The Letters Of Vita Sackvillewest To Virginia

Woolf Victoria Sackvillewest Virginia Woolf

Mitchell Alexander Leaska Louise A Desalvo
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 'Amon^ tke greatest pleasures provided by
is tin
tkese two decades of well-edited letters
ckance to recall every love affair's keenest
intoxication —tke tkrill of kearing tke tking
you want insisting tkat you take it... Tke
result is a volume tkat reads like a kook,
I not just a gathering of marvelous scraps."
The New York Times Book Review

mt

Wm

r r ri n r
r D r
r

Vita Sackvilfe-West
TO Virginia Woo if
LOUISE DESALVD and MITCHELL LEASKA
 ickville-West ana Virginia Wbolf met
at a dinner party given by Clive Bell in
London on December 14, 1922. Their
love affair grew out or an instant friendship.
Virginia confided her impressions or Vita to

her diary: "She is a pronounced Sapphist, &

may... nave an eye on me, old though I am.
Nature might have sharpened her faculties.

Inob as I am, I trace her passions 500 ye«

hack, & they hecome romantic to me, like
old vellow wine."

Vita was quite taken with Virginia as well.

CD
cu
Jhe wrote to her husharid Harold
Nicholson: "I simply adore Virginia ^bolf, ~ C\J
and so would you. You would fall quite flat
-J
O
O
hefore her charm and personality.... Mrs

^>olf is so simple: she does give the

sion of something hig. She is

im A
utterly unaf-
II
fected.... At first you think she is plain, then c o
a sort of spiritual beauty imposes itself on is co
you, and you find a fascination in watching w o
She both detached and human,
O CO
her.... is
CO
silent till she wants to say something, and
then says it supremely well. She is quite old.

I've rarely taken such a fancy to anyone,

and I think she likes me. At least she's

asked me to Richmond where she lives.

Darling, I have quite lost my heart."

The Letters of Vita Sackville-West tp Virginia

Woolj contains over 500 letters, both from

Vita to Virginia and from Virginia to Vita in

reply, a monument to a passionate relationship

that lasted until Woolf's death in 1941.
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2012

http://archive.org/details/lettersofvitasacOOsack
 The Letters of
Vita Sackville-West
to Virginia Woolf

Edited by

Louise DeSalvo and

Mitchell Leaska

Introduction by Mitchell Leaska

CLE1S
 The Letters ofVita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf © by Nigel Nicolson 1984.
Introduction © by Mitchell Leaska 1984.
Text and commentary © by Mitchell Leaska and Louise DeSalvo 1984

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, or television

reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Cleis Press Inc., P.O. Box 14684, San Francisco, California 94114.

Printed in the United States.

Cover design: Scott Idleman

Text design: Ned Takahashi

Logo art: Juana Alicia

Excerpts from The Letters ofVirginia Woolf, volumes 3, 4, 5, 6, edited by Nigel Nicolson
and Joanne Trautmann are reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and the
Hogarth Press ©by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980.

Photographs reproduced courtesy of Nigel Nicolson.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sackville-West,V. (Victoria), 1892-1962

The Letters ofVita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf

Reprint. Originally published: New York: Morrow, ©1985.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.
Sackville-West, V (Victoria), 1892-1962— Correspondence.
Woolf,Virginia, 1882-1941 — Correspondence.
Authors, English —20th century—Correspondence.
I.Woolf,Virginia, 1882-1941. II. DeSalvo, Louise A., 1942- .

HI. Leaska, Mitchell. IVTitle.

PR6037.A35Z497 2001 823'912 85-16903
ISBN 1-57344-136-8

Edition
First Cleis Press
pp pp
123456789 10 PR6037
.A35Z497
2001X
Table of Contents

Editorial Note 5

Introduction 7

March 1923 - Early 1924 37

March- December 1924 41

January- November 1925 51

December 1925- January 1926 65
January- February 1926 77
March- May 1926 97
May- September 1926 107
October 1926- January 1927 125
January- February 1927 143
February- May 1927 149
May- September 1927 169
October- December 1927 197
January- April 1928 207
May- September 1928 227
October- December 1928 239
January-July 1929 253
July- December 1929 283
1930- 1931 299
1932 301
1933 305
1934- 1936 327
1937 333
1938 343
1939 353
1940- 1942 363

Postcnpt 377
Index 378
Editorial Note

All the letters ofVita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, with the exception of eighteen,

are preserved in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection in the New York Public
Library. The remaining letters are at the University of Sussex Library. With one or two
exceptions, the letters are handwritten and, for the most part, legible.Vita was an accu-
rate speller and she followed the rules of traditional grammar, syntax, punctuation, and
paragraphing.
Establishing the chronological order of the letters was quite another matter. Vita
was not especially concerned with dates. Often only the day of the week is given.

Sometimes she added the numerical date, and sometimes the month. But rarely did she

enter the day, the date, the month, and the year. In almost every instance, however, after
considerable research, we were able to deduce the letter's exact place in the sequence
either from its internal evidence or from the date given in Virginias corresponding
letter—or both. All other dating information, added editorially, has been set within
square brackets.
Most of Vita's letters were written on stationery headed 'Long Barn, Weald,
Sevenoaks' or, after 1932,'Sissinghurst Castle, Kent'. These addresses have been repro-
duced exactly as they appear in the original letters. When she wrote on blank sheets,
she occasionally wrote only part of the address: 'Long Barn', for example. All informa-
tion added for fuller place identification has also been set within brackets. Sometimes
no part of an address was included in a letter. In these instances we have added nothing.
Annotations have been provided to identify peripheral characters and to clarify

otherwise obscure allusions. A brief narrative has been entered at intervals to provide
a context for the people and events about to figure in exchanges and to supply the
reader with a little background reference.
Virginia Woolf 's letters were all published in six volumes, between 1975 and 1980.
As the editing ofVita's letters to Virginia proceeded, it became clear that their friend-

ship was an extremely complex affair. Vita's letters contained numerous and often mys-
terious allusions and barely detectable innuendos that could not be adequately
explained in a footnote. It thus became clear that Virginia herself must be given a fair

hearing if we were to convey authentically something of the changing emotional tone

of their relations during their nineteen-year friendship. We have included, then, some
175 extracts from nearly 400 surviving letters Virginia wrote to Vita.
Virginia's letters, fortunately, have all been chronologically numbered by their

editors. So when the reader comes across, for instance, 'See VW 1733' in one of our
annotations, the reader should turn to The Letters of Virginia Woolf, and refer to the
letter numbered 1733.
One other small matter needs a word of explanation. There were several periods

of two or three months' duration when Vita went to Teheran or to Berlin to stay with
her husband, Harold Nicolson. During these times the sequence of dates in Vita's and
Virginia's letters may appear to be out of order. They are not actually out of sequence.
Because of the irregularity of the international postal service it was necessary to order
the letters not by the dates on which they were written but rather by the dates on
which either Vita or Virginia received a letter and subsequently replied to it.

A number of books, already published, were extremely helpful in the editing of this
collection. To the authors and editors responsible for those volumes we acknowledge
a debt of gratitude. They are, most particularly, Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann,
editors of The Letters of Virginia Woolf(6 vols.);Vita's biographer Victoria Glendinning
for her Vita: The Life ofV Sackville-West; Anne Olivier Bell, editor of The Diaries of
Virginia Woolf (5 vols.); Quentin Bell for Virginia WoolfA Biography; Nigel Nicolson for

Portrait of a Marriage; and James Lees-Milne for Harold Nicolson: A Biography (2 vols.).

For permission to quote from The Letters of Virginia Woolf and The Diaries of Virginia
Woolf we thank the Hogarth Press. We also proffer our gratitude to Lola L. Szladits,
curator of the Berg Collection, the New York Public Library, and A. N. Peasgood of
the University of Sussex Library. Dr Szladits and her staff offered generous assistance
in making the originals of Vita's letters available to us. Mr Peasgood kindly located,
photocopied, and sent us the eighteen Vita letters presently housed in the Sussex
Collection.
Our final and deepest thanks are offered to Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville- West's

son and literary executor. The editing of this collection was at his invitation, and
throughout its course he answered questions and provided us with information he
alone possessed. His generosity and judgement have been extraordinary. We are grateful
for being the privileged beneficiaries of his trust.

L.D. and M.L.

Introduction

by Mitchell Leaska

The letters which follow chronicle the story of two extraordinary women — Vita
Sackville-West, who quested for glory, and Virginia Woolf, who sought her love and
affection. Rarely can a collection of correspondence have cast into more dramatic
relief two personalities more individual or more complex; and rarely can an enterprise
of the heart have been carried out so near the verge of archetypal feeling. Their adven-
ture was filled with love and with expectation, and these pages effervesce with excite-
ment and hope and verbal caress. In their fertility and abundance, these documents
belong as much to literature as they do to life. In letter after letter, we come across

little dramas of daily affairs; cameos of friends caught in folly; snatches of gossip, some-
times serious, more often profane; polychrome snapshots of exotic travelogue; and
little shared confidences of literary craft. Sometimes there are muffled warnings of
wounded affection or injured pride; and as often the small benedictions of loving
appeasement. But below the surface foam of words, we sense occasionally the strange
alchemy of love mixed with uncertainty and of compulsion mingled with constraint.

Such are the hieroglyphs of emotion imprinted across these pages.

The chronicle covers almost two decades. These were years filled for each of them
with as many large public successes as there were personal failures and private sorrows.
But in their art as in their lives, however great the differences which separated them,
they were, alike, women of formidable resilience and determination. In their writing

Virginia, the innovator, tunnelled her way into the future and Vita, the traditionalist,
sorted out the past. And during these years of alternating confidence and doubt in their
private lives, Virginia learned all the adverbs of manner and motive, and Vita mastered
all the verbs of love and passion.

Virginia's early impressions ofVita are recorded in a letter to a friend. She was the

high aristocrat called Vita Sackville-West, daughter of Lord Sackville, daughter of

Knole, wife of Harold Nicolson, and novelist, but her real claim to consideration, is,

if I may be so coarse, her legs. Oh they are exquisite —running like slender pillars up
into her trunk, which is that of a breastless cuirassier (yet she has 2 children) but all

about her is virginal, savage, patrician. . .

To Vita Sackville-West, Virginia was, simply, the 'gentle genius' — lovely, idolized and
remote.
8 Introduction

Even through the calculated medium of letters, where verbal risks are minimized,
it is evident that, in the early months of their friendship, Vita's attention settled on
Virginia with obstinate concentration, and Virginia responded with a blend of appre-
hensive mockery and guarded acquiescence. Each clearly had something the other
wanted. Vita was the superior woman in Virginia's eyes, and Virginia was the superior
writer in Vita's; and it would soon become apparent to both of them that just as one
was questing for glory, the other was in search of affection. And in those dual pursuits

large loyalties and high proprietorial claims would soon emerge, and with them four
distinct personalities as well. Vita would become for Virginia the voluptuous aristocrat

some of the time, while at other times she would be the protective maternal figure,
crooning affectionate reassurance. Virginia would represent to Vita the mistress of
English letters at one moment, and at the next the helpless, affectionate child solicit-
ing Vita's custodial embraces. The rapport between them was by no means a simple

matter, and both women would eventually be reminded, more often perhaps than they
liked, that every human being needs something, and that neither of them would ever
love the other for herself alone. So that as there was passion and promise in the begin-
ning, in the end there would be compassion and compromise.

Virginia, the writer, was a woman of swift perception and incisive analytical power
an intellectual who weighed and probed and tested for the exact motives of human
action and utterance. She was by all standards a brilliant 'experimentalist in humanity';

but she appeared unattainable, unpredictable and sometimes even unapproachable.

With so much of her emotional side kept under cover, she was reserved and at the
same time mysterious. More than that,Virginia was a woman at once curious and inde-
pendent; a curiosity frequently misconstrued as affection and an independence often
interpreted as absent-minded detachment. As a result she sometimes gave the impres-
sion of being a part of everyone, yet belonging to no one. To the small Dionysian fig-

ure hidden in Vita, this Apollonian frieze of intellect and intuition was an irresistible
challenge.

There was another part ofVirginia which Vita found easier to warm towards, and
that was the childlike, affectionate side of her; the self-absorbed, impatient and demon-
strative girl who forever needed practical reassurance and confidence-bolstering; the
vulnerable creature who was prone to emotional bruising, who hated criticism,
demanded directness, craved affection — the brave 'Potto' who over and over again got
knocked down but refused to admit defeat. This was the Virginia that Vita loved and
protected and mothered.
Vita, on her side, was a catalogue of contradictions. She was rebellious and she was
reticent. She was fearless and she was frightened; she was sociable and reclusive; bold
as well as shy. She was a woman who concealed an essentially timid nature under a

carapace of managerial competence and extravagant courage. Then she was a woman
who saw only what she wanted to see, who was lavish with those of whose love and
obedience she was sure, but who neglected those whose wishes failed to coincide with
Introduction 9

her own; and she was someone who had taught herself from a very early age to spot
the weaknesses of others.
What Virginia saw in Vita, however, was a sensuous person who could be just
noticeably elusive and often puzzling. But this was 'the real woman', as Virginia often
said, and a passionate one she was too. But as with all contradictory personalities there
was something slightly deceptive about her. Not far from the surface, one could touch
the stargazer, the lonely Vita who sought privacy and shunned messy emotional
embroilments. Yet it was this same woman who lived often enough on false promise
and counterfeit hope, who seemed forever fanning the embers of love and forever step-
ping back from its blaze.

There were other sides to Vita which Virginia seems to have detected almost from
the beginning. One of them was the indomitable woman who took charge of one's
life and charted one's destiny, whose arrogance flattened obstacles and whose vanity
refused to acknowledge shabbiness, poverty or familiarity. This woman
was the exalted
who strode her own private acres and Hved in castles andwho spoke her mind with
devastating simplicity Then there was the compassionate woman who understood life's
miseries and dispensed her bounty on the world's downtrodden — the gentle Vita
whose strong hands cupped the fragile moth and nursed the injured nightingale. And
there was also the heroic Vita who worked like a slave and played like a prince and saw
the whole world as her personal challenge. All of these Vitas, wrapped into one, held
Virginia magnetized in a bright circle of high romance and adventure.

Vita's emotional terrain, however, revealed a dark sadistic province which few people
saw and still fewer acknowledged. Virginia seems to have felt it from the very start, and
there is enough in these letters to suggest that in recognizing it she assumed a role suf-
ficiently submissive to indicate to the woman she would soon love that she was pre-
pared to accept —indeed she would encourage — their relations to develop along the

lines of dominance and compliance. In Virginia's mind this stratum of friendship was
perhaps the closest she felt she would ever get to playing the part of the submissive
child to the dominant, affectionate and protective mother.
Little phrases scattered throughout the letters and cushioned in often deceptive

contexts support the notion that Virginia placed a sufficiently low value on herself in
relation to Vita to permit her to feel both helpless and needy and at the same time to
feel a certain strange contentment with whatever small abuses Vita might inadvertently
cause her to suffer. Virginia was too sensitive an observer of human behaviour not
to recognize the role she was creating for herself. 'Is it true you love giving pain?' she

asked Vita once in mock seriousness. In one of the earliest pieces of the correspon-
dence, Virginia wrote: 'I enjoyed your intimate letter.... It gave me a great deal

of pain —which is I've no doubt the first stage of intimacy. .. . Never mind: I enjoyed
your abuse very much.' Later she would beg Vita not to 'snuff the stinking tallow out
of your heart —poor Virginia to wit....' Later still: 'Chuck me as often as you like, and
don't give it a moments thought.' One year before her death, Virginia would still write;
10 Introduction

'...you'll never shake me off — .'And running parallel to this line of submission or self-

deprecation or whatever we choose to call it were two accompanying strands of

Virginia's feeling for Vita. One was her 'childlike dazzled affection' and the other was
the extraordinary serenity and comfort Vita's presence brought her during her frequent
periods of illness. It is true that these scattered citations are mere scraps of evidence,
little more than fragments broken off at odd, unpremeditated moments. Yet for all their

scrappiness and seeming irrelevance, these odds and ends of feeling do indicate the
thrust of Virginia's emotional alignment to Vita. For they illuminate the otherwise

unexplained roles of dominance and compliance which both women acted out in their
lives in the guise of parent and child, healer and patient, and, metaphorically, perhaps
even victor and victim. Virgima could only have been more explicit if she had said to
Vita: your maternal protection strengthens the lost and wandering child in me; your
healing hand soothes me in illness; and your abuses assure me that I matter to you.
There is no question that she sensed in Vita the fearless competence and mastery she
needed to demonstrate, together with the aggression she tried to conceal. By the time
she came to write the first sentence of Orlando, there wasn't the slightest doubt in
Virginia's mind that Orlando should make his entrance committing an act of vio-
lence
— 'slicing at the head of a Moor.
Vita's perception of herself is more difficult to ascertain, for, contradictory as she
was, self-deception came easily to her, and she saw only what she wanted to see. But
she did say something in a letter to Virgima which seems to sum up the way she
approached life. She would rather 'fail gloriously than dingily succeed', she wrote.
Those five words appear to hold the key to much ofVita's inner domain of feeling; for

they define the nature of her quest for glory — a quest rooted in the assumption that
the world was a potential battlefield, that people were only safe when they were in cap-
tivity, that one's resources should be mobilized not in the interest of mere survival but
indeed in the continuing struggle to triumph. No risk was too perilous and no sacri-

fice too great for that necessary achievement. Even her intimacy with Virgima she saw
as a 'catch', as a conquest: Vita was 'rather proud, really, of having caught such a big sil-

ver fish', she said to her husband, Harold Nicolson. Nor is it an accident of phrasing
that she called the novel describing her turbulent love affair with Violet Trefusis
Challenge. Everyone in her life, it seems, began as a potential challenge, and everything
she came up against was, to her mind, susceptible to conquest. Virginia summed her up
accurately when she said that Orlando 'liked to think that she was riding the back of
the world'.

'Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest?' Vita asked, regarding the
novel she was about to write. 'Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety.. . . Anyhow
I don't care about what is "better", for however many resolutions one makes, one's
pen... always finds its own level.'

To this Virgima replied: 'Why need you be so timid and pride-blown, both at

once. . . . Please write your novel, and then you will enter into the unreal world, where
Virginia lives —and poor woman, can't now live anywhere else.'
Introduction 1

Virginia knew perfectly well what Vita's question meant, but she knew too that

living in the 'unreal world' of fantasy was also living with a sense of freedom and
power, something she had discovered on her own during the pains and uncertainties
of adolescence. For Virginia's artistic roots stretch back to the unsettled world of child-

hood dominated by an often absent mother. If one could move back in time to 25
January 1882, the day ofVirginia's birth, one would catch a glimpse of Julia Stephen,
the beautiful and mysterious mother whose chief concern in life, for some equally
mysterious reason, was nursing the sick and the dying; a woman who was convinced
that the 'ordinary relations between the sick and the well are far easier and pleasanter
than between the well and the well'. This was the woman Virginia would one day cap-
ture in the person of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse — the mother whose mysteries
haunted the novelist for so much of her life.

Whatever her motives, however, Julia Stephen's unceasing benevolence killed her

at the age of forty-nine, leaving Virginia, aged thirteen, motherless, numb with terror,

and about to descend into her first black period of insanity. When she recovered two
years later — that is, in 1897 — she learned that private feeling and public fact were fear-
fully discrepant, and until she could correct that discrepancy, her world was in danger,
and herself at everyone's mercy. With a mother who had been away so much of the
time, Virginia's childhood had lacked plan, continuity and coherence. With her mother
now dead, there was no telling what might happen. It didn't take long for this preco-

cious girl to discover, however, that although feeling and fact were out of synchronism,
feeling and fantasy were not; and with that discovery the world of the future novelist
opened up to her: if she could teach herself to fuse feeling with fantasy, she could create

her own world — a spacious republic populated only by those she chose to put there,
a place where fact could not disturb, an invented realm entirely under her control,
where sorrow and doubt had no place. But however sovereign and almighty the story-
teller might be, there still remained the stark fact of having no mother. Until that
emptiness could be filled (which was impossible) or some reasonably satisfying substi-

tute presented itself (which was highly improbable), the safest place to live was in the
'unreal world' of imagination. Virginia, therefore, knew the power of fantasy perhaps
better than did Vita, though her way of dealing with it would always be different from
Vita's.

Thus, when the women met for the first time on 14 December 1922, two highly
organized personalities faced each other. They had much in common, but even more
differentiated them. What mattered, however, and would continue to matter in the

years ahead, was that each was in possession of something the other felt she had been
denied. Vita envied Virginia the writer and Virginia stood in awe of Vita the woman.
In the woman Virginia would find the mother, and in the writer Vita would discover
the child. It was an auspicious beginning.

Vita's earliest history also tells much about the woman who speaks in the pages ahead,
and although countless little details complicate her portrait, it is safe to say that when
Vita was born at Knole in the small hours of 9 March 1892, she already had two dis-
12 Introduction

advantages. The first was having been born female. According to the family entail, as a

woman she would never inherit Knole, the great ancestral house which had been
granted to Thomas Sackville by Queen Elizabeth in 1566. The second was being the
daughter of Victoria Sackville-West, an essentially destructive woman. She was rapa-
cious; she was ruthless; she was self-centred; she was beautiful. She was also over-

whelmed with self-doubt. Without much thought to the consequences, she bribed her

little daughter by showering her with every kind of material reward if she could make
her mother feel adored and indispensable. No matter how much the child tried, how-
ever, the effort unfortunately was never enough. Vita was simply inadequate to the task.

Lady Sackville moreover believed it her privilege, indeed her right, to indulge, when-
ever it took her fancy, in great pendulum swings of mood and temper, with Vita almost
always the innocent and confused recipient of her mother's flamboyant emotionalism.
Day after day, as a child, Vita was treated as though she were a plaything —smothered
with love one moment, hated the next; called beautiful and cherished in the morning,
condemned as ugly and unwanted in the afternoon. Throughout much of her adult
life, and even after her marriage, Vita lived in the shade of this egotistical and power-
hungry woman who 'wounded and dazzled and fascinated' her. More important, how-
ever, Vita grew up with a sense of personal impotence. Never was she allowed to feel

herself a separate person with rights of her own.

Before and even during marriage, Lady Sackville's beauty had attracted countless
suitors, and she continued, after her separation from Lord Sackville, to attract a good
many more —John Murray Scott, Pierpont Morgan, William Waldorf Astor — all men
of fabulous wealth and influence. It is not hard to see how Vita, when she was old
enough to acknowledge her sex, became fearful that it might put her in deadly com-
bat with her mother for male favour. And so she subconsciously did what must some-
how have seemed to her the most logical thing to do: she suppressed her feminine side
and, when it was safe enough to do so, granted ascendancy to masculine behaviour,
male pursuits and boyish mannerisms. What better way was there of avoiding con-
frontation with her mother in the arena of male contestants? And what more effective

way was there than this not only to imagine herself male, but to imagine herself as suc-
cessor to Knole as well?
Somewhere in the confusion of these early years, Vita assimilated her mother's
conviction that 'the world was a hard place where one must fight one's own battle for

one's own best advantage'. In addition to the fighting spirit, Vita appears also to have
learned some conjuring tricks from Lady Sackville, who 'possessed more than anybody
I have ever known the faculty of delusion. . . . She entered the only world she knew,
the world of unreality which she made real to herself, and into which she persuaded
other people by the sheer strength of her own personality and conviction to enter.' As
long as one was in her presence, one was almost 'tempted to believe in all the fables
she told one'.
Thus raised in the shadow of a mother whose life was disordered, whose habits
were erratic and whose affections were unreliable, it was perfectly natural for Vita to
realize at some early period of her life that, if she genuinely needed stability, order and
Introduction 13

permanence, she would have to invent them for herself. And this she did. How easy it

is to imagine her as a child roaming the hundreds of rooms of Knole, rooms which
had survived for hundreds of years, acknowledging their durability, imagining their his-
tory, inventing little fables of beauty, valour and bloodshed. Those ancient paintings and
tapestries —each of them must contain some magnificent tale hidden somewhere. Each
of them must hoard some mystery of forsaken honour and defeated love.One sees her
in the guarded secrecy of an impressionable youth stepping timidly down the silent
corridors of the past, searching the farthest corners of antiquity, where all had once
been solid and unchanging.
Vita's retreat into the past was her defence against the present. Knole was the only
place she knew, and it grew to symbolize for her all the permanence and security her

present life was denied. Knole also carried with it all the ceremony of history and the
poetry of romance, and in these Vita sought refuge. In history and in romance, she
could put aside her confusion and fear, and imagine herself to be anyone she chose.
This step backward into antiquity was only one short move from freedom. IfVita

could shed her bondage to the present altogether, she might be tree to invent a new
persona to bear the weight of heroism and reflect the burmsh of glory. But there was
one obstacle: she was female. The legislators of the Sackville family had long ago
decreed that Vita Sackville-West would never govern Knole. Of that she was certain.
But there was no rule on earth, past or present, which could prevent her from stretch-

ing her fantasy to the extent of changing her sex. Of that too she was certain. And so,

step by step, with trial and caution, Vita moved towards the ground which men cus-
tomarily trod; and as she did so, a substantial part of the female persona receded, made
room for the new male figure she was constructing, a figure of power and courage and
a certain lusty recklessness.

This might all have remained a child's game, a fantasy of adolescence to ward off
the unhappiness of growing up under Lady Sackville 's dictatorship. But for Vita the

feeling of dominance was magnificent, and the male self she had created would
become the personal myth which would govern the way she lived for the remainder
of her life. As a male, moreover, there was nothing to discourage her from courting her
mother with the same ceremonious rituals as did her other suitors. This was something
she could have done as Vita the daughter. And there was a certain high drama in Vita's

adoration for her beautiful, wicked mother, something lusty and primitive. Lady
Sackville might abuse or humiliate her in any way she chose, and still 'I would have
died for her', wrote Vita, 'I would have murdered anyone that breathed a word against

her. I would have suffered any injustice at her hands.'

But as with all attempts to establish harmony, however artificial, out of the chaos
of one's life, this attempt too would produce a conflict with unhappy results. Vita had
learned from childhood that she needed autonomy as well as affection, privacy as well
as intimacy, but she had also learned under her mother's disobliging hand just how
unlovable she was. She must have realized, too, that being loved and being free somehow
didn't go together. Independence required emotional distance from others, just as

affection called for submission and acquiescence. This was the awful tug-of-war which
14 Introduction

Vita had no way of resolving, but she learned with the passage of time that negotiation
and compromise might go a long way towards bridging the rift. In her future love
affairs with women, the compromise she settled on to reconcile these opposing urges
took the form of deep maternal compassion accompanied by extravagant gestures of
passion — a combination which these women interpreted as love. But passion and pity,

neither singly nor in sum, equal love. It was in fact this very combination which caused
her so much heartache. Yet however much turmoil her amorous embroilments
caused her, Vita could not live without love — or, more accurately, without the idea of
love — in her life, another conviction she seems to have inherited from her mother.
'Mais enfin, ma cheriel Lady Sackville insisted in her characteristic mix of languages,
'...you know love is the most beautiful thing on Earth? Et c'est ce qui le plus to most
people.' One of the little ironies in this story was that Lady Sackville herself became
the principal beneficiary ofVita's love.
It was thus through many conflicting shades and tangled paths of childhood that
Vita grew up to become the woman who would one day write these letters. She car-
ried with her, in fantasy at least, the banner of conquest, the emblem of history and
the shield of manhood.These were her defences for fighting 'one's own battles for one's

best advantage', as Lady Sackville had taught her, and 'one's best advantage' to Vita

meant personal franchise and self-jurisdiction. These she must have if she was eventu-
ally to gain fame and prestige, the only really enduring safeguards in what she felt to

be a potentially hostile world. The sadistic streak in her, of which so few people knew,
was rooted not in the desire to inflict pain, but rather in the urgency to feel in posses-

sion of sufficient power to direct the course of her life as a separate and autonomous
woman own locus
with her of rights. Only in her fiction do we find scenes of physi-
cal violence. The women in her factual life dramatize a different story.

In this distant light. Vita's preferring to 'fail gloriously than dingily succeed' assumes a
larger significance. It speaks ot her attitude towards life, and it lays bare the range of
her striving for domination, authority and control. It was an attitude of aggressiveness
reflected even in her letters to Virginia. How often we come across phrasing like
4

I don't want to drag you down here VI shall pin you down'; 'Let me come and carry
you off'; 'The wish to steal Virginia overcomes me'; 'I shall have to make you come by
main force', and so much more. These citations are indeed so slight that they might
pass unnoticed, and some of us might even insist upon seeing them as negligible. They
are nevertheless from the lexicon oi abduction and they belong to the language of
aggression.

With the same pen she used to write her letters to Virginia, Vita would in a few
years write a novel in which her sadistic hero would say to his lover: 'I would like to

chain you up . . . naked and beat you and beat you till you screamed.' This is of course
very strong fantasy, but we need no psychoanalytical assistance to interpret the under-
lying message, which, stated simply, runs something like this: 'Only when I've relieved

my inferior sense of myself by putting you in bondage can I feel comfortable with you
emotionally —and sexually' This was a language Vita understood perfectly.
Introduction 15

The same tough strand of muscle runs through these letters, though certainly no
violence was ever directed toward Virginia. It is important only to notice the sponta-
neous word choices, for they bespeak Vita's buried conviction that life, in all its diver-

sity, was something which needed to be fought and conquered; something which
required competence and force. This was clearly the emotional atmosphere in which
Her smallest acts of affection were coloured and often twisted with the
she lived.
romance of power and ravishment. Such was the cast of her mind. Vita's dream world
was a world fraught with danger —and the prospect of conquest. We need to remind
ourselves, however, that the Vita who fantasized about muscular force and sadistic tor-

ture 'was the woman who, first of all, had all her life been overwhelmed and dimin-
ished by a grasping mother; and secondly, who, in losing Knole, was daily reminded of
the inferior place of her sex in a world assigned to male governance. It is little won-
der that she should learn to see the vulnerable spots in others; less wonder still that she

should emotionally brutalize anyone who threatened her precarious sense of

sovereignty. 'Social relations', said Vita, 'are just the descendants of the primitive tribal

need to get together for the purposes of defence.' In her interior world only the 'fittest'

survived. Weakness was devoured by strength.

In a letter to Virginia — Vita was tending the Woolfs' spaniel, Pinker, at the time
she wrote:

Pinker and I try to console one another. She sleeps on my bed, and clings to me as

the one comparatively familiar thing in a strange and probably hostile world. ... I had
to explain that Mrs Woolf lived in London, a separate life, a fact which was as unpleas-
ant to me as it could be to any spaniel puppy. ... I explained that everybody always
betrayed one sooner or later, and usually gave one away to somebody else, and that

the only thing to do was to make the best of it.

People were not kind and nature was indifferent to human wishes. This was an atavis-
tic world ruled by laws which inevitably destroyed what one loved. 'Something always
does, when one wants a thing too passionately,' she had written just a little earlier.
Just how savage or indifferent people could be, to Vita's way of thinking, emerges
in a letter written during her first voyage to Persia. En route, she fell ill and 'all last

night I had a fever and a sore throat, and was quite certain through my nightmares that
I should be put ashore at Karachi with diphtheria and left there alone.. I am all alone,
. .

and there is no one on this ship who cares whether I live or die.' Of course a great

many people cared very much whether she lived or died, but the subjective world she
experienced was under the primeval powers of the jungle, and it was from its dense
and perilous growth that her emotional life drew its characteristic mood. If she didn't

master life, she would forever be its slave, at its mercy. What looked like overpowering
aggressiveness on Vita's part was fundamentally a determination to survive through the
exercise of personal might. She had to deal competently with the techniques of life in
order to master it —or to be mastered by it. It is unlikely that Vita herself would have
articulated her feelings in quite this way, but it is clear from hundreds of accumulated
details scattered throughout these letters that the atmosphere of combat was the one
16 Introduction

in which, much of the time, she genuinely felt herself to be.

Her superior sense of efficiency often led her into misunderstanding and difficulty.

In a letter to Virginia in the earliest months of their friendship, for example, Vita sug-
gested an expedition to the Basque provinces. Thinking that Virginia might need some
powerful incentive for going, Vita suggested that she look on the trip 'as copy, — as I

believe you look upon everything, human relationships included. Oh yes, you like

people, through the brain better than through the heart, — forgive me if I am wrong.'
Virginia was justifiably hurt by that remark and said so. What is so astonishing,
however, is that Vita didn't have the slightest notion of what she had said to hurt

Virginia. This was the truth. What someone else might consider a heartless remark
not understanding her hidden motives — Vita regarded simply as a suggestion of effi-

ciency. Four years later, when Vita's father lay dying at Knole, she said again, and with
the same disconcerting directness, 'What good copy it would all be for Virginia's book
[Orlando]. The whole thing', she added with her characteristic penchant for high
romance, was a 'mixture of the tragic, the grotesque, and the magnificent.'

By the time she met Vita Sackville-West in 1922, Virginia Woolf had survived three
major periods of insanity and had published three novels. She was forty, and already a

writer of acknowledged importance, but she had not yet had a commercial success.Vita
had already published several volumes of poetry and fiction by this date, and was also

an established author. She was thirty years old, ten years Virginia's junior.
The day after that first encounter on 14 Dec ember, Virginia recorded in her diary
meeting 'the lovely aristocratic Sackville-West last night at Clive's. Not much to my
severer taste... with all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist.

She writes 15 pages —a day has finished another book — publishes with Heinemanns
knows everyone —But could I ever know her?'

Up to this time,Virginia had had only two infatuations in her life, one in her teens

with Madge Vaughan (after whom Clarissa Dalloway was modelled), and one in her
early twenties with Violet Dickinson, a woman many years older than Virginia. Her
willing surrender to Vita Sackville-West's magnetism would therefore be the first in

Virginia's adult life, andVita would be the first woman to appear on the domestic scene

of Virginia's married life with Leonard Woolf. But Vita was something special, and
Virginia appears to have been willing to search out the possibilities. 'Mrs Nicolson
thinks me the best woman writer' — Virginia wrote in her journal, '& I have almost got
used to Mrs Nicolson's having heard of me. But it gives me some pleasure.' If Mrs
Nicolson liked Mrs Woolf 's writing, well... at least she had that much in her favour.

