The Voyage Out

by Virginia Woolf


Contents

 CHAPTER I.
 CHAPTER II.
 CHAPTER III.
 CHAPTER IV.
 CHAPTER V.
 CHAPTER VI.
 CHAPTER VII.
 CHAPTER VIII.
 CHAPTER IX.
 CHAPTER X.
 CHAPTER XI.
 CHAPTER XII.
 CHAPTER XIII.
 CHAPTER XIV.
 CHAPTER XV.
 CHAPTER XVI.
 CHAPTER XVII.
 CHAPTER XVIII.
 CHAPTER XIX.
 CHAPTER XX.
 CHAPTER XXI.
 CHAPTER XXII.
 CHAPTER XXIII.
 CHAPTER XXIV.
 CHAPTER XXV.
 CHAPTER XXVI.
 CHAPTER XXVII.




CHAPTER I


As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very
narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist,
lawyers’ clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady
typists will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where
beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is
better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the
air with your left hand.

One afternoon in the beginning of October when the traffic was becoming
brisk a tall man strode along the edge of the pavement with a lady on
his arm. Angry glances struck upon their backs. The small, agitated
figures—for in comparison with this couple most people looked
small—decorated with fountain pens, and burdened with despatch-boxes,
had appointments to keep, and drew a weekly salary, so that there was
some reason for the unfriendly stare which was bestowed upon Mr.
Ambrose’s height and upon Mrs. Ambrose’s cloak. But some enchantment
had put both man and woman beyond the reach of malice and unpopularity.
In his case one might guess from the moving lips that it was thought;
and in hers from the eyes fixed stonily straight in front of her at a
level above the eyes of most that it was sorrow. It was only by
scorning all she met that she kept herself from tears, and the friction
of people brushing past her was evidently painful. After watching the
traffic on the Embankment for a minute or two with a stoical gaze she
twitched her husband’s sleeve, and they crossed between the swift
discharge of motor cars. When they were safe on the further side, she
gently withdrew her arm from his, allowing her mouth at the same time
to relax, to tremble; then tears rolled down, and leaning her elbows on
the balustrade, she shielded her face from the curious. Mr. Ambrose
attempted consolation; he patted her shoulder; but she showed no signs
of admitting him, and feeling it awkward to stand beside a grief that
was greater than his, he crossed his arms behind him, and took a turn
along the pavement.

The embankment juts out in angles here and there, like pulpits; instead
of preachers, however, small boys occupy them, dangling string,
dropping pebbles, or launching wads of paper for a cruise. With their
sharp eye for eccentricity, they were inclined to think Mr. Ambrose
awful; but the quickest witted cried “Bluebeard!” as he passed. In case
they should proceed to tease his wife, Mr. Ambrose flourished his stick
at them, upon which they decided that he was grotesque merely, and four
instead of one cried “Bluebeard!” in chorus.

Although Mrs. Ambrose stood quite still, much longer than is natural,
the little boys let her be. Some one is always looking into the river
near Waterloo Bridge; a couple will stand there talking for half an
hour on a fine afternoon; most people, walking for pleasure,
contemplate for three minutes; when, having compared the occasion with
other occasions, or made some sentence, they pass on. Sometimes the
flats and churches and hotels of Westminster are like the outlines of
Constantinople in a mist; sometimes the river is an opulent purple,
sometimes mud-coloured, sometimes sparkling blue like the sea. It is
always worth while to look down and see what is happening. But this
lady looked neither up nor down; the only thing she had seen, since she
stood there, was a circular iridescent patch slowly floating past with
a straw in the middle of it. The straw and the patch swam again and
again behind the tremulous medium of a great welling tear, and the tear
rose and fell and dropped into the river. Then there struck close upon
her ears—

Lars Porsena of Clusium
By the nine Gods he swore—


and then more faintly, as if the speaker had passed her on his walk—

That the Great House of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.


Yes, she knew she must go back to all that, but at present she must
weep. Screening her face she sobbed more steadily than she had yet
done, her shoulders rising and falling with great regularity. It was
this figure that her husband saw when, having reached the polished
Sphinx, having entangled himself with a man selling picture postcards,
he turned; the stanza instantly stopped. He came up to her, laid his
hand on her shoulder, and said, “Dearest.” His voice was supplicating.
But she shut her face away from him, as much as to say, “You can’t
possibly understand.”

As he did not leave her, however, she had to wipe her eyes, and to
raise them to the level of the factory chimneys on the other bank. She
saw also the arches of Waterloo Bridge and the carts moving across
them, like the line of animals in a shooting gallery. They were seen
blankly, but to see anything was of course to end her weeping and begin
to walk.

“I would rather walk,” she said, her husband having hailed a cab
already occupied by two city men.

The fixity of her mood was broken by the action of walking. The
shooting motor cars, more like spiders in the moon than terrestrial
objects, the thundering drays, the jingling hansoms, and little black
broughams, made her think of the world she lived in. Somewhere up there
above the pinnacles where the smoke rose in a pointed hill, her
children were now asking for her, and getting a soothing reply. As for
the mass of streets, squares, and public buildings which parted them,
she only felt at this moment how little London had done to make her
love it, although thirty of her forty years had been spent in a street.
She knew how to read the people who were passing her; there were the
rich who were running to and from each others’ houses at this hour;
there were the bigoted workers driving in a straight line to their
offices; there were the poor who were unhappy and rightly malignant.
Already, though there was sunlight in the haze, tattered old men and
women were nodding off to sleep upon the seats. When one gave up seeing
the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath.

A fine rain now made her still more dismal; vans with the odd names of
those engaged in odd industries—Sprules, Manufacturer of Saw-dust;
Grabb, to whom no piece of waste paper comes amiss—fell flat as a bad
joke; bold lovers, sheltered behind one cloak, seemed to her sordid,
past their passion; the flower women, a contented company, whose talk
is always worth hearing, were sodden hags; the red, yellow, and blue
flowers, whose heads were pressed together, would not blaze. Moreover,
her husband walking with a quick rhythmic stride, jerking his free hand
occasionally, was either a Viking or a stricken Nelson; the sea-gulls
had changed his note.

“Ridley, shall we drive? Shall we drive, Ridley?”

Mrs. Ambrose had to speak sharply; by this time he was far away.

The cab, by trotting steadily along the same road, soon withdrew them
from the West End, and plunged them into London. It appeared that this
was a great manufacturing place, where the people were engaged in
making things, as though the West End, with its electric lamps, its
vast plate-glass windows all shining yellow, its carefully-finished
houses, and tiny live figures trotting on the pavement, or bowled along
on wheels in the road, was the finished work. It appeared to her a very
small bit of work for such an enormous factory to have made. For some
reason it appeared to her as a small golden tassel on the edge of a
vast black cloak.

Observing that they passed no other hansom cab, but only vans and
waggons, and that not one of the thousand men and women she saw was
either a gentleman or a lady, Mrs. Ambrose understood that after all it
is the ordinary thing to be poor, and that London is the city of
innumerable poor people. Startled by this discovery and seeing herself
pacing a circle all the days of her life round Picadilly Circus she was
greatly relieved to pass a building put up by the London County Council
for Night Schools.

“Lord, how gloomy it is!” her husband groaned. “Poor creatures!”

What with the misery for her children, the poor, and the rain, her mind
was like a wound exposed to dry in the air.

At this point the cab stopped, for it was in danger of being crushed
like an egg-shell. The wide Embankment which had had room for
cannonballs and squadrons, had now shrunk to a cobbled lane steaming
with smells of malt and oil and blocked by waggons. While her husband
read the placards pasted on the brick announcing the hours at which
certain ships would sail for Scotland, Mrs. Ambrose did her best to
find information. From a world exclusively occupied in feeding waggons
with sacks, half obliterated too in a fine yellow fog, they got neither
help nor attention. It seemed a miracle when an old man approached,
guessed their condition, and proposed to row them out to their ship in
the little boat which he kept moored at the bottom of a flight of
steps. With some hesitation they trusted themselves to him, took their
places, and were soon waving up and down upon the water, London having
shrunk to two lines of buildings on either side of them, square
buildings and oblong buildings placed in rows like a child’s avenue of
bricks.

The river, which had a certain amount of troubled yellow light in it,
ran with great force; bulky barges floated down swiftly escorted by
tugs; police boats shot past everything; the wind went with the
current. The open rowing-boat in which they sat bobbed and curtseyed
across the line of traffic. In mid-stream the old man stayed his hands
upon the oars, and as the water rushed past them, remarked that once he
had taken many passengers across, where now he took scarcely any. He
seemed to recall an age when his boat, moored among rushes, carried
delicate feet across to lawns at Rotherhithe.

“They want bridges now,” he said, indicating the monstrous outline of
the Tower Bridge. Mournfully Helen regarded him, who was putting water
between her and her children. Mournfully she gazed at the ship they
were approaching; anchored in the middle of the stream they could dimly
read her name—_Euphrosyne_.

Very dimly in the falling dusk they could see the lines of the rigging,
the masts and the dark flag which the breeze blew out squarely behind.

As the little boat sidled up to the steamer, and the old man shipped
his oars, he remarked once more pointing above, that ships all the
world over flew that flag the day they sailed. In the minds of both the
passengers the blue flag appeared a sinister token, and this the moment
for presentiments, but nevertheless they rose, gathered their things
together, and climbed on deck.

Down in the saloon of her father’s ship, Miss Rachel Vinrace, aged
twenty-four, stood waiting her uncle and aunt nervously. To begin with,
though nearly related, she scarcely remembered them; to go on with,
they were elderly people, and finally, as her father’s daughter she
must be in some sort prepared to entertain them. She looked forward to
seeing them as civilised people generally look forward to the first
sight of civilised people, as though they were of the nature of an
approaching physical discomfort—a tight shoe or a draughty window. She
was already unnaturally braced to receive them. As she occupied herself
in laying forks severely straight by the side of knives, she heard a
man’s voice saying gloomily:

“On a dark night one would fall down these stairs head foremost,” to
which a woman’s voice added, “And be killed.”

As she spoke the last words the woman stood in the doorway. Tall,
large-eyed, draped in purple shawls, Mrs. Ambrose was romantic and
beautiful; not perhaps sympathetic, for her eyes looked straight and
considered what they saw. Her face was much warmer than a Greek face;
on the other hand it was much bolder than the face of the usual pretty
Englishwoman.

“Oh, Rachel, how d’you do,” she said, shaking hands.

“How are you, dear,” said Mr. Ambrose, inclining his forehead to be
kissed. His niece instinctively liked his thin angular body, and the
big head with its sweeping features, and the acute, innocent eyes.

“Tell Mr. Pepper,” Rachel bade the servant. Husband and wife then sat
down on one side of the table, with their niece opposite to them.

“My father told me to begin,” she explained. “He is very busy with the
men. . . . You know Mr. Pepper?”

A little man who was bent as some trees are by a gale on one side of
them had slipped in. Nodding to Mr. Ambrose, he shook hands with Helen.

“Draughts,” he said, erecting the collar of his coat.

“You are still rheumatic?” asked Helen. Her voice was low and
seductive, though she spoke absently enough, the sight of town and
river being still present to her mind.

“Once rheumatic, always rheumatic, I fear,” he replied. “To some extent
it depends on the weather, though not so much as people are apt to
think.”

“One does not die of it, at any rate,” said Helen.

“As a general rule—no,” said Mr. Pepper.

“Soup, Uncle Ridley?” asked Rachel.

“Thank you, dear,” he said, and, as he held his plate out, sighed
audibly, “Ah! she’s not like her mother.” Helen was just too late in
thumping her tumbler on the table to prevent Rachel from hearing, and
from blushing scarlet with embarrassment.

“The way servants treat flowers!” she said hastily. She drew a green
vase with a crinkled lip towards her, and began pulling out the tight
little chrysanthemums, which she laid on the table-cloth, arranging
them fastidiously side by side.

There was a pause.

“You knew Jenkinson, didn’t you, Ambrose?” asked Mr. Pepper across the
table.

“Jenkinson of Peterhouse?”

“He’s dead,” said Mr. Pepper.

“Ah, dear!—I knew him—ages ago,” said Ridley. “He was the hero of the
punt accident, you remember? A queer card. Married a young woman out of
a tobacconist’s, and lived in the Fens—never heard what became of him.”

“Drink—drugs,” said Mr. Pepper with sinister conciseness. “He left a
commentary. Hopeless muddle, I’m told.”

“The man had really great abilities,” said Ridley.

