But though I remember so distinctly those two moments – the arch of glass burning at the end of Paddington Station and the poem I read in Kensington Gardens, those two clear moments are almost the only clear moments in the muffled dulness that then closed over us. With mother’s death the merry, various family life which she had held in being shut for ever. In its place a dark cloud settled over us; we seemed to sit all together cooped up, sad, solemn, unreal, under a haze of heavy emotion. It seemed impossible to break through. It was not merely dull; it was unreal. A finger seemed laid on one’s lips.
I see us now, all dressed in unbroken black, George and Gerald in black trousers, Stella with real crape deep on her dress, Nessa and myself with slightly modified crape, my father black from head to foot – even the notepaper was so black bordered that only a little space for writing remained – I see us emerging from Hyde Park Gate on a fine summer afternoon and walking in procession hand in hand, for we were always taking hands – I see us walking – I rather proud of the solemn blackness and the impression it must make – into Kensington Gardens; and how golden the laburnum shone. And then we sat silent under the trees. The silence was stifling. A finger was laid on our lips. One had always to think whether what one was about to say was the right thing to say. It ought to be a help. But how could one help? Father used to sit sunk in gloom. If he could be got to talk – and that was part of our duty – it was about the past. It was about “the old days”. And when he talked, he ended with a groan. He was getting deaf, and his groans were louder than he knew. Indoors he would walk up and down the room, gesticulating, crying that he had never told mother how he loved her. Then Stella would fling her arms round him and protest. Often one would break in upon a scene of this kind. And he would open his arms and call one to him. We were his only hope, his only comfort, he would say. And there kneeling on the floor one would try – perhaps only to cry.
Stella of course bore the brunt. She grew whiter and whiter in her unbroken black dress. She would sit at her table with the black-edged notepaper before her writing, answering letters of sympathy. There was a photograph of mother in front of her; and sometimes she would cry, as she wrote. As the summer wore on, visitors came, sympathetic women, old friends. They were admitted to the back drawing room, where father sat like the Queen in Shakespeare – “here I and sorrow sit” – with the Virginia Creeper hanging a curtain of green over the window, so that the room was like a green cave. We in the front room sat crouched, hearing muffled voices, ready for the visitor to emerge with tears on tear-stained cheeks. The shrouded, cautious, dulled life took the place of all the chatter and laughter of the summer. There were no more parties; no more young men and women laughing. No more flashing visions of white summer dresses and hansoms dashing off to private views and dinner parties, none of that natural life and gaiety which my mother had created. The grown-up world into which I would dash for a moment and pick off some joke or little scene and dash back again upstairs to the nursery was ended. There were none of those snatched moments that were so amusing and for some reason so soothing and yet exciting when one ran downstairs to dinner arm in arm with mother; or chose the jewels she was to wear. There was none of that pride when one said something that amused her, or that she thought very remarkable. How excited I used to be when the ‘Hyde Park Gate News’ was laid on her plate on Monday morning, and she liked something I had written!fn33 Never shall I forget my extremity of pleasure – it was like being a violin and being played upon – when I found that she had sent a story of mine to Madge Symonds; it was so imaginative, she said; it was about souls flying round and choosing bodies to be born into.
The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and selfconscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled. It made one hypocritical and immeshed in the conventions of sorrow. Many foolish and sentimental ideas came into being. Yet there was a struggle, for soon we revived, and there was a conflict between what we ought to be and what we were. Thoby put his into words. One day before he went back to school, he said: “It’s silly going on like this . . .”, sobbing, sitting shrouded, he meant. I was shocked at his heartlessness; yet he was right, I know; and yet how could we escape?
It was Stella who lifted the canopy again. A little light crept in.
June 20th 1939.1 was thinking as I crossed the Channel last night of Stella; in a very jerky disconnected way, with people quarrelling outside the door; the boat train arriving; chains clanking; and the steamer giving those sudden stertorous snorts. And as the first morning after a broken night is distracted and broken, instead of beginning Roger again, as I ought, I will write down some of my distracted and disconnected thoughts; to serve, should the time come, for notes.
