About the Author

Victoria Mary Sackville-West, known as Vita, was born in 1892 at Knole in Kent, the only child of aristocratic parents. In 1913 she married diplomat Harold Nicolson, with whom she had two sons and travelled extensively before settling at Sissinghurst Castle in 1930, where she devoted much of her time to creating its now world-famous garden. Throughout her life Sackville-West had a number of other relationships with both men and women, and her unconventional marriage would later become the subject of a biography written by her son Nigel Nicolson. Though she produced a substantial body of work, amongst which are writings on travel and gardening, Sackville-West is best known for her novels The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931), and for the pastoral poem The Land (1926) which was awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Prize. She died in 1962 at Sissinghurst.

ALSO BY VITA SACKVILLE-WEST

Novels

The Dragon in Shallow Waters

The Heir

Challenge

Seducers in Ecuador

The Edwardians

All Passion Spent

Family History

Grand Canyon

Non-Fiction

Passenger to Teheran

Saint Joan of Arc

English Country Houses

Pepita

The Eagle and The Dove

Sissinghurst: The Creation of a Garden

VITA SACKVILLE-WEST

Heritage

vintage

To My Mother

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Epub ISBN: 9781473552951

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Copyright renewed © Nigel Nicolson 1975

Victoria Sackville-West has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Cover illustration © Gosia Herba

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd in 1919
This edition reissued by Vintage in 2018

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Part One

1

Two years of my life were spent in a rough gray village of the Apennines; a shaggy village, tilted perilously up the side of the hill; a rambling village, too incoherent to form a single perspectived street, but which revolved around, or, rather, above and below, a little piazza warm with present sun, though grim with unknown, conjectured violence in the past. Here stood the massive civic palace, ancient and forbidding, with its tower poised and tremulous in the evening sky; and here the church, with its marble pietà, the work, it was said, of Mino da Fiesole. A mountain torrent poured down the village, a wild little storm of water, brown and white, spanned by a bridge, which rose abruptly to a peak, and as abruptly descended. In the evenings the youth of the village drifted towards the bridge, gossiped there, sang a snatch of song, or indolently fished. In the silent midday, stretched at length on the flat stone parapet, they slept …

The village was called Sampiero della Vigna Vecchia.

If I dwell thus upon its characteristics, it is from lingering affection and melancholy memories. My sentiment is personal; irrelevant to my present purpose. I resume:

In this village – and it is for this reason that the village started up so irrepressibly in my thoughts – I had as a companion a man named Malory. Like me, he was there to study Italian. We were not friends; we lodged in the same house, and a certain degree of intimacy had thereby necessarily forced itself upon us; but we were not friends. I cannot tell you why. No quarrel stood between us. I liked him; I believe he liked me. But we were each conscious that our last day in Sampiero would also be the last day we spent together. No pleasant anticipation of continued friendship in our own country came to sweeten our student days in Italy.

Yet for one week in those two years Malory and I were linked by the thread of a story he told me, sitting out under a clump of stone-pines overlooking the village. It linked us, indeed, not for that week alone, but, though interruptedly and at long intervals, for many years out of our lives. Neither of us foresaw at the time the far-reaching sequel of his confidences. He, when he told me the story, thought that he was telling me a completed thing, an incident revived in its entirety out of the past; I, when I later went to investigate for myself, went with no thought of continuance; and finally, I, when I departed, did so in the belief that the ultimate word was spoken. Our error, I suppose, arose from our delusion that in this affair, which we considered peculiarly our own, we held in some measure the levers of control. Our conceit, I see it now, was absurd. We were dealing with a force capricious, incalculable, surprising, a force that lurked at the roots of nature, baffling alike the onlooker and the subject whose vagaries it prompted.