“His introduction to Jellaby holds its own still,” went on Mr. Pepper,
“which is surprising, seeing how text-books change.”

“There was a theory about the planets, wasn’t there?” asked Ridley.

“A screw loose somewhere, no doubt of it,” said Mr. Pepper, shaking his
head.

Now a tremor ran through the table, and a light outside swerved. At the
same time an electric bell rang sharply again and again.

“We’re off,” said Ridley.

A slight but perceptible wave seemed to roll beneath the floor; then it
sank; then another came, more perceptible. Lights slid right across the
uncurtained window. The ship gave a loud melancholy moan.

“We’re off!” said Mr. Pepper. Other ships, as sad as she, answered her
outside on the river. The chuckling and hissing of water could be
plainly heard, and the ship heaved so that the steward bringing plates
had to balance himself as he drew the curtain. There was a pause.

“Jenkinson of Cats—d’you still keep up with him?” asked Ambrose.

“As much as one ever does,” said Mr. Pepper. “We meet annually. This
year he has had the misfortune to lose his wife, which made it painful,
of course.”

“Very painful,” Ridley agreed.

“There’s an unmarried daughter who keeps house for him, I believe, but
it’s never the same, not at his age.”

Both gentlemen nodded sagely as they carved their apples.

“There was a book, wasn’t there?” Ridley enquired.

“There _was_ a book, but there never _will_ be a book,” said Mr. Pepper
with such fierceness that both ladies looked up at him.

“There never will be a book, because some one else has written it for
him,” said Mr. Pepper with considerable acidity. “That’s what comes of
putting things off, and collecting fossils, and sticking Norman arches
on one’s pigsties.”

“I confess I sympathise,” said Ridley with a melancholy sigh. “I have a
weakness for people who can’t begin.”

“. . . The accumulations of a lifetime wasted,” continued Mr. pepper.
“He had accumulations enough to fill a barn.”

“It’s a vice that some of us escape,” said Ridley. “Our friend Miles
has another work out to-day.”

Mr. Pepper gave an acid little laugh. “According to my calculations,”
he said, “he has produced two volumes and a half annually, which,
allowing for time spent in the cradle and so forth, shows a commendable
industry.”

“Yes, the old Master’s saying of him has been pretty well realised,”
said Ridley.

“A way they had,” said Mr. Pepper. “You know the Bruce collection?—not
for publication, of course.”

“I should suppose not,” said Ridley significantly. “For a Divine he
was—remarkably free.”

“The Pump in Neville’s Row, for example?” enquired Mr. Pepper.

“Precisely,” said Ambrose.

Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex, highly
trained in promoting men’s talk without listening to it, could
think—about the education of children, about the use of fog sirens in
an opera—without betraying herself. Only it struck Helen that Rachel
was perhaps too still for a hostess, and that she might have done
something with her hands.

“Perhaps—?” she said at length, upon which they rose and left, vaguely
to the surprise of the gentlemen, who had either thought them attentive
or had forgotten their presence.

“Ah, one could tell strange stories of the old days,” they heard Ridley
say, as he sank into his chair again. Glancing back, at the doorway,
they saw Mr. Pepper as though he had suddenly loosened his clothes, and
had become a vivacious and malicious old ape.

Winding veils round their heads, the women walked on deck. They were
now moving steadily down the river, passing the dark shapes of ships at
anchor, and London was a swarm of lights with a pale yellow canopy
drooping above it. There were the lights of the great theatres, the
lights of the long streets, lights that indicated huge squares of
domestic comfort, lights that hung high in air. No darkness would ever
settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for
hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for
ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to
adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound,
eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great
city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.

Leaning over the rail, side by side, Helen said, “Won’t you be cold?”
Rachel replied, “No. . . . How beautiful!” she added a moment later.
Very little was visible—a few masts, a shadow of land here, a line of
brilliant windows there. They tried to make head against the wind.

“It blows—it blows!” gasped Rachel, the words rammed down her throat.
Struggling by her side, Helen was suddenly overcome by the spirit of
movement, and pushed along with her skirts wrapping themselves round
her knees, and both arms to her hair. But slowly the intoxication of
movement died down, and the wind became rough and chilly. They looked
through a chink in the blind and saw that long cigars were being smoked
in the dining-room; they saw Mr. Ambrose throw himself violently
against the back of his chair, while Mr. Pepper crinkled his cheeks as
though they had been cut in wood. The ghost of a roar of laughter came
out to them, and was drowned at once in the wind. In the dry
yellow-lighted room Mr. Pepper and Mr. Ambrose were oblivious of all
tumult; they were in Cambridge, and it was probably about the year
1875.

“They’re old friends,” said Helen, smiling at the sight. “Now, is there
a room for us to sit in?”

Rachel opened a door.

“It’s more like a landing than a room,” she said. Indeed it had nothing
of the shut stationary character of a room on shore. A table was rooted
in the middle, and seats were stuck to the sides. Happily the tropical
suns had bleached the tapestries to a faded blue-green colour, and the
mirror with its frame of shells, the work of the steward’s love, when
the time hung heavy in the southern seas, was quaint rather than ugly.
Twisted shells with red lips like unicorn’s horns ornamented the
mantelpiece, which was draped by a pall of purple plush from which
depended a certain number of balls. Two windows opened on to the deck,
and the light beating through them when the ship was roasted on the
Amazons had turned the prints on the opposite wall to a faint yellow
colour, so that “The Coliseum” was scarcely to be distinguished from
Queen Alexandra playing with her Spaniels. A pair of wicker arm-chairs
by the fireside invited one to warm one’s hands at a grate full of gilt
shavings; a great lamp swung above the table—the kind of lamp which
makes the light of civilisation across dark fields to one walking in
the country.

“It’s odd that every one should be an old friend of Mr. Pepper’s,”
Rachel started nervously, for the situation was difficult, the room
cold, and Helen curiously silent.

“I suppose you take him for granted?” said her aunt.

“He’s like this,” said Rachel, lighting on a fossilised fish in a
basin, and displaying it.

“I expect you’re too severe,” Helen remarked.

Rachel immediately tried to qualify what she had said against her
belief.

“I don’t really know him,” she said, and took refuge in facts,
believing that elderly people really like them better than feelings.
She produced what she knew of William Pepper. She told Helen that he
always called on Sundays when they were at home; he knew about a great
many things—about mathematics, history, Greek, zoology, economics, and
the Icelandic Sagas. He had turned Persian poetry into English prose,
and English prose into Greek iambics; he was an authority upon coins;
and—one other thing—oh yes, she thought it was vehicular traffic.

He was here either to get things out of the sea, or to write upon the
probable course of Odysseus, for Greek after all was his hobby.

“I’ve got all his pamphlets,” she said. “Little pamphlets. Little
yellow books.” It did not appear that she had read them.

“Has he ever been in love?” asked Helen, who had chosen a seat.

This was unexpectedly to the point.

“His heart’s a piece of old shoe leather,” Rachel declared, dropping
the fish. But when questioned she had to own that she had never asked
him.

“I shall ask him,” said Helen.

“The last time I saw you, you were buying a piano,” she continued. “Do
you remember—the piano, the room in the attic, and the great plants
with the prickles?”

“Yes, and my aunts said the piano would come through the floor, but at
their age one wouldn’t mind being killed in the night?” she enquired.

“I heard from Aunt Bessie not long ago,” Helen stated. “She is afraid
that you will spoil your arms if you insist upon so much practising.”

“The muscles of the forearm—and then one won’t marry?”

“She didn’t put it quite like that,” replied Mrs. Ambrose.

“Oh, no—of course she wouldn’t,” said Rachel with a sigh.

Helen looked at her. Her face was weak rather than decided, saved from
insipidity by the large enquiring eyes; denied beauty, now that she was
sheltered indoors, by the lack of colour and definite outline.
Moreover, a hesitation in speaking, or rather a tendency to use the
wrong words, made her seem more than normally incompetent for her
years. Mrs. Ambrose, who had been speaking much at random, now
reflected that she certainly did not look forward to the intimacy of
three or four weeks on board ship which was threatened. Women of her
own age usually boring her, she supposed that girls would be worse. She
glanced at Rachel again. Yes! how clear it was that she would be
vacillating, emotional, and when you said something to her it would
make no more lasting impression than the stroke of a stick upon water.
There was nothing to take hold of in girls—nothing hard, permanent,
satisfactory. Did Willoughby say three weeks, or did he say four? She
tried to remember.

At this point, however, the door opened and a tall burly man entered
the room, came forward and shook Helen’s hand with an emotional kind of
heartiness, Willoughby himself, Rachel’s father, Helen’s
brother-in-law. As a great deal of flesh would have been needed to make
a fat man of him, his frame being so large, he was not fat; his face
was a large framework too, looking, by the smallness of the features
and the glow in the hollow of the cheek, more fitted to withstand
assaults of the weather than to express sentiments and emotions, or to
respond to them in others.

“It is a great pleasure that you have come,” he said, “for both of us.”

Rachel murmured in obedience to her father’s glance.

“We’ll do our best to make you comfortable. And Ridley. We think it an
honour to have charge of him. Pepper’ll have some one to contradict
him—which I daren’t do. You find this child grown, don’t you? A young
woman, eh?”

Still holding Helen’s hand he drew his arm round Rachel’s shoulder,
thus making them come uncomfortably close, but Helen forbore to look.

“You think she does us credit?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” said Helen.

“Because we expect great things of her,” he continued, squeezing his
daughter’s arm and releasing her. “But about you now.” They sat down
side by side on the little sofa. “Did you leave the children well?
They’ll be ready for school, I suppose. Do they take after you or
Ambrose? They’ve got good heads on their shoulders, I’ll be bound?”

At this Helen immediately brightened more than she had yet done, and
explained that her son was six and her daughter ten. Everybody said
that her boy was like her and her girl like Ridley. As for brains, they
were quick brats, she thought, and modestly she ventured on a little
story about her son,—how left alone for a minute he had taken the pat
of butter in his fingers, run across the room with it, and put it on
the fire—merely for the fun of the thing, a feeling which she could
understand.

“And you had to show the young rascal that these tricks wouldn’t do,
eh?”

“A child of six? I don’t think they matter.”

“I’m an old-fashioned father.”

“Nonsense, Willoughby; Rachel knows better.”

Much as Willoughby would doubtless have liked his daughter to praise
him she did not; her eyes were unreflecting as water, her fingers still
toying with the fossilised fish, her mind absent. The elder people went
on to speak of arrangements that could be made for Ridley’s comfort—a
table placed where he couldn’t help looking at the sea, far from
boilers, at the same time sheltered from the view of people passing.
Unless he made this a holiday, when his books were all packed, he would
have no holiday whatever; for out at Santa Marina Helen knew, by
experience, that he would work all day; his boxes, she said, were
packed with books.

“Leave it to me—leave it to me!” said Willoughby, obviously intending
to do much more than she asked of him. But Ridley and Mr. Pepper were
heard fumbling at the door.

“How are you, Vinrace?” said Ridley, extending a limp hand as he came
in, as though the meeting were melancholy to both, but on the whole
more so to him.

Willoughby preserved his heartiness, tempered by respect. For the
moment nothing was said.

“We looked in and saw you laughing,” Helen remarked. “Mr. Pepper had
just told a very good story.”

“Pish. None of the stories were good,” said her husband peevishly.

“Still a severe judge, Ridley?” enquired Mr. Vinrace.

“We bored you so that you left,” said Ridley, speaking directly to his
wife.

As this was quite true Helen did not attempt to deny it, and her next
remark, “But didn’t they improve after we’d gone?” was unfortunate, for
her husband answered with a droop of his shoulders, “If possible they
got worse.”

The situation was now one of considerable discomfort for every one
concerned, as was proved by a long interval of constraint and silence.
Mr. Pepper, indeed, created a diversion of a kind by leaping on to his
seat, both feet tucked under him, with the action of a spinster who
detects a mouse, as the draught struck at his ankles. Drawn up there,
sucking at his cigar, with his arms encircling his knees, he looked
like the image of Buddha, and from this elevation began a discourse,
addressed to nobody, for nobody had called for it, upon the unplumbed
depths of ocean. He professed himself surprised to learn that although
Mr. Vinrace possessed ten ships, regularly plying between London and
Buenos Aires, not one of them was bidden to investigate the great white
monsters of the lower waters.

“No, no,” laughed Willoughby, “the monsters of the earth are too many
for me!”

Rachel was heard to sigh, “Poor little goats!”

