26.
fn10 See Sonya Rudikoff, Ancestral Houses: Virginia Woolf and the Aristocracy, SPOSS, 1999.
fn11 See Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, Chatto & Windus, 1996, 80, pp. 130–1.
Reminiscences
Chapter One
YOUR MOTHER WAS born in 1879, and some six years at least must have passed before I knew that she was my sister, I can say nothing of that time.fn1 A photograph is the best token there is of her appearance, and the face in this instance shows also much of the character. You see the soft, dreamy and almost melancholy expression of the eyes; and it may not be fanciful to discover some kind of test and rejection in them as though, even then, she considered the thing she saw, and did not always find what she needed in it. But certainly it would be mere fancy to conceive that this was other than unconscious at that age. For the rest, a mother who gazed in her face might feel her heart leap at the endowment already promised her daughter, for she was to have great beauty. And in this case the mother would also feel tender joy within her, and some bright amusement too, for already her daughter promised to be honest and loving; already, as I have heard, she was able to care for the three little creatures who were younger than she was, teaching Thoby his letters, and giving up to him her bottle. I can imagine that she attached great importance to the way in which Thoby sat in his highchair, and appealed to Nurse to have him properly fastened there before he was allowed to eat his porridge. Her mother would smile silently at this.
Our life was ordered with great simplicity and regularity. It seems to divide itself into two large spaces, not crowded with events, but in some way more exquisitely natural than any that follow; for our duties were very plain and our pleasures absolutely appropriate. Earth gave all the satisfaction we asked. One space was spent indoors, in the drawing room and nursery, and the other in Kensington Gardens. There were a number of little warfares, and sometimes Nessa and Thoby fought with us and sometimes they were our friends. I remember too the great extent and mystery of the dark land under the nursery table, where a continuous romance seemed to go forward, though the time spent there was really so short. Here I met your mother, in a gloom happily encircled by the firelight, and peopled with legs and skirts. We drifted together like ships in an immense ocean and she asked me whether black cats had tails. And I answered that they had not, after a pause in which her question seemed to drop echoing down vast abysses, hitherto silent. In future I suppose there was some consciousness between us that the other held possibilities. But though shot occasionally by stormy passions, when sympathies seemed to waken beyond the reach of circumstances, the great satisfaction was to be had from impersonal things. There were smells and flowers and dead leaves and chestnuts, by which you distinguished the seasons, and each had innumerable associations, and power to flood the brain in a second. There were long summer evenings, with white moths abroad; and bright winter evenings when the fire-wood could be cut into shape. “The others” were not brothers and sister,fn2 but beings possessed of knives, or enviable gifts for running or carving; and your mother, partly because she did not seem to hold these views as completely as we did, was the first to disturb me from my contentment. Another influence was even then astir in her, the influence of an affection only to be gratified by people. No hole dug in the gardens however deep, so that it was possible to extract clay of a malleable quality from it, gave her all that she needed. Dolls did not satisfy her. At present, until she was fifteen indeed, she was outwardly sober and austere, the most trustworthy, and always the eldest; sometimes she would lament her “responsibilities”. Other children had their stages, and sudden gifts and failings; she seemed to draw on steadily, as though with her eye on some far object, which attained, she might reveal herself. She was very silent, and the only peculiar tastes which she seemed encouraged to show were those that people called out; she cried when Thoby went to school, and she minded more than the rest when your grandmother declared with some passion and humour, as I think, that she could never trust a single one of us again; had we not gone hunting for a dead cat against her commands? But beneath the serious surface only legitimately broken by such affections, there burnt also the other passion, the passion for art. She drew indeed under the care of a Mr Cook, but talk of art, talk of her own gifts and loves, was unknown to her. What did she think then? For with her long fingers grouping, and her eye considering, she surely painted many pictures without a canvas. Once I saw her scrawl on a black door a great maze of lines, with white chalk.
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