(In the Conservatory at Dalingridge Hall)
VIRGINIA
Go away, Leonard. I can’t bear to hear you lie to me.
LEONARD
I’m not lying when I say I want you to get well more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life.
VIRGINIA
Don’t bother making me feel guilty, I already know I’m wasting your life. If only I weren’t so stupid a Mandrill, so unworthy of her poor, virtuous outsider Mongoose who is so thin, who trembles so much and who tries so hard. You have headaches too, you suffer from recurring malaria. Why should you toil so that I can be idle? I know these doctors’ bills are crushing us. Nessa sold the silver, I sold the jewelry, Thoby sold the Thackeray letters. What’s left, Leonard? Will you scheme with them to isolate me until there’s nothing left?
LEONARD
I can earn money writing. I’ve proved that. You can earn money writing, you’ve proved that. But to get back in the fight we must be hardy and strong.
VIRGINIA
I should never have married you. What kind of a wife can I ever be? Save yourself, Leonard. It’s too late for me. Let the wind blow, let the poppy seed itself, let the carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the swallow build her nest in the drawing room where the thistle thrusts between the tiles. Let all civilization be like broken china tangled over with blackberries and grass.
LEONARD
That you demand so much of existence, still fighting as you sit among George’s flowers, shows you’re feeling better. What we must do is keep up the strengthening. A few more days, Virginia.
VIRGINIA
But how can I return to you? There’s the undisputed fact of my sexual cowardice. Perhaps it’s really nothing but my terror of real life that keeps me in this nunnery. I tried telling my parents but they didn’t want to hear. Parents have forgotten their own childhood. Or they don’t want to remember.
LEONARD
What did you try to tell them? You can say anything to me.
VIRGINIA
I saw the spirits of evil as soon as I could speak, but because I was a girl child I was not supposed to know. Each child hugs its vice, brooding over the swollen vein, the bruised flesh that was white and sweet but yesterday.
LEONARD
I told my parents that life is unquestionably vile and humanity’s nothing but an ant heap. Parents never want to hear that.
VIRGINIA
That’s what I love about you, Leonard. You at least will speak the truth. Sometimes.
LEONARD
It’s a fallacy to think that children are happy. They’re not. I never suffered so much as when I was a child. Children never forget injustice. But here is the heart of it, Virginia. What we write depends upon what we think. What “spirits of evil” did you see?
VIRGINIA
Going to practice Dr. Head’s talking cure on me, are you? Is that the plan? I could make up a dozen stories – I see a dozen pictures. But when I open my mouth I am locked up and shut away. What is my true story? Something lies deeply buried. Shall I grasp it or let it mortify in the depths of my mind? I want to describe the world seen without a self. But I am afraid that there is no future. There are no words.
LEONARD
There are words, and there is a future we shall make. Tell me. Tell me everything.
VIRGINIA
When I was young, I dug furiously to uncover myself. When I discovered that I was me and not anyone else it seemed a wonderful achievement. Once I sat beside my stepsister Stella on roots as hard as skeletons, and the next day she was a skeleton. It’s strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners or in dreams. Don’t you remember that morning at breakfast when I saw my mother? You said she wasn’t there.
LEONARD
I saw nothing.
VIRGINIA
Cambridge educated everything but your eyes. What is the hope of talking to you? That was the morning was when I first became aware of the enemies who change but are always present; the forces we must fight even though we suffer terribly becoming separate bodies. Don’t you recognize the enemy advancing against us, pawing at his pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy.
LEONARD
Marriage is the opposing force against death. A marriage of true minds can fight all enemies. Once upon a time we shared our thoughts, and fell in love. I needed someone who could hold her own, and there you were. You are the only wife I ever wanted, the only woman I have ever loved. Please, Virginia, I want you to come back to me.
VIRGINIA
(dazzled)
Oh to be a wife, to be wanted, would be so complete! Is it possible, Leonard, after the terrors, the disgusting dangers we have seen?
LEONARD
If it isn’t I don’t want to live either.
(She holds out a hand to him. They clutch hands briefly)
VIRGINIA
Sit down, Leonard. You look silly on your knees.
