All Passion Spent

by Vita Sackville-West

  She was, after all, a woman. Thwarted as an artist, was it perhaps possible to find fulfilment in other ways? Was there, after all, some foundation for the prevalent belief that woman should minister to man? Had the generations been right, the personal struggle wrong? Was there something beautiful, something active, something creative even, in her apparent submission to Henry? Could she not balance herself upon the tight-rope of her relationship with him, as dangerously and precariously as in the act of creating a picture? Was it not possible to see the tones and half-tones of her life with him as she might have seen the blue and violet shadows of a landscape; and so set them in relation and ordain their values, that she thereby forced them into beauty? Was not this also an achievement of the sort peculiarly suited to women? of the sort, indeed, which women alone could compass; a privilege, a prerogative, not to be despised? All the woman in her answered, yes! All the artist in her countered, no!

  And then again, were not women in their new Protestant spirit defrauding the world of some poor remnant of enchantment, some illusion, foolish perhaps, but lovely? This time the woman and artist in her alike answered, yes.

  She remembered a young couple she had known – the man a secretary at the Paris Embassy; very young they were – receiving her visits, as their ambassadress, with suitable reverence. She knew that they loved her, but at the same time she always felt her visits to be an intrusion. She divined them to be so much in love that they must grudge any half-hour filched from their allowance of years together. And she, for her part, counted her visits to them as an agony, yet she was drawn towards them partly from affection, partly from a desire to martyrise herself by the sight of their union. ‘Male and female created he them,’ she said to herself always, coming away. Sometimes, coming away, she felt herself to be so falsely placed in relation to Henry that the burden of life became too heavy, and she wished she might die. It was no phrase: she really wished it. She was too honest not to suffer under the burden of such falsity. She longed at times for a relationship as simple, as natural, and as right as the relationship between those two very uninteresting but engaging young people. She envied Alec as he stood before the fire jingling the coins in his pocket and looking down on his wife curled into a corner of the sofa. She envied Madge her unquestioning acceptance of everything that Alec said or did. Yet in the midst of her envy something offended her: this intolerably masculine lordliness, this abject feminine submission.

  Where, then, lay the truth? Henry by the compulsion of love had cheated her of her chosen life, yet had given her another life, an ample life, a life in touch with the greater world, if that took her fancy; or a life, alternatively, pressed close up against her own nursery. For a life of her own, he had substituted his life with its interests, or the lives of her children with their potentialities. He assumed that she might sink herself in either, if not in both, with equal joy. It had never occurred to him that she might prefer simply to be herself.

  A part of her had acquiesced. She remembered acquiescing in the assumption that she should project herself into the lives of her children, especially her sons, as though their entities were of far greater importance than her own, and she herself but the vehicle of their creation and the shelter of their vulnerable years. She remembered the birth of Kay. She had wanted to call him Kay, because just before his birth she had been reading Malory. Up till then, her sons had succeeded automatically to the family names – Herbert, Charles, Robert, William – but over the fifth son, for some reason, her wishes were consulted, and when she suggested Kay as a name Henry did not protest. He had been in a good humour and had said, ‘Have it your own way.’ She remembered that even in her weakness she had thought Henry generous. Looking down into the crumpled red face of her new baby – though crumpled red faces had become quite usual to her by then, at the sixth repetition – she had realised the responsibility of launching the little creature labelled by a name not of its own choosing, like launching a battleship, only instead of turrets and decks and guns she had to do with the miraculous tissue of flesh and brain. Was it fair to call a child Kay? A name, a label, exerted an unseen though continuous pressure. People were said to grow up in accordance with their names. But Kay, at any rate, had not grown up unduly romantic, though certainly he could not be said to resemble his brothers or elder sister.

