Vita Sackville-West

by Vita Sackville-West

  Presently the path ceased to lead downhill and became flat, running along the top of the rocky cliff about twenty feet above the sea. She moved more cautiously, knowing that it would bring her to the little creek where the boat was to be waiting; as she moved she blundered constantly against boulders, for the path was winding and in the starlight very difficult to follow. She was still fighting with herself, “No, I could not go with him; I am not fit.… I don’t belong here…” that reiterated cry. “But without him—no, no, no! This is quite simple. Will he think me bad? I hope not; I shall have done what I could … Her complexity had entirely deserted her, and she thought in broad, childish lines. “Poor Eve,” she thought suddenly, viewing herself as a separate person, “she was very young” (in her eyes youth amounted to a moral virtue), “Julian, Julian, be a little sorry for her—I was cursed, I was surely cursed,” she added, and at that moment she found herself just above the creek.

  The path descended to it in rough steps, and with a beating heart she crept down, helping herself by her hands, until she stood upon the sand, hidden in the shadow of a boulder. The shadows were very black and hunched, like the shadows of great beasts. She listened, the softness of her limbs pressed against the harshness of the rocks. She heard faint voices, and, creeping forward, still keeping in the shadows, she made out the shape of a rowing-boat filled with men about twenty yards from the shore.

  “Kato has gone with him” was her first idea, and at that all her jealousy flamed again—the jealousy that, at the bottom of her heart, she knew was groundless, but could not keep in check. Anger revived her—“Am I to waste myself on him?” she thought, but immediately she remembered the blank that that one word “Never!” could conjure up, and her purpose became fixed again. “Not life without him,” she thought firmly and unchangeably, and moved forward until her feet were covered by the thin waves lapping the sandy edge of the creek. She had thrown off her shoes, standing barefoot on the soft wet sand.

  Here she paused to allow the boat to draw farther away. She knew that she would cry out, however strong her will, and she must guard against all chance of rescue. She waited at the edge of the creek, shivering and drawing her silk garments about her, and forcing herself to endure the cold horror of the water washing round her ankles. How immense was the night, how immense the sea!—The oars in the boat dipped regularly; by now it was almost undistinguishable in the darkness.

  “What must I do?” she thought wildly, knowing the moment had come. “I must run out as far as I can.… She sent an unuttered cry of “Julian!” after the boat, and plunged forward; the coldness of the water stopped her as it reached her waist, and the long silk folds became entangled around her limbs, but she recovered herself and fought her way forward. Instinctively she kept her hands pressed against her mouth and nostrils, and her staring eyes tried to fathom this cruelly deliberate death. Then the shelving coast failed her beneath her feet; she had lost the shallows and was taken by the swell and rhythm of the deep. A thought flashed through her brain, “This is where the water ceases to be green and becomes blue”; then in her terror she lost all self-control and tried to scream; it was incredible that Julian, who was so near at hand, should not hear and come to save her; she felt herself tiny and helpless in that great surge of water; even as she tried to scream she was carried forward and under, in spite of her wild terrified battle against the sea, beneath the profound serenity of the night that witnessed and received her expiation.

  SEDUCERS IN ECUADOR (1924)

  Included complete in this volume is the brief and brilliant Seducers in Ecuador. Among all Vita Sackville-West’s writings, this very short novel, or novella, stands out as the most complex and the most highly stylized, the most interesting and the most modernist of Vita Sackville-West’s works. Unsurprisingly, it is also the one of Vita’s productions that most appealed to Virginia Woolf, to whom it is dedicated. “I wish I had written it,” said she. With its plot dependent upon the varying colors of spectacles chosen by the hero, each of which determines a way of not just seeing but acting upon what he sees, it exudes an air of high modernist experiment. The shifting perspective calls forth the very “curious world so recently his own.”