“If it weren’t for the goats there’d be no music, my dear; music
depends upon goats,” said her father rather sharply, and Mr. Pepper
went on to describe the white, hairless, blind monsters lying curled on
the ridges of sand at the bottom of the sea, which would explode if you
brought them to the surface, their sides bursting asunder and
scattering entrails to the winds when released from pressure, with
considerable detail and with such show of knowledge, that Ridley was
disgusted, and begged him to stop.

From all this Helen drew her own conclusions, which were gloomy enough.
Pepper was a bore; Rachel was an unlicked girl, no doubt prolific of
confidences, the very first of which would be: “You see, I don’t get on
with my father.” Willoughby, as usual, loved his business and built his
Empire, and between them all she would be considerably bored. Being a
woman of action, however, she rose, and said that for her part she was
going to bed. At the door she glanced back instinctively at Rachel,
expecting that as two of the same sex they would leave the room
together. Rachel rose, looked vaguely into Helen’s face, and remarked
with her slight stammer, “I’m going out to t-t-triumph in the wind.”

Mrs. Ambrose’s worst suspicions were confirmed; she went down the
passage lurching from side to side, and fending off the wall now with
her right arm, now with her left; at each lurch she exclaimed
emphatically, “Damn!”




CHAPTER II


Uncomfortable as the night, with its rocking movement, and salt smells,
may have been, and in one case undoubtedly was, for Mr. Pepper had
insufficient clothes upon his bed, the breakfast next morning wore a
kind of beauty. The voyage had begun, and had begun happily with a soft
blue sky, and a calm sea. The sense of untapped resources, things to
say as yet unsaid, made the hour significant, so that in future years
the entire journey perhaps would be represented by this one scene, with
the sound of sirens hooting in the river the night before, somehow
mixing in.

The table was cheerful with apples and bread and eggs. Helen handed
Willoughby the butter, and as she did so cast her eye on him and
reflected, “And she married you, and she was happy, I suppose.”

She went off on a familiar train of thought, leading on to all kinds of
well-known reflections, from the old wonder, why Theresa had married
Willoughby?

“Of course, one sees all that,” she thought, meaning that one sees that
he is big and burly, and has a great booming voice, and a fist and a
will of his own; “but—” here she slipped into a fine analysis of him
which is best represented by one word, “sentimental,” by which she
meant that he was never simple and honest about his feelings. For
example, he seldom spoke of the dead, but kept anniversaries with
singular pomp. She suspected him of nameless atrocities with regard to
his daughter, as indeed she had always suspected him of bullying his
wife. Naturally she fell to comparing her own fortunes with the
fortunes of her friend, for Willoughby’s wife had been perhaps the one
woman Helen called friend, and this comparison often made the staple of
their talk. Ridley was a scholar, and Willoughby was a man of business.
Ridley was bringing out the third volume of Pindar when Willoughby was
launching his first ship. They built a new factory the very year the
commentary on Aristotle—was it?—appeared at the University Press. “And
Rachel,” she looked at her, meaning, no doubt, to decide the argument,
which was otherwise too evenly balanced, by declaring that Rachel was
not comparable to her own children. “She really might be six years
old,” was all she said, however, this judgment referring to the smooth
unmarked outline of the girl’s face, and not condemning her otherwise,
for if Rachel were ever to think, feel, laugh, or express herself,
instead of dropping milk from a height as though to see what kind of
drops it made, she might be interesting though never exactly pretty.
She was like her mother, as the image in a pool on a still summer’s day
is like the vivid flushed face that hangs over it.

Meanwhile Helen herself was under examination, though not from either
of her victims. Mr. Pepper considered her; and his meditations, carried
on while he cut his toast into bars and neatly buttered them, took him
through a considerable stretch of autobiography. One of his penetrating
glances assured him that he was right last night in judging that Helen
was beautiful. Blandly he passed her the jam. She was talking nonsense,
but not worse nonsense than people usually do talk at breakfast, the
cerebral circulation, as he knew to his cost, being apt to give trouble
at that hour. He went on saying “No” to her, on principle, for he never
yielded to a woman on account of her sex. And here, dropping his eyes
to his plate, he became autobiographical. He had not married himself
for the sufficient reason that he had never met a woman who commanded
his respect. Condemned to pass the susceptible years of youth in a
railway station in Bombay, he had seen only coloured women, military
women, official women; and his ideal was a woman who could read Greek,
if not Persian, was irreproachably fair in the face, and able to
understand the small things he let fall while undressing. As it was he
had contracted habits of which he was not in the least ashamed. Certain
odd minutes every day went to learning things by heart; he never took a
ticket without noting the number; he devoted January to Petronius,
February to Catullus, March to the Etruscan vases perhaps; anyhow he
had done good work in India, and there was nothing to regret in his
life except the fundamental defects which no wise man regrets, when the
present is still his. So concluding he looked up suddenly and smiled.
Rachel caught his eye.

“And now you’ve chewed something thirty-seven times, I suppose?” she
thought, but said politely aloud, “Are your legs troubling you to-day,
Mr. Pepper?”

“My shoulder blades?” he asked, shifting them painfully. “Beauty has no
effect upon uric acid that I’m aware of,” he sighed, contemplating the
round pane opposite, through which the sky and sea showed blue. At the
same time he took a little parchment volume from his pocket and laid it
on the table. As it was clear that he invited comment, Helen asked him
the name of it. She got the name; but she got also a disquisition upon
the proper method of making roads. Beginning with the Greeks, who had,
he said, many difficulties to contend with, he continued with the
Romans, passed to England and the right method, which speedily became
the wrong method, and wound up with such a fury of denunciation
directed against the road-makers of the present day in general, and the
road-makers of Richmond Park in particular, where Mr. Pepper had the
habit of cycling every morning before breakfast, that the spoons fairly
jingled against the coffee cups, and the insides of at least four rolls
mounted in a heap beside Mr. Pepper’s plate.

“Pebbles!” he concluded, viciously dropping another bread pellet upon
the heap. “The roads of England are mended with pebbles! ‘With the
first heavy rainfall,’ I’ve told ’em, ‘your road will be a swamp.’
Again and again my words have proved true. But d’you suppose they
listen to me when I tell ’em so, when I point out the consequences, the
consequences to the public purse, when I recommend ’em to read
Coryphaeus? No, Mrs. Ambrose, you will form no just opinion of the
stupidity of mankind until you have sat upon a Borough Council!” The
little man fixed her with a glance of ferocious energy.

“I have had servants,” said Mrs. Ambrose, concentrating her gaze. “At
this moment I have a nurse. She’s a good woman as they go, but she’s
determined to make my children pray. So far, owing to great care on my
part, they think of God as a kind of walrus; but now that my back’s
turned—Ridley,” she demanded, swinging round upon her husband, “what
shall we do if we find them saying the Lord’s Prayer when we get home
again?”

Ridley made the sound which is represented by “Tush.” But Willoughby,
whose discomfort as he listened was manifested by a slight movement
rocking of his body, said awkwardly, “Oh, surely, Helen, a little
religion hurts nobody.”

“I would rather my children told lies,” she replied, and while
Willoughby was reflecting that his sister-in-law was even more
eccentric than he remembered, pushed her chair back and swept upstairs.
In a second they heard her calling back, “Oh, look! We’re out at sea!”

They followed her on to the deck. All the smoke and the houses had
disappeared, and the ship was out in a wide space of sea very fresh and
clear though pale in the early light. They had left London sitting on
its mud. A very thin line of shadow tapered on the horizon, scarcely
thick enough to stand the burden of Paris, which nevertheless rested
upon it. They were free of roads, free of mankind, and the same
exhilaration at their freedom ran through them all. The ship was making
her way steadily through small waves which slapped her and then fizzled
like effervescing water, leaving a little border of bubbles and foam on
either side. The colourless October sky above was thinly clouded as if
by the trail of wood-fire smoke, and the air was wonderfully salt and
brisk. Indeed it was too cold to stand still. Mrs. Ambrose drew her arm
within her husband’s, and as they moved off it could be seen from the
way in which her sloping cheek turned up to his that she had something
private to communicate. They went a few paces and Rachel saw them kiss.

Down she looked into the depth of the sea. While it was slightly
disturbed on the surface by the passage of the _Euphrosyne_, beneath it
was green and dim, and it grew dimmer and dimmer until the sand at the
bottom was only a pale blur. One could scarcely see the black ribs of
wrecked ships, or the spiral towers made by the burrowings of great
eels, or the smooth green-sided monsters who came by flickering this
way and that.

—“And, Rachel, if any one wants me, I’m busy till one,” said her
father, enforcing his words as he often did, when he spoke to his
daughter, by a smart blow upon the shoulder.

“Until one,” he repeated. “And you’ll find yourself some employment,
eh? Scales, French, a little German, eh? There’s Mr. Pepper who knows
more about separable verbs than any man in Europe, eh?” and he went off
laughing. Rachel laughed, too, as indeed she had laughed ever since she
could remember, without thinking it funny, but because she admired her
father.

But just as she was turning with a view perhaps to finding some
employment, she was intercepted by a woman who was so broad and so
thick that to be intercepted by her was inevitable. The discreet
tentative way in which she moved, together with her sober black dress,
showed that she belonged to the lower orders; nevertheless she took up
a rock-like position, looking about her to see that no gentry were near
before she delivered her message, which had reference to the state of
the sheets, and was of the utmost gravity.

“How ever we’re to get through this voyage, Miss Rachel, I really can’t
tell,” she began with a shake of her head. “There’s only just sheets
enough to go round, and the master’s has a rotten place you could put
your fingers through. And the counterpanes. Did you notice the
counterpanes? I thought to myself a poor person would have been ashamed
of them. The one I gave Mr. Pepper was hardly fit to cover a dog. . . .
No, Miss Rachel, they could _not_ be mended; they’re only fit for dust
sheets. Why, if one sewed one’s finger to the bone, one would have
one’s work undone the next time they went to the laundry.”

Her voice in its indignation wavered as if tears were near.

There was nothing for it but to descend and inspect a large pile of
linen heaped upon a table. Mrs. Chailey handled the sheets as if she
knew each by name, character, and constitution. Some had yellow stains,
others had places where the threads made long ladders; but to the
ordinary eye they looked much as sheets usually do look, very chill,
white, cold, and irreproachably clean.

Suddenly Mrs. Chailey, turning from the subject of sheets, dismissing
them entirely, clenched her fists on the top of them, and proclaimed,
“And you couldn’t ask a living creature to sit where I sit!”

Mrs. Chailey was expected to sit in a cabin which was large enough, but
too near the boilers, so that after five minutes she could hear her
heart “go,” she complained, putting her hand above it, which was a
state of things that Mrs. Vinrace, Rachel’s mother, would never have
dreamt of inflicting—Mrs. Vinrace, who knew every sheet in her house,
and expected of every one the best they could do, but no more.

It was the easiest thing in the world to grant another room, and the
problem of sheets simultaneously and miraculously solved itself, the
spots and ladders not being past cure after all, but—

“Lies! Lies! Lies!” exclaimed the mistress indignantly, as she ran up
on to the deck. “What’s the use of telling me lies?”

In her anger that a woman of fifty should behave like a child and come
cringing to a girl because she wanted to sit where she had not leave to
sit, she did not think of the particular case, and, unpacking her
music, soon forgot all about the old woman and her sheets.

Mrs. Chailey folded her sheets, but her expression testified to
flatness within. The world no longer cared about her, and a ship was
not a home. When the lamps were lit yesterday, and the sailors went
tumbling above her head, she had cried; she would cry this evening; she
would cry to-morrow. It was not home. Meanwhile she arranged her
ornaments in the room which she had won too easily. They were strange
ornaments to bring on a sea voyage—china pugs, tea-sets in miniature,
cups stamped floridly with the arms of the city of Bristol, hair-pin
boxes crusted with shamrock, antelopes’ heads in coloured plaster,
together with a multitude of tiny photographs, representing downright
workmen in their Sunday best, and women holding white babies. But there
was one portrait in a gilt frame, for which a nail was needed, and
before she sought it Mrs. Chailey put on her spectacles and read what
was written on a slip of paper at the back:

“This picture of her mistress is given to Emma Chailey by Willoughby
Vinrace in gratitude for thirty years of devoted service.”

Tears obliterated the words and the head of the nail.

“So long as I can do something for your family,” she was saying, as she
hammered at it, when a voice called melodiously in the passage:

“Mrs. Chailey! Mrs. Chailey!”

Chailey instantly tidied her dress, composed her face, and opened the
door.

