But all these difficulties and jealousies resolved themselves shortly into one formidable question; where were they to live after their marriage? Your grandfather had taken it for granted that Stella would not leave him, since she had become indispensable; and in the first flush of their joy both Stella and Jack had agreed that it would be possible to live on at Hyde Park Gate. Then they began to consider rooms, and habits, conveniences and rights, and it soon became obvious that the plan was impossible. And if they started wrong disasters would accumulate. Stella was convinced, for she began to entertain a just idea of her independence as a wife; and George and Gerald agreed also. It is significant however of your grandfather’s temper at the time that he continued to count upon their rash promise as though it were the natural and just arrangement, which did not need further consideration. His awakenment was bound to be painful, and there were many painful words to be said on his side; they had promised and they had deserted him. One night however Stella went up into his study alone, and explained what they felt. What she said, what he answered, I cannot tell; but for some time afterwards he could never hear the marriage spoken of without a profound groan, and the least encouragement would lead him to explain precisely how much he suffered, and how little cause there was for him to rejoice. But Stella was very patient, and just capable now under Jack’s influence of seeing another side to her stepfather’s remarks. There were signs that in years to come she would enjoy a lively and delightful companionship with him. They took a house at the end of the street, for that was the compromise, and in the beginning of April, 1897, they were married.
There had been so much talk of loss, loneliness and change that it was surprising to find that the house went on next day very much as usual. We went to Brighton, and letters began to come from Stella in Florence and from Jack giving promise, stirring as Spring, of happy new intimacies in the future. Indeed it was already a relief that there should be a separate house with a different basis from ours, untinged presumably with our gloom; under these influences that gloom itself seemed to lighten. For your grandfather, left alone with us, found doubtless much to try him in our crudeness and lack of sympathy but there was also great interest in our development, and we began to surprise him with voluntary remarks, bearing on matters of art and literature. Thoby was becoming, he said, ‘a fine fellow’; he discovered that suddenly your mother was grown ‘very handsome’; friendship with us, in short, was the great desire of his life, and Stella’s marriage seemed to clear the way for it. We had our theory too, of the way to manage him, and it was not Stella’s way, but promised well. Thus, when it was time to come back to London we were eager to see Stella again, and had many things to tell her, and much curiosity to see how she would live. But on the very morning of our return a letter came from George saying that Stella was in bed with a chill. When we got back home she was a little worse; almost immediately it seemed we were in the midst of serious illness, nurses, consultations, interviews and whispers. Like a nightmare it came upon us, waking terrible memories, confronting us with a possibility which we could not even believe, and then, like a nightmare, it was gone; Stella was said to be recovered. Indeed she went about a little, came in to tea and lunch with us, and walked out in Kensington Gardens. But she had a relapse, and then another; and the doctors ordered that for a certain time she should stay in her room. But she could see us; and it seemed that although the time was interrupted by terrible fears, to which we got accustomed however, and was never quite secure, our hopes were realized. She was certainly happy; she was less despondent, less modest than ever before, as though Jack had finally convinced her of her worth. That indeed was a service for which one might forgive much, and under the influence of her large presence and repose he lost many of his difficult ways, his emphatic insistence upon the commonplaces of life, and showed himself loyal and kind as he had always been, but more gentle, and far more sensitive of perception than he was of old. He only needed perhaps some such happiness to discard all his angularities, which were partly produced, no doubt, by the need he had been in for so many years of forcing his way through obstacles. All her arrangements prospered; she had her stepfather to tea with her regularly, and marvelled at his good spirits and health, and he was very tender to her when he heard that she was to be a mother. George and Gerald had their interviews alone. And your mother ‘came out’ that summer, and Stella had one of the purest pleasures of her life in gazing on her beauty and speculating on her success. She felt what a mother would have felt, and this was the sort of triumph that she could herself understand to the uttermost; she had attempted it. But once more she fell ill; again, almost in a moment, there was danger, and this time it did not pass away, but pressed on and on, till suddenly we knew that the worst had actually come to pass. Even now it seems incredible.