How many people are there still able to think about Stella on the 20th June 1939? Very few. Jack died last Christmas; George and Gerald a year or two ago; Kitty Maxse and Margaret Massingberd have been dead many years now. Susan Lushington and Lisa Stillman are still alive; but how they live and where, I know not. Perhaps thus I think of her less disconnectedly and more truly than anyone now living, save for Vanessa and Adrian; and perhaps old Sophie Farrell.fn34 Of her childhood I know practically nothing. She was the only daughter of the handsome barrister Herbert Duckworth, but as he died when she was three or four, she did not remember him, or those years when her mother was as happy as anyone can be. I think, from stray anecdotes and from what I noticed myself, that when she came to consciousness as a child the unhappy years were at their height. That would account for some qualities in Stella. Her first memories were of a very sad widowed mother, who “went about doing good” – Stella wished to have that on the tombstone – visiting the slums, visiting too the Cancer Hospital in the Brompton Road. Our Quaker Aunt told me that this was her habit; for she said how one case there had “shocked her”. Thus Stella as a child lived in the shade of that widowhood; saw that beautiful crape-veiled figure daily; and perhaps took then the ply that was so marked – that attitude of devotion, almost canine in its touching adoration, to her mother; that passive, suffering affection; and also that complete unquestioning dependence.
They were sun and moon to each other; my mother the positive and definite; Stella the reflecting and satellite. My mother was stern to her. All her devotion was given to George who was like his father; and her care was for Gerald, born posthumously and very delicate. Stella she treated severely; so much so that before their marriage my father ventured a protest. She replied that it might be true; she was hard on Stella because she felt Stella “part of myself”. A pale silent child I imagine her; sensitive; modest; uncomplaining; adoring her mother, thinking only how she could help her, and without any ambition or even character of her own. And yet she had character. Very gentle, very honest, and in some way individual – so she made her own impression on people. Friends, like Kitty Maxse, the brilliant, the sparkling, loved her with a real laughing tenderness for her own sake. Her charm was great; it came partly from this modesty, from this honesty, from this perfectly simple unostentatious unselfishness; it came too from her lack of pose, her lack of snobbery; and from the genuineness, from something that was – could I put my finger on it – perfectly herself, individual. This unnamed quality – the sensitiveness to real things – was queer in the sister of George and Gerald, who were so opaque and conventional; who had so innate a respect for the conventions and respectabilities. By some odd fling in her birth, she had escaped all taint of Duckworth philistinism; she had none of their shrewd middle-class complacency. Instead of their little brown eyes that were so greedy and twinkling, hers were very large and rather a pale blue. They were dreamy, candid eyes. She was without their instinctive worldliness. She was lovely too, in a far vaguer, less perfect way than my mother. She reminded me always of those large white flowers – elder-blossom, cow parsley, that one sees in the fields in June. Perhaps
my mother’s laughing nickname – ‘Old Cow’ – suggests the cow parsley. Or again, a white faint moon in a blue sky suggests her. Or those large white roses that have many petals and are semi-transparent. She had beautiful fair hair, growing in horns over her forehead; and no colour in her face at all. As for teaching – she had perhaps a governess; went to classes; was taught the violin by Arnold Dolmetsch and played in Mrs Marshall’s orchestra. But there was a stoppage in her mind, a gentle impassivity about books and learning. As Jack told me after her death, she thought herself so stupid as to be almost wanting; and said that the rheumatic fever she had as a child had (I remember the word) ‘touched’ her. But again, what was remarkable considering the Duckworth strain – so boorish, so rustic, so philistine – is that however simple she was in brain, she was not, as George’s sister might so well have been, a cheery ordinary English upper middle class girl with rosy cheeks and bright brown eyes. She was herself. She remains quite distinct in my mind. What is odd is that I cannot compare her either in character or face with anyone else. What she would have looked like now in a room full of other people I cannot imagine; or how she would have talked. I have never seen anyone who reminded me of her; and that is true too of my mother. They do not blend in the world of the living at all.
