Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  After that she was happy, though her qualms about her young descendants continued to worry her. By a curious twist, her qualms of conscience about them increased now that she had satisfactorily explained her own action to herself, as though she blamed herself for some extravagant gesture of self-indulgence. Perhaps she had come too hastily to her decision? Perhaps she had treated the children unfairly? Perhaps one should not demand sacrifices of others, consequent upon one’s own ideas? She had consulted her own ideas entirely, with the added spice of pleasure, she must admit, in annoying Carrie, Herbert, Charles, and William. It had seemed wrong to her that private people should own such possessions, such exaggerated wealth; therefore she had hastened to dispose of both, the treasures to the public and the money to the suffering poor; the logic was simple though trenchant. Stated in these terms, she could not believe in her own wrong-doing; but, on the other hand, should she not have considered her great-grandchildren? It was a subtle problem to decide alone; and Mr. Bucktrout, to whom she confided it, gave her no help, for not only was he entirely in sympathy with her first instinct but, moreover, in view of the approaching end of the world, he could not see that it mattered very much one way or the other. “My dear lady,” he said, “when your Cellinis, your Poussins, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren are all mingled in planetary dust your problem of conscience will cease to be of much importance.” That was true rather than helpful. Astronomical truths, enlarging though they may be to the imagination, contain little assistance for immediate problems. She continued to gaze at him in distress, a distress which at that very moment had been augmented by a sudden thought of what Henry, raising his eyebrows, would have said.

  “Miss Deborah Holland,” said Genoux, throwing open the door. She threw it open in such a way as to suggest that she was retrospectively aping the manner of the grand major-domo at the Paris Embassy.

  Lady Slane rose in a fluster, with the usual soft rustle of her silks and laces; her knitting slipped to the floor; she stooped ineffectually to retrieve it; her mind swept wildly round, seeking to reconcile this improbable encounter between her great-granddaughter, Mr. Bucktrout, and herself. The circumstances were too complicated for her to govern successfully in a moment’s thought. She had never been good at dealing with a situation that demanded nimbleness of wit; and, considering the conversations she had had with Mr. Bucktrout about her great-grandchildren, of whom Herbert’s granddaughter thus suddenly presented herself as a specimen, the situation demanded a very nimble wit indeed. “My dear Deborah,” said Lady Slane, scurrying affectionately, dropping her knitting, trying to retrieve it, abandoning the attempt midway, and finally managing to kiss Deborah on the cheek.

  She was the more confused, for Deborah was the first young person to enter the house at Hampstead since Lady Slane had removed herself from Elm Park Gardens. The house at Hampstead had opened its doors to no one but Mr. FitzGeorge, Mr. Bucktrout, and Mr. Gosheron—and, of course, on occasion, to Lady Slane’s own children, who, although they might be unwelcome, were at any rate advanced in years. Deborah came in the person of youth knocking at the doors. She was pretty, under her fur cap; pretty and elegant; the very girl Lady Slane would have expected from her photographs in the society papers. In the year since Lady Slane had seen her, she had changed from a schoolgirl into a young lady. Of her activities in the fashionable world since she became a young lady, Lady Slane had had ample evidence. This observation reminded Lady Slane of her press-cutting album, which was lying on the table under the lamp; releasing Deborah’s hand, she hurriedly removed the album to a dark place, as though it were a dirtied cup of tea. She put the blotter over it. A narrow escape; narrow and unforeseen; but now she felt safe. She came back and introduced Deborah formally to Mr. Bucktrout.

  Mr. Bucktrout had the tact to take his leave almost immediately. Lady Slane, knowing him, had feared that he might plunge instantly into topics of the deepest import, with references to her own recent and eccentric conduct, thereby embarrassing both the girl and herself. Mr. Bucktrout, however, behaved most unexpectedly as a man of the world. He made a few remarks about the beginning of spring—about the reappearance of flowers on barrows in the London streets—about the longevity of anemones in water, especially if you cut their stems—about the bunches of snowdrops that came up from the country, and how soon they would be succeeded by bunches of primroses—about Covent Garden. But about cosmic catastrophes or the right judgment of Deborah Holland’s great-grandmother he said nothing. Only once did he verge on an indiscretion, when he leant forward, putting his finger against his nose, and said, “Miss Deborah, you bear a certain resemblance to Lady Slane whom I have the honour to call my friend.” Fortunately, he did not follow up the remark, but after the correct interval merely rose and took his leave. Lady Slane was grateful to him, yet it was with dismay that she saw him go, leaving her face to face with a young woman bearing what had once been her own name.