I should like to explain here that those who look for facts and events as the central points of significance in a tale, will be disappointed. On the other hand, I may fall upon an audience which, like myself, contend that the vitality of human beings is to be judged less by their achievement than by their endeavour, by the force of their emotion rather than by their success; if this is my lot I shall be fortunate. Indeed, my difficulty throughout has been that I laboured with stones too heavy for my strength, and tried to pierce through veils too opaque for my feeble eyes. Little of any moment occurs in my story, yet behind it all I am aware of tremendous forces at work, which none have rightly understood, neither the actors nor the onlookers.

It was less of a story that Malory told me, than a quiet meditative reminiscence, and he wove into it a great deal which, I begin to suspect, as I think over it, without extracting from my granary of words and impressions any very definite image, was little more than the fleeting phantom of his own personality. I could wish that fate had been a little kinder to me in regard to Malory. I am sure now that he was a man in whom I could have rejoiced as a friend.

When I think of him now, he stands for me as the type of the theorist, who, when confronted with realities, strays helplessly from the road. He had theories about love, but he passed love by unseen; theories about humour, but was himself an essentially unhumorous man; theories about friendship between men, but was himself the loneliest being upon earth. At the same time, I sometimes think that he had something akin to greatness in him; a wide horizon, and a generous sweep of mind. But I may be mistaking mere earnestness for force, and in any case I had better let the man speak for himself.

He said to me as we smoked, ‘Do you know the Weald of Kent?’ and as he spoke he indicated with his pipe stem a broad half-circle, and I had a glimpse of flattened country lying in such a half-circle beneath my view.

His words gave me a strong emotional shock; from those gaunt mountains, that clattering stream, I was suddenly projected into a world of apple-blossom and other delicate things. The mountains vanished; the herd of goats, which moved near us cropping at the scant but faintly aromatic grass of the hill-side, vanished; and in their place stood placid cows, slowly chewing the cud in lush English meadows.

‘I fancied once that I would take up farming as a profession,’ said Malory. ‘I have touched and dropped many occupations in my life,’ and I realised then that never before in the now eighteen months of our acquaintance had he made to me a remark even so remotely personal. ‘Many occupations, that have all fallen from me, or I from them. I am an inconstant man, knowing that no love can hold me long. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why I have never married. Such people should not marry, or, if they do, should at least choose a partner as inconstant as themselves. When I say inconstant, I mean of course the temperamentally, not the accidentally, inconstant. It is a new kind of eugenics, a sort of moral eugenics.

‘So at one period of my life I had a fancy that I would try my hand at farming. I think perhaps it was one of my most successful experiments. I have a great love for the country people; they are to me like the oaks of the land, enduring and indigenous, beautiful with the beauty of strong, deep-rooted things, without intention of change. I love in them the store of country knowledge which they distil as resin from a pine, in natural order, with the revolving seasons. I love the unconsciousness of them, as they move unheeding, bent only on the practical business of their craft. I revere the simplicity of their traditional ideals. Above all, I envy them the balance and the stability of their lives.’

I wasn’t very much surprised; I had always thought him a dreamy, sensitive sort of fellow. I said,

‘But you surely don’t want to change with them?’

Malory smiled.

‘Don’t I? Well, perhaps I don’t. I should have to give up my sense of wonderment, for they have none. They may be poems, but they are not poets. The people among whom I lived were true yeomen; they and their forefathers had held the house and tilled the land for two hundred and fifty years or more, since the Puritan founder of their race had received the grant from, so tradition said, the hands of Cromwell in person. Since the days of that grim Ironside, one son at least in the family had been named Oliver.

‘The house was partly built of lath and plaster and partly of that gray stone called Kentish rag, which must have been, I used to reflect with satisfaction, hewn out of the very land on which the house was set. I remembered how the thought pleased me, that no exotic importation had gone to the making of that English, English whole. No brilliant colour in that dun monochrome, save one, of which I will tell you presently. Have patience, for the leisure of those days comes stealing once more over me, when haste was a stranger, and men took upon them the unhurrying calm of their beasts.