She was nineteen when I was six or seven; and as a girl could not then go about London alone, I used as a small child to be sent with her, as chaperone. Among my earliest memories is the memory of going out with her perhaps to shop, or to pay some call; and, the errand done, she would take me to a shop and give me a glass of milk and biscuits sprinkled with sugar on a marble table. And sometimes we went in hansoms. But she lived, of course, downstairs in the drawing room; pouring out tea; and there were many young men, it seemed when one dashed in for a second, sitting round her. Vaguely we knew that Arthur Studd was in love with her; and Ted Sanderson; and I think Richard Norton; and Jim Stephen.fn35 That great figure with the deep voice and the wild eyes would come to the house looking for her, with his madness on him; and would burst into the nursery and spear the bread on his swordstick and at one time we were told to go out by the back door and if we met Jim we were to say that Stella was away. 19th July 1939.1 was forced to break off again, and rather suspect that these breaks will be the end of this memoir.
I was thinking about Stella as we crossed the Channel a month ago. I have not given her a thought since. The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual. For this reason – that it destroys the fullness of life – any break – like that of house moving – causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin splinters. As I say to L[eonard]: “What’s there real about this? Shall we ever live a real life again?” “At Monks House,” he says. So I write this, taking a morning off from the word filing and fitting that my life of Roger means – I write this partly in order to recover my sense of the present by getting the past to shadow this broken surface. Let me then, like a child advancing with bare feet into a cold river, descend again into that stream.
. . . Jim Stephen was in love with Stella. He was mad then. He was in the exalted stage of his madness. He would dash up in a hansom; leave my father to pay it. The hansom had been driving him about London all day. The man wanted perhaps a sovereign. It was paid. For ‘dear Jim’ was a great favourite. Once, as I say, he dashed up [to] the nursery and speared the bread. Another time, off we went to his room in De Vere Gardens and he painted me on a small bit of wood. He was a great painter for a time. I suppose madness made him believe he was all powerful. Once he came in at breakfast, “Savagefn36 has just told me I’m in danger of dying or going mad”, he laughed. And soon he ran naked through Cambridge; was taken to an asylum; and died. This great mad figure with his broad shoulders and very clean cut mouth, and the deep voice and the powerful face – and the very blue eyes – this mad man would recite poetry to us; “The Burial of Sir John Moore”, I remember; and he always brings to mind some tormented bull; and also Achilles – Achilles on his pressed bed lolling roars out a deep applause. He was in love with Stella – incongruously enough. And we had orders to tell him, if we met him in the street, that she was away, staying with the Lushingtons at Pyports. There was a great mystery about love then.
Jim was one of her lovers. The other – that is, the most important – was Jack Hills. It was at St Ives that she refused him; late one night we heard her sobbing through the attic wall. He had gone at once. A refusal in those days was catastrophic. It meant a complete breach. Human relations, at least between the sexes, were carried on as relations between countries are now – with ambassadors, and treaties. The parties concerned met on the great occasion of the proposal. If this were refused, a state of war was declared. That explains why she cried so bitterly. For she had done something of great practical as well as emotional importance. He went off at once – to Norway to fish; later perhaps they met in a completely formal way at parties. Negotiations were kept faintly alive through my mother; an interpreter was necessary. All this procedure gave love its solemnity. Feelings were banked up; silence interposed; there was in every family a code, a religious code, that penetrated, somehow or other, to the children. It was secret; but we guessed.
Thus, when my mother died, Stella was left without any negotiator, for my father did not fill the part. He must have come back – it proves how deep the feeling was to admit such a return – the night before my mother died. It was desperate but not hopeless.fn37
June 8th 1940. I have just found this sheaf of notes, thrown away into my waste-paper basket. I had been tidying up; and had cast all my life of Roger into that large basket, and with it, these sheets too. Now I am correcting the final page proofs of Roger; and it was to refresh myself from that antlike meticulous labour that I determined to look for these pages. Shall I ever finish these notes – let alone make a book from them? The battle is at its crisis; every night the Germans fly over England; it comes closer to this house daily. If we are beaten then – however we solve that problem, and one solution is apparently suicide (so it was decided three nights ago in London among us) – book writing becomes doubtful. But I wish to go on, not to settle down in that dismal puddle.