More important than that, however, Vita had aroused something childlike in Virginia:
'The aristocratic manner is something like the actresses —no false shyness or modesty:
a bead dropped into her plate at dinner — given to CHve — asks for liqueur — has her
hand on all the ropes —makes me feel virgin, shy, & schoolgirlish. . . . She is a grenadier;

hard; handsome, manly.

Following their first meeting, there was a quick exchange of dinners and books.
Virginia read Vita's novel and poems with approval, and confided again to her diary:
Introduction 17

'She is a pronounced Sapphist, & may... have an eye on me, old though I am. Nature
might have sharpened her faculties. Snob as I am, I trace her passions 500 years back,
& they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine.' It is clear that Virginia would
not have minded at all ifVita had 'an eye' on her, for she was fascinated by this 'pro-

nounced Sapphist'.

The fascination was reciprocal.Vita's letter to her husband, Harold Nicolson, dated
19 December 1922, just after their meeting, fills in her page of the story.

I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you. You would fall quite flat before her
charm and personality.... Mrs Woolf is so simple: she does give the impression of

something big. She is utterly unaffected. ... At first you think she is plain, then a sort
of spiritual beauty imposes itself on you, and you find a fascination in watching her. . .

She is both detached and human, silent till she wants to say something, and then says
it supremely well. She is quite old. I've rarely taken such a fancy to anyone, and I think
she likes me. At least she's asked me to Richmond where she lives. Darling, I have
quite lost my heart.

Virginia was indeed 'both detached and human', as Vita had observed, and in the
next nineteen years she would learn in full measure exactly how detached Virginia
Woolf could be — as well as how human. The detachment, however, held a certain mag-
ical pull for Vita, and she saw it as a challenge. Didn't winning the friendship of this

genius of letters mean a kind of triumph? After all, Virginia was a 'big silver fish', and
to land her would be indeed a conquest to be proud of. Vita would say as much to

Harold in the months ahead.

But here a long pause interrupted the proceedings of love. Whether their first

steps had been taken too quickly, or whether Virginia became apprehensive, or whether
Vita simply grew impatient, is not clear; but for many months an almost complete

silence separated them. In March 1924, however, when the Woolfs moved from
Richmond who
to Tavistock Square,

would Vita come and have lunch

Bloomsbury,
in the new
it

flat
—was Virginia
'but prepare for a
broke the
complete picnic,
silence:

among the ruins of books and legs of tables, dirt and dust and only fragments of food'.
This was the first time they had ever been alone together, and Vita went away with her
'head swimming with Virginia'.
Something of greater importance was in the offing, however —an opportunity
that would serve Vita's ambitions as a novelist. Would she write a book for the Hogarth
Press to publish, Virginia asked her in May. 'If so, what and when? Could it be this

autumn?' This was rather a challenge, being asked to produce a book at three months'
notice. But Vita thrived on challenges — the bigger, the better. Of course she would
give them a book. Better still, she would write it during her holiday on the peaks of
the Italian Alps! But that was really no challenge. How could Virginia so underestimate
her? Writing a book was a mere 'commercial proposition'. The real challenge was
Virgima's charging her with writing 'letters of impersonal frigidity'. Well, now, that
was quite a different proposition. First, however, the book must get written, as indeed
it was; and it turned out to be perhaps Vita's most imaginatively conceived novel. Its
1 Introduction

title was Seducers in Ecuador. She dedicated it to Virginia, and with that dedication the

first real step was taken towards a deeper intimacy.

When the manuscript arrived, Virginia wrote again for her own eyes:

Vita was here for Sunday, gliding down the village in her large new blue Austin car,

which she manages consummately. She was dressed in ringed yellow Jersey, & a large

hat, & had a dressing case all full of silver & night gowns wrapped in tissue. Nelly said
'If only she weren't an honourable!'.... But like her being honourable, & she
I is it,

a perfect lady, with all the dash & courage of the aristocracy. She left with us a story . . .

which really interests me rather. I see my own face in it, its true. But she has shed the
old verbiage, & come to terms with some sort glimmer of art; so I think; & indeed, I

rather marvel at her skill, & sensibility; for is she not mother, wife, great lady, hostess,
as well as scribbling? How litde do of all
I that: my brain would never let me milk it

to the tune of 20,000 words in a fortnight....

But, she went on, Vita

is like an over ripe grape in features, moustached, pouting, will be a little heavy; mean-
while, she strides on fine legs, in a well cut skirt. .has a . manly good sense & simplic-
ity.. . . Oh yes, I like her; could tack her on to my equipage for all time; & suppose if

life allowed, this might be a friendship of a sort.

The Hogarth Press published Seducers in Ecuador in November of that year.

Virginia offered small criticisms, but it was, she said to Vita, 'much more interesting (to

me at least) than you've yet done. ... I am very glad we are going to publish it, and
extremely proud and indeed touched, with my childlike dazzled affection for you, that

you should dedicate it to me.' Thus, little by little, visit by visit, and letter by letter, the
friendship grew —Aphrodite was beginmng to exert her influence.

In 1925, both Virginia's T\\e Common Reader and Mrs Dalloway made their debut.

Vita was in awe of their brilliance. One thing that Mrs Dalloway had done for her, she
said to its author, was to make it unnecessary ever to go to London again, for the 'whole

of London in June is in your first score of pages. (Couldn't you do a winter London
now...)' (She could not of course foresee that in three years' time she would be read-
ing about herself, garbed as Orlando, skating on the Thames during the Great Frost.) By
late summer, while Vita was writing Vie Land, which would become her most endur-
ing work, Virginia was forced to retire to bed suffering from headaches and exhaustion.
Once more their letters alone carried the weight of their developing intimacy.
Harold Nicolson had been informed by the Foreign Office in September that he
was being posted to the British Legation in Teheran, and it was arranged that Vita

would join him there in January and remain until May. This news made Virginia see

for the first how much Vita had come to mean to her.
time, and to her surprise, exacdy
Vita was 'doomed to go to Persia; & I minded the thought so much (thinking to lose
sight of her for 5 years) that I conclude I am genuinely fond of her. There is the glam-

our of unfamihanty to reckon with; of aristo cracy... of flattery. All the same, after sift-
Introduction 19

ing & filing, much, I am sure, remains. Shall I stay with her?'
By December Virginia was pronounced sufficiently recovered to brave a change
of scenery, and on 17 December was efficiently 'carried off' by Vita to Long Barn,
where she stayed for three nights. It was during this weekend that the goddess Astarte

descended upon them and advanced their friendship to the deeper level of love. Vita
made a note in her diary for 17 December: 'A peaceful evening.' For the eighteenth,
however: 'Talked to her till 3 a.m. —Not a peaceful evening.'

Virginia too recorded the event — a little defensively: 'These Sapphists love women:
friendship is never untinged with amorosity.' But, she went on,

I like her & being with her, & the splendour — she shines in the grocer's shop in
Sevenoaks with a candle lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing,
grape clustered, pearl hung. That is the secret of her glamour, I suppose. Anyhow she
found me incredibly dowdy, no woman cared less for personal appearance —no one
put on things the way I did. Yet so beautiful, &c.What is the effect of all this on me?
Very mixed. There is her maturity &
much in full sail
full breastedness: her being so

on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters; her capacity I mean to take
the floor in any company, to represent her country. .to control silver, servants, chow .

dogs; her motherhood... her being in short (what I have never been) a real woman.
Then there is some voluptuousness about her; the grapes are ripe; & not reflective.

No. In brain & insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of
this, & so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I

have always most wished from everyone.

From Long Barn, Vita wrote about her side of the adventure to Harold. Having
suffered only a few years earlier through Vita's devastating affair with Violet Trefusis as

well as through the slightly less destructive liaison with Geoffrey Scott, Harold was
understandably worried. But he had no reason to be, Vita assured him on 17 December,
for she would not 'fall in love with Virginia', nor would Virginia fall in love with her.

On the eighteenth,Vita assured again: 'She says she depends on me. She is so vulnera-

ble under all her brilliance. I do love her, but not b.s.ly [back-stairs-ly, i.e. homosexu-
allyJ.'And again on the nineteenth: 'We have made friends by leaps and bounds in these
two days. I love her, but couldn't fall "in love" with her, so don't be nervous.'

In the years ahead Virginia would return again and again to that precious image ofVita
'pink with pearls' in a Sevenoaks fishmonger's. In her mind, that memory marked a

change in her life. But here and now, in January 1926, Virginia realized that she was
almost completely in Vita's thrall, and the departure for Teheran was dreadful. 'Parting',
as the poet said, would 'turn their hearts into clocks.' They were both dedicated, liter-

ary women, however, and in the months that followed they created an epistolarium of
love that was large, complicated and obsessive.

So the weeks passed —and the months. Vita returned to England in May, and
Harold, who had remained in Teheran, needed once more to be reassured: 'Oh my
dear, I do hope that Virginia is not going to be a muddle! It is like smoking over a
20 Introduction

petrol tank.' But there was no muddle, Vita insisted.

I love Virginia — as who wouldn't? But really, my sweet, one's love for Virginia is a very
different thing: a mental thing; a spiritual thing, if you like, an intellectual thing, and
she inspires a feeling of tenderness, which is, I suppose, owing to her funny mixture
of hardness and softness — the hardness of her mind, and her terror of going mad
again. She makes me feel protective. Also she loves me, which flatters and pleases

me.... I am scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her, because of the mad-
ness. I don't know what effect it would have, you see: it is a fire with which I have
no wish to play. I have too much real affection and respect for her.. . . Besides, Virginia
is not the sort of person one thinks of in that way. There is something incongruous
and almost indecent in the idea. I have gone to bed with her (twice), but that's all.

Now you know all about it, and I hope I haven't shocked you.

Vita was an impressario of passion and there were times when her life rang with
a chorus of lovers; but she showed great wisdom in having 'too much real affection and
respect' for Virginia to play with her emotionally. Virginia possessed artistic genius,
something Vita greatly valued and would have liked herself to have had. It is true that
the few sexual episodes between them flattered Virginia's vanity, but their real emo-
tional centre lay elsewhere. Vita idolized the mistress of letters and felt compassionate
who resided within; and with Vita's extraordinary com-
love for the vulnerable child
much on display, it was easy for Virginia to forget that underneath was a
petence so
woman who also needed understanding and love. As usual, however, the old conflict
reared its uncompromising head: so long as Vita's need for affection vied with her need
for independence, and so long as both of these opposing urges claimed equal ascen-
dancy, she would never be on open and equal terms with anyone, Virginia included.
Nor, it seems, did Virginia realize how often she threatened Vita's loyalty v/ith her
inquisitorial cross-examinations and sometimes exasperating demands for attention. It

is no wonder that below her patrician surface Vita felt unsatisfied and solitary; even less

wonder that she was promiscuous and sometimes ruthless with her lovers. They did not
understand her, and she simply could not help them to. That would have amounted to
confessing how much she needed their affection, and that would have betrayed her
own weakness. It was easier to see herself in command in a world of strife. Maintaining
that magisterial posture at least justified her craving for And so she contin- autonomy.
ued to force the own limitations. What Vita
people in her universe to conform to her
did not perhaps realize was that at the loneliest of times, when she managed to laugh,
she should have permitted herself to weep. For with the laughter, the real woman went
deeper into hiding, and the Sovereign Vita climbed a step higher, hardening even fur-
ther the already brittle architecture of conflict.
The nicknames Virginia and Vita used with one another identify the alternating

roles they assumed. When Virginia addressed 'dearest Vita' she was appealing to the lov-
ing, protective maternal figure. When 'Donkey West' was summoned, she sought the
haughty and glamorous woman who wrote novels and poetry. On Vita's side, when a

letter began with 'My dearest Virginia' she was talking to her 'lovely and remote' mis-
Introduction 21

tress of prose. When 'Potto' was called upon, it was the child in Virginia who was being
invited out for a romp.
Thus at least two Vitas were in constant negotiation with at least two Virginias.
Their ten-year age difference really mattered very little in the organization of their
relationship, although Virginia did occasionally resort to her seniority when it suited
her plan or when she needed to scheme for sympathy. And there was plenty of room
for confusion in the intense, and sometimes untidy, game of love they so beautifully
dramatized. How often Virginia, with one breath, shouted at 'Donkey West' for mud-
dling up human relations and, with the next breath, implored her 'Dearest Vita' to
repeat to her on which 'rung of the ladder' Potto stood in Vita's affections. In other

words, at any given moment the elegant writer of prose called upon the aristocratic
woman and wheedled her into repeating how much the dominating mother loved the
anxious child. This could be very confusing indeed.

There is something 'obscure' in you, Virginia unexpectedly wrote to Vita one day. It

was a flaw in Vita's make-up which affected everything she did and everything she
wrote. 'There's something that doesn't vibrate in you: It may be purposely —you don't
let it: but I see it with other people, as well as with me: something reserved, muted
God knows what. . . . It's in your writing too, by the bye. The thing I call central trans-

parency —sometimes fails you there too.'

Who can say from what depths of perception Virginia came to identify the very
conflict which Vita worked so hard to conceal. It was a conflict, nevertheless, which
Virginia thought responsible for blocking her expression of feeling with people as well
as in her books. Vita wrote to Harold,

Damn the woman, she has put her finger on it. There is something muted....
Something that doesn't vibrate, something that doesn't come alive. ... It makes every-
thing I do (i.e. write) a little unreal; gives the effect of having been done from the
outside. It is the thing which spoils me as a writer; destroys me as a poet. But how
did Virginia discover it? I have never owned it to anybody, scarcely even to myself. It

is what spoils my human relationships too. . .

Virginia saw it,Vita should have realized, because Virginia suffered from the same afflic-

tion — the need of affection in combat with the need for independence. There was one
great difference between the two women, however. Virginia, we know, like many
another writer, shielded herself from life's insults with pen and ink. But her particular
sense of intellectual superiority, pressed directly beside a pronounced emotional sub-
missiveness, permitted her as a novelist to surrender herself completely and willingly
to the mental atmospheres of her characters. With astonishing ease she could crawl
in and out of her characters' minds, however different from one another they might
be, and record for each of them feelings so deeply wrought as to bear the stamp of life-
like authenticity. That is, she was sure enough of herself intellectually and compliant
enough emotionally to abdicate her deepest self in order to imagine the emotions of
others during the act of creation. And this was something Vita simply could not do.
22 Introduction

Vita's orientation to the world was one of competition and conquest, and hers was
an aggressive stance. The very notion of submission was foreign to her nature and men-
acing to her deepest and most vulnerable sensibilities. In consequence, she often wrote
lavish descriptions about her characters' feelings, but rarely permitted herself —and
hence the reader — a taste of what the experience itself felt like. Her basic timidity, hid-

den under the aggression, in combination, did not allow her to enter the minds of her
fictional people and surrender herself to the experience of their feelings. This explains
why she wrote 'from the outside'.
Virginia had somehow ferreted out her secret, and the discovery seemed to make
a difference to their relations in the months ahead. Vita would have given anything to

be able to write 'from the inside', and so she began to look at Virginia's art with greater
concentration.Virginia may have found Vita's attention intellectually flattering, but cer-
tainly not emotionally satisfying. For now the affectionate Potto — the thirteen-year-
oldVirginia —would have to move over and make room for Virginia, the 'gentle genius'

of fiction. She would now assume the part of literary mentor, and Vita would follow
her like 'a puppy on a string' and wag an appreciative tail for whatever morsels she
might sniff out. In this vaguely defined office, the gentle genius had now become
'essential' to Vita.

'I don't know how I shall get on without you,'Vita wrote at her second departure

for Teheran. 'Darling, please go on loving me — I am so miserable —Don't forget me — .'

On the next day: 'I shall work so hard, partly to please you, partly to please myself....

It is quite true that you have had infinitely more influence on me intellectually than
anyone, and for that alone I love you. . . . You do like me to write well, don't you? And
I do hate writing badly —and having written so badly in the past.'

Again what seems not to have crossed Vita's mind was not that her writing was
bad — for she was indeed a proficient novelist —but that her writing was so different

from Virginia's; and that difference had its provenance in the structure of her person-
ality, not in her performance as a writer. What she could not have known at the time,
however, was that eventually she would hit upon a subject for a novel for which her
exterior mode of writing would be not only appropriate, but necessary to its success.

That novel would be Tlie Edwardians.

Vita returned from Teheran in 1927 at about the same time Virginia's To the Lighthouse

was published, and she was 'dazzled and bewitched' by it. 'Darling, it makes me afraid

of you,' she wrote. 'Afraid of your penetration and loveliness and genius.' In this novel,

Virginia had performed one of her most brilliant analyses of the minds and motives
of her characters. 'Only if I had read it without knowing you, I should be frightened of
you,'Vita added.
Virginia's 'penetration' was indeed frightening, for in Vita's mind it translated as

domination over people; it was an advantage which Vita as an exterior writer didn't
have. Hadn't Virginia's 'penetration' already discovered Vita's weak spot? Wasn't it possi-

ble that she might unearth others and render Vita even more vulnerable than secretly

she already was? There was something terrifying about being under Virginia's intellec-
Introduction 23

tual and moral scrutiny.

