Heritage

by V. Sackville-West

I

I continued to feel, as I have said, that there was much in Malory’s story which remained to be satisfactorily explained, for I was convinced in my own mind that his interpretation of Ruth Pennistan’s flight, plausible as it was, was totally misleading, with the dangerous verisimilitude of a theory which will fit all, or nearly all, the facts, and yet more entirely miss the truth, by a mere accident, than would a frank perplexity. I think that he himself secretly agreed with me, a conviction I arrived at less by his own doubting words after the reading of the letter, than by his manner towards me when he had finished the story, and his mute, but none the less absolute, refusal to discuss, as I in my interest would willingly have discussed, certain points in his narration. I received the impression that he had chosen me as his audience merely because we knew nothing of one another beyond our names, from a craving to pour out that long dammed-up flood of emotion and meditation. I had—a somewhat galling reflection—played the part of the ground to Malory’s King Midas. I think that his indifference towards me turned to positive dislike after our week of intimacy, and this belief was strengthened when, with scarcely a farewell, he took an abrupt departure.

I will confess that I was hurt at the time, but an unaccountable instinct buoyed me up that some day, it might be after the passage of years, I should again be thrown in contact either with him or with his dramatis personæ. How this came about I will now tell, though I do not pretend that any more mysterious purpose than my own desire intervened in the accomplishment of my hopes. Perhaps Malory would say that War was my fate, my god in the machine; perhaps it was; I do not know. The definition of fate is a vicious circle; like a little animal, say a mouse, turning after its tail.

I left Sampiero in 1914, a year after I had parted there from Malory, and my earlier prophecy justified itself, that our acquaintance would not be continued in our own country. In fact, amid the excitement of the war, I had almost forgotten the man, his habitual reticence, his sudden outburst into narrative, and the unknown, unseen people with whom that narrative had been concerned. But now as I idled disconsolately in London, discharged from hospital but indefinitely unfit for service, there stirred in my memory a recollection of the Pennistans, who were to me so strangely familiar, and I resolved that I would go for myself to pick up the thread where Malory had dropped it, to work on the fields where he had worked, and to probe into the lives he had tried to probe.

Hearing that the small help I could give would be welcome, I started out, much, I suppose, as Malory had started, with my bag in my hand, and reached the tiny station one evening in early April. The stationmaster directed me across the fields, by a way which I felt I already knew, and as I walked I wondered what had become of Malory; presumably he had turned his hand to a fighting trade, or had he sought some bizarre occupation congenial to him, in the bazaars of Bagdad, or in a North Sea drifter, or had the air called to him? I could not decide; perhaps the Pennistans would have news of his whereabouts.

But they had none. He had sent them a field post card from Gallipoli, and since then he had again disappeared; they did not seem very much surprised, and I guessed that in their slow instinctive way they had felt him to be a transitory, elusive man, who might be expected to turn up in his own time from some unanticipated corner. They suggested, however, that I should walk over to Westmacotts’ on a Sunday, and inquire from their daughter Ruth about Mr. Malory.

I cannot say that I was unhappy at the Pennistans’, for, though I fretted a good deal at my comparative inactivity, the peace and stability of the place, of which Malory had so often spoken, stole over me with gradual enchantment of my spirit, like the incoming tide steals gradually over the sands. During the first days I took a curious delight in discovering the spots that had figured in his story, the fields, the dairy, and the cowshed, in recognising the pungent farm smells which had pleased his alert senses. These things were the same, but in other respects much was changed. The three bullock-like sons were gone, and few men remained to work the land. Rawdon Westmacott, they told me, was at the war, so was Nancy’s husband. And on sunny days I used to watch the aeroplanes come sailing up out of the blue, the sun catching their wings, and tumble, for sheer joy it seemed, in the air, while the hum of their engines filled the whole sky as with a gigantic beehive.

One detail I noticed after several days. The cage of mice which Malory had given to Ruth was no longer in the place I expected to see it, on the kitchen window-sill.

The unexpected had favoured me in one particular. Malory had mentioned that the old woman was ninety-six in the year he had gone to Pennistans’, and although he had never, so far as I remembered, given a date to that year, I reckoned that she must, if alive now, have passed her century. I was certain I should find her gone. Yet the first thing I saw as I entered the house was that little old huddled figure by the fire, head nodding, hands trembling, alive enough to feed and breathe, but not alive enough for anything else; she spent all her days in a wheeled chair, sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes in her own room, the quondam parlour, on the ground-floor across the passage; sometimes, when it was very warm, beside the garden-door out in the sun. She must always have been tiny, but now the frailty of her shrunken form was pitiable. Her wrists were like the legs of a chicken. Her jaws were fallen in, thin and flabby; her eyes never seemed to blink, but stared straight in front of her, at nothing, through everything....

I had Malory’s bedroom. It was bare, whitewashed, monastic, and appeared to me peculiarly suitable as a shrine to his personality. I wondered whether he had spent any part of his wandering life in the seclusion of a cloister, and as I wondered the realisation came over me that Malory was in spirit nearly allied to those mediæval scholars, so unassuming, so far removed from the desire of fame, as to dedicate their anonymous lives to a single script, finding in their own inward satisfaction the fulfilment of personal ambition. And as I thought on Malory, in that clean, bare room, I came to a closer understanding of his kinship with many conditions of men, of his sympathy with life, nature, and craft—Malory, the man who had not been my friend.

