The Edwardians

by Vita Sackville-West

  “The sooner he gets engaged to Alice, the better,” said Mrs. Levison firmly.

  “I quite agree. I am on tenterhooks whenever that girl is in the house,” said Lucy. “Whenever Sebastian comes into my room I look up to see whether he has got anything to tell me, but he always throws himself down on the sofa with the Tatler. But still I do think there is something in it. He has never shown any interest in a girl before—a girl of his own class, I mean, of course; I don’t count the keeper’s daughter. But now he has made me invite Alice for three weekends running.”

  “And you have to endure her parents, my poor Lucy!”

  “I know. They aren’t much trouble. Lord O. talks to Sebastian about his farms. And Lady O. amuses me. She is torn in half between her desire that her Alice shall marry Sebastian and her intense disapproval of the rest of us. She tries so hard to be civil, and it does go so obviously against the grain! She is used only to people like the Wexfords and the Porteviots. Did I tell you what Potini said to me last night? You know how tiresome he is with his views on the English character? Well, he said to me, “Ma petite duchesse”—he always calls me that—“ma petite duchesse, in Lady O. you have the English terrrrritorial arrristocracy personified. Look at her bosom—it is like two turnips. Look at her teeth—they are like twelve sarsen stones.”

  Mrs. Levison gave her scream of exaggerated amusement, the scream which had been responsible for half her success in a society to which she did not properly belong. But, indeed, Lucy’s mimicry had been exact.

  “Oh, Lucy, you are impayable! Dear me, it makes me sad when I remember how the poor dear King used to enjoy your imitations. You were one of the few people who could always keep him amused. How awful it is to think that all those good times are over. We shall be like a flock of sheep, leaderless.” No one could expect Mrs. Levison’s metaphors about sheep to be realistically very accurate. “We shall have to make a little temple of our own, out of our ruins. You and Romola between you—when Romola comes back—must build it. We must hold the fort, mustn’t we, Lucy?” She glanced at Lucy, and, shrewdly perceiving that this thesis was unwelcome, changed the subject. Not in vain had she always relied upon her wits. “Meanwhile, of course, there is the Coronation to be got over before things can become normal again, but engagements don’t wait for coronations, do they, Lucy? There is no reason why the engagement shouldn’t be announced at once. There would be plenty of time left”—by plenty of time left, Mrs. Levison meant plenty of time before the end of the season—“plenty of time left for the wedding to take place. The Coronation isn’t till the twenty-second of June. It would be nice if you could get them married in, say, the first week of July.”

  Lucy thought, too, that it would be very nice. Meanwhile, it was necessary that Sebastian should make up his mind. There was the whole difference between an unspoken proposal and a spoken one. Lucy, with her vague apprehensions of disturbances in the air and her distress over the breaking-up of her own set, felt that she would give much to get her own family affairs settled. She had always lived in the dread that Sebastian would make some terrible or eccentric marriage or would involve himself permanently in some hopeless liaison; but now the advent of Lady O.’s Alice seemed to promise a solution that, to Lucy, would be like sinking back into a comfortable armchair. She could not pretend that Sebastian was very ardent in his courtship. He pursued it, indeed, with the utmost languor; but he did pursue it. That was the main thing. He made his mother renew her invitation to Alice over and over again—an invitation which, needless to say, was always accepted—and when Alice was at Chevron he dutifully appropriated her; took her off for walks and rides; allowed her to play with the puppies of Sarah and Henry, while Sarah and Henry soberly looked on; conceded that she was “good with dogs,” and consulted her as to the new golf course he was planning. Lucy could not imagine that his interest in so dull and meek a girl could have any source other than a desire for marriage. Like Miss Wace, she could not believe that Sebastian was in love.