Jack Hills, I was saying, came back the night before my mother died, which shows that though the negotiations had been broken off, there must have been a connection, or how could he have come that night of great crisis?
We were in the back drawing room, and there was the tea tray, for we had a curious habit of drinking tea about nine o’clock. The silver hot water jug which I still possess – but it has a hole in it – had a handle that grew hot. Aunt Mary, summoned from Brighton, picked it up and put it down quickly.fn38 “Only Mrs Stephen and Stella can manage that”, said Jack Hills with the queer sad little smile that went with the little joke. And I remember that he said ‘Stella’. And since he was there, that last night, the affair must have been in being – sufficiently so to make it possible for him to be with us in intimacy. That was the 4th May, 1895.
The next thing I remember is the night at Hindhead (August 22nd 1896) – the black and silver night of mysterious voices, the night when father packed us off to bed early; and we heard voices in the garden; and saw Stella and Jack passing; and disappearing; and the tramp came; and Thoby countered him; and Nessa and I sat up in our bedroom waiting; and Stella never came; and at last in the early morning she came and told us that she was engaged; and I whispered, “Did mother know?” and she murmured, “Yes”.
 
; And next morning at breakfast there was excitement and emotion and gloom. Adrian cried; and Jack kissed him; and father said gently but seriously: “We must all be happy, because Stella is happy” – a command which, poor man, he could not himself obey.
But Jack Hills? He had been at Eton with George. He stands in my mind’s picture gallery for a type – and a desirable type; the English country gentleman type, I might call it, by way of running a line round it; and I add, it is a type I have seldom been intimate with; perhaps no one is ever intimate with the country gentleman type; yet for nine years I was intimate with Jack Hills; a reason perhaps why we became so completely separate later; it was impossible to begin again formally after that intimacy. And the country gentleman came to the surface and separated us.
Can I quickly fill in that outline? To begin then, he was the son of a commonplace little round man – Judge Hills – ‘Buzzy’ he was called in the family – and like a bluebottle, buzzing, I still remember him; short, jocular, in knickerbockers, giving us Russian toffee up at Corby. Buzzy had once written a sonnet that had been taken for Shakespeare’s, and liked to make little facetious jokes with young ladies – I remember Susan Lushington “didn’t know which way to look”, she said, when he chaffed her about a husband – “I seemed to be sitting on a tripod and looking into the future”, Buzzy said, having archly used the word husband when it should have been father – Buzzy lived chiefly in Egypt, and Mrs Hills – Anna her name was – lived mostly alone at Corby. She was a hard, worldly woman, tightly dressed in black satin in London; up at Corby, a county lady, collecting Chelsea enamel snuffboxes, with ambitions to be the friend of intellectual men. She detested women; she got on very well with Andrew Lang. He stayed there often; and she described a party when the local dentist came in a frock coat – “all the other men looking so picturesque in knickerbockers.” And she said: “I was in mourning for nine people at Easter”; also, looking at horses in the paddock, “That makes the second pair”; also she stressed “under housemaid” to impress us that she had several; and dwelt on the noble descent of the Curwens, to whom they were related; and went weekly to Naworth with a wreath to lay on Christopher Howard’s grave. It was handed in at the carriage; like a picnic basket – the weekly wreath. And I still see her in shiny black satin and feathered Victorian hat bending over the grave in Naworth burial ground; and Susan whispering in agitation “Suppose Lady Carlisle or one of them should come out and catch us!” These recollections spring from that dreary and terrifying week at Corby after Stella’s death in the autumn of 1897. They leased Corby from the Howards; the lion stood with his tail perfectly straight on top of the roof. The river dashed through the grounds; and there I saw Jack catch a salmon; for the first time after those desperate months he looked triumphant; and worn as he [had] come to look, I was struck by his sudden exultation as the line tautened and he held the fish there in the river. We saw it afterwards in the game larder; and Mrs Hills asked: “Has he those little creatures on him?” It was a proof of freshness, I think, if you found lice on a salmon. Tuddenham, the keeper, who stood by us on the bank, said: “He’s hooked him.”