be got through as inconspicuously as possible; and leaning against the deck-house for support he came nearer to tears than he had ever been in his life.

  * * *

  Of course it was to be expected that the death of so wealthy a man as Bellamy should create a certain sensation. There were headlines in the papers, and Arthur Lomax, who had dined with him that evening and had been the last person to see him alive, spent tiresome days evading reports. Veronal it was; no question or doubt about that; the tumbler containing the dregs of poison and the dregs of whisky and soda was found quite frankly standing on the table beside him. Lomax’s evidence at the inquest threw no light on the suicide; no, Mr. Bellamy had not appeared depressed; yes, Mr. Bellamy had mixed a whisky and soda and drunk it off in his, Lomax’s, presence. He had not seen Mr. Bellamy add anything to the contents of the tumbler. He was unable to say whether Mr. Bellamy had mixed a second whisky and soda after he, Lomax, had left the house. What time had he left? Late; about one in the morning. They had sat up talking. No, he had not known Mr. Bellamy very long, but they had been for a yachting cruise together, lasting some weeks. He would not say that they had become intimate. He knew nothing of Mr. Bellamy’s private affairs. He had been very much shocked to read of the death next morning in the papers. Thank you, Mr. Lomax, that will do.

  Bellamy was buried, and Lomax, Artivale, and Miss Whitaker attended the funeral, drawn together again into their little group of four—if you counted Bellamy, invisible, but terribly present, in his coffin. To be buried in the rain is dreary, but to be buried on a morning of gay sunshine is more ironical. Fortunately for Lomax, he was able to obscure the sunshine by the use of his black glasses; and heaven knows he needed them. He was either indifferent or oblivious to the remarkable appearance he offered, in a top-hat, a black coat, and black spectacles. “Weak eyes,” noted the reporters. In fact he cared nothing for externals now, especially with the memory of his last meeting with Bellamy strong upon him. On seeing Miss Whitaker he roused himself a little, just enough to look at her with a wondering curiosity; he had forgotten her existence lately, except for the dim but constant knowledge that something stood blocked between him and Marion Vane, a something that wore neither name nor features, and whose materialisation he recognised, briefly puzzled by her importance, as Miss Whitaker. Important yet not important, for, in the muffled world which was his refuge, nothing mattered; events happened, but his mind registered nothing. Marion Vane herself was but a figure coming to him with outstretched hands, a figure so long desired, wearing that very gesture seemingly so impossible; and, in that gesture finally made, so instantly repudiated. His whole relationship with Marion Vane seemed now condensed into that moment of repudiation. “I am the resurrection and the life,” saith the Lord, but the clods thumped down with very convincing finality into Bellamy’s grave. Miss Whitaker stood near him, in black, very fragile; yes, she too had her pathos. Whether she had or had not trapped him with a lie … well, the lie, and the necessity for the lie, were of a deeper pathos than any truth she might have chosen to exploit. It is less pathetic to have a seducer in Ecuador than to have no seducer anywhere. But she might, thought Lomax, at least have acted up to her own invention. She might, knowing that she was going to meet him at the funeral, at least have thrust a cushion up under her skirt. A coarse man, Lomax. But perhaps she would have thought that irreverent at a funeral. There was no telling what queer superstitions people had; half the time, they did not know themselves, until a test found them out. Perhaps Miss Whitaker had boggled at that. Give her the benefit of the doubt; oh, surely better to credit her with a scruple than with lack of imagination! “I am become the first-fruits of them that sleep”—what did it all mean, anyway? Bellamy and the storm; why should the storm have given Bellamy courage? brought, so to speak, his hitherto only speculative courage to a head? Where was the relationship? What bearing had the extrinsic world upon the intrinsic? Why should the contemplation of life through coloured glasses make that life the easier to ruin? Why should reality recede? What was reality? Marion with her hands outstretched; so sure of him. Better to have helped Bellamy; better to have helped Miss Whitaker. Even though Miss Whitaker’s need of help was, perhaps, fictitious? Yes, even so. The loss was hers, not his. Her falsity could not impair his quixotism; that was a wild, irrational thing, separate, untouched, independent. It flamed out of his life—for all the unreality of Miss Whitaker, that actual Miss Whitaker who subscribed to the census paper, paid rates and taxes, and had an existence in the eyes of the law—it flamed as a few things flamed: his two meetings with Bellamy, his repudiation of Marion Vane. There were just a few gashes of life, bitten in; that was all one could hope for. Was it worth living seventy, eighty years, to accumulate half-a-dozen scars? Half-a-dozen ineradicable pictures, scattered over the monotony of seventy, eighty pages. He had known, when he married Miss Whitaker, that he repudiated Marion Vane; to repudiate her when she came with outstretched hands was but the projection of the half-hour in the Cairo registry office. But it was that that he remembered. And her hurt incredulous eyes; as it was Bellamy’s cry that he remembered; always the tangible thing—such was the weakness of the human, fleshly system. Now Bellamy would rot and be eaten, “Earth to earth, dust to dust”; his sickly body corrupting within the senseless coffin; and by that Lomax would be haunted, rather than by his spiritual tragedy; the tangible again, in the worms crawling in and out of a brain its master had preferred to still into eternal nescience. How long did it take for the buried flesh to become a skeleton? So long, and no less, would Lomax be haunted by the rotting corpse of Bellamy, as he would not have been haunted by the man dragging out a living death. Illogical, all of it; based neither upon truth nor upon reason, but always upon instinct, which reason dismissed as fallacious. Lomax opened his eyes, which he had closed; saw the world darkened, though he knew the sun still shone; and regretted nothing.

