Moments of Being

  One of the few things that is certain about her is that she married two very different men. If one looks at her not as a child, of seven or eight, but as a woman now older than she was when she died, there is something to take hold of in that fact. She was not so rubbed out and featureless, not so dominated by the beauty of her own face, as she has since become – and inevitably. For what reality can remain real of a person who died forty-five years agofn20 at the age of forty-nine, without leaving a book, or a picture, or any piece of work – apart from the three children who now survive and the memory of her that remains in their minds? There is the memory; but there is nothing to check that memory by; nothing to bring it to ground with.

  There are however these two marriages; and they show that she was capable of falling in love with two very different men; one, to put it in a nutshell, the pink of propriety; the other, the pink of intellectuality. She could span them both. This must serve me by way of foot rule, in trying to measure her character.

  The elements of that character, though, are formed in twilight. She was born, I think, in 1848;fn21 I think in India; the daughter of Dr Jackson and his half-French wife. Not very much education came her way. An old governess – was she Mademoiselle Rose? did she give her the picture of Beatrice that hung in the dining room at Talland House? – taught her French, which she spoke with a very good accent; and she could play the piano and was musical. I remember that she kept De Quincey’s Opium Eater on her table, one of her favourite books; and for a birthday present she chose all the works of Scott which her father gave her in the first edition – some remain; others are lost. For Scott she had a passion. She had an instinctive, not a trained mind. But her instinct, for books at least, seems to me to have been strong, and I liked it, for she gave a jump, I remember, when reading Hamlet aloud to her I misread ‘sliver’ ‘silver’ – she jumped as my father jumped at a false quantity when we read Virgil with him. She was her mother’s favourite daughter of the three; and as her mother was an invalid even as a child she was used to nursing; to waiting on a sick bed. They had a house at Well Walk during the Crimean War; for there was an anecdote about watching the soldiers drill on the Heath. But her beauty at once came to the fore, even as a little girl; for there was another anecdote – how she could never be sent out alone, but must have Mary with her, to protect her from admiring looks: to keep her unconscious of that beauty – and she was, my father said, very little conscious of it. It was due to this beauty, I suspect, that she had that training which was much more important than any she had from governesses – the training of life at Little Holland House. She was a great deal at Little Holland House as a child, partly, I imagine, because she was acceptable to the painters, and the Prinseps – Aunt Sara and Uncle Thoby must have been proud of her.fn22

  Little Holland House was her world then. But what was that world like? I think of it as a summer afternoon world. To my thinking Little Holland House is an old white country house, standing in a large garden. Long windows open on to the lawn. Through them comes a stream of ladies in crinolines and little straw hats; they are attended by gentlemen in peg-top trousers and whiskers. The date is round about 1860. It is a hot summer day. Tea tables with great bowls of strawberries and cream are scattered about the lawn. They are “presided over” by some of the six lovely sisters;fn23 who do not wear crinolines, but are robed in splendid Venetian draperies; they sit enthroned, and talk with foreign emphatic gestures – my mother too gesticulated, throwing her hands out – to the eminent men (afterwards to be made fun of by Lytton);fn24 rulers of India, statesmen, poets, painters. My mother comes out of the window wearing that striped silk dress buttoned at the throat with a flowing skirt that appears in the photograph. She is of course “a vision” as they used to say; and there she stands, silent, with her plate of strawberries and cream; or perhaps is told to take a party across the garden to Signior’s studio.fn25 The sound of music also comes from those long low rooms where the great Watts pictures hang; Joachim playing the violin; also the sound of a voice reading poetry – Uncle Thoby would read his translations from the Persian poets. How easy it is to fill in the picture with set pieces that I have gathered from memoirs – to bring in Tennyson in his wideawake; Watts in his smock frock; Ellen Terry dressed as a boy; Garibaldi in his red shirt – and Henry Taylor turned from him to my mother – “the face of one fair girl was more to me” – so he says in a poem. But if I turn to my mother, how difficult it is to single her out as she really was; to imagine what she was thinking, to put a single sentence into her mouth! I dream; I make up pictures of a summer’s afternoon.

