Life rather had taught her that facts, as she interpreted them, were by themselves of supreme importance; it was a matter of anxious moment to her that Lisa Stillman should like her brother-in-law, or that a workman wounded in an accident should find healthy employment. She kept herself marvellously alive to all the changes that went on round her, as though she heard perpetually the ticking of a vast clock and could never forget that some day it would cease for all of us. People of the most diverse kinds came to her when they had reason to rejoice or to weep; she seemed, if anything, a little indiscriminate in her choice of friends; but bores and fools have their moments. And it must be owned that living thus at high pressure she contrived to invest the whole scene with an inimitable bravery as though she saw it properly composed, of fools, clowns and splendid Queens, a vast procession on the march towards death. This intense preoccupation with the event of the moment arose partly no doubt because nature had fitted her to deal victoriously with such matters; but also because she had inborn in her and [had] acquired a deep sense of the futility of all effort, the mystery of life. You may see the two things in her face. ‘Let us make the most of what we have, since we know nothing of the future’ was the motive that urged her to toil so incessantly on behalf of happiness, right doing, love; and the melancholy echoes answered ‘What does it matter? Perhaps there is no future.’ Encompassed as she was by this solemn doubt her most trivial activities had something of grandeur about them; and her presence was large and austere, bringing with it not only joy and life, exquisite fleeting femininities, but the majesty of a nobly composed human being.
Written words of a person who is dead or still alive tend most unfortunately to drape themselves in smooth folds annulling all evidence of life. You will not find in what I say, or again in those sincere but conventional phrases in the life of your grandfather, or in the noble lamentations with which he fills the pages of his autobiography, any semblance of a woman whom you can love. It has often occurred to me to regret that no one ever wrote down her sayings and vivid ways of speech since she had the gift of turning words in a manner peculiar to her, rubbing her hands swiftly, or raising them in gesticulation as she spoke, I can see her, standing by the open door of a railway carriage which was taking Stella and some others to Cambridge, and striking out in a phrase or two pictures of all the people who came past her along the platform, and so she kept them laughing till the train went.
What would one not give to recapture a single phrase even! or the tone of the clear round voice, or the sight of the beautiful figure, so upright and so distinct, in its long shabby cloak, with the head held at a certain angle, a little upwards, so that the eye looked straight out at you. “Come children,” she would say directly she had waved her last fantastic farewell, and one would grasp her umbrella, and another her arm, and one no doubt would stand gaping, and she would call sharply, “Quick, quick”. And so she would pass with her swift step, through the crowds, and into some dingy train or omnibus, where perhaps she would ask the conductor why the company did not give him straw to stand on— “Your feet must be cold” — and hear his story and make her comment, until we were home just in time for lunch. “Don’t keep father waiting.” And at lunch in answer to some languid question, “So those young people are gone? Well, I don’t envy ‘em”, she would have her little story to tell, or perhaps her cryptic phrase which we could not interpret, but knew from the shrugs and “Perhaps” that it bore on one of those romances which they both loved to discuss. The relationship between your grandfather and mother was, as the saying is, perfect, nor would I for a moment dispute that, believing as I do that each of these much tried and by no means easy-going people found in the other the highest and most perfect harmony which their natures could respond to. Beautiful often, even to our eyes, were their gestures, their glances of pure and unutterable delight in each other. But, if I can convey my meaning by the metaphor, the high consonance, the flute voices of two birds in tune, was only reached by rich, rapid scales of discord, and incongruity. After all she was fifteen years the younger, and his age was made emphatic by the keen intellect, always voyaging, as she must have thought, alone in ice-bound seas. Her pride in it was like the pride of one in some lofty mountain peak, visited only by the light of the stars, and the rain of snow; it was enthusiastic, but very humble.
She delighted to transact all those trifling businesses which, as women feel instinctively, are somehow derogatory to the dignity which they like to discover in clever men; and she took it as proud testimony that he came to her ignorant of all depressions and elations but those that high philosophy bred in him. But she never belittled her own works, thinking them, if properly discharged, of equal, though other, importance with her husband’s. Thus in those moments, breathing spaces in the incessant conflict, when each rested secure for a second in the other’s embrace, she knew with just but always delighted pride, that he worshipped in her something as unchallengeably high as the lofty remote peak which she honoured in him. And each sprang rejoicing to do homage to qualities unlike their own — how sweet, released from the agony and loneliness of thought to recognize instantly the real presence of unquestionable human loveliness! as a seafarer wrapt for many days in mist on the fruitless waters lands at dawn upon a sunlit shore, where all nature enfolds him and breathes in his ear rest and assurance. She too whose days were spent in labours often trifling, and often vain, exulted as one clasped suddenly in strong arms and set above it all, silent, still and immortal. She was always the first to reinforce his own impulse towards the most remote and unprofitable tasks; it was on her assurance I think that he began his last long book, The Utilitarians, which would yield no wealth and very little fame, for she undertook that all other matters would prosper meanwhile.