Chapter Four
It generally happens in seasons of such bewilderment as that in which we now found ourselves, that one person becomes immediately the central figure, as it were the solid figure, and on this occasion it was your mother. Many reasons combined to give her this prominence. She fulfilled the duties which Stella had but lately fulfilled; she had much of the beauty and something of the character which with but little stretch of the imagination we could accept as worthy to carry on the tradition; for in our morbid state, haunted by great ghosts, we insisted that to be like mother, or like Stella, was to achieve the height of human perfection. Vanessa then at the age of eighteen was exalted, in the most tragic way, to a strange position, full of power and responsibility. Everyone turned to her, and she moved, like some young Queen, all weighed down with the pomp of her ceremonial robes, perplexed and mournful and uncertain of her way. The instant need was to comfort, say rather, to be with, Jack. He had lost infinitely more than anyone could calculate; his sorrow seemed to stretch over years to come, withering them, and to cast a bitter light on his past. Never was there so cruel a loss, for it was cruel in the harshest way, in that it somehow seemed to damage him. Like some animal stunned by a blow on the head he went methodically about his work, worn and grim enough to behold, taking an abrupt mechanical interest in substantial facts, the make of a bicycle, or the number of men killed at the battle of Waterloo. But in the evenings he would come and sit with your mother, and loosen this tight tension and burst out what he could speak of his sorrow. Poor inarticulate man! In his dumb way he had worshipped beauty; it had been a long discipline; and he may well have doubted half consciously, whether he could ever achieve such heights again. Stella had been his pinnacle, all through his tenacious youth; he had loved her and her mother with all that he had of love; they had been to him poetry and youth. A very high nature perhaps might have preserved the echo; but Jack was more inclined to set his eye upon the hardship of his loss, unflinchingly, as he would have considered the harm done him by some unscrupulous human enemy. His attitude was courageous indeed, in a dogged way; but there was little of hope in it, and it threatened to cramp his future.
Your mother, as I have said, coming into this inheritance, with all its complications, was bewildered; so many demands were made on her; it was, in a sense, so easy to be what was expected, with such models before her, but also it was so hard to be herself. She was but just eighteen, and when she should have been free and tentative, she was required to be definite and exact. It came to pass then that she acted at first as though she had her lesson by heart but did not attach much meaning to it; to George she would be devoted and submissive; to Gerald affectionate; to her father helpful; to us protective. She was more than anyone, I suppose, left desolate by Stella’s death, bereft of happy intercourse, which had grown daily more intimate, and also she had much responsibility and there was no woman older than herself to share it with her. Strange was her position then; and an affectionate onlooker might well have asked himself anxiously what kind of nature she was able to oppose to it. One glance at her might have reassured him and yet served but to shift his anxiety. She looked so self-contained, and so mature that clearly she w
ould never act foolishly; but also there was so much promise of thought and development in eye and brow, and passionate mouth, that it was certain she would not long stay quiescent. The calm of the moment was as an instinctive shield to cover her wounded senses; but soon they would collect themselves and fall to work upon all these difficult matters so lavishly heaped upon them — and with what result?
