All Passion Spent

by Vita Sackville-West

Alone in the room his widow contemplated him, filled with thoughts that would greatly have surprised her children, could they but have read her mind. Her children, however, were not there to observe her. They were collected in the drawing-room, all six of them; two wives and a husband bringing the number up to nine. A sufficiently formidable family gathering – old, black ravens, thought Edith, the youngest, who was always flustered and always trying to confine things into the shape of a phrase, like pouring water into a ewer, but great gouts of meaning and implication invariably ran over and slopped about and were lost. To attempt to recapture them after they had spilt was as hopeless as trying to hold the water in your hand. Perhaps, if one had a notebook and pencil always ready – but then the thought would be lost while one was looking for the right word; and, moreover, it would be difficult to use a notebook without everybody seeing. Shorthand? – but one must not let one’s thoughts run on like this; one must discipline one’s mind, keeping one’s attention on the present matter, as other people seemed to do without any difficulty; though, to be sure, if one had not learnt that lesson by the time one was sixty, one was never likely to learn it. A formidable family gathering, thought Edith, coming back: Herbert, Carrie, Charles, William, and Kay; Mabel, Lavinia; Roland. They went in groups: the Hollands themselves, the sisters-in-law, the brother-in-law; then they sorted th...

curious,

Edith

thought, that Death should be the convener, as though all the living rushed instantly together for protection and mutual support. Dear me, how old we all are. Herbert must be sixty-eight, and I’m sixty; and Father was over ninety, and Mother is eighty-eight. Edith, who had begun making a sum of their total ages, surprised them all very much by asking, ‘How old are you, Lavinia?’ Thus taken aback, they rebuked Edith by their stare; but that was Edith all over, she never listened to what was being said, and then suddenly came out with some irrelevant remark. Edith could have told them that all her life she had been trying to say what she meant, and had never yet succeeded. Only too often, she said something precisely the opposite of what she wanted to say. Her terror was that she should one day use an indecent word by mistake. ‘Isn’t it splendid that Father is dead,’ she might say, instead of, ‘Isn’t it terrible’; and there were other possibilities, even more appalling, by which one might use a really dreadful word, the sort of word that butcher-boys scrawled in pencil on the white-washed walls of the basement passage...

columbarium

I

considered

the eyes ...

world for so long that I think it is time I had a little holiday from them. If one is not to please oneself in old age, when is one to please oneself? There is so little time left!’ ...

On the contrary,’ said Lady Slane, ‘that is another thing about which I have made up my mind. You see, Carrie, I am going to become completely self-indulgent. I am going to wallow in old age. No grandchildren. They are too young. Not one of them has reached forty-five. No great-grandchildren either; that would be worse. I want no strenuous young people, who are not content with doing a thing, but must needs know why they do it. And I don’t want them bringing their children to see me, for it would only remind me of the terrible effort the poor creatures will have to make before they reach the end of their lives in safety. I prefer to forget about them. I want no one about me except those who are nearer to their death than to their birth.’

If not now-when?

Edith alone frolicked in her mind. She thought her mother not mad, but most conspicuously sane. She was delighted to see Carrie and Herbert routed, by their mother quietly disentangling herself from their toils. Softly she clapped her hands together, and whispered ‘Go on, Mother! go on!’ Only a remnant of prudence prevented her from saying it out loud. She revelled in her mother’s new-found eloquence – not the least of the surprises of that surprising morning, for Lady Slane habitually was reserved in speech, withholding her opinion, concealing even the expression on her face as she bent her head over her knitting or embroidery, when her occasional ‘Yes, dear?’ gave but little indication of what she was really thinking. It now dawned upon Edith that her mother might have lived a full private life, all these years, behind the shelter of her affectionate watchfulness. How much had she observed? noted? criticised? stored up? She was

I lost it, of course; one always does lose the things one values most. I never lost any of the other things; perhaps because Genoux always had charge of them – and she used to invent the most extraordinary places

hide them in – she mistrusted safes, so she used to drop my diamonds into the cold water jug – no robber would think of looking for them there, she said. I often thought that if Genoux died suddenly I shouldn’t know where to look for the jewels myself – but the topaz I used to carry in my pocket.’ Here Lady Slane’s dreamy reminiscences were cut short as Genoux came in, rustling like a snake in dry leaves, creaking like a saddle, for, until May was out, Genoux would not abandon the layers of brown paper that reinforced her corsets and her combinations against the English climate. ‘Miladi a sonné?’ Yes, thought Edith, there’s nobody here for

They all know that nobody cares for them; that’s why they talk so loud. Mother has never talked at all – until to-day; yet Genoux comes in as though Mother were the only person in the room, in the house, fit to give an order. Genoux knows where respect is due. Genoux takes no account of insistent voices. ‘Miladi a sonné?’ ‘Genoux, vous avez les bijoux?’ ‘Mais bien sûr, miladi, que j’ai les bijoux. J’appelle ça le trésor. Miladi veut que j’aille chercher le trésor?’

