Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  The public see me in the dock; they do not see me in my cell. Let me look at the walls; they are white, not clouded into a nameless colour, as once they would have been. Uncompromisingly white. How ugly, how bare! But I must remember: this is a prison cell. I have no means of turning it into anything else. I am a prisoner on trial for my life. That’s fact. A plain man, suffering the consequences for the actions of a creature enchanted, now disappeared. The white walls are fact. Geometry is a fact—or so they say—but didn’t some one suggest that in another planetary system the laws of geometry might be reversed? This cell is geometrical; square floor, square ceiling, square walls, square window intersected by bars. Geometrical shadows, Euclidean angles. White light. Did I, or did I not, do this, that, and the other? I did, but … No buts. Facts are facts. Yes or no. Geometrical questions require geometrical answers. If A be equal to B, then C … But either I am mad, or they are mad, or the King’s English no longer means what it used to mean.

  In the dock again. Amazing statements, in substance true, in essence madly false. He must neither interrupt nor attempt to justify. All these events, which dance round him pointing crooked fingers, disfiguring their aspects into such caricatures, all these events came about so naturally, so inevitably. He knows that, as a lesson learnt, though the enchantment is gone from him. If he might speak, even, what should he relate of that experience? If he might speak! But when he speaks he damns himself. His counsel speaks for him, well-primed, so far as his client’s idea of honour has been allowed to prime him; but Lomax knows all the time that his life is of no real consequence to his counsel, except in so far as success provides advertisement; he knows that after the trial is over, one way or the other, his counsel will meet the opposing counsel in the lobby and stop to joke with him, “Got the better of you that time,” or, “Well, you were too much for me.”

  Meanwhile his counsel has been eloquent, in an academic way. Lomax has nothing to complain of. The opening speech for the defence. A simple defence: murder at the victim’s request; a man threatened by a mortal disease. An act of friendship; an exaggerated act of friendship, it may be said; but shall it be called the less noble for that? But Lomax sees it coldly; he judges dispassionately, as though the story were not his own. Here stands this man; the jury will hear him tell how, out of compassion for a man he barely knew, he exposed himself to the utmost risk; even the precautions of common prudence were neglected by him in the urgency and delicacy of the circumstances. Another man would have refused this friendly office; or, accepting it, would have ensured his personal safety by a written assurance; or, thirdly, would have hurried from the house before the death had taken place. Not so the prisoner. Prisoner had remained for two hours with the dead body of his friend in the room, dealing with his private papers according to instructions previously received. (Here the prisoner was observed to show some signs of emotion.) Again, the prisoner might have pleaded not guilty; but, regretting his inaccuracies at the time of the inquest, had refused to do so. He was determined to tell the whole truth and to throw himself upon the mercy of the jury.

  Lomax realised fully the impossible task his obstinacy had imposed upon his unfortunate counsel.

  He realised too, however, that the difficulties improved the game, from the point of view of his counsel. How great would his triumph be, supposing…! And, after all, it was nothing but a game.

  “A hopeless fellow,” said counsel to his wife that night, over his port. “I never had to deal with such a case—never. Of course, if I can get him off, I’m made,” and he fell to ruminating, and his wife who was in love with him, knew better than to interrupt.

  How strange a colour were faces in the mass! A face examined separately and in detail was pink, porous, distinctive with mouth and eyebrows, but taken collectively they were of a uniform buff, and wore but one expression, of imbecile curiosity. Upturned, vacuous curiosity. Lomax had a prolonged opportunity for looking down upon such a mass. Here and there he picked out a face he knew—Artivale, Robert Whitaker, the captain of the Nereid,—and wondered vaguely what strands had drawn them all together at that place. Only by an effort of concentration could he connect them with himself. The voice went on, telling the truth on his behalf. The jury leaned forward to stare at him. The judge, with a long face and dewlaps like a bloodhound, up under his canopy, drew pictures on his blotting-paper. Outside in the streets, sensational posters flowered against the railings with the noonday editions. The Coati in the Zoo waggled his snout; at Mme. Tussaud’s the waxen murderers stood accumulating dust in the original dock of the Old Bailey; the Nereid, stripped of her wings, swayed a forlorn hulk in the mud at Brightlingsea.

