Heritage

by V. Sackville-West

IV

How? I never formulated, but I suppose now, looking back, that the prosaic solution of divorce lay behind my evasions. I did not take into account the dreary conventionality of the English side to Ruth’s nature. People like the Pennistans do not divorce; they endure. Nor do they run away; yet Ruth had run away. Which would prove the stronger, her life-long training, or the flash of her latent blood?

There came a day—for I have dallied a long time over Malory’s letters and my own reflections—when Ruth came into Pennistans’ kitchen, hatless, with her three children clinging round her skirts. Her father and mother stared at her; she gave no explanation, and Amos, who was a great gentleman in his way, asked for none, and moreover checked the doleful inquiries of his wife, to whom the prompt and vulgar tear was always ready. I saw then a certain likeness between the father and the daughter; that apostolic beard of his gave him a southern dignity, and his scarlet braces marked his shirt with a blood-red slash, as red as her lips over her little teeth white as nuts. She could remain at the farm as long as she chose, he said. She had, he did not add, but his eyes added it, a refuge from all mankind in her father.

No reproaches, no recriminations, and when Mrs. Pennistan, after Ruth had gone out with all apparent calm to put her children to bed, began anew to wonder tearfully what had happened, and to suggest lugubriously that as Ruth had made her bed, so she must lie in it, he checked her again and frightened her into silence by his sternness. She went out weeping, and Amos and I were left together.

I offered to go, but he assured me that my presence in the house would be a help, adding that he supposed I had heard something of his daughter’s story, and that her marriage was not a happy one. It probably cost him a great effort to say this. I tried to make it as easy as I could for him. He then asked me to remain with Ruth should her husband follow her, and should he, Amos, or one of her brothers, not be in the house.

I could see that he thought it likely Westmacott would come over sooner or later.

I was greatly elated at the turn things had taken, and felt that my belief in the lucky star of my scheme had been justified. I had no doubt now that Ruth would rid herself of Westmacott, and do for herself what the war had not done for her. I hung about the farm all day, partly to oblige Amos, who had his usual work to attend to, but principally to satisfy the tense spirit of expectation which had risen in me since the morning. As the player sees an imaginary line running between his ball and the objective, so I imagined a string running between the moment at Sampiero when Malory had said, “Do you know the Weald of Kent?” and this moment when I, a tardy, but, I flattered myself, an essential actor, waited about Pennistans’ threshold for the advent of Rawdon Westmacott. All the beads but one were now threaded on that string; I must watch the last and final threading, before I could put on the clasp.

Towards evening I espied Westmacott entering a distant field, and something in me gave a fierce leap of exultation. I then realised the practical difficulties of the position. Here was I, left on guard, but physically quite unable to grapple with the wiry man should he lay hands on me, or on his wife. I thought for an instant of summoning Amos, but as instantly rejected the idea: the final act must lie between Westmacott, Ruth, and myself. Had I been alone, I would have chanced his violence; as it was, I must consider the woman. I ran quickly into the house, up to my room, and brought down my service revolver.

When I came into the kitchen carrying this weapon, Ruth, who was sitting there sewing, as placidly, I swear, as she had sat sewing in her own kitchen the first time I had seen her, looked at my loaded hand and up into my face with a grave, inquiring surprise. I reassured her. Her husband, I told her, was coming across the fields and would doubtless insist on seeing her, and considering the nature of the man I had thought it best to have an unanswerable threat ready to hand. With that muzzle we would keep him at bay.

Ruth rose very quietly and took the weapon from me. I had no idea of resistance. Malory himself could not have felt more definitely than I that the words we were to speak, the actions we were to perform, were already written out on a slowly unwinding scroll.

She asked me to leave her alone with her husband; to my feeble protest, made by my tongue, but barely seconded by the vital part of my being, the part so intensely conscious, yet at the same time so pervaded by a sense of trance and unreality,—to that feeble protest she replied, bitterly enough that she had faced him many times before and with my weapon on the table beside her would face him with additional confidence and security. She had already taken it from me, and now laid it on the table, speaking as one does to a child from whom one has just taken a dangerous toy. She smiled as she spoke, so serenely that I felt sure she had accepted the revolver merely for the sake of my peace of mind. She charged me to keep the children away, should I see them drawing near to the house, and with that injunction she took me kindly by the shoulders and turned me out into the garden.

Westmacott entered it at the same moment by the swing-gate. His looks were black as he passed me and strode into the house he had not darkened since his marriage. I stood out in the garden alone in the dusk. I looked in through the latticed window of the kitchen, seeing every detail as the detail of a Dutch picture, lit by the fire; the window was very largely blocked by the red geraniums, but I could see the deal table, the swinging lamp, the brass ornaments gleaming by the fireplace, the pictures on the walls, the thin ribbon of steam coming from the spout of the singing kettle; I could even see the brown grain in the wood of which the table-top was made. I saw Ruth standing, and Westmacott looking at her; then he caught sight of me, and with an angry gesture dragged the curtain across the window.

