Miss La Trobe waved her hand ecstatically at the cows.
“Thank Heaven!” she exclaimed.
Suddenly the cows stopped; lowered their heads, and began browsing. Simultaneously the audience lowered their heads and read their programmes.
“The producer,” Mrs. Elmhurst read out for her husband’s benefit, “craves the indulgence of the audience. Owing to lack of time a scene has been omitted; and she begs the audience to imagine that in the interval Sir Spaniel Lilyliver has contracted an engagement with Flavinda; who had been about to plight her troth; when Valentine, hidden inside the grandfather’s clock, steps forward; claims Flavinda as his bride; reveals the plot to rob her of her inheritance; and, during the confusion that ensues, the lovers fly together, leaving Lady Harpy and Sir Spaniel alone together.”
“We’re asked to imagine all that,” she said, putting down her glasses.
“That’s very wise of her,” said Mrs. Manresa, addressing Mrs. Swithin. “If she’d put it all in, we should have been here till midnight. So we’ve got to imagine, Mrs. Swithin.” She patted the old lady on the knee.
“Imagine?” said Mrs. Swithin. “How right! Actors show us too much. The Chinese, you know, put a dagger on the table and that’s a battle. And so Racine . . .”
“Yes, they bore one stiff,” Mrs. Manresa interrupted, scenting culture, resenting the snub to the jolly human heart. “T’other day I took my nephew — such a jolly boy at Sandhurst — to Pop Goes the Weasel. Seen it?” She turned to Giles.
“Up and down the City Road,” he hummed by way of an answer.
“Did your Nanny sing that!” Mrs. Manresa exclaimed. “Mine did. And when she said ‘Pop’ she made a noise like a cork being drawn from a ginger-beer bottle. Pop!”
She made the noise.
“Hush, hush,” someone whispered.
“Now I’m being naughty and shocking your aunt,” she said. “We must be good and attend. This is Scene Three. Lady Harpy Harraden’s Closet. The sound of horses’ hooves is heard in the distance.”
The sound of horses’ hooves, energetically represented by Albert the idiot with a wooden spoon on a tray, died away.
LADY H. H. Half-way to Gretna Green already! O my deceitful niece! You that I rescued from the brine and stood on the hearthstone dripping! O that the whale had swallowed you whole! Perfidious porpoise, O! Didn’t the Horn book teach you Honour thy Great Aunt? How have you misread it and misspelt it, learnt thieving and cheating and reading of wills in old boxes and hiding of rascals in honest time-pieces that have never missed a second since King Charles’s day! O Flavinda! O porpoise, O!
SIR S. L. (trying to pull on his jack boots) Old — old — old. He called me “old”— “To your bed, old fool, and drink hot posset!”
LADY H. H. And she, stopping at the door and pointing the finger of scorn at me said “old” Sir— “woman” Sir — I that am in the prime of life and a lady!
SIR S. L. (tugging at his boots) But I’ll be even with him. I’ll have the law on’ em! I’ll run ’em to earth . . .
(He hobbles up and down, one boot on, one boot off)
LADY H. H. (laying her hand on his arm) Have mercy on your gout, Sir Spaniel. Bethink you, Sir — let’s not run mad, we that are on the sunny side of fifty. What’s this youth they prate on? Nothing but a goose feather blown on a north wind. Sit you down, Sir Spaniel. Rest your leg — so —
(She pushes a cushion under his leg)
SIR S. L. “Old” he called me . . . jumping from the clock like a jack-in-the-box . . . And she, making mock of me, points to my leg and cries “Cupid’s darts, Sir Spaniel, Cupid’s darts.” O that I could braise ’em in a mortar and serve ’em up smoking hot on the altar of — O my gout, O my gout!
LADY H. H. This talk, Sir, ill befits a man of sense. Bethink you, Sir, only t’other day you were invoking — ahem — the Constellations. Cassiopeia, Aldebaran; the Aurora Borealis . . . It’s not to be denied that one of ’em has left her sphere, has shot, has eloped, to put it plainly, with the entrails of a time-piece, the mere pendulum of a grandfather’s clock. But, Sir Spaniel, there are some stars that — ahem — stay fixed; that shine, to put it in a nutshell, never so bright as by a sea-coal fire on a brisk morning.
SIR S. L. O that I were five and twenty with a sharp sword at my side!