There were other matters, too, troubling Vita. She was frustrated. She needed an
adventure, not minute cerebral dissections. Her months away from England had low-
ered what little immunity she had to Cupid's darts — Virginia or no Virginia. And the
adventure she hankered for now appeared in the person of Mary Campbell, wife of the
poet, Roy Campbell. (Vita, one might add parenthetically, had a tendency, perhaps even
a talent, for coming between husbands and wives. Danger may have been part of the

attraction, and of course the challenge too. Earlier she had been in part responsible for

the marital warfare between Violet and Denys Trefusis; she had been the cause of
Geoffrey Scott's divorce; and there was even some suspicion that she had been instru-
mental in separating Dorothy Wellesley from her husband.)
Vita met Roy and Mary Campbell on 22 May. On the twenty-third the
Campbells dined with her at Long Barn. On 1 October they moved into Long Barn

cottage, by which time Vita had become Mary's lover —and her mother as well. Soon
there would trail behind Mary a small procession of new love affairs and passionate
encounters: of which Margaret Voigt, Hilda Matheson and Evelyn Irons would be the
first in line. Yet Vita's love letters to Virginia continued without interruption as though
no one else in the world existed.

Fear sharpens one's perception and Virginia sensed immediately that something
was amiss. She had warned Vita only a few months earlier to be careful in her 'gam-
boilings, or you'll find Virginia's soft crevices lined with hooks. You'll admit I'm
mysterious —you don't fathom me yet — .'
She was right. Virginia kept a good deal

of herself 'up her sleeve', as Vita phrased it, and there were still large unknown areas to

be explored. Little did Vita know that when Virginia felt threatened by her lapses in
fidelity, she would seize whatever opportunity chose to offer; and as it happened
opportunity put pen and ink within easy reach. The result was to become one of the
most personal footnotes in English literary history — a fictional biography of Vita
Sackville-West.
The Campbells had moved into Long Barn cottage on 1 October 1927, and on
the fifth Virginia noted in her diary the idea for 'a biography beginning in the year
1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about
from one sex to another'; and she began immediately to write it. On 9 October she
wrote to let Vita know that she was indeed aware of the beautiful Mary Campbell s
existence, as well as to tell her about the birth of Orlando. 'But listen,' she urged, 'sup-
pose Orlando turns out to be Vita; and its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and
the lure of yourmind (heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with
Campbell). Shall you mind? Say yes, or No.' Five days later, in a more tranquil mood:
. . .

'Never do I leave you without thinking, its for the last time.' (Vita confessed to galli-
vanting because Virginia left her 'unguarded'.) 'If you've given yourself to Campbell,'
Virginia went on, 'I'll have no more to do with you, and so it shall be written, plainly,

for all the world to read in Orlando.'

There was more truth in that statement than Virginia herself knew at the time.
She was aware ofVita's past love affairs; and she knew too that, temperamentally and
24 Introduction

psychologically unsuited as she was, she had never and could never satisfy Vita's pas-

sionate physical appetite, and about that there was little to be done. But there was noth-
ing in the world of fiction or fantasy to prevent her from inscribing for posterity Vita's
lusty delinquencies, fierce ambitions and yearnings for fame. With all the elegance at
her command, Virginia would show the world a Vita in full plumage —and in all her
magnificent contradiction.
Thus in much the same proprietorial spirit as Browning's jealous Duke, preserv-
ing for himself his 'Last Duchess' in a portrait, so Virginia preserved for herself the Vita
she loved in the spectacular world of Orlando. No matter how many slips in fidelity or
how much gambolling there might be in the months and even years ahead, Orlando
the seductive aristocrat of Virginia's imagination —would remain inviolate, safely

beyond the menacing lure of other women, and permanently beyond the threat of loss.
The Orlando ofVirginia's book had stepped outside the irrelevancies of life and into
the purer chambers of art, where she would remain forever. Others might seduce Vita
in the flesh, but no one could sully the Vita ofVirginia's creation.

While Orlando was in the making, Virginia became a little philosophical about Vita, even
a little withdrawn. So much of what Vita had done was not an affirmation of love, in
any of its ambiguous senses; and that knowledge was too alive and too submerged
in Virginia to be ignored. But art, not life, now consumed her attention. 'I'm not afraid
of your not wanting me,' she wrote in October, 'only of what one calls circum-
stances.... My questions about your past can wait till you're in London.' But by
November Roy Campbell, having discovered the affair between his wife and Vita,
threatened first Mary's life, and then divorce. Vita turned to her biographer for help.

Virginia listened carefully. She weighed the pros, considered the cons, and then
reproached Vita roundly for disrupting the lives of others —her own included. Vita left

in tears. She 'was a failure all round'.

'You made me feel such a brute,' Virginia wrote the next day, 'and I didn't mean
to be.... And I'm half, or 10th, part, jealous, when I see you with theValeries and
Marys: so you can discount that.... I'm happy to think you do care: ...'Yet however
open-minded or generous Virginia wanted to be, the little girl inside would inevitably

erupt in molten jealousy. 'Promiscuous you are,' she would soon write, 'and that's all

there is to be said of you. Look in the Index to Orlando — after Pippin [Vita's dog] and
see what comes next —Promiscuity passim!
Vita's affair with Mary Campbell meanwhile grew stronger as the months passed.

By early December Vita had written fourteen sonnets to her, while Virginia continued
assiduously to weave the fantastic world of Orlando.
Following a visit to Long Barn in the summer of 1928, Virginia, in a contem-
plative mood, pondered her changing relations with Vita:

I'm interested by the gnawing down of strata in friendship; how one passes uncon-
sciously to different terms; takes things easier; dont mind hardly at all about dress or
anything.... Lay by the black currant bushes lecturing Vita on her floundering habits
Introduction 25

with the Campbells for instance. Mrs C. beat by her husband, all because V. will come
triumphing, with her silver & her coronets & her footmen into the life of a herring-
cooker. She cooks herrings on her gas stove, I said, always remembering my own
phrases [in Orlando].

Virginia's detachment at this time probably puzzled Vita, for she now looked analyti-
cally on Vita's affair with Mary, and saw it as some grim charade of love gone wrong;
yet there could be something in it which she might sift out and weave into the gauzy
web of biographical prose. But the ground on which she and Vita now stood was shift-

ing perceptibly, and Virginia found herself often comparing the Vita she was in the
process of creating to the living model who stood before her. She wondered at the

difference, pondered the similarities, and tried to imagine new variations.

In September 1928 the two women finally made the trip to France they had planned
for so long. It was the first and only expedition they would make together, and the first

trial of what the close company of day-to-day living might produce. 'This is written
on the verge of my alarming holiday in Burgundy,' Virginia confided to her diary. 'I

am alarmed of 7 days alone with Vita: interested; excited, but afraid — she may find me
out, I her out.' Virginia's fear notwithstanding, the expedition turned out to be a suc-
cess.The French countryside was beautiful, the food delicious, and the days full of
adventure. From Burgundy, Virginia wrote to Leonard: 'Vita is a perfect old hen, always
running about with hot water bottles, and an amazingly competent traveller, as she
talks apparently perfect French.... The truth is she is an extremely nice, kind nature;
but what I like, as a companion, is her memories of the past.' To Harold, Vita wrote:
'Virginia is very sweet, and I feel extraordinarily protective towards her. The combina-
tion of that brilliant brain and fragile body is very lovable. She has a sweet and child-
like nature, from which her intellect is completely separate.' To her diary: 'In the middle
of the night I was woken up by a thunderstorm. Went along to Virginia's room think-
ing she might be frightened. We talked... and then as the storm had gone over I left

her to go to sleep again.'

It is not by chance that both the letters and the diary entry call attention to
Virginia's need for protection and Vita's need to protect her. Virginia's childlike help-

lessness stimulated Vita's sense of domination. Virginia's fragility aroused her sense of
power. It fed and simultaneously appeased the deep vein of aggression which ran
through Vita's nature. Strong, self-sufficient women, however brilliant or beautiful,
would never have great appeal to her. To need her protection, however, to be depen-
dent upon her, was always a deep though temporary satisfaction, and the closest Vita
would ever get to achieving simultaneously the privacy she coveted and the intimacy
she craved. Her bounty, her protection, her passion — these were not love, exactly, but
they were the only generous expedients she could offer in its place.Virginia came close

to describing the dominant-compliant character of their relations when she said to Vita
just after their expedition: 'I have seen a little ball kept bubbling up and down on the
spray of a fountain: the fountain is you; the ball me. It is a sensation I get only from you.'
26 Introduction

They returned to London and to the publication of Orlando. Vita had up to this

time been kept entirely in the dark about the book. She had not been allowed to read
even a single line. But now it was here, finished, for all the world to see. And it was a

great success. Reviewers couldn't find words enough in praise. As Nigel Nicolson said,
.

Orlando was 'the longest and most charming love letter in literature. . . ' More than that,
the fact that Lord Sackville had died when the book was half written made Orlando,
in one sense, a kind of 'memorial mass'; and Vita was enchanted, 'under a spell'.

Harold Nicolson wrote to Virginia from Berlin: 'It really is Vita —her puzzled con-
centration, her absent-minded tenderness.... She strides magnificent and clumsy
through 350 years.' One black cloud hovered over the book's publication, however, and
that cloud was Lady Sackville. 'You have written some beautiful phrases in Orlando,'
wrote Vita's mother to Virginia, 'but probably you do not realise how cruel you have
been. And the person who inspired the Book has been crueller still.' (Beside Virgima's
photograph, which she pasted into her copy, Lady Sackville wrote: 'The awful face of
a mad woman whose successful mad desire is to separate people who care for each
other. I loathe this woman for having changed my Vita and taken her away from me.')

Orlando, however, affected Vita in a very private way. As it happened, in January of

this year — 1928, the year of its publication — Vita's father had died. His death made a

reality of the one thing Vita dreaded most: her permanent loss of Knole. As a woman,
she no longer had any legitimate claim to her ancestral home. With Lionel Sackville 's

death, Knole now passed to Vita's uncle Charles and would in turn eventually fall to

her cousin, Edward Sackville- West. That monumental loss and all it represented to Vita
was monstrous. With the birth of Orlando, however, its edge had been dulled. For in
the deepest symbolic sense, Knole had been restored to her. Their pasts had been
reunited. 'You made me cry with your passages about Knole, you wretch,' Vita wrote
to its maker.
But there was something else Virginia had done in Orlando which was harder to
talk about, and that was her uncovering of the hidden side of her subject. Virginia had
indeed 'found her out'. There for all the civilized world to read was Orlando's violence;
his lust for glory and his swings of temper; his rages, his dreams, his wish for solitude;
and there was that terrible flaw in his nature of substituting 'a phantom for reality'.

Virginia came nearest to touching the very soul of her subject when she said that
Orlando would surrender everything he owned in the world 'to write one little book
and become famous'. 'Desire for fame' — that was the vital force in Orlando's life. And
in Vita's too. 'There was a glory about a man who had written a book.'

—
So much of Vita's life past, present and future could be understood if one —
knew how much that fame meant to her. With it, she had approval, power, recogni-
tion. It was the achievement of glory that excited her most extravagant passions. If she

could not be remembered in the histories of England as the successor to Knole, surely
she could take her place forever as one of England's poets. Fame was the hidden key.
And Virginia had unearthed it. Vita saw that at once. IfVirginia's penetration into the
human heart in To the Lighthouse had made Vita 'afraid' of her, we must try to imagine
how unshielded she felt now with Orlando staring at the world from the windows of
Introduction 27

bookshops. Virginia had been relentless in her search and brilliant in her exposition.
Indeed the entire creation had about it a kind of ruthless virtuosity.

Now there was nothing, Vita realized, either too private or too personal, she could
withhold from Virginia, and with that realization her feelings for her began once more
to change. Towards Virginia the artist Vita's adoration increased, but so did the distance

which would now separate them further. 'Darling, you're my anchor,' Vita said, follow-

ing the debut of Orlando. 'An anchor entangled in gold nuggets at the bottom of the

sea.' And she began to drift more openly from her adored Virginia. The anchor would
remain forever steadfast. Of that she was certain, and with that certainty the restless Vita

bobbed and plunged and dipped on the sea above. Just as she had had her adventures
in the past, so she would have them in the months ahead. Virginia would continue to
love her, perhaps with greater ease, now that she was captured in the permanent edi-
fice of words. So that while the jealous child remained cradled in Vita's affection, the

author of Orlando stood poised, watchful and just a little out of reach.
In the often bewildering interplay of these multiple roles, there was always a dan-
ger: the more openly Virginia tried to monopolize Vita, the greater the strain she put
on their relations. Vita was generous with everything she had, except her personal free-

dom, the emotional franchise her biographer repeatedly put to the test. Virginia, how-
ever, was reasonably assured ofVita's yielding to her whenever her maternal suscepti-
bilities were touched, and she frequently took advantage of that weakness. How often
she waved goodbye to Vita feeling like 'a baby having drunk sweet milk'. Even in her
chronic illnesses, Virginia knew that she could arouse Vita's protective instincts more
effectively by pretending she was well when she wasn't —andVita knew that she wasn't

than by acting the simpering, propitiatory invalid.Vita never failed to come to her side.

The lover posed all kinds of difficulties. But Vita, the mother, was as steady as the Rock
of Gibraltar.
Much of this maternal benevolence Vita carried into all her intimacies, and it made
her strangely and even paradoxically inaccessible to the women she attracted. For, in
secretly guarding her privacy, Vita made it impossible for them ever to know her well
enough to meet her securely on an open and emotionally equal footing. Her generosity
and protective affection tended to deny her love partners the privilege of behaving
maturely and responsibly toward her. They became something like dependent and
loving children. For this reason, in none of these intimacies could Vita feel very much
fulfilment, for they did not allow her to experience herself as an entire and fully-valued
human being in her own right. In other words she was unable to feel loved, valued and
validated by an adult woman, because her loving beneficiary, in submitting to Vita's

protective embraces, simultaneously forfeited her status of equality.

As if still under the feudal system of old, the lord dispensed her bounty and
guardianship, and her vassals pledged in return their fealty. Vita gave. They took. Vita
requisitioned. They supplied. The intimacies were skewed, unbalanced, unsymmetrical.
But there seemed no other way for her to assuage her deep and abiding sense of iso-
lation. When these women asked for genuine love, Vita would be made to realize once
more that love was not hers to give. She wrote somewhere that her mother, for all her
28 Introduction

amorous extravagance, 'was a dictator: not a colleague'. In a much subtler way, this
applied to Vita as well.

'I... would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.' How easy it is to imagine those
words coming from Orlando, so charged are they with dramatic heroism. But in fact

they were written by Vita herself when the idea came to her for The Edwardians — six

weeks before the publication of Orlan do. Virginia, in the early months of her work on
the book, had recruited Vita's help in collecting facts about Knole: tracing its history,

taking photographs, wandering through its great halls. It appears that in the process of
Virginia's creation, Vita's own imagination began to kindle. What was there to prevent
her from making up her own story of Knole?
In early February 1929 Vita wrote from Germany, with a Tauchnitz edition of
Orlando before her, that she could not read it without shedding tears. 'Whether it is the
mere beauty of the book, or whether it is because of you, or because it is Knole,' she
did not know; but in late June she began writing at top speed about her magnificent
ancestral home in a novel she would call Tlie Edwardians, a book that would mark a

major change in her life as a writer.

From Savoy, where she continued to work on the book, she wrote to Virginia one
of her most private statements as a writer: it is the letter of one novelist to another:

This is perhaps not what you call an intimate letter? But I disagree. The book that

one is writing at the moment is really the most intimate part of one, and the part
about which one preserves the strictest secrecy. What is love or sex, compared
with the intensity of the life one leads in one's book? A trifle; a thing to be shouted
from the hilltops. Therefore if I write to you about my book, I am writing really inti-

mately, though, it may not be very interestingly.... But you would rather I told you I

missed Potto and Virginia, those silky creatures... and so I do....

At the beginning of their friendship, Virginia had written a little unfairly to the

artist Jacques Raverat that Vita wrote 'with complete competency, and with a pen of
brass.... 'The truth is that Vita was a very skilled writer, and as for the 'pen of brass'
well, that was rather a matter of taste. Vita's novels almost always sold well, and she had
considerable popular success —more, in fact, than Virginia herself. But Vita Sackville-

West could not write like Virginia Woolf, any more than Virginia Woolf could write
like Vita Sackville-West. One does not criticize a pianist, however, for failing to play like

a harpsichordist. Moreover, what Virginia thought ofVita's writing is ultimately beside

the point. What does matter is that Virginia, from the very start, saw in her a highly

marketable author, and (fame aside for the moment) with the publication of The
Edwardians in 1930 Vita made a great deal of money for the Hogarth Press, as well as

a great deal of money for herself —money that would soon be put to use in realizing
one of her most persistent dreams.

In early March 1930, as it happened, the view from the terrace of Long Barn was
being threatened by poultry farmers who were negotiating the purchase of a neigh-
Introduction 29

bouring farm. The thought of having in the future to look out on chicken-houses
appalled Vita. It was time to move on. And so she began looking for another house. On
a rainy 4 April she discovered Sissinghurst Castle, a monumental ruin set gloriously in

acres of mud and rubble. 'Fell flat in love with it,' Vita wrote in her diary. Her offer of
£12,375 was accepted and Sissinghurst was hers.