  She clung to Sebastian as the only hope she had left in life. She was beginning to feel her age, and the things of her youth were beginning to shrink all round her. It was unpleasant to observe the alteration in values. Viola, for instance—so recently as in nineteen hundred and six Viola had allowed herself to be taken to all the right parties, but in nineteen hundred and ten Viola had rebelled; on one unforgettable evening at Chevron, after dinner, she had announced that she had taken a flat in London. “You prevented me from going to Cambridge, mother, but you can’t prevent me from doing this. I’m of age.” That phrase had entered Lucy’s soul as a dagger. She had never heard it before as applied to a girl; she had heard it only as applied to young men, in connection with festivities, and fireworks, and tenants’ balls, and the presentation of silver salvers, engraved with a double column of names. Then it was due and proper; on the lips of a girl it was unforeseen; it was immodest. But it was also unanswerable. Lucy’s authority shrivelled as muslin in a fire. And as her legal authority shrivelled, so did her personal authority turn suddenly into a thing which had never enjoyed any real existence. She could do nothing but stammer and weep before Viola’s cold, though regretful, logic. She had appealed to all the standards within her range. “If you won’t think of me,” she had said, “think at least of your position and the example you are setting!” Viola had smiled, patiently but inexorably. “Oh, darling mother!” she had said, “all that rubbish!” To Lucy it was not rubbish; it was the very bricks of life. In her anguish she had revealed some of the secrets of those who would not sin against their code. “Look at the Templecombes,” she had said; “twenty years of misery rather than give a bad example to the world. Remember Lavender Garrow, who went off with Caryl Thorpe, and was never heard of again. That was all the reward she got for her independence.” “But,” Viola had said, “I don’t want to go off with anybody. I only want to lead my own life.” “That’s almost worse,” Lucy had groaned; “up to a certain point, people can sympathise with lovers—only, of course, they can never be received—but for a woman to go off with herself is unheard of. People won’t understand. You will lose caste, Viola, utterly. You will never be invited anywhere. You will bring shame on me and on Sebastian. What excuse shall we be able to give, when people ask us where you have gone to?” At this point Sebastian had failed her. He had ceased pulling Sarah’s ears; had allowed Sarah to fall with a flop on the floor, much to her indignation; and had stood up with his back to the library fire. “I entirely sympathise with Viola, mother,” he had said; “I think she has every right to lead her own life, as she says, if she wants to. She happens to have her own money, but if she hadn’t, I should certainly give her a sufficient income. I wish I had her courage, and I envy it. She won’t be stifled by you, or by Chevron. She wants to be a separate person, and not just a piece fitted into a picture. As to the example she is giving, I hope a lot of girls will follow it. When you are eighty,” he had said, squashing himself down into the same armchair as his mother and putting his arm round her shoulders, “you will dodder and say how proud you were of your daughter.”

  Lucy was not yet eighty—far from it; and she was not yet proud of her daughter. Indeed, so far was she from proud, that she continued to make so many excuses for Viola’s absence that her friends began to wonder whether there was not, in fact, some very discreditable reason for Viola’s unusual behaviour. “Qui s’excuse,” said the new Duchess of D., “s’accuse,” and Viola was struck off the list. Lucy was thereby justified in her prediction, to her mingled grief and satisfaction. It was a consolation to be able to say “I told you so!” but a mortification to go unaccompanied by a daughter to D. House. It was still more of a mortification to find that Viola did not care.

  Still, she had Sebastian. Sebastian had not yet broken loose. He grumbled and he rumbled, with a noise like an approaching storm; but, then, he had done that ever since the age of sixteen. Lucy sighed as she remembered how poor Sylvia Roehampton
had said that Sebastian sulky was irresistible. Sebastian had sulked, at intervals, for years. She had always been a little bit in awe of him. Perhaps she might be thankful now that he should have released his mood in periodic sulks, spread over so many years, rather than affect docility like Viola, and then suddenly break away as Viola had broken. “I’m of age.” Sebastian had never said that, or anything analogous. His obstinacies had always been much softer, much more in keeping with the traditions that Lucy understood; at moments, certainly, he had been tiresome; he had given her frights, as when he threatened to marry the keeper’s daughter; but he had never done anything beyond the natural extravagance of a spoilt young man. His worst threat was to join the Socialist party; and Lucy could generally dismiss that as too impossible to offer any very serious danger. She had, too, a comfortable, old-fashioned conviction that marriage would cure him of such fantasies. They were included, even for Lucy, in the category that Miss Wace labelled Wild Oats.