Please,

Genoux,’ said Lady Slane, determined, though Genoux sent a glance round the family circle as though Herbert, Carrie, Charles, William, Lavinia, and even the snubbed and innocuous Mabel were the very robbers against whose coming she had dropped the diamonds nightly into the jug of cold water. Indian verandahs and South African stoeps ha...

but now a more immediate, because a more legitimate and English, danger menaced these jealously guarded possessions. Miladi, so gentle, so vague, so detached, could never be trusted to look after herself or her belongings. Genoux was by nature a watchdog. ‘Miladi se souviendra au moins que les bagues lui ont été très spécialemen...

saying goes, loaded with rings. That saying means, in so far as any saying means anything at all – and every saying, every cliché, once meant something tightly related to some human experience – that the gems concerned were too weighty for the hands that bore them. Her hands were indeed loaded with rings. They had been thus loaded by Lord Slane – tokens of affection, certainly, but no less tokens of the embellishments proper to the hands of Lord Slane’s...

Lady Slane, then, looked down at her hands as though Genoux had for the first time drawn attention to them. For one’s hands are the parts of one’s body that one suddenly sees with the maximum of detachment; they are suddenly far off; and one observes their marvellous articulations, and miraculous response to the transmission of

‘

So

No? Then we are agreed upon at least one of the major subjects. It is terrible to be twenty, Lady Slane. It is as bad as being faced with riding over the Grand National course. One knows one will almost certainly fall into the Brook of Competition, and break one’s leg over the Hedge of Disappointment, and stumble over the Wire of Intrigue, and quite certainly come to grief over the Obstacle of Love. When one is old, one can throw oneself down as a rider on the evening after the race, and think, Well, I shall never have to ride that course again.

Still,

Hampstead.

like

the

house,’ said Lady Slane, ‘and apparently,’ she added with a smile that undid the viceregal manner, ‘you approve of me as a tenant. But what about business? What about the rent?’ He gave her a startled look; evidently, he had been busy pig-sticking by himself in the interval; had returned to life as a Hussar, forgetting himself as owner and agent. He put his finger to his nose this time, quizzing Lady Slane, giving himself time to think. The subject seemed distasteful to him, though relics of a business training tugged at him, jerking some string in his mind; he lived, naturally, in a world where rents were not of much importance. So did Lady Slane; and thus a pair more ill-assorted, and yet better assorted, to discuss rents could scarcely be imagined. ‘The rent…the rent…’ said Mr Bucktrout, as one ...

It would scarcely be worth your while,’ he added, ‘to take it on more than a yearly tenancy. You might vacate it at any moment, and your heirs would not wish to have it

like the idea of a tenant who will give me recovery of the house within a short period. Apart from my personal predilection for you, Lady Slane, abruptly sprung though that predilection may be, I relish the idea that this particular house should return at short intervals again into my keeping. From that point of view alone, you would suit me admirably as a tenant. There are other points of view, of course – as in this life there invariably

Delicacy again, thought Lady Slane. He doesn’t say: ‘What rent could you afford to pay?’ This fencing, this walking round one another like two courting pigeons, was becoming ludicrous. Henry would have struck down between them, cleaving the situation with an axe of cold sense. Yet she liked the odd little man, and was thankful, heartily thankful, that she had rejected Carrie’s company. Carrie, like her father, would drastically have intervened, shattering thereby a relationship which had grown up, creating itself, as swiftly and exquisitely as a little rigged ship of blown glass, each strand hardening instantly as it left the tube and met the air, yet remaining so brittle that a false note, jarring on the ethereal ripples, could splinter it. Shrinking, Lady Slane named a sum, too large; which Mr Bucktrout immediately halved, too small.

Say a thing often enough, and it becomes true; by hammering in sufficient stakes

vrai

Monsieur

aurait dû se faire floriste.