The ease with which such a fate befalls you suggests that it is really necessary to assert yourself in order to prevent yourself from being skipped; how could you ever come to life again if the butcher[,] the postman and the policeman made up their minds to ignore you? It is a terrible fate; I think I will knock over a chair at this moment; now the lodger beneath knows that I am alive at any rate.
But to return to the mysterious case of Miss V., in which initial, be it understood is concealed the person also of Miss Janet V.: it is hardly necessary to split one letter into two parts.
They have been gliding about London for some fifteen years; you were to find them in certain drawing-rooms or picture galleries, and when you said, ‘Oh how d’you do Miss V.’ as though you have been in the habit of meeting her every day of your life, she would answer, ‘Isn’t it a pleasant day,’ or ‘What bad weather we are having’ and then you moved on and she seemed to melt into some armchair or chest of drawers. At any rate you thought no more of her until she detached herself from the furniture in a year’s time perhaps, and the same things were said over again.
A tie of blood — or whatever the fluid was that ran in Miss V.’s veins - made it my particular fate to run against her - or pass through her or dissipate her, whatever the phrase may be - more constantly perhaps than any other person, until this little performance became almost a habit. No party or concert or gallery seemed quite complete unless the familiar grey shadow was part of it; and when, some time ago, she ceased to haunt my path, I knew vaguely that something was missing. I will not exaggerate and say that I knew that she was missing; but there is no insincerity in using the neuter term.
Thus in a crowded room I began to find myself gazing round in nameless dissatisfaction; no, everyone seemed to be there — but surely there was something lacking in furniture or curtains - or was it that a print was moved from the wall?
Then one morning early, wakening at dawn indeed, I cried aloud, Mary V. Mary V!! It was the first time, I am sure that anyone had ever cried her name with such conviction; generally it seemed a colourless epithet, used merely to round a period. But my voice did not as I half expected, summon the person or semblance of Miss V. before me: the room remained vague. All day long my own cry echoed in my brain; till I made certain that at some street corner or another I should come across her as usual, and see her fade away, and be satisfied. Still, she came not; and I think I was discontented. At any rate the strange fantastic plan came into my head as I lay awake at night, a mere whim at first, which grew serious and exciting by degrees, that I would go and call on Mary V. in person.
O how mad and odd and amusing it seemed, now that I thought of it! - to track down the shadow, to see where she lived and if she lived, and talk to her as though she were a person like the rest of us!
Consider how it would seem to set out in an omnibus to visit the shadow of a blue bell in Kew Gardens, when the sun stands halfway down the sky! or to catch the down from a dandelion! at midnight in a Surrey meadow. Yet it was a much more fantastic expedition than any of these that I proposed; and as I put on my clothes to start I laughed and laughed to think that such substantial preparation was needed for my task. Boots and hat for Mary V.! It seemed incredibly incongruous.
At length I reached the flat where she lived, and on [looking at] the signboard I found it stated ambiguously - like the rest of us - that she was both out and in. At her door, high up in the topmost storey of the building, I knocked and rang, and waited and scrutinised; no one came; and I began to wonder if shadows could die, and how one buried them; when the door was gently opened by a maid. Mary V. had been ill for two months; she had died yesterday morning, at the very hour when I called her name. So I shall never meet her shadow any more.
THE JOURNAL OF MISTRESS JOAN MARTYN
My readers may not know, perhaps, who I am. Therefore, although such a practice is unusual and unnatural - for we know how modest writers are - I will not hesitate to explain that I am Miss Rosamond Merridew, aged forty-five — my frankness is consistent! — and that I have won considerable fame among my profession for the researches I have made into the system of land tenure in mediaeval England. Berlin has heard my name; Frankfurt would give a soirée in my honour; and I am not absolutely unknown in one or two secluded rooms in Oxford and in Cambridge. Perhaps I shall put my case more cogently, human nature being what it is, if I state that I have exchanged a husband and a family and a house in which I may grow old for certain fragments of yellow parchment; which only a few people can read and still fewer would care to read if they could. But as a mother, so I read sometimes not without curiosity in the literature of my sex, cherishes most the ugliest and stupidest of her offspring, so a kind of maternal passion has sprung up in my breast for these shrivelled and colourless little gnomes; in real life I see them as cripples with fretful faces, but all the same, with the fire of genius in their eyes. I will not expound that sentence; it would be no more likely to succeed than if that same mother to whom I compare myself took pains to explain that her cripple was really a beautiful boy, more fair than all his brothers.