  The prosecution was thick with argument. It bore down upon Lomax like a fog through which he could not find his way. He heard his piteous motives scouted; he heard the exquisite ridicule: he saw a smile of derision flicker across the jury. And he sympathised. He quite saw that he could not expect to be believed. If only Bellamy had not left him that fortune, he might have stood a chance. But he would not be so ungenerous as to criticise Bellamy.

  That was the first day of the prosecution. Lomax at night in his cell was almost happy: he was glad to endure this for Bellamy’s sake. He had loved Bellamy. He was glad to know at last how much he had loved Bellamy. And his privilege had been to spare Bellamy years of intolerable life. He never stopped to argue that Bellamy might just as well have performed the function for himself; for Bellamy was a coward—had said so once and for all, and Lomax had accepted it. Lomax did not sleep much that night, but a sort of exultation kept him going: he had saved Bellamy, Artivale would have the money, and it was still just possible that to Miss Whitaker he had rendered a service. Not much of a service, certainly, to provide her with a convicted murderer upon whom to father her child; but, between himself and his own conscience, he knew that his intentions had been honourable. His brain was perfectly clear that night. He knew that he must hold on to those three things, and he would go compensated to the scaffold.

  On the second day two of his three things were taken from him.

  The first was the harder to bear. Post-mortem had revealed no mortal disease in the exhumed body. Lomax, lack-lustre in the dock stirred to brief interest: so Bellamy, too, had been of the same company? But what Bellamy had really believed would now never be known.

  The second concerned Miss Whitaker. Before she was called, the court was cleared, counsel submitting that the evidence about to be produced was of too delicate and private a character for publication. Ah, thought Lomax, here is a delicacy they can understand! He sat quiet while feet shuffled out of the court, herded away by a bailiff. Then when the doors were closed he heard the now familiar voice: Evelyn Amy Whitaker.

  She was in the witness-box. She was very much frightened but she had been subpoenaed, and Robert had terrorised her. She would not look at Lomax. Was she resident at 40 College Buildings, Kensington? She was. She had known the prisoner since April of the present year. She had met him on Mr. Bellamy’s yacht. They had sailed from Southampton to Alexandria and from thence had travelled by train to Cairo. In Cairo she had married the prisoner.

  Here Lomax’s counsel protested that the evidence was irrelevant.

  Counsel for the Crown maintained that the evidence was necessary to throw light upon the prisoner’s character, and the objection was overruled.

  Examination continued: the marriage took place entirely at the prisoner’s suggestion. He had appeared very strange, and insisted upon wearing coloured spectacles even when not in the sun—but here another protest was raised, and allowed by his lordship. Prisoner had always been very much interested in Mr. Bellamy, and occasionally said he could not understand him; also asked witness and Mr. Artivale their opinion. She had never heard Mr. Bellamy make any reference to his health. She had known Mr. Bellamy and the prisoner to be closeted for long talks in Mr. Bellamy’s cabin.

  Cross-examined by counsel for the defence: was it not a fact that she had led the prisoner to bel
ieve that she was with child by a man then living abroad? and that prisoner’s suggestion of marriage was prompted by considerations of chivalry? Certainly not.

  Dr. Edward Williams, of Harley Street, gynaecologist, examined: he had attended the witness, and could state upon oath that she was not in the condition described. The lady was, in fact, he might add, a virgin.

  Lomax listened to this phantasmagoria of truth and untruth. He could have thanked the doctor for the outstanding and indubitable accuracy of his statement. It shone out like a light in darkness.

  His lordship, much irritated: “I cannot have this.”

  As your lordship pleases.