  She expected an evasive and meaningless conversation as a start, dreading the chance phrase that would fire it into realities, growing swiftly like Jack’s beanstalk into a tangle of reproaches; she expected anything in the world but that Deborah should sit at her knee and thank her with directness and simplicity for what she had done. Lady Slane made no answer at all, except to lay her hand on the girl’s head pressed against her knee. She was too much moved to answer; she preferred to let the young voice go on, imagining that she herself was the speaker, reviving her adolescent years and deluding herself with the fancy that she had at last found a confidant to whom she could betray her thoughts. She was old, she was tired, she lost herself willingly in the sweet illusion. Was it an echo that she heard? or had some miracle wiped out the years? were the years being played over again, with a difference? She allowed her fingers to ruffle Deborah’s hair, and, finding it short instead of ringleted, supposed vaguely that she had put her own early plans for escape into execution. Had she then really run away from home? had she, indeed, chosen her own career instead of Henry’s? Was she now sitting on the floor beside a trusted friend, pouring out her reasons, her aspirations, and her convictions, with a firmness and a certainty lit as by a flame from within? Fortunate Deborah! she thought, to be so firm, so trustful, and by one person at least so well understood; but to which Deborah she alluded, she scarcely knew.

  She had told herself after FitzGeorge’s death that no strange and lovely thing would ever enter her life again, a foolish prophecy. This unexpected confusion of her own life with that of her great-granddaughter was as strange and as lovely. FitzGeorge’s death had aged her; at her time of life people aged suddenly and alarmingly; her mind was, perhaps, no longer very clear; but at least it was clear enough for her to recognise its weakness, and to say, “Go on, my darling; you might be myself speaking.” Deborah, in her young egoism, failed to pick up the significance of that remark, which Lady Slane, indeed, had inadvertently let slip. She had no intention of revealing herself to her great-granddaughter; her hand upon the latch of the door of death, she had no intention of troubling the young with a recital of her own past problems; enough for her, now to submerge herself into a listener, a pair of ears, though she might still keep her secrets running in and out of her mind according to her fancy—for it must be remembered that Lady Slane had always relished the privacy of her enjoyments. This enjoyment was especially private now, though not very sharp; it was hazy rather than sharp, her perceptions intensified and yet blurred, so that she could feel intensely without being able or obliged to reason. In the deepening twilight of her life, in the maturity of her years, she returned to the fluctuations of adolescence; she became once more the reed wavering in the river, the skiff reaching out towards the sea, yet blown back again and again into the safe waters of the estuary. Youth! youth! she thought; and she, so near to death, imagined that all the perils again awaited her, but this time she would face them more bravely, she would allow no concessions, she would be firm and certain. This child, this Deborah, this self, this othe
r self, this projection of herself, was firm and certain. Her engagement, she said, was a mistake; she had drifted into it to please her grandfather; (Mother doesn’t count, she said, nor does Granny—poor Mabel!); her grandfather had ambitions for her, she said; he liked the idea of her being, some day, a duchess; but what was that, she said, compared with what she herself wanted to be, a musician?

  When she said “a musician,” Lady Slane received a little shock, so confidently had she expected Deborah to say “a painter.” But it came to much the same thing, and her disappointment was quickly healed. The girl was talking as she herself would have talked. She had no prejudice against marriage with someone who measured his values against the same rod as herself. Understanding was impossible between people who did not agree as to the yard and the inch. To her grandfather and her late fiance, wealth and so great a title measured a yard—two yards—a hundred yards—a mile. To her, they measured an inch—half an inch. Music, on the other hand, and all that it implied, could be measured by no terrestrial scale. Therefore she was grateful to her great-grandmother for reducing her value in the worldly market. “You see,” she said amused, “for a week I was supposed to be an heiress, and when it was found that I wasn’t an heiress at all it became much easier for me to break off my engagement.”