‘After the fashion of such homes, the house stood back from a narrow lane; a low stone wall formed a kind of forecourt, which was filled with flowers, and a flagged path bordered with lavender lay stretched from the little swing-gate to the door. The steps were rounded with the constant passing of many feet. The eaves were wide, and in them the martins nested year after year; the steep tiled roofs, red-brown with age, and gold-spattered with stonecrops, rose sharply up to the chimney-stacks. You have seen it all a hundred times. Do you know how such houses crouch down into their hollow? So near, so near to the warm earth. Earth! there’s nothing like it; lying on it, being close to it, smelling it, and smelling all the country smells as well, not honeysuckle and roses, but the clean, acrid smell of animals, horses, dogs, and cattle, and the smell of ripe fruit, and of cut hay.

‘And there’s something of the Noah’s Ark about a farm; there’s Mr Noah, Mrs Noah, and Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and the animals, because there’s nothing in the world more like the familiar wooden figures of our childhood than the domestic animals. If you have never seen a cow before, gaunt and unwieldy, what a preposterous beast you would think it. Also a sheep – the living sheep is, if anything, even more like the woolly toy than the woolly toy is like the living sheep. And they all fit in so neatly, so warmly, just like the Noah’s Ark. However, I won’t labour the point …

‘This house of which I am telling you was nearer to the earth than most; it had, in fact, subsided right down into it, sinking from north to south with the settling of the clay, and the resultant appearance of established comfort was greater than I can describe to you. The irregularity of the building was the more apparent by reason of the oak beams, which should have been horizontal, but which actually sloped at a considerable angle. I found, after I had lived there no more than a couple of days, that one adopted this architectural irregularity into one’s scheme of life; the furniture was propped up by blocks of wood on the south side, and I learnt not to drop round objects on to my floor, knowing that if I did so they would roll speedily out of reach. For the same reason, all the children of the house, in this generation as no doubt in many generations past, had made their first uncertain steps out in the garden before they climbed the hill or toppled down the incline of their mother’s room.

‘I paused, on the evening of my arrival, before my future home. I said to myself, here I shall live for one, two, three, possibly four years; how familiar will be that unfamiliar gate; I arrive with curiosity, I shall leave, I hope, with regret. And I foresaw myself leaving, and my eyes travelling yearningly over the house and the little garden, which in a moment the bend of the lane would hide from me for ever. I say for ever, for I would not court the disillusion of returning to a once happy home. Then, as my eyes began to sting with the prophetic sorrow of departure, I remembered that my one, two, three, or possibly four, years were before and not behind me; so, amused at my own sensibility, I pushed open the swing-gate and went in.

‘The house door opened to my knock. I stood on the threshold – I stand there now in spirit. Have you experienced the thrill of excitement which overcomes one when one stands on the threshold of new friendship, new intimacy? such a thrill as overcame me now as I stood, literally and figuratively, in the doorway of the Pennistans’ home. I scanned the faces which were raised towards me, faces which were to me then as masks, or as books written in a language I could not read, but which would speedily become open and speaking; no longer the disguise, but the revelation of the human passion which lay behind. The facts of life at Pennistans’ I could foresee, but not the life of the spirit, the mazy windings of mutual relation, the circumstance of individual being. These people were anonymous to me in their spirits as in their names.

‘You might fare far before you came upon a better-favoured family. I was in the low, red-tiled kitchen; they were seated at their supper round a central table, the father, the mother, three sons, and the daughter Nancy. Amos Pennistan had the bearing, the gravity, and the beard of an apostle; I never saw a nobler looking man; he had his coat off, and his scarlet braces marked his shirt like a slash of blood. His sons, as they raised their heads to me from their bread and porridge, cast their eyes over my city-bred frame, much as calves in a field raise their heads to stare at the passer-by over the hedge, and I felt myself in the presence of young, indifferent animals.

