Grand Canyon Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/vitasackville-west

  Contents

  Vita Sackville-West

  Author’s Note

  PART ONE

  The Hotel

  PART TWO

  The Canyon

  Vita Sackville-West

  Grand Canyon

  Vita Sackville-West

  The Hon. Lady Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West, was an English poet, novelist and gardener. She was famous for her exuberant aristocratic life, her strong marriage to Harold Nicolson, her passionate relationships with women and her gardens at Sissinghurst Castle, Kent.

  Sackville-West’s long narrative poem, The Land, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927, and her Collected Poems won the prize again in 1933. Her best-known novels are The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931). Both titles were reissued alongside her earlier novel, Challenge (1923), by Virago in Spring 2011.

  In 1946 Sackville-West was made a Companion of Honour for her services to literature. The following year she began a weekly column in the Observer called ‘In your Garden’. In 1948 she became a founder member of the National Trust’s garden committee.

  Sissinghurst Castle is now owned by the National Trust and the garden Vita Sackville-West created there is open to the public. It is one of the most visited gardens in England.

  Author’s Note

  In Grand Canyon I have intended a cautionary tale. In it I have contemplated the dangers of a world in which Germany, by the use of an unspecified method of attack, is assumed to have defeated Great Britain in the present war. Peace terms have been offered on the basis of the status quo of 1939 and the Germans have made a plausible appeal to the United States Government (who have meanwhile satisfactorily concluded their own war with Japan) to mediate in the name of humanity to prevent a prolongation of human suffering. For the purposes of my story I have allowed the United States Government to fall into the Nazi trap and to be deluded into making this intervention as “the nation which, in its hour of victory, brought peace to the world.” The terrible consequences of an incomplete conclusion or indeed of any peace signed by the Allies with an undefeated Germany are shown.

  Such a supposition is by no means intended as a prophecy and indeed bears no relation at all to my own views as to the outcome of the present war.

  V. S.-W.

  PART ONE

  The Hotel

  Mr. Dale had seen Mrs. Temple daily, including her among the other hotel guests. There were as usual a number of people staying in the hotel on the edge of the canyon, even more than usual this year, owing to the manœuvres. This time he really saw her for the first time, talking to an Indian boy with a pony, out in the desert. She talked earnestly and quickly, having orders to give and he orders to fulfil, and both of them some consultation to take with one another. The boy standing beside his pony nodded rapidly, ready to be off. They made a contrast with one another under the strong sunlight of the desert, she the European, he the Indian, she light, he dark, she in her flowery muslin, he in his red shirt and fringed trousers of tanned hide, she with a sunshade like a bubble above her head, he with his black hair bound by a scarlet band.

  Then he was gone, in the instant he bestrode his pony. He became part of the desert, a Centaur speck of boy and horse, he crouching low over the mane, native, going off on the unknown mission given to him by the European woman.

  So she has a life of her own? She talks with Indian boys and gives them their instructions. She is not just a hotel guest among other hotel guests? What then is she? Who is Sylvia, what is she?

  “Fairer than Isaac’s lover at the well,

  She that in chains of pearl and unicorn

  Leads at her train the ancient golden world.” …

  The climate of his mind was composed of such small scraps of beauty, though he carefully concealed the fact from everyone and even instantly corrected the weakness in his private heart. Thus, although this sudden vision of Mrs. Temple had given him so intense a pleasure that it had caused him to whisper the lines to himself, a trick he had acquired during many years spent in solitude with no one else to speak to, he immediately came back to realism with the reflection that she was not especially fair, nor even especially young. She is a woman in her middle years, staying as inexplicably as any other person in an hotel; a woman who, perhaps, has no fixed home. Every evening she dines alone at a little table, reading a book propped open by a fork. There is nothing to mark her out as different from any other tourist. Why then does she come out into the desert with her sunshade and speak so urgently to an Indian boy? She has a private existence which has no connexion with the hotel. Her name, as may be discovered from the visitors’ book, is Mrs. Temple, first name, Helen. Her address is given as London. London was large once, and vague as an address. Her occupation she has left blank. She has no occupation. There is nothing more to be learnt about her.

  There she goes, returning towards the hotel. She returns at a leisurely pace—and, indeed, the sun is hot and the day made for leisure; she returns, having disposed of her business with the Indian boy and despatched him off on his mission into the Painted Desert. She returns towards the hotel, following the winding path which will lead her under the pine-trees along the edge of the canyon. It is a fantastic place to watch any woman, to eavesdrop on any woman unaware that she is under observation. The human figure is dwarfed here by the extravagance of nature. It is easy to observe a woman gleaning in a cornfield, throwing out her rake and drawing it back in a gesture older than the Bible; but what is one to make of a woman wandering between the desert and the canyon? She seems to have come out of nothing and to belong to nothing.