(She looks away. LEONARD sits)
VIRGINIA
I used to make the family laugh. They thought me clever. But when I chased the evil spirits through a hole in the escallonia hedge, I resolved to tell the exact truth and write down the phenomena I’d seen. But no one believed me, and at that moment the laughter turned against me. I said, must not we find some way to get outside ourselves, to give our brains a wider scope? My parents declared God was dead and the world empty and meaningless. Father said to be weak is to be wretched. He said that Society is a ravenous appetite, and Nature is a state of war. You’ve laughed at me behind my back, I know you have. You, my own husband, want to get rid of me, to lock me up forever and steal my money.
LEONARD
I love you, Virginia. Maybe it’s a bad thing to love you as much as I do – it cuts me off from the outside world. But the outside world is worthless and your world is so rich. When I went away to school for the first time I was shocked and appalled by the horrifying corruption of dirty-minded schoolboys. It marked me. Then I realized all of humanity are mean, nasty, untruthful, cowardly, and cruel. Perhaps I’ve been searching for a world that doesn’t exist.
VIRGINIA
Perhaps we both have.
LEONARD
If you will care for your health – if you will allow me to care for your health – you’ll recover. As you’ve recovered before.
VIRGINIA
Nessa won’t rest till I’m brought low. When she was ill with typhoid Savage wanted to put her in a home but I backed her up! I told Savage I would care for her. Now look at what she’s done to me. You betrayed our secret, telling Nessa I’m a frigid failure as a wife. She told Clive and now everyone knows. They’re all laughing, jeering. plotting behind my back. You were sent to Ceylon to break the natives and now you’ve been sent to break me. I have been derided, insulted, sacrificed and betrayed, by all of you.
LEONARD
Virginia, I am on your side. My eyes were opened in Ceylon. I was an anti-imperialist wallowing in the fleshpots of imperialism. But I changed. Now I support the independence movement with all my heart. All problems can be solved by science and logic, Virginia. It was I who was a failure as a husband. It was my marital duty to arouse you but you seemed so afraid of me. At my wit’s end, I asked your older sister for help.
VIRGINIA
Does she offer lessons in humiliation? She knows how better than anyone. Is it my fault that I hate my legs being pried apart? I should never have married you, but I couldn’t bear to remain a spinster. I was struggling at everything, and you seemed so different. You said you liked women. You said you admired women’s minds.
LEONARD
It’s true. Women feel more deeply, think more deeply, talk more deeply.
VIRGINIA
Yet men demand obedience. You want me to obey you but I never will. You know nothing about me. Did you know that before I tried to die I read a book? Would you like to know which one?
LEONARD
Which book did you read?
VIRGINIA
It was your book. Your book that I read.
LEONARD
My book?
VIRGINIA
Your book about me.
LEONARD
(a gratified author, in spite of everything)
You read The Wise Virgins? What did you think?
VIRGINIA
So you admit it’s about me!
LEONARD
Virginia, please. I’d love to discuss my book with you.
(She hesitates, turning away her face, then facing him with rage)
VIRGINIA
You locked me away so I’d never find out!
LEONARD
You were ordered rest cures long before you met me! I don’t believe in guilt or blame. Honestly, I wanted you to read my book as soon as you were well.
VIRGINIA
I won’t be stamped and stereotyped. You have publicly lampooned me as a frozen, dowdy, fussy, futile woman.
LEONARD
Not true at all. I called you my Aspasia.
VIRGINIA
“Cold and snowy, like the rocks.” You said.
LEONARD
I’m a bad writer. I agree. I’ve got nothing of your genius. I can never explain what I really want to say. If it’s any comfort to you no one else likes or understands it either. Sales are awful. All I was attempting to do was contrast the world of a poor Jew from Putney with the rarified aristocratic Olympus for which he yearns.
VIRGINIA
You hold my world in contempt because you can never be a gentleman.
LEONARD
Virginia, you hold “your world” in contempt.
VIRGINIA
And then the hero marries the other girl. The stupid, cow-eyed one! It’s a betrayal.
LEONARD
It’s just a bad novel, I’ll give you that. Don’t laugh at me. Not everyone is born with your gifts. Consider my perspective. Any rational mind must inevitably face disillusion and depression. I tried to show how poor Harry just couldn’t escape his past. He couldn’t but I think we can. I probably shouldn’t have published it but Arnold was willing and I couldn’t bear to waste all that work and all that suffering.
VIRGINIA
What can you, a prizewinning Apostle from Cambridge, an imperialist potentate of a subject country, possibly know of real suffering?