‘An old, old woman was sitting over the fire. No mention of her had been made in our correspondence, nor did I then know who she was. Yet had it not been for her, and for the strange flame she had introduced into this English home, the story I am endeavouring to tell you might never have sprung up out of the grayness of commonplace.

‘The faintest smell floated about the room, and as I stood in slight bewilderment looking round I wondered what it could be; it was oddly familiar; it transported me, by one of those sideslips of the brain, away from England, and though the vision was too dim and transitory for me to crystallise it into a definite picture, I dreamed myself for a second in a narrow street between close, towering houses; yoked bullocks were there somewhere, and the clamour of a Latin city. I have gazed at a rainbow, and fancied I caught a violet ribbon between the red and the blue; gazed again, and it was gone; so with my present illusion. Then I saw that the old woman was fingering something by the fire, and in my interest I looked, and made out a row of chestnuts on the rail; one of them cracked and spat, falling on to the hearth, where she retrieved it with the tongs and set it on the rail again to roast.

‘The bullock-like sons took no notice of me beyond their first dispassionate glance, but Mrs Pennistan in her buxom, and Amos in his reticent, fashion gave me an hospitable welcome. I was strongly conscious of the taciturn sons, who, after a grudging shuffle – a concession, I suppose, to my quality as a stranger – returned to their meal in uninterested silence. I was abashed by the contempt of the young men. It was a relief to me when one of them pushed aside his bowl and rose, saying, “I’ll be seeing to the cattle, father.”

‘Amos replied, “Ay, do, and see to the window in the hovel; remember it’s shaky on the hinge.” I had a sudden sense of intimacy: a day, a week, and I too should know the shaky hinge, the abiding place of tools, the peculiarities of the piggery.

‘I wandered out. A mist lay over the gentle hills, as the bloom lies on a grape; a great stillness sank over the meadows, and that mellow melancholy of the English autumn floated towards me on the wings of the evening. I felt infinitely at peace. I reflected with a deep satisfaction that no soul in London knew my address. My bank, my solicitors, would be extremely annoyed when they discovered that they had mislaid me. To me there was a certain satisfaction in that thought also.’

‘On the following morning,’ continued Malory, ‘I rose early. I went out. The freshness of this Kentish morning was a thing new to me. The ground, the air, were wet with dew; gossamer was over all the grass and hedges, shreds of gossamer linking bramble to bramble, perfect spiders’ webs of gossamer, and a veil of gossamer seemed to hang between the earth and the sun. The grass in the field was gray with wet. A darker trail across it showed me where the cattle had passed, as though some phantom sweeper had swept with a giant broom against the pile of a velvet carpet. The peculiar light of sunrise still clung about the land.’

For a moment Malory ceased speaking, and the goats, the barren mountains, the impetuous torrent, rushed again into my vision like a wrong magic-lantern slide thrown suddenly, and in error, upon the screen. Then as his voice resumed I saw once more the hedges, the clump of oaks, and the darker trail where the cattle had passed across the field.

‘I was at a loss,’ said Malory, ‘to know how to employ my morning, and regretted my stipulation that my training should not begin until the following day. I wished for a pitchfork in my hand, that I might carry the crisp bracken for bedding into the empty stalls. I heard somewhere a girl’s voice singing; the voice, I later discovered, of Nancy, upraised in a then popular song which began, “Oh, I do love to be beside the sea-side,” and so often subsequently did I hear this song that it is for ever associated in my mind with Nancy. I could hear somewhere also the clank of harness, and presently one of the sons came from the stable, sitting sideways upon a great shire horse and followed by two other horses; they passed me by with the heavy, swinging gait of elephants, out into the lane where they disappeared, leaving me to my loneliness. I felt that the great fat ball of the world was rolling, rolling in the limpidity of the morning, and that I alone had given no helping push.

