Heritage

by Vita Sackville-West

  ‘If I take all my reflections about Death, slender as is their worth, and pass them through a sieve of analysis, what do I get? I get, as a dominant factor, Pity. Pity, yes, pity that these young men should have missed the good things life would have given them; not horror so much that they should be in the blackness below the ground, as pity that they should not be above it in the light . . .’

  An intense anger and irritation rose in me at his passive acceptance of what he termed fate. If man must struggle against his fellow-men in order to survive in the life-battle, then why not against fate also? He who does not resist must inevitably be crushed. It was at this stage that my great scheme began to formulate in my mind, by which I should defeat fate for the sake of Malory and Ruth; partly, largely, for the sake of their happiness, but partly also, I must admit, for the triumph of taking Malory by the hand and showing him how with the help of a little energy I had overcome the destiny he had been passively prepared to accept as inevitable. I would pit my philosophy against his philosophy, and incidentally bring two muddled lives to a satisfactory conclusion.

  I hugged my scheme to myself in the succeeding months as a lunatic hugs an obsession.

  Chapter Three

  I was a little disturbed by the thought that even I could not make myself wholly independent of what, for want of a better word, I had to call fate; independent of a certain Providence whose concurrence I daily implored, but on whose nature I deliberately tried to set a more religious complexion than did Malory, who was frankly, in every instinct, a pagan. Wriggle as I might, I could not wriggle away from the fact that as prime essentials to the success of my scheme stood the survival of Malory and the non-survival of Westmacott. If the unknown chose to thwart me in these two particulars, my cherished plan must come to naught, but a conviction, whose very intensity persuaded me of its truth, entered into my spirit that in this respect at all events all would be well.

  As the war progressed I fell into one of the inconsistencies of our nature, for as the news of Malory continued good I came gradually to feel that his safety up this point was growing into a kind of earnest for his safety in the future — a conclusion in itself totally illogical — whereas the equally continued safety of Westmacott, whom I so ardently desired out of the way, distressed me not at all.

  Was I presumptuous in thus constituting myself the guardian angel of two lives? I was only a poor wreck, flotsam of the war, cheated of the man’s part I had hoped to play, and nursing my scheme like an old maid cheated of the woman’s part she, on her side, should have played on earth.

  I shall not dwell longer than I need upon the days of the war, considering them rather as an incident, a protracted incident, than as a central point in my story, for we have no need or desire to revive artificially the realities we have lived through. I quote, however, Malory on this subject:

  ‘ . . . Our sons will scarcely be our children, for the war will have fathered them and mothered them both. The children of the war! growing up with the shadow of that great parent in the background of their lives, a progenitor dark as the night, yet radiant as the sun; torn with misery, yet splendid and entire with glory; poor and bereft by ruin, yet rich with gold-mines as the earth; a race of men sprung from loins broad and magnificent. They will stand like the survivors of the Flood when the waters had retreated from the clean-washed world. What will they make of their opportunity? They will not, I trust, hold up a mirror to reflect the familiar daily tragedy, but out, of the depths of their own enfranchised hearts will call up a store of little, lovely, sincere, human, and simple things wherewith to make life sweet. They must be as children in a meadow. Let us have done with pretence and gloom. There is no room now in the world for the introspective melancholy of the idler. We hope for a world of active sanity.’

  He reverted several times to the men who had been torn from their homes, the men who, but for war, would never have gone beyond the limit of their parish. He compared himself angrily with them, and I perceived that his theory, in embryo at Sampiero, had struck deep roots under the rain of present day realities.

  ‘. . . I want to shout it aloud: objectivity! objectivity! action, the parent of thought. We had worn thought to a shadow, with hunting him over hill, plain, and valley. We were miners who had exhausted the drift of gold. Thank God, we are daily burying fresh gold for our successors. We were sick with the sugar of introspection; introspection, subtlest of vanities; introspection, the damnable disease. We were old and out-worn in spirit. The soil bore weakly crops, and cried out for nourishment. We are giving it blood to drink, and it grows fertile in the drinking.

  ‘I am aware of the coarsening of my fibres; I grow more conscious of my body, less conscious of my mind I am very humble. I know that the meanest hind who turned the ridges under the ploughshare had a truer value than I, the critic, the analyst — I use the words disparagingly — the commentator. He silently constructed while I noisily destroyed.’

  Malory continued at great length in this strain, and I read between the lines of his letter that he had devoted much of the intolerable leisure of his soldier’s life to the evolution of a new creed, not really new to him, for its precepts were and must always have been in his blood, but now for perhaps the first time formulated and taken close to his heart. He wrote to me more and more openly, and I knew that I was getting the expression of his inmost thoughts. I have all his letters – for they came now in numbers though with great irregularity – and have sometimes thought that I have not the right, nor he the right to compel me, to keep them to myself. As he said:

  ‘. . . All men have creeds, and I behold myself a faddist in a universe of faddists. I cannot be wholly right, nor they wholly wrong. But I argue in my own defence, that a creed such as mine, resting on many pillars, the most mighty of which is the pillar of tolerance is at least inoffensive in a world it does not even seek to convert. I offer my little gift – and if it is rejected I withdraw my hand, and tender it elsewhere.

