Moments of Being

  The regular Sunday walk was to Trick Robin or, as father liked to call it, Tren Crom. From the top, one could see the two seas; St Michael’s Mount on one side; the Lighthouse on the other. Like all Cornish hills, it was scattered with blocks of granite; said some of them to be old tombs and altars; in some, holes were driven, as if for gate posts. Others were piled up rocks. The Loggan rock was on top of Tren Crom; we would set it rocking; and be told that perhaps the hollow in the rough lichened surface was for the victim’s blood. But father, with his severe love of truth, disbelieved it; he said, in his opinion, this was no genuine Loggan rock; but the natural disposition of ordinary rocks. Little paths led up to the hill, between heather and ling; and our knees were pricked by the gorse – the blazing yellow gorse with its sweet nutty smell. Another walk, a short children’s walk, was to Fairyland, as we called that solitary wood, with a broad wall circling it. We walked on the wall, and looked down into a forest of oak trees, and great ferns, higher than our heads. It smelt of oak apples; it was dark, damp, silent, mysterious. A longer, an adventurous walk was to Halestown Bog. Again father corrected us; Helston Bog we called it; the real name was Halestown. In that bog we sprang from hag to hag; and the hags squelched and we plunged up to the knee in the brown bog water. There the Osmunda grew; and the rare maiden-hair fern. Better than these walks, a treat announced perhaps once a fortnight, was an afternoon sailing. We would hire a lugger; the fisherman went with us. But once Thoby was allowed to steer us home. “Show them you can bring her in, my boy,” father said, with his usual trust and pride in Thoby. And Thoby took the fisherman’s place; and steered; flushed and with his blue eyes very blue, and his mouth set, he sat there, bringing us round the point, into harbour, without letting the sail flag. One day the sea was full of pale jelly fish, like lamps, with streaming hair; but they stung you if you touched them. Sometimes lines would be handed us; baited by gobbets cut from fish; and the line thrilled in one’s fingers as the boat tossed and shot through the water; and then – how can I convey the excitement? – there was a little leaping tug; then another; up one hauled; up through the water at length came the white twisting fish; and was slapped on the floor. There it lay flapping this way and that in an inch or two of water.

  Once, after we had hung about, tacking, and hauling in gurnard after gurnard, dab after dab, father said to me: “Next time if you are going to fish I shan’t come; I don’t like to see fish caught but you can go if you like.” It was a perfect lesson. It was not a rebuke; not a forbidding; simply a statement of his own feeling, about which I could think and decide for myself. Though my passion for the thrill and the tug had been perhaps the most acute I then knew, his words slowly extinguished it; leaving no grudge, I ceased to wish to catch fish. But from the memory of my own passion I am still able to construct an idea of the sporting passion. It is one of those invaluable seeds, from which, since it is impossible to have every experience fully, one can grow something that represents other people’s experiences. Often one has to make do with seeds; the germs of what might have been, had one’s life been different. I pigeonhole ‘fishing’ thus with other momentary glimpses; like those rapid glances, for example, that I cast into basements when I walk in London streets.

  Oak apples, ferns with clusters of seeds on their backs, the regatta, Charlie Pearce, the click of the garden gate, the ants swarming on the hot front door step; buying tintacks; sailing; the smell of Halestown Bog; splits with Cornish cream for tea in the farm house at Trevail; the floor of the sea changing colour at lessons; old Mr Wolstenholme in his beehive chair; the spotted elm leaves on the lawn; the rooks cawing as they passed over the house in the early morning; the escallonia leaves showing their grey undersides: the arc in the air, like the pip of an orange, when the powder magazine at Hayle blew up; the boom of the buoy – these for some reason come uppermost at the moment in my mind thinking of St Ives – an incongruous miscellaneous catalogue, little corks that mark a sunken net.