‘I wandered, stepping gingerly upon the cobble stones, round the corner of the farm buildings, and there, in a doorway, I came unexpectedly upon a girl I had not previously seen. She stood with a wooden yoke across her shoulders, and her hands upon the two pendent buckets of milk. I felt myself – do not misunderstand me – suddenly and poignantly conscious of her sex. The blue linen dress she wore clung unashamedly to every curve of her young and boyish figure, and around the sleeves the sweat had stained the linen to a widening circle of darker blue. Swarthy as a gipsy, I saw her instinctively as a mother, with a child in her arms, and other children clinging about her skirts.’

I thought I understood Malory, a lyre whose neurotic treble alone had hitherto responded to the playing of his dilettantism, with the chords of the bass suddenly stirred and awakened.

‘You have probably known in your life one or more of those impressions so powerful as to amount to emotions, an impression such as I received now, as, at a loss for words, this girl and I stood facing one another. I knew, I knew,’ said Malory, looking earnestly at me as though driving his meaning by force of suggestion into my brain, ‘that here stood one for whom lay in wait no ordinary destiny. She might be common, she might be, probably was, rude and uncultivated, nevertheless something in her past was preparing a formidable something for her future.’

As he spoke I thought that, by the look on his face, he was again receiving what he described as an impression so powerful as to amount to an emotion. And he communicated this emotion to me, so that I felt his prophecy to be a true one, and that his story would henceforward cease to be a mere story and would become a simple unwinding off the spool of inevitable truth.

He went on,

‘Our silence of course couldn’t endure for ever. The girl herself seemed conscious of this, for a smile, not unfriendly, came to her lips, and she said quite simply,—

‘“How you startled me! Good-morning.”

‘“I am very sorry,” I said. “Can’t I make up for it by carrying those buckets for you?”

‘“Oh, they’re nothing with the yoke,” she answered.

‘Here old Amos came round the corner, walking clumsily on the cobbles with his hob-nailed boots. He looked surprised to find me standing with the dairymaid, a little group of two.

‘“Morning!” he cried very heartily to me. “You’re out betimes. Fine day, sir, fine day, fine day. Well, my girl, done with the cows?”

‘“I’m on my way to the dairy, dad,” she said.

‘I asked if I might come with her.

‘“Ay, go with Ruth,” said Amos, “she’ll show you round,” and he went off, evidently glad to have shifted the responsibility of my morning’s entertainment.

‘Ruth refused to let me carry the buckets, and by the time we reached the dairy – one of the pleasantest places I ever was in, clean and bright as a yacht – their weight had brought a warm flush of colour to her cheeks. Great flat pans of milk stood on gray slate slabs, covered over with filmy butter-muslin; in one corner was fixed a sink, and in another corner a machine which I learnt was called the separator.

‘“Father’s very proud of this,” said my companion, “none of the other farms round here have got one.”

‘I sat on the central table watching her as she moved about her business; she didn’t take very much notice of me, and I was at liberty to observe her, noting her practised efficiency in handling the pans and cans of milk; noting, too, her dark, un-English beauty, un-English not so much, as you might think, owing to the swarthiness of her complexion, as to something subtly tender in the curve of her features and the swell of her forearm. She hummed to herself as she worked. I asked her whether the evening did not find her weary.

‘“One’s glad to get to bed,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone, adding, “but it’s all right unless one’s queer.”

‘“Can’t you take a day off, being on your father’s farm?”

‘“Beasts have to be fed, queer or no queer,” she replied.

‘The milk was now ready in shining cans, and going to the door she shouted,—

‘“Sid!”

‘A voice calling in answer was followed by one of the sons. Neither brother nor sister spoke, while the young man trundled away the cans successively; I heard them bumping on the cobbles, and bumping more loudly as, presumably, he lifted them into a cart. Ruth had turned to wiping up the dairy.

‘“Where is he going with the cans?” I asked.

‘“Milk round,” she answered laconically.