  “When did you break it off?” asked Lady Slane, thinking of her newspaper cuttings which had not mentioned the fact.

  “The day before yesterday.”

  Genoux came in with the evening post, glad of a pretext to take another look at Deborah. Lady Slane slipped the green packet under her knitting. “I didn’t know,” she said, “that you had broken it off.”

  And such a relief it was, said Deborah, wriggling her shoulders. She would have no more to do, she said, with that crazy world. “Is it crazy, great-grandmother,” she asked, “or am I? Or am I merely one of the people who can’t fit in? Am I just one of the people who think a different set of things important? Anyhow, why should I accept other people’s ideas? My own are just as likely to be right—right for me. I know one or two people who agree with me, but they are always people who don’t seem to get on with grandfather or great-aunt Carrie. And another thing”—she paused.

  “Go on,” said Lady Slane, moved to the heart by this stumbling and perplexed analysis.

  “Well,” said Deborah, “there seems to be a kind of solidarity between grandfather and great-aunt Carrie and the people that grandfather and great-aunt Carrie approve of. As though cement had been poured over the whole lot. But the people I like always seem to be scattered, lonely people—only they recognise each other as soon as they come together. They seem to be aware of something more important than the things grandfather and great-aunt Carrie think important. I don’t yet know exactly what that something is. If it were religion—if I wanted to become a nun instead of a musician—I think that even grandfather would understand dimly what I was talking about. But it isn’t religion; and yet it seems to have something of the nature of religion. A chord of music, for instance, gives me more satisfaction than a prayer.”

  “Go on,” said Lady Slane.

  “Then,” said Deborah, “among the people I like, I find something hard and concentrated in the middle of them, harsh, almost cruel. A sort of stone of honesty. As though they were determined at all costs to be true to the things that they think matter. Of course,” said Deborah dutifully, remembering the comments of her grandfather and her great-aunt Carrie, “I know that they are, so to speak, very useless members of society.” She said it with a childish gravity.

  “They have their uses,” said Lady Slane; “they act as a leaven.”

  “I never know how to pronounce that word,” said Deborah; “whether to rhyme with even or seven. I suppose you are right about them, great-grandmother. But the leaven takes a long time to work, and even then it only works among people who are more or less of the same mind.”

  “Yes,” said Lady Slane, “but more people are really of the same mind than you would believe. They take a great deal of trouble to conceal it, and only a crisis calls it out. For instance, if you were to die,”—but what she really meant was, If I were to die—“I daresay you would find that your grandfather had understood you (me) better than you (I) think.”

  “That’s mere sentimentality,” said Deborah firmly; “naturally, death startles everybody, even grandfather and great-aunt Carrie—it reminds them of the things they prefer to ignore. My point about the people I like is not that they dwell morbidly on death, but that they keep continually a sense of what, to them, matters in life. Death, after all, is an incident. Life is an incident too. The thing I mean lies outside both. And it doesn’t seem compatible with the sort of life grandfather and great-aunt Carrie think I ought to lead. Am I wrong, or are they?”

  Lady Slane perceived one last opportunity for annoying Herbert and Carrie. Let them call her a wicked old woman! she knew that she was no such thing. The child was an artist and must have her way. There were other people in plenty to carry on the work of the world, to earn and enjoy its rewards, to suffer its malice and return its wounds in kind; the small and rare fraternity to which Deborah belonged, indifferent to gilded lures, should be free to go obscurely but ardently about its business. In the long run, with the strange bedlam always in process of sorting itself out, as the present-day became history, the poets and the prophets counted for more than the conquerors. Christ himself was of their company.