She was beautiful, but she had not lived for eighteen years without revealing that she was also strong of brain, agile and determined; she had revealed so much in the nursery, where she would meet Thoby in argument, and press on to the very centre of the matter, whether it were question of art or morality. She was also, on her secret side, sensitive to all beauty of colour and form; but she hid this, because her views did not agree with those current around her, and she feared to give pain. Again, she was as quick to detect insincerity of nature as fallacy of argument, and the one fared as ill with her as the other; for her standard was rigid. But then she was bound to certain people by a kind of instinctive fidelity, which admitted of no question; it was, if anything, too instinctive. Such was the feeling she had for Jack before his marriage, and it was the first thread in her devotion to her mother or to Thoby. If her mother had lived it is easy to imagine how Vanessa, questing about her, like some active dog, would have tried one experiment after another, arguing, painting, making friends, disproving fallacies, much to her mother’s amusement; she would have delighted in her daughter’s spirit and adventures, mourned her lack of practical wisdom, and laughed at her failures, and rejoiced in her sense. But that is one of the things, which though they must have happened, yet, incredible though it seems, never did happen, death making an end of all these exquisite preparations. Instead Vanessa was first baffled by her mother’s death, and the unnatural life which for a time was entailed upon us, and now again, Stella’s death set her among entirely new surroundings.
People who must follow obvious tokens, such as the colour of the eye, the shape of the nose, and love to invent a melodramatic fitness in life, as though it were a sensational novel, acclaimed her now the divinely appointed inheritor of all womanly virtues, and with a certain haziness forgot your grandmother’s sharp features and Stella’s vague ones, and created a model of them for Vanessa to follow, beautiful on the surface, but fatally insipid within. Once again we went through the same expressions of sympathy; we heard again and again that so great a tragedy had never happened; sometimes it appeared almost in the light of a work of art; more often it revealed a shapeless catastrophe, from which there could be no recovery. But happily it was time for us to leave London; we had taken a house at Painswick; and the ghastly mourners, the relations and friends, went back to their own homes.
But for us the tragedy was but just beginning; as in the case of other wounds the pain was drugged at the moment, and made itself felt afterwards when we began to move. There was pain in all our circumstances, or a dull discomfort, a kind of restlessness and aimlessness which was even worse. Misery of this kind tends to concentrate itself upon an object, if it can find one, and there was a figure, unfortunately, who would serve our purpose very well. Your grandfather showed himself strangely brisk, and so soon as we came to think, we fastened our eyes upon him, and found just cause for anger. We remembered how he had tasked Stella’s strength, embittered her few months of joy, and now when he should be penitent, he showed less grief than anyone. On the contrary none was more vigorous, and there were signs at once which woke us to a sort of frenzy, that he was quite prepared to take Vanessa for his next victim. When he was sad, he explained, she should be sad; when he was angry, as he was periodically when she asked him for a cheque, she should weep; instead she stood before him like a stone. A girl who had character would not tolerate such speeches, and when she connected them with other words of the same kind, addressed to the sister lately dead, to her mother even, it was not strange that an uncompromising anger took possession of her. We made him the type of all that we hated in our lives; he was the tyrant of inconceivable selfishness, who had replaced the beauty and merriment of the dead with ugliness and gloom. We were bitter, harsh, and to a great extent, unjust; but even now it seems to me that there was some truth in our complaint; and sufficient reason why both parties should be unable at the time and without fault, to come to a good understanding. If he had been ten years younger, or we older, or had there been a mother or sister to intervene, much pain and anger and loneliness might have been spared. But again, death spoilt what should have been so fair.
There was also another cause to fret us and forbid us from judging clearly. Jack who was spending a terrible summer in London came to us regularly on Sunday. He was tired and morose, and it seemed that his only relief was to spend long hours with your mother or with me in a little summer house in the garden; he talked, when he talked, of Stella and the past; there were silences when no words seemed to have meaning; I remember the shape of a small tree which stood in a little hollow in front of us, and how, as I sat holding Jack’s hand, I came to conceive this tree as the symbol of sorrow, for it was silent, enduring and without fruit. But now and then Jack would say something bitter though restrained, about your grandfather and his behaviour to Stella, and how her death had not saddened him. That was enough to sharpen all our feelings against him; for we had an enthusiastic wish to help Jack, and in truth he seemed the person who best understood our misery. But although I shared these vigils equally at first with Vanessa she, by degrees, began to have more of Jack’s favour and confidence than I did; and directly any such favour is shown it becomes more marked and endures. She was the natural person to be with him, and also, as I have said, she had of old an affection for him, which although immature, was easily the starting point of much quicker and more fervent feelings, and the incentive now was urgent.