I was now shut out from all participation in this act of the drama, but I did not care; I felt that what must be, must be, that the inevitable was right, and, above all, ordained. Come what might, no human agency could interfere. I smiled to myself as I thought of Malory’s triumph could he behold my resignation, and as I smiled I felt Malory’s presence in the garden, waiting like me, and, like me, entirely passive. I saw his face; his iron gray hair where it grew back from his temples; I saw the tiny hairs in his nostrils, and the minute pores of his skin. My head was swimming, and the vividness of my perception stabbed me.

Then a little scent floated out to me, and I wondered vaguely what it was, and what were the memories it awakened, and in some dim, extremely complicated way I knew those memories were awakened by a mental rather than a physical process, and that they were, at best, only second-hand. A narrow street, yoked bullocks, and the clamour of a Latin city.... These meaningless and irrelevant words shaped themselves out of the mist of my sensitiveness. I linked them and the picture they created to the violence of feeling within the little room behind the drawn curtain, and as I did so they fell away together from the twilit English garden, the English country; fell away to their own place, as a thing apart; or shall I say, they stood behind the English country as a ghostly stranger behind a familiar form? This was the ghost of which Malory had always been conscious. Then I knew that my troubled perplexity was but the echo of Malory’s first perplexity, and I narrowed it down with an effort of will to the scent of roasting chestnuts. The ancient woman in her bedroom was at her usual occupation.

I folded my arms and leant my back against the house wall; I heard the rise and fall of angry voices within the room; I found that I could look only at little things, such as the cracks in the stone paving of the garden path, or the latch on the gate, and that the horizon, when I raised my eyes towards it, swam. I tried to drag back my failing sense of proportions. As I did this, clinging on to and deliberately ranging my thoughts in ordered formation, there emerged the dearness and all-eclipsing importance of my scheme to me in the past; I realised that never for a moment had it been absent from my conscious or my sub-conscious thought. So, I said to myself, this is the phenomenon of poets, and are they, I wonder, as passive as I am when after months of carrying their purpose in their brain, the moment comes of its fruition? Have they, like me, no feeling of control? I remembered what Malory had said of the corelation of human effort.

I looked towards the darkened window and, hearing the drone of voices, beheld myself again as the brother of the poet whose puppets, brought by him to a certain point, continue to work along the lines he has laid down, as though independent of his agency. I would resume control, I thought, when this so terribly inevitable act had played itself out. Then I would step in, lead Malory to Ruth, and again step out, leaving them to the joy of their bewilderment.

Why should I have cherished this scheme so passionately? so passionately that my desire had risen above my reason, carrying with it that strange conviction that by the sheer force of my will events would shape themselves—as indeed they were shaping—under my inactive hand? Why? I could not explain, but as the twilight deepened rapidly in the garden I saw again Malory’s grave, lean face, heard his half-sad, half-happy comments, was pierced by the pitiable and unnecessary tragedy of his loneliness—Malory away in France, unconscious of the intensity of the situation created around him, without his knowledge and without his consent, by a woman who loved him and a man who, I suppose, loved him too.

It was at that moment, when I had worked myself up into a positive exaltation, that I heard a sudden angry shout and a shot from a revolver.

I awoke, and I confess that before rushing into the house I stood for a dizzy second while a thousand impressions wheeled like a flock of startled birds in my brain. It was over, then? Westmacott was dead, I was sure of that. Would the mice, two miles away, be waltzing? I had an insane desire to run over and look. Westmacott was dead; then I had killed him, I was his murderer as much as if I stood in Ruth’s place with the smoking revolver in my hand. It was over; the recent tradition of war, where life was cheap, had joined with Concha’s legacy for the fulfilment of my purpose. What a heritage! for that double heritage, not fate, had helped me out. Blood, war, and I were fellow conspirators.

I stood for a second only before I burst open the door, but the strength of my impression was already so powerfully upon me that when I saw Westmacott by the fire holding the revolver I did not believe my eyes. When I say I did not believe my eyes I mean that I was quite soberly, deliberately persuaded that my eyes were telling an actual falsehood to my brain. Westmacott could not be standing by the fire; he must be lying somewhere on the ground, huddled and lifeless. I removed my eyes from the false Westmacott standing by the fire, and sent them roving over the floor in search of that other Westmacott from whom life had flown.

I ran my eyes up and down the cracks between the tiles until they came to a darkness, and then, running them upwards, I reached the face of Ruth. She was there, shrinking as she must suddenly have shrunk when he snatched the revolver from her. In her face I read defeat, reaction, submission. She had struck her blow, and it had failed; and she and I were together beaten and vanquished.

I knew that my attempt would be hopeless, but a great desperation seized hold of me, and I cried out, absurdly, miserably,—

“There are other methods.”

She only shook her head, and, pointing at the revolver, said,—

“It kicked in my hand.”

I looked across the room, and running to the fire I picked up some bits of china which had fallen in the grate; I tried to fit them together, repeating sorrowfully,—

“Look, you have broken a plate, you have broken a plate to pieces.”