  She wondered about Sebastian, but, being a woman, her speculations were confined to the adventures he had had with women. The greater adventure of his mind was of no interest to her. She had scarcely suspected his true perplexities; or, if she had noticed their outward signs in his sudden reticences, his ill humour, his cutting remarks, she had at once attributed them to some love affair gone wrong. Lucy’s imagination could not move outside that orbit. She had all the inquisitiveness of a woman about a man’s life, even when that man happened to be her son. Honey would have seemed less sweet than any revelation from Sebastian about himself; but as no revelation was ever forthcoming she had to be content with such pictures as she could secretly make. From her point of view, Sylvia had certainly been the most satisfactory of Sebastian’s affairs; for, out of her own experience, she could build up a very detailed reproduction of the relations between them. She had dwelt with an almost incestuous pleasure upon the vision of her son in the role of Sylvia’s lover. But what of the other women Sebastian had known? What, for instance, of the little model he was said to have picked up in Chelsea?

  The little model was, in reality, the fourth of Sebastian’s experiments. Looking back over his life, he saw that it took shape, and that, out of the welter, four experiments emerged. (The crowd of other women counted for nothing; they had been merely incidents; inevitable, nauseating in retrospect, and, above all, tedious.) Only four women had made any mark on him; and, now that he could contemplate them detachedly, he observed with interest and surprise that each one had been drawn from a different caste—Sylvia; Teresa; the keeper’s daughter; and now the little model. Not one of them had given him satisfaction. He had been defeated by Sylvia’s code; defeated by Teresa’s; the keeper’s daughter—a desperate expedient, undertaken in a moment of revolt against both the upper and the middle classes—had ruffled his sensibilities from the start by her personal habits. In vain had he told himself that such things ought not to matter. They did matter. She was a good girl, a wholesome girl, a friendly, sensible girl, whom he had first noticed going the rounds with a pail of boiled meal for his young pheasants; but she had dropped her aitches and she had sucked her teeth, and Sebastian, examining himself severely, had come to the conclusion that he would wince too acutely whenever she was presented to his friends. He was thankful, at least, that he had withdrawn from that experiment before he could possibly be said to have behaved badly. He had gone through a period of the blackest despair when he realised how tyrannically he—even he!—was bound by custom. He scorned himself for being no better than Sylvia or Teresa: they had their codes, and he had his; they were all prisoners, bound in hoops of iron. He wondered sceptically what Viola would make of her new freedom. “But Viola is tougher than I,” he thought in his dejection; “I am too soft ever to carry my struggles through to their conclusion.” He felt, indeed, that he fiddled inconclusively at everything he undertook.

  Then, at Viola’s fiat, he had met Phil, his little model. Before he knew what was happening—such was the exaggeration of his moods—Sebastian somersaulted into a championship of Bohemia. The full torrent of excitement in his new discovery poured over Viola, towards whom since her emancipation he had relaxed something of his reserve. He did not specifically mention Phil, but all his lyricism extolled the independence of the artist; the gaiety, the moral courage, of the happy-go-lucky life. Viola listened, made no comment, smiled at him, guessed with great exactitude what had taken place, and privately prophesied exactly how the new whim was likely to end. Meanwhile, Sebastian trod on air; he thought that he had found his salvation; he had broken the bounds of his own world; he thought that he had discovered everything that was disenfranchised, liberal, free of spirit. His conviction was increased by the fact that, until his advent, Phil had led what is known as a virtuous life; was not in the least impressed by his worldly assets; and gave herself to him without any fuss, within twenty-four hours of their meeting, simply because he had taken her fancy. All this she explained to him in the frankest language, adding that the moment she tired of him she would throw him out. Sebastian, who was not accustomed to be treated in this way, delighted in such discourse. Lying on her divan amid the ruins of their supper, he prodded her on from statement to statement, from revelation to revelation. She had run away from home when she was seventeen; she had served in an A.B.C. shop; and there, Augustus John had seen her.

  “Well, and what then?”

  “He painted me. He said I was his type.” So she was, with her black hair cut square; her red, generous mouth; her thick white throat; and brilliant colours; especially when she crouched, gipsy-like, over her guitar.

  “And what then?”

  “Lots of other people painted me.”

  “But you never lived with any of them?”

  “You ought to know that I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t like them enough. I was awfully hard up at times, too.”

  “What do you mean by hard up?”

  “Well, I hadn’t enough to eat”

  “Literally?”

  “Literally.”

  “You were hungry?”

  “Horribly hungry. I used to faint.”

  For the first time it dawned upon Sebastian that people, other than the rheumy old women who sat under arches selling matches, did not have enough to eat. He remembered the meals at Chevron; the endless meals that he had sat through.

  “You used to faint? From hunger?” he said incredulously.