With the money that she would earn from The Edwardians in the months ahead,
Sissinghurst was to become something like her own private version of Knole. The
Castles traceable history went back at least as far as Orlando's. Was it not morally right
that Sissinghurst should eventually come into Vita's hands? Orlando had sought fame
and glory through writing a book. Now Vita's book had earned her that fame, and
Sissinghurst would turn her glory into something tangible and material. Thus the dream
and the quest of a lifetime converged in The Edwardians, materially and metaphorically.
There was an additional prize. Sissinghurst had a rose-brick tower which would soon
become Vita's most guarded sanctuary and most bastioned citadel. If she wanted soli-
tude and safety, she would have them —but now with a certain lofty splendour.

All Passion Spent, another success, followed in 1931, and in 1932 the Nicolsons left Long
Barn to take up full-time residence at Sissinghurst. During this interval, although Vita
and Virginia saw each other from time to time and exchanged letters, the rift widened,
on Vita's part primarily. She had a castle to restore, a garden to create, and a great deal

more money to earn; and Harold, who had resigned from diplomatic life, was now liv-

ing permanently in London and about to turn his talents to literature and politics.

The space left by Vita in the early 1930s was taken, to some degree, by Ethel
Smyth, composer, autobiographer and incurable egotist. Now well into her seventies,
she became Virginia s most frequent visitor and correspondent, and her insatiable

curiosity about Virginia's personal history was undoubtedly flattering. This new friend-
ship, however, did not usurp or even disturb Vita's place in Virginia's heart. Her love for
Vita simply folded its wings and waited in silence.

Virginia spoke ofVita in her diary from time to time, as though to keep the image
sharp: 'Vita last night:' she wrote in January 1931, '...she says she gets more pain than
pleasure from praise of her books, which I believe to be true. Never was there a more
modest writer. And yet she makes £74 in a morning — I mean a cheque drops in for a

story.' In March 1932: 'We went to Sissinghurst.... Vita in breeches We & pink shirt.

went over the grounds... ate cold salmon & raspberries& cream & variegated choco-
lates given by Lady Sackville...& drank lots of drinks; & then climbed Vita's tower;
lovely pink brick; but like Knole, not much view, save of stables that are to be guest
rooms. So home.'
Like many another rejected lover, out of sheer self-protection Virginia shut her
eyes to a good many changes in Vita which were so obvious to others; but she con-
tinued to see the essential portrait, and her own deep sense of honesty forbade her to
falsify that portrait, as the following letter to Ottoline Morrell testifies:

I remain always very fond of her — this I say because on the surface, she's rather red
and black and gaudy, I know: and very slow; and very, compared to us, primitive: but
30 Introduction

she is incapable of insincerity or pose, and digs and digs, and waters, and walks her
dogs, and reads her poets, and falls in love with every pretty woman, just like a man,
and is to my mind genuinely aristocratic; but I cant swear that she won't bore you....
But do let her come from her rose-red tower where she sits with thousands of pigeons
cooing over her head.

But Virginia persisted. She began a letter of April 1934:

Yes, I must really write to you, because I want to know what is happening. But that
said, I've damn you!. The
nothing to say.Thats because your 're in love with another, . . .

week after next we goAnd there I may be windswept in to the sea. But
to Ireland. . . .

what would Vita care. "No", she'd say, we had Petulaneum Ridentis in that bed last
year: we'll try Scrofulotum Perineum there this." So she'd bury me under, wouldn't

she Vita?

In her diary she wrote a few months later: 'Vita to lunch, after many weeks, yester-

day... She has grown opulent & bold & red —tomato coloured, & paints her fingers &
lips which need no paint... underneath much the same; only without the porpoise
radiance, & the pearls lost lustre.' So Virginia ended, thinking back once more to
December 1925, a scene touched with the loving brush strokes of nostalgia.
Then, finally, the diary entry of 11 March 1935: 'My friendship with Vita is over.

Not with a quarrel, not with a bang, but as ripe fruit falls.... But her voice saying
"Virginia?" outside the tower room was as enchanting as ever...& thats an end of it.

And there is no bitterness, & no disillusion, only a certain emptiness.'

The friendship did not come to an end. It was Virginia's depression that spoke.

The deaths of Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry had cut her off from two of her closest

friends. The Years had got out of control and was causing her months of tortured writ-
ing. She was in her fifty-third year and feeling old, unendorsed and irrelevant. All of
these troubles coalesced in her mind and pressed her into a state of vulnerability not
far from despair. Her rapport with Vita had now reached, for Virginia at least, a less fan-
ciful, more realistic footing that would endure for the remaining years of her life; but
the diminished privilege in their relations appeared to Virginia as a separation: the

voluptuous aristocrat she loved so much was drifting beyond her reach; the passionate

woman with gypsy blood coursing her English veins was moving away from her
anchorage, and there was nothing Virginia could do to stop it.

Sissinghurst Castle, with all its symbolic meaning, was becoming the centre ofVita's
world, a safe reclusive world of continuity and pattern. She strode her own grounds
now, attired almost exclusively in whipcord breeches and high boots, pearls and
earrings. Her earliest fantasies of manhood were swelling to life, and her craving for self-

governance was now taking the shape of solitude in the guarded privacy of her tower
room. There Vita sat, alone for long periods, writing her books and scanning her poems
with 'thousands of pigeons cooing over her head'. Within the next year or two, she
would be ready to write 'Solitude', the poem which had for so long been accumulating
in some sequestered corner of her mind.
Introduction 31

Lady Sackville died in 1936, and Vita discovered among her papers the testimonies
from Spanish witnesses she had collected in 1910 in preparation for the Knole succes-
sion case. The testimonies came from people who had known Lady Sackville as a child

as well as Pepita, Vita's Spanish gypsy grandmother. The discovery made her 'mouth
water'. Here was a book Vita must write. The materials were made to order, and at once
her imagination went to work. Pepita was begun in August 1936 and was published in
October 1937 by the Hogarth Press. Ten thousand copies were sold within the first

eight weeks of publication. She had scored another success.

The second half of the book was devoted to 'Pepita 's Daughter, 1862-1936', that

is, to Vita's mother; and of course the years from 1892 to 1936 include Vita herself. As
we read through those pages today, we cannot fail to notice that Vita was not writing
about her mother alone. As principal observer and participant in the drama of Lady
Sackville's life, Vita, without realizing it, was also writing a kind of oblique memoir of
her own youth and young womanhood. Her values, her attitudes, her preoccupations

permeate every page. In her effort to get her mother into perspective,Vita, now in her

rose-brick tower at Sissinghurst, was forced to take a long, unflinching look at her ear-
lier self. And she didn't like everything she saw. With the passage of years, she began to
realize how much terrible waste there had been in her many adventures into passion.
Now she saw them as

Those cheap and easy loves!...

Those rash intruders into darkest lairs?...

That lure the flesh and leave it slighdy smutched. . .

Such were the lines Vita would write into 'Solitude'. To have abandoned so much of
her life to the rituals of passion had been destructive and wasteful. Worse than that, she
had repeatedly dramatized a scalding rapture without feeling the salve of love. It had
been so much caressing without much caring.

Virginia was the one exception. But then she understood Vita as the others had
not. She knew that there was something blocked, hidden, permanently frozen. That
knowledge by no means diminished the intensity of her feeling. In understanding the
source ofVita's 'floundering habits', however, the 'gentle genius' of letters saw the 'cheap
and easy loves' and did her best to wait in patience, while the possessive child, the

demanding Potto, continued to squirm in pain and fear and anger.

With the approach of the Second World War in 1938, international tension was
mounting. The tension in Virginia's workroom mounted too. She had just gone
through five years of 'sweat and tears' with her longest and most troublesome book,
The Years. Her nephew Julian Bell had recently been killed in the Spanish Civil War.
Her world was becoming a madhouse of brutality and slaughter. And it was in this
strange atmosphere of noisy emptiness and in a state of increasing exhaustion that she
wrote Three Guineas, a passionate denunciation of wars and the men who fought them.
The book was published in 1938, and it provoked one of her very few notable, quarrels
32 Introduction

with Vita. Three Guineas, Virginia said, was meant to stir up popular feeling; she had
meant to 'say irritating things', to 'rouse objections'; but Vita's charge that the book
advanced 'misleading arguments', amounting to dishonesty, made her wince. The pain
turned quickly to anger, and the anger brought Virginia's professional integrity surg-
ing to the surface. What, she wanted to know, didVita mean by 'misleading arguments'?
Did she mean that Virginia had arranged the facts in a dishonest way so as to produce
a desired effect? If so, then they would have to have the matter out
—'whether with
swords or fisticuffs. And I dont think whichever we use, you will, as you say, knock me
down. It may be a silly book, and I dont agree with you that its a well-written book:
but its certainly an honest book....'

Vita's letter had stung, but Virginia stood firm, even refusing to readVita's manuscript

until the matter was settled. In July, another letter to Sissinghurst was fired off:

I feel I cant read your poem impartially while your charges against me... remain

unsubstantiated.... You said something about its [Three Guineas] being 'misleading'

and suggested that if only you weren't incurably clumsy honest and slow-witted your-
self you could demolish my specious humbug. You could knock me down with your
honest old English fists and so on. And then you sicklied me over with praise of
charm and wit.

'Horrified by your letter,' Vita wired her. More letters shot back and forth before
Virginia was certain that she had not been accused of dishonesty
— 'and thats the only
thing I mind. So forgive and forget,' said Virginia a little submissively, just as so much
else, whether rightly or wrongly, had been forgiven and forgotten. Where Vita was con-
cerned, the stakes were too high, the potential loss too great. Virginia would continue
to remain compliant.

Far more serious trouble lay ahead, however. Tlie Years had been an enormous
drain not only on Virginia's energy, but on her confidence as a writer, and the hostility

Three Guineas aroused in some quarters did little to bolster her flagging self-assurance.

When she began the life of Roger Fry as well as Pointz Hall (Between the Acts) in April
of 1938, it was, therefore, rather in the spirit of defeat. The Fry biography, because it

was so personal, caused her endless trouble and doubt; and the more she struggled with
it, the less sure of herself she became. She had convinced herself that it was not going
to be a good book. Leonard Woolf, always Virginia's most reliable critic, found it inad-
equate, and told her so.

Over all of this private hardship loomed the dark shadow of Hitler, threatening

the fate of the civilized world. An approaching war, and all of its companion horrors,
added considerably to an already heavily charged atmosphere. To both novelists this

meant a shift to herd conformity. It meant refinquishing private satisfactions for the

benefit of the greater good.ToVirgima this was intolerable. To Vita it was necessary. In
fact, the very differences which separated them in their private lives differentiated them
too in their response to the war. When the bombs began to fall on England Vita's

intrinsic mood for combat was quickened to life. She might write pastoral verse and
reflective poetry in the solitude of her pink tower, but in the crisis of war she rolled
Introduction 33

up her sleeves and took over civic duties. The urge to literary creation yielded to the

spirit of patriotism. War to Vita was one thing. Writing was another. She could take it

up. She could put it down. Her writing was not inextricably woven into her sense of
self, and the two never got confused.
For Virginia, however, war held a different meaning. She was always actively a part

of the world in ordinary life; but when she came to write, she invariably drew apart
from it. On one level war of course meant loss and privation. At a deeper level, how-
ever, it meant having no readers; and to Virginia's way of thinking, without readers
there was no writer. Numerous other circumstances in her life during this period of
trial conspired to exaggerate her situation, to get things out of all proportion. And it

took no great stretch of imagination for her to begin to feel herself a piece of excess
baggage. More than that, war meant the end of personal independence, the end of pub-
lic recognition. Everything she had worked for now hung in the balance. Without
readers, without the public echo, there was nothing.
It is not clear whether Virginia herself understood the struggle within during
these last years. If she did, it is unlikely that she would have mentioned it to Vita, for

the struggle was too close to death, and death was 'the one experience I shall never
describe', she had once said. Perhaps there was no need to.

There is no effective way to document loneliness at times like this. One can only
try to approximate the sense and the intensity of emptiness a human being is capable
of feeling. As often happens, however, when one's world is threatened with annihila-
tion and death lurks just around the corner, people who at some earlier time have
loved deeply tend to want to relive those earlier feelings and recall once more the hap-
piest of those times past. And in this crisis, Vita seemed to realize more than ever before
just how much Virginia meant to her. For they lived through these dark days with the
full knowledge that every visit might be their last. Bombs were falling near Sissinghurst,
just as they fell in Virginia's garden at Monk's House.
'I did like your letter,' wrote Virginia in the autumn of 1939, 'And if I'm dumb and
chill it doesn't mean I dont always keep thinking of you —one of the constant presences
is yours, and so — well, no more.' In March 1940: '. .how . I long to hear from your own
lips whats been worrying you — for you'll never shake me off —no, not for a moment
do I feel ever less attached.' A
with the enemy aircraft closer than ever:
few days later,

"What can I say — You have given me such happiness.'

except that I love you.. . .

By October 1940 the Woolfs' two London houses had been either destroyed or
made uninhabitable by German air attacks. Whatever remaining possessions they could
salvage, they moved to Rodmell in Sussex, where Virginia was trying desperately to

finish Between the Acts. And it was during this time and in the early months of 1941
that she began to drift into a strange kind of serenity, something like a state of exhausted
euphoria. The strain of war, the fatigue of compulsive writing, the terror of failing as

a novelist, the horror of old age and dependency, her fear of madness — all converged,
finally, and reversed the spurious euphoria into the blackest of depressions. But Vita
knew nothing of this.
In her letter to Sissinghurst dated Saturday 22 March Virginia inquired about Vita's
34 Introduction

dying birds —her budgerigars. The Woolfs' housekeeper kept budgerigars too, but
'Louie's survive: and she feeds them on scraps — I suppose they're lower class, humble,
birds. If we come over, may bring her a pair if any survive? Do they die in an
instant? When shall
I

we come? Lord knows

— all

Those were her last words to Vita. Virginia ended her life on Friday 28 March 1941.
There is a curious little detail connected with Virginia's last reference to dying
birds. In the closing scenes of Between the Acts, posthumously published in July 1941,
there is a line about 'birds syllabling discordantly life, life, life. . .
.

' When Vita read this

passage, some months after Virginia's death, she could not have failed to recognize its

origin in Orlando, which runs:

Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring the plum blos-

som and the bee. And

humming and hawing, let us ask of the starling (who is a more
sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on the brink of the dust bin, whence

he picks among the sticks combings of scullion's hair. What's life, we ask, leaning on
the farmyard gate; Life, Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard....

In 1945, four years after Virginia's death,Vita, together with Harold Nicolson, compiled
an anthology of poetry called Another World Than Tins... . In that volume is a 'poem' by
Virginia Woolf which Vita lineated from this Orlando passage:

Let us go, then, exploring

This summer morning,
When all are adoring
The plum-blossom and the bee.

And humming and hawing

Let us ask of the starling
What he may think
On the brink
Of the dust-bin whence he picks
Among the sticks
Combings of scullion's hair.

What's life, we ask;

Life, Life, Life! cries the bird

As if he had heard. . .

That Vita should have chosen this very passage from Orlando, Virginia's longest love
letter to her, has by itself a certain commemorative importance. But its valedictory

significance to Vita only becomes clear when we remember that, in her teens, Virginia
had had lessons in Latin and Greek. For in this posthumous novel 'Life, Life, Life!' trans-

lates into Latin as 'Vita, Vita, Vita!' And nothing could have been more fitting for

Virginia's last farewell to Vita, who had given her so much life —with all its happiness
and sorrow — in almost twenty years of love and friendship.
 The Letters of

Vita Sackville-West
to Virginia Woolf
 March 1923 - Early 1924

Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolffirst met at a dinner party given by Clive Bell
in London on 14 December 1922. Soon afterwards Virginia dined with Vita at her

house in Ebury Street, and on 11 January 1923 Vita paid her first visit to Hogarth
House, Richmond, where the Woolfs had begun to print short books, including T. S.

Eliot's The Waste Land. Their friendship at first seemed to develop rapidly. After her

visit to Richmond Vita wrote to her husband, Harold Nicolson, 'I love Mrs Woolf with
a sick passion' but , it was more instant admiration than instant infatuation. Then, for
the remainder of 1923 and early 1924, there was a hiatus in their relationship. They
seldom met or corresponded, for Vita felt snubbed by Virginia's refusal to join PEN, as

the first of these letters records. Besides, Vita had fallen temporarily in love with

Geoffrey Scott, wrecking his marriage in the process. She lived mostly in the country,
writing novels, while Virginia was working on Mrs Dalloway and The Common Reader.

To Virginia Woolf

182 Ebury Street

London SW1
26 March

Dear Mrs Woolf

I write this tonight, because I think you said you were going to Spain on the 27th and
I want it to catch you before you go. The PEN club committee are very anxious for
1

you to join the club, and at their request I proposed you, —now will you be nice and
let them make you a member? for my sake if for no other reason. It is only a guinea a
year, and they would be so pleased. They dine once a month; it is quite amusing. Do,
please, and come to the May dinner when they are entertaining distinguished foreign
writers. There was a little shout of excitement from the Committee about you, and
Galsworthy (so to speak) got up and made a curtsey.

I hope you will have fun in Spain. It is I know. Please let me know
the best country
when you come back, as I do want you both come and stay at Long Barn, and come
to
2

up to Knole with me. And I shan't know when you are back unless you tell me.