  But the jury looked paternally at Miss Whitaker, thinking that she had had a lucky escape.

  And again Lomax sympathised with the scepticism of the jury. Again he saw that he could not expect to be believed. “People don’t do such things”; men were not quixotic to that extent. Of course they could not believe. Why, he himself, in his pre-spectacle days, would not have believed. He scarcely believed now. The spectacles were really responsible; but it would only make matters worse to tell the jury about the spectacles. There was no place for such things in a tribunal; and, since all life was a tribunal, there should be no place for such things in life. The evidence for the defence was already sufficiently weak. Lomax had never known the name of the doctor who had given Bellamy his death-sentence, and advertisement had failed to produce him. Artivale, an impassioned witness, had had his story immediately pulled to pieces. Lomax himself was examined. But it all sounded very thin. And now that he was deprived of his spectacles—was become again that ordinary man, that Arthur Lomax getting through existence, with only the information of that fantastic interlude, as though it concerned another man, the information rather than the memory, since it existed now for him in words and not in sensation—now that he was returned to his pre-spectacle days, he could survey his story with cold hard sense and see that it could bear no relation to a world of fact. It was a mistake, he had always known that it was a mistake, to mix one’s manners. And for having permitted himself that luxury, he was about to be hanged. It was perhaps an excessive penalty, but Lomax was not one to complain.

  Miss Whitaker came to visit him in prison. She was his wife, however shamefully he had treated her, and had no difficulty in obtaining the necessary permission from compassionate authority. Lomax was pleased to see her. She reminded him of Illyria and the Coati—though, of course, Illyria and the Coati were things he knew of only by hearsay. But Miss Whitaker herself was a little embarrassed; was almost sorry she had come. Like Lomax, she found reality confusing. “I am afraid you have ruined your life,” she said, looking round Lomax’s neat cell.

  “Not at all,” said Lomax politely, “so long as I haven’t ruined yours. I am only sorry my counsel should have mentioned that about the child. He got it out of me in an unguarded moment. I am glad to have this opportunity of apologising.”

  “Yes, poor little thing,” said Miss Whitaker. “But as my name hasn’t appeared, no harm was done. I was sorry, too, that I had to give evidence against you. Robert insisted—I always warned you that Robert was very revengeful.”

  “Quite,” said Lomax.

  “I ought to tell you,” said Miss Whitaker, looking down at her shoes, “that he is coming home. He has been among the Indians for the last six months, and it has broken his health. He lands at Southampton—where we sailed from, do you remember?—just before Christmas.”

  “I am sorry,” said Lomax, “that I shan’t have the pleasure of meeting him.”

  “No,” said Miss Whitaker, and then, seeming to lose her head a little, she again said, “No; of course you won’t. Perhaps I ought to be going?”

  Anyway, Artivale would have the money. Lomax hugged that to his breast. Science would have the money; and science was a fact, surely, incapable of caricature; absolute, as mathematics were absolute. He had had enough of living in a world where truth was falsehood and falsehood truth. He was about to abandon that world, and his only legacy to it should be to an incorruptible province; let him hold that comfort, where all other comforts had turned to so ingenious a mockery.

  * * *

  Shortly after Lomax had been hanged, Bellamy’s nearest relations, two maiden ladies who lived at Hampstead and interested themselves in the conversion of the heathen, entered a plea that Bellamy’s will had been composed under the undue influence of Arthur Lomax. The case was easily proved, and it was understood that the bulk of the fortune would be placed by the next-of-kin as conscience money at the disposal of His Majesty’s Treasury.

  FROM ALL PASSION SPENT (1931)

  This book, probably Vita’s best-known production apart from her garden columns, essays, and radio broadcasts, was written in May of 1930, just when Vita had made an offer for the purchase of Sissinghurst Castle. Sissinghurst had to be renovated, and so there was again the question, as often there was, of Vita having to make money for the family. The novel was begun just when she had finished correcting the proofs of The Edwardians, which was set against the background of a large house and was an instant bestseller by early June of 1930. During this period she also wrote the poem “Sissinghurst,” which she dedicated to Virginia Woolf enraging B. M., who would have liked it dedicated to herself.