LADY H. H. (bridling) I take your meaning, Sir. Te hee — To be sure, I regret it as you do. But youth’s not all. To let you into a secret, I’ve passed the meridian myself. Am on t’other side of the Equator too. Sleep sound o’ nights without turning. The dog days are over. . . . But bethink you, Sir. Where there’s a will there’s a way.
SIR S. L. God’s truth Ma’am . . . ah my foot’s like a burning, burning horseshoe on the devil’s anvil ah! — what’s your meaning?
LADY H. H. My meaning, Sir? Must I disrupt my modesty and unquilt that which has been laid in lavender since, my lord, peace be to his name— ’tis twenty years since — was lapped in lead? In plain words, Sir, Flavinda’s flown. The cage is empty. But we that have bound our wrists with cowslips might join ’em with a stouter chain. To have done with fallals and figures. Here am I, Asphodilla — but my plain name Sue. No matter what my name is — Asphodilla or Sue — here am I, hale and hearty, at your service. Now that the plot’s out, Brother Bob’s bounty must go to the virgins. That’s plain. Here’s Lawyer Quill’s word for it. “Virgins . . . in perpetuity . . . sing for his soul” And I warrant you, he has need of it . . . But no matter. Though we have thrown that to the fishes that might have wrapped us in lamb’s-wool, I’m no beggar. There’s messuages; tenements; napery; cattle; my dowry; an inventory. I’ll show you; engrossed on parchment; enough I’ll warrant you to keep us handsomely, for what’s to run of our time, as husband and wife.
SIR S. L. Husband and wife! So that’s the plain truth of it! Why, Madam, I’d rather lash myself to a tar barrel, be bound to a thorn tree in a winter’s gale. Faugh!
LADY H. H. . . . A tar barrel, quotha! A thorn tree — quotha! You that were harping on galaxies and milky ways! You that were swearing I outshone ’em all! A pox on you — you faithless! You shark, you! You serpent in jack boots, you! So you won’t have me? Reject my hand do you?
(She proffers her hand; he strikes it from him.)
SIR S. L. . . . Hide your chalk stones in a woollen mit! pah! I’ll none of ‘em! Were they diamond, pure diamond, and half the habitable globe and all its concubines strung in string round your throat I’d none of it . . . none of it. Unhand me, scritch owl, witch, vampire! Let me go!
LADY H. H. . . . So all your fine words were tinsel wrapped round a Christmas cracker!
SIR S. L. . . . Bells hung on an ass’s neck! Paper roses on a barber’s pole . . . O my foot, my foot . . . Cupid’s darts, she mocked me . . . Old, old, he called me old . . .
(He hobbles away)
LADY H. H. (left alone) All gone. Following the wind. He’s gone; she’s gone; and the old clock that the rascal made himself into a pendulum for is the only one of ’em all to stop. A pox on ’em — turning an honest woman’s house into a brothel. I that was Aurora Borealis am shrunk to a tar barrel. I that was Cassiopeia am turned to a she-ass. My head turns. There’s no trusting man nor woman; nor fine speeches; nor fine looks. Off comes the sheep’s skin; out creeps the serpent. Get ye to Gretna Green; couch on the wet grass and breed vipers. My head spins . . . Tar barrels, quotha. Cassiopeia . . . Chalk stones . . . Andromeda . . . Thorn trees. . . . Deb, I say, Deb (She holloas) Unlace me. I’m fit to burst . . . Bring me my green baize table and set the cards. . . . And my fur lined slippers, Deb. And a dish of chocolate. . . . I’ll be even with ’em . . . I’ll outlive ’em all. . . Deb, I say! Deb! A pox on the girl! Can’t she hear me? Deb, I say, you gipsy’s spawn that I snatched from the hedge and taught to sew samplers! Deb! Deb!
(She throws open the door leading to the maid’s closet)
Empty! She’s gone too! . . . Hist, what’s that on the dresser?
(She
picks up a scrap of paper and reads)
“What care I for your goose-feather bed? I’m off with the raggle-taggle gipsies, O! Signed: Deborah, one time your maid.” So! She that I fed on apple parings and crusts from my own table, she that I taught to play cribbage and sew chemises . . . she’s gone too. O ingratitude, thy name is Deborah! Who’s to wash the dishes now; who’s to bring me my posset now, suffer my temper and unlace my stays? . . . All gone. I’m alone then. Sans niece, sans lover; and sans maid.