Yours very sincerely

Vita Nicolson

Berg

1
Vita was a member of the Committee of PEN, the international authors' society of whichJohn Galsworthy
was chairman. Virginia had received a previous invitation from PEN autumn of 1921 and had refused it.
in the
2
Vita's home in Kent, two miles from Knole, the great house of the Sackvilles where she was born in 1892.
38 March 1923-Early 1924

To Vita Sackville-West

Hotel Ingles
Madrid
Good Friday [30 March]

Dear Mrs Nicolson,

(But I wish you could be induced to call me Virginia). I got your letter as we left
Richmond. I am much flattered that the P.E.N, should ask me to become a member
I would do so with pleasure, except that I don't know what being a member

means. Does it commit one to make speeches, or to come regularly, or to read papers

or what? Living so far out, dinners are apt to be difficult, and I cant speak. . .

Berg

To Virginia Woolf

Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
8 April

My dear Virginia

(You see I don't take much inducing. Could you be induced likewise, do you think?)

It is nice of you to say you will join the PEN club provided you don't have to
make speeches. I can guarantee that, as by one of the club rules they are forbidden. The

most you ever get is a statement from the chairman. Nor need you go to any dinners

unless you want to. Nor does anyone read papers. You just go to a dinner when the
spirit moves you, and take your chance of sitting next to Mr H.G.Wells or an obscure
and spotty young journalist.
I don't suppose this letter will ever reach you. It always seems to be quite incred-
ible anyway that any letter should ever reach its destination. But I seem to remember
that you have already said — or, rather, written — all that there is to be said about let-

ters. So I won't compete.

I am envying you Spain more than I can say. I wish I were with you —But the
lady's smocks are very nice, along the hedges, and my tulips are coming out.

Yours very sincerely

Vita Nicolson
15 April 39

[Written in pencil] This paper is like blotting paper to write on in ink.

Berg

To Vita Sackville- West

Murcia
Spain
15 April

Dear Mrs Nicolson

The secretary of the P.E.N, club has written to me to say that I have been elected a
member. Very regretfully I have had to decline — since I see from the club papers that

it is wholly a dining club, and my experience is that I can't, living at Richmond, belong
to dining clubs. I've tried two dining clubs, with complete disaster But I'm very sorry,

as I should like to know the members, and see you also.

But this last I hope can be managed in other ways. . .

Berg
 March - December 1924
In March 1924 the Woolfs moved from Richmond to Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury,

taking the Hogarth Press with them, and Vita was among their first visitors. Virginia

invited her to contribute a book to the Press, and she responded by writing Seducers
in Ecuador while on a walking tour through the Dolomites with Harold. Virginia

was impressed by it, and began to regard her with new respect and admiration. In July
she paid her first visit to Long Barn in Kent, Vita's house, and to Knole, the ances-

home of Vita's father, Lord Sackville, who had been separated from his wife since
tral

1919. Lady Sackville, who figures frequently in this correspondence, lived alone in a
huge house in Brighton. In September Vita paid a return visit to Monk's House at

Rodmell, in Sussex, where the Woolfs spent the summer and many weekends. Their

friendship was still not intimate.

To Virginia Woolf

Tre Croci, Cadore

[Italy]

16 July

My dear Virginia

I hope that no one has ever yet, or ever will, throw down a glove I was not ready to
pick up. You asked me to write a story for you. On the peaks of mountains, and beside
green lakes, I am writing it for you. I shut my eyes to the blue of gentians, to the coral
of androsace; I shut my ears to the brawling of rivers; I shut my nose to the scent of
pines; I concentrate on my story,
1

Perhaps you will be the Polite Publisher, and I shall

get my story back

—'The Hogarth Press regrets that the accompanying manuscript,'
etc. —or whatever your formula may be. Still, I shall remain without resentment. The
peaks and the green lakes and the challenge will have made it worth while, and to you
alone shall it be dedicated. But of course the real challenge wasn't the story, (which was
after all merely a 'commercial proposition',) but the letter. You said I wrote letters of
impersonal frigidity. Well, it is difficult, perhaps, to do otherwise, in a country where
two rocky peaks of uncompromising majesty soar into the sky immediately outside
one's window, and where an amphitheatre of mountains encloses one's horizons
and one's footsteps. Today I climbed up to the eternal snows, and there found bright
yellow poppies braving alike the glacier and the storm; and was ashamed before their
courage. Besides, it is said that insects made these peaks, deposit on deposit; though if

you could see the peaks in question you would find it hard to believe that any insect,
however industrious, had found time to climb so far towards the sky. Consequently,

you see, one is made to feel extremely impersonal and extremely insignificant. I can't

1
Seducers in Ecuador.
42 March-December 1924

tell you how many Dolomitic miles and altitudes I have by now in my legs. I feel as

though all intellect had been swallowed up into sheer physical energy and well-being.
This is how one ought to feel, I am convinced. I contemplate young mountaineers
hung with ropes and ice-axes, and think that they alone have understood how to live
life —Will you ever play truant to Bloomsbury and culture, I wonder, and come trav-

elling with me? No, of course you won't. I told you once I would rather go to Spain
with you than with anyone, and you looked confused, and I felt I had made a gaffe,

been too personal, in fact, —but still the statement remains a true one, and I shan't be
really satisfied till I have enticed you away. Will you come next year to the place where
the gipsies of all nations make an annual pilgrimage to some Madonna or other? 1 for- 2

get its name. But it is a place somewhere near the Basque provinces, that I have always
wanted to go to, and next year I AM GOING. I think you had much better come too.

Look on it, if you like, as copy, — as I believe you look upon everything, human rela-

tionships included. Oh yes, you like people through the brain better than through the
heart, — forgive me if I am wrong. Of course there must be exceptions; there always
are. But generally speaking. . .

And then, I don't believe one ever knows people in their own surroundings; one
only knows them away, divorced from all the little strings and cobwebs of habit. Long
Barn, Knole, Richmond, and Bloomsbury. All too familiar and entrapping. Either I am
at home, and you are strange; or you are at home, and I am strange; so neither is the
real essential person, and confusion results.

But in the Basque provinces, among a horde of zingaros,

3
we should both be equally
strange and equally real.

On the whole, I think you had much better make up your mind to take a holi-

day and come.

Vita

Sussex

To Vita Sackville- West

Monk's House
Rodmell
Lewes
Sussex
19 August

My dear Vita,

Have you come back, and have you finished your book —when will you let us have it?

2
Santiago de Compostela.
3
Gipsies.
22 August 43

Here I am, being a nuisance, with all these questions.

I enjoyed your intimate letter from the Dolomites. It gave me a great deal of
pain —which is I've no doubt the first stage of intimacy —no friends, no heart, only an

indifferent head. Never mind: I enjoyed your abuse very much....

But I will not go on else I should write you a really intimate letter, and then you
would dislike me, more, even more, than you do.
But please let me know about the book.

To Virginia Woolf

Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
22 August

My dear Virginia

Aren't you a pig, to make me feel one? I have searched my brain to remember what
on earth in my letter could have given you 'a great deal of pain'. Or was it just one of
your phrases, poked at me? Anyhow, that wasn't my intention, as you probably know.
Do you ever mean what you say, or say what you mean? Or do you just enjoy baffling
the people who try to creep a little nearer?

My story I fear is but a crazy affair. If you gave me a severe date by which it must
reach you, typed and tidy, I should obey, being very tractable. If you say you must have
it next week I will sit up all night and finish it. If you say 'any time will do' I shall con-
tinue to glance at it disgustedly once a day and shove it back into its drawer with no
word added. Three-quarters of it exist at present, and your letter gave it a fillip. Please
issue an irrevocable command.
'Dislike you more, even more.' Dear Virginia, (said she putting her cards on the
table,) you know very well that I like you a fabulous lot; and any of my friends could
tell you that. But I expect you are blasee about people liking you, — no, you aren't,

though, — I take that back.

I nearly came to see you last Sunday, as I was coming back from my mother at

Brighton, but I thought you mightn't like it. And it was such a horrible day of gale and
rain.

Now I had better go on with that story.

Vita
44 March-December 1924

Sussex
To Vita Sackville-West

Monk's House
Rodmell
Lewes
26 August

My Dear Vita

The position about your story is this: if you could let us have it by Sept. 14th, we
should make an effort to bring it out this autumn; if later, it is highly improbable that
we could bring it out before early next year. . .

But really and truly you did say — I cant remember exactly what, but to the effect
that I made copy out of all my friends, and cared with the head, not with the heart.

As I say, I forget; and so we'll consider it cancelled....

Berg

To Vita Sackville- West

Monk's House
Rodmell
Lewes
Sussex
Sunday [31 August]

My dear Vita,

. . .could you come on Saturday 13th, not Sunday 14th, as Leonard has to disappear on 1

Monday at dawn, and therefore wouldn't see you at all.

I ought to warn you of the inconveniences and discomforts of this house,

especially when it rains, but they are too many to begin on. Anyhow, we shall enjoy
seeing you.

Berg

To Yorkshire.
[15 September] 45

To Virginia Woolf

Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
[15 September]

My dear Virginia

In the first place this must be a Collins to thank

1

you for the great enjoyment of my

2
hours with you, and in the second place it must be an explanation, for I find I have
cut a paragraph out of my story, meaning to insert it in another place; so if you came
on any passage which failed to make sense, that is the reason.
It is quite a short paragraph, and I can put it into the proof.
(I like the way I go on the assumption that the story has found sufficient favour

in the eyes of the Press, when all the time it may be in the post on itsway back to me.)
I have not forgotten the Flying Terrapin, 3 but can't find it. Someone must have
taken it. I will send it when it turns up.
I have ordered a dozen ilium croceum for your garden, just to convert you to
Dutch bulbs.

Will you ask Mr Leonard if I may review 4

book of poems by Claude Colleer
a

Abbott, which is to appear shortly? I man, but they are country poems
don't like the
lamentably like my own, and I thought some of them rather good. So if he is sending
them to anyone, may it be to me?
I did love being with you both; I was so happy there. I look forward to coaxing
you to Knole in December!

Yours affect'ly

Vita

Sussex

1
A thank-you letter named after Mr Collins in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
2
Vita spent her first Woolf at Monk's House, Rodmell, on Saturday 13
night with Virginia and Leonard
September 1924. In her diary of 15 September Virginia wrote about her: 'A perfect lady, with all the dash
and courage of the aristocracy, and less of its childishness than I expected.' 'They also visited Virginia's sister,
Vanessa Bell, at nearby Charleston.
3
The Flaming (not Flying) Terrapin, a book of poems by Roy Campbell.
4
For the Nation and Athenaeum (called Nation throughout this volume), of which Leonard Woolf was then
Literary Editor.
46 March-December 1924

To Vita Sackville- West

Monk's House
Rodmell
Lewes
Monday [15 September]

My dear Vita,

I like the story

1
very very much — in fact, I began reading it after you left. . .went out
for a walk, thinking of it all the time, and came back and finished it, being full of a par-
ticular kind of interest which I daresay has something to do with its being the sort of
thing I should like to write myself. I don't know whether this fact should make you
discount my praises, but I'm certain that you have done something much more inter-
esting (to me at least) than you've yet done....

am very glad we are going to publish it, and extremely proud and indeed
I

touched, with my childlike dazzled affection for you, that you should dedicate it to me.
We sent it to the printers this morning.
. . .By the way, you must let me have a list of people to send circulars to — as many
as you can. And to do this you must come and see me in London for you should have
heard Leonard and me sitting over our wood fire last night and saying what we don't
generally say when our guests leave us, about the extreme niceness etc etc and (I'm
now shy —and so will cease.)

Berg

To Virginia Woolf

Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
17 September

My dear Virginia

I have walked on air all day since getting your letter. I am more pleased than I can tell

you at your approval, and if I can tighten I will, — I felt myself that it needed this. Any
suggestion would be welcomed?
I will make out a list for circulars.

I sent the Terrapin — also the typist's address, which I forgot to give you:

1
Seducers in Ecuador.
Other documents randomly have
different content
 "I say," he said.
"Well, what do you say?"
"I say," was still all that Tommy said.
"Yes, I hear you do. But what?"
"I'm right-down glad you come here to stay, instead of going on
to Wilmington, like what you might have," was the most Tommy
could do. Then he added, after a fierce, brief struggle between
affection and shyness: "I do take it very kind, sir—and the
peppermints, and all. Good night, sir."
It was the happiest day Edward had spent since he left Crewe.
And next day they began to make the aeroplane. I do not know
how toy aeroplanes are made. There may be a hundred ways of
making them. If there are, Mr. Basingstoke knew at least one of
these ways, and it was quite a good way, too. The village carpenter
and the village blacksmith each was visited—I know that—and a
good deal of the work was done at the carpenter's bench. And at the
end of the third day the toy was ready.
"We'll fly it in the morning," said Mr. Basingstoke. "Are you glad
it's done? Sure you wouldn't have liked a kite better?"
"Not by long chalks," was Tommy's fervent answer.
The little aeroplane sat on the little stand the carpenter had made
for it, shiny with varnish, white with canvas, glittering in all its metal
mysteries.
"Jiminy!" said Tommy, awe-stricken at his own good fortune, "I
didn't know anybody could be so clever as what you are."
Edward Basingstoke, as he went to bed, wondered whether, after
all, he could spend his money to any better purpose than going
about the country making aeroplanes to please little boys.
 III
EDEN