LEONARD
Virginia, I’m a Jew from Putney. All my life I’ve been spat upon. Job is the only book of the Bible I ever understood. Who ridiculed who first? I trained myself to avoid personal feeling. Admit you despised me. Your set. You made me into a joke.
VIRGINIA
My set despises everyone. That’s what we do. It’s self-defense, from growing up amongst the most monumental hypocrites.
LEONARD
You despised me personally. Be honest. You hated kissing me. You could barely bring yourself to marry me.
VIRGINIA
But I did it, didn’t I!
LEONARD
You wanted to shock them. You were competing with Nessa to see who could be most scandalous.
VIRGINIA
I wouldn’t dare compete with Nessa. Competition is a male thing. It’s a brutal, endless game. I think all competition should be abolished.
LEONARD
But it’s all you ever do! Your flirtation with her husband –
VIRGINIA
(cringes visibly)
Oh God, not that. Somehow that memory turns a knife in me more than anything. How it catches at me, the fangs of that old pain. I know I lost Vanessa forever. She will never forgive me. I simply couldn’t comprehend why she married such a strange, intolerable creature with his twitching pink skin and a jerky laugh. Before Clive, Nessa and I drifted together on a sea of seducing half-brothers,
hiding together beneath the dining room table. We spoke a special animal language.
LEONARD
But you were no longer children. Vanessa waited till twenty-eight to marry.
VIRGINIA
Who would willingly grow up? I never wanted to. As soon as you’re pushed out of the nursery, the happy moments vanish. Vanessa was the bowl of golden water that brims but never overflows. I lie prostrate at her shrine and still she won’t forgive me. When she brought home friends from the Slade they laughed at me behind the door. You can’t think what it feels like, having one’s self so thoroughly extinguished.
LEONARD
I do know it. That was my exact experience at both St. Paul’s and Cambridge. St. Paul’s was a disgusting brothel, but at Trinity I met G. E. Moore. He taught me how to ask the important questions.
VIRGINIA
And what are the important questions?
LEONARD
The most important question is why. Why can’t Vanessa forgive a mere flirtation? She must know by now that Clive sets out to bed every woman he meets. You at least resisted him.
VIRGINIA
But I did wrong. Clive and I made common cause against my sister, his own wife. Some things should be sacred.
LEONARD
Wasn’t it true that he respected your intellectual work more than he could ever appreciate Vanessa’s daubs?
VIRGINIA
Leonard! How can you!
LEONARD
If it’s the truth, shouldn’t we say so?
VIRGINIA
I tried speaking the truth, yet here I am locked up among the imbeciles. And weren’t we just arguing whether all imbeciles should be killed?
LEONARD
You’re hardly “locked up with the imbeciles” at Dalingridge Hall!
VIRGINIA
You’re wrong. In this castle beats the very heart of idiocy and evil. Aren’t you the one who said the most dangerous imbeciles are running the nation? Here I am at home among the hunters, where the miner sweats and dies and maiden faith is rudely strumpeted.
LEONARD
But you used to love George! He told me you’d make an adorable wife.
VIRGINIA
Perhaps I’ve been given too much time to think. Get a sense of proportion, the doctors keep telling me. So now I stare for the first time into the very mouth of doom. Look your last on all things lovely.
LEONARD
Virginia, if you don’t want to be called crazy, you really must explain yourself. Whatever do you mean?
VIRGINIA
George behaved little better than a brute. He never let me alone for a moment. That he was the pet of duchesses hardly excuses him. And yet it was Gerald who broke my hymen, when I was six years old. It’s a painful process. and now I freeze like ice. Give up on me, Leonard, there’s no awakening the dead. I’m ruined by incest, I’ve even desired my own sister. I’m locked up because I stew in murder, just as Laura did. I long to slice Gerald’s fat, transparent flesh, to take a rifle and shoot George directly in his smug, piggy face. Or could I bag him with a net and killing bottle? And why shouldn’t I turn on my tormentors? I suffered, I was helpless, why should I be the one forced to writhe with shame? I longed to be petted but instead was trapped in a cage with lions as sulky and angry as they were ferocious. I’m just a little monkey and little monkeys are too easily squashed and trampled. It’s too late for me, Leonard. My body is spoiled forever by George and Gerald.
LEONARD
(shocked)
George? Gerald? These are pillars of society, your own half-brothers! It’s so unbelievable.