  But the dream is based upon one fact. Once when we were children, my mother took us to Melbury Road; and when we came to the street that had been built on the old garden she gave a little spring forward, clapped her hands, and cried “That was where it was!” as if a fairyland had disappeared. Thus I think it is true that Little Holland House was a summer afternoon world to her. As a fact too I know that she adored her Uncle Thoby. His walking stick, with a hole in the top through which a tassel must have hung, a beautiful eighteenth-century looking cane, always stood at the head of her bed at Hyde Park Gate. She was a hero worshipper, simple, uncritical, enthusiastic. She felt for Uncle Thoby, my father said, much more than she felt for her own father – “old Dr Jackson”; “respectable”; but, for all his good looks and the amazing mane of white hair that stood out like a three-cornered hat round his head, he was a commonplace prosaic old man; boring people with his stories of a famous poison case in Calcutta; excluded from this poetical fairyland; and no doubt out of temper with it. My mother had no romance about him; but she derived from him, I suspect, the practicality, the shrewdness, which were among her qualities.

  Little Holland House then was her education. She was taught there to take such part as girls did then in the lives of distinguished men; to pour out tea; to hand them their strawberries and cream; to listen devoutly, reverently to their wisdom; to accept the fact that Watts was the great painter; Tennyson the great poet; and to dance with the Prince of Wales. For the sisters, with the exception of my grandmother who was devout and spiritual, were worldly in the thoroughgoing Victorian way. Aunt Virginia, it is plain, put her own daughters, my mother’s first cousins, through tortures compared with which the boot or the Chinese shoe is negligible, in order to marry one to the Duke of Bedford, the other to Lord Henry Somerset. (That is how we came to be, as the nurses said, so “well connected”.) But here again I am dipping into memoirs, and leaving Julia Jackson, the real person, on one side. The only certainties I can lay hands on in those early years are that two men proposed to her (or to her parents on her behalf); one was Holman Hunt; the other Woolner, a sculptor.fn26 Both proposals were made and refused when she was scarcely out of the nursery. I know too that she went once wearing a hat with grey feathers to a river party where Anny Thackerayfn27 was; and Nun (that is Aunt Caroline, father’s sister) saw her standing alone; and was amazed that she was not the centre of a bevy of admirers; “Where are they?” she asked Anny Thackeray; who said, “Oh they don’t happen to be here today” – a little scene which makes me suspect that Julia aged seventeen or eighteen was aloof; and shed a certain silence round her by her very beauty.

  That little scene is dated; she cannot have been more than eighteen; because she married when she was nineteen.fn28 She was in Venice; met Herbert Duckworth; fell head over ears in love with him, he with her, and so they married. That is all I know, perhaps all that anyone now knows, of the most important thing that ever happened to her. How important it was is proved by the fact that when he died four years later she was “as unhappy as it is possible for a human being to be”. That was her own saying; it came to me from Kitty Maxse. “I have been as unhappy and as happy as it is possible for a human being to be.” Kitty remembered it, because though she was very intimate with my mother, this was the only time in all their friendship that she ever spoke of what she had felt for Herbert Duckworth.

  What my mo
ther was like when she was as happy as anyone can be, I have no notion. Not a sound or a scene has survived from those four years. They were well off; lived in Bryanston Square; he practised not very seriously at the Bar; (once they went on circuit; and a friend said to him, “I spent the whole morning in Court looking at a beautiful face” – Herbert’s wife); George was born; then Stella; and Gerald was about to be born when Herbert Duckworth died. They were staying with the Vaughans at Upton;fn29 he stretched to pick a fig for my mother; an abscess burst; and he died in a few hours. Those are the only facts I know about those four happy years.

