Heritage

by Vita Sackville-West

  ‘I realised then that I was glad. When I was a boy and couldn’t make up my mind whether I wanted to do a thing or not, I used to toss a coin, not necessarily abiding by the coin’s decision, but my own predominant feeling of relief or disappointment. I found the system invaluable. In this case Mrs Pennistan had spun herself as a coin for me.

  ‘Westmacott, I knew, would be out. Would Ruth be out, too? and my problem thus resolved by, as it were, another spin of the coin? She was not out; she was in her kitchen rolling a white paste with a rolling-pin, the sleeves of her blue linen dress turned back, and as she rolled she sang to the baby which lay in a low cradle in the corner. The baby lay on its back waving a piece of red coral which it occasionally chewed. I stood for quite a long time in the doorway watching them, and then Ruth looked up and saw me.

  ‘I suppose I had remembered her blush as the most vivid thing about her, for I had waited there fully expecting her to look up and colour as she always did when surprised in any way, but instead of this she stood there gazing at me with the colour faded entirely from her face. She stood holding the rolling-pin, as white as the flour upon her hands and arms. The strong light of the window was upon her. Red geraniums were in the window. The strident voice of a canary broke our stillness.

  ‘ “Ruth,” I said, “aren’t you glad to see me?”

  ‘I went forward into the kitchen, standing close to her by the table, and light was all around us, light, and the song of the bird. Everything was light, white, and dazzling; a flood of light, and bright colours. Revelation, like an archangel, was in that room.

  ‘She asked,—

  ‘“Where have you come from?”

  ‘“From your father’s house.”

  ‘“You’re living there?”

  ‘“Only for to-day.”

  ‘“And then you’re going . . . ?”

  ‘“Away.”

  ‘“Away?”

  ‘“For good?”

  ‘“To travel . . .”

  ‘I saw her face, and her beauty began to swim in front of my eyes, and a roaring began in my ears like a man who is breathing chloroform. Swimming, swimming, all the room and the light, and I heard my own voice as I had never heard it before,—

  ‘“Ruth! Ruth! you must come with me.”

  ‘“Come with you?”

  ‘“Yes, now, at once. Before your husband comes back. Get your things. I give you five minutes.”

  ‘She cried,—

  ‘“Oh, but the baby?”

  ‘“I’ll look after it while you go upstairs.”

  ‘“No, no,” she said, “not now; afterwards?”

  ‘I understood.

  ‘“Take it with you.”

  ‘“But, my dear, I’ve three children!”

  ‘The divinity was vanishing from the room, the sunlight grew flat and cold. We stared at one another. I heard Westmacott’s voice out in the yard. I said desperately,—

  ‘“Let me tell him!”

  ‘“Oh, no! “ she cried shrinking, “no, no, no.”

  ‘“You’re afraid,” I taunted her.

  ‘“What if I am? Please go.”

  ‘“Alone?”

  ‘“Please, please go.”

  Chapter Two

  ‘You want to know if I went? I did, and in the yard I met Westmacott, who discussed with me the prospects of the season. He was particularly affable, and I did my utmost not to appear absent-minded. I suppose that I succeeded, for his affability increased, culminating in an invitation to join him in a glass of ale within the house. I was dismayed, and protested that I had no time, also – quite untruthfully – that since the war I had given up drink of all kinds. He urged me.

  ‘“You’ll not refuse to taste my wife’s cider?”

  ‘I thought that I cried out,—

  ‘“Man alive, I come straight from imploring your wife to come away with me,” but as his expression remained the same, and neither glazed into horror nor blazed into fury, I suppose that the words, though they screamed in my head, never materialised on my lips.

  ‘I was helpless. He led me back, odious and hospitable, into the kitchen where Ruth still stood rhythmically rolling the dough. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the room, which had been so dazzling with its colours and its clarity, was dim, even to the red of the geraniums, even to the glow under the skin of Ruth. Dead, I thought, dead, dead.