“I’m in a fix,” said Mrs. Ambrose, who was flushed and out of breath.
“You know what gentlemen are. The chairs too high—the tables too
low—there’s six inches between the floor and the door. What I want’s a
hammer, an old quilt, and have you such a thing as a kitchen table?
Anyhow, between us”—she now flung open the door of her husband’s
sitting room, and revealed Ridley pacing up and down, his forehead all
wrinkled, and the collar of his coat turned up.

“It’s as though they’d taken pains to torment me!” he cried, stopping
dead. “Did I come on this voyage in order to catch rheumatism and
pneumonia? Really one might have credited Vinrace with more sense. My
dear,” Helen was on her knees under a table, “you are only making
yourself untidy, and we had much better recognise the fact that we are
condemned to six weeks of unspeakable misery. To come at all was the
height of folly, but now that we are here I suppose that I can face it
like a man. My diseases of course will be increased—I feel already
worse than I did yesterday, but we’ve only ourselves to thank, and the
children happily—”

“Move! Move! Move!” cried Helen, chasing him from corner to corner with
a chair as though he were an errant hen. “Out of the way, Ridley, and
in half an hour you’ll find it ready.”

She turned him out of the room, and they could hear him groaning and
swearing as he went along the passage.

“I daresay he isn’t very strong,” said Mrs. Chailey, looking at Mrs.
Ambrose compassionately, as she helped to shift and carry.

“It’s books,” sighed Helen, lifting an armful of sad volumes from the
floor to the shelf. “Greek from morning to night. If ever Miss Rachel
marries, Chailey, pray that she may marry a man who doesn’t know his
ABC.”

The preliminary discomforts and harshnesses, which generally make the
first days of a sea voyage so cheerless and trying to the temper, being
somehow lived through, the succeeding days passed pleasantly enough.
October was well advanced, but steadily burning with a warmth that made
the early months of the summer appear very young and capricious. Great
tracts of the earth lay now beneath the autumn sun, and the whole of
England, from the bald moors to the Cornish rocks, was lit up from dawn
to sunset, and showed in stretches of yellow, green, and purple. Under
that illumination even the roofs of the great towns glittered. In
thousands of small gardens, millions of dark-red flowers were blooming,
until the old ladies who had tended them so carefully came down the
paths with their scissors, snipped through their juicy stalks, and laid
them upon cold stone ledges in the village church. Innumerable parties
of picnickers coming home at sunset cried, “Was there ever such a day
as this?” “It’s you,” the young men whispered; “Oh, it’s you,” the
young women replied. All old people and many sick people were drawn,
were it only for a foot or two, into the open air, and prognosticated
pleasant things about the course of the world. As for the confidences
and expressions of love that were heard not only in cornfields but in
lamplit rooms, where the windows opened on the garden, and men with
cigars kissed women with grey hairs, they were not to be counted. Some
said that the sky was an emblem of the life to come. Long-tailed birds
clattered and screamed, and crossed from wood to wood, with golden eyes
in their plumage.

But while all this went on by land, very few people thought about the
sea. They took it for granted that the sea was calm; and there was no
need, as there is in many houses when the creeper taps on the bedroom
windows, for the couples to murmur before they kiss, “Think of the
ships to-night,” or “Thank Heaven, I’m not the man in the lighthouse!”
For all they imagined, the ships when they vanished on the sky-line
dissolved, like snow in water. The grown-up view, indeed, was not much
clearer than the view of the little creatures in bathing drawers who
were trotting in to the foam all along the coasts of England, and
scooping up buckets full of water. They saw white sails or tufts of
smoke pass across the horizon, and if you had said that these were
waterspouts, or the petals of white sea flowers, they would have
agreed.

The people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England.
Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a very small
island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned.
One figured them first swarming about like aimless ants, and almost
pressing each other over the edge; and then, as the ship withdrew, one
figured them making a vain clamour, which, being unheard, either
ceased, or rose into a brawl. Finally, when the ship was out of sight
of land, it became plain that the people of England were completely
mute. The disease attacked other parts of the earth; Europe shrank,
Asia shrank, Africa and America shrank, until it seemed doubtful
whether the ship would ever run against any of those wrinkled little
rocks again. But, on the other hand, an immense dignity had descended
upon her; she was an inhabitant of the great world, which has so few
inhabitants, travelling all day across an empty universe, with veils
drawn before her and behind. She was more lonely than the caravan
crossing the desert; she was infinitely more mysterious, moving by her
own power and sustained by her own resources. The sea might give her
death or some unexampled joy, and none would know of it. She was a
bride going forth to her husband, a virgin unknown of men; in her vigor
and purity she might be likened to all beautiful things, for as a ship
she had a life of her own.

Indeed if they had not been blessed in their weather, one blue day
being bowled up after another, smooth, round, and flawless, Mrs.
Ambrose would have found it very dull. As it was, she had her
embroidery frame set up on deck, with a little table by her side on
which lay open a black volume of philosophy. She chose a thread from
the vari-coloured tangle that lay in her lap, and sewed red into the
bark of a tree, or yellow into the river torrent. She was working at a
great design of a tropical river running through a tropical forest,
where spotted deer would eventually browse upon masses of fruit,
bananas, oranges, and giant pomegranates, while a troop of naked
natives whirled darts into the air. Between the stitches she looked to
one side and read a sentence about the Reality of Matter, or the Nature
of Good. Round her men in blue jerseys knelt and scrubbed the boards,
or leant over the rails and whistled, and not far off Mr. Pepper sat
cutting up roots with a penknife. The rest were occupied in other parts
of the ship: Ridley at his Greek—he had never found quarters more to
his liking; Willoughby at his documents, for he used a voyage to work
off arrears of business; and Rachel—Helen, between her sentences of
philosophy, wondered sometimes what Rachel _did_ do with herself? She
meant vaguely to go and see. They had scarcely spoken two words to each
other since that first evening; they were polite when they met, but
there had been no confidence of any kind. Rachel seemed to get on very
well with her father—much better, Helen thought, than she ought to—and
was as ready to let Helen alone as Helen was to let her alone.

At that moment Rachel was sitting in her room doing absolutely nothing.
When the ship was full this apartment bore some magnificent title and
was the resort of elderly sea-sick ladies who left the deck to their
youngsters. By virtue of the piano, and a mess of books on the floor,
Rachel considered it her room, and there she would sit for hours
playing very difficult music, reading a little German, or a little
English when the mood took her, and doing—as at this moment—absolutely
nothing.

The way she had been educated, joined to a fine natural indolence, was
of course partly the reason of it, for she had been educated as the
majority of well-to-do girls in the last part of the nineteenth century
were educated. Kindly doctors and gentle old professors had taught her
the rudiments of about ten different branches of knowledge, but they
would as soon have forced her to go through one piece of drudgery
thoroughly as they would have told her that her hands were dirty. The
one hour or the two hours weekly passed very pleasantly, partly owing
to the other pupils, partly to the fact that the window looked upon the
back of a shop, where figures appeared against the red windows in
winter, partly to the accidents that are bound to happen when more than
two people are in the same room together. But there was no subject in
the world which she knew accurately. Her mind was in the state of an
intelligent man’s in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; she
would believe practically anything she was told, invent reasons for
anything she said. The shape of the earth, the history of the world,
how trains worked, or money was invested, what laws were in force,
which people wanted what, and why they wanted it, the most elementary
idea of a system in modern life—none of this had been imparted to her
by any of her professors or mistresses. But this system of education
had one great advantage. It did not teach anything, but it put no
obstacle in the way of any real talent that the pupil might chance to
have. Rachel, being musical, was allowed to learn nothing but music;
she became a fanatic about music. All the energies that might have gone
into languages, science, or literature, that might have made her
friends, or shown her the world, poured straight into music. Finding
her teachers inadequate, she had practically taught herself. At the age
of twenty-four she knew as much about music as most people do when they
are thirty; and could play as well as nature allowed her to, which, as
became daily more obvious, was a really generous allowance. If this one
definite gift was surrounded by dreams and ideas of the most
extravagant and foolish description, no one was any the wiser.

Her education being thus ordinary, her circumstances were no more out
of the common. She was an only child and had never been bullied and
laughed at by brothers and sisters. Her mother having died when she was
eleven, two aunts, the sisters of her father, brought her up, and they
lived for the sake of the air in a comfortable house in Richmond. She
was of course brought up with excessive care, which as a child was for
her health; as a girl and a young woman was for what it seems almost
crude to call her morals. Until quite lately she had been completely
ignorant that for women such things existed. She groped for knowledge
in old books, and found it in repulsive chunks, but she did not
naturally care for books and thus never troubled her head about the
censorship which was exercised first by her aunts, later by her father.
Friends might have told her things, but she had few of her own
age,—Richmond being an awkward place to reach,—and, as it happened, the
only girl she knew well was a religious zealot, who in the fervour of
intimacy talked about God, and the best ways of taking up one’s cross,
a topic only fitfully interesting to one whose mind reached other
stages at other times.

But lying in her chair, with one hand behind her head, the other
grasping the knob on the arm, she was clearly following her thoughts
intently. Her education left her abundant time for thinking. Her eyes
were fixed so steadily upon a ball on the rail of the ship that she
would have been startled and annoyed if anything had chanced to obscure
it for a second. She had begun her meditations with a shout of
laughter, caused by the following translation from _Tristan_:

In shrinking trepidation
His shame he seems to hide
While to the king his relation
He brings the corpse-like Bride.
Seems it so senseless what I say?


She cried that it did, and threw down the book. Next she had picked up
_Cowper’s Letters_, the classic prescribed by her father which had
bored her, so that one sentence chancing to say something about the
smell of broom in his garden, she had thereupon seen the little hall at
Richmond laden with flowers on the day of her mother’s funeral,
smelling so strong that now any flower-scent brought back the sickly
horrible sensation; and so from one scene she passed, half-hearing,
half-seeing, to another. She saw her Aunt Lucy arranging flowers in the
drawing-room.

“Aunt Lucy,” she volunteered, “I don’t like the smell of broom; it
reminds me of funerals.”

“Nonsense, Rachel,” Aunt Lucy replied; “don’t say such foolish things,
dear. I always think it a particularly cheerful plant.”

Lying in the hot sun her mind was fixed upon the characters of her
aunts, their views, and the way they lived. Indeed this was a subject
that lasted her hundreds of morning walks round Richmond Park, and
blotted out the trees and the people and the deer. Why did they do the
things they did, and what did they feel, and what was it all about?
Again she heard Aunt Lucy talking to Aunt Eleanor. She had been that
morning to take up the character of a servant, “And, of course, at
half-past ten in the morning one expects to find the housemaid brushing
the stairs.” How odd! How unspeakably odd! But she could not explain to
herself why suddenly as her aunt spoke the whole system in which they
lived had appeared before her eyes as something quite unfamiliar and
inexplicable, and themselves as chairs or umbrellas dropped about here
and there without any reason. She could only say with her slight
stammer, “Are you f-f-fond of Aunt Eleanor, Aunt Lucy?” to which her
aunt replied, with her nervous hen-like twitter of a laugh, “My dear
child, what questions you do ask!”

“How fond? Very fond!” Rachel pursued.

“I can’t say I’ve ever thought ‘how,’” said Miss Vinrace. “If one cares
one doesn’t think ‘how,’ Rachel,” which was aimed at the niece who had
never yet “come” to her aunts as cordially as they wished.

“But you know I care for you, don’t you, dear, because you’re your
mother’s daughter, if for no other reason, and there _are_ plenty of
other reasons”—and she leant over and kissed her with some emotion, and
the argument was spilt irretrievably about the place like a bucket of
milk.

By these means Rachel reached that stage in thinking, if thinking it
can be called, when the eyes are intent upon a ball or a knob and the
lips cease to move. Her efforts to come to an understanding had only
hurt her aunt’s feelings, and the conclusion must be that it is better
not to try. To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between
oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently. It was
far better to play the piano and forget all the rest. The conclusion
was very welcome. Let these odd men and women—her aunts, the Hunts,
Ridley, Helen, Mr. Pepper, and the rest—be symbols,—featureless but
dignified, symbols of age, of youth, of motherhood, of learning, and
beautiful often as people upon the stage are beautiful. It appeared
that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling
they felt, but that was what music was for. Reality dwelling in what
one saw and felt, but did not talk about, one could accept a system in
which things went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people,
without often troubling to think about it, except as something
superficially strange. Absorbed by her music she accepted her lot very
complacently, blazing into indignation perhaps once a fortnight, and
subsiding as she subsided now. Inextricably mixed in dreamy confusion,
her mind seemed to enter into communion, to be delightfully expanded
and combined with the spirit of the whitish boards on deck, with the
spirit of the sea, with the spirit of Beethoven Op. 112, even with the
spirit of poor William Cowper there at Olney. Like a ball of
thistledown it kissed the sea, rose, kissed it again, and thus rising
and kissing passed finally out of sight. The rising and falling of the
ball of thistledown was represented by the sudden droop forward of her
own head, and when it passed out of sight she was asleep.

