Heritage

by V. Sackville-West

II

“You want to know if I went? I did, and in the yard I met Westmacott, who discussed with me the prospects of the season. He was particularly affable, and I did my utmost not to appear absent-minded. I suppose that I succeeded, for his affability increased, culminating in an invitation to join him in a glass of ale within the house. I was dismayed, and protested that I had no time, also—quite untruthfully—that since the war I had given up drink of all kinds. He urged me.

“‘You’ll not refuse to taste my wife’s cider?’

“I thought that I cried out,—

“‘Man alive, I come straight from imploring your wife to come away with me,’ but as his expression remained the same, and neither glazed into horror nor blazed into fury, I suppose that the words, though they screamed in my head, never materialised on my lips.

“I was helpless. He led me back, odious and hospitable, into the kitchen where Ruth still stood rhythmically rolling the dough. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the room, which had been so dazzling with its colours and its clarity, was dim, even to the red of the geraniums, even to the glow under the skin of Ruth. Dead, I thought, dead, dead.

“Westmacott stood outside, stamping the clay from his boots, and calling to his wife for cider. I winced from his heartiness, and from the tragic absurdity of my position. If only tragedy could be our lot, we should at least enjoy the consolation of the heroic, but in the comic tragedy to which Providence so delights in exposing us, there is no consolation. I was thankful that Westmacott did not know what a fool he was successfully making of me.

“Ruth took down from the dresser an earthenware jug, and went through into the little back hall of the place. I watched her through the door which she had left open. She filled the jug at a great wooden barrel; the golden cider streamed out from the tap, and she held the jug with a precision and a steadiness of hand that made me marvel. Returning, she set it with two glasses on the table.

“‘This is my own brewing,’ she said to me.

“I thought that the cider must surely spill from my glass as I raised it from the table, or that it must bubble and choke in my throat as I drank with her eyes upon me. I felt trapped and prisoned, but in Westmacott’s face there was nothing sinister, no trace of suspicion. He was not playing a game with me. Perversely enough, I should have preferred an outburst of fury on his part, to have felt his fist in my face, and to roll with him, body grappling with body, on the floor. But this could not be, and I must sit, drinking cider, between those two, a husband and wife whom the flash of a revolver had so nearly separated not many weeks beforehand, a revolver fired in anger and hatred, and in a desire for freedom; I must sit there, near a woman between whom and myself unforgettable words had been suddenly illuminatingly spoken. I laughed; Westmacott had just made some remark to which my laugh came as an inappropriate answer; he looked a little surprised, and I was hunting about for some phrase to cover my lapse, when Ruth said,—

“‘Here are the boys.’

“They came in whistling, but fell silent as they saw me, and took their caps off awkwardly. They were good-looking little boys—but I forget: you’ve seen them. Westmacott glanced at them with obvious pride. Ruth moved with her former steadiness to the cupboard to cut them each a chunk of bread liberally spread with jam; she pushed their chairs close up to the table, and ran her fingers through their rough mops of hair. They began to eat solidly. Westmacott winked at me.

“‘There’s a mother for you,’ he said.

“I could make no reply to his hideous jocularity; if I had spoken, I should have screamed.

“I felt that I should never escape, that the situation would last for ever. I was, naturally enough, not very clear in my mind just then, but already I seemed to see my recent scene with Ruth as a sunlit peak bursting out of the dreariness and blindness of days, as brief as the tick of a clock, but as vibrant as a trumpet-call, while the present scene was long, interminable, flat as a level plain. Yes, that was my impression: the peak and the plain. I longed to get away, that I might dwell at my leisure upon that moment full of wonder. I bitterly resented my bondage. I wanted to go away by myself to some solitary corner where I might sit and brood for hours over the one moment in which, after years of mere vegetation, I could tell myself that I had truly lived. I felt that every minute by which my stay in that kitchen was prolonged, was making of the place a thing of nightmare, instead of the enchanted chamber it actually was, and this also I resented. Why could not I have come, lived my brief spell, and gone with an untarnished treasure imprisoned for ever within my heart? Why should perfection be marred by the clumsiness of a farmer’s hospitality?

