Heritage

by Vita Sackville-West

  I went again, as I have said, into the house with the intention of waiting in the kitchen on Amos’s return. In this small plan as in my larger ones I was, it appeared, to be thwarted, for as I passed down the narrow passage I noticed that the door of old Mrs Pennistan’s rooms was open. I paused at first with no thought of alarm. I longed to go in, and to tell the ancient woman of the futile suffering she had brought upon her hapless descendants. I longed insanely to shout it into her brain and to see remorse wake to life in her faded eyes. As I stood near her door she grew for me into a huge, portentous figure, she and her love for Oliver Pennistan, and I saw her, the tiny woman I had all but forgotten, as a consciously evil spirit, a malign influence, the spring from which all this river of sorrow had flowed. Then my steps were drawn nearer and nearer to the door, till I stood at last on the threshold, looking for the first time into the room. Some one, presumably the now invisible servant, had lit the two candles on the dressing-table, and these with the glow of the fire between the bars threw over the room a fitful light. I had, curiously enough, no sense of intrusion; I might have been looking at a mummy. Yet I should have remembered that the occupant was not a mummy, for the familiar smell of the chestnuts had greeted me even in the passage.

  She was sitting in her usual place over the fire, her back turned to me, and a black shawl tightly drawn round her shrunken shoulders. Again I was struck by her look of fragility. I had a sudden impulse that I would speak to her, and would try to draw some kind of farewell from her, explaining that I was leaving the house the next day – though whether she had ever realised my presence there at all I very much doubted.

  As I went forward the crackle of a chestnut broke the utter stillness of the room. I waited for her to pick it out of the grate with the tongs, but she did not stir. I came softly round her chair and stood there, waiting for her to notice me, as I had seen the Pennistans do when they did not wish to startle her. Indeed, so tiny and frail was she, that I thought a sudden fright might shatter her, as too loud a noise will kill a lark.

  I looked down at the chestnuts on the bar, and then I saw that they were quite black. I bent down. They were burnt black and friable as cinders. Sudden panic rushed over me. I dropped on to my knees and stared up into the old woman’s fallen face. She was dead.

  PART III

  Chapter One

  During ten years my story remained at that, with a fictitious appearance of completion. Then I received a letter which, without further preamble, I here transcribe:

  ‘. . . I laugh to myself when I think of you receiving this letter, surely the most formidable letter ever penned by mortal man to mortal man, a letter one hundred and fifty pages long; who ever heard of such a thing? You will stare dismayed at the bundle, and, having forgotten the sight of my writing, will turn to the end for the signature; which finding, you will continue to stare bewildered at the name of Malory until light breaks upon you as faint and feeble as a winter dawn. Let me help you by reminding you of Sampiero first, and of Pennistan’s farm later. You see, I am not vain, and am perfectly prepared to believe that the little set of your fellow-men among whom I figured had entirely faded from your mind.

  ‘Are they gradually reviving as I write? and do you, as they one by one sit up in the coffins to which you had prematurely relegated them, greet them with a smile? Oh, I don’t blame you, my dear fellow, for having put us away, myself included, in those premature graves. I should have done as much myself. I will go further: I should have buried the lot that day I left you at Sampiero; yes, I am sure I should not have displayed your energy in seeking out the birds in their very nest.

  ‘I had better warn you at the start that you will find it hard to believe the things I am going to tell you. You know already of two crises in the lives of my Hispano-Kentish yeomen, two crises which I think have puzzled you sufficiently – though in the first case I suspect that you were more clear-sighted than I – but in this third crisis with which I deal you will probably refuse to believe altogether. I do not pretend to explain it myself. I only know that it happened, and therefore that it is true. Were it not true, I would not dare to foist its relation on any living man, however credulous. Human ingenuity could not, however, have planned this sequel, nor human courage have invented a solution at once so subtle and so naïf, and so in the absurd incredibility of my tale I place my reliance that it will carry conviction.

