But to return to Jack — when Stella accepted him, we approved, in our republic, which, though rapidly losing shape, was still in being after mother’s death. The marriage would have been, I think, a very happy marriage. It should have borne many children. And still she might have been alive. Certainly he was passionately in love; she at first passively. And it was through that engagement that I had my first vision — so intense, so exciting, so rapturous was it that the word vision applies — my first vision then of love between man and woman. It was to me like a ruby; the love I detected that winter of their engagement, glowing, red, clear, intense. It gave me a conception of love; a standard of love; a sense that nothing in the whole world is so lyrical, so musical, as a young man and a young woman in their first love for each other. I connect it with respectable engagements; unofficial love never gives me the same feeling. “My Love’s like a red, red rose, that’s newly sprang in June” — that was the feeling they gave; the feeling that has always come back, when I hear of ‘an engagement’; not when I hear of ‘an affair’. It derives from Stella and Jack. It springs from the ecstasy I felt, in my covert, behind the folding doors of the Hyde Park Gate drawing room. I sat there, shielded, being half insane with shyness and nervousness; reading Fanny Burney’s diary; and feeling come over me intermittent waves of very strong emotion — rage sometimes; how often I was enraged by father then! — love, or the reflection of love, too. It was bodiless; a light; an ecstasy. But also extraordinarily enduring. Once I came on a letter from him which she had slipped between the blotting paper — a sign of the lack of privacy in which we lived — and read it. “There is nothing sweeter in the whole world than our love”, he wrote. I put the page down, not so much guiltily, at having pried; but in a quiver of ecstasy at the revelation. Still I cannot read words that give me that quiver twice over. If I get a letter that pleases me intensely, I never read it again. Why I wonder? For fear lest it shall dwindle? This colour, this incandescence, was in Stella’s whole body. Her pallor became lit up, her eyes bluer. She had something of moonlight about her that winter, as she went about the house. “There’s never been anything like it in the world”, I said — or something like it — when she found me awake one night. And she laughed, tenderly, very gently, and kissed me and said, “Oh lots of people are in love as we are. You and Nessa will be one day”, she said. Once she told me, “You must expect people to look at you both”.
“Nessa”, she said, “is much more beautiful than I ever was” — at twenty-six she spoke of her beauty as a thing of the past. She told Aunt Mary — I think I read this too, nefariously, in some letter in a blotting book, she could only be neat and tidy now; she was to float us on the life of love; to launch us out on the ordinary woman’s life that promised such treasures. At some party, perhaps Nessa’s first party, a party where she wore white and amethysts perhaps, a party where Desmond remarked her ‘like a Greek slave’, she was certain that George Booth had fallen in love, and feared, tenderly foreboding, yet proudly, and gladly, how the Booths would mind if Nessa rejected him. Had Stella lived, the recollection makes me reflect, how different ‘coming out’ and those Greek slave years and all their drudgery and tyranny and rebellion would have been!
For some reason Stella and Jack’s engagement lasted all the months from July till April. It was a clumsy, cruel, unnecessary trial for them both. Looking back, it seems everything was done without care or consideration, clumsily, wantonly. I conceive that as the months of that long waiting time passed she slowly roused herself out of the numb, frozen state in which mother’s death had left her. At first she found in Jack rest and support; a refuge from all the worries and responsibilities of ‘the family’, relief too from those glooms which father never controlled, and spent on her. Slowly she became more positive, less passive; and asserted Jack’s rights; her desire too for her own house; her own husband; a life, a home of their own. At last the promise, apparently exacted by father, and tacitly accepted, that they were to live on with us after their marriage, an arrangement now incredible but then accepted, became intolerable; and she went up to father one night in his study; and told him so; and there was ‘an explosion’.
As the engagement went on, father became indeed increasingly tyrannical. He didn’t like the name ‘Jack’, I remember his saying; it sounded like the smack of a whip. He was jealous clearly. But in those days nothing was clear. He had his traditional pose; he was the lonely; the deserted; the old unhappy man. In fact he was possessive; hurt; a man jealous of the young man. There was every excuse, he would have said, had he been asked, for his explosions. And as by this time he had entrenched himself away from all truth, in a world which it is almost impossible to describe, for I know no one now who could inhabit such a world-the engagement was incredibly involved, frustrated, and impeded. At last in April 1897 the marriage took place — conventionally, ceremoniously, with bells ringing, and company collected, and silver engraved wedding invitations, at St Mary Abbots. Nessa and I handed flowers to the guests; father marched up the aisle with Stella on his arm.