  Blue glasses were all the rage at the time that this work was written. Duncan Grant had seen a listing of Cézanne’s painting of six apples, simply called “Pommes,” at the Degas sale, and suggested to John Maynard Keynes that to acquire this painting would be a good way to repay some of Britain’s debt to France. With Sir Charles Holmes, Director of the National Gallery, they set off for Paris. Sir Charles—eager to acquire the painting anonymously—wore blue glasses throughout the sale, and Keynes acquired the painting. But when he arrived at Charleston, in the evening of March 28, 1918, he had too much baggage and so left the painting in the hedge just outside.1 A few days later, at Gordon Square, Vanessa Bell brought out the painting for Virginia Woolf, Keynes, classical scholar J. T. Sheppard, and Roger Fry. What she brought was, as Virginia Woolf writes:

  … a small parcel about the size of a large slab of chocolate. On one side are painted 6 apples by Cézanne. Roger very nearly lost his senses. I’ve never seen such a sight of intoxication. He was like a bee on a sunflower. Imagine snow falling outside, a wind like there is in the Tube, an atmosphere of yellow grains of dust, and us all gloating upon these apples.2

  The color of glasses, of course, determines the twists, turns, and changeability in Seducers in Ecuador, and in this way, the novella is quite unlike the straightforward and successful views promoted in the Edwardians and All Passion Spent, the best known of Vita’s works. For present-day readers, more given to the brief and the complex, it has a completely different appeal. Vita was clearly fascinated by this kind of alteration of perspective. One of her gardening pieces included here, “Full-bosomed trollop of a rose,” begins with a gentleman “wearing amber-colored spectacles.” He urges the narrator to try on his glasses: “look at your roses; look also at your brown-tiled roofs; look at the clouds in the sky.” Everything is intensified, deepened, and made far more interesting.

  “Look, he said.…” This could well be Vita’s message to the reader.

  SEDUCERS IN ECUADOR

  It was in Egypt that Arthur Lomax contracted the habit which, after a pleasantly varied career, brought him finally to the scaffold.

  In Egypt most tourists wear blue spectacles. Arthur Lomax followed this prudent if unbecoming fashion. In the company of three people he scarcely knew, but into whose intimacy he had been forced by the exigencies of yachting, straddling his long legs across a donkey, attired in a suit of white ducks, a solar topee on his head, his blue spectacles on his nose, he contemplated the Sphinx. But Lomax was less interested in the Sphinx than in the phenomenon produced by the wearing of those coloured glasses. In fact, he had already dismissed the Sphinx as a most overrated object, which, deprived of the snobbishness of legend to help it out, would have little chance of luring the traveller over fifteen hundred miles of land and sea to Egypt. But, as so often happens, although disappointed in one quarter he had been richly and unexpectedly rewarded in another. The world was changed for him, and, had he but known it, the whole of his future altered, by those two circles of blue glass. Unfortunately one does not recognise the turning-point of one’s future until one’s future has become one’s past.

  Whether he pushed the glasses up on to his forehead, and looked out from underneath them, or slid them down to the tip of his nose, and looked out above them, he confronted unaided the too realistic glare of the Egyptian sun. When, however, he readjusted them to the place where they were intended to be worn, he immediately re-entered the curious world so recently become his own. It was more than curious; it was magical. A thick green light shrouded everything, the sort of light that might be the forerunner of some undreamed-of storm, or hang between a dying sun and a dead world. He wondered at the poverty of the common imagination, which degraded blue glasses into a prosaic, even a comic, thing. He resolved, however, not to i
nitiate a soul into his discovery. To those blessed with perception, let perception remain sacred, but let the obtuse dwell for ever in their darkness.

  But for Bellamy, Lomax would not have been in Egypt at all. Bellamy owned the yacht. A tall, cadaverous man, with a dark skin, white hair, and pale blue eyes, he belonged to Lomax’s club. They had never taken any notice of one another beyond a nod. Then one evening Bellamy, sitting next to Lomax at dinner, mentioned that he was sailing next day for Egypt. He was greatly put out because his third guest, a man, had failed him. “Family ties,” he grumbled; and then, to Lomax, “somehow you don’t look as though you had any.” “I haven’t,” said Lomax. “Lucky man,” grumbled Bellamy. “No,” said Lomax, “not so much lucky as wise. A man isn’t born with wife and children, and if he acquires them he has only himself to blame.” This appeared to amuse Bellamy, especially coming from Lomax, who was habitually taciturn, and he said, “That being so, you’d better come along to Egypt tomorrow.” “Thanks,” said Lomax, “I will.”