At any rate, my investigations have made a travelling pedlar of me; save that it is my habit to buy and not to sell. I present myself at old farm houses, decayed halls, parsonages, church vestries always with the same demand. Have you any old papers to show me? As you may imagine the palmy days for this kind of sport are over; age has become the most merchantable of qualities; and the state moreover with its Commissions has put an end for the most part to the enterprise of individuals. Some official, I am often told, has promised to come down and inspect their documents; and the favour of the ‘State’ which such a promise carries with it, robs my poor private voice of all its persuasion.
Still it is not for me to complain, looking back as I can look back, upon some very fine prizes that will have been of real interest to the historian, and upon others that because they are so fitful and so minute in their illumination please me even better. A sudden light upon the legs of Dame Elizabeth Partridge sends its beams over the whole state of England, to the King upon his throne; she wanted stockings! and no other need impresses you in quite the same way with the reality of mediaeval legs; and therefore with the reality of mediaeval bodies, and so, proceeding upward step by step, with the reality of mediaeval brains; and there you stand at the centre of all ages: middle beginning or end. And this brings me to a further confession of my own virtues. My researches into the system of land tenure in the 13th[,] 14th and 15th Centuries have been made doubly valuable, I am assured, by the remarkable gift I have for presenting them in relation to the life of the time. I have borne in mind that the intricacies of the land tenure were not always the most important facts in the lives of men and women and children; I have often made so bold as to hint that the subtleties which delight us so keenly were more a proof of our ancestors’ negligence than a proof of their astonishing painstaking. For what sane man, I have had the audacity to remark, could have spent his time in complicating his laws for the benefit of half a dozen antiquaries who were to be born five centuries after he was in the grave?
We will not here discuss this argument on whose behalf I have given and taken many shrewd blows; I introduce the question merely to explain why it is that I have made all these enquiries subsidiary to certain pictures of the family life which I have introduced into my text; as the flower of all these intricate roots; the flash of all this scraping of flint.
If you read my work called ‘The Manor Rolls’ you will be pleased or disgusted according to your temperament by certain digressions which you will find there.
I have not scrupled to devote several pages of large print to an attempt to show, vividly as in a picture, some scene from the life of the time; here I knock at the serf’s door, and find him roasting rabbits he has poached; I show you the Lord of the Manor setting out on some journey, or calling his dogs to him for a walk in the fields, or sitting in the high backed chair inscribing laborious figures upon a glossy she
et of parchment. In another room I show you Dame Elinor, at work with her needle; and by her on a lower stool sits her daughter stitching too, but less assiduously. ‘Child, thy husband will be here before thy house linen is ready,’ reproves the mother.
Ah, but to read this at large you must study my book! The critics have always threatened me with two rods; first, they say, such digressions are all very well in a history of the time, but they have nothing to do with the system [of] mediaeval land tenure; secondly, they complain that I have no materials at my side to stiffen these words into any semblance of the truth. It is well known that the period I have chosen is more bare than any other of private records; unless you choose to draw all your inspiration from the Paston Letters you must be content to imagine merely, like any other story teller. And that, I am told, is a useful art in its place; but it should be allowed to claim no relationship with the sterner art of the Historian. But here, again, I verge upon that famous argument which I carried on once with so much zeal in the Historian’s Quarterly. We must make way with our introduction, or some wilful reader may throw down the book and profess to have mastered its contents already: O the old story! Antiquaries’ Quarrels! Let me draw a line here then so and put the whole of this question of right and wrong, truth and fiction behind me.