  And to pull that net, leaving its contents unsorted, to shore, by way of making an end where there is no such thing, I add: for two or three years before mother’s death (1892—3—4, that is) ominous hints reached the nursery that the grown ups talked of leaving St Ives. The distance had become a drawback; by that time George and Gerald had work in London. Expense, Thoby’s school, Adrian’s school, became more urgent. And then just opposite the Lookout place a great square oatmeal coloured hotel appeared when we came down in July. My mother said, with her dramatic gestures, that the view was spoilt; that St Ives would be ruined. For all these reasons, then, a house agent’s board appeared one October in our garden; and as it needed repainting, I was allowed to fill in some of the letters – This House to Let – from a pot of paint. The joy of painting mingled with the dread of leaving. But for a summer or two no tenant came. The danger, we hoped, was averted. And then in the spring of 1895 mother died. Father instantly decided that he wished never to see St Ives again. And perhaps a month later Gerald went down alone; settled the sale of our lease to some people called Millie Dow, and St Ives vanished for ever.

  I recover then today (October 11th 1940) a mild Autumn day (London battered last night) from these rapid notes only one actual picture of Thoby; steering us round the point without letting the sail flap. I recover the picture of a schoolboy whose jacket was rather tight; whose arms shot out of their sleeves. He looked sulky; grim; his eyes became bluer when he was thus on his mettle; his face flushed a little. He was feeling earlier than most boys, the weight laid on him by father’s pride in him; the burden, the responsibility of being treated as a man.

  Why do I shirk the task, not so very hard to a professional – have I not conveyed Roger from one end of life to the other? – like myself, of wafting this boy from the boat to my bed sitting room at Hyde Park Gate? It is because I want to go on thinking about St Ives. I have the excuse that I could, if I went on thinking, recall many other pictures; bring him in again and again. And it is not only an excuse; for always round him, like the dew that collects in beads on a rough coat, there hangs the country; butterflies; birds; muddy roads; muddy boots; horses.

  But it is true, I do not want to go into my room at Hyde Park Gate. I shrink from the years 1897—1904, the seven unhappy years. Not many lives were tortured and fretted and made numb with non-being as ours were then. That, in shorthand, was the legacy of those two great unnecessary blunders; those two lashes of the random unheeding, unthinking flail that brutally and pointlessly killed the two people who should have made those years normal and natural, if not ‘happy’.

  I am not thinking of mother and of Stella; I am thinking of the damage that their deaths inflicted. I will describe it more carefully later, I will illustrate with a scene or two. That is why I do not wish to bring Thoby out of the boat into my room.

  Without those deaths, to hark back to an earlier thought, it is true that he would not have been so genuinely, though dumbly, bound to us. If there is any good (I doubt it) in these mutilations, it is that it sensitises. If to be aware of the insecurity of life, to remember something gone, to feel now and then, overwhelmingly, as I felt for father when he made no claim to it, a passionate fumbling fellowship – if it is a good thing to be aware of all this at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, by fits and starts – if, if, if—. But was it good? Would it not have been better (if there is any sense in saying good and better when there is no possible judge, no standard) to go on feeling, as at St Ives, the rush and tumble of family life? To be family surrounded; to go on exploring and adventuring privately while all the while the family as a whole continued its prosaic, rumbling progress; would this not have been better than to have had that protection removed; to have been tumbled out of the family shelter; to have had it cracked and gashed; to have become critical and sceptical of the family—? Perhaps to have remained in the family, believing in it, accepting it, as we should, without those two deaths, would have given us greater scope, greater variety, and certainly greater confidence. On the other hand
, I can put another question: Did those deaths give us an experience that even if it was numbing, mutilating, yet meant that the Gods (as I used to phrase it) were taking us seriously, and giving us a job which they would not have thought it worthwhile to give – say, the Booths or the Milmans? I had my usual visual way of putting it. I would see (after Thoby’s death) two great grindstones (as I walked round Gordon Square)fn70 and myself between them. I would stage a conflict between myself and ‘them’. I would reason that if life were thus made to rear and kick, it was a thing to be ridden; nobody could say ‘they’ had fobbed me off with a weak little feeble slip of the precious matter. So I came to think of life as something of extra reality. And this of course increased my sense of my own importance. Not in relation to human beings; in relation to the force which had respected me sufficiently to make me feel myself ground between grindstones.

