All Passion Spent

by Vita Sackville-West

  From time to time she came across allusions to her family in the papers. Carrie had opened a bazaar. Carrie’s granddaughter was taking part in a charity matinée. Charles had succeeded in getting one of his letters into The Times. Richard – Herbert’s eldest grandson – had won a point-to-point race. Deborah, his sister, had become most suitably engaged to the eldest son of a duke. Herbert himself had been delivered of a speech in the House of Lords. It was rumoured that the next vacant Governor-generalship would be awarded to Herbert. As it was, he had received the K.C.M.G. in the New Year Honours … From the immense distance of her years Lady Slane contemplated these happenings, tiny and far-off, bringing with them some echo of the events mixed up with her own life. ‘How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable,’ she said to herself, going carefully downstairs with the help of a stick and the banisters, and wondering why, at the end of one’s life, one should ever trouble to read anything but Shakespeare; or, for the matter of that, at the beginning of one’s life either, since he seemed to have understood both exuberance and maturity. But it was only in maturity, perhaps, that one could fully appreciate his deeper understanding.

  She looked upon this group of people, sprung from her own loins, and saw them in mid-career or else starting out upon their course. Young Deborah, she supposed, was happy in her engagement, and young Richard felt himself filled to the brim with life as he rode across country. She smiled quite tenderly as she thought of the two young creatures. But they would harden, she thought, they would harden when their warm youth grew chilled; they would become worldly-wise, self-seeking; the rash generosity of youth would be replaced by the prudence of middle-age. There would be no battle for them, no struggle in their souls; they would simply set hard into the moulds prepared for them. Lady Slane sighed to think that she was responsible, though indirectly, for their existence. The long, weary serpent of posterity streamed away from her. She felt sick at heart, and looked forward only to release.

  Still, she did an inexplicable thing. After she had done it – after she had written the letter, stamped it, and given it to Genoux to post – she looked back upon her action and decided that she had acted in a trance. She could not say what impulse had moved her, what strange desire had tugged at her to recreate a link with the life she had abjured. Perhaps her loneliness was greater than any human courage could stand; perhaps she had overrated her own fortitude. Only a very strong soul could stand quite alone. Be that as it might, she had written to a press-cutting agency with the instruction that any references to her own family should be supplied to her. Privately, she knew that she wanted only the references to her great-grandchildren. She cared very little what happened to Carrie, Herbert, Charles, and William; the path that they followed and would continue to follow was clearly marked, offering no surprises, no delights. But even in her trance she shrank from betraying herself to the eyes of an agency in Holborn: she disguised her real desire under the extravagance of a general order. When the little green packets began to arrive, however, all references to her own children went straight into the waste-paper basket, and references to her great-grandchildren only were pasted very carefully by Lady Slane into an album bought from the stationer round the corner.

  She derived an extraordinary pleasure from this occupation, carried on every evening under the shade of the pink lamp. Every evening, for, realising that a fresh supply would not arrive more than twice or thrice a week, she economised her little hoard, and would allow herself the luxury of pasting in only a proportion of the cuttings every day, so that one or two might always remain left over for the morrow. Fortunately, out of Lady Slane’s great-grandchildren, two were grown-up, and their activities manifold. They were, in fact, among the prominent young people of the day, and in the gossip columns they had their news-value. Many pleasant hours were spent by Lady Slane in constructing their characters and personalities from these snippets, reinforced by her previous knowledge of them; a recreation for their great-grandmother of which the children themselves were entirely ignorant, an ignorance which added considerably to Lady Slane’s half-mischievous, half-sentimental pleasure, for pleasure to her was entirely a private matter, a secret joke, intense, redolent, but as easily bruised as the petals of a gardenia. Genoux alone knew of her nightly occupation, but Genoux was no intrusion, being as much a part of Lady Slane as her boots or her hot-water bottle, or as the cat John, who sat bunched with incomparable neatness and dignity before the fire. Genoux indeed shared Lady Slane’s interest in the young Hollands, though from a different point of view. She had been quick to guess and to welcome Lady Slane’s reviving interest, and trotted in with a green packet as soon as it had fallen through the letter-box. ‘Voilà, miladi! c’est arrivé!’ and she would stand by expectantly while Lady Slane stripped off the wrapper and revealed the print. They were futile enough, heaven knows, these paragraphs. Treasure-hunting in Underground stations; a ball; a party; sometimes a photograph, of Richard in riding-breeches or of Deborah representing Mary Queen of Scots at a fancy-dress ball. Futile, but young and harmless. Lady Slane turned them over, and who should presume to analyse her feelings? But Genoux frankly clasped her hands in ecstasy. ‘Ah, miladi, qu’il est donc beau, Monsieur Richard! Ah, miladi, qu’elle est donc jolie!’ That was Deborah. Lady Slane would smile, pleased by Genoux’s admiration. She was, after all, an old woman, and small things pleased her now. ‘Yes,’ she said, looking at a photograph of Richard, muddy, holding a silver cup under one arm and a riding whip under the other, ‘he is a well-built young man – pas si mal.’ ‘Pas si mal!’ cried Genoux in indignation, ‘he is superb, a god; such elegance, such chic. All the young women must be mad about him. And he will follow in the footsteps of his great-grandfather,’ added Genoux, who had a wholesome appreciation of worldly prestige; ‘he will be Viceroy, Prime Minister, Dieu sait quoi encore; miladi verra.’ For Genoux had never estimated Lady Slane’s contempt for such things. ‘No, Genoux,’ said Lady Slane; ‘I shan’t be there to see.’