“Nor was this all. Creeping over me came again the humiliating sensation which I had more than once experienced in the presence of Ruth and Westmacott, the sensation that they were alien to me, bound together by some tie more mysterious than mere cousinship, a tie which, I believed, held them joined in spite of the hatred that existed between them. I won’t go into this now. It is a mystery which lies at the very root of their strange relationship. I do not suppose that Ruth was conscious of it—she was, after all, an essentially unanalytical and primitive creature—but it drove her now to a manifestation as typical of her in particular as it was of all women in general.

“She set herself deliberately to increase my misery and discomfort by every trick within her power. She must have been aware of what I was enduring, and you would have thought, however indifferent to me in the emotional sense, that she would have tried, in ordinary human pity and charity, to help me to escape as soon as possible from my wretched position, and to make that position less wretched while it still lasted. You would have thought this. Any man would have thought it. But apparently women are different.

“She took, then, my misery and played with it, setting herself to intensify it by every ruse at her disposal. She contrived, with diabolical subtlety, to separate us into two groups, one consisting of herself, her husband, and her children, the other consisting of me, isolated and alone. To this day I do not know whether she wanted to punish me for my former temerity, or whether she was simply obeying some obscure feminine instinct. In any case, she succeeded. I had never felt myself such an intruder. Even the resemblance between husband and wife, the curious, intangible resemblance of race and family in their dark looks, rose up and jeered at me. ‘We understand one another,’ something seemed to say, ‘and we are laughing together at your expense.’

“I realised then that the calm with which she had received me, and had drawn my cider, the matter-of-fact way in which she had told me it was of her own brewing, were all part of her scheme, as was her present conversation, standing by the table, and her occasional demonstrations of affection towards her boys. You will remember perhaps that I once told you of a walk she and I had taken to Penshurst. Well, I dimly felt that her behaviour on that occasion and upon this were first-cousins. I don’t know why I felt this; I only record it for you without comment.

“So she stood there talking, a hard devil behind all her commonplace words. I hated her; I wished myself dead. My one consolation, that Westmacott did not know what a fool he was making of me, was gone, since Ruth was making of me a much bigger fool, and was doing it in all consciousness. How I hated her! and at the same time, through her hatefulness, she seemed to me more than ever desirable. Westmacott knew nothing of what had gone before, but, sensitive as he was underneath his brutality, with the unmistakable sensitiveness of the Latin, he was, I think, aware of some atmospheric presence in the room. At any rate, he realised the devilish attraction of his wife, and in his spontaneous foreign way he put out his hand to touch hers. An English farmer! I nearly laughed again. When he did this, she sat down on the arm of his chair, and, putting her arms round his neck, laid her cheek against his hair, with her eyes on me all the while. Then, as though she had released some lever by her action, he turned within her arms, and kissed her savagely.

“The next thing I knew was that I was walking at an extraordinary pace across the fields, gasping in the air, and that strong shudders like the shudders of a fever were running down my frame. I am not really very clear as to how I spent the rest of that day, or of the days that followed. Do you know that familiar nightmare in which you roll a tiny ball no bigger than a cartridge-shot between your finger and thumb, till it grows and grows into an immense ball that overwhelms you? So through a nightmare haze I rolled the memory of that horrible little scene into a tight ball, till I could see neither beyond nor above it, but all my horizon was obscured by the distended pellet in my brain. And during all this time I moved about the world like a man in full possession of his senses, making my dispositions for a long absence abroad, talking to my banker out of the depths of a leather arm-chair, buying my tickets from Thomas Cook, directing the packing of my luggage, and, so far as I know, neither my banker nor Cook’s clerk nor the club servant realised that anything was amiss with me.