VIRGINIA
George drowned us in kisses, me and Vanessa. Each kiss was an amputation. I used to sign my work, “One of the Drowned.” Oh, those horrible parties! The oppressive gatherings of Stephenses ground one to a pulp. Because I wanted to discuss Plato I was told I had no conversation. George was so angry! After I removed my ball gown and stripped off my gloves and stockings, he would come into my room and lock the door.
LEONARD
But how can any of this be true? How could nobody have noticed it?
VIRGINIA
Everyone did notice it. People contrive to bend it to the conventional heroic shape because he kept insisting on the purity of his love. I saw him kissing Countess Carnarvon behind a pillar at the opera! And now she’s his mother-in-law. I asked to join the British Sex Society, dedicated to the study of parent/child incest, but they wouldn’t let me in. Now that you know, you’ll have to spit in George’s face at the club.
LEONARD
We don’t belong to the same clubs.
VIRGINIA
Then when you thank him for this execrable house, challenge him to a duel. Will he at least feel some regret? Will he take the pigeon gun and blast himself instead? Then the aristocracy will hate me because it’s all my fault. Yet is it not a noble work, letting light in upon the evil Duckworths? Probably he’ll feel nothing. Possibly some vague imbalance.
LEONARD
Let’s try to be objective, Virginia.
VIRGINIA
If only I could! What a luxury that would be! How I hunger for the objectivity of beloved Macaulay or the stern analysis of cherished Carlyle. Lockhart’s ten volume Life of Scott was the best present I ever received. Reading relieves all my pain, but they won’t let me read anything here. In spite of them I’m continuing to learn. Only life itself matters, nothing but life – and the process of discovery, the everlasting perpetual process, and not the thing itself at all.
LEONARD
Virginia, I am speechless.
VIRGINIA
Now you know how it feels. I used to think it would be enough to have someone share my loneliness. But if no one believes me, the solitude is total. The Duckworths are guilty of nameless atrocities, and you’re complicit. You locked me away here, so I couldn’t speak. As soon as I open my mouth they try to destroy me. It’s a conspiracy of hush.
LEONARD
If this is something you’ve only just remembered how can it possibly be true? It sounds mad.
VIRGINIA
I don’t think memory is always at the forefront, Leonard. There’s only so much a human being can bear. Memory comes and goes. One requires tools to think with, to make sense of one’s experience, and these tools are alternately dull and sharp.
LEONARD
Well, there are some things no one wants to think about.
VIRGINIA
It’s clearer in my mind than the bad, stodgy meal I was force-fed yesterday. Our summer place at St. Ives, in the dining room; I must have been six years old. Eighteen-year-old Gerald lifted me up to a high ledge and explored my private parts. I fought and I struggled but I couldn’t get away. I could see his face in the dining room mirror. It was the face of a demon. I’ve seen that face since, on the drooling men who expose themselves in the park. Now I no longer look in mirrors. I can’t cross a puddle. The depth looks back at me, concealing malicious, hairy arms to reach out and grab. I can’t go forward, I am stuck in the loop of the six, no power even to lift my legs.
LEONARD
The loop of the six? I don’t understand.
VIRGINIA
I was learning numbers. Six was my number. But I couldn’t close the loop.
LEONARD
This was Gerald you say? But Gerald is your publisher!
VIRGINIA
I know! If I am not a madwoman, then the world itself is mad. What was I to do? I wrote a book and my incestuous brother was a publisher! Who else would even look at my work? When I delivered my manuscript to Gerald I was in such acute despair – so near the precipice!
LEONARD
Did you tell anyone?
VIRGINIA
I told Nessa and she told Dr. Savage. Who is an idiot, as you well know.
LEONARD
I can’t believe it. Gerald seems so – so – well, ordinary. So completely controlled.
VIRGINIA
Get out of here! I’m sorry I told you. I wish I was dead!
(She is tearing at her own throat – he rushes forward to hold her hands down, lifting her body out of the chair)
The use of force is all you know!
LEONARD
Virginia, I love you.
(He kisses her neck, she becomes a dead weight. He lowers her carefully into the chair, arranges a blanket on her knees)
VIRGINIA
When you touch me, I feel nothing. My body goes dead. That’s how I froze when George came into my room, night after night.
LEONARD
Oh, Beloved!
VIRGINIA
Don’t. He called me that. I don’t want to be loved, I want to be believed.
Alysse Aallyn 