As the week passed, I found myself greatly moved by the prospect of seeing, of speaking with Ruth. As I drew near to Westmacotts’, I felt the physical tingling of intense excitement run over me. I was about to meet a dear companion, to hear the sound of her voice, and to look into the familiarity of her eyes. Another picture swam up out of the mist to dim my vision, a babbling music filled my ears like the sound of waves in a shell, and the faintest scent quivered under my nostrils; gradually as these ghosts emerged from the confusion I defined the Italian hill-side, the rushing stream, and the dry, aromatic scent of the ground. Was this, then, the setting in which Ruth walked and spoke for me? I was startled at the vividness of the impression, and at the incredibly subtle complexity of the ordinary brain.

Although Malory had never, so far as I could remember, given me any description of Westmacott’s farm, whether of impression or detail, I recognised the place as soon as I had emerged from a little wood and had seen it lying in a hollow across the ploughed field, a connecting road which was little more than a cart-track running from it at right angles into the neat lane beyond. I recognised the farm-house, of creamy plaster heavily striped by gray oak beams, its upper story slightly overhanging, and supported on rounded corbels of the same bleached oak, rough-hewn. I was prepared to see, as I actually saw, the large barn of black, tarred weather-boarding, terminated by the two rounded oast-houses, and should have missed it had I not found it there.

And I knocked, and the sense of reality still failed to return to me. Some one opened the door. I saw a young woman in a blue linen dress, with a child in her arms, and other children clinging about her skirts. My first impression was of astonishment at her beauty; Malory had led me to expect a subtle and languorous seduction, but I was not prepared for such actual beauty as I now found in her face.

“Are you Mrs. Westmacott?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” she said, “are you the gentleman that’s stopping with father?”

“I see you know about me.”

“Yes, sir; mother was over yesterday, and said you’d likely be coming. Won’t you come in, sir? if you’ll excuse the children. There’s only me to look after them to-day.”

I went into a clean and commonplace kitchen, and Ruth wiped a chair for me with her skirt, and put the baby into its cradle. She then sat down beside it, and with her foot kept the cradle moving on its rockers. I glanced round, and on the window-sill, among the pots of red geranium, I espied a wire cage with some little mice huddled in a corner.

“Mrs. Westmacott,” I said, feeling that the beginning of the conversation rested with me, “you and I are quite old friends though you may not know it.” I hated myself for my jocularity. “You remember Mr. Malory? He has spoken to me about his life here, and about you.”

I was looking at her; I saw that marvellous, that red rose blush of which Malory had spoken, come up under her skin till her cheek was like the rounded beauty of a nectarine. And I wondered, as I had wondered before; I wondered....

“And what news have you of Mr. Malory?” she asked.

“None,” I said. “I thought perhaps you might have heard.”

“I? If Mr. Malory was to write at all, would he not have written to you? Why should he write to me?”

“I hope,” I said, “that nothing has happened to him.”

She had answered me before I had finished speaking.

“Nothing has happened to him.”

“Why,” I said surprised, “how are you so certain?”

She looked suddenly trapped and angry.

“It’s an odd name,” she said at last, “one would notice it in a casualty list.” She rushed on. “We poor women, you know, have to keep our eye on the lists; there’s few officers, but many men, a mistake’s soon made, and my husband is there in France. This is my husband.” She lifted a photograph and showed me the keen, Arab face I had expected.

“Mr. Malory always told me your husband was a very handsome man. Are any of your children like him?”

I wished that Malory could have seen the softening of her face when I spoke of her children.

“No, sir,” she said, and I could have sworn I heard an exultant note in her voice. “They mostly take after their grandmother, I think,” and indeed I could see in the sleeping baby an absurd resemblance to Mrs. Pennistan. “Now my sister’s children, she has two, and one is fair like her, and one is as dark as my husband.”

I do not know what impulse moved me to rise and go over to the cage of mice.

“I have heard of these, too, from Mr. Malory,” I said. “You have had them six, seven, eight years now?”

“Oh, sir,” she cried amused, “those are not the pair Mr. Malory gave me. Those are their great-great-great-great, I don’t know how many greats, grandchildren. I’ve bred from them and bred from them; they’re friendly little things, and the children like them.”

“How do they breed now?” I asked.

“Well,” she replied, “they mostly come brown, I notice; I fancy the strain’s wearing out. From time to time I’ll get a black and white that doesn’t waltz—waltzing mice Mr. Malory used to call them—and from time to time I’ll get a waltzer; there was a lot of them at first, one or two in a litter, but they’re getting rare. That little fellow,” she said, pointing—and as she stood beside me I was conscious of her softness and warmth, and felt myself faintly troubled—“I’ve known him waltz once only since I’ve had him, which is since he was born. I look at them,” she added unexpectedly, “when they’re blind and pink in the nest, and wonder which’ll grow up brown and which’ll waltz and which be just piebald.”

“You speak like Mr. Malory,” I said.

She laughed as she turned away.

“Is that so, sir? Well, Mr. Malory always liked the mice, I don’t know why. He lived with us over a year, and maybe one takes on a manner of thinking in a year, I don’t know.”

Somehow I felt that the section of our conversation dealing with Malory was closed by that remark. We hung fire for a little. Then I asked her to show me over the place, which she did, and after that we had tea in the kitchen, brown bread cut from the big loaf, honey from her own hives, and jam of her own making. I watched her as she laid the cloth, noted her quick efficiency, was conscious of her quiet reserve and her strength, saw her beauty foiled and trebled by the presence of her children. After tea she made me smoke a pipe, sent the children out to play, and sat opposite me in a rocking chair with sewing in her hands and more sewing heaped near her on the floor. It was very pleasant in that warm interior, the fire crackled, the big clock ticked. I thought what a fool Malory had been.

I walked home in the dusk, hearing what he had never heard from those meadows: the thudding and bruising of the distant guns.