W HEN you have made an aeroplane, the next thing is to make

it fly. And however agreeable an admiring audience may be
while one is fiddling with definite and concrete objects of wood,
canvas, and metal, one is apt, for the flight itself—the great flight,
the flight by which the aeroplane shall stand or fall—to desire
solitude.
That was why Edward drew the yellow blind up and the dimity
curtain aside and turned his bed round, so that the sun at its first
rising should strike through his dreams and awaken him. The sun did
exactly what it was expected to do, and Edward awoke saying
"Bother" before he remembered that "Bother" was not at all what he
meant. Then he got up and splashed gently, so as not to break the
audible sleep of the people in the next room, stole down the
creaking, twisted stairs in his tennis-shoes, soft-footed as a cat,
drew the bolts of the back door, and slipped out, closing the door
noiselessly behind him. He was careful to draw the bolt into its place
again by means of a bit of fishing-line. You can do this quite easily
with an old door that does not fit very closely—if you are careful to
mark with chalk on the outside of the door, as Edward did, the exact
place where the bolt is. Having thus secured the door against
passing tramps or burglars, he went out across the highroad, soft
with thick, white dust, where the dew lay on hedge and grassy
border, and the sun made diamonds of the dew. Charles, choking
himself in the stable, grew faint with distance.
Beyond the village was a meadow suited to his needs. It was
bordered on one side by a high red-brick wall, above whose moss-
grown coping the rounded shapes of trees leaned. A wood edged it
on two other sides, and in the front was a road.
Here he made his preparations, wound up his machine, and, after
one or two false starts, got it going. He meant to fly it like a kite,
and to this end he had tied one end of a ball of fine twine to the
middle of its body. Now he raised it above his head and launched it.
The little creature rose like a bird; the ball of string leaped and
jumped between his feet, as he paid out the line; the whirring wings
hung poised a second, at the level of the tree-tops, and then, caught
by the wind, sailed straight toward the red wall, burrowed into the
trees, and stopped. He ran toward the wall, winding up the string,
and stood below, looking up. He could not see the winged loose
thing. He tweaked the string and his tweak was met with
uncompromising resistance. The aeroplane had stuck in a chestnut-
tree, and hung there, buzzing.
Edward measured the wall with his eye. It was an old wall, of soft
red brick, from which the mortar had fallen away. In its crannies
moss grew, and ragged-robin and ground-ivy hung their delicate veil
in the angles of its buttresses—little ferns and wall-flowers run to
seed marked its courses, the yellow snapdragon which English
children call toad-flax flaunted its pure sulphur-colored plumes from
the ledge below the coping. An architect would have said that the
wall wanted pointing; a builder would have pointed it—an artist
would have painted it. To an engineer in grief for a lost toy the wall
presented itself as an obstacle to be climbed. He climbed it.
He thrust the string into his jacket pocket, and presently set hand
and foot to the hold that the worn wall afforded. In half a minute he
was astride the coping; next moment he had swung by his hands
and let himself go on the wall's other side. It was a longer drop than
he expected; it jarred him a little, and his hat tumbled off. As he
picked this up he noticed that the wall on the inside had been newly
pointed. The trees were a good thirty feet from the wall. There
would be no getting back by the way he had come. He must find a
gate. Meantime the little aeroplane's buzzing had grown faint and
ceased. But the twine led him to the tree, as the silken clue led
Queen Eleanor to the tower of Fair Rosamond. The next thing was to
climb the tree and bring down the truant toy.
The park spread smooth and green before him—the green
smoothness that comes only to English grass growing where grass
has been these many years. Quiet trees dotted the smooth
greenness—thickening about the house, whose many chimneys, red
and twisted, rose smokeless above the clustered green. Nothing
moved in all the park, where the sun drank the dew; birds stirred
and twittered in the branches—that was all. The little aeroplane had
stopped its buzzing. Edward was moved to thank Fate that he had
not brought Charles. Also he was glad that this trespass of his had
happened so early. He would get down the aeroplane and quietly go
out by the lodge gate. Even if locked, it would be climbable.
The chestnut-tree, however, had to be climbed first. It was easy
enough, though the leaves baffled him a little, so that it was some
time before he saw the desired gleam of metal and canvas among
the dappled foliage. Also, it was not quite easy to get the thing down
without injuring it, and one had to go slowly.
He lowered it, at last, by its string to the ground from the lowest
branch, then moved along a little, hung by his hands, and dropped.
He picked up the toy and turned to go. "Oh!" he said, without
meaning to. And, "I beg your pardon," without quite knowing what
for.
Because, as he turned he came face to face with a vision, the last
one would have expected to see in an English park at early day. A
girl in a Burmese coat, red as poppies, with gold-embroidered hem a
foot deep. Her dress was white. Her eyes were dark, her face palely
bright, and behind her dark head a golden-green Japanese umbrella
made a great ridged halo.
"I beg your pardon," said Edward again, and understood that it
was because he was, after all, trespassing.
 "I should think you did," said the vision, crossly. "What on earth
do you mean by it? How did you get in?"
Edward, standing a little awkwardly with the aeroplane in his
hands, looked toward the wall.
"I came over after this," he said. "I'm very sorry. I was flying the
thing and it stuck in the tree. If you'll tell me the way to the lodge,
I'll—I hope I didn't scare you."
"I couldn't think what it was," she answered, a little less crossly.
"I saw the tree tossing about as if—as if it had gone mad."
"And you thought of dryads and hastened to the spot. And it was
only an idiot and his aeroplane. I say—I am sorry—"
"You can't help not being a dryad," she said, and now she smiled,
and her smile transformed her face as sunlight does a landscape.
"What I really thought you were was a tramp. Only tramps never
climb trees. I couldn't think how you got in here, though. Tramps
never climb walls. They get in sometimes through the oak fence
beyond the plantations."
"It was very intrepid of you to face a tramp," he said.
"Oh, I love tramps," she said; "they're always quite nice to you if
you don't bully them or patronize them. There were two jolly ones
last week, and I talked to them, and they made tea out in the road,
you know, and gave me a cup over the fence. It was nasty." She
shuddered a little. "But I liked it awfully, all the same," she added. "I
wish I were a tramp."
"It's not a bad life," said he.
"It's the life," she said, enthusiastically. "No ties, no
responsibilities—no nasty furniture and hateful ornaments—you just
go where you like and do what you like; and when you don't like
where you are, you go somewhere else; and when you don't like
what you're doing, you needn't go on doing it."
 "Those are very irresponsible sentiments—for a lady."
"I know. That's why I think it's so dull being a woman. Men can
do whatever they want to."
"Only if they haven't their living to earn," said Edward, not quite
so much to himself as he would have liked.
There was a little pause, and then, still less himself, he blundered
into, "I say, it is jolly of you to talk to me like this."
She froze at once. "I forgot," she said, "that we had not been
introduced. Thank you for reminding me."
Edward's better self was now wholly lost, and what was left of
him could find nothing better to answer than, "Oh, I say!"
"What I ought to have said," she went on, her face a mask of cold
politeness, "is that you can't possibly get out by the lodge. There are
fierce dogs. And the lodge-keepers are worse than the dogs. If you
will follow me—at a distance, for fear I should begin to talk to you
again—I'll show you where the gardener's ladder is, and you can put
it up against the wall and get out that way."
"Couldn't I get out where the tramps get in?" he asked, humbly.
"I don't like to trouble you."
"Not from here. We should have to pass close by the house."
The "we" gave him courage. "I say—do forgive me," he said.
"There's nothing to forgive," said she.
"Oh, but do," he said, "if you'd only see it! It was just because it
was so wonderful and splendid to have met you like this . . . and to
have you talk to me as you do to the other tramps."
"You're not a tramp," she said, "and I ought not to have forgotten
it."
 "But I am," said he, "it's just what I really and truly am."
"Come and get the ladder," said she, and moved toward the wall.
"Not unless you forgive me. I won't," he added, plucking up a
little spirit, "be indebted for ladders to people who won't forgive a
man because he speaks the truth clumsily."
"Come," she said, looking back over her shoulder.
"No," he said, obstinately, not moving. "Not unless you forgive
me."
"It can't possibly matter to you whether I forgive you or not," she
turned to say it. And as she spoke there came to Edward quite
suddenly and quite unmistakably the knowledge that it did matter.
Sometimes glimpses do thus suddenly and strangely come to us—
and that by some magic inner light that is not reason we know
things that by the light of reason we could never know.
"Look here," he said. "I'll go after that ladder in a minute. But
first I've got something to say to you. Don't be angry, because I've
got to say it. Do you know that just now—just before I said that
stupid thing that offended you—you were talking to me as though
you'd known me all your life?"
"You needn't rub it in," she said.
"Do you know why that is? It's because you are going to know me
all your life. I'm perfectly certain of it. Somehow or other, it's true.
We're going to be friends. I sha'n't need to say again how jolly it is
of you to talk to me. We shall take all that as a matter of course.
People aren't pitchforked into meetings like this for nothing. I'm glad
I said that. I'm glad you were angry with me for saying it. If you
hadn't I might just have gone away and not known till I got outside
—and then it would have been a deuce and all of a business to get
hold of you again. But now I know. And you know, too. When shall I
see you again? Never mind about forgiving me. Just tell me when I
shall see you again. And then I'll go."
 "You must be mad," was all she could find to say. She had furled
her sunshade and was smoothing its bamboo ribs with pink fingers.
"You'll be able to find out whether I'm mad, you know, when you
see me again. As a matter of fact—which seems maddest, when you
meet some one you want to talk to, to go away without talking or to
insist on talk and more talk? And you can't say you didn't want to
talk to me, because you know you did. Look here, meet me to-
morrow morning again—will you?"
"Certainly not."
"You'll be sorry if you don't. We're like two travelers who have
collected all sorts of wonderful things in foreign countries. We long
to show each other our collections—all the things we've thought and
dreamed. If we'd been what you call introduced, perhaps we
shouldn't have found this out. But as it is, we know it."
"Speak for yourself," she said.
"Thank you," he said, seriously. "I will. Will you sit down for ten
minutes? This tree-root was made for you to sit down on for ten
minutes, and I will speak for myself."
"I can't," she said, and her voice—there was hurry in it, and
indecision, but the ice had gone. "You must come at once for that
ladder. It's getting more dangerous every moment. If any one saw
you here there'd be an awful row."
"For you?"
"Yes, for me. Come on."
He followed her along the wall under the chestnuts. There was no
more spoken words till they came to the ladder.
Then, "Right," he said. "Thank you. Good-by." And set the ladder
against the wall.
"Good-by," said she. "I'll hand the aeroplane up to you?"
 "Stand clear," he said, half-way up the ladder. "I'll give it a
sideways tip from the top—it'll fall into its place. It's too heavy for
you to lift. Good-by."
He had reached the top of the wall. She stood below, looking up
at him.
"There won't be any row now?"
"No. It's quite safe."
"Then have you nothing to say?"
"Nothing. Yes, I have. I will come to-morrow. You'll
misunderstand everything if I don't."
"Thank you," he said.
She came up the ladder, two steps, then handed him his toy.
Then the ladder fell with a soft thud among the moss and earth and
dead leaves; his head showed a moment above the wall, then
vanished.
He went thoughtfully through the dewy grass, along the road,
and back to his inn.
Tommy met him by the horse-trough. "You been flying it?" he
asked, breathlessly.
"Yes. She went like a bird."
"How far did she go?" Tommy asked.
"I don't quite know," said Edward, quite truly, "how far she went.
I shall know better to-morrow."
 IV
THE SOUTH DOWNS

T HE day was long. Though the aeroplane flew to admiration,

though Tommy adored him and all his works, though the
skylarks sang, and the downs were drenched in sunshine, Edward
Basingstoke admitted to himself, before half its length was known to
him, that the day was long.
He climbed the cliff above Cuckmere and sat in the sunshine
there, where the gulls flashed white wings and screamed like babies;
he watched the tide, milk-white with the fallen chalk of England's
edge, come sousing in over the brown, seaweed-covered rocks; he
felt the crisp warmth of the dry turf under his hand, and smelt the
sweet smell of the thyme and the furze and the sea, and it was all
good. But it was long. And, for the first time in his life, being alone
was lonely.
And for the second time since the day when Charles, bounding at
him from among the clean straw of an Oxford stable, had bounded
into his affections, he had left that strenuous dog behind.
He got out his road map and spread it in the sun—with stones at
the corners to cheat the wind that, on those Downs, never sleeps—
and tried to believe that he was planning his itinerary, and even to
pretend to himself that he should start to-morrow and walk to
Lewes. But instead his eyes followed the map's indication of the road
to that meadow where the red wall was, and presently he found that
he was no longer looking at the map, but at the book of memory,
and most at the pictures painted there only that morning. Already it
seemed a very long time ago.
 "I am afraid," said Mr. Basingstoke, alone at the cliff's edge, "that
this time it really is it. It's different from what I thought. It's
confoundedly unsettling."
Like all healthy young men, he had always desired and intended
to fall in love; he had even courted the experience, and honestly
tried to lose his heart, but with a singular lack of success. In the girls
he had met he had found gaiety, good looks, and a certain vague
and general attractiveness—the common attribute of youth and
girlhood—but nothing that even began to transfigure the world as
his poets taught him that love should transfigure it. The little, trivial
emotions which he had found in pressing hands and gazing into eyes
had never lured him further than the gaze and the hand-clasp. Yet
he had thought himself to be in love more than once.
"Or perhaps this isn't the real thing, either," he tried to reassure
himself. "How could it be?"
Then he explained to himself, as he had often explained to
Vernon, that love at first sight was impossible. Love, he had held and
proclaimed, was not the result of the mere attraction exercised by
beauty—it was the response of mind to mind, the admiration of
character and qualities—the satisfaction of one's nature by the
mental and moral attributes of the beloved. That was not exactly
how he had put it, but that was what he had meant. And now—he
had seen a girl once, for ten minutes, and already he could think of
nothing else. Even if he thought of something else he could perceive
the thought of her behind those other thoughts, waiting, alluring,
and sure of itself, to fill his mind the moment he let it in.
"Idiot," he said at last, got up from the turf, and pocketed the
map, "to-morrow she'll be quite ordinary and just like any other girl.
You go for a long walk, young-fellow-my-lad, and think out a water-
mill for Tommy."
This had, indeed, been more than half promised. Mr. Basingstoke
was one of those persons whom their friends call thorough; their
enemies say that they carry everything too far. If he did a thing at
all, he liked to do it thoroughly. If he wrote a duty-letter to an aunt,
he wrote a long one, and made it amusing. As often as not he would
illustrate it with little pictures. If he gave a shilling to a beggar he
would immediately add tobacco and agreeable conversation. One of
his first acts, on coming into his inheritance, had been to pension his
old nurse, who was poor and a widow with far too many children—
too many, because she was a widow and poor and had to go out to
work instead of looking after her family, as she wanted to do. Any
one else would have written and told her she was to have two
pounds a week as long as she lived. Edward sent her a large box of
hot-house flowers—her birthday happening to occur at about that
date—the most expensive and beautiful flowers he could find,
anonymously. Then he sent her a fat hamper bursting with excellent
things to eat and drink—and a box of toys and clothes for the
children. The lady who "served" him with the clothes was amused at
his choice—but approved it. And in the end he told his solicitors—
smiling to himself at the novel possession—to write and tell the
woman that an old employer had secured her an annuity. Later he
went down to see her, to find her incredibly happy and prosperous,
and to hear the wonderful and mysterious tale. So now, in the case
of Tommy, most people would have thought an aeroplane and a
motor-ride as much as any little boy could expect. But Mr.
Basingstoke liked to give people much more than they could expect.
It was not enough to give them enough. He liked to give a feast.
That evening after tea, Tommy breathing hard on the back of his
neck, he sketched the water-wheel with the highest degree of
precision and a superfluous wealth of detail. But the thought was
with him through it all.
Next morning he went to the trysting-place, through the fresh,
sweet morning. He climbed the wall, sat down on the log, and
waited. He waited an hour, and she did not come. It says a good
deal for his tenacity of purpose that when he went home he began
at once on the water-wheel.
 In the afternoon he took Charles out for a walk. Charles chased
and killed a hen, and was butted by a goat, before they reached the
end of the street; knocked a leg of mutton off the block at the
butcher's in the next village; bit the rural police to the very
undershirt, and also to the tune of ten compensating shillings; and
was run over by a bicycle, which twisted its pedal in the consequent
fall, and grazed its rider's hands and trousers knees. After each
adventure Charles was firmly punished, but, though chastised, he
was not chastened, and when they met a dog-cart coming slowly
down a hill he was quite ready to run in front of it, barking and
leaping at the horse's nose. The horse, which appeared to Charles's
master to be a thoroughbred, shied. There was a whirl of dust and
hoofs and brown flank, a cry from the driver—another cry, a fierce
bark from Charles, ending in a howl of agony—the next instant the
horse had bolted and Edward was left in the dusty road, Charles
writhing in the dust, and the dog-cart almost out of sight.
"Charles, old man—Charles, lie still, can't you? Let me see if
you're hurt."
He stooped, and as he stooped Charles did lie still.
His master lifted the heavy, muscular body that had been so full
of life and energy. It lay limp and lifeless, head and hind-quarters
drooping over his arm like a wet shawl.
Basingstoke sat down on the roadside with the dog across his
knees. For him the light of life was out. Men do not cry, of course, as
women do when their dogs die, but he could not see very clearly.
Presently he found himself face to face with that question, always so
disconcerting, even to criminals—what to do with the body. He was
miles from his inn, and Charles was no light weight. He could not
leave the dog in the road. His friend must have decent burial. There
was nothing for it but to wait till some cart should come by and then
to ask for a lift.
 So he sat there, thinking such thoughts as men do think in
adversity. After a calamity, when the first excitement of horror dies
down, one always says, "How different everything was yesterday!"
and Mr. Basingstoke said what we all say. Yesterday Charles was
alive and well, and his master had not taken him out because he
wanted to be at leisure to think—he realized that now—about the girl
whom he was to have met to-day. And he had not met the girl. And
Charles was dead.
"I wish I hadn't left you at home yesterday, old boy," said Mr.
Basingstoke.
And then came the sound of hoofs, and he prepared to stop the
vehicle, whatever it was, and beg for a lift for himself and what he
carried. But when the wheels came near and he saw that it was the
very cart that had run over Charles he sat down again and kept his
eyes on the ground. It wasn't their fault, of course, but still. . . .
The cart stopped and some one was saying: "I hope the dog isn't
much hurt." A hard, cold voice it was.
Edward got out his hand from under Charles to take his hat off,
and said: "My dog is dead."
"I am extremely sorry, but it was the dog's fault," said the voice,
aggressively.
"Yes," said Edward.
"There's nothing to be done," said the voice. "It was nearly a
nasty accident for us."
"I apologize for my dog's conduct," said Edward, formally.
And then came another voice, "But, Aunt Loo, can't we do
anything?"
Of course you will have known all along whose voice that would
be. Edward was less discerning. He had been far too much occupied
with Charles and the horse to do more than realize that the two
people in the cart were women—and now when he heard again the
voice that had talked to him yesterday in the freshness of the
morning, the shock sent his blood surging. He looked up—face,
neck, ears were burning. Men do not blush, but if they did you
would have said that Mr. Basingstoke blushed in that hour.
He looked up. Holding the reins was a hard, angular woman of
fifty, the sort that plays golf and billiards and is perfectly competent
with horses. Beside her sat the girl, and under her white hat the
crimson of her face matched his own. The distress he felt at this
unpropitious coincidence deepened his color. Hers deepened, too.
"You can't do anything, thank you," he said, just a moment too
late. For his pause had given the aunt time to look from one to the
other.
"Oh!" she said, shortly.
The girl spoke, also just too late.
"At least, let us take the poor, dear dog home for you," she said.
"By all means," said the aunt, with an air of finality. "Where shall
we leave it?"
"I am at the Five Bells, in Jevington," said Edward, and was
thankful to feel his ears a shade less fiery.
"I see," said the aunt, with hideous significance. "Put it in at the
back, will you?"
She spoke as though Charles were a purchase she had just made
and Mr. Basingstoke the shopman.
He would have liked to refuse, but how dear of her to suggest it.
"Thank you," he said, and came through the dust to the back of the
cart.
 Almost before he had replaced the second pin the cart moved,
and he was left alone in the white road.
The way home was long and dismal—its only incident the finding
of a little white handkerchief in the dust about a mile from the scene
of the tragedy. It was softly scented. Of course it might be Aunt
Loo's handkerchief, but he preferred to think that it was Hers. He
shook the dust from it and put it in his pocket. As he came down the
village street he remembered how, only yesterday, he had heard,
just here by the saddler's, that strangled, choking bark which
betokened Charles's recognition of his master's approach. Well, there
would be no such barking welcome for him now.
Some other dog was choking and barking, though, and in that
very stable where Charles had choked and barked. And Charles's
body would have been put in the stable, no doubt. He would go
round and see. He went round, opened the stable door, and next
moment was struck full in the chest by what seemed to be a heavy
missive hurled with tremendous force. It was Charles, who had
leaped from the end of his chain to greet his master—Charles, alive
and almost idiotic in his transports of uncouth affection. Edward felt
the dog all over—to see if any bones were broken. Charles never
winced. There was not a cut or a bruise on him! The two sat on the
straw embracing for quite a long time.
"Yes, sir, seems quite himself, don't he?" said Robert. "Miss
Davenant she brought him. Told me to tell you the dog come to
himself quite sudden on the cart. Must have fainted, young miss
said, and when he come to it was all she could do to hold him down.
He seems to have come to quite sudden and all wild-like among
their legs in the bottom of the cart till miss dragged him out—nearly
upset the old lady right out of the cart, coming up sudden under her
knees. Awful nasty she was about it. Said the dog must have been
shamming. Thank you, sir. I'll drink your health and the dog's."
"Shamming, indeed!" said Edward to himself, and resented the
cruel and silly aspersion. Yet, stay, was it really quite impossible that
Charles, fearing that the same punishment might visit this last
exploit as had followed his earlier outrages, had really shammed, to
disarm a doting master? Edward put away the thought. It was
impossible.
The main thing was that Charles was alive. But, after all, was that
the main thing? Now that the dog was alive it suddenly ceased to
be. The main thing was that he had not seen her that morning and
that he must, somehow, see her again.
Somehow. But how? This gave him food for thought.
He went into his parlor and sat down—to think. But, try as he
could, there seemed no way. Of course he could go next morning—
of course he would go next morning—and every morning for a week.
But if she hadn't come to-day, why should she come to-morrow or
the next day, or the day after that?
Or the handkerchief. Wouldn't it be natural that he should call to
return it and to thank them for taking care of the lifeless Charles,
and apologize for that thoughtless animal's inconvenient and sudden
change of attitude? Yes, that would have been natural if the girl had
not blushed and if he had not turned scarlet.
He took out the handkerchief and spread it on the table—what
silly little things girls' handkerchiefs were! Then he looked at it more
closely. Then he took it to the window, stretched it tightly, and
looked more closely than ever. Yes, there was something on it,
something intended—not just the marks of the road. There were
letters—pencil letters an inch or more long, very rough and
straggling, but quite unmistakable—Ce soir 12 heures. At least, it
might be 13, but, then, she wasn't an Italian.
The light of life blazed up, and the world suddenly became
beautiful again. She had not forgotten—she had wished to come to
meet him—something had prevented her coming in the morning. But
to-night she would come. Twelve o'clock! A strange hour to choose.
Bah! who was he to cavil at the hour she chose to set? How sweet
and soft the handkerchief was!
 V
LA MANCHE