Ten minutes later Mrs. Ambrose opened the door and looked at her. It
did not surprise her to find that this was the way in which Rachel
passed her mornings. She glanced round the room at the piano, at the
books, at the general mess. In the first place she considered Rachel
aesthetically; lying unprotected she looked somehow like a victim
dropped from the claws of a bird of prey, but considered as a woman, a
young woman of twenty-four, the sight gave rise to reflections. Mrs.
Ambrose stood thinking for at least two minutes. She then smiled,
turned noiselessly away and went, lest the sleeper should waken, and
there should be the awkwardness of speech between them.




CHAPTER III


Early next morning there was a sound as of chains being drawn roughly
overhead; the steady heart of the _Euphrosyne_ slowly ceased to beat;
and Helen, poking her nose above deck, saw a stationary castle upon a
stationary hill. They had dropped anchor in the mouth of the Tagus, and
instead of cleaving new waves perpetually, the same waves kept
returning and washing against the sides of the ship.

As soon as breakfast was done, Willoughby disappeared over the vessel’s
side, carrying a brown leather case, shouting over his shoulder that
every one was to mind and behave themselves, for he would be kept in
Lisbon doing business until five o’clock that afternoon.

At about that hour he reappeared, carrying his case, professing himself
tired, bothered, hungry, thirsty, cold, and in immediate need of his
tea. Rubbing his hands, he told them the adventures of the day: how he
had come upon poor old Jackson combing his moustache before the glass
in the office, little expecting his descent, had put him through such a
morning’s work as seldom came his way; then treated him to a lunch of
champagne and ortolans; paid a call upon Mrs. Jackson, who was fatter
than ever, poor woman, but asked kindly after Rachel—and O Lord, little
Jackson had confessed to a confounded piece of weakness—well, well, no
harm was done, he supposed, but what was the use of his giving orders
if they were promptly disobeyed? He had said distinctly that he would
take no passengers on this trip. Here he began searching in his pockets
and eventually discovered a card, which he planked down on the table
before Rachel. On it she read, “Mr. and Mrs. Richard Dalloway, 23
Browne Street, Mayfair.”

“Mr. Richard Dalloway,” continued Vinrace, “seems to be a gentleman who
thinks that because he was once a member of Parliament, and his wife’s
the daughter of a peer, they can have what they like for the asking.
They got round poor little Jackson anyhow. Said they must have
passages—produced a letter from Lord Glenaway, asking me as a personal
favour—overruled any objections Jackson made (I don’t believe they came
to much), and so there’s nothing for it but to submit, I suppose.”

But it was evident that for some reason or other Willoughby was quite
pleased to submit, although he made a show of growling.

The truth was that Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway had found themselves stranded
in Lisbon. They had been travelling on the Continent for some weeks,
chiefly with a view to broadening Mr. Dalloway’s mind. Unable for a
season, by one of the accidents of political life, to serve his country
in Parliament, Mr. Dalloway was doing the best he could to serve it out
of Parliament. For that purpose the Latin countries did very well,
although the East, of course, would have done better.

“Expect to hear of me next in Petersburg or Teheran,” he had said,
turning to wave farewell from the steps of the Travellers’. But a
disease had broken out in the East, there was cholera in Russia, and he
was heard of, not so romantically, in Lisbon. They had been through
France; he had stopped at manufacturing centres where, producing
letters of introduction, he had been shown over works, and noted facts
in a pocket-book. In Spain he and Mrs. Dalloway had mounted mules, for
they wished to understand how the peasants live. Are they ripe for
rebellion, for example? Mrs. Dalloway had then insisted upon a day or
two at Madrid with the pictures. Finally they arrived in Lisbon and
spent six days which, in a journal privately issued afterwards, they
described as of “unique interest.” Richard had audiences with
ministers, and foretold a crisis at no distant date, “the foundations
of government being incurably corrupt. Yet how blame, etc.”; while
Clarissa inspected the royal stables, and took several snapshots
showing men now exiled and windows now broken. Among other things she
photographed Fielding’s grave, and let loose a small bird which some
ruffian had trapped, “because one hates to think of anything in a cage
where English people lie buried,” the diary stated. Their tour was
thoroughly unconventional, and followed no meditated plan. The foreign
correspondents of the _Times_ decided their route as much as anything
else. Mr. Dalloway wished to look at certain guns, and was of opinion
that the African coast is far more unsettled than people at home were
inclined to believe. For these reasons they wanted a slow inquisitive
kind of ship, comfortable, for they were bad sailors, but not
extravagant, which would stop for a day or two at this port and at
that, taking in coal while the Dalloways saw things for themselves.
Meanwhile they found themselves stranded in Lisbon, unable for the
moment to lay hands upon the precise vessel they wanted. They heard of
the _Euphrosyne_, but heard also that she was primarily a cargo boat,
and only took passengers by special arrangement, her business being to
carry dry goods to the Amazons, and rubber home again. “By special
arrangement,” however, were words of high encouragement to them, for
they came of a class where almost everything was specially arranged, or
could be if necessary. On this occasion all that Richard did was to
write a note to Lord Glenaway, the head of the line which bears his
title; to call on poor old Jackson; to represent to him how Mrs.
Dalloway was so-and-so, and he had been something or other else, and
what they wanted was such and such a thing. It was done. They parted
with compliments and pleasure on both sides, and here, a week later,
came the boat rowing up to the ship in the dusk with the Dalloways on
board of it; in three minutes they were standing together on the deck
of the _Euphrosyne_. Their arrival, of course, created some stir, and
it was seen by several pairs of eyes that Mrs. Dalloway was a tall
slight woman, her body wrapped in furs, her head in veils, while Mr.
Dalloway appeared to be a middle-sized man of sturdy build, dressed
like a sportsman on an autumnal moor. Many solid leather bags of a rich
brown hue soon surrounded them, in addition to which Mr. Dalloway
carried a despatch box, and his wife a dressing-case suggestive of a
diamond necklace and bottles with silver tops.

“It’s so like Whistler!” she exclaimed, with a wave towards the shore,
as she shook Rachel by the hand, and Rachel had only time to look at
the grey hills on one side of her before Willoughby introduced Mrs.
Chailey, who took the lady to her cabin.

Momentary though it seemed, nevertheless the interruption was
upsetting; every one was more or less put out by it, from Mr. Grice,
the steward, to Ridley himself. A few minutes later Rachel passed the
smoking-room, and found Helen moving arm-chairs. She was absorbed in
her arrangements, and on seeing Rachel remarked confidentially:

“If one can give men a room to themselves where they will sit, it’s all
to the good. Arm-chairs are _the_ important things—” She began wheeling
them about. “Now, does it still look like a bar at a railway station?”

She whipped a plush cover off a table. The appearance of the place was
marvellously improved.

Again, the arrival of the strangers made it obvious to Rachel, as the
hour of dinner approached, that she must change her dress; and the
ringing of the great bell found her sitting on the edge of her berth in
such a position that the little glass above the washstand reflected her
head and shoulders. In the glass she wore an expression of tense
melancholy, for she had come to the depressing conclusion, since the
arrival of the Dalloways, that her face was not the face she wanted,
and in all probability never would be.

However, punctuality had been impressed on her, and whatever face she
had, she must go in to dinner.

These few minutes had been used by Willoughby in sketching to the
Dalloways the people they were to meet, and checking them upon his
fingers.

“There’s my brother-in-law, Ambrose, the scholar (I daresay you’ve
heard his name), his wife, my old friend Pepper, a very quiet fellow,
but knows everything, I’m told. And that’s all. We’re a very small
party. I’m dropping them on the coast.”

Mrs. Dalloway, with her head a little on one side, did her best to
recollect Ambrose—was it a surname?—but failed. She was made slightly
uneasy by what she had heard. She knew that scholars married any
one—girls they met in farms on reading parties; or little suburban
women who said disagreeably, “Of course I know it’s my husband you
want; not _me_.”

But Helen came in at that point, and Mrs. Dalloway saw with relief that
though slightly eccentric in appearance, she was not untidy, held
herself well, and her voice had restraint in it, which she held to be
the sign of a lady. Mr. Pepper had not troubled to change his neat ugly
suit.

“But after all,” Clarissa thought to herself as she followed Vinrace in
to dinner, “_every one’s_ interesting really.”

When seated at the table she had some need of that assurance, chiefly
because of Ridley, who came in late, looked decidedly unkempt, and took
to his soup in profound gloom.

An imperceptible signal passed between husband and wife, meaning that
they grasped the situation and would stand by each other loyally. With
scarcely a pause Mrs. Dalloway turned to Willoughby and began:

“What I find so tiresome about the sea is that there are no flowers in
it. Imagine fields of hollyhocks and violets in mid-ocean! How divine!”

“But somewhat dangerous to navigation,” boomed Richard, in the bass,
like the bassoon to the flourish of his wife’s violin. “Why, weeds can
be bad enough, can’t they, Vinrace? I remember crossing in the
_Mauretania_ once, and saying to the Captain—Richards—did you know
him?—‘Now tell me what perils you really dread most for your ship,
Captain Richards?’ expecting him to say icebergs, or derelicts, or fog,
or something of that sort. Not a bit of it. I’ve always remembered his
answer. ‘_Sedgius aquatici_,’ he said, which I take to be a kind of
duck-weed.”

Mr. Pepper looked up sharply, and was about to put a question when
Willoughby continued:

“They’ve an awful time of it—those captains! Three thousand souls on
board!”

“Yes, indeed,” said Clarissa. She turned to Helen with an air of
profundity. “I’m convinced people are wrong when they say it’s work
that wears one; it’s responsibility. That’s why one pays one’s cook
more than one’s housemaid, I suppose.”

“According to that, one ought to pay one’s nurse double; but one
doesn’t,” said Helen.

“No; but think what a joy to have to do with babies, instead of
saucepans!” said Mrs. Dalloway, looking with more interest at Helen, a
probable mother.

“I’d much rather be a cook than a nurse,” said Helen. “Nothing would
induce me to take charge of children.”

“Mothers always exaggerate,” said Ridley. “A well-bred child is no
responsibility. I’ve travelled all over Europe with mine. You just wrap
’em up warm and put ’em in the rack.”

Helen laughed at that. Mrs. Dalloway exclaimed, looking at Ridley:

“How like a father! My husband’s just the same. And then one talks of
the equality of the sexes!”

“Does one?” said Mr. Pepper.

“Oh, some do!” cried Clarissa. “My husband had to pass an irate lady
every afternoon last session who said nothing else, I imagine.”

“She sat outside the house; it was very awkward,” said Dalloway. “At
last I plucked up courage and said to her, ‘My good creature, you’re
only in the way where you are. You’re hindering me, and you’re doing no
good to yourself.’”

“And then she caught him by the coat, and would have scratched his eyes
out—” Mrs. Dalloway put in.

“Pooh—that’s been exaggerated,” said Richard. “No, I pity them, I
confess. The discomfort of sitting on those steps must be awful.”

“Serve them right,” said Willoughby curtly.

“Oh, I’m entirely with you there,” said Dalloway. “Nobody can condemn
the utter folly and futility of such behaviour more than I do; and as
for the whole agitation, well! may I be in my grave before a woman has
the right to vote in England! That’s all I say.”

The solemnity of her husband’s assertion made Clarissa grave.

“It’s unthinkable,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re a suffragist?” she
turned to Ridley.

“I don’t care a fig one way or t’other,” said Ambrose. “If any creature
is so deluded as to think that a vote does him or her any good, let him
have it. He’ll soon learn better.”

“You’re not a politician, I see,” she smiled.

“Goodness, no,” said Ridley.

“I’m afraid your husband won’t approve of me,” said Dalloway aside, to
Mrs. Ambrose. She suddenly recollected that he had been in Parliament.

“Don’t you ever find it rather dull?” she asked, not knowing exactly
what to say.

Richard spread his hands before him, as if inscriptions were to be read
in the palms of them.