  Yet of all her children, Kay and Edith had alone inherited something of their mother – Kay with his astrolabes, Edith with her muddles. Carrie, characteristically, had given her least trouble; Carrie had managed her own way into the world. Herbert, as the eldest son, had arrived in pomp and with difficulty. William had been a mean, silent baby, with small eyes; greedy, too, as though determined to squeeze all the provision of her breast even as, to-day, he and Lavinia, his fitting mate, were determined to squeeze all their advantage from the local dairy. Charles had arrived protesting, even as he protested to-day, only at that time he knew nothing of War Offices. Edith had had to be beaten into drawing her first breath; she had been able to manage life no better at its beginning than at its end. The fact remained that in Kay and Edith alone she divined an unexpressed sympathy. All the rest were Henry’s children, with his energy just gone wrong. Yet when her children were babies – small, prone things, or things so young and feeble that one could sit them up in safety only by supporting their insecure heads – she, trying to compensate herself for her foregone independence, had made an effort to look forward from the day when the skull over the pulse which so terrifyingly and openly throbbed should have closed up, when their hold on life would no longer be so alarmingly precarious, when she would no longer be afraid of their drawing their last breath even as she bent over their cradle in the absence of the nurse. She had tried to look forward to the day when they would develop characters of their own; when they would hold opinions different from their parents’, when they would make plans and arrangements for themselves. Even in this, she had been suppressed, thwarted. ‘How amused we shall be,’ she had said to Henry as they stood together looking down on Herbert netted in his cot, ‘when he starts writing us letters from school.’ Henry had not liked that remark; she divined his criticism instantly. Henry thought that all real women ought to prefer their children helpless, and to deplore the day when they would begin to grow up. Long-clothes should be preferable to smocks; smocks to knickers; knickers to trousers. Henry had definite, masculine ideas about women and motherhood. Although secretly proud of his rising little sons, he pretended even to himself that they were, so far, entirely their mother’s concern. So, naturally, she had endeavoured to adopt those views. Herbert, at two years old, had been deposed in favour of Carrie; Carrie, at a year, in favour of Charles. Because it was expected of her, the baby had always been officially her darling. But none of these things had held any truth in them. She had always been aware that the self of her children was as far removed from her as the self of Henry, or, indeed, her own.

  Shocking, unnatural thoughts had floated into her mind. ‘If only I had never married … if only I had never had any children.’ Yet she loved Henry – to the point of agony – and she loved her children – to the point of sentimentality. She wove theories about them, which she confided to Henry in moments of privacy and expansion. Herbert would be a statesman, she said, for had he not questioned her (at the age of twelve) about problems of native government? And Kay, aged four, had asked to be taken to see the Taj Mahal. Henry had indulged her in these fancies, not seeing that she was, in fact, indulging him.

  But all this had been as nothing compared with Henry’s ambitions which drove her down a path hedged with thorns. Everything in Henry’s conceptions of the world had run counter to her own grain. Realist and idealist, they represented the extreme opposites of their points of view, with the difference that whereas Henry need make no bones about his creed, she must protect hers from shame and ridicule. Yet there, again, confusion swathed her. There were moments when she could enter into the excitement of the great game that Henry was always playing; moments when
the private, specialised, intense, and lovely existence of the artist – whose practice had been denied her, but after whose ideal of life she still miserably and imaginatively hankered – seemed a poor and selfish and over-delicate thing compared with the masculine business of empire and politics and the strife of men. There were moments when she could understand not only with her brain but with her sensibility, that Henry should crave for a life of action even as she herself craved for a life of contemplation. They were indeed two halves of one dissevered world.

  Part Three

  This Life we live is dead for all its breath;

  Death’s self it is, set off on pilgrimage,

  Travelling with tottering steps the first short stage.

  CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

  Summer over, the October days were no longer warm enough for Lady Slane to sit in the garden. In order to get her airing she must go for a little walk, loaded with cloaks and furs by Genoux, who accompanied her to the front door to make sure that she did not discard any of her wrappings in the hall on the way. Lady Slane sometimes protested, as Genoux dragged one garment after another from the cupboard. ‘But, Genoux, you are making me look like an old bundle.’ Genoux, hanging the last cloak firmly round her shoulders, replied, ‘Miladi est bien trop distinguée pour avoir jamais l’air d’un vieux bundle.’ ‘Do you remember, Genoux,’ said Lady Slane, drawing on her gloves, ‘how you always wanted me to wear woollen stockings for dinner?’ It was indeed true. Genoux in cold weather had never been willing to put out silk stockings with her mistress’s evening dress; or if she put them, after many remonstrances, she hopefully put also a woollen pair to wear underneath. ‘Mais pourquoi pas, miladi?’ said Genoux sensibly; ‘dans ce temps-là les dames, même les jeunes dames, portaient les jupes convenablement longues, et un jupon par dessus le marché. Pourquoi s’enrhumer, pour des chevilles qui n’y paraissent pas? C’était la même histoire pour les combinaisons que miladi voulait à tout prix ôter pour le dîner, précisément au soir lorsqu’il fait plus froid.’ She accompanied Lady Slane downstairs, talking in this strain, for all her volubility had been released since quitting Elm Park Gardens and the household of English servants with their cold discreet ways. She hovered and clucked over Lady Slane, half-scolding, half-cherishing. ‘Miladi n’a jamais su se soigner. Elle ferait beaucoup mieux d’écouter sa vieille Genoux. Les premiers jours d’octobre, c’est tout ce qu’il y a de plus malin. Ça vous attrape sans crier gare. A l’âge de miladi on ne doit pas prendre de libertés.’ ‘Don’t bury me till you need, Genoux,’ said Lady Slane, escaping from her Anglicisms and pessimism alike.

  She went down the steps carefully, for there had been a frost and they might be slippery. Genoux would watch her out of sight, she knew, so at the corner she must turn round to wave. Genoux would be hurt if she forgot to turn round. Yet by the gesture she would not be reassured; she would not be happy again until she had readmitted the muffled figure of the old lady to the safety of the house; drawn her in, taken off her boots, brought her slippers and perhaps a cup of hot soup, carried away her wraps, and left her to her book beside the sitting-room fire. Yet Genoux, for all her adages and croakings, was a gay and philosophical old soul, full of wisdom of the sturdy peasant kind. (She waved back to Lady Slane as Lady Slane after dutifully looking round turned the corner and pursued her way slowly towards the Heath.) Now she would go back to the kitchen and talk to the cat while she busied herself with her pots and pans. Lady Slane frequently heard her talking to the cat, ‘Viens, mon bo-bo,’ she would say; ‘nice dinner, look, that’s all for you,’ – for she had an idea that English animals understood English only, and once, hearing the jackals bark round Gul-a-hek, had remarked to Lady Slane, ‘C’est drôle tout de même, miladi, comme on entend tout de suite que ce ne sont pas des Anglais.’ Well, it was a gentle life they led now, she and Genoux, thought Lady Slane making her way slowly up the hill towards the Heath; she and Genoux, living in such undisturbed intimacy, bound by the ties respectively of gratitude and devotion, bound also by the tie of their unspoken speculation as to which would be taken from the other first. Whenever the front door shut behind one of their rare visitors, each was conscious of a certain relief at the departure of intruders. The routine of their daily life was all they wanted – all, indeed, that they had strength for. Effort tired them both, though they had never admitted it to one another.

  Fortunately, the intruders came but seldom. Lady Slane’s children had come first, in rotation, as a duty, but most of them indicated to their mother so clearly the extreme inconvenience of coming as far as Hampstead that she felt justified in begging them to spare themselves the trouble, and except at intervals they took her at her word. Lady Slane was quite shrewd enough to imagine what they said to one another to appease their consciences: ‘Well, we asked Mother to make her home with us …’ Edith alone had shown some disposition to come frequently and, as she called it, help. But Edith was now living in such a state of bliss in her own flat, that she had been easily able to decide that her mother didn’t really want her. Kay she had not seen for some time. Last time he came, he had said after a great deal of shuffling and embarrassment that a friend of his, old FitzGeorge, wanted to be brought to call upon her. ‘I think,’ said Kay, poking the fire, ‘that he said he had met you in India.’ ‘In India?’ said Lady Slane vaguely. ‘It’s quite possible, dear, but I don’t remember the name. So many people came, you see. We were often twenty to luncheon. Could you put him off, do you think, Kay? I don’t want to be rude, but somehow I seem to have lost my taste for strangers.’

  Kay longed to ask his mother what Fitz had meant by saying he had seen him in his cradle. He had in fact come up to Hampstead determined to clear up this mystery. But, of course, he went away without asking.