“I had only one desire: to get away, to think. I was as impatient for solitude as the thirsty man is for water. I resented every one in my surroundings and my delay in London much as I had resented Westmacott and my delay in the kitchen. Until I could get away, I banished all thought from my mind; only, as I tell you, the scene in the kitchen remained whirling and whirling beyond my control.

“Finally I escaped from England, and as I lay sleepless, buffeted all night in the train, one thought persisted like music in my brain, ‘To-morrow I shall be alone, I shall be rid of nightmare, I shall be able to dwell luxuriously upon the magical moment, and all that it means, all that it entails. Yes! I shall be alone with it, for weeks, months, years if I like. I shall no longer be forced to grant undue proportion to the nightmare; until now it has made black night of my days, but to-morrow it will recede like a fog before the sun, and I shall dwell in the crystal light of the mountain-tops.’

“My destination was—I wonder if you have guessed it already?—Sampiero. I knew that there I was certain of peace, hospitality, familiar rooms. Besides, it was there that I had spoken to you for so many hours of the opening chapters of this story, and I had a fancy that if I took my dreamings up to the clump of pines, the shadows of those earlier chapters might come, re-evoked to brush like soft birds against my cheek. I had planned to go up to the clump of pines on my first evening after dinner. My dear fellow, do not be offended when I tell you that as I arrived by that absurd mountain railway at Sampiero, I was seized by a sudden panic that some desire for rest and peace might have brought you, like myself, to the same old haunt. I suppose that I was in an excitable state of mind already, for by the time I reached our old lodging-house I was in a fever and a passion of certainty that I should find you there before me. Signora Tagliagambe was at the door to welcome me, but I rushed at her with inquiries as to whether I was or was not her only guest. She stared at me with obvious concern for my reason. There were no other guests. I had my former room, also the sitting room to myself. I should be completely undisturbed.

“I recovered myself then, realising that I had been a fool, as I dare say you are thinking me at this moment. A delicious peace came stealing over me, the peace of things suspended. I was half tempted to give myself the luxury of putting off my first visit to the stone-pines until the following day. But the evening fell in such perfection that I wandered out, much as you and I have often wandered out to sit there in silence, sucking at our pipes; in the days, I mean, before I asked you that memorable question about the Weald of Kent.

“So there I was, at length, at peace, and I stretched myself out on the ground beneath the pines, pulling idly at a tuft of wild thyme, and rubbing it between my hands till the whole evening was filled with its curious aromatic scent, that came at me in gusts like a tropical evening comes at one in gusts of warmth. I had not yet begun to think, for, knowing that the moment when thought first consciously began to well up in my spirit would take its place in the perspective of my life not far short of that other moment on whose sacredness I scarcely dared to dwell, I put it off, even now, when it had become inevitable, torturing myself with the Epicureanism of my refinement. I was thirsty, thirsty, thirsty, and though the water stood there, sparkling and clear, I still refused myself the comfort of stretching out my hand.

“And then it came. Slowly and from afar, almost like pain running obscurely and exquisitely down my limbs, reflection returned to me like light out of darkness. I lay there absolutely motionless, while in my head music began to play, and I was transported to palaces where the fountains rose in jets of living water. Light crept all round me, and music, music ... a great chorus, now, singing in unison; swelling and bursting music, swelling and bursting light, louder and louder, brighter and more dazzling; a deafening crash of music, a blinding vision of light.

“I stood at last on the sunlit peak.

“All around me, but infinitely below, stretched the valleys and plains of darkness where I had dragged out my interminable days. I looked down upon them from my height, knowing that I should never return. I knew that I now stood aloft, at liberty to examine the truth which had come to me, turning it over and over in my hands like a jewel, playing with it, luxuriating in its possession. It was to be mine, to take at will from the casket of my mind, or to return there when other, prosaic matters claimed my attention. But, whether I left it or whether I took it out, I should bear it with me to the ends of the earth, and death alone could wrench me from its contemplation.

