The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled. It made one hypocritical and immeshed in the conventions of sorrow. Many foolish and sentimental ideas came into being. Yet there was a struggle, for soon we revived, and there was a conflict between what we ought to be and what we were. Thoby put this into words. One day before he went back to school, he said: “It’s silly going on like this... sobbing, sitting shrouded, he meant. I was shocked at his heartlessness; yet he was right, I know; and yet how could we escape?
It was Stella who lifted the canopy again. A little light crept in.
June 20th 1939. I was thinking as I crossed the Channel last night of Stella; in a very jerky disconnected way, with people quarrelling outside the door; the boat train arriving; chains clanking; and the steamer giving those sudden stertorous snorts. And as the first morning after a broken night is distracted and broken, instead of beginning Roger again, as I ought, I will write down some of my distracted and disconnected thoughts; to serve, should the time come, for notes.
How many people are there still able to think about Stella on the 20th June 1939? Very few. Jack died last Christmas; George and Gerald a year or two ago; Kitty Maxse and Margaret Massingberd have been dead many years now. Susan Lushington and Lisa Stillman are still alive; but how they live and where, I know not. Perhaps thus I think of her less disconnectedly and more truly than anyone now living, save for Vanessa and Adrian; and perhaps old Sophie Farrell. Of her childhood I know practically nothing. She was the only daughter of the handsome barrister Herbert Duckworth, but as he died when she was three or four, she did not remember him, or those years when her mother was as happy as anyone can be. I think, from stray anecdotes and from what I noticed myself, that when she came to consciousness as a child the unhappy years were at their height. That would account for some qualities in Stella. Her first memories were of a very sad widowed mother, who “went about doing good” — Stella wished to have that on the tombstone — visiting the slums, visiting too the Cancer Hospital in the Brompton Road. Our Quaker Aunt told me that this was her habit; for she said how one case there had “shocked her”. Thus Stella as a child lived in the shade of that widowhood; saw that beautiful crape-veiled figure daily; and perhaps took then the ply that was so marked — that attitude of devotion, almost canine in its touching adoration, to her mother; that passive, suffering affection; and also that complete unquestioning dependence.
They were sun and moon to each other; my mother the positive and definite; Stella the reflecting and satellite. My mother was stern to her. All her devotion was given to George who was like his father; and her care was for Gerald, born posthumously and very delicate. Stella she treated severely; so much so that before their marriage my father ventured a protest. She replied that it might be true; she was hard on Stella because she felt Stella “part of myself”. A pale silent child I imagine her; sensitive; modest; uncomplaining; adoring her mother, thinking only how she could help her, and without any ambition or even character of her own. And yet she had character. Very gentle, very honest, and in some way individual — so she made her own impression on people. Friends, like Kitty Maxse, the brilliant, the sparkling, loved her with a real laughing tenderness for her own sake. Her charm was great; it came partly from this modesty, from this honesty, from this perfectly simple unostentatious unselfishness; it came too from her lack of pose, her lack of snobbery; and from the genuineness, from something that was — could I put my finger on it — perfectly herself, individual. This unnamed quality — the sensitiveness to real things — was queer in the sister of George and Gerald, who were so opaque and conventional; who had so innate a respect for the conventions and respectabilities. By some odd fling in her birth, she had escaped all taint of Duckworth philistinism; she had none of their shrewd middle-class complacency. Instead of their little brown eyes that were so greedy and twinkling, hers were very large and rather a pale blue. They were dreamy, candid eyes. She was without their instinctive worldliness. She was lovely too, in a far vaguer, less perfect way than my mother. She reminded me always of those large white flowers — elder-blossom, cow parsley, that one sees in the fields in June. Perhaps my mother’s laughing nickname— ‘Old Cow’ — suggests the cow parsley. Or again, a White faint moon in a blue sky suggests her. Or those large white roses that have many petals and are semi-transparent. She had beautiful fair hair, growing in horns over her forehead; and no colour in her face at all. As for teaching — she had perhaps a governess; went to classes; was taught the violin by Arnold Dolmetsch and played in Mrs Marshall’s orchestra. But there was a stoppage in her mind, a gentle impassivity about books and learning. As Jack told me after her death, she thought herself so stupid as to be almost wanting; and said that the rheumatic fever she had as a child had (I remember the word) ‘touched’ her. But again, what was remarkable considering the Duckworth strain — so boorish, so rustic, so philistine — is that however simple she was in brain, she was not, as George’s sister might so well have been, a cheery ordinary English upper middle class girl with rosy cheeks and bright brown eyes. She was herself. She remains quite distinct in my mind. What is odd is that I cannot compare her either in character or face with anyone else. What she would have looked like now in a room full of other people I cannot imagine; or how she would have talked. I have never seen anyone who reminded me of her; and that is true too of my mother. They do not blend in the world of the living at all.