  She would see only, and at so queer a remove, their lovely, silly youth. Thank God, she would not be there to see their hardening into an even sillier adult life, redeemed not even by this wild, foolish, but decorative quality. ‘Nymphs and shepherds, come away,’ she murmured, looking at the thick hair, the slim elastic limbs. ‘Ah, Genoux,’ she said, ‘it was good to be young.’

  That depends, said Genoux sagely, on what sort of a youth one had. It was not good to be the twelfth child of poor parents, and to be sent to live with farmers near Poitiers; to sleep on straw in a barn; never to see one’s parents; to get up at five every morning, winter and summer; to be beaten if one didn’t do one’s work properly; to know that one’s brothers and sisters were growing up as strangers. Genoux had been with Lady Slane for nearly seventy years, yet Lady Slane had never heard this revelation. She turned to Genoux with curiosity. ‘And when you did see your brothers and sisters again, Genoux, did it feel very strange to you?’

  Not a bit, said Genoux; blood counted. One’s own family was one’s own family. She had walked into the little flat in Paris, at the age of sixteen, as though she belonged there by right. The farm near Poitiers had vanished, and she never thought of it again, though she knew better than anybody where the straying hens laid their eggs. She had walked straight into the lives of her brothers and sisters and had taken up her place there as though she had never been away. She had had a little trouble with one of her sisters, who had given birth to twins just after her elder child had died of diphtheria. They had tried to conceal the death from her, Genoux said, but she had guessed it somehow, and leaping straight out of bed had rushed as she was, in her nightgown, to the cemetery, there to fling herself upon the grave. Genoux had been sent to fetch her back, nor had it apparently struck her as odd that a girl of her age should be employed on such a mission. Necessity ruled; and her mother had to stay at home to look after the twins. But her sojourn with her family had been but a brief interlude. Her father had already put down her name at a registry offi
ce, and the next thing she knew was that she was crossing the Channel to England, to take service with miladi.

  Lady Slane listened with some emotion to this simple and philosophical recital. She blamed herself for never having questioned Genoux before. She had taken Genoux for granted, all these years; yet a wealth of experience was locked up in that sturdy breast. It must have been a curious transition, from the farm near Poitiers, where she slept on straw and was beaten, to the magnificence of Government House and Viceregal Lodge … The experiences of her great-grandchildren seemed shallow indeed by comparison; her own experiences seemed thin and over-civilised, lacking any contact with reality. She, who had brooded in secret over an unfulfilled vocation, had never been obliged to tear a distraught sister away from a newly-dug grave. Watching Genoux, who stood there imperturbably relating these trials out of the past, she wondered which wounds went the deeper: the jagged wounds of reality, or the profound invisible bruises of the imagination?

  Since those days Genoux had never had any personal life, she supposed. Her life was in her service, with self submerged. Lady Slane suddenly condemned herself as an egoistic old woman. Yet, she reflected, she also had given her life away, to Henry. She need not blame herself overmuch for the last indulgence of her melancholy.