And so to end the play, the moral is,
The God of love is full of tricks;
Into the foot his dart he sticks,
But the way of the will is plain to see;
Let holy virgins hymn perpetually:
“Where there’s a will there’s a way”
Good people all, farewell,
(dropping a curtsey, Lady H. H. withdrew)
The scene ended. Reason descended from her plinth. Gathering her robes about her, serenely acknowledging the applause of the audience, she passed across the stage; while Lords and Ladies in stars and garters followed after; Sir Spaniel limping escorted Lady Harraden smirking; and Valentine and Flavinda arm in arm bowed and curtsied.
“God’s truth!” cried Bartholomew catching the infection of the language. “There’s a moral for you!”
He threw himself back in his chair and laughed, like a horse whinnying.
A moral. What? Giles supposed it was: Where there’s a Will there’s a Way. The words rose and pointed a finger of scorn at him. Off to Gretna Green with his girl; the deed done. Damn the consequences.
“Like to see the greenhouse?” he said abruptly, turning to Mrs. Manresa.
“Love to!” she exclaimed, and rose.
Was there an interval? Yes, the programme said so. The machine in the bushes went chuff, chuff, chuff. And the next scene?
“The Victorian age,” Mrs. Elmhurst read out. Presumably there was time then for a stroll round the gardens, even for a look over the house. Yet somehow they felt — how could one put it — a little not quite here or there. As if the play had jerked the ball out of the cup; as if what I call myself was still floating unattached, and didn’t settle. Not quite themselves, they felt. Or was it simply that they felt clothes conscious? Skimpy out-of-date voile dresses; flannel trousers; panama hats; hats wreathed with raspberry-coloured net in the style of the Royal Duchess’s hat at Ascot seemed flimsy somehow.
“How lovely the clothes were,” said someone, casting a last look at Flavinda disappearing. “Most becoming. I wish . . .”
Chuff, chuff, chuff went the machine in the bushes, accurately, insistently.
Clouds were passing across the sky. The weather looked a little unsettled. Hogben’s Folly was for a moment ashen white. Then the sun struck the gilt vane of Bolney Minster.
“Looks a little unsettled,” said someone.
“Up you get . . . Let’s stretch our legs,” said another voice. Soon the lawns were floating with little moving islands of coloured dresses. Yet some of the audience remained seated.
“Major and Mrs. Mayhew,” Page the reporter noted, licking his pencil. As for the play, he would collar Miss Whatshername and ask for a synopsis. But Miss La Trobe had vanished.
Down among the bushes she worked like a nigger. Flavinda was in her petticoats. Reason had thrown her mantle on a holly hedge. Sir Spaniel was tugging at his jack boots. Miss La Trobe was scattering and foraging.
“The Victorian mantle with the bead fringe . . . Where is the damned thing? Chuck it here . . . Now the whiskers . . .”
Ducking up and down she cast her quick bird’s eye over the bushes at the audience. The audience was on the move. The audience was strolling up and down. They kept their distance from the dressing-room; they respected the conventions. But if they wandered too far, if they began exploring the grounds, going over the house, then. . . . Chuff, chuff, chuff went the machine. Time was passing. How long would time hold them together? It was a gamble; a risk. . . . And she laid about her energetically, flinging clothes on the grass.
Over the tops of the bushes came stray voices, voices without bodies, symbolical voices they seemed to her, half hearing, seeing nothing, but still, over the bushes, feeling invisible threads connecting the bodiless voices.
“It all looks very black.”
“No one wants it — save those damned Germans.”
There was a pause.
“I’d cut down those trees . . .”
“How they get their roses to grow!”
“They say there’s been a garden here for five hundred years . . .”
“Why even old Gladstone, to do him justice . . .”
Then there was silence. The voices passed the bushes. The trees rustled. Many eyes, Miss La Trobe knew, for every cell in her body was absorbent, looked at the view. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Hogben’s Folly; then the vane flashed.
“The glass is falling,” said a voice.
She could feel them slipping through her fingers, looking at the view.
“Where’s that damned woman, Mrs. Rogers? Who’s seen Mrs. Rogers?” she cried, snatching up a Victorian mantle.