But these are the pinnacles of life, and as time drew on, the struggle grew sharper, and the buoyancy of youth diminished. His health was worn, and the kind of praise which would have encouraged him, delayed unduly, as he complained. And by this time she had expanded so far, into such remote recesses, alleys in St Ives, London slums, and many other more prosperous but no less exacting quarters, that retrenchment was beyond her power. Every day brought her, it seemed, a fresh sprung harvest that must be despatched and would flourish infallibly tomorrow. Each evening she sat at her table, after some laborious afternoon, her hand moving ceaselessly, at the last a little erratically, as she wrote answers, advice, jests, warning, sympathy, her wise brow and deep eyes presiding, so beautiful still, but now so worn, so profoundly experienced that you could hardly call them sad. When she was dead I found a desk shut when we left St Ives with all the letters received that morning freshly laid in it, to be answered perhaps when she got to London. There was a letter from a woman whose daughter had been betrayed and asked for help; a letter from George, from Aunt Mary, from a nurse who was out of work, some bills, some begging letters, and many sheets from a girl who had quarrelled with her parents and must reveal her soul, earnestly, diffusely. “Ah, thank Heaven, there is no post tonight!” she would exclaim, half smiling and half sighing, on Saturday; and even your grandfather would look up from his book, press her hand, and vainly protest, “there must be an end of this, Julia!”
In addition to all her other labours she took it on herself to teach us our lessons, and thus established a very close and rather trying relationship, for she was of a quick temper, and least of all inclined to spare her children. “Your father is a great man.” But in no other way could we have learnt, in the short time we had, so much of her true nature, obscured by none of those graceful figments which interpose themselves generally in the gulf which lies between a middle-aged woman and her children. It might have been better, as it certainly would have tired her less, had she allowed that some of those duties could be discharged for her. But she was impetuous, and also a little imperious; so conscious of her own burning will that she could scarcely believe that there was not something quicker and more effective in her action than in another’s. Thus when your gra
ndfather was ill she would never suffer a nurse to be with him, nor could she believe that a governess would teach us as well as she did. And apart from economy, which always weighed with her, she had come to attach a desperate importance to the saving of time, as though she saw heap themselves all round her, duties and desires, and time to embrace them slipped from her and left her with grasping fingers. She had constantly in mind that comprehensive view of the final proportions of things which I have noticed; for her words were never trivial; but as her strength lessened her respites were fewer; she sank, like an exhausted swimmer, deeper and deeper in the water, and could only at moments descry some restful shore on the horizon to be gained in old age when all this toil was over. But when we exclaim at the extravagant waste of such a life we are inclined no doubt to lose that view of the surrounding parts, the husband and child and home which if you see them as a whole surrounding her, completing her, robs the single life of its arrow-like speed, and its tragic departure. What is noticeable about her, as I am come to think, is not the waste and the futile gallantry, but the niceness, born of sure judgement, with which her effort matched her aim. There was scarcely any superfluity; and it is for this reason that, past as those years are, her mark on them is ineffaceable, as though branded by the naked steel, the sharp, the pure. Living voices in many parts of the world still speak of her as of someone who is actually a fact in life. Whether she came merry, wrathful or in impulsive sympathy, it does not matter; they speak of her as of a thing that happened, recalling, as though all round her grew significant, how she stood and turned and how the bird sang loudly, or a great cloud passed across the sky. Where has she gone? What she said has never ceased. She died when she was forty-eight, and your mother was a child of fifteen. If what I have said of her has any meaning you will believe that her death was the greatest disaster that could happen; it was as though on some brilliant day of spring the racing clouds of a sudden stood still, grew dark, and massed themselves; the wind flagged, and all creatures on the earth moaned or wandered seeking aimlessly. But what figure or variety of figures will do justice to the shapes which since then she has taken in countless lives? The dead, so people say, are forgotten, or they should rather say, that life has for the most part little significance to any of us. But now and again on more occasions than I can number, in bed at night, or in the street, or as I come into the room, there she is; beautiful, emphatic, with her familiar phrase and her laugh; closer than any of the living are, lighting our random lives as with a burning torch, infinitely noble and delightful to her children.
Chapter Two
Her death, on the 5th of May, 1895, began a period of Oriental gloom, for surely there was something in the darkened rooms, the groans, the passionate lamentations that passed the normal limits of sorrow, and hung about the genuine tragedy with folds of Eastern drapery. Your grandfather had in him much of the stuff of a Hebrew prophet; something of the amazing vigour of his youth remained to him, but he no longer spent his strength in climbing mountains or coaching crews; all his devotion for many years had concentrated itself upon his home. And now that against all his expectations, his wife had died before him, he was like one who, by the failure of some stay, reels staggering blindly about the world, and fills it with his woe. But no words of mine can convey what he felt, or even the energy of the visible expression of it, which took place in one scene after another all through that dreadful summer. One room it seemed was always shut, was always disturbed now and then, by some groan or outburst. He had constant interviews with sympathetic women, who went in to see him nervously enough, and came out flushed and tear-stained, confused as people are who have been swept away on the tide of someone else’s emotion, to give their report to Stella. Indeed all her diplomacy was needed to keep him occupied in some way, when his morning’s work was over; and there were dreadful meal-times when, unable to hear what we said, or disdaining its comfort, he gave himself up to the passion which seemed to burn within him, and groaned aloud or protested again and again his wish to die. I do not think that Stella lost consciousness for a single moment during all those months of his immediate need. She would always have some little device to offer him, observing him so closely that she would suddenly beg one of us to speak to him directly, or ask him to walk with us. Sometimes at night she spent a long time alone in his study with him, hearing again and again the bitter story of his loneliness, his love and his remorse. For exhausted and unstrung as he was he came to torment himself piteously with the idea that he had never told his wife how much he had loved her, that she had endured anxiety and suffering by his side in silence.