  She returned to Genoux. The Holland family had replaced Genoux’s own family, absorbing everything that Genoux possessed of pride, ambition, snobbery. She remembered Genoux’s paeans of delight when Henry had been given a peerage. Over every child she had watched as though it were her own, and nothing but her fierce protectiveness of Lady Slane could have drawn from her a word of criticism about the Holland children. Now she transferred her interest to the great-grandchildren, making no difference since the day they had ceased to come to the house. Her loyal soul had momentarily been torn in half by Lady Slane’s refusal to receive Deborah and Richard. But when Lady Slane explained that youthful vitality was too tiring for an old lady, she had at once readjusted her notions. ‘Bien sûr, miladi; la jeunesse, c’est très fatigant.’

  She welcomed, however, this suitable revival of family pride typified in the green packets and the album. Deep down in her peasant wisdom, she recognised the wholesome instinct for perpetuation in posterity. Her own womanhood unfulfilled, she clung pathetically to a vicarious satisfaction through the medium of her adored Lady Slane. ‘Ça me fait du bien,’ she said, tears in her eyes, ‘de voir miladi s’occuper avec son petit pot of Stickphast.’ And once she lifted up John, the cat, to look at a full-page photograph of Richard in the Tatler. ‘Regarde, mon bobo, le beau gars.’ John struggled and would not look. She set him down again, disappointed. ‘C’est drôle, miladi; les animaux, c’est si intelligent, mais ça ne reconnaît jamais les images.’

  Common sense rarely laid its fingers on Lady Slane, these days. It did occur to her to wonder, however, what the young people had thought of her renunciation of FitzGeorge’s fortune. They had been indignant probably; they had cursed their great-grandmother soundly for defrauding them of a benefit which would eventually have been theirs. They would certainly have given her no credit for romantic motives. Perhaps she owed them an explanation, though not an apology? But how could she get into touch with them, now especially? Pride caught her wrist even as she stretched her pen out towards the ink. She had, after all, behaved towards them in what to any reasonable person must seem a most unnatural way; first she had refused to see them, and then she had eliminated from their future the possibility of great and easy wealth. She must appear to them as the incarnation of egoism and inconsideration. Lady Slane was distressed, yet she knew that she had acted according to her convictions. Had not FitzGeorge himself once taken her to task for sinning against the light? And suddenly, in a moment of illumination, she understood why FitzGeorge had tempted her with this fortune: he had tempted her only in order that she should find the strength to reject it. He had offered her not so much a fortune as a chance to be true to herself. Lady Slane bent down and stroked the cat, whom as a rule she did not much like. ‘John,’ she said, ‘John – how fortunate that I did what he wanted, before I realised what he wanted.’

  After that she was happy, though her qualms about her young descendants continued to worry her. By a curious twist, her qualms of conscience about them increased now that she had satisfactorily explained her own action to herself, as though she blamed herself for some extravagant gesture of self-indulgence. Perhaps she had come too hastily to her decision? Perhaps she had treated the children unfairly? Perhaps one should not demand sacrifices of others, consequent upon one’s own ideas? She had consulted her own ideas entirely, with the added spice of pleasure, she must admit, in annoying Carrie, Herbert, Charles, and William. It had seemed wrong to her that private people should own such possessions, such exaggerated wealth; therefore she had hastened to dispose of both, the treasures to the public and the money to the suffering poor; the logic was simple though trenchant. Stated in these terms, she could not believe in her own wrong-doing; but, on the other hand, should she not have considered her great-grandchildren? It was a subtle problem to decide alone; and Mr Bucktrout, to whom she confided it, gave her no help, for not only was he entirely in sympathy with her first instinct but, moreover, in view of the approaching end of the world, he could not see that it mattered very much one way or the other. ‘My dear lady,’ he said, ‘when your Cellinis, your Poussins, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren are all mingled in planetary dust your problem of conscience will cease to be of much importance.’ That was true rather than helpful. Astronomical truths, enlarging though they may be to the imagination, contain little assistance for immediate problems. She continued to gaze at him in distress, a distress which at that very moment had been augmented by a sudden thought of what Henry, raising his eyebrows, would have said.