She was nineteen when I was six or seven; and as a girl could not then go about London alone, I used as a small child to be sent with her, as chaperone. Among my earliest memories is the memory of going out with her perhaps to shop, or to pay some call; and, the errand done, she would take me to a shop and give me a glass of milk and biscuits sprinkled with sugar on a marble table. And sometimes we went in hansoms. But she lived, of course, downstairs in the drawing room; pouring out tea; and there were many young men, it seemed when one dashed in for a second, sitting round her. Vaguely we knew that Arthur Studd was in love with her; and Ted Sanderson; and I think Richard Norton; and Jim Stephen. That great figure with the deep voice and the wild eyes would come to the house looking for her, with his madness on him; and would burst into the nursery and spear the bread on his swordstick and at one time we were told to go out by the back door and if we met Jim we were to say that Stella was away.
19th July 1939. I was forced to break off again, and rather suspect that these breaks will be the end of this memoir.
I was thinking about Stella as we crossed the Channel a month ago. I have not given her a thought since. The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual. For this reason — that it destroys the fullness of life — any break — like that of house moving — causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin splinters. As I say to L[eonard]: “What’s there real about this? Shall we ever live a real life again?”
“At Monks House,” he says. So I write this, taking a morning off from the word filing and fitting that my life of Roger means — I write this partly in order to recover my sense of the present by getting the past to shadow this broken surface. Let me then, like a child advancing with bare feet into a cold river, descend again into that stream.
... Jim Stephen was in love with Stella. He was mad then. He was in t
he exalted stage of his madness. He would dash up in a hansom; leave my father to pay it. The hansom had been driving him about London all day. The man wanted perhaps a sovereign. It was paid. For ‘dear Jim’ was a great favourite. Once, as I say, he dashed up [to] the nursery and speared the bread. Another time, off we went to his room in De Vere Gardens and he painted me on a small bit of wood. He was a great painter for a time. I suppose madness made him believe he was all powerful. Once he came in at breakfast, “Savage has just told me I’m in danger of dying or going mad”, he laughed. And soon he ran naked through Cambridge; was taken to an asylum; and died. This great mad figure with his broad shoulders and very clean cut mouth, and the deep voice and the powerful face — and the very blue eyes — this mad man would recite poetry to us; “The Burial of Sir John Moore”, I remember; and he always brings to mind some tormented bull; and also Achilles — Achilles on his pressed bed lolling roars out a deep applause. He was in love with Stella — incongruously enough. And we had orders to tell him, if we met him in the street, that she was away, staying with the Lushingtons at Pyports. There was a great mystery about love then.
Jim was one of her lovers. The other — that is, the most important — was Jack Hills. It was at St Ives that she refused him; late one night we heard her sobbing through the attic wall. He had gone at once. A refusal in those days was catastrophic. It meant a complete breach. Human relations, at least between the sexes, were carried on as relations between countries are now — with ambassadors, and treaties. The parties concerned met on the great occasion of the proposal. If this were refused, a state of war was declared. That explains why she cried so bitterly. For she had done something of great practical as well as emotional importance. He went off at once — to Norway to fish; later perhaps they met in a completely formal way at parties. Negotiations were kept faintly alive through my mother; an interpreter was necessary. All this procedure gave love its solemnity. Feelings were banked up; silence interposed; there was in every family a code, a religious code, that penetrated, somehow or other, to the children. It was secret; but we guessed.
Thus, when my mother died, Stella was left without any negotiator, for my father did not fill the part. He must have come back — it proves how deep the feeling was to admit such a return — the night before my mother died. It was desperate but not hopeless.
June 8th 1940. I have just found this sheaf of notes, thrown away into my waste-paper basket. I had been tidying up; and had cast all my life of Roger into that large basket, and with it, these sheets too. Now I am correcting the final page proofs of Roger; and it was to refresh myself from that antlike meticulous labour that I determined to look for these pages. Shall I ever finish these notes — let alone make a book from them? The battle is at its crisis; every night the Germans fly over England; it comes closer to this house daily. If we are beaten then — however we solve that problem, and one solution is apparently suicide (so it was decided three nights ago in London among us) — book writing becomes doubtful. But I wish to go on, not to settle down in that dismal puddle.