  ‘I am not concerned with practical matters, nor with controversial subjects; I am not a political or a social reformer, nor a nut-eater, nor a prophet of the Pit. I am not, I fear, a very practical preacher even in my own region, for my words, were I ever to spread them abroad, could germinate only in the ready tilled field of a contented soul, and will put no bread into the mouth of the hungry. So I desist, for mere reflection is of no value in our times, and he alone has justified his existence who has relieved the poor, benefited the sickly, or fed the starving.’

  I do not wholly agree with him.

  At least in one particular I will take his advice, and will not dwell further upon those years. We know now that, interminable as they seemed at the time, they passed, and in a golden autumn peace came to the earth like sleep returning after night upon night of insomnia. Malory wrote to me on that occasion also, a letter more full of sarcasm, bitterness, and sorrow than any I had yet received.

  ‘. . . So here we are at last at the end of this long, long road, more like straight railway-lines than like a road, which is a poetical thing. I look back, and I see iron everywhere: iron hurtling through the air and smashing against the soft flesh of men and the softer hearts of women; iron thundering in the sea; masonry toppling; careful labour destroyed; skies full of black smoke; giant machines. Impressionism is the only medium to express the war. In this chaos little men have laboured, trying to put their brains round the war like putting a string round the globe; and pitting their little bodies against the moving tons of iron, like a new-born baby trying to push against a Titan. What has emerged? a new, a great tradition, greater than the Trojan or the Elizabethan; a new legend for the ornament of art. For it all comes down to art in the end; the legend is greater than the fact; the mind survives the perishing matter. We are the heirs of the past. The man of action is the progenitor of the dreamer. What am I saying? The progenitor? he is the manure, merely the manure dug into the soil on which the dreamer will
presently grow. Poor, inarticulate, uncomprehending men have died in their anonymous millions to furnish a song for the future singer, a vicious, invertebrate effete, no doubt; a moral hermaphrodite of a worthless generation.

  ‘How many before me have asked, What is Truth? is it indeed a flower which blooms only on a dung-heap?

  ‘. . . I have seen so many men here die in their prime, who were precious to mankind or all in all to their individual loves, yet they have been taken, and I, the valueless, the solitary, am left. Is there a purpose behind these things? or am I to believe that fate is, after all, the haphazard of chance?’

  We held no peace rejoicings at Pennistans’, for Nancy’s sake; peace was to her an additional sorrow. During the war she had had the feverish interest of having given her greatest sacrifice to the ideal of the moment, but as the horror faded away so the memory of those who had died faded also. Nancy and her kindred ceased to shine as the heroic, and became merely the unfortunate, a sad and scattered population to whom the war would last, not a few years, but all their lives. Shattered women and shattered men but to us the war appeared already as a nightmare interlude from which we had awakened.

  I was now confronted with my own particular purpose, the one I had bargained with myself to carry out; I turned it over and over in my mind, and though by the light of reason I could perceive no solution to the obvious difficulty presented, yet my curious instinct persisted, that all would be well. I was certain that my purpose was a good one. I contemplated a Malory changed, softened, hardened, sobered, steadied, by the red-hot furnace of war; he had called himself an inconstant man; I felt that he would be now no longer inconstant. I contemplated a Ruth intolerant, after her four years lived in liberty, of her former bondage. I saw them fuse, in my own mind, in mutual completion. In the meantime, Westmacott stood ominously in the centre of the road.

  I heard first of his return from Amos, as I stood with Mrs Pennistan watching the folding of the sheep. Amos had brought the sheep with him in a cart from Tonbridge market; he was taciturn while he turned them out from under the net into the hurdled fold, but when the hired man had driven away the lumbering cart, he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder,—

  ‘Wife, who d’you think I met on the road yonder?’

  She stared at him, and he added, in his laconic way,—

  ‘Rawdon.’

  ‘He’s back?’ she said, dismayed.

  Amos expanded.

  ‘Ay. They’ve a system for bringing them home, it seems, according to their employ: farmers and food producers come first.’

  ‘Then Malory,’ I said involuntarily, ‘will come among the last lot as a man of no occupation.’

  ‘That’ll be it. We’ll be looking soon for those boys of ourn,’ he said to his wife.

  She smiled gladly at him, but remained pensive. Then she asked,–

  ‘Was he alone, Amos?’

  ‘Ay. He’d his pack on his back, too, so I doubt he’d come from the station. He’d his back to Penshurst and his face towards home. He touched his cap at me, friendly, and I twirled my whip to him, friendly, too.’

  ‘I’m glad of that,’ his wife murmured.

  Amos shrugged.

  ‘A man’s glad to welcome his son-in-law back from the wars,’ he said ironically as he turned to go.

  Mrs Pennistan and I strolled out towards the road.