  Of all Vita’s books, All Passion Spent has remained in print the longest, and was even made into a television show. Its dedication to Vita’s sons:

  For Benedict and Nigel

  Who are young

  This story of people who are old.

  In All Passion Spent, Lady Slane, the gentle aged widow who had given up her own ambition to be a painter in order to be a proper wife to her husband, has an admirable spaciousness of mind. She will encourage the ambition of young Deborah, her great-granddaughter, who is herself determined to be a musician, remembering how her own potential career as a painter was stifled. Lady Slane’s stiff children, who want to arrange her life and that of the younger generation, have a far more constricted point of view than hers. The point is firmly made about women, old and young, following their own bent and having their own careers. Lady Slane, now eighty-eight, who has devoted herself to her husband and his career, has made the decision to take no interest in her children, who are prim, proper, and boring, and has moved to the country, away from the society she despises, accompanied only by her French maid, Genoux. Nearby, she has for company three elderly gentleman friends: her landlord and adviser, Mr. Bucktrout; a carpenter, Mr. Gosheron, who will give his finest piece of wood for her coffin; and an eccentric millionaire friend, FitzGeorge, whom she had loved many years before and whose fortune she has refused.

  Lady Slane’s encouragement of her granddaughter is based on her own loss of “what she herself wanted to be … the girl was talking as she herself would have talked.… If she wanted approval, she should have it. ‘Of course you are right, my dear,’ she said quietly.” Vita’s passionate belief that women should be as free as men to develop and assert their own passions impels her encouragement of others.

  This novel had such immediate success that Virginia Woolf wrote to Vita of her exhaustion wrapping it up to send to those who have ordered it. She exclaims how her fingers are red from doing up the parcels: “Oh Lord what it is to publish a best seller—when shall I be able to hold a pen again? … Yes, I’ll come to Sissinghurst. But when will you come here—all covered with gold as you are? You must sign my 6 thousandth copy … What fun it all is to be sure—selling 6,000.”3

  The pages reprinted here are the final ones. Many readers consider this novel Vita’s finest, and certainly it is her most influential. The freedom for the young women here suggested, advised, demanded, and, ultimately, taken is couched in terms available and moving. Considering Vita’s problematic relation with her mother, whose harsh judgement of her was, on all counts, the opposite of Lady Slane’s encouragement of the younger generation of women, it is all the more remarkable that she should have written such a convincing novel
on the topics of age and women’s self-determination.

  ALL PASSION SPENT

  Common sense rarely laid its fingers on Lady Slane, these days. It did occur to her to wonder, however, what the young people had thought of her renunciation of FitzGeorge’s fortune. They had been indignant probably; they had cursed their great-grandmother soundly for defrauding them of a benefit which would eventually have been theirs. They would certainly have given her no credit for romantic motives. Perhaps she owed them an explanation, though not an apology? But how could she get into touch with them, now especially? Pride caught her wrist even as she stretched her pen out towards the ink. She had, after all, behaved towards them in what to any reasonable person must seem a most unnatural way; first she had refused to see them, and then she had eliminated from their future the possibility of great and easy wealth. She must appear to them as the incarnation of egoism and inconsideration. Lady Slane was distressed, yet she knew that she had acted according to her convictions. Had not FitzGeorge himself once taken her to task for sinning against the light? And suddenly, in a moment of illumination, she understood why FitzGeorge had tempted her with this fortune: he had tempted her only in order that she should find the strength to reject it. He had offered her not so much a fortune as a chance to be true to herself. Lady Slane bent down and stroked the cat, whom as a rule she did not much like. “John,” she said, “John—how fortunate that I did what he wanted, before I realised what he wanted.”