‘That was the first time I saw her,’ he added. ‘The second time was in full midday, and she was gleaning in a stubble-field; yes; her name was Ruth, and she was gleaning. She moved by stages across the field, throwing out her long wooden rake to its farthest extent and drawing it back to her until she had gathered sufficient strands into a heap, when, laying down the rake, she bound the corn against her thigh, rapidly and skilfully into a sheaf. The occupation seemed wholly suitable. Although her head was not covered by a coloured handkerchief, but hidden by a linen sunbonnet, she reminded me of the peasant-women labouring in the fields of other lands than ours. I do not know whether, in the light of my present wisdom, I exaggerate the impression of those early days. I think that perhaps at first, imbued as I was with the idea of the completely English character of my surroundings, I remained insensible to the flaw which presently became so self-evident in the harmony of my preconceived picture.

‘Tiny things occurred, which I noted at the time and cast aside on the scrap-heap of my observation, and which later I retrieved and strung together in their coherent order. As who should come upon the pieces of a child’s puzzle strewn here and there upon his path.

‘Ruth, my instructress and companion, I saw going about her work without haste, almost without interest. She was kind to the animals in her care after an indifferent, sleepy fashion, more from habit and upbringing than from a natural benevolence. She brought no enthusiasm to any of her undertakings. Her tasks were performed conscientiously, but by rote. Yet one day, when the sheep-dog happened to be in her path, I saw her kick out at it in the belly with sudden and unbridled vehemence.

‘I was first really startled by the appearance of Rawdon Westmacott. In the big, shadowy, draughty barn I was cutting chaff for the horses, while Ruth sat near by on a truss of straw, trying to mend a bridle-strap with string. I had then been at Pennistans’ about a week. The wide doors of the barn were open, letting in a great square of dust-moted sunlight, and in this square a score of Leghorn hens and cockerels moved picking at the scattered chaff, daintily prinking on their spindly feet, snowy white and coral crested. A shadow fell across the floor. Ruth and I raised our heads. A young man leant against the side of the door, a tall young man in riding breeches, with a dull red stock twisted round his throat, smacking at his leathern gaiters with a riding whip he held in his hand. The rein was over his arm, and his horse, lowering his head, snuffed breezily at the chaff blown out into the yard.

‘“You’re back, then?” said Ruth.

‘“Ay,” said the young man, looking suspiciously at me, and I caught the slightest jerk of the head and interrogative crinkle of the forehead by which he required an explanation.

‘“This is my cousin, Rawdon Westmacott, Mr Malory,” Ruth said.

‘The young man flicked his whip up to his cap, and then dismissed me from his interest.

‘“Coming out, Ruth?” he asked.

‘She pouted her indecision.

‘“You shall have a ride,” he suggested.

‘“No, thanks.”

‘“Well, walk a bit of the way home with me, anyhow.”

‘“I don’t know that I’m so very keen.”

‘“Oh, come on, Ruthie, after I’ve ridden straight over here to see you; thrown my bag into the house, and come straight away to you, without a look into one single thing at home.”

‘“It’d be better for things if you did look into them a bit more, Rawdon.”

‘Overcome by the perversity of women, he said again,—

‘“Come on, Ruthie.”

‘She rose slowly, and, untying the apron of sacking which she wore over her skirt, she stepped out into the sunshine. For a flash I saw them standing there together, and I saw Rawdon Westmacott as he ever after appeared to me: a Bedouin in corduroy, with a thin, fierce face, the grace of an antelope, and the wildness of a hawk; a creature captured either in the desert or from the woods. Strange product for the English countryside! Then they were gone, and the horse, turning, followed the tug on the rein.

‘I date from that moment my awakening to a state of affairs less simple than I had imagined. I saw Ruth again with Westmacott, and learnt with a little shock that here was not merely an idle, rural, or cousinly flirtation. The man’s blood was crazy for her.