  ‘Westmacott stood outside, stamping the clay from his boots, and calling to his wife for cider. I winced from his heartiness, and from the tragic absurdity of my position. If only tragedy could be our lot, we should at least enjoy the consolation of the heroic, but in the comic tragedy to which Providence so delights in exposing us, there is no consolation. I was thankful that Westmacott did not know what a fool he was successfully making of me.

  ‘Ruth took down from the dresser an earthenware jug, and went through into the little back hall of the place. I watched her through the door which she had left open. She filled the jug at a great wooden barrel; the golden cider streamed out from the tap, and she held the jug with a precision and a steadiness of hand that made me marvel. Returning, she set it with two glasses on the table.

  “This is my own brewing,” she said to me.

  ‘I thought that the cider must surely spill from my glass as I raised it from the table, or that it must bubble and choke in my throat as I drank with her eyes upon me. I felt trapped and prisoned, but in Westmacott’s face there was nothing sinister, no trace of suspicion. He was not playing a game with me. Perversely enough, I should have preferred an outburst of fury on his part, to have felt his fist in my face, and to roll with him, body grappling with body, on the floor. But this could not be, and I must sit, drinking cider, between those two, a husband and wife whom the flash of a revolver had so nearly separated not many weeks beforehand, a revolver fired in anger and hatred, and in a desire for freedom; I must sit there, near a woman between whom and myself unforgettable words had been suddenly illuminatingly spoken. I laughed; Westmacott had just made some remark to which my laugh came as an inappropriate answer; he looked a little surprised, and I was hunting about for some phrase to cover my lapse, when Ruth said,—

  ‘“Here are the boys.”

  ‘They came in whistling, but fell silent as they saw me, and took their caps off awkwardly. They were good-looking little boys — but I forget: you’ve seen them. Westmacott glanced at them with obvious pride. Ruth moved with her former steadiness to the cupboard to cut them each a chunk of bread liberally spread with jam; she pushed their chairs close up to the table, and ran her fingers through their rough mops of hair. They began to eat solidly. Westmacott winked at me.

  ‘“There’s a mother for you,” he said.

  ‘I could make no reply to his hideous jocularity; if I had spoken, I should have screamed.

  ‘I felt that I should never escape, that the situation would last for ever. I was, naturally enough, not very clear in my mind just then, but already I seemed to see my recent scene with Ruth as a sunlit peak bursting out of the dreariness and blindness of days, as brief as the tick of a clock, but as vibrant as a trumpet-call, while the present scene was long, interminable, flat as a level plain. Yes, that was my impression: the peak and the plain. I longed to get away, that I might dwell at my leisure upon that moment full of wonder. I bitterly resented my bondage. I wanted to go away by myself to some solitary corner where I might sit and brood for hours over the one moment in which, after years of mere vegetation, I could tell myself that I had truly lived. I felt that every minute by which my stay in that kitchen was prolonged, was making of the place a thing of nightmare, instead of the enchanted chamber it actually was, and this also I resented. Why could not I have come, lived my brief spell, and gone with an untarnished treasure imprisoned for ever within my heart? Why should perfection be
marred by the clumsiness of a farmer’s hospitality?

  ‘Nor was this all. Creeping over me came again the humiliating sensation which I had more than once experienced in the presence of Ruth and Westmacott, the sensation that they were alien to me, bound together by some tie more mysterious than mere cousinship, a tie which, I believed, held them joined in spite of the hatred that existed between them. I won’t go into this now. It is a mystery which lies at the very foot of their strange relationship. I do not suppose that Ruth was conscious of it – she was, after all, an essentially unanalytical and primitive creature – but it drove her now to a manifestation as typical of her in particular as it was of all women in general.