Jack Hills, I was saying, came back the night before my mother died, which shows that though the negotiations had been broken off, there must have been a connection, or how could he have come that night of great crisis? We were in the back drawing room, and there was the tea tray, for we had a curious habit of drinking tea about nine o’clock. The silver hot water jug which I still possess — but it has a hole in it — had a handle that grew hot. Aunt Mary, summoned from Brighton, picked it up and put it down quickly. “Only Mrs Stephen and Stella can manage that”, said Jack Hills with the queer sad little smile that went with the little joke. And I remember that he said ‘Stella’. And since he was there, that last night, the affair must have been in being — sufficiently so to make it possible for him to be with us in intimacy. That was the 4th May, 1895.
The next thing I remember is the night at Hindhead (August 22nd 1896) — the black and silver night of mysterious voices, the night when father packed us off to bed early; and we heard voices in the garden; and saw Stella and Jack passing; and disappearing; and the tramp came; and Thoby countered him; and Nessa and I sat up in our bedroom waiting; and Stella never came; and at last in the early morning she came and told us that she was engaged; and I whispered, “Did mother know?” and she murmured, “Yes”.
And next morning at breakfast there was excitement and emotion and gloom. Adrian cried; and Jack kissed him; and father said gently but seriously: “We must all be happy, because Stella is happy” — a command which, poor man, he could not himself obey.
But Jack Hills? He had been at Eton with George. He stands in my mind’s picture gallery for a type — and a desirable type; the English country gentleman type, I might call it, by way of running a line round it; and I add, it is a type I have seldom been intimate with; perhaps no one is ever intimate with the country gentleman type; yet for nine years I was intimate with Jack Hills; a reason perhaps why we became so completely separate later; it was impossible to begin again formally after that intimacy. And the country gentleman came to the surface and separated us.
Can I quickly fill in that outline? To begin then, he was the son of a commonplace little round man — Judge Hills— ‘Buzzy’ he was called in the family — and like a bluebottle, buzzing, I still remember him; short, jocular, in knickerbockers, giving us Russian toffee up at Corby. Buzzy had once written a sonnet that had been taken for Shakespeare’s, and liked to make little facetious jokes with young ladies — I remember Susan Lushington “didn’t know which way to look”, she said, when he chaffed her about a husband— “I seemed to be sitting on a tripod and looking into the future”, Buzzy said, having archly used the word husband when it should have been father — Buzzy lived chiefly in Egypt, and Mrs Hills — Anna her name was — lived mostly alone at Corby. She was a hard, worldly woman, tightly dressed in black satin in London; up at Corby, a county lady, collecting Chelsea enamel snuff boxes, with ambitions to be the friend of intellectual men. She detested women; she got on very well with Andrew Lang. He stayed there often; and she described a party when the local dentist came in a frock coat— “all the other men looking so picturesque in knickerbockers.” And she said: “I was in mourning for nine people at Easter”; also, looking at horses in the paddock, “That makes the second pair”; also she stressed “under housemaid” to impress us that she had several; and dwelt on the noble descent of the Curwens, to whom they were related; and went weekly to Naworth with a wreath to lay on Christopher Howard’s grave. It was handed in at the carriage; like a picnic basket — the weekly wreath. And I still see her in shiny black satin and feathered Victorian hat bending over the grave in Naworth burial ground; and Susan whispering in agitation “Suppose Lady Carlisle or one of them should come out and catch us!” These recollections spring from that dreary and terrifying week at Corby after Stella’s death in the autumn of 1897. They leased Corby from the Howards; the lion stood with his tail perfectly straight on top of the roof. The river dashed through the grounds; and there I saw Jack catch a salmon; for the first time after those desperate months he looked triumphant; and worn as he [had] come to look, I was struck by his sudden exultation as the line tautened and he held the fish there in the river. We saw it afterwards in the game larder; and Mrs Hills asked: “Has he those little creatures on him?” It was a proof of freshness, I think, if you found lice on a salmon. Tuddenham, the keeper, who stood by us on the bank, said: “He’s hooked him.”