“He took it for granted that he was to give her away”, George and Gerald grumbled. He ignored the fact that they had any claim. No one would have dared to take that privilege from him. It was somehow typical — his assumption; and his enjoyment of the attitude. They went to Italy; we to Brighton. One fortnight was the length of their honeymoon. And directly she came back she was taken ill. It was appendicitis; she was going to have a baby. And that was mismanaged too; and so, after three months of intermittent illness, she died — at 24 Hyde Park Gate, on July 27th, 1897.
By the time I had that room, when I was fifteen that is, “we four”— “us four” as we called ourselves — had become separate. That was symbolized by our separate rooms. Thoby was at Clifton, Adrian at Evelyns. Yet we were not so separate as brothers and sisters become at that age. Mother’s death and Stella’s death kept us, I suppose, together. We never spoke of either of them; I can remember the awkwardness with which Thoby avoided saying “Stella” when a ship called Stella sank. (I remember when Thoby died, that Adrian and I agreed to talk about him. “There are so many people that are dead now”, we said.) But this silence was known to cover something. And if I were to describe myself, at fifteen, I should have to describe Nessa and Thoby; both in great detail; for they [were] as much my life as anything. Thoby was two years (about) older than I was. He dominated us four. He was a clumsy little boy, very fat, bursting through his Norfolk jacket. He was not a fawning or ingratiating child, I imagine: Napoleonic, one of the Aunts described him as a baby, sitting on a rock with a fishing net, staring contemplatively.
“Those far away eyes” — someone said. He grew very quickly out of nursery ways. I cannot remember him, as I can Adrian, appealing, childish. Florence called him her Blue Mouse: mother called him her Benjamin. Thoby was a determined, resolute little boy: whose rages were very thorough and formidable. I see him struggling with Gerald; or so truculent with the nurses that father had to be sent for. He was powerful in mind, mastering things rather than guessing at them; not clever, but gifted. He had a natural, easy gift for drawing. He would take a sheet of paper, hold it at an odd angle and begin drawing a bird, at some queer place, so that I could not guess how the bird would become a bird. He was not precocious: now and then he won a prize, but failed to win an Eton scholarship. His Latin and Greek were rough, the masters said; his essays showed great intelligence. I remember his easy, vigorous, slovenly handwriting. School I think suited him; he went through what he went through silently. Was he unhappy, bullied? He never said so. I suspect he held his own, fairly easily, and would rather be among boys than at home. Yet, there was his sensibility — though rough and slovenly, according to reports, he it was who first told me — handing it on as something worth knowing — about the Greeks. The day after he came back from Evelyns the first time he was very shy; unfamiliar; yet affectionate, glad, in his queer speechless way, to be home; and we went walking up and down stairs togethe
r, and he told me the story of the Greeks: about Hector and Troy. I felt he was shy of telling it; and so must keep walking up and down; and so we kept on going upstairs and then downstairs, and he told me about the Greeks, fitfully, excitedly. To do that, he had to break through the schoolboy convention about ‘work’. There was no such convention about friends. He told me stories about the boys at Evelyns: then about the Clifton boys: and in the same way about his Cambridge friends. These stories went on and on every holidays. That was very characteristic. He had a great power for admiring his friends, for liking them. That I suppose was why he found school tolerable. Yet he held his own. He was not easy to put upon. He did not expect to win things, or care very much. I felt he had taken stock of his own power; dominated his friends in his own way; and was sure he would come into possession of his gifts all in good time. He could enjoy their gifts to the full. He was always amused by them; admired them; saw a great deal in them; and yet I think felt himself in his own way their equal. And would not let himself be put upon. This blend of mastery and sensibility, of friendliness and composure, gave him a great deal of character. He was amazingly reserved. Not a word of feeling was allowed to escape him. And yet under that strange awkward silence there would creep out a curious sympathy, a pride in us.
I continue (22nd September 1940) on this wet day; and we think of the weather now as it affects invasion, as it affects raids on London — not as weather that we like or dislike privately. I continue, for I am at a twist in my novel. I was writing about Thoby when I left off. And last night I tried to soothe myself to sleep (being in a pucker, as Clive would say, about the Anreps coming here) by thinking of St Ives. I will write about St Ives; and so, fittingly though indirectly, lead up to Thoby again.