  It seems to me therefore that our relation (Thoby’s and mine) was more serious than it would have been without those deaths. The unspoken thought – I have roughly visualised it – was there, in him; in me; when he came into my room at Hyde Park Gate. It was behind our arguments. We were, of course, naturally attracted to each other. Besides his brother’s feeling (and he was protective) he had I think an amused, surprised, questioning attitude to me as an individual. I was a year and a half younger; and a girl. A shell-less little creature, I think he thought me; so sheltered, in my room, compared with him; an ingenuous, eager listener to his school stories; without any experience of my own with which to cap his; but not passive; on the contrary, bubbling, inquisitive, restless, contradicting. We had branched off, after that rambling up and down stairs, to read on our own. He had consumed Shakespeare, somehow or other, by himself. He had possessed himself of it, in his large clumsy way, and our first arguments, since I listened passively to the story of the Greeks on the stairs outside the water closet, outside the candle grease smelling landing, were about Shakespeare. He would sweep down upon me, with his assertion that everything was in Shakespeare. He let the whole mass that he held in his grasp descend in an avalanche on me. I revolted. But how could I oppose all that? Rather feebly; getting red and agitated. Still it was then my genuine feeling that a play was antipathetic to me. How did they begin? With some dull speech a hundred miles from anything interesting. To prove it I opened [Twelfth Night]fn71 and read “If music be the food of love, play on . . .” I was downed that time. And he was ruthless; exasperating; downing me, overwhelming me; with enough passion to make us both heated. So that my opposition cannot have been quite ineffectual. He made me feel his pride, it was like his pride in his friends, in Shakespeare – shuffling off Falstaff, he pointed out, without a sign of sympathy. That large natural inhumanity in Shakespeare delighted him. It was a tree’s way of shedding its leaves. On the other hand, when Desdemona wakes again, he thought possibly Shakespeare was ‘sentimental’. These are the only particular criticisms that I remember, for he was not, as I am, a breaker off of single words, or sentences, not a note taker. He was more casual, rough and ready and comprehensive. And so I did not get from him any minute comments; but felt rather that Shakespeare was to him his other world; the place where he got the measure of the daily world. He took his bearings there; and sized us up from that standard. I felt once that he was half thinking of Falstaff and Hal and Mother Quickly and the rest, in a third class smoker in the underground, when there was some squabble between drunken men; and he sat in the corner, with his pipe in his mouth, looking over the edge of a newspaper; surveying them; unperturbed; equipped; as if placing it all. I felt (not only then) that he knew his own place; and relished his inheritance. I felt he scented the battle; was already, in anticipation, a law maker; proud of his station as a man; ready to play his part among men. Had he been put on, he would have proved most royally. The words Walter Lamb used of him were very fitting.fn72

  So we argued; about Shakespeare; about many many things; and often lost our tempers; but were attracted by some common admiration. The spot in Grays’ Inn where, walking home one night, he said to me: “I always wonder what the man in green is thinking” – (where does that come from?) by which I was elated, knowing him to mean that he wanted me to talk – [wanted] my opinion – that flag stone in the dark is still one of my unsubmerged islands. But how reserved we were! Brothers and sisters today talk quite freely together about – oh everything. Sex, sodomy, periods, and so on. We never talked much about ourselves even; I can recall no confidences, no compliments; no kisses; no self analysis between me and him. As for sex, he passed from childhood to boyhood, from boyhood to manhood under our eyes, in our presence, without saying a single word that could have been taken for a sign of what he was feeling. Did other boys fall in love with him? Not he with them, for a certainty. From Clive I learnt later (when talk was about everything) that Lytton’s sodomy was to him one of the stock jokes; one of the Strache’s preposterous, laughable absurdities. Yet beneath that silence – it may be kept cool and sweet, it may be given a depth and seriousness, an emotional power and quality that speech destroys – dwelt as I felt great susceptibility; great sensibility; great pride in us whose photographs were always on his fireplace at Cambridge; and all those desires which would have made him a lover; a husband; a father. His loves were already distinctly sketched though so submerged; was there some dancing mistress, at Cambridge, brought to light by Gerald who found her photograph? And then of course Elena; and then Irene. But again how ceremonious, how formal, his approach to loving women was. How very silent in words; yet how apparent in its tremble and quiver without words. That would have been his private life. Publicly, he would have been, had he been put on, a judge certainly. Mr Justice Stephen he would be today; with several books to his credit; one or two on law; some essays exposing humbugs; perhaps a book on birds, with drawings by himself. By this time, aged sixty, he would have been a distinguished figure; but not prominent; for he was too melancholy, too independent, unconforming, to take any ready made mould. He would have been more of a character than a success, I suppose; had he been put on.