  She could form no estimate of Deborah’s talents; that was beside the point. Achievement was good, but the spirit was better. To reckon by achievements was to make a concession to the prevailing system of the world; it was a departure from the austere, disinterested, exacting standards that Lady Slane and her kindred recognised. Yet what she said was not at all in accordance with her thoughts; she said, “Oh dear, if I hadn’t given away that fortune I could have made you independent.”

  Deborah laughed. She wanted advice, she said, not money. Lady Slane knew very well that she did not really want advice either; she wanted only to be strengthened and supported in her resolution. Very well, if she wanted approval, she should have it. “Of course you are right, my dear,” she said quietly.

  They talked for a while longer, but Deborah, feeling herself folded into peace and sympathy, noticed that her great-grandmother’s mind wandered a little into some maze of confusion to which Deborah held no guiding thread. It was natural at Lady Slane’s age. At moments she appeared to be talking about herself, then recalled her wits, and with pathetic clumsiness tried to cover up the slip, rousing herself to speak eagerly of the girl’s future, not of some event which had gone wrong in the distant past. Deborah was too profoundly lulled and happy to wonder much what that event could be. This hour of union with the old woman soothed her like music, like chords lightly touched in the evening, with the shadows closing and the moths bruising beyond an open window. She leaned against the old woman’s knee as a support, a prop, drowned, enfolded, in warmth, dimness, and soft harmonious sounds. The hurly-burly receded; the clangour was stilled; her grandfather and her great-aunt Carrie lost their angular importance and shrivelled to little gesticulating puppets with parchment faces and silly wavering hands; other values rose up like great archangels in the room, and towered and spread their wings. Inexplicable associations floated into Deborah’s mind; she remembered how once she had seen a young woman in a white dress leading a white borzoi across the darkness of a southern port. This physical and mental contact with her great-grandmother—so far removed in years, so closely attuned in spirit—stripped off the coverings from the small treasure of short experience that she had jealously stored away. She caught herself wondering whether she could afterwards recapture the incantation of this hour sufficiently to render it into terms of music. Her desire to render an experience in terms of music transcended even her interest in her great-grandmother as a human being; a form of egoism which she knew her great-grandmother would neither resent nor misunderstand. The impulse which had led her to
her great-grandmother was a right impulse. The sense of enveloping music proved that. On some remote piano the chords were struck, and they were chords which had no meaning, no existence, in the world inhabited by her grandfather and her great-aunt Carrie; but in her great-grandmother’s world they had their value and their significance. But she must not tire her great-grandmother, thought Deborah, suddenly realising that the old voice had ceased its maunderings and that the spell of an hour was broken. Her great-grandmother was asleep. Her chin had fallen forward on to the laces at her breast. Her lovely hands were limp in their repose. As Deborah rose silently, and silently let herself out into the street, being careful not to slam the door behind her, the chords of her imagination died away.

  Genoux, bringing in the tray an hour later, announcing “Miladi est servie,” altered her formula to a sudden, “Mon Dieu, mais qu’est-ce que c’est ça—Miladi est morte.”

  * * *

  “It was to be expected,” said Carrie, mopping her eyes as she had not mopped them over the death of her father; “it was to be expected, Mr. Bucktrout. Yet it comes as a shock. My poor mother was such a very exceptional woman, as you know—though I’m sure I don’t see how you should have known it, for she was, of course, only your tenant. A correspondent in The Times described her this morning as a rare spirit. Just what I always said myself: a rare spirit.” Carrie had forgotten the many other things she had said. “A little difficult to manage sometimes,” she added, stung by a sudden thought of FitzGeorge’s fortune; “unpractical to a degree, but practical things are not the only things that count, are they, Mr. Bucktrout?” The Times had said that too. “My poor mother had a beautiful nature. I don’t say that I should always have acted myself as she sometimes acted. Her motives were sometimes a little difficult to follow. Quixotic, you know, and—shall we say?—injudicious. Besides, she could be very stubborn. There were times when she wouldn’t be guided, which was unfortunate, considering how unpractical she was. We should all be in a very different position now had she been willing to listen to us. However, it’s no good crying over spilt milk, is it?” said Carrie, giving Mr. Bucktrout what was meant to be a brave smile.