  The boy was gone; Mrs. Temple alone returned, tranquil, having given her orders. She returned, to resume her life as an hotel-guest. Lester Dale watched her go. He was not particularly interested in Mrs. Temple, not more interested in her, except for the moment, than in anyone else, for he was not particularly interested in anyone, man or woman; not even in himself. A vague speculation was the most that ever tickled his fancy. Indifference ruled his life. Places interested him more than people; but when he met with the combination of place and person, as he did now watching Mrs. Temple strolling along the edge of the canyon, his amusement was aroused. He liked to spin a tale, however little it might approach the truth. And any number of tales could be spun with the canyon as their background; the Indians themselves had turned it into the abode of legend: the spirits of the living came from it, they said, and the spirits of the dead descended into it as the entrance to the underworld, not to mention the race of little horses which were said to live at the bottom.

  But Mrs. Temple—what was she doing there? She was a woman of culture and sophistication; an elegant woman. Not fashionable; nothing so shallow; but truly elegant of mind as of body. All her movements showed that, as well as her smile. Moreover, she was alone. No husband or lover kept her company. She was more than alone, she was extremely detached, as isolated as a figure living within a globe of glass. He had an idea that no real sound ever reached her from outside. She smiled, she laid aside her book to talk to the college girls who pestered her with adoration, she was
charming, amiable, she had a friendly word always for the little waitress who had come here to Arizona because she was consumptive and loved the flowers of the desert; she could be civil even to the smart manager and his acolyte the urbane reception-clerk who inspired Lester Dale with nothing but a mild desire to push them both over the edge of the canyon. Yes, Mrs. Temple could be amiable, friendly, civil to all without ever impairing her real detachment, without ever making herself cheap and easy in the usual manner of most amiable, friendly, and civil people. That, in his eyes, was an achievement.

  He had been leaning with his back against a pine-tree; now, having lost Mrs. Temple from sight, he shoved himself away from the trunk and idly followed her along the path soft with pine-needles. He could see her sunshade swelling on that narrow path above the edge of the canyon. A false step, and she would go over. Her elegance was poised precariously between the path laid by a considerate civilization and the chasm cut by inconsiderate nature.

  He preferred the chasm to the path. He had seen many strange places on earth, but none so strange as this. Every year, in the course of a desultory life, he came back to it, knowing it in all seasons and by all lights. Like the Indians, he could believe that the canyon held the secrets of life and death.

  It amused him to observe the various people who strayed to its rim in order to gape and wonder and exclaim. The spectacle of human vulgarity, confronted with that majesty, provoked him to a grim entertainment. Unlike Mrs. Temple, so friendly with the college girls, so benevolent towards the young lovers, he could establish no contact with them, nor was he aware of any desire to do so; and that, possibly, provided part of the pleasure he had in watching Mrs. Temple at her game of skilful management between personal immunity and human friendliness, for, like many another, he appreciated to the point of over-estimation the gifts he did not himself possess. This inability to establish ordinary contact, however, this lack of desire to do so, could not rob him of his pleasure in the spectacle of his fellow-beings at their antics. Their antics appeared especially diverting on the rim of a chasm ten miles wide and one mile deep.

  He could always count on finding a parade worthy to divert him. The characters might vary in detail, but in essence they were always very much the same: muddled, inconsequent, and incomplete. Lester Dale liked his specimens to be muddled, inconsequent, and incomplete. He had persuaded himself that he successfully avoided being any of those things.

  They always performed their antics very comprehensively at the hotel. This time there were the young lovers, anonymous, free French, who might as well have been at the North Pole for all they noticed of the world outside themselves. There was the baby stumbling out for a walk every morning along that precarious path. There was the blind man who had to be led. There was the deaf man whose world of silence was impenetrable. There was the consumptive waitress whose hours of freedom were few. There was the young poet whose appreciation of the external world was manifestly nil—why then had he come here to the canyon, where the external world was more overwhelming than anywhere else?—but whose preoccupation with the sufferings of his fellow-men caused him an intense, a continuous pain. There was the Polish woman. Mr. Dale disliked and mistrusted the Polish woman. There was the rabble of travellers arriving every morning and departing every night. A mixed bag. There were the college girls, going out daily with knapsacks as though they carried all the promises of life parcelled upon their backs. And there was Mrs. Temple, who belonged nowhere, yet who could send an Indian boy at full gallop out into the Painted Desert.

  She worried Lester Dale. Without knowing her at all or anything about her beyond her name, she had managed to make him feel that she understood life better than he did, and in quite as detached a way.