On a June morning two years ago, it chanced that I was driving along the Thetford road from Norwich to East Harling. I had been on some expedition, a wild goose chase it was, to recover some documents which I believed to lie buried in the ruins of Caister Abbey. If we were to spend a tithe of the sums that we spend yearly upon excavating Greek cities in excavating our own ruins what a different tale the Historian would have to tell!
Such was the theme of my meditations; but nevertheless one eye, my archaeological eye, kept itself awake to the landscape through which we passed. And it was in obedience to a telegram from this that I leapt up in the carriage, at a certain point and directed the driver to turn sharply to the left. We passed down a regular avenue of ancient elm trees; but the bait which drew me was a little square picture, framed delicately between green boughs at the far end, in which an ancient doorway was drawn distinctly in lines of carved white stone.
As we approached[,] the doorway proved to be encircled by long low walls of buff coloured plaster; and on top of them, at no great distance was the roof of ruddy tiles, and finally I beheld in front of me the whole of the dignified little house, built like the letter E with the middle notch smoothed out of it.
Here was one of those humble little old Halls, then, which survive almost untouched, and practically unknown for centuries and centuries, because they are too insignificant to be pulled down or rebuilt; and their owners are too poor to be ambitious. And the descendants of the builder go on living here, with that curious unconsciousness that the house is in any way remarkable which serves to make them as much a part of it, as the tall chimney which has grown black with generations of kitchen smoke. Of course a larger house might be preferable, and I doubt not that they would hesitate to sell this old one, if a good offer were to be made for it. But that is the natural, and unself-conscious spirit which proves somehow how genuine the whole thing is. You can not be sentimental about a house you have lived in for five hundred years. This is the kind of place, I thought, as I stood with my hand on the bell, where the owners are likely to possess exquisite manuscripts, and sell them as easily [to] the first rag man who comes along, as they would sell their pig wash, or the timber from the park. My point of view is that of a morbid eccentric, after all, and these are the people of truly healthy nature. Can’t they write? they will tell me; and what is the worth of old letters? I always burn mine — or use them to tie over jampots.
A maid came, at last, staring meditatively at me, as though she ought to have remembered my face and my business. ‘Who lives here?’ I asked her. ‘Mr Martyn,’ she gaped, as if I had asked the name of the reigning King of England, is there a Mrs Martyn, and is she at home, and might I see her?’ The girl waved to me to follow, and led me in silence to a person who could, presumably, undertake the responsibility of answering my strange questions.
I was shown across a large hall, panelled with oak, to a smaller room in which a rosy woman of my own age was using a machine upon a pair of trousers. She looked like a housekeeper; but she was, the maid whispered, Mrs Martyn.
She rose with a gesture that indicated that she was not precisely a lady to receive morning calls, but was nevertheless the person of authority, the mistress of the house; who had a right to know my business in coming there.
There are certain rules in the game of the antiquary, of which the first and simplest is that you must not state your object at the first encounter, I was passing by your door; and I took the liberty -I must tell you I am a great lover of the picturesque, to call, on the chance that I might be allowed to look over the house. It seems to me a particularly fine specimen.’
‘Do you want to rent it, may I ask,’ said Mrs Martyn, who spoke with a pleasant tinge of dialect.
‘Do you let rooms then?’ I questioned.
‘O no,’ rejoined Mrs Martyn, decisively: ‘We never let rooms; I thought perhaps you wished to rent the whole house.’
it’s a little big for me; but still, I have friends.’