T HE bolts of the back door did not creak at all when, at twenty
minutes to twelve, Edward Basingstoke let himself out. Tommy
always saw to the bolts, for his own purposes, with a feather and a
little salad oil.
The night was sweet and dark under the trees and in among the
houses. In the village no lamp gleamed at any window. Beyond the
village, the starshine and dew lent a gray shimmer to field and
hedge, and the road lay before him like a pale ribbon. He crossed
the meadow, climbed the wall, and dropped. The earth sounded
dully under his feet, and twigs crackled as he moved. There was no
other sound. She was not there. He dared not light a match to see
his watch's face by. Perhaps he was early. Well, he could wait. He
waited. He waited and waited and waited. He listened till his ears
were full of the soft rustlings and movements which go to make up
the silence of country night. He strained his eyes to see some
movement in the gray park dotted with black trees. But all was still.
It was very dark under the trees. And through all his listening he
thought, thought. Did it do to trust to impulses—to instincts? Did it
do, rather, to disregard them? A gipsy woman had said to him once,
"Your first thoughts are straight—give yourself time to think twice
and you'll think wrong." What he had felt that morning while he
waited, vainly, for her to come had taught him that, fool as he might
be for his pains, the feeling that possessed him was more like the
love poets talked of than he would have believed any feeling of his
could be. And, after all, love at first sight was possible—was it not
the theme of half the romances in the world? He felt that at this,
their second meeting, he must know whether he meant to advance
or to retreat. Always when he had trusted his impulse his choice had
been a wise one. But was a choice necessary now? His instincts told
him that it was. This midnight meeting—planned by her and not by
him—it was a meeting for "good-by." No girl would make an
assignation at that hour just to tell a man that she intended to meet
him again the next day. So he must know whether he meant to
permit himself to be said good-by to. And he knew that he did not.
The day had been long, but it seemed to him that already the
night had been longer than the day. Could he have mistaken the
hour? No, it was certainly twelve—or thirteen. Then his heart leaped
up. If it had been thirteen, that meant one o'clock. Perhaps it was
not one yet. But he felt that he knew it to be at least three. Yet if it
were three there would be the diffused faint illumination of dawn
growing, growing. And there was no light at all but the changeless
light of the stars. Again and again he thought he saw her, thought
he heard her. And again and again only silence and solitude came to
meet his thoughts.
When at last she did come he saw her very far off, and heard the
rustle of her dress even before he saw her.
He would not go to meet her across the starlit space; that would
be very dangerous. He stood where he was till she came into the
shadow. Then he went toward her and said:
"At last!"
She drew a long breath. "Oh, I was so afraid you wouldn't come!"
"I was here at twelve," he said.
"So you got the handkerchief. I put thirteen because I thought if I
put one—it was so difficult to write—and, of course, I couldn't look
at it to see if it was readable. I wrote it under the driving-rug. Oh,
suppose you hadn't got it!"
"I can't suppose it. What should I have done if I hadn't?"
 "Oh," she said, "don't! Please don't. I thought you'd understand it
was serious. I shouldn't have asked you to come in the middle of the
night to talk nonsense as if we were at a dance."
"What's serious?" he said.
She said, "Everything," and her voice trembled.
He took her arm, and felt that she herself was trembling.
"Come and sit down," he said, comfortably, as one might speak to
a child in trouble. "Come and sit down and tell me all about it."
They sat down on the log, and he pulled the dark cloak she wore
more closely round her.
"Now," he said, "what's happened? Why didn't you come this
morning?"
"I stayed too long the first time," she answered, "and met Aunt
Loo as I went in. She asked me where I'd been. I said I'd been out
to swim in the lake. That was quite true. That was why I had gone
out. I've often done it. But, of course, my hair wasn't wet. She didn't
say anything. But this morning when I came down she was sitting in
the hall, waiting for me. She asked me if I was going bathing again,
and I said, No, I was going to walk in the park. So she said,
'Charming idea. I'll come, too.'"
"And what did you say?"
"I said, 'Do,' of course. But it was awful. I was so afraid of her
seeing you."
"Suppose she had chosen to walk that way."
"Yes, of course I thought of that. So I led the way and walked
straight toward you. Then she thought whoever I was going to meet
must be the other way. So she insisted on going the other way. I
knew she would."
 "That was subtle of you."
"No; it's only that she's stupid. It wouldn't have taken any one
else in."
"So she was baffled."
"Yes, but she has instincts, though she's so stupid. She knew
there was something up. And then when we met you—oh, I am so
glad the dog's all right—when we met you I knew she thought you'd
something to do with my being out so early in the morning, and
then you blushed."
"If I did," he said, "I wasn't the only one."
"Oh, I know," she said, "but I don't suppose I should have if you
hadn't. Though unjust suspicions like that are enough to make
anybody blush. Yes, they were unjust because you had nothing to do
with my going out the first time—why, I didn't even know there was
a you. And now all the fat's in the fire, and she's taking me to
Ireland or Scotland to-morrow—she won't say which. And I couldn't
bear to go and have you think I'd made an appointment and not
kept it. It's so unbusiness-like to break appointments," she said.
"Does she suppose, then, that we—that I am—that you have—
that I should—?"
"I don't know what she supposes. At least I do. But it's too silly.
Now I've explained everything. Good-by. I'm glad you found the
handkerchief—and I'm awfully glad about Charles."
"I didn't know you knew his name."
"The stableman said it when the dog ran between his knees and
nearly knocked him down. It's a darling dog—but isn't it strong!
Good-by!" She held out her hand. "Good-by," she said, again.
"No," said he, and held the hand.
There was a little pause.
 "Say good-by," she said. "Indeed I must go."
"Why?" he asked, releasing the hand.
"I've said everything there was to say—I mean, what I came to
say."
"There's a very great deal that you haven't told me. I don't
understand. Who does your aunt think I am?"
"I would rather not tell you; you'd only laugh."
"But please tell me. I shouldn't."
A troubled silence answered him.
"Look here," he said, "I know there's a lot you haven't told me.
Do tell me, and let me help you, if I can. You're worried and
unhappy. I can hear it in your voice. Tell me. Things look different
when you've put them into words. First of all, tell me who your aunt
thought I was."
She sat down again with the air of definite decision. "Very well,"
she said, "if you will have it, she thought you were the piano-tuner.
Why don't you laugh?"
"I'm not amused yet," he said. "What piano-tuner? And why
should he—why should you—"
"The piano-tuner is a fence," she said, "and she thinks you're it."
"I don't understand a word you're saying."
"I don't care," she said, desperately. "I'll tell you the whole silly
story and you can laugh, if you like. I shan't be offended. Last
autumn father brought a man to lunch, quite a nice man—sensible,
middle-aged, very well off—and next day he told me the man had
proposed for me, and I'd better take him. He'd accepted for me."
 "Good heavens!" said Edward, "I thought it was only in the Family
Herald that such fathers existed."
"Laugh as much as you like," said she; "it's true, for all that. You
see, I'd refused several before that. It's rather important for me to
marry well—my father's not rich, and—"
"I see. Well?"
"Well, I wasn't going to. And when it came to this luncheon man I
told you about there was a scene, and my father said was there any
one else, and I said no; but he went on so frightfully and wouldn't
believe me. So at last I told him."
"Told him what?"
"That there was some one."
"Yes?" His voice was only more gentle for the sudden sharp stab
of disappointment which told him what hope it was that he had
nursed.
"And then, of course, I wouldn't say who it was. And he sent for
my aunts. Aunt Enid's worse than Aunt Loo. And they bothered and
bothered. And at last I said it was the piano-tuner. I don't know how
I could have. Father turned him off, of course, poor wretch, and they
brought me down here to come to my senses. Aunt Loo never saw
the miserable piano-tuner, and she thinks you're him. So now you
know. And that's why they're taking me away from here. They think
the piano-tuner is pursuing me. I believe Aunt Loo thinks you trained
the dog to bark at horses so as to get a chance to speak to me."
"Do you care much for your father?" he asked, "or for any of
them?"
"It's a horrid thing to say," she answered, "but I don't. The only
one I care for's Aunt Alice—she's an invalid and a darling. Father
thinks about nothing but bridge and races, and Aunt Loo's all golf
and horses, and Aunt Enid's a social reformer. I hate them all. And
I've never been anywhere or seen anything. I'm not allowed to write
to any one. And they don't have any one here at all, and I'm not to
see a single soul till I've come to my senses, as they call it. And
that's why I was so glad to talk to you yesterday."
"I see," he said, very kindly. "Now what can I do for you? Where's
the other man? Can't I post a letter to him or something? Why
doesn't he come and rescue you?"
"What other man?" she asked.
"The man you're fond of. The man whose name you wouldn't tell
them."
"Oh," she said, lightly, and just as though it didn't matter. "There
isn't any other man."
"There isn't?" he echoed, joyously.
"No, of course not. I just made him up—and then I called him the
piano-tuner."
"Then," he said, "forgive me for asking, but I must be quite sure
—you don't care for any man at all?"
"Of course I don't," she answered, resentfully, "I shouldn't go
about caring about any one who didn't care for me—and if any one
cared for me and I cared for him, of course we should run away with
each other at once."
"I see," said Mr. Basingstoke, slowly and distinctly. "Then if there
isn't any one else I suggest that you run away with me."
It was fully half a minute before she spoke. Then she said: "I
don't blame you. I deserve it for asking you to meet me and coming
out like this. But I thought you were different."
"Deserve what?"
"To be insulted and humiliated. To be made a jest of."
 "It seems to me that my offer is no more insulting or humiliating
than any of your other offers. I like you very much. I think you like
me. And I believe we should suit each other very well. Don't be
angry. I'm perfectly serious. Don't speak for a minute. Listen. I've
just come into some money, and I'm going about the country, seeing
places and people. I'm just a tramp, as I told you. Come and be a
tramp, too. We'll go anywhere you like. We'll take the map and you
shall put your finger on any place you think you'd like to see, and
we'll go straight off to it, by rail or motor, or in a cart, or a caravan,
if you'd like it. Caravans must be charming. To go wherever you like,
stop when you like—go on when you like. Come with me. I don't
believe you'd ever regret it. And I know I never should."
"I believe you're serious," she said, half incredulously.
"Of course I am. It's a way out of all your troubles."
"I couldn't," she said, earnestly, "marry any one I wasn't very
fond of. And one can't be fond of a person one's only seen twice."
"Can't you?" he said, a little sadly.
"No," she answered. "I think it's very fine of you to offer me this
—just to get me out of a bother. And I'm sorry I thought you were
being horrid. I'll tell you something. I've always thought that even if
I cared very much for some one I should be almost afraid to marry
him unless I knew him very, very well. Girls do make such frightful
mistakes. You ought to see a man every day for a year, and then,
perhaps, you'd know if you could really bear to live with him all your
life."
Instead of answering her directly, he said: "You would love the life
in the caravan. Think of the camp—making a fire of sticks and
cooking your supper under the stars, and the great moonlit nights,
and sleeping in pine woods and waking in the dawn and curling
yourself up in your blanket and going to sleep again till I shouted
out that the fire was alight and breakfast nearly ready."
 "I wish I could come with you without having to be married."
"Come, then," he said. "Come on any terms. I'll take you as a
sister if I'm not to take you as a wife."
"Do you mean it? Really?" she said. "Oh, why shouldn't I? I
believe you would take me—and I should be perfectly free then. I've
got a little money of my own that my godmother left me. I was
twenty-one the other day. I don't get it, of course. My father says it
costs that to keep me. But if I were to run away he would have to
give it to me, wouldn't he? And then I could pay you back what you
spent on me. Oh, I wish I could. Will you really take me?"
But he had had time to think. "No," he said, "on reflection, I don't
think I will."
But she did not hear him, for as he spoke she spoke, too. "Hush!"
she said. "Look — look there."
Across the park, near the house, lights were moving.
"They're looking for me," she gasped. "They've found out that I'm
away. Oh, what shall I do? Aunt Loo will never be decent to me
again. What shall I do?"
"Come with me," he said, strongly. "I'll take care of you. Come."
He took her hand. "I swear by God," he said, "that everything
shall be as you choose. Only come now—come away from these
people. You're twenty-one. You're your own mistress. Let me help
you to get free from all this stuffy, stupid tyranny."
"You won't make me marry you?" she asked.
"I can't make you do anything," he said. "But if you're coming, it
must be now."
"Come, then," she said, making for the ladder.
 VI
CROW'S NEST

H E had brought a ball of string in his pocket, this time, and he

was glad to know he could lower the ladder by it—for the thud
of a falling ladder would sound far in the night stillness. From the
top of the wall he held the ladder while she mounted.
"Sit here a moment," he said, "while I get rid of the ladder." He
lowered it gently, drew the string up, leaped to the ground outside
the wall, and held up his hands to her.
"Jump," he whispered. "I'll catch you."
But even as he spoke she had turned and was hanging by her
hands. He let her do it her own way. She dropped expertly, landing
with a little rebound. He was glad he had not tried to catch her. It
would have been a poor beginning to their comradeship if he had, at
the very outset, shown doubts of her competence to do anything
she set out to do.
They stood under the wall very near together.
"What are you going to do?" she said.
"I must get a car and take you away. Are you afraid to be left
alone for a couple of hours?"
"I—I don't think so," she said. "But where? Did you notice the
lights as you got over the wall?"
"Yes; they were still near the house."
The two were walking side by side along the road now.
 "If you were any ordinary girl I should be afraid to leave you to
think things over—for fear you should think you'd been rash or silly
or something—and worry yourself about all sorts of nonsense, and
perhaps end in bolting back to your hutch before I could come back
to you. But since it's you—let's cut across the downs here—we'll
keep close to the edge of the wood."
Their feet now trod the soft grass.
"How sensible of you to wear a dark cloak," he said.
"Yes," she said, "a really romantic young lady in distress would
have come in white muslin and blue ribbons, wouldn't she?"
He glowed to the courage that let her jest at such a moment.
"Where am I to wait?" she asked.
"There's an old farm-house not far away," he said. "If you don't
mind waiting there. Could you?"
"Who lives there?"
"Nobody. I happen to have the key. I was looking at it yesterday.
It's not furnished, but I noticed some straw and packing-cases. I
could rig you up some sort of lounge, but don't do it if you're afraid.
If you're afraid to be left to yourself we'll walk together to
Eastbourne. But if we do we're much more likely to be caught."
"I'm not in the least afraid. Why should I be?" she said, and they
toiled up the hill among the furze bushes in the still starlight.
"What they'll do," she said, presently, "when they're sure I'm not
in the park, is to go down to your inn and see if you're there."
"Yes," he said, "I'm counting on that. That's why I said two or
three hours. You see, I must be there when they do come, and the
minute they're gone I'll go for the motor. Look here—I've got some
chocolate that I got for a kiddy to-day; luckily, I forgot to give it to
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