  Having nothing better to do, he followed her at a distance. She walked slowly, in fact she strolled, as though the urgency of the message she had despatched into the desert were now a thing of the past, completed and dismissed from her mind. He admired her power of dismissal, a masculine trait estimable in so feminine a woman. She knew better than to fidget; most women were born fidgeters, one reason why he found them beyond his short patience. She strolled as though she were now given up entirely to quiet enjoyment and contemplation. He had no scruples in thus observing a woman unaware that she was under observation. It never occurred to him that some people might call him indiscreet and inquisitive. On the contrary (he would have explained), my interest is shot with admiration. He remembered a legend of the Empress Eugénie. walking across the Piazzetta at Venice; how nothing could be seen of her person because of the crowds surrounding her; nothing could be seen but the bubble of her sunshade preserving its steady unvarying level above the dipping bobbing bubbles of other women’s less Imperial gait. Helen Temple walks like that. Here on the rim of the canyon she walks alone, but in a crowd she would walk with the same serenity. In any circumstance of pomp or danger she would still walk with the same serenity.

  How do I know these things about her? I know them, now that I have perceived her for the first time. I am watching her now and I suddenly know more about her than if she had been my wife, my sister or my mistress for twenty years.

  He continued to follow her. She wandered on, leaving the pine-trees behind her and the soft path of pine-needles, passing the hotel and wandering on towards the stark splendour of the canyon. She paused there for a lonely moment, but then the college boys and girls appeared riding up on a string of mules. Lester Dale watched them meeting Mrs. Temple at the head of Bright Angel Trail. He and Mrs. Temple were both English. It amused him to watch his compatriot meeting American youth at the head of the trail.

  He wondered what had happened to all of them down there. It must be a strange experience to go a mile down into the earth. What had they learnt there, all those youths and girls? Adolescent youth. Had they learnt something about life and possibly sex down there? Bright Angel Trail—splendid words. The trail of the bright deceptive angel. Had they learnt something unforgettable down there, something important yet unimportant, the expense of spirit in a waste of shame? Lester Dale had a realistic mind. Sex had never bothered him much; but that lucky escape did not prevent him from speculating on the sex life of other people. Those adolescents. Co-ed. Fraternity; sorority. Phi-Kappa-delta. Boys and girls. Animal nature, human nature. What use had they made of it at the bottom of the canyon, that dangerous place? Adonis’ gardens, that one day bloomed and fruitful were the next. What was Mrs. Temple saying to the college boys and girls now that she had met them at the head of Bright Angel Trail?

  He stopped behind a pine-tree to watch her intercepted by the gay train of boys and girls.

  The boys came up out of the canyon and rode away at once, to get away alone by themselves from women. They had got themselves up in cowboy dress, open shirt necks, big hats and fringed chaps, because it was the romantic thing to do. The touch of the dude ranch had laid itself on their shoulders. But they had had enough of romance and women for the day and were relieved to leave their girls in the charge of Mrs. Temple, a woman in charge of women. Later, after dinner, they would join up again and then there would be dancing and flirtation as usual, when they had all had their baths and changed their clothes and got themselves into the evening mood.

  Meanwhile they were all dusty and tired and excited. Over-excited. Mr. Dale could not hear what the college girls were saying to Mrs. Temple. What they were saying evidently counted for little; she was observing them with an eye that skidded away from the ear. He was amused by the difference between her manner towards them and their manner towards her. They were still under the excitement of their descent into the chasm; she, who had not ridden down with them, was cool; richer than they by some experience not gained solely by a descent a mile deep into the earth. A mile deep into the earth was nothing to her whose fifty years deep into life must count for something, as life goes.

  Mrs. Temple, he judged, must be quite half a century old.

  He watched the college girls getting stiffly off
their mules; they chattered round her, very young. She listened to them all seriously, making remarks where remarks were needed as though, youthfully eager and uncertain of themselves beneath their self-sufficiency and scorn, they divined in her someone having something to give them, some value to impart; so that, although so manifestly a being from an order other than their own, they could still without apology or mockery divert a portion of their time on their gay progress and consecrate it to her, not for her pleasure indeed, in a courteous gesture of youth towards an older person, but for their own pleasure, as a right presumed by the arrogance of their unlicked egoism. Lester Dale, bored man, amused himself by speculating on Mrs. Temple’s probable attitude towards them. She must be well aware that nothing but their own inclinations dictated their own actions. At the first moment of boredom or at the first hint of something more inviting, they would have risen like the flock of birds to which she must compare them; risen, as from an exhausted feeding-ground, a field from which the last grains of profit had been pecked, scattering in their inconsequent way on their flight towards the new attraction. But until such a diversion should present itself, she certainly held some kind of appeal for them in their idle moments; some kind of appeal not easy to analyse, since what gift could she bestow on them, he wondered? They could not prize such wisdom and experience as she might be able to share out, for their own experience was—and rightly—dearer to them than any second-hand tested knowledge; perhaps it was because, in their easy way, they knew that she would not sit in critical judgment; would merely enjoy them, amused, older; perhaps also because in no sense could she be regarded as a competitor. They might touch briefly; but never, never could her life threaten an infringement on theirs.