Heritage

by Vita Sackville-West

  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 storey 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. Someone 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 today.’

  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.

  Chapter Two

  Little by little I learnt the details which linked the end of Malory’s story to the point where I was to take it up. Rawdon Westmacott, in spite of his wife’s entreaties to settle in another part of the country, had insisted on returning almost directly after their marriage to his farm, and there, ignored by her own family and by the whole horrified, scandalised countryside, Ruth had dwelt in a companionship more terrible than solitude. For Westmacott had followed unbridled his habitual paths of drunkenness and violence. How grim and disquieting must have been that situation: not two miles separated Pennistans’ from Westmacotts’, not two miles lay between the parents and the daughter, yet they were divided by league upon league of pride, across which their mutual longing quivered as heat-waves upon the surface of the desert. The mother, I think, would have gone, but Amos, with that Biblical austerity which Malory had noted in him, forbade any advance towards, any mention of, the prodigal. The ideal of decency, which is the main ideal of the country people, had been outraged, and this Amos, the heir of tradition, could not forgive. During the greater part of the first year, neither Ruth nor her mother can willingly have stirred far from their own garden door.
The torment, the gnawing of that self-consciousness! The apprehension of that first Sunday, when Amos with set jaw forced his wife to church! with what tremulousness she must have entered the little nave, casting round her eyes in secret, dreading yet hoping, relieved yet disappointed. She bore traces of the strain, the buxom woman, in the covert glance of her eyes and the listening, searching expression of her face. I have seen her start at the sound of the door-latch, and look up expectantly as she must have looked in those days, afraid and longing to see the beloved figure in the door.

  The tension came to an end at last, for Nancy, whose will might not be crossed, burst out with indignation at the treatment of her sister and set off angrily for Westmacotts. She returned within an hour with the information that Rawdon was dead drunk in the kitchen and that Ruth’s child would surely be born before morning. Mrs Pennistan had not known of the child; she leapt to her feet saying that she must go at once, and upbraided Amos for having withheld her so long from her own flesh and blood. Amos rose, and saying gloomily, ‘Do what you will, but don’t let me know of it,’ he left the room.

  I know nothing of the meeting between mother and daughter, but I imagine that the sheer urgency of the situation mercifully did much to smooth the difficulty of the moment. The crisis over, a new order of things replaced the old: relations were re-established, and Ruth henceforward came and went between her present and her former home. Only, the Pennistans’ door was barred to the son-in-law, as their lips were barred to his name. At the most, his phantasm hovered between them.

  Now I have told all that I could reconstruct, and most of this I heard from Nancy, who was a frank, outspoken girl; common, I thought her, and ordinary, but good-hearted underneath her exuberance. She had lived at home since her husband had gone to fight. She was very different from her quiet sister, as different as a babbling brook from a wide, calm pool of water. I heard a great deal of abuse of Westmacott from her, even to tales of how he ill-treated his wife; and I also heard of her own happiness, confidences unrestrainedly poured out, for she was innocent of reserve. To this I preferred to listen, though, truthfully, she often bored and sometimes embarrassed me. I soon discovered that for all her fiery temper she was a woman of no moral stamina, and I didn’t like to dwell in my own mind upon her utter annihilation under the too probable blow of war.

  The blow fell, and by the curse of Heaven I was there to see it; the reality of the danger had always seemed remote, even in the midst of its nearness, for such nightmares crawl closer and closer only to be flung back repeatedly by the force of human optimism. I had never before realised the depths of such optimism. Her first cry was ‘It cannot be true!’ her first instinct the instinct of disbelief. In the same way she had always clung to an encouraging word, however futile, and had been cast down to an equal degree by an expression of pessimism. I suppose that when the strings of the human mind are drawn so taut, the slightest touch will call forth their pathetic music . . . Poor Nancy! I had seen her husband on leave for ten days during which her eyes were radiant and her voice busy with song; he went; and was killed the day after his return to France.

  Not very long afterwards I got a letter from Malory, forwarded and re-forwarded, which, coming out of the, so far as he was concerned, silence of years, reminded me forcibly of the day he had broken silence at Sampiero. It gave me a queer turn of the heart to see that the envelope I held in my hand had gone first of all to Sampiero, to our little lodging house, had been handled, no doubt, by the hunch-backed postman I had known so well. I could see him, going down the street, with his bag over his shoulder, and my letter in his bag. I could see my old landlady with the letter in her hand, turning it over and over, till light broke on her, and she remembered the Englishman, and hunted up his unfamiliar address, and wondered, perhaps, whether he, too, had fallen in the war.

  I give Malory’s letter here.

  ‘. . . I read his name in the official list, and can only suppose that it is my Daphnis, as I know he was in a Kentish regiment. Oh, these yeomen of England, of whom I always thought as indigenous to the soil, born there, living there, dying there, buried there, with no knowledge beyond their counted acres, but knowing those so well and thoroughly, tree by tree, crop by crop, path by path through the woodland! They have been uprooted and borne to foreign shores, but they are England, and it is for their own bit of England, weald, marsh, or fell, that they die.