To return to Anna Hills. She hated women. But I doubt that she was sexually ambitious. I think all she wanted was to rule a little court of well brushed, mildly well-known males; in the decorous, snobbish Victorian manner. She was thankful, I remember she told us, that she had no daughters; and it was plain she detested having us two rather gawky girls to stay. “Your hair’s parted awry”, she said, fixing me with her little black eyes. Fortunately she had three sons; and they were sent to Eton and Oxford. She liked the soft sweet voiced Eustace with his draw
l, and his pleasant manners, and his gentle ways, far the best. Jack and she were on very distant terms. Thus it was natural that when he was living alone in Ebury Street, very hard up, very hard worked, stammering, and lonely, that he came to my mother for sympathy. They were very intimate. Indeed Kitty Maxse said, discussing my mother and her masterful ways once: “For instance, how could Mrs Hills have liked it — Jack treating your mother as if she were his?” He was, roughly speaking, affectionate, honest, domestic, and a perfect gentleman. He was a real [countryman] too; not a fake; a passionate countryman. He rode very well; he fished very well; and there was too a vein of poetry in him. Once when we met years later he told me he read every book of new poetry that came out; and thought the young poets (then Siegfried Sassoon; Robert Graves; and de la Mare) every bit as good as the old. He read philosophy too; Nettleship, the Oxford philosopher, had been a kind of god to him. “He was like Christ”, I remember his saying, in his emphatic sententious way, as he tried very laboriously to explain Nettleship’s philosophy; he lent us the book; it was at Warboys that I remember him explaining Plato to me and Nessa and Marny Vaughan. Gerald, who sat beneath the window, sneered later: “Well, how did the Sunday prayer meeting go off?” But he was not, compared with my own friends, anything but a simple, primitive-minded man. Unlike them, however — was it for this I liked him, yet could never be altogether at my ease with him? — he was an all-round man; without any gift that dominated, he did a great many different things. He was a Gunner. “I have heard of him standing on one foot, driving three horses”, Ethel Dilke wrote when the engagement was public, “and I’ve no doubt he does other things as well.” He was a good solicitor. Doggedly he worked his way high up into the firm of Roper and Whateley; of Whateley he used to tell many stories: “a disgusting man, but in some ways the ablest man I have ever known. He was a great fisherman — so they say. And I like his fishing books.” Politics came later. He was also very deft with his hands. But as I heard my mother tell my father once, he was ‘nothing out of the way’ intellectually. His appearance was in keeping with this rough sketch. He had beautiful brown eyes, a nose with an obstinate knob at the end of it; curious wrinkles, like a dachshund’s, round his retreating chin. (He was of course very fond of dogs.) He stammered, and his stammer made his very positive statements— “A duck must have water” — all the more positive when at last he got them out. We laughed at him and could imitate him as time went on. He was scrupulously clean; he washed all over ever so many times a day, and was scrupulously well dressed, as a Victorian city solicitor; also as a countryman. The word ‘scrupulous’ suggests itself when I think of Jack Hills. He was scrupulously honest, honourable, in the Eton and Balliol sense, but there was more to his scrupulosity than that. He it was who first spoke to me openly and deliberately about sex — in Fitzroy Square, with the green carpet and the red Chinese curtains. He opened my eyes on purpose, as I think, to the part played by sex in the life of the ordinary man. He shocked me a little, wholesomely. He told me that young men talked incessantly of women; and ‘had’ them incessantly. “But are they—” I hesitated for a word and then ventured “honourable?” He laughed, “of course — of course”, he assured me. Sexual relations had nothing to do with honour. Having women was a mere trifle in a man’s life, he explained, and made not a jot of difference to their honourableness — to their reputation with other men. I was incredibly, but only partially, innocent. I knew nothing about ordinary men’s lives, and thought all men, like my father, loved one woman only, and were ‘dishonourable’ if unchaste, as much as women; yet, at the same time I had known since I was sixteen or so, all about sodomy, through reading Plato. That was Jack’s honesty; and it differed from George’s or Gerald’s. Neither of them would have spoken to any girl as cleanly, humorously, openly, about sex. That quality penetrated to us as children, and he brought too, country life into our distinguished literary, book-loving world. He taught us to sugar trees; he gave us his copy of Morris’s Butterflies and Moths, over which I spent many hours, hunting up our catches among all those pictures of hearts and darts and setaceous Hebrew characters. For I had the post of name finder in our Entomological Society; and was scolded severely by Thoby, I remember, for slackness. At dinner one night Gerald disclosed, with his teasing and treacherous laughter, how we had a store of dying insects in old tooth-powder jars at the bottom of the well. Greatly to our relief instead of scolding and forbidding, mother and, I think, father recognised our mania; and put it on a legal basis; bought us nets and setting boards; and indeed she went with Walter Headlam down to the St Ives public house and bought us rum. How strange a scene — my mother buying rum. She would go round the sugar after we were in bed.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 547