“I was not as bad as Carlyle, was I?” I have heard him ask. Stella perhaps knew little of Carlyle, but her assurance came over and over again, tired but persistent. There is, no doubt, a strange comfort in making the living hear your confession of wrong done to the dead; not only can they reassure you from their own observation, but they also represent, mysteriously, a power which can be appeased by your confession, and can grant you something approaching a final absolution. For these reasons, then, and also because it was his nature and habit to find ease in the expression of his feelings, he did not scruple to lay before her his sufferings and to demand perpetual attention, and whatever comfort she had to give. But what comfort could she give? From the nature of the case there was little to be done; all depended therefore upon what she was, for suddenly she was placed in the utmost intimacy with a man who as her stepfather and an elderly man of letters she had hitherto regarded only with respect and a formal affection. Stella’s position, until this crisis, had been in some ways peculiar; indeed her character altogether, as one sees it now illuminated afresh by one’s own equality of age, was remarkable; remarkable for what it was, and for its destiny; great issues hung upon her life; but the shortness and almost tremulous quality of the early years make it hard to tell the story with any decision.
She was not clever, she seldom read a book; and this fact had I think an immense influence upon her life, a disproportionate influence, indeed. She exaggerated her own deficiency, and, living in close companionship with her mother, was always contrasting their differences, and imputing to herself an inferiority which led her from the first to live in her mother’s shade. Your grandmother too was, I have said, ruthless in her ways, and quite indifferent, if she saw good, to any amount of personal suffering. It was characteristic of her to feel that her daughter was, as she expressed it, part of herself, and as a slower and less efficient part she did not scruple to treat her with the severity with which she would have treated her own failings, or to offer her up as freely as she would have offered herself. Once before your grandparents’ marriage, when your grandfather remarked to her upon the harshness with which she treated Stella in comparison with the other children who were both boys, she gave the answer I have written.
As a child then, Stella was suppressed, and learned early to look upon her mother as a person of divine power and divine intelligence. But later as Stella grew older and developed her own beauty, her own singular charm and temperament, her mother ceased her harshness, if it were ever rightly called so, and showed only the true cause of it, a peculiar depth and intimacy of feeling. They always kept in the main the relationship which nature perhaps had ordained. Stella was always the beautiful attendant handmaid, feeding her mother’s vivid flame, rejoicing in the service, and making it the central duty of her life. But besides this she began very soon to enjoy the influence of her gifts on others; she was beautiful, more beautiful than her pictures show, for much of her phantom loveliness came from accidents of the moment — the pale luminous complexion, the changing light in the eyes, the movement and ripple of the whole. If your grandmother’s was a head of the finest period of Greek art, Stella’s was Greek too, but it was Greek of a later and more decadent age, making with its softer lines and more languid shape, a closer appeal. But in each case, their beauty was the expression of them. Stella was mutable, modest, but somehow with what is called charm or magic po
ssessed of wonderful distinction, and the power of penetrating deeply into people’s minds. It was not I suppose for what she said, for that was simple enough; but for her ripple of sweetness and laughter over a shape, dimly discerned, as of statuesque marble. She was so gay, so feminine, and at the same time had about her something of the large repose which in her mother, under stress of circumstance, had resolved itself into an enduring melancholy. Stella and her coming out, and her success and her lovers, excited many instincts long dormant in her mother; she liked young men, she enjoyed their confidences, she was intensely amused by the play and intrigue of the thing; only, as she complained, Stella would insist upon going home, long before the night was over, for fear lest she should be tired. That indeed was what, with desperate use of imagery, I have called her marble shape; for all her triumphs were mere frippery on the surface of this constant preoccupation with her mother. It was beautiful, it was almost excessive; for it had something of the morbid nature of an affection between two people too closely allied for the proper amount of reflection to take place between them; what her mother felt passed almost instantly through Stella’s mind; there was no need for the brain to ponder and criticize what the soul knew. Your grandmother would no doubt have liked some brisker resistance, some intellectual opposition, calling out a different sort of care; she may well have felt that the tie was too close to be wholesome, and might hinder Stella from entertaining those natural feelings upon which she set so high a value. Even a short parting was unduly painful; Stella was white as a ghost for days before she went abroad, and broke once into a passion of tears. “What can it matter where we are”, she said, “so long as we are all together?”
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 540