“If you ask me whether I ever find it rather dull,” he said, “I am
bound to say yes; on the other hand, if you ask me what career do you
consider on the whole, taking the good with the bad, the most enjoyable
and enviable, not to speak of its more serious side, of all careers,
for a man, I am bound to say, ‘The Politician’s.’”

“The Bar or politics, I agree,” said Willoughby. “You get more run for
your money.”

“All one’s faculties have their play,” said Richard. “I may be treading
on dangerous ground; but what I feel about poets and artists in general
is this: on your own lines, you can’t be beaten—granted; but off your
own lines—puff—one has to make allowances. Now, I shouldn’t like to
think that any one had to make allowances for me.”

“I don’t quite agree, Richard,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Think of Shelley.
I feel that there’s almost everything one wants in ‘Adonais.’”

“Read ‘Adonais’ by all means,” Richard conceded. “But whenever I hear
of Shelley I repeat to myself the words of Matthew Arnold, ‘What a set!
What a set!’”

This roused Ridley’s attention. “Matthew Arnold? A detestable prig!” he
snapped.

“A prig—granted,” said Richard; “but, I think a man of the world.
That’s where my point comes in. We politicians doubtless seem to you”
(he grasped somehow that Helen was the representative of the arts) “a
gross commonplace set of people; but we see both sides; we may be
clumsy, but we do our best to get a grasp of things. Now your artists
_find_ things in a mess, shrug their shoulders, turn aside to their
visions—which I grant may be very beautiful—and _leave_ things in a
mess. Now that seems to me evading one’s responsibilities. Besides, we
aren’t all born with the artistic faculty.”

“It’s dreadful,” said Mrs. Dalloway, who, while her husband spoke, had
been thinking. “When I’m with artists I feel so intensely the delights
of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures
and music and everything beautiful, and then I go out into the streets
and the first child I meet with its poor, hungry, dirty little face
makes me turn round and say, ‘No, I _can’t_ shut myself up—I _won’t_
live in a world of my own. I should like to stop all the painting and
writing and music until this kind of thing exists no longer.’ Don’t you
feel,” she wound up, addressing Helen, “that life’s a perpetual
conflict?” Helen considered for a moment. “No,” she said. “I don’t
think I do.”

There was a pause, which was decidedly uncomfortable. Mrs. Dalloway
then gave a little shiver, and asked whether she might have her fur
cloak brought to her. As she adjusted the soft brown fur about her neck
a fresh topic struck her.

“I own,” she said, “that I shall never forget the _Antigone_. I saw it
at Cambridge years ago, and it’s haunted me ever since. Don’t you think
it’s quite the most modern thing you ever saw?” she asked Ridley. “It
seemed to me I’d known twenty Clytemnestras. Old Lady Ditchling for
one. I don’t know a word of Greek, but I could listen to it for ever—”

Here Mr. Pepper struck up:

πολλὰ τὰ δεινά, κοὐδὲν ἀν-
θρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.
τοῦτο καὶ πολιοῦ πέραν
πόντου χειμερίῳ νότῳ
χωρεῖ, περιβρυχίοισι
περῶν ὑπ᾽ οἴδμασι.


Mrs. Dalloway looked at him with compressed lips.

“I’d give ten years of my life to know Greek,” she said, when he had
done.

“I could teach you the alphabet in half an hour,” said Ridley, “and
you’d read Homer in a month. I should think it an honour to instruct
you.”

Helen, engaged with Mr. Dalloway and the habit, now fallen into
decline, of quoting Greek in the House of Commons, noted, in the great
commonplace book that lies open beside us as we talk, the fact that all
men, even men like Ridley, really prefer women to be fashionable.

Clarissa exclaimed that she could think of nothing more delightful. For
an instant she saw herself in her drawing-room in Browne Street with a
Plato open on her knees—Plato in the original Greek. She could not help
believing that a real scholar, if specially interested, could slip
Greek into her head with scarcely any trouble.

Ridley engaged her to come to-morrow.

“If only your ship is going to treat us kindly!” she exclaimed, drawing
Willoughby into play. For the sake of guests, and these were
distinguished, Willoughby was ready with a bow of his head to vouch for
the good behaviour even of the waves.

“I’m dreadfully bad; and my husband’s not very good,” sighed Clarissa.

“I am never sick,” Richard explained. “At least, I have only been
actually sick once,” he corrected himself. “That was crossing the
Channel. But a choppy sea, I confess, or still worse, a swell, makes me
distinctly uncomfortable. The great thing is never to miss a meal. You
look at the food, and you say, ‘I can’t’; you take a mouthful, and Lord
knows how you’re going to swallow it; but persevere, and you often
settle the attack for good. My wife’s a coward.”

They were pushing back their chairs. The ladies were hesitating at the
doorway.

“I’d better show the way,” said Helen, advancing.

Rachel followed. She had taken no part in the talk; no one had spoken
to her; but she had listened to every word that was said. She had
looked from Mrs. Dalloway to Mr. Dalloway, and from Mr. Dalloway back
again. Clarissa, indeed, was a fascinating spectacle. She wore a white
dress and a long glittering necklace. What with her clothes, and her
arch delicate face, which showed exquisitely pink beneath hair turning
grey, she was astonishingly like an eighteenth-century masterpiece—a
Reynolds or a Romney. She made Helen and the others look coarse and
slovenly beside her. Sitting lightly upright she seemed to be dealing
with the world as she chose; the enormous solid globe spun round this
way and that beneath her fingers. And her husband! Mr. Dalloway rolling
that rich deliberate voice was even more impressive. He seemed to come
from the humming oily centre of the machine where the polished rods are
sliding, and the pistons thumping; he grasped things so firmly but so
loosely; he made the others appear like old maids cheapening remnants.
Rachel followed in the wake of the matrons, as if in a trance; a
curious scent of violets came back from Mrs. Dalloway, mingling with
the soft rustling of her skirts, and the tinkling of her chains. As she
followed, Rachel thought with supreme self-abasement, taking in the
whole course of her life and the lives of all her friends, “She said we
lived in a world of our own. It’s true. We’re perfectly absurd.”

“We sit in here,” said Helen, opening the door of the saloon.

“You play?” said Mrs. Dalloway to Mrs. Ambrose, taking up the score of
_Tristan_ which lay on the table.

“My niece does,” said Helen, laying her hand on Rachel’s shoulder.

“Oh, how I envy you!” Clarissa addressed Rachel for the first time.
“D’you remember this? Isn’t it divine?” She played a bar or two with
ringed fingers upon the page.

“And then Tristan goes like this, and Isolde—oh!—it’s all too
thrilling! Have you been to Bayreuth?”

“No, I haven’t,” said Rachel.

“Then that’s still to come. I shall never forget my first _Parsifal_—a
grilling August day, and those fat old German women, come in their
stuffy high frocks, and then the dark theatre, and the music beginning,
and one couldn’t help sobbing. A kind man went and fetched me water, I
remember; and I could only cry on his shoulder! It caught me here” (she
touched her throat). “It’s like nothing else in the world! But where’s
your piano?”

“It’s in another room,” Rachel explained.

“But you will play to us?” Clarissa entreated. “I can’t imagine
anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to
music—only that sounds too like a schoolgirl! You know,” she said,
turning to Helen, “I don’t think music’s altogether good for people—I’m
afraid not.”

“Too great a strain?” asked Helen.

“Too emotional, somehow,” said Clarissa. “One notices it at once when a
boy or girl takes up music as a profession. Sir William Broadley told
me just the same thing. Don’t you hate the kind of attitudes people go
into over Wagner—like this—” She cast her eyes to the ceiling, clasped
her hands, and assumed a look of intensity. “It really doesn’t mean
that they appreciate him; in fact, I always think it’s the other way
round. The people who really care about an art are always the least
affected. D’you know Henry Philips, the painter?” she asked.

“I have seen him,” said Helen.

“To look at, one might think he was a successful stockbroker, and not
one of the greatest painters of the age. That’s what I like.”

“There are a great many successful stockbrokers, if you like looking at
them,” said Helen.

Rachel wished vehemently that her aunt would not be so perverse.

“When you see a musician with long hair, don’t you know instinctively
that he’s bad?” Clarissa asked, turning to Rachel. “Watts and
Joachim—they looked just like you and me.”

“And how much nicer they’d have looked with curls!” said Helen. “The
question is, are you going to aim at beauty or are you not?”

“Cleanliness!” said Clarissa, “I do want a man to look clean!”

“By cleanliness you really mean well-cut clothes,” said Helen.

“There’s something one knows a gentleman by,” said Clarissa, “but one
can’t say what it is.”

“Take my husband now, does he look like a gentleman?”

The question seemed to Clarissa in extraordinarily bad taste. “One of
the things that can’t be said,” she would have put it. She could find
no answer, but a laugh.

“Well, anyhow,” she said, turning to Rachel, “I shall insist upon your
playing to me to-morrow.”

There was that in her manner that made Rachel love her.

Mrs. Dalloway hid a tiny yawn, a mere dilation of the nostrils.

“D’you know,” she said, “I’m extraordinarily sleepy. It’s the sea air.
I think I shall escape.”

A man’s voice, which she took to be that of Mr. Pepper, strident in
discussion, and advancing upon the saloon, gave her the alarm.

“Good-night—good-night!” she said. “Oh, I know my way—do pray for calm!
Good-night!”

Her yawn must have been the image of a yawn. Instead of letting her
mouth droop, dropping all her clothes in a bunch as though they
depended on one string, and stretching her limbs to the utmost end of
her berth, she merely changed her dress for a dressing-gown, with
innumerable frills, and wrapping her feet in a rug, sat down with a
writing-pad on her knee. Already this cramped little cabin was the
dressing room of a lady of quality. There were bottles containing
liquids; there were trays, boxes, brushes, pins. Evidently not an inch
of her person lacked its proper instrument. The scent which had
intoxicated Rachel pervaded the air. Thus established, Mrs. Dalloway
began to write. A pen in her hands became a thing one caressed paper
with, and she might have been stroking and tickling a kitten as she
wrote:

Picture us, my dear, afloat in the very oddest ship you can imagine.
It’s not the ship, so much as the people. One does come across queer
sorts as one travels. I must say I find it hugely amusing. There’s the
manager of the line—called Vinrace—a nice big Englishman, doesn’t say
much—you know the sort. As for the rest—they might have come trailing
out of an old number of _Punch_. They’re like people playing croquet in
the ’sixties. How long they’ve all been shut up in this ship I don’t
know—years and years I should say—but one feels as though one had
boarded a little separate world, and they’d never been on shore, or
done ordinary things in their lives. It’s what I’ve always said about
literary people—they’re far the hardest of any to get on with. The
worst of it is, these people—a man and his wife and a niece—might have
been, one feels, just like everybody else, if they hadn’t got swallowed
up by Oxford or Cambridge or some such place, and been made cranks of.
The man’s really delightful (if he’d cut his nails), and the woman has
quite a fine face, only she dresses, of course, in a potato sack, and
wears her hair like a Liberty shopgirl’s. They talk about art, and
think us such poops for dressing in the evening. However, I can’t help
that; I’d rather die than come in to dinner without changing—wouldn’t
you? It matters ever so much more than the soup. (It’s odd how things
like that _do_ matter so much more than what’s generally supposed to
matter. I’d rather have my head cut off than wear flannel next the
skin.) Then there’s a nice shy girl—poor thing—I wish one could rake
her out before it’s too late. She has quite nice eyes and hair, only,
of course, she’ll get funny too. We ought to start a society for
broadening the minds of the young—much more useful than missionaries,
Hester! Oh, I’d forgotten there’s a dreadful little thing called
Pepper. He’s just like his name. He’s indescribably insignificant, and
rather queer in his temper, poor dear. It’s like sitting down to dinner
with an ill-conditioned fox-terrier, only one can’t comb him out, and
sprinkle him with powder, as one would one’s dog. It’s a pity,
sometimes, one can’t treat people like dogs! The great comfort is that
we’re away from newspapers, so that Richard will have a real holiday
this time. Spain wasn’t a holiday. . . .

“You coward!” said Richard, almost filling the room with his sturdy
figure.

“I did my duty at dinner!” cried Clarissa.

“You’ve let yourself in for the Greek alphabet, anyhow.”

“Oh, my dear! Who _is_ Ambrose?”

“I gather that he was a Cambridge don; lives in London now, and edits
classics.”

“Did you ever see such a set of cranks? The woman asked me if I thought
her husband looked like a gentleman!”

“It was hard to keep the ball rolling at dinner, certainly,” said
Richard. “Why is it that the women, in that class, are so much queerer
than the men?”