  This trip would serve to pass the time. A yachting trip was a pleasant, civilised thing to undertake, and Lomax appreciated pleasant, civilised things. He had very little use for the conspicuous or the arresting. Such inclinations as he had towards the finer gestures—and it is not to be denied that such inclinations were latent in him—had been judiciously repressed, until Lomax could congratulate himself on having achieved the comfortable ideal of all true Englishmen. From this trip, then, he anticipated nothing but six or seven agreeable weeks of sightseeing in company as civilised as his own. It is, however, the purpose of this story to demonstrate the danger of becoming involved in the lives of others without having previously tested the harmlessness of those others, and the danger above all of contracting in middle-age a new habit liable to release those lions of folly which prowl about our depths, and which it is the duty of every citizen to keep securely caged.

  Of course one cannot blame Lomax. He knew nothing of Bellamy, and for Miss Whitaker his original feeling was one of purely chivalrous compassion. Besides, it must be remembered that under the new influence of his spectacles he was living in a condition of ecstasy—a breathless condition, in which he was hurried along by his instincts, and precipitated into compromising himself before he had had time to remove his spectacles and consult his reason. Indeed, with a rapidity that he was never well able to understand, he found himself in such a position that he no longer dared to remove his spectacles at all; he could not face a return to the daylight mood; realism was no longer for him. And the spectacles, having once made him their slave, served him well. They altered the world in the most extraordinary way. The general light was green instead of yellow, the sky and the desert both turned green, reds became purple, greens were almost black. It produced an effect of stillness, everything seemed muffled. The noises of the world lost their significance. Everything became at once intensified and remote. Lomax found it decidedly more interesting than the sights of Egypt. The sights of Egypt were a fact, having a material reality, but here was a phenomenon that presented life under a new aspect. Lomax knew well enough that to present life under a new aspect is the beginning and probably also the end of genius; it is therefore no wonder that his discovery produced in him so profound and sensational an excitement. His companions thought him silent; they thought him even a little dull. But they were by that time accustomed to his silence; they no longer regarded him as a possible stimulant; they regarded him merely as a fixture—uncommunicative, but emanating an agreeable if undefined sense of security. Although they could not expect to be amused by him, in each one of them dwelt an unphrased conviction that Lomax was a man to be depended upon in the event of trouble. The extent to which he could be depended upon they had yet to learn.

  It is now time to be a little more explicit on the question of the companions of Lomax.

  Perhaps Miss Whitaker deserves precedence, since it was she, after all, who married Lomax.

  And perhaps Bellamy should come next, since it was he, after all, for whose murder Lomax was hanged.

  And perhaps Artivale should come third, since it was to him, after all, that Lomax bequeathed his, that is to say Bellamy’s, fortune.

  The practised reader will have observed by now that the element of surprise is not to be looked for in this story.

  “Lord Carnarvon would be alive today if he had not interfered with the Tomb,” said Miss Whitaker to Lomax.

  Lomax, lying in a deck-chair in the verandah of their hotel, expressed dissent.

  “I know it,” said Miss Whitaker with extreme simplicity.

  “Now how do you know it?” said Lomax, bored.

  But Miss Whitaker never condescended to the direct explanation. She preferred to suggest reserves of information too recondite to be imparted. She had, too, that peculiarly irritating habit of a constant and oblique reference to absent friends, which makes present company feel excluded, insignificant, unadventurous and contemptible. “You and I would never agree on those questions,” she replied on this occasion.