  No great-grandchildren. They were forbidden. The grandchildren did not count; they were insignificant as the middle distance. But the great-grandchildren, who were not insignificant, but might be disturbing, were forbidden. Lady Slane had adhered to that, with the strange firmness sometimes and suddenly displayed by the most docile people. Mr Bucktrout was the only regular visitor, coming once a week to tea, on Tuesdays. But she was not tired by Mr Bucktrout; they would sit on either side of the fire, not lighting the lamps, while Mr Bucktrout’s conversation ran on like a purling brook, and Lady Slane listened or not, as she felt inclined.

  Meanwhile, it was very beautiful, up on the Heath, with the brown trees and the blue distance. Lady Slane sat down on a bench and rested. Little boys were flying kites; they ran dragging the string across the turf, till like an ungainly bird the kite rose trailing its untidy tail across the sky. Lady Slane remembered other little boys flying kites in China. Her foreign memories and her English present played at chassé-croisé often now in her mind, mingling and superimposing, making her wonder sometimes whether her memory were not becoming a little confused, so immediate and simultaneous did both impressions appear. Was she on a hillside near Pekin with Henry, a groom walking their horses up and down at a respectful distance; or was she alone, old, and dressed in black, resting on a bench on Hampstead Heath? But there were the chimney-pots of London to steady her. No doubt about it, these little boys were Cockneys in rags, not celestial urchins in blue cotton; and her own limbs, as she shifted her position a little on the hard bench, gave her a rheumatic tweak bearing no relation to her young and physical well-being as she cantered up the scorched hillside with Henry. She tried, in a dim and groping way, to revive the sensation of that well-being. She found it impossible. A dutiful inner voice summoned from the past as some old melody might float unseizable into the outskirts of recollection, reproduced for her in words the facts of that sensation without awakening any response in her dulled old body. In vain she now told herself that once she had woken up on a summer morning longing to spring from her bed and to run out for sheer exuberance of spirit into the air. In vain she tried, and most deliberately, to renew the sharpness of waiting for the moment when – their official life suspe
nded – she would turn in the darkness into Henry’s arms. It was all words now, without reality. The only things which touched reality were the routine of her life with Genoux; the tiny interests of that life – the tradesmen’s ring at the back door, the arrival of a parcel of books from Mudie’s, the consultation as to Mr Bucktrout’s Tuesday tea, should they buy muffins or crumpets? the agitation over an announced visit from Carrie; and then the growth of her bodily ailments, for which she was beginning to feel quite an affection. Her body had, in fact, become her companion, a constant resource and preoccupation; all the small squalors of the body, known only to oneself, insignificant in youth, easily dismissed, in old age became dominant and entered into fulfilment of the tyranny they had always threatened. Yet it was, rather than otherwise, an agreeable and interesting tyranny. A hint of lumbago caused her to rise cautiously from her chair and reminded her of the day she had ricked her back at Nervi, since when her back had never been very reliable. The small intimacies of her teeth were known to her, so that she ate carefully, biting on one side rather than on the other. She instinctively crooked one finger – the third on the left hand – to save it from the pang of neuritis. An in-growing toe-nail obliged Genoux to use the shoe-horn with the greatest precaution. And all these parts of the body became intensely personal: my back, my tooth, my finger, my toe; and Genoux, again, was the only person who knew exactly what she meant by a sudden exclamation as she fell back into her chair, the bond between herself and Genoux thereby strengthening to the pitch of the bond between lovers, of an exclusive physical intimacy. Of such small things was her life now made: of communion with Genoux, of interest in her own disintegrating body, of Mr Bucktrout’s courtesy and weekly visits, of her pleasure in the frosty morning and the little boys flying kites on the Heath; even of her anxiety about slipping upon a frozen doorstep, for the bones of the aged, she knew, were brittle. All tiny things, contemptibly tiny things, ennobled only by their vast background, the background of Death. Certain Italian paintings depicted trees – poplar, willow, alder – each leaf separate, and sharp, and veined, against a green translucent sky. Of such a quality were the tiny things, the shapely leaves, of her present life: redeemed from insignificance by their juxtaposition with a luminous eternity.