  If it were possible to know what Herbert himself was like, some ray of light might fall from him upon my mother. But, like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face – a face one might see today in the street or here in my studio. To Aunt Mary – my mother’s sister, likely thus to share some of her feelings – he was “Oh darling, a beam of light. . . like no one I have ever met. . . When Herbert Duckworth smiled . . . when Herbert Duckworth came into the room . . .” here she broke off, shook her head quickly from side to side and screwed her face up, as if he were ineffable; no words could describe him. And in this spasmodic way she gave an echo of what must have been my mother’s feeling; only hers was much deeper, and stronger. He must have been to her the perfect man; heroic; handsome; magnanimous; “the great Achilles, whom we knew” – it seems natural to quote Tennyson – and also genial, lovable, simple, and also her husband; and her children’s father. It was thus natural to her when she was a girl to love the simple, the genial, the normal ordinary type of man, in preference to the queer, the uncouth artistic, the intellectual, whom she had met and who had wished to marry her. Herbert was the perfect type of public school boy and English gentleman, my father said. She chose him and how completely he satisfied her is proved by the collapse, the complete collapse into which she fell when he died. All her gaiety, all her sociability left her. She was as unhappy as it is possible for anyone to be. There is very little known of the years that were thus stamped. Only that saying, and Stella once told me that she used to lie upon his grave at Orchardleigh. As she was undemonstrative that seems a superlative expression of grief.

  What is known, and is much more remarkable, is that during those eight years spent, so far as she had time over from her children and house, ‘doing good’, nursing, visiting the poor, she lost her faith. This hurt her mother, a deeply religious woman, to whom she was devoted, and thus must have been a genuine conviction; something arrived at as the result of solitary and independent thinking. It proves that there was more in her than simplicity; enthusiasm; romance; and thus makes sense of her two incongruous choices: Herbert and my father. There was a complexity in her; great simplicity and directness combined with a sceptical, a serious spirit. Probably it was that combination that accounted for the great impression she made on people; the positive impression. Her character was sharpened by the mixture of simplicity and scepticism. She was sociable yet severe; very amusing; but very serious; extremely practical but with a depth in her . . . “She was a mixture of the Madonna and a woman of the world,” is Miss Robins’s description.fn30

  The certain fact at any rate is that when at last she was left alone – “Oh the torture of never being left alone!” is a saying of hers, reported I forget by whom, that refers to her widowhood, and the fuss that friends and family made – when she was alone at last in Hyde Park Gate, she began to think out her position; and for this reason perhaps read something my father had written. She liked it (he says in the ‘Mausoleum Book’), when she was not sure that she liked him. It is thus permissible to think of her sitting in the creeper-shaded drawing room at Hyde Park Gate in her widow’s dress, alone, when the children had gone to bed, with a copy of the Fortnightly, trying to reason out the case for agnosticism. From that she would go on to think of Leslie Stephen, the gaunt bearded man who lived up the street, married to Minny Thackeray. He was in every way the opposite of Herbert Duckworth; but there was something in his mind that interested her. One evening she called on the Leslie Stephens, [and] found them sitting over the fire together; a happy married pair, with one child in the nursery, and another to be born soon. She sat talking; and then went home, envying them their happiness and comparing it with her own loneliness. Next day Minny died suddenly. And about two years later she married the gaunt bearded widower.fn31

  “How did father ask you to marry him?” I once asked her, with my arm slipped in hers as we went down the twisted stairs into the dining room. She gave her little laugh, half surprised, half shocked. She did not answer. He asked her in a letter; and she refused him. Then one night when he had given up all thought of it, and had been dining with her, and asking her advice about a governess for Laura, she followed him to the door and said “I will try to be a good wife to you.”

  Perhaps there was pity in her love; certainly there was devout admiration for his mind; and so she spanned the two marriages with the two different men; and emerged from that corridor of the eight silent years to live fifteen years more;fn32 to bear four children; and [to] die early on the morning of the 5th of May 1895. George took us down to say goodbye. My father staggered from the bedroom as we came. I stretched out my arms to stop him, but he brushed past me, crying out something I could not catch; distraught. And George led me in to kiss my mother, who had just died.