“They’re not half bad-looking, really—only—they’re so odd!”

They both laughed, thinking of the same things, so that there was no
need to compare their impressions.

“I see I shall have quite a lot to say to Vinrace,” said Richard. “He
knows Sutton and all that set. He can tell me a good deal about the
conditions of ship-building in the North.”

“Oh, I’m glad. The men always _are_ so much better than the women.”

“One always has something to say to a man certainly,” said Richard.
“But I’ve no doubt you’ll chatter away fast enough about the babies,
Clarice.”

“Has she got children? She doesn’t look like it somehow.”

“Two. A boy and girl.”

A pang of envy shot through Mrs. Dalloway’s heart.

“We _must_ have a son, Dick,” she said.

“Good Lord, what opportunities there are now for young men!” said
Dalloway, for his talk had set him thinking. “I don’t suppose there’s
been so good an opening since the days of Pitt.”

“And it’s yours!” said Clarissa.

“To be a leader of men,” Richard soliloquised. “It’s a fine career. My
God—what a career!”

The chest slowly curved beneath his waistcoat.

“D’you know, Dick, I can’t help thinking of England,” said his wife
meditatively, leaning her head against his chest. “Being on this ship
seems to make it so much more vivid—what it really means to be English.
One thinks of all we’ve done, and our navies, and the people in India
and Africa, and how we’ve gone on century after century, sending out
boys from little country villages—and of men like you, Dick, and it
makes one feel as if one couldn’t bear _not_ to be English! Think of
the light burning over the House, Dick! When I stood on deck just now I
seemed to see it. It’s what one means by London.”

“It’s the continuity,” said Richard sententiously. A vision of English
history, King following King, Prime Minister Prime Minister, and Law
Law had come over him while his wife spoke. He ran his mind along the
line of conservative policy, which went steadily from Lord Salisbury to
Alfred, and gradually enclosed, as though it were a lasso that opened
and caught things, enormous chunks of the habitable globe.

“It’s taken a long time, but we’ve pretty nearly done it,” he said; “it
remains to consolidate.”

“And these people don’t see it!” Clarissa exclaimed.

“It takes all sorts to make a world,” said her husband. “There would
never be a government if there weren’t an opposition.”

“Dick, you’re better than I am,” said Clarissa. “You see round, where I
only see _there_.” She pressed a point on the back of his hand.

“That’s my business, as I tried to explain at dinner.”

“What I like about you, Dick,” she continued, “is that you’re always
the same, and I’m a creature of moods.”

“You’re a pretty creature, anyhow,” he said, gazing at her with deeper
eyes.

“You think so, do you? Then kiss me.”

He kissed her passionately, so that her half-written letter slid to the
ground. Picking it up, he read it without asking leave.

“Where’s your pen?” he said; and added in his little masculine hand:

R.D. _loquitur_: Clarice has omitted to tell you that she looked
exceedingly pretty at dinner, and made a conquest by which she has
bound herself to learn the Greek alphabet. I will take this occasion of
adding that we are both enjoying ourselves in these outlandish parts,
and only wish for the presence of our friends (yourself and John, to
wit) to make the trip perfectly enjoyable as it promises to be
instructive. . . .


Voices were heard at the end of the corridor. Mrs. Ambrose was speaking
low; William Pepper was remarking in his definite and rather acid
voice, “That is the type of lady with whom I find myself distinctly out
of sympathy. She—”

But neither Richard nor Clarissa profited by the verdict, for directly
it seemed likely that they would overhear, Richard crackled a sheet of
paper.

“I often wonder,” Clarissa mused in bed, over the little white volume
of Pascal which went with her everywhere, “whether it is really good
for a woman to live with a man who is morally her superior, as Richard
is mine. It makes one so dependent. I suppose I feel for him what my
mother and women of her generation felt for Christ. It just shows that
one can’t do without _something_.” She then fell into a sleep, which
was as usual extremely sound and refreshing, but visited by fantastic
dreams of great Greek letters stalking round the room, when she woke up
and laughed to herself, remembering where she was and that the Greek
letters were real people, lying asleep not many yards away. Then,
thinking of the black sea outside tossing beneath the moon, she
shuddered, and thought of her husband and the others as companions on
the voyage. The dreams were not confined to her indeed, but went from
one brain to another. They all dreamt of each other that night, as was
natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how
strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in
mid-ocean, and see every detail of each other’s faces, and hear
whatever they chanced to say.




CHAPTER IV


Next morning Clarissa was up before anyone else. She dressed, and was
out on deck, breathing the fresh air of a calm morning, and, making the
circuit of the ship for the second time, she ran straight into the lean
person of Mr. Grice, the steward. She apologised, and at the same time
asked him to enlighten her: what were those shiny brass stands for,
half glass on the top? She had been wondering, and could not guess.
When he had done explaining, she cried enthusiastically:

“I do think that to be a sailor must be the finest thing in the world!”

“And what d’you know about it?” said Mr. Grice, kindling in a strange
manner. “Pardon me. What does any man or woman brought up in England
know about the sea? They profess to know; but they don’t.”

The bitterness with which he spoke was ominous of what was to come. He
led her off to his own quarters, and, sitting on the edge of a
brass-bound table, looking uncommonly like a sea-gull, with her white
tapering body and thin alert face, Mrs. Dalloway had to listen to the
tirade of a fanatical man. Did she realise, to begin with, what a very
small part of the world the land was? How peaceful, how beautiful, how
benignant in comparison the sea? The deep waters could sustain Europe
unaided if every earthly animal died of the plague to-morrow. Mr. Grice
recalled dreadful sights which he had seen in the richest city of the
world—men and women standing in line hour after hour to receive a mug
of greasy soup. “And I thought of the good flesh down here waiting and
asking to be caught. I’m not exactly a Protestant, and I’m not a
Catholic, but I could almost pray for the days of popery to come
again—because of the fasts.”

As he talked he kept opening drawers and moving little glass jars. Here
were the treasures which the great ocean had bestowed upon him—pale
fish in greenish liquids, blobs of jelly with streaming tresses, fish
with lights in their heads, they lived so deep.

“They have swum about among bones,” Clarissa sighed.

“You’re thinking of Shakespeare,” said Mr. Grice, and taking down a
copy from a shelf well lined with books, recited in an emphatic nasal
voice:

“Full fathom five thy father lies,


“A grand fellow, Shakespeare,” he said, replacing the volume.

Clarissa was so glad to hear him say so.

“Which is your favourite play? I wonder if it’s the same as mine?”

“_Henry the Fifth_,” said Mr. Grice.

“Joy!” cried Clarissa. “It is!”

_Hamlet_ was what you might call too introspective for Mr. Grice, the
sonnets too passionate; Henry the Fifth was to him the model of an
English gentleman. But his favourite reading was Huxley, Herbert
Spencer, and Henry George; while Emerson and Thomas Hardy he read for
relaxation. He was giving Mrs. Dalloway his views upon the present
state of England when the breakfast bell rung so imperiously that she
had to tear herself away, promising to come back and be shown his
sea-weeds.

The party, which had seemed so odd to her the night before, was already
gathered round the table, still under the influence of sleep, and
therefore uncommunicative, but her entrance sent a little flutter like
a breath of air through them all.

“I’ve had the most interesting talk of my life!” she exclaimed, taking
her seat beside Willoughby. “D’you realise that one of your men is a
philosopher and a poet?”

“A very interesting fellow—that’s what I always say,” said Willoughby,
distinguishing Mr. Grice. “Though Rachel finds him a bore.”

“He’s a bore when he talks about currents,” said Rachel. Her eyes were
full of sleep, but Mrs. Dalloway still seemed to her wonderful.

“I’ve never met a bore yet!” said Clarissa.

“And I should say the world was full of them!” exclaimed Helen. But her
beauty, which was radiant in the morning light, took the contrariness
from her words.

“I agree that it’s the worst one can possibly say of any one,” said
Clarissa. “How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!” she
added, with her usual air of saying something profound. “One can fancy
liking a murderer. It’s the same with dogs. Some dogs are awful bores,
poor dears.”

It happened that Richard was sitting next to Rachel. She was curiously
conscious of his presence and appearance—his well-cut clothes, his
crackling shirt-front, his cuffs with blue rings round them, and the
square-tipped, very clean fingers with the red stone on the little
finger of the left hand.

“We had a dog who was a bore and knew it,” he said, addressing her in
cool, easy tones. “He was a Skye terrier, one of those long chaps, with
little feet poking out from their hair like—like caterpillars—no, like
sofas I should say. Well, we had another dog at the same time, a black
brisk animal—a Schipperke, I think, you call them. You can’t imagine a
greater contrast. The Skye so slow and deliberate, looking up at you
like some old gentleman in the club, as much as to say, ‘You don’t
really mean it, do you?’ and the Schipperke as quick as a knife. I
liked the Skye best, I must confess. There was something pathetic about
him.”

The story seemed to have no climax.

“What happened to him?” Rachel asked.

“That’s a very sad story,” said Richard, lowering his voice and peeling
an apple. “He followed my wife in the car one day and got run over by a
brute of a cyclist.”

“Was he killed?” asked Rachel.

But Clarissa at her end of the table had overheard.

“Don’t talk of it!” she cried. “It’s a thing I can’t bear to think of
to this day.”

Surely the tears stood in her eyes?

“That’s the painful thing about pets,” said Mr. Dalloway; “they die.
The first sorrow I can remember was for the death of a dormouse. I
regret to say that I sat upon it. Still, that didn’t make one any the
less sorry. Here lies the duck that Samuel Johnson sat on, eh? I was
big for my age.”

“Then we had canaries,” he continued, “a pair of ring-doves, a lemur,
and at one time a martin.”

“Did you live in the country?” Rachel asked him.

“We lived in the country for six months of the year. When I say ‘we’ I
mean four sisters, a brother, and myself. There’s nothing like coming
of a large family. Sisters particularly are delightful.”

“Dick, you were horribly spoilt!” cried Clarissa across the table.

“No, no. Appreciated,” said Richard.

Rachel had other questions on the tip of her tongue; or rather one
enormous question, which she did not in the least know how to put into
words. The talk appeared too airy to admit of it.

“Please tell me—everything.” That was what she wanted to say. He had
drawn apart one little chink and showed astonishing treasures. It
seemed to her incredible that a man like that should be willing to talk
to her. He had sisters and pets, and once lived in the country. She
stirred her tea round and round; the bubbles which swam and clustered
in the cup seemed to her like the union of their minds.

The talk meanwhile raced past her, and when Richard suddenly stated in
a jocular tone of voice, “I’m sure Miss Vinrace, now, has secret
leanings towards Catholicism,” she had no idea what to answer, and
Helen could not help laughing at the start she gave.

However, breakfast was over and Mrs. Dalloway was rising. “I always
think religion’s like collecting beetles,” she said, summing up the
discussion as she went up the stairs with Helen. “One person has a
passion for black beetles; another hasn’t; it’s no good arguing about
it. What’s _your_ black beetle now?”

“I suppose it’s my children,” said Helen.

“Ah—that’s different,” Clarissa breathed. “Do tell me. You have a boy,
haven’t you? Isn’t it detestable, leaving them?”

It was as though a blue shadow had fallen across a pool. Their eyes
became deeper, and their voices more cordial. Instead of joining them
as they began to pace the deck, Rachel was indignant with the
prosperous matrons, who made her feel outside their world and
motherless, and turning back, she left them abruptly. She slammed the
door of her room, and pulled out her music. It was all old music—Bach
and Beethoven, Mozart and Purcell—the pages yellow, the engraving rough
to the finger. In three minutes she was deep in a very difficult, very
classical fugue in A, and over her face came a queer remote impersonal
expression of complete absorption and anxious satisfaction. Now she
stumbled; now she faltered and had to play the same bar twice over; but
an invisible line seemed to string the notes together, from which rose
a shape, a building. She was so far absorbed in this work, for it was
really difficult to find how all these sounds should stand together,
and drew upon the whole of her faculties, that she never heard a knock
at the door. It was burst impulsively open, and Mrs. Dalloway stood in
the room leaving the door open, so that a strip of the white deck and
of the blue sea appeared through the opening. The shape of the Bach
fugue crashed to the ground.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” Clarissa implored. “I heard you playing, and
I couldn’t resist. I adore Bach!”

Rachel flushed and fumbled her fingers in her lap. She stood up
awkwardly.

“It’s too difficult,” she said.

“But you were playing quite splendidly! I ought to have stayed
outside.”