Then, ignoring the conventions, a head popped up between the trembling sprays: Mrs. Swithin’s.
“Oh Miss La Trobe!” she exclaimed; and stopped. Then she began again; “Oh Miss La Trobe, I do congratulate you!”
She hesitated. “You’ve given me . . .” She skipped, then alighted— “Ever since I was a child I’ve felt . . .” A film fell over her eyes, shutting off the present. She tried to recall her childhood; then gave it up; and, with a little wave of her hand, as if asking Miss La Trobe to help her out, continued: “This daily round; this going up and down stairs; this saying ‘What am I going for? My specs? I have ’em on my nose.’ . . .”
She gazed at Miss La Trobe with a cloudless old-aged stare. Their eyes met in a common effort to bring a common meaning to birth. They failed; and Mrs. Swithin, laying hold desperately of a fraction of her meaning, said: “What a small part I’ve had to play! But you’ve made me feel I could have played . . . Cleopatra!”
She nodded between the trembling bushes and ambled off.
The villagers winked. “Batty” was the word for old Flimsy, breaking through the bushes.
“I might have been — Cleopatra,” Miss La Trobe repeated. “You’ve stirred in me my unacted part,” she meant.
“Now for the skirt, Mrs. Rogers,” she said.
Mrs. Rogers stood grotesque in her black stockings. Miss La Trobe pulled the voluminous flounces of the Victorian age over her head. She tied the tapes. “You’ve twitched the invisible strings,” was what the old lady meant; and revealed — of all people — Cleopatra! Glory possessed her. Ah, but she was not merely a twitcher of individual strings; she was one who seethes wandering bodies and floating voices in a cauldron, and makes rise up from its amorphous mass a recreated world. Her moment was on her — her glory.
“There!” she said, tying the black ribbons under Mrs. Rogers’ chin. “That’s done it! Now for the gentleman. Hammond!”
She beckoned Hammond. Sheepishly he came forward, and submitted to the application of black side whiskers. With his eyes half shut, his head leant back, he looked, Miss La Trobe thought, like King Arthur — noble, knightly, thin.
“Where’s the Major’s old frock coat?” she asked, trusting to the effect of that to transform him.
Tick, tick, tick, the machine continued. Time was passing. The audience was wandering, dispersing. Only the tick tick of the gramophone held them together. There, sauntering solitary far away by the flower beds was Mrs. Giles escaping.
“The tune!” Miss La Trobe commanded. “Hurry up! The tune! The next tune! Number Ten!”
“Now may I pluck,” Isa murmured, picking a rose, “my single flower. The white or the pink? And press it so, twixt thumb and finger. . . .”
She looked among the passing faces for the face of the man in grey. There he was for one second;
but surrounded, inaccessible. And now vanished.
She dropped her flower. What single, separate leaf could she press? None. Nor stray by the beds alone. She must go on; and she turned in the direction of the stable.
“Where do I wander?” she mused. “Down what draughty tunnels? Where the eyeless wind blows? And there grows nothing for the eye. No rose. To issue where? In some harvestless dim field where no evening lets fall her mantle; nor sun rises. All’s equal there. Unblowing, ungrowing are the roses there. Change is not; nor the mutable and lovable; nor greetings nor partings; nor furtive findings and feelings, where hand seeks hand and eye seeks shelter from the eye.”
She had come into the stable yard where the dogs were chained; where the buckets stood; where the great pear tree spread its ladder of branches against the wall. The tree whose roots went beneath the flags, was weighted with hard green pears. Fingering one of them she murmured: “How am I burdened with what they drew from the earth; memories; possessions. This is the burden that the past laid on me, last little donkey in the long caravanserai crossing the desert. ‘Kneel down,’ said the past. ‘Fill your pannier from our tree. Rise up, donkey. Go your way till your heels blister and your hoofs crack.’”
The pear was hard as stone. She looked down at the cracked flags beneath which the roots spread. “That was the burden,” she mused, “laid on me in the cradle; murmured by waves; breathed by restless elm trees; crooned by singing women; what we must remember; what we would forget.”
She looked up. The gilt hands of the stable clock pointed inflexibly at two minutes to the hour. The clock was about to strike.
“Now comes the lightning,” she muttered, “from the stone blue sky. The thongs are burst that the dead tied. Loosed are our possessions.”
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 252