  ‘Ours has been a queer friendship, but one which has held great value for me; I think many people would be the better for such a friendship in their lives. Of course, to make it ideal, I should never have seen you; picked your name and address out of a telephone directory, and written; I am sure you would have answered. Then I should have had no reserve towards you, not that I have much now, but you see I never can be certain that I am not going to meet you in a train or in the street, when my ideally unknown correspondent and I could pass by without recognition, but when you and I would have to stop, and shake hands, and a host of intimate, remembered phrases would come crowding up to people our silence. I dislike such embarrassments. I find that solitude, like leprosy, grows upon one with age, for I observe myself physically wincing from the idea that I might possibly meet you as I have said, in a train or in the street.

  ‘You will be surprised, after this, to hear that I no longer live alone. But I shall not give you the pleasure of anticipating the end of what I have set out to tell you; I am going to roll my story off my pen for my own delectation far more than for yours, and to see whether in the telling I cannot chance upon the explanation of various points which are still obscure.

  ‘I was never a man who thought life simple; I had not a five-hundred word vocabulary wherewith I explained the primitive emotions of birth, hunger, adolescence, love, and death; no, life was always difficult and involved to me, but now in the evening of my own existence, serene and ordered as that evening turns out to be, it appears as a labyrinth beyond conception, with not one, but a thousand centres into which we successively stray. Difficult, difficult and heavy to shift are the blocks of which our mansion is built. Nor am I now speaking of social-political creeds which are to govern the world; I am speaking only of poor, elementary human beings, for, not having mastered the individual, I don’t attempt to discuss the system under which he lives. Big and little things alike go to our building; and if it was the war which first put the grace of humility into me, it is the sequel to a tale of plain people which has kept it there.

  ‘Oh, the humility of me! I cross my arms over my eyes and bow myself down to the ground like a Mussulman at prayer. There’s nothing like life for teaching humility to a man, nothing like life for shouting “Fool! fool! fool!” at him till he puts his hands over his ears. It buzzes round our heads like a mosquito inside mosquito-curtains. Humility isn’t the gift of youth — thank God — for it takes a deal of buffeting to drive it into us. The war should have taught us a lesson in humility; a wider lesson, I mean, than the accident of defeat or victory, efficiency or non-efficiency. Let us ignore those superficial aspects of the war. What we are concerned with, is the underlying forces, the courage, the endurance, the loyalty, the development of a great heart by little mean men; all this, abstract but undeniable, unrivalled, the broadest river of human excellence that ever flowed. What then? Mistaken, by God! wrong-headed! an immense sacrifice on the altar of Truth which was all the time the altar of Untruth. Doesn’t it make you weep? All the gold of the human heart poured out, like the gold of the common coffers, in a mistaken cause. It’s barbaric; it’s more than barbaric, it’s pre-historic; it’s going back to the Stone Age. We can’t say these things now; not yet; not from lack of courage, but from a sense of tact: we’re living in the wrong century. It’s an outrage on tact to say to your century what will be self-evident to the next; therefore we continue to hate our enemy and love our country; mistaken ideals both.

  ‘There, my dear fellow, I profoundly apologise; if I oughtn’t to say these
things to my century I oughtn’t to say them to you either, not that you are narrow enough to condemn me, but because I shall bore you. I promised you, too, that my letter was to deal with our little corner of Kent, and on that understanding I have induced you to read thus far. I reflect, moreover, that I have no right to speak thus and thus to a man who has lost much of his activity in his country’s service. Mrs Pennistan has drawn me a touching picture of you, though she hasn’t much descriptive talent, has she? A motherly soul, pathetically out of place among that untamed brood. Like the majority of people, she lives a life of externals, with sentimentality as a mild substitute for the more heroic things, and it has been her misfortune for her lot to fall among people who, in the critical moments of their lives, allow themselves to be guided by internal powers of which Mrs Pennistan knows nothing. I said, nothing. Yet is such true placidity possible? When you see a person, a body, marvellous casket and mask of secrets, what do you think? I think, there stands a figure labelled with a name, but he, or she, has lived a certain number of years; that is to say, has suffered, rejoiced, loved, been afraid, known pain; owns secrets, some dirty, some natural, some shameful, some merely pathetic; and the older the figure, the greater my wonderment and my admiration. Mrs Pennistan, dull, commonplace woman, once gave herself to Amos; was then that not an immortal moment? But if she remembers at all, she remembers without imagination; she can’t touch her recollection into life.