  May 28th 1939. Led by George with towels wrapped round us and given each a drop of brandy in warm milk to drink, we were taken into the bedroom. I think candles were burning; and I think the sun was coming in. At any rate I remember the long looking-glass; with the drawers on either side; and the washstand; and the great bed on which my mother lay. I remember very clearly how even as I was taken to the bedside I noticed that one nurse was sobbing, and a desire to laugh came over me, and I said to myself as I have often done at moments of crisis since, “I feel nothing whatever”. Then I stooped and kissed my mother’s face. It was still warm. She [had] only died a moment before. Then we went upstairs into the day nursery.

  Perhaps it was the next evening that Stella took me into the bedroom to kiss mother for the last time. She had been lying on her side before. Now she was lying straight in the middle of her pillows. Her face looked immeasurably distant, hollow and stern. When I kissed her, it was like kissing cold iron. Whenever I touch cold iron the feeling comes back to me – the feeling of my mother’s face, iron cold, and granulated. I started back. Then Stella stroked her cheek, and undid a button on her nightgown. “She always liked to have it like that,” she said. When she came up to the nursery later she said to me, “Forgive me. I saw you were afraid.” She had noticed that I had started. When Stella asked me to forgive her for having given me that shock, I cried – we had been crying off and on all day – and said, “When I see mother, I see a man sitting with her.” Stella looked at me as if I had frightened her. Did I say that in order to attract attention to myself? Or was it true? I cannot be sure, for certainly I had a great wish to draw attention to myself. But certainly it was true that when she said: “Forgive me,” and thus made me visualize my mother, I seemed to see a man sitting bent on the edge of the bed.

  “It’s nice that she shouldn’t be alone”, Stella said after a moment’s pause.

  Of course the atmosphere of those three or four days before the funeral was so melodramatic, histrionic and unreal that any hallucination was possible. We lived through them in hush, in artificial light. Rooms were shut. People were creeping in and out. People were coming to the door all the time. We were all sitting in the drawing room round father’s chair sobbing. The hall reeked of flowers. They were piled on the hall table. The scent still brings back those days of astonishing intensity. But I have one memory of great beauty. A telegram had been sent to Thoby at Clifton. He was to arrive in the evening at Paddington. George and Stella whispered together in the hall, about who was to go and mee
t him. To my relief, Stella overcame some objection on George’s part, and said, “But I think it would do her good to go”; and so I was taken in a cab with George and Nessa to meet Thoby at Paddington. It was sunset, and the great glass dome at the end of the station was blazing with light. It was glowing yellow and red and the iron girders made a pattern across it. I walked along the platform gazing with rapture at this magnificent blaze of colour, and the train slowly steamed into the station. It impressed and exalted me. It was so vast and so fiery red. The contrast of that blaze of magnificent light with the shrouded and curtained rooms at Hyde Park Gate was so intense. Also it was partly that my mother’s death unveiled and intensified; made me suddenly develop perceptions, as if a burning glass had been laid over what was shaded and dormant. Of course this quickening was spasmodic. But it was surprising – as if something were becoming visible without any effort. To take another instance – I remember going into Kensington Gardens about that time. It was a hot spring evening, and we lay down – Nessa and I – in the long grass behind the Flower Walk. I had taken The Golden Treasury with me. I opened it and began to read some poem. And instantly and for the first time I understood the poem (which it was I forget). It was as if it became altogether intelligible; I had a feeling of transparency in words when they cease to be words and become so intensified that one seems to experience them; to foretell them as if they developed what one is already feeling. I was so astonished that I tried to explain the feeling. “One seems to understand what it’s about”, I said awkwardly. I suppose Nessa has forgotten; no one could have understood from what I said the queer feeling I had in the hot grass, that poetry was coming true. Nor does that give the feeling. It matches what I have sometimes felt when I write. The pen gets on the scent.