  ‘She set herself deliberately to increase my misery and discomfort by every trick within her power. She must have been aware of what I was enduring, and you would have thought, however indifferent to me in the emotional sense, that she would have tried, in ordinary human pity and charity, to help me to escape as soon as possible from my wretched position, and to make that position less wretched while it still lasted. You would have thought this. Any man would have thought it. But apparently women are different.

  ‘She took, then, my misery and played with it, setting herself to intensify it by every ruse at her disposal. She contrived, with diabolical subtlety, to separate us into two groups, one consisting of herself, her husband, and her children, the other consisting of me, isolated and alone. To this day I do not know whether she wanted to punish me for my former temerity, or whether she was simply obeying some obscure feminine instinct. In any case, she succeeded. I had never felt myself such an intruder. Even the resemblance between husband and wife, the curious, intangible resemblance of race and family in their dark looks, rose up and jeered at me. “We understand one another,” something seemed to say, “and we are laughing together at your expense.”

  ‘I realised then that the calm with which she had received me, and had drawn my cider, the matter-of-fact way in which she had told me it was of her own brewing, were all part of her scheme, as was her present conversation, standing by the table, and her occasional demonstrations of affection towards her boys. You will remember perhaps that I once told you of a walk she and I had taken to Penshurst. Well, I dimly felt that her behaviour on that occasion and upon this were first-cousins. I don’t know why I felt this; I only record it for you without comment.

  ‘So she stood there talking, a hard devil behind all her commonplace words. I hated her; I wished myself dead. My one consolation, that Westmacott did not know what a fool he was making of me, was gone, since Ruth was making of me a much bigger fool, and was doing it in all consciousness. How I hated her! and at the same time, through her hatefulness, she seemed to me more than ever desirable. Westmacott knew nothing of what had gone before, but, sensitive as he was underneath his brutality, with the unmistakable sensitiveness of the Latin, he was, I think, aware of some atmospheric presence in the room. At any rate, he realised the devilish attraction of his wife, and in his spontaneous foreign way he put out his hand to touch hers. An English farmer! I nearly laughed again. When he did this, she sat down on the arm of his chair, and, putting her arms round his neck, laid her cheek against his hair, with her eyes on me all the while. Then, as though she had released some lever by her action, he turned within her arms, and kissed her savagely.

  ‘The next thing I knew was that I was walking at an extraordinary pace across the fields, gasping in the air, and that strong shudders like the shudders of a fever were running down my frame. I am not really very clear as to how I spent the rest of that day, or of the days that followed. Do you know that familiar nightmare in which you roll a tiny ball no bigger than a cartridge-shot between your finger and thumb, till it grows and grows into an immense ball that overwhelms you? So through a nightmare haze I rolled the memory of that horrible little scene into a tight ball, till I could see neither beyond nor above it, but all my horizon was obscured by the distended pellet in my brain. And during all this time I moved about the world like a man in full possession of his senses, making my dispositions for a long absence abroad, talking to my banker out of the depths of a leather arm-chair, buying my tickets from Thomas Cook, directing the packing of my luggage, and, so far as I know, neither my banker nor Cook’s clerk nor the club servant realised that anything was amiss with me.

  ‘I had only one desire: to get away, to think. I was as impatient for solitude as the thirsty man is for water. I resented every one in my surroundings and my delay in London much as I had resented Westmacott and my delay in the kitchen. Until I could get away, I banished all thought from my mind; only, as I tell you, the scene in the kitchen remained whirling and whirling beyond my control.

  ‘Finally I escaped from England, and as I lay sleepless, buffeted all night in the train, one thought persisted like music in my brain, “Tomorrow I shall be alone, I shall be rid of nightmare, I shall be able to dwell luxuriously upon the magical moment, and all that it means, all that it entails. Yes! I shall be alone with it, for weeks, months, years if I like. I shall no longer be forced to grant undue proportion to the nightmare; until now it has made black night of my days, but tomorrow it will recede like a fog before the sun, and I shall dwell in the crystal light of the mountain-tops.”

