Heritage

by V. Sackville-West

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.