  His incredulity made her laugh. “But of course. Lots of people do. Whenever I was flush, I used to bring people back here and give them a meal. “

  “What sort of a meal?”

  “Oh, eggs—sardines—sausages. It depended. When I was very flush there might be a bit of cold meat.”

  “And didn’t they do the same for you when you weren’t flush?”

  “Of course they did. We all helped each other. Only, sometimes we were all down and out at the same time. But why do you want to know? It’s all very sordid, and not very interesting. It’s only interesting to you because it’s something you’ve never known.”

  “That,” said Sebastian gravely, “is the essence of romance.”

  Phil stared. “Oh, you’re too clever for me. You wouldn’t think it romantic if you knew it. But don’t let us talk about all that. I don’t have to worry about that kind of thing now.”

  “You never will again,” said Sebastian resolutely.

  “Oh yes,” said Phil lightly; “when you’re tired of me, or I’m tired of you. But why bother about the future? Let’s put on the gramophone. Let’s dance. Let’s do something. Or shall we go out?” “Go out” meant the Café Royal. “We might meet Viola.”

  “Is Viola often there?” asked Sebastian with curiosity. The truth about Viola’s life was gradually, very gradually, becoming apparent to him.

  “Oh yes,” said Phil unconcernedly; “she’s been th
ere for years. She used to go under another name. We used to call her Lisa, because she looked so smooth—like the Gioconda, you know. But since she came to live in London she goes under her own name. I can’t think why she ever bothered to conceal it. Everybody knew quite well who she was.”

  Sebastian recoiled before the task of explaining to Phil why Viola should have troubled to conceal her name. Such explanations, as he had already learnt, meant less than nothing to Phil. He wished that his mother could have heard some of her comments in the days when he had been so ill-advised as to endeavour to explain certain things to her.

  “Don’t let us go out,” he said, though there were times when he liked sitting at the café in her company. “I like talking to you.” It was true. He wondered now how he could ever have endured the conversation of Mrs. Levison or the Duchess of D. Phil was rough and frank, when she was neither frivolous nor sensuous; she had brought herself up in a hard school, reinforcing her native candour. Beside her, he felt that his own experience had been banked with cushions. She had estimated him shrewdly when she compared him to the princess who felt the pea through four-and-twenty mattresses. He had to adjust himself to her scheme of values, for nothing that he said made the slightest impression upon her. Physically fragile, she was spiritually tough; she had made up her mind, long ago—she was now twenty-two—as to what she considered worth while or not worth while; and her judgement was extraordinarily pure. Sebastian was guiltless of a lover’s delusion when he decided that her nature was without dross. The best in him had recognised the best in her. Her taste, too, in letters, art, or music, though uneducated, was direct and right; the second-rate, to her thinking, was excluded from consideration; in those matters, as in life, no compromise was possible. But often her lack of sentimentality hurt him, even while it braced him; he could not grow accustomed to her unflinching brutality. “But I like the truth,” she said when he upbraided her; “facts are facts, why shirk them?” Yes, facts were facts to her, as sprouts were sprouts to old Turnour, or winter sales to Mrs. Tolputt, or reputation to Sylvia. “You won’t love me forever,” she said, “so I may as well make up my mind to it now. And I suppose I shan’t love you forever, though for the moment I could almost believe it. You and I are as different as chalk from cheese”—that was one of her favourite, stereotyped phrases, that contrasted so oddly with her independent nature. “One day I shall love somebody of my own sort. Then I shall probably stick to him till I die. I love you, but you aren’t my sort. You love me, but I’m not your sort. We can’t help it. Why worry? Why not enjoy the present? We may all be dead tomorrow, or there may be a war, or an earthquake,” she added vaguely; “personally, I don’t much care whether I live or die—do you? What I like better than anything, is driving with you in that racing motor of yours; then I feel we might be dashed to death at any moment. I think one never enjoys life so much as when it becomes dangerous. Meantime, I love you like anything,” she said, putting her arms round him as though to make up in passion what she had lacked in tenderness, “and that’s enough for me; it makes me feel like a real thing, a tree, or a stone; a thing that you can see and touch and hold; a thing which you know doesn’t exist only in your imagination. It may be gone tomorrow, but it’s here today—here now, now,” she said, holding him closer and emphasising the word as though inspired by some superstitious terror to catch the second even as it ticked away.