  ‘My destination was — I wonder if you have guessed it already? — Sampiero. I knew that there I was certain of peace, hospitality, familiar rooms. Besides, it was there that I had spoken to you for so many hours of the opening chapters of this story, and I had a fancy that if I took my dreamings up to the clump of pines, the shadows of those earlier chapters might come, reevoked to brush like soft birds against my cheek. I had planned to go up to the clump of pines on my first evening after dinner. My dear fellow, do not be offended when I tell you that as I arrived by that absurd mountain railway at Sampiero. I was seized by a sudden panic that some desire for rest and peace might have brought you, like myself, to the same old haunt. I suppose that I was in an excitable state of mind already, for by the time I reached our old lodging-house I was in a fever and a passion of certainty that I should find you there before me. Signora Tagliagambe was at the door to welcome me, but I rushed at her with inquiries as to whether I was or was not her only guest. She stared at me with obvious concern for my reason. There were no other guests. I had my former room, also the sitting room to myself. I should be completely undisturbed.

  ‘I recovered myself then, realising that I had been a fool, as I dare say you are thinking me at this moment. A delicious peace came stealing over me, the peace of things suspended. I was half tempted to give myself the luxury of putting off my first visit to the stone-pines until the following day. But the evening fell in such perfection that I wandered out, much as you and I have often wandered out to sit there in silence, sucking at our pipes; in the days, I mean, before I asked you that memorable question about the Weald of Kent.

  ‘So there I was, at length, at peace, and I stretched myself out on the ground beneath the pines, pulling idly at a tuft of wild thyme, and rubbing it between my hands till the whole evening was filled with its curious aromatic scent, that came at me in gusts like a tropical evening comes at one in gusts of warmth. I had not yet begun to think, for, knowing that the moment when thought first consciously began to well up in my spirit would take its place in the perspective of my life not far short of that other moment on whose sacredness I scarcely dared to dwell, I put it off, even now, when it had become inevitable, torturing myself with the Epicureanism of my refinement. I was thirsty, thirsty, thirsty, and though the water stood there, sparkling and clear, I still refused myself the comfort of stretching out my hand.

  ‘And then it came. Slowly and from afar, almost like pain running obscurely and exquisitely down my limbs, reflection returned to me like light out of darkness. I lay there absolutely motionless, while in my head music began to play, and I was transported to palaces where the fountains rose in jets of living water. Light crept all
round me, and music, music . . . a great chorus, now, singing in unison; swelling and bursting music, swelling and bursting light, louder and louder, brighter and more dazzling; a deafening crash of music, a blinding vision of light.

  ‘I stood at last on the sunlit peak.

  ‘All around me, but infinitely below, stretched the valleys and plains of darkness where I had dragged out my interminable days. I looked down upon them from my height, knowing that I should never return. I knew that I now stood aloft, at liberty to examine the truth which had come to me, turning it over and over in my hands like a jewel, playing with it, luxuriating in its possession. It was to be mine, to take at will from the casket of my mind, or to return there when other, prosaic matters claimed my attention. But, whether I left it or whether I took it out, I should bear it with me to the ends of the earth, and death alone could wrench me from its contemplation.

  ‘What a lunatic you must think me after this rhapsody! What! you will say, does the man really mean that he wouldn’t exchange the recollection of a moment for the living, material presence of the woman concerned? Well, it is very natural that you should think me a lunatic, but have patience; take into consideration my life, which has been lived, as you know, alone; always in unusual places, with no one near my heart. Living, material presences come to have comparatively little significance after twenty or thirty years of solitude. Try it, and you will see. One drifts into a more visionary world, peopled by shadowy and ideal forms; memories assume incredible proportions and acquire an unbelievable value; one browses off them like a camel off his hump. Do you begin to understand now that this great, shining, resplendent moment should rush in to fill a mind so dependent on the life unreal? One must have something, you see, and if one can’t have human love one must fall back upon imagination. Hence the romantic souls of spinsters . . .