‘As well, then,’ broke in Mrs Martyn, cheerfully, setting aside the notion of profit, and looking merely to do a charitable act; ‘I’m sure I should be very pleased to show you over the house - I don’t know much about old things myself; and I never heard as the house was particular in any way. Still it’s a pleasant kind of place - if you come from London.’ She looked curiously at my dress and figure, which I confess felt more than usually bent beneath her fresh, and somewhat compassionate gaze; and I gave her the information she wanted. Indeed as we strolled through the long passages, pleasantly striped with bars of oak across the white wash, and looked into spotless little rooms with square green windows opening on the garden, and where I saw furniture that was spare but decent, we exchanged a considerable number of questions and answers. Her husband was a farmer on rather a large scale; but land had sunk terribly in value; and they were forced to live in the Hall now, which would not let; although it was far too large for them, and the rats were a nuisance. The Hall had been in her husband’s family for many a year, she remarked with some slight pride; she did not know how long, but people said the Martyns had once been great people in the neighbourhood. She drew my attention to the ‘y’ in their name. Still she spoke with the very chastened and clear sighted pride of one who knows by hard personal experience how little nobility of birth avails, against certain material drawbacks, the poverty of the land, for instance, the holes in the roof, and the rapacity of rats.
Now although the place was scrupulously clean, and well kept there was a certain bareness in all the rooms, a prominence of huge oak tables, and an absence of other decorations than bright pewter cups and china plates which looked ominous to my inquisitive gaze. It seemed as though a great deal must have been sold, of those small portable things that make a room look furnished. But my hostess’ dignity forbade me to suggest that her house had ever been other than it was at present. And yet I could not help fancying a kind of wistfulness in the way she showed me into rooms that were almost empty, compared the present poverty to days of greater affluence, and had it on the tip of her tongue to tell me that ‘Things had once been better.’ She seemed half apologetic, too, as she led me through a succession of bedrooms, and one or two rooms that might have served for sitting rooms if people had had leisure to sit there, as though she wished to show me that she was quite aware of the discrepancy between such a house and her own sturdy figure. All this being as it was, I did not like to ask the question that interested me most — whether they had any books? and I was beginning to feel that I had kept the good woman from her sewing machine long enough, when she suddenly looked out of the window, hearing a whistle below, and shouted something about coming in to dinner. Then she turned to me with some shy
ness, but an expression of hospitality, and begged me to ‘Sit down to dinner’ with them. ‘John, my husband, knows a sight more than I do of these old things of his, and I know he’s glad enough to find some one to talk to. It’s in his blood, I tell him,’ she laughed, and I saw no good reason why I should not accept the-invitation. Now John did not fall so easily beneath any recognized heading as his wife did. He was a man of middle age and middle size, dark of hair and complexion, with a pallor of skin that did not seem natural to a farmer; and a drooping moustache which he smoothed slowly with one well shaped hand as he spoke. His eye was hazel and bright, but I fancied a hint of suspicion when its glance rested upon me. He began to speak however, with even more of a Norfolk accent than his wife; and his voice, and dress asserted that he was, in truth if not altogether in appearance, a solid Norfolk farmer.
He nodded merely when I told him that his wife had had the kindness to show me his house. And then, looking at her with a twinkle in his eye he remarked, if she had her way the old place would be left to the rats. The house is too big, and there are too many ghosts. Eh Betty.’ She merely smiled, as though her share of the argument had been done long ago.
I thought to please him by dwelling upon its beauties, and its age; but he seemed little interested by my praises, munched largely of cold beef, and added ‘ayes’ and ‘noes’ indifferently.
A picture, painted perhaps in the time of Charles the First, which hung above his head, had so much the look of him had his collar and tweed been exchanged for a ruff and a silk doublet, that I made the obvious comparison.
‘O aye,’ he said, with no great show of interest, ‘that’s my grandfather; or my grandfather’s grandfather. We deal in grandfathers here.’
‘Was that the Martyn who fought at the Boyne,’ asked Betty negligently while she pressed me to take another slice of beef.
‘At the Boyne,’ exclaimed her husband, with query and even irritation - ‘Why, my good woman, you’re thinking of Uncle Jasper. This fellow was in his grave long before the Boyne. His name’s Willoughby,’ he went on speaking to me, as though he wished me to understand the matter thoroughly; because a blunder about such a simple fact was unpardonable, even though the fact itself might not be of great interest.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 259