Father, I think, was on one of his walking tours, in 1881 it must have been, when he discovered St Ives. He must have seen Talland House, which belonged to the G.W.R.; and have found it to let. He must have seen the town, almost as it had been in the sixteenth century; and the bay as it had been since time began. It was the first year, I think I have heard, that the line from St Erth to St Ives was open. Until then St Ives was about eight miles from any railway. And I suppose, munching his sandwich perhaps up at Tregenna, he had thought this might do for a summer place for us — and worked out, with [his] usual caution, ways and means. I was about to be born; and though they wished to limit their family, my conception (birth 1882) showed that they were not going to succeed. Adrian was to follow (1883) — also against their intention. It proves the ease and amplitude of those days that a man to whom money was an obscene nightmare, yet thought it feasible to take a house on the very toenail, as he said, of England — so that every summer he would be faced with the expense of moving family, nurses, servants, from one end of England to the other. Yet he did it. The distance was a drawback; for it meant that we could only go to St Ives in the summer. Our country was canalised into two or two months and a half. Yet that made the country more intense. And, in retrospect, probably nothing that we had as children was quite so important to us as our summer in Cornwall. To go away to the end of England; to have our own house, our own garden — to have that bay, that sea, and the mount: Clodgy and Halestown bog; Carbis Bay; Lelant; Zennor, Trevail, the Gurnard’s Head; to hear the waves breaking that first night behind the yellow blind; to sail in the lugger; to dig in the sands; to scramble over the rocks and see the anemones flourishing their antennae in the pools; now and then to find a small fish flapping there; to look up over the lesson book in the dining room and see the lights changing on the waves; to go down to the town and buy penny boxes of tintacks or whatever it might be at Lanham’s: Mrs Lanham wore false curls all round her face: the servants said Mr Lanham had married her ‘from an advertisement’; to smell all the fishy smells in the steep little streets; and see the innumerable cats; and the women on the raised steps outside the houses pouring pails of dirty water down the gutters; every day to have a great dish of Cornish cream, skinned with a yellow skin, handed round with plenty of brown sugar... I could fill pages remembering one thing after another that made the summer at St Ives the best beginning to a life conceivable. When they took Talland House, my father and mother gave me, at any rate, something I think invaluable. Suppose I had only Surrey or Sussex or the Isle of Wight to think about when I think about my childhood.
The town was then much as it must have been in the sixteenth century: a scramble, a pyramid, of whitewashed granite houses, crusting the slope made in the hollow under the Island. It was built there for shelter — built for a few fishermen, when Cornwall was a country more remote from England than Spain is now. It was a steep little town. Many houses had stairs running up from the pavement to the door. The walls were thick blocks of granite, to stand the sea and gale, I suppose. They were splashed with a wash the colour of Cornish cream. There was nothing mellow about them. There was no red brick: there was no thatch; the eighteenth century had left no mark, as it has in the south. St Ives might have been built yesterday; or in the time of the Conqueror. It had no architecture; no conscious arrangement. The market place was a jagged cobbled open place; the Church was a granite church — of what age, I do not know. It was a windy, noisy, fishy, vociferous, narrow-streeted town; the colour of a mussel or a limpet; like a bunch of rough shell fish, oysters or mussels, all crowded together.
Our house, Talland House, was outside the town; on the hill. [When it was built, for] whom it was built by the G.W.R., I do not know; some time in the forties [or] fifties I suppose; a square house, like a child’s drawing of a house; remarkable only for its flat roof, and the railing with crossed bars of wood that ran round the roof. It had, when we came there, a perfect view — right across the Bay to Godrevy Lighthouse. It had, running down the hill, little lawns, surrounded by thick escallonia bushes, whose leaves one picked and pressed and smelt: it had so many corners and lawns that each was named: the coffee garden; the fountain; the cricket ground; the love corner, under the greenhouse; jackmanii grew there; on the seat under the jackmanii, Leo Maxse became engaged to Kitty Lushington (I thought I heard Paddy talking to his son, Thoby announced); the strawberry bed; the kitchen garden; the pond; and the big tree. All different places were crowded together in that one garden; for it was a large garden — two or three acres at most, I suppose. You entered Talland House by a large wooden gate, the sound of whose latch clicking comes back: you went up the carriage drive, with its steep wall scattered with mesembryanthemums; and then came to the Lookout place on the right. This was a mound, grassy, unplanted, that jutted out over the garden wall. There one stood to look if the signal was down. If it were down, it was time to start for the station to meet the train from St Erth — the train that brought Mr Lowell, Mr Gibbs, the Stillmans, the Symondses, the Lushingtons. But that was entirely a grown-up affair — receiving friends. We never had friends to stay with us. Did we want them? I think ‘us four’ were completely self-sufficing. When once a girl called Elsie was brought over by Mrs Westlake from Zennor I “broomed her round the garden”, the grown ups laughing and approving. They liked us to be independent.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 548