  The knell of those words affects my memory of a time when in fact they were not heard at all. We had no kind of foreboding that he was to die when he was twenty-six and I was twenty-four. That is one of the falsifications – that knell I always find myself hearing and transmitting – that one cannot guard against, save by noting it. Then I never saw him as I see him now, with all his promise ended. Then I thought only of the moment; him there in the room; just back from Clifton; or from Cambridge; dropping in to argue with me. It was, whatever date I give it, an exciting moment; in which we both pushed out from the mists of childhood; and each saw the other emerging; and each felt new qualities, he in himself, me in myself; both in each other. They were days of discovery. Exciting days, whether one called them happy or unhappy; or agitating. Externally I remember the discovery that he looked astonishingly handsome, in his new J. Hills suit of blue serge. That was in October 1899 when he first went to Cambridge. The summer at Warboys I discovered that he smoked a pipe. He never had it out of his mouth. Then term after term I discovered Bell, the Strache, and Sydney-Turnerfn73 But I am rushing too far ahead of myself in Hyde Park Gate. I go back then to the year that Stella died – 1897.

  I could sum it all up in one scene. I always see when I think of the months that followed her death a leafless bush, a skeleton bush, in the dark of a summer’s night. This rather finely drawn many twigged tree stands outside a garden house. Inside I am sitting with Jack Hills. He grips my hand in his. He wrings my hand. He groans: “It tears one asunder . . .” He gripped my hand to make his agony endurable; as women in childbirth grip a sheet. “But you can’t understand”, he broke off. “Yes I can”, I murmured. Subconsciously, I knew that he meant his sexual desires tore him asunder; I knew that he felt that at the same time as his agony at Stella’s death. Both tortured him. And the tree outside in the August summer half light was giving me, as he groaned, a symbol of his agony; of our sterile agony; was summing
it all up. Still the leafless tree is to me the emblem, the symbol, of those summer months.

  He came every weekend to the house we had at Painswick. Every night either Vanessa or I wandered off with him alone after dinner. Every day he wrote to one or the other. We bore the brunt of his anguish. He was in agony. “Poor boy, he looks very bad”, Father once muttered audibly. And Jack, overhearing, stammered some awkward sentence to cover up, to prevent him from saying more. He looked anguished; yet dogged; all in coal black. George, Gerald, Jack were all in black from head to toe. The leafless tree and Jack’s hand gripping my wrist; they come back together when I think of that summer.

  The leafless tree was behind our ostensible lives for many months. But trees do not remain leafless. They begin to grow little red chill buds. By that image I would convey the misery, the quarrels, the irritations, half covered, then spurting out, the insinuations, which as soon as family life started again began to prove that Stella’s death had not left us more united; as father said; but had left us all ill adjusted; growing painfully into relations that her death had distorted.

  Another garden scene – this time at Fritham – comes back to me. George had taken my arm in his. Indoors father was playing his nightly whist with the others. George singled me out, and walked me off round the lawn. I cannot remember any phrase exactly. A sound of mumbling comes back; his pressure on my hand; and then I gathered that very emotionally and ambiguously, with many such words as “Darling old Goat”, “old party”, and so on, he was telling me that people were saying that Vanessa was in love with Jack; it was illegal; their marriage he meant; could I not speak to her; persuade her – It was a blurred night talk; with the usual resonance of emotional chords; and I was flattered; perhaps felt important; and must have promised I would say whatever it was he wanted me to say. What? I do not remember what I said; only her answer, and its bitterness: “So you take their side too.”