‘And so I became aware of the existence of some element I could not reconcile with my surroundings, some unseen presence which would jerk me away abruptly to the sensation that I was in the midst of a foreign encampment; was it Biblical? was it Arab? troubled was I and puzzled; I tried to dismiss the fancy, but it returned; I even appealed to various of the Pennistans for enlightenment, but they stared at me blankly.

‘Yes, I tried to dismiss it, and to brush aside the haze of mystery as one brushes aside the smoke of a cigarette. And I could not succeed. How trivial, how easily ignored are facts, when one’s quarrel is with the enigma of force at the heart of things! It isn’t often in this civilised life of ours that one comes into contact with it; one’s business lies mostly with men and women whose whole system of philosophy is inimical to natural, inconvenient impulse. It obeys us as a rule, like a tame lion doing its tricks for the lion-tamer. A terrifying thought truly, that we are shut up for life in a cage with a wild beast that may at any moment throw off its docility to leap upon us! We taunt it, we provoke it, we tweak its tail, we take every advantage of its forbearance; then when the day comes for it to turn on us, we cry out, and try to get away into a corner. At least let us do it the honour to recognise its roar of warning, as I did then, though I was as surprised and disquieted as I dare say you would have been, at meeting a living lion in the woods of Kent.

‘I could compare it to many other things, but principally I think I felt it as a ghost that peeped out at me from over innocent shoulders. Am I mixing my metaphors? You see, it was so vague, so elusive, that it seemed to combine all the bogeys of one’s childhood. Something we don’t understand; that is what frightens us, from the child alone in the dark to the old man picking at the sheets on his deathbed. Perhaps you think I am exaggerating. Certainly my apprehension was a very indefinite one, at most it was a dim vision of possibilities unnamed, it wasn’t even a sense of the imminence of crisis, much less the imminence of tragedy. And yet … I don’t know. I still believe that tragedy was there somewhere, perhaps only on the horizon, and that the merest chance alone served to avert it. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely averted. One never knows; one only sees with one’s clumsy eyes. One sees the dead body, but never the dead soul. The whole story is, to me, unsatisfactory; I often wonder whether there is a conclusion somewhere, that either I have missed, or that hasn’t yet been published by the greatest of story-tellers.

‘Anyway, all this is too fanciful, and I have inadvertently wandered into an inner circle of speculation, I mean soul-speculation, when I really meant to be concerned with the outer circle only.

‘I could lay my hand on nothing more definite than the appearance, certainly unusual, of Ruth or of Westmacott; other trifles were so absurd that I scorned to dwell on them in my mind, the red braces of Amos and that faint scent of roasting chestnuts in the kitchen under the hands of Amos’s grandmother. Whenever I went into the kitchen I met that scent, and heard the indefinite mumble of the old woman’s toothless mouth, and the smell of the chestnuts floated out, too, into the narrow entrance-passage and up the steep stairs which led to the rooms above. I associate it always now with a narrow passage, rather dark; sloping ceilings; and rooms where the pictures could be hung on the south wall only, because of the crookedness of the house. In the parlour, which balanced the kitchen, but was never used, was an old-fashioned oil-painting of a soldier with whiskers and a tightly-buttoned uniform, and this painting swung out from the north wall and a space of perhaps six inches between the wall and the bottom of the frame.’

2

On the morrow we again took our pipes to the clump of pines, and Malory began, in his drowsy, meditative voice, to tell his story from where he had left off.

‘I hope you are by now as curious as I was to discover the secret of the Pennistan quality. The family were evidently unconscious that there was any secret to discover. They thought no more of themselves than they did of their blue surrounding hills, though in relation to the weather they considered their blue hills a good deal, and Amos taught me one evening that too great a clearness was not to be desired; the row of poplars over towards Penshurst should be slightly obscured, misty; and if it was so, and if the haze hung over Crowborough Beacon, I might safely leave the yearling calves out in the field all night. I should look also for a heavy dew upon the ground, which would predict a fine day besides bringing out the mushrooms.

Cowden