  ‘And she dwells among hot, smouldering natures to whom the life of the spirit is real. She doesn’t understand them, and when her daughter, who is apparently living in externals likewise, breaks out into the unexpected, she is perplexed, dismayed, aggrieved. She doesn’t travel on parallel lines with the workings of such a mind as her daughter’s and consequently has to catch up with a sudden leap forward which disturbs her comfortable amble. She had to take such a leap when her daughter eloped, and another similar leap when her daughter tried to shoot her son-in-law. Humorous, isn’t it? and rather sad. I feel less for Amos, whose instinct is more in tune with Ruth’s, and is able to follow quickly by instinct if not by reason.

  ‘At present Mrs Pennistan’s mind must be in chaos, but it is happy chaos, and so she accepts it without disproportionate bewilderment. Besides, she has come by now to a fortunate state of resignation, in which she is determined to be surprised at nothing. I have questioned her on the subject. She is so profoundly unanalytical that I had some difficulty in getting her to understand at all what I was driving at, let alone getting her to answer my questions; still, what she told me was, in substance, this:

  ‘ “Ruth was my own girl, and a quiet girl at that, but Rawdon isn’t my boy, and we all knew that Rawdon was queer (this is the adjective she invariably applies, I find, to anything a little bit beyond her), so we got into the way of not being surprised when Rawdon did queer things. Though, I must say, this beats all. After ten years! . . . And he no coward either, I’ll say that for him. He was always a reckless boy, and if you’d seen the things he did you’d wonder, like I do, that he ever lived to grow up.”

  ‘That, of course, is where her lack of imagination leaves her so much at fault. She has seen Rawdon climb into the tops of spindly trees after jackdaws’ nests, and has trembled lest he should fall and break his head, and has marvelled at his daring; but she cannot imagine, because she cannot with her physical eyes behold the torments he endured of late because his moral imaginative cowardice was so much greater than his physical courage. She cannot understand that the force of his imagination was such as to drive him away from all that he most desired. She cannot understand this, and I will admit that for us, who are phlegmatic English folk, it is difficult to understand also. We must dismiss our own standards first, and approach the situation with an unbiased eye. We must, in fact, pull prejudice down from his throne and set up imagination in his place. We must forget our training and our national conventions, if we wish to understand something alien to ourselves, something alien, but not thereby impossible or, believe me, uninteresting.

  ‘I look back over what I have already written, and am bound to confess that I have set down hitherto the incoherent thoughts that came into my head, simply because I have been afraid of tackling my settled duty. To deal with ten years — for it is now ten years since the period of our correspondence ceased with the ceasing of the war — is a very alarming task for any man to undertake. I could, of course, acquaint you in a dozen lines with the salient happenings of those years. But it amuses me to cast them into ‘the form of a narrative, and you will forgive me if I should slip into elaborating scenes in which I played no part.

  ‘At the end of the war, I must tell you, I came back to England with no very fixed ideas as to my future. I had been a wanderer, and, I say it with shame, a dilettante all my life, and I felt that my restlessness had not yet spent itself. I had hated, oh, how I had hated, the discipline of the army! I had no joy in war; my theories — I can’t call them principles, for they were things too fluid for so imposing a name - my theories were in complete disaccord with war, and moreover my freedom, for the love of which I had sacrificed a possible home and children, was now taken from me, and, in its place, fetters both physical and moral were clamped upon me. As my feet had to move left! right! left! right! so my poor rebellious tongue had to move left! right! also. And yet, there were fine moments in that war; one learnt lessons, and one watched great splendid fountains - leaping upwards out of the sea of humanity. . . . Then the end came when I was free, and could make a bonfire of my uniform. I wondered what I should do next, and as I wondered I became aware of two things pulling at me; one thing pulled me towards the Weald of Kent, and the other pulled me towards the Channel, where all the world would lie open to my wandering. I decided that the two were, in order, compatible.