  * * *

  He had never before seen Miss Whitaker’s house. It was small, and extremely conventional. He sat drinking her tea, and telling himself over and over again that she was his wife. There were letters on her writing-table, and he caught himself looking for the foreign stamp; but he could see nothing but bills. He suspected her correspondence of containing nothing more intimate. Yet here she was, a woman secretly married; that, at any rate, was true, whatever else might be false. He wondered whether she hinted it to her acquaintances, and whether they disbelieved her.

  “Why did you laugh?” said Miss Whitaker.

  They resumed their conversation. It was feverishly impersonal, yet they both thought it must end by crashing into the shrine of intimacy. But as though their lives depended upon it they juggled with superficiality. Lomax devoted only half his attention to their talk, which indeed was of a nature so contemptibly futile as to deserve no more; the rest of his attention wandered about the room, inquiring into the sudden vividness of Miss Whitaker’s possessions: her initials on a paper-cutter, E. A. W.; the photograph of a woman, unknown to him, on the mantelpiece; a little stone Buddha; a seal in the pen-tray. Lomax saw them all through his darkened veil. This was her present—this small, conventional room; here she opened her morning paper, smoked her after-breakfast cigarette; here she returned in the e
vening, removed her hat, sat down to a book, poked the fire. But her past stretched away behind her, a blank to Lomax. No doubt she had done sums, worn a pig-tail, cried, and had a mother. So far, conjectures were safe. But her emotional interludes? All locked up? or hadn’t there been any? What, to her, was the half-hour in the Cairo registry office? Did it bulk, to her, as Bellamy and Marion Vane bulked to him? One could never feel the shape of another person’s mind; never justly apprehend its population. And he was not at all anxious to plumb the possibly abysmal pathos of Miss Whitaker; he didn’t want those friends of hers, those strong manly men, to evaporate beneath the crudity of his search. He didn’t want to be faced with the true desolation of the little room.

  * * *

  The rumours about Bellamy’s death became common property only a few weeks later. They apparently had their origin in Bellamy’s will, by which the fortune went to Lomax, turning him from a poor man into a rich one, to his embarrassed astonishment. He wondered vaguely whether the rumours had been set afoot by Miss Whitaker, but came to the conclusion that fact or what she believed to be fact had less allurement for her than frank fiction. Ergo, he said, her seducer in Ecuador interests her more than her secret husband in London. And he reasoned well.