Profoundly gloomy as this all was, the intolerable part of it was the feeling of difference of temper and aim revealed day by day, among people who must live together. For Stella had united many things otherwise incompatible. We, (in future this ‘we’ must stand for your mother and me) walked alone when we could, and discussed the state of the different parties, and how they threatened to meet in conflict over her body. So far they did not more than threaten; but a man, or woman, of the world, George, for example or Kitty Maxse, might already foretell the supreme struggle of the future. Decency at present forbade open speech, but no doubt the suspicion was alive, and made itself felt in an unrest and intensity of feeling on George’s part which we saw, but failed as yet to interpret. George indeed had become and was to remain, a very important figure. He had advanced so suddenly into the closest intimacy with us, that it was not strange if in our blindfold state we made rash and credulous judgements about him. He had been once, when we were children, a hero to us; strong and handsome and just; he taught us to hold our bats straight and to tell the truth, and we blushed with delight if he praised. All the world so far as we could tell, applauded him too. Your grandmother showed keen delight in his presence, and, sentimental as children are, we believed that he was like her dead husband, and perhaps we were not wrong. His triumphs over Italian Countesses and watchmakers in the slums, who all revealed to him at once their inmost hearts, were part of our daily legend; and then he would play with us in the back garden, and pretend, for we guessed that it was pretence, that he read our school stories. His affections, his character, his soul, as we understood, were immaculate; and daily achieved that uncomfortable and mysterious victory which virtue, in books, achieves over intellect. Gerald, strange though it may seem, represented intellect in the contest. George was in truth, a stupid, good natured young man, of profuse, voluble affections, which during his mother’s lifetime were kept in check. When she died however, some restraint seemed to burst; he showed himself so sad, so affectionate, so boundlessly unselfish in his plans, that the voices of all women cried aloud in his praise, and men were touched by his modest virtues, at the same time that they were puzzled. What was it that made him so different from other
men?
Stupid he was, and good natured; but such qualities were not simple; they were modified, confused, distorted, exalted, set swimming in a sea of racing emotions until you were completely at a loss to know where you stood. Nature, we may suppose, had supplied him with abundant animal vigour, but she had neglected to set an efficient brain in control of it. The result was that all the impressions which the good priggish boy took in at school and college remained with him when he was a man; they were not extended, but were liable to be expanded into enormous proportions by violent gusts of passion; and [he] proved more and more incapable of containing them. Thus, under the name of unselfishness he allowed himself to commit acts which a cleverer man would have called tyrannical; and, profoundly believing in the purity of his love, he behaved little better than a brute. How far he wilfully deceived himself, how far he was capable of understanding, what juggleries went on in that obscure mind, is a problem which we at any rate could never solve. But the combination of something like reason and much unlike anything but irrational instinct was for ever confusing us, deceiving us and leading us alternately to trust and suspect him, until his marriage happily made such speculations but an occasional diversion for the intellect. But at the moment his position seemed perfectly accountable; he was the simple domestic creature, of deep feeling, who, from native goodness now that his chief joy was gone, was setting himself to do all he could to be mother and sister and brother to us in one. He spent his holiday with us and was always ready to take your grandfather for a walk, to discuss her difficulties with Vanessa, to arrange little plans for our amusement. Who shall say that there was not some real affection in this? some effort to do what he thought right against his will? But who again can distinguish the good from the bad, the feeling from the sentiment, the truth from the pose? We however were simply credulous, and ready to impose our conventional heroic shape upon the tumult of his character. Virtue it seemed was always victorious. Such were the figures that seemed unnaturally brought together in the great whirlpool; and it did not need the eye of a seer to foretell collision, fracture, and at length a sundering of the parts. Where are we today, indeed, who used to stand so close?
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 542