  ‘What a free man I was! I enjoyed paying the full fare for my ticket, and no longer travelling by warrant. You and I both know that journey to Penshurst, but you don’t know the freedom that was mine in those fields; I shouted, I ran, I jumped the brooks, I was like a lamb in May, forgetful of my middle-age. And then I was suddenly lonely, wanting, for the first time in my life, a companion to share my light-heartedness. I wished that you were with me, for I couldn’t think of anybody else. Home from the war; free indeed, but no welcome anywhere. Not even a dog. And as for a woman! . . .

  ‘Westmacott had come home, and I knew that he had found his children grown, and his wife, perhaps, temporarily happy to see him. At least he could turn to watch her beauty as she slept. . . . I cursed my instinct for following people into their private lives, a damnable trick, and nothing more than a trick, but one which made me lower my eyes in shame when next I met them. Peeping through keyholes. I had done it all my life. Well, if anybody peeped through my keyhole, there wouldn’t be much to see.

  ‘How queerly things work out sometimes, for no sooner had I emerged from the fields on to the cross-roads, where the finger-post says “Edenbridge, Leigh, Cowden,” still wrapped in my loneliness as in a cloak, I came upon Mrs Pennistan walking slowly up and down, waiting, I presumed, for Amos. At the sight of me she stopped and stared, till we simultaneously cried one another’s names. I was filled with real warm gladness on seeing her there unchanged, unchangeable, and I went forward with my hands outstretched to clasp her fat, soft hands – do you remember her hands? they spoke of innumerable kneadings of dough, and she had no knuckles, only dimples where the knuckles should have been. And then, before I knew what had happened, that good woman’s arms were round my neck and her soft, jolly face was against mine, and she kissed me and I kissed her, and I swear there were tears in her eyes, which, for that matter, she didn’t trouble to conceal.

  ‘Presently Amos came along. I had intended returning to London that night, but they would hear nothing of it, and I found myself supping as of old in their happy kitchen, and going upstairs later to that bare little room which had once been mine and had since been yours. It is a real satisfaction to m
e that you should be as familiar with these surroundings as I am myself, for you have, as you read, the same picture as I have as I write, and this harmony we could never achieve were I telling you of places and faces you had never seen.

  ‘We talked, naturally, of you, for after the manner of old friends we travelled from one to the other of persons we had known. The sons, who were there solemnly munching, lent a certain constraint to the evening. And I missed so poignantly, so unexpectedly, the figure of the old woman by the fire. I had not realised until then what a prominent figure it had been, although so tiny and so silent, bent over the eternal chestnuts, the great-great grandmother of the little Westmacotts. Will you smile if I tell you that I took the diary up to bed with me, and read myself again into the underworld of Spain?

  Was it you, by the way, that drew a charcoal portrait of me over the wash-stand in my room?

  ‘I got up and dressed the next morning still uncertain as to whether I should or should not go over to Westmacotts’. I do not exactly know why I was uncertain, but perhaps my loneliness on the previous day had more to do with it than my self-offered pretext, that my acquaintance with Ruth had better be left where it was at our last meeting. Remember, I had not seen her since she stood distraught but resolute in the cowshed with the Hunter’s moon as a halo behind her head. What could one say to people in greeting when one’s last words had been full of dark mystery and of things which don’t come very often to the surface of life? In a word, I was afraid. Afraid of embarrassment, afraid of the comfort of her home, afraid of her. Afraid of my own self as a companion through lonely years afterwards. I dressed very slowly because I wanted to put off the inevitable moment of making up my mind. And after all it was Mrs Pennistan who made it up for me, for such was her surprise when I mentioned catching a train which would certainly leave me no time for the visit, that I said I would go.