  ‘They have lived all their lives in security, and the security of centuries lies behind them, as the volume of ocean lies behind each wave that laps the shore. Now the mammoth of danger and unrest prowls round their homesteads, and a hand whose presence they did not suspect moves and removes them, pawns in the game. How can they understand? They do not. They only cling, for the sake of sanity, to what they know: their corner of England and their own individuality, rocks which have been with them since they were born, and which in the thunderstorm about their ears they can retain unaltered.

  ‘I live amongst them now, and I know.

  ‘I have been once in a great earthquake, and I know that the secret of its terror is that the earth, the steady immutable earth, betrays the confident footstep. So in this earthquake men cling to themselves and to their land, as they know it, as immutable things.

  ‘I am living now in a great peace; I do not hear the din around me; I am as one in the centre of those tropical winds, where all that is in the path of the hurricane is destroyed, but in the still and silent centre birds sing and leaves do not stir. Or I am as a totally deaf man, the drums of whose ears are burst. I am happy.

  ‘But the others, who are in the path of the wind, they are clouted and pushed and beaten, blinded and deafened by the cyclone. They are made to gyrate as the little mice were made to gyrate. What is it, oh God, that drives us, poor creatures?

  ‘I am not one of those who, at this moment, hold that the war is supreme and all-eclipsing. The war is not eternal, and its proportions are relative; only life is eternal, and fate is eternal. Fate! Do you remember the Pennistans, and how fate, the freaky humorist, played her tricks upon them? There was no escape for them then, there is no escape for us now.

  ‘If all mankind were resigned to fate, sorrow would take wing and fly from the world.

  ‘I think of this present stirring of nations as the stirring of huge antediluvian beasts, kicked up out of their slumber by a giant’s foot, and fighting amongst themselves like the soldiers of Jason. No human eye can follow the drift of war, as no human mind can encircle the entirety of modern knowledge. We are as men in the valley, with mountains rising around, and, beyond each ridge that we climb, a farther ridge. It is for the geographers of the future to come with their maps and measure peak after peak to their correctness of altitude. And it is for us to remember that as the highest peak is as nothing upon the perfect roundness of the globe, so is our present calamity as nothing upon the perfect roundness of the scheme of destiny.’

  Again that strange impulse to confide in me! in me the stranger whom he, if anything, disliked. I wondered whether our whole lives were to be punctuated by these spasmodic confidences, and whether the forging of a number of such links would finally weave together a chain of friendship? I reflected that he, the analyst, could probably explain the kink in men’s brains by which confidential expansion is not necessarily based on sympathy, but I admitted to myself that I was routed by the problem.

  I liked his letter; it produced in me a sensation of peace and light, and of a great broadening. I envied him his balance and his sanity. I envy him still more now that peace has come, and that the rapid perspective of history already shows me the precision of his judgment.

  I showed part of the letter to Ruth, curious to observe the impression which Malory’s reflections would produce on a primitive and uncultivated brain. I knew that that letter was not the outcome of a transitory or accidental frame of mind, but that, like a rock gathering speed as it bowls down the side of a hi
ll, the swell and rush of his considered thought had borne him along until his fingers, galloping to the dictation of his mind, had covered the sheets I now held in my hand. Ruth frankly understood no word of his letter. She merely asked me in her direct way whether I thought Mr Malory was sorry her brother-in-law had been killed. Privately I thought that some devilish cynicism in the man, some revolting sense of artistic fitness, would rejoice in a detached, inhuman fashion at the pertinence of the tragedy.

  He said in his next letter to me — a reply to a letter of mine: —

  ‘. . . Destiny and nature are, after all, the only artists of any courage, of any humour. Do they take Rawdon Westmacott? for whose disappearance all concerned must pray; no, they take Daphnis, who, of the thirty or forty million fighting men, is in the minority that should be spared.

  ‘From the beginning they have exercised their wit on these innocent country people. How can we escape from their humour, when it gambols around us in the unseen? we cannot escape it, we can only hope to cap it with the superlative humour of our indifference.

  ‘Around how many homes must it be gambolling now! from the little centre in the Weald of Kent, which is known to both you and me, to the little unknown centres of human life in the heart of Asia, where anxiety dwells, and where no news will ever come, but where hope will flag and droop day by day, till at last it expires in hopeless certainty.

  ‘If you do not hear of me again, you may conclude that the arch-joker has taken me also, but remember that I shall have had the laugh on him after all, for I shall not care. However, I shall probably be spared, for no man or woman would weep for me.

  ‘One’s chief need, one’s principal craving, I find, is to get Death into his true proportion. We have always been accustomed to think of Death as a suitable and even dignified ending to life in old age, but to regard the overtaking of youth by Death in quite a different light, as an unspeakable calamity. Here, of course, such an overtaking is of everyday occurrence. This, you will say, is a truism. I answer, that there is no such thing as truism in war; there is only Truth.