  ‘Miss Deborah Holland,’ said Genoux, throwing open the door. She threw it open in such a way as to suggest that she was retrospectively aping the manner of the grand major-domo at the Paris Embassy.

  Lady Slane rose in a fluster, with the usual soft rustle of her silks and laces; her knitting slipped to the floor; she stooped ineffectually to retrieve it; her mind swept wildly round, seeking to reconcile this improbable encounter between her great-granddaughter, Mr Bucktrout, and herself. The circumstances were too complicated for her to govern successfully in a moment’s thought. She had never been good at dealing with a situation that demanded nimbleness of wit; and, considering the conversations she had had with Mr Bucktrout about her great-grandchildren, of whom Herbert’s granddaughter thus suddenly presented herself as a specimen, the situation demanded a very nimble wit indeed. ‘My dear Deborah,’ said Lady Slane, scurrying affectionately, dropping her knitting, trying to retrieve it, abandoning the attempt midway, and finally managing to kiss Deborah on the cheek.

  She was the more confused, for Deborah was the first young person to enter the house at Hampstead since Lady Slane had removed herself from Elm Park Gardens. The house at Hampstead had opened its doors to no one but Mr FitzGeorge, Mr Bucktrout, and Mr Gosheron – and, of course, on occasion, to Lady Slane’s own children, who, although they might be unwelcome, were at any rate advanced in years. Deborah came in the person of youth knocking at the doors. She was pretty, under her fur cap; pretty and elegant; the very girl Lady Slane would have expected from her photographs in the society papers. In the year since Lady Slane had seen her, she had changed from a schoolgirl into a young lady. Of her activities in the fashionable world since she became a young lady, Lady Slane had had ample evidence. This observation reminded Lady Slane of her press-cutting album, which was lying on the table under the lamp; releasing Deborah’s hand, she hurriedly removed the album to a dark place, as though it were a dirtied cup of tea. She put the blotter over it. A narrow escape; narrow and unforeseen; but now she felt safe. She came back and introduced Deborah formally to Mr Bucktrout.

  Mr Bucktrout had the tact to take his leave almost immediately. Lady Slane, knowing him, had fea
red that he might plunge instantly into topics of the deepest import, with references to her own recent and eccentric conduct, thereby embarrassing both the girl and herself. Mr Bucktrout, however, behaved most unexpectedly as a man of the world. He made a few remarks about the beginning of spring – about the reappearance of flowers on barrows in the London streets – about the longevity of anemones in water, especially if you cut their stems – about the bunches of snowdrops that came up from the country, and how soon they would be succeeded by bunches of primroses – about Covent Garden. But about cosmic catastrophes or the right judgment of Deborah Holland’s great-grandmother he said nothing. Only once did he verge on an indiscretion, when he leant forward, putting his finger against his nose, and said, ‘Miss Deborah, you bear a certain resemblance to Lady Slane whom I have the honour to call my friend.’ Fortunately, he did not follow up the remark, but after the correct interval merely rose and took his leave. Lady Slane was grateful to him, yet it was with dismay that she saw him go, leaving her face to face with a young woman bearing what had once been her own name.

  She expected an evasive and meaningless conversation as a start, dreading the chance phrase that would fire it into realities, growing swiftly like Jack’s beanstalk into a tangle of reproaches; she expected anything in the world but that Deborah should sit at her knee and thank her with directness and simplicity for what she had done. Lady Slane made no answer at all, except to lay her hand on the girl’s head pressed against her knee. She was too much moved to answer; she preferred to let the young voice go on, imagining that she herself was the speaker, reviving her adolescent years and deluding herself with the fancy that she had at last found a confidant to whom she could betray her thoughts. She was old, she was tired, she lost herself willingly in the sweet illusion. Was it an echo that she heard? or had some miracle wiped out the years? were the years being played over again, with a difference? She allowed her fingers to ruffle Deborah’s hair, and, finding it short instead of ringleted, supposed vaguely that she had put her own early plans for escape into execution. Had she then really run away from home? had she, indeed, chosen her own career instead of Henry’s? Was she now sitting on the floor beside a trusted friend, pouring out her reasons, her aspirations, and her convictions, with a firmness and a certainty lit as by a flame from within? Fortunate Deborah! she thought, to be so firm, so trustful, and by one person at least so well understood; but to which Deborah she alluded, she scarcely knew.