  ‘He’s dead against Rawdon; always was,’ she said in a distressed tone. ‘I was for making up, and making the best of it, but Pennistan isn’t that sort. He’d sooner have life unbearable than go a tittle against his prejudices. After all, Rawdon’s married to Ruth, and the father of our grandchildren, and there’s no going against that. He’s an unaccountable hard man, my man, when he chooses. I couldn’t never do nothing with him, and Nancy she’s the same.’

  ‘And Mrs Westmacott?’ I asked.

  The distress in her tone deepened.

  ‘I used to think Ruth a good quiet girl, but since the trick she played me over her marriage I haven’t known what to think. I’ve lain awake o’ nights worrying over it. You’ve heard the whole tale from Mr Malory. Gentle she was until then, and a good daughter to me, I must say, and then . . . gone in a night withouten a sign, and never a word to me in explanation since. What’s a mother to make of that?’

  I could have laughed at the poor woman’s perplexity. I thought of the hen whose brood of ducklings takes suddenly to the water.

  But has she never alluded to her . . . her elopement?’

  ‘Never a word, I tell you. I asked her once, and she put on a look as black as night, and I never asked her again. I’ve sometimes wished Mr Malory could speak to her, I’ve a fancy she might answer him freer and yet I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ve never fully understood,’ I said, wishing to make the most of my opportunity, ‘whether she cares at all for her husband or not?’

  ‘Small wonder that you haven’t understood,’ said Mrs Pennistan tartly, ‘when her own mother is kept out in the dark. It’s my belief she hates him, and it’s my knowledge that he ill-treats her, but at the same time it’s my instinct she loves him in a way. It sounds a hard thing to say of one’s child, but I’ve always held Ruth was a coarse, rough creature at times under her smoothness.’

  She instantly repented of her words. ’There, what am I saying of my own kith and kin? I get mad when I get thinking of my girl, so you mustn’t lay too much store by my talk. Pennistan’d give it me if he heard me.’

  I persisted,

  ‘Then you think that, when she ran away with him, she hated him and loved him both together?’

  Mrs Pennistan paused for a long time.

  ‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘if you ask me what I think, it’s this. There was a deal more in that running away than any of us knew at the time. What it exactly was I don’t know even now. I doubt Ruth doesn’t know either, or if she does know, she doesn’t own to it, not to herself even. I doubt Rawdon knows most about it.’

  I saw another name becoming inevitable.

  ‘And Mr Malory?’

  She shot at me a quick suspicious look.

  ‘You’re Mr Malory’s friend, what do you know?’

  ‘I know nothing,’ I said. ‘He didn’t know himself.’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Pennistan suddenly, ‘that’s the truth. He didn’t know himself. He wasn’t a man to fancy those things. To me it was as plain as daylight, but Pennistan he always scoffed at me, and I daren’t speak it to Ruth, and I’ve thought since that maybe I was wrong after all. Maybe she went with Rawdon because she loved Rawdon: maybe she didn’t go, as I’ve sometimes thought, because she was afraid . . . It’s hard, isn’t it, to see into people’s hearts, even when you live in the same house with them? Day in, day out, and you know little more of them than the clothes they wear and what they like to get to eat.’

  I was sorry for her. She went on,—

  ‘Your children, they seem so close to you when they’re little, they come to you when they’re hungry, and they come to you when they tumble, and you cosset them; and then when they’re big you find you’re the last person they want to come to. It’s cruel hard sometimes on a woman. But they don’t mean it,’ she added, brightening, ‘and my children have been good children to me, even Ruth.’

  I met Westmacott, the formidable man, the day after his return, a Sunday, walking on the village green with his wife and the two eldest children. As I looked at him I felt a little pang of horror on realising how ardently I had desired this man to die in the trenches, and now, as he materialised for me out of a mere name into a creature of flesh and blood, I grew dismayed, and was overcome by the reality of the obstacle. Perhaps I had always unconsciously thought of him as a myth. And now here he was, and Ruth shyly introduced me.

  I fancied I caught a sullen look on her face, a look of suffering, long l
ulled to sleep, and suddenly returned. Perhaps for the last four years he had been a myth to her also.

  By his home-coming he soon waked the echoes of scandal; his way of life, they said, had not been mended by the war, and after the long restraint of discipline he broke loose into his old debauches. I noted the growing of that sullen look on Ruth’s features; she made no comment, but I divined the piling-up of the thunderstorm. So, I thought, she must have looked during the month of her engagement to Leslie Dymock, when Malory in his error had considered her as a nun in her novitiate. The kettle, she had said, is long on the hob before it boils over.

  She spent less time at Pennistans’ than formerly, pride and obstinacy withholding all confessions from her lips or from her actions. Amos was gloomy, and Mrs Pennistan oppressed. As for me, I lived dreamily, content to let the river of events carry my boat onwards. I made no prophecies to myself, I experienced no impatience; Malory was not yet home, and I believed that by the time he got home my problem would have resolved itself automatically.

  Chapter Four

  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.