  Lomax asked her once where she lived in London. She looked at him mistrustfully, like a little brown animal that fears to be enticed into a trap, and replied that she was to be found at a variety of addresses. “Not that you’d find me there,” she added, with a laugh. Lomax knew that she did not mean to be rude, but only interesting. He was not interested; not interested enough even to ask Bellamy. Bellamy, now, interested him a great deal, though he would always have waited for Bellamy to take the first step towards a closer intimacy. Bellamy, however, showed no disposition to take it. He was civil and hospitable to his guests, but as aloof as a peak. Lomax knew him to be very rich and very delicate, and that was about the sum of his knowledge. Bellamy’s reticence made his confidences, when they did finally come, all the more surprising.

  Artivale, the fourth member of the party, was on the contrary as expansive as he well could be. He was a dark, slim, poor, untidy young scientist, consumed by a burning zest for life and his profession. His youth, his zeal, and his ability were his outstanding characteristics. Bellamy in his discreet way would smile at his exuberance, but everybody liked Artivale except Miss Whitaker, who said he was a bounder. Miss Whitaker admired only one type of man, and dismissed as perverts or bounders all those who did not belong to it; which was unfortunate for Lomax, Bellamy, and Artivale, none of whom conformed. Her friends, she let it be understood, were men of a very different stamp. Artivale did not appear to suffer under her disapprobation, and his manner towards her remained as candid and as engaging as towards everybody else, no less sure of his welcome than a puppy or a child. With him alone Lomax might have shared the delight of the coloured spectacles, had he felt any desire so to share. Artivale had skirted the subject; he had settled his spectacles, peered about him, and laughed. “By Jove, what a queer world! Every value altered.” He dashed off to other trains of thought—he couldn’t stay long poised on any one thing—giving Lomax just a second in which to appreciate the exactness of his observation.

  Artivale was like that—swift and exact; and always uninsistent.

  Lomax went to the chemist in Cairo, and bought all the coloured spectacles he could find. He had already his blue pair, bought in London; in Cairo he bought an amber pair, and a green, and a black. He amused himself by wearing them turn and turn about; but soon it ceased to be an amusement and became an obsession—a vice. Bellamy with his reserve, and Heaven knows what tragedy at the back of it; a finished life, Bellamy’s, one felt, without knowing why. Miss Whitaker with her elaborate mystery; an empty life, one felt, at the back of it; empty as a sail inflated by wind—and how the sails bellied white, across the blue Mediterranean! Artivale with his energy; a bursting life, one felt, thank God, beside the other two. Lomax with his spectacles. All self-sufficient, and thereby severed from one another. Lomax thought himself the least apart, because, through his glasses, he surveyed.

  He was wearing the black ones when he came on Miss Whitaker, sobbing in the verandah.


  Miss Whitaker had not taken much notice of him on the journey. She had not, in fact, taken much notice of anybody, but had spent her time writing letters, which were afterwards left about in subtle places, addressed to Ecuador. Arrived in Egypt, she had emerged from her epistolary seclusion. Perhaps it had not aroused the comment she hoped for. She had then taken up Lomax, and dealt out to him the fragments of her soul. She would not give him her address in London, but she would give him snippets of her spiritual experience. Allusive they were, rather than explicit; chucked at him, with a sort of contempt, as though he were not worthy to receive them, but as though an inner pressure compelled their expectoration. Lomax, drunk behind his wall of coloured glass, played up to the impression he was expected to glean. He knew already—and his glasses deepened the knowledge—that life was a business that had to be got through; nor did he see any reason, in his disheartened way, why Bellamy’s queer yachting party shouldn’t enrich his ennui as far as possible.

  He was, then, wearing his black spectacles when he came on Miss Whitaker sobbing in the verandah.

  The black ones were, at the moment, his favourites. You know the lull that comes over the world at the hour of solar eclipse? How the birds themselves cease to sing, and go to roost? How the very leaves on the trees become still and metallic? How the heaven turns to copper? How the stars come out, terrible in the daytime, with the clock at midday instead of at midnight? How all is hushed before the superstition of impending disaster? So, at will, was it with Lomax. But Miss Whitaker, for once, was a natural woman.