“What a lunatic you must think me after this rhapsody! What! you will say, does the man really mean that he wouldn’t exchange the recollection of a moment for the living, material presence of the woman concerned? Well, it is very natural that you should think me a lunatic, but have patience; take into consideration my life, which has been lived, as you know, alone; always in unusual places, with no one near my heart. Living, material presences come to have comparatively little significance after twenty or thirty years of solitude. Try it, and you will see. One drifts into a more visionary world, peopled by shadowy and ideal forms; memories assume incredible proportions and acquire an unbelievable value; one browses off them like a camel off his hump. Do you begin to understand now that this great, shining, resplendent moment should rush in to fill a mind so dependent on the life unreal? One must have something, you see, and if one can’t have human love one must fall back upon imagination. Hence the romantic souls of spinsters....

“And hence, I might say, a great many other things which practical men barely acknowledge. I find myself straying off down paths of thought which may lead me into swamps of digression. Hence religion, hence poetry, hence art, hence love itself—the spiritual side of love. All these things, unpractical, inconvenient, unimportant things, all sprung from a craving in man’s nature! A craving for what? Hasn’t he been given strength, health, bodily well-being, hunger and thirst, fellow-men to fight, and fists to fight them with? What more does the creature want? He wants a thing called Beauty, but what it is he can’t tell you, and what he wants to do with it when he’s got it he can’t tell you; but he wants it. Something that he calls his soul wants it. A desire to worship.... Beauty, a purely arbitrary thing. All men strive after it, some men so little that they are themselves unconscious of the desire, other men so passionately that they give up their whole lives to its pursuit; and all the graded differences come in between.

“Here am I, then, a man of irregular and spasmodic occupation, an unsatisfactory, useless member of society, I’ll admit, useless, but quite harmless; an educated man, what you would call an intellectual, not endowed with a brain of the good, sound type, but with a rambling, untidy sort of brain that is a curse to himself and a blessing to nobody. Here am I, without one responsibility in the world, with nothing to do unless I go out and forage for it, living alone with books, dabbling in this and that, and necessarily thrown for a certain number of hours each day on my own resources. You cannot wonder that my life of the imagination—as I will call it—becomes of supreme importance to me as my only companion. It had been a singularly blank life, so blank that when I went out for walks alone I used to fall back on repeating verse aloud, so you see it was a life of books, and man wants more than that. He wants something that shall be at once ideal and personal. There is only one thing which fulfils those two conditions: Woman. But, you will say, if there’s no woman in a man’s life he has only himself to blame. You’re right; I don’t know why I never set out to find myself a woman, perhaps because I was too hard to please, perhaps because I knew myself to be too fickle and restless. You used to laugh at me when I said this. Of course, I don’t pretend that there haven’t been incidents in my life; but they never lasted, never satisfied me for long; they weren’t even good to think about afterwards. Anyway, there I was: free, but lonely.

“And now I had got this new, precious, incredible thing to think over. I am afraid to tell you how long I stayed at Sampiero, doing nothing, lapped in my thoughts as in a bath of warm water. My conversation with Ruth had been brief, and I knew every word of it by heart; my hour started from when I had come up to her house and had stolen surreptitiously to the doorway to take her unawares, and had stood there with a smile on my lips, waiting for her to look up. I saw again the light and the flowers and the baby in the cradle. I felt again the swimming in my head as I looked, for the first time, it seemed, into the beauty of her face. I heard again my own voice saying, ‘Ruth! Ruth! you must come with me.’

“But I told you all that before; why do I repeat it? Because I lived through it all an infinitude of times myself. I thought I couldn’t exhaust the richness of my treasure. Nor could I, but after a while I found that my perfect contentment was being gradually replaced by a hunger for something more; I was human; the imagination wasn’t enough.

“I began to want Ruth, Ruth herself, warm and living, and when I made this discovery I took a step I had long since prepared in my mind, foreseeing the day when dissatisfaction would overcome me: I left Sampiero and joined a party that was going into Central Africa after ivory.