“No,” said Rachel.

She slid _Cowper’s Letters_ and _Wuthering Heights_ out of the
arm-chair, so that Clarissa was invited to sit there.

“What a dear little room!” she said, looking round. “Oh, _Cowper’s
Letters_! I’ve never read them. Are they nice?”

“Rather dull,” said Rachel.

“He wrote awfully well, didn’t he?” said Clarissa; “—if one likes that
kind of thing—finished his sentences and all that. _Wuthering Heights_!
Ah—that’s more in my line. I really couldn’t exist without the Brontes!
Don’t you love them? Still, on the whole, I’d rather live without them
than without Jane Austen.”

Lightly and at random though she spoke, her manner conveyed an
extraordinary degree of sympathy and desire to befriend.

“Jane Austen? I don’t like Jane Austen,” said Rachel.

“You monster!” Clarissa exclaimed. “I can only just forgive you. Tell
me why?”

“She’s so—so—well, so like a tight plait,” Rachel floundered.

“Ah—I see what you mean. But I don’t agree. And you won’t when you’re
older. At your age I only liked Shelley. I can remember sobbing over
him in the garden.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night,
Envy and calumny and hate and pain—


you remember?

Can touch him not and torture not again
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain.


How divine!—and yet what nonsense!” She looked lightly round the room.
“I always think it’s _living_, not dying, that counts. I really respect
some snuffy old stockbroker who’s gone on adding up column after column
all his days, and trotting back to his villa at Brixton with some old
pug dog he worships, and a dreary little wife sitting at the end of the
table, and going off to Margate for a fortnight—I assure you I know
heaps like that—well, they seem to me _really_ nobler than poets whom
every one worships, just because they’re geniuses and die young. But I
don’t expect _you_ to agree with me!”

She pressed Rachel’s shoulder.

“Um-m-m—” she went on quoting—

Unrest which men miscall delight—


“when you’re my age you’ll see that the world is _crammed_ with
delightful things. I think young people make such a mistake about
that—not letting themselves be happy. I sometimes think that happiness
is the only thing that counts. I don’t know you well enough to say, but
I should guess you might be a little inclined to—when one’s young and
attractive—I’m going to say it!—_every_thing’s at one’s feet.” She
glanced round as much as to say, “not only a few stuffy books and
Bach.”

“I long to ask questions,” she continued. “You interest me so much. If
I’m impertinent, you must just box my ears.”

“And I—I want to ask questions,” said Rachel with such earnestness that
Mrs. Dalloway had to check her smile.

“D’you mind if we walk?” she said. “The air’s so delicious.”

She snuffed it like a racehorse as they shut the door and stood on
deck.

“Isn’t it good to be alive?” she exclaimed, and drew Rachel’s arm
within hers.

“Look, look! How exquisite!”

The shores of Portugal were beginning to lose their substance; but the
land was still the land, though at a great distance. They could
distinguish the little towns that were sprinkled in the folds of the
hills, and the smoke rising faintly. The towns appeared to be very
small in comparison with the great purple mountains behind them.

“Honestly, though,” said Clarissa, having looked, “I don’t like views.
They’re too inhuman.” They walked on.

“How odd it is!” she continued impulsively. “This time yesterday we’d
never met. I was packing in a stuffy little room in the hotel. We know
absolutely nothing about each other—and yet—I feel as if I _did_ know
you!”

“You have children—your husband was in Parliament?”

“You’ve never been to school, and you live—?”

“With my aunts at Richmond.”

“Richmond?”

“You see, my aunts like the Park. They like the quiet.”

“And you don’t! I understand!” Clarissa laughed.

“I like walking in the Park alone; but not—with the dogs,” she
finished.

“No; and some people _are_ dogs; aren’t they?” said Clarissa, as if she
had guessed a secret. “But not every one—oh no, not every one.”

“Not every one,” said Rachel, and stopped.

“I can quite imagine you walking alone,” said Clarissa: “and
thinking—in a little world of your own. But how you will enjoy it—some
day!”

“I shall enjoy walking with a man—is that what you mean?” said Rachel,
regarding Mrs. Dalloway with her large enquiring eyes.

“I wasn’t thinking of a man particularly,” said Clarissa. “But you
will.”

“No. I shall never marry,” Rachel determined.

“I shouldn’t be so sure of that,” said Clarissa. Her sidelong glance
told Rachel that she found her attractive although she was inexplicably
amused.

“Why do people marry?” Rachel asked.

“That’s what you’re going to find out,” Clarissa laughed.

Rachel followed her eyes and found that they rested for a second, on
the robust figure of Richard Dalloway, who was engaged in striking a
match on the sole of his boot; while Willoughby expounded something,
which seemed to be of great interest to them both.

“There’s nothing like it,” she concluded. “Do tell me about the
Ambroses. Or am I asking too many questions?”

“I find you easy to talk to,” said Rachel.

The short sketch of the Ambroses was, however, somewhat perfunctory,
and contained little but the fact that Mr. Ambrose was her uncle.

“Your mother’s brother?”

When a name has dropped out of use, the lightest touch upon it tells.
Mrs. Dalloway went on:

“Are you like your mother?”

“No; she was different,” said Rachel.

She was overcome by an intense desire to tell Mrs. Dalloway things she
had never told any one—things she had not realised herself until this
moment.

“I am lonely,” she began. “I want—” She did not know what she wanted,
so that she could not finish the sentence; but her lip quivered.

But it seemed that Mrs. Dalloway was able to understand without words.

“I know,” she said, actually putting one arm round Rachel’s shoulder.
“When I was your age I wanted too. No one understood until I met
Richard. He gave me all I wanted. He’s man and woman as well.” Her eyes
rested upon Mr. Dalloway, leaning upon the rail, still talking. “Don’t
think I say that because I’m his wife—I see his faults more clearly
than I see any one else’s. What one wants in the person one lives with
is that they should keep one at one’s best. I often wonder what I’ve
done to be so happy!” she exclaimed, and a tear slid down her cheek.
She wiped it away, squeezed Rachel’s hand, and exclaimed:

“How good life is!” At that moment, standing out in the fresh breeze,
with the sun upon the waves, and Mrs. Dalloway’s hand upon her arm, it
seemed indeed as if life which had been unnamed before was infinitely
wonderful, and too good to be true.

Here Helen passed them, and seeing Rachel arm-in-arm with a comparative
stranger, looking excited, was amused, but at the same time slightly
irritated. But they were immediately joined by Richard, who had enjoyed
a very interesting talk with Willoughby and was in a sociable mood.

“Observe my Panama,” he said, touching the brim of his hat. “Are you
aware, Miss Vinrace, how much can be done to induce fine weather by
appropriate headdress? I have determined that it is a hot summer day; I
warn you that nothing you can say will shake me. Therefore I am going
to sit down. I advise you to follow my example.” Three chairs in a row
invited them to be seated.

Leaning back, Richard surveyed the waves.

“That’s a very pretty blue,” he said. “But there’s a little too much of
it. Variety is essential to a view. Thus, if you have hills you ought
to have a river; if a river, hills. The best view in the world in my
opinion is that from Boars Hill on a fine day—it must be a fine day,
mark you—A rug?—Oh, thank you, my dear . . . in that case you have also
the advantage of associations—the Past.”

“D’you want to talk, Dick, or shall I read aloud?”

Clarissa had fetched a book with the rugs.

“_Persuasion_,” announced Richard, examining the volume.

“That’s for Miss Vinrace,” said Clarissa. “She can’t bear our beloved
Jane.”

“That—if I may say so—is because you have not read her,” said Richard.
“She is incomparably the greatest female writer we possess.”

“She is the greatest,” he continued, “and for this reason: she does not
attempt to write like a man. Every other woman does; on that account, I
don’t read ’em.”

“Produce your instances, Miss Vinrace,” he went on, joining his
finger-tips. “I’m ready to be converted.”

He waited, while Rachel vainly tried to vindicate her sex from the
slight he put upon it.

“I’m afraid he’s right,” said Clarissa. “He generally is—the wretch!”

“I brought _Persuasion_,” she went on, “because I thought it was a
little less threadbare than the others—though, Dick, it’s no good
_your_ pretending to know Jane by heart, considering that she always
sends you to sleep!”

“After the labours of legislation, I deserve sleep,” said Richard.

“You’re not to think about those guns,” said Clarissa, seeing that his
eye, passing over the waves, still sought the land meditatively, “or
about navies, or empires, or anything.” So saying she opened the book
and began to read:

“‘Sir Walter Elliott, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man
who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the
_Baronetage_’—don’t you know Sir Walter?—‘There he found occupation for
an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one.’ She does write
well, doesn’t she? ‘There—’” She read on in a light humorous voice. She
was determined that Sir Walter should take her husband’s mind off the
guns of Britain, and divert him in an exquisite, quaint, sprightly, and
slightly ridiculous world. After a time it appeared that the sun was
sinking in that world, and the points becoming softer. Rachel looked up
to see what caused the change. Richard’s eyelids were closing and
opening; opening and closing. A loud nasal breath announced that he no
longer considered appearances, that he was sound asleep.

“Triumph!” Clarissa whispered at the end of a sentence. Suddenly she
raised her hand in protest. A sailor hesitated; she gave the book to
Rachel, and stepped lightly to take the message—“Mr. Grice wished to
know if it was convenient,” etc. She followed him. Ridley, who had
prowled unheeded, started forward, stopped, and, with a gesture of
disgust, strode off to his study. The sleeping politician was left in
Rachel’s charge. She read a sentence, and took a look at him. In sleep
he looked like a coat hanging at the end of a bed; there were all the
wrinkles, and the sleeves and trousers kept their shape though no
longer filled out by legs and arms. You can then best judge the age and
state of the coat. She looked him all over until it seemed to her that
he must protest.

He was a man of forty perhaps; and here there were lines round his
eyes, and there curious clefts in his cheeks. Slightly battered he
appeared, but dogged and in the prime of life.

“Sisters and a dormouse and some canaries,” Rachel murmured, never
taking her eyes off him. “I wonder, I wonder.” She ceased, her chin
upon her hand, still looking at him. A bell chimed behind them, and
Richard raised his head. Then he opened his eyes which wore for a
second the queer look of a shortsighted person’s whose spectacles are
lost. It took him a moment to recover from the impropriety of having
snored, and possibly grunted, before a young lady. To wake and find
oneself left alone with one was also slightly disconcerting.

“I suppose I’ve been dozing,” he said. “What’s happened to everyone?
Clarissa?”

“Mrs. Dalloway has gone to look at Mr. Grice’s fish,” Rachel replied.

“I might have guessed,” said Richard. “It’s a common occurrence. And
how have you improved the shining hour? Have you become a convert?”

“I don’t think I’ve read a line,” said Rachel.

“That’s what I always find. There are too many things to look at. I
find nature very stimulating myself. My best ideas have come to me out
of doors.”

“When you were walking?”

“Walking—riding—yachting—I suppose the most momentous conversations of
my life took place while perambulating the great court at Trinity. I
was at both universities. It was a fad of my father’s. He thought it
broadening to the mind. I think I agree with him. I can remember—what
an age ago it seems!—settling the basis of a future state with the
present Secretary for India. We thought ourselves very wise. I’m not
sure we weren’t. We were happy, Miss Vinrace, and we were young—gifts
which make for wisdom.”

“Have you done what you said you’d do?” she asked.

“A searching question! I answer—Yes and No. If on the one hand I have
not accomplished what I set out to accomplish—which of us does!—on the
other I can fairly say this: I have not lowered my ideal.”

He looked resolutely at a sea-gull, as though his ideal flew on the
wings of the bird.

“But,” said Rachel, “what _is_ your ideal?”

“There you ask too much, Miss Vinrace,” said Richard playfully.

She could only say that she wanted to know, and Richard was
sufficiently amused to answer.

“Well, how shall I reply? In one word—Unity. Unity of aim, of dominion,
of progress. The dispersion of the best ideas over the greatest area.”

“The English?”

“I grant that the English seem, on the whole, whiter than most men,
their records cleaner. But, good Lord, don’t run away with the idea
that I don’t see the drawbacks—horrors—unmentionable things done in our
very midst! I’m under no illusions. Few people, I suppose, have fewer
illusions than I have. Have you ever been in a factory, Miss
Vinrace!—No, I suppose not—I may say I hope not.”

As for Rachel, she had scarcely walked through a poor street, and
always under the escort of father, maid, or aunts.

“I was going to say that if you’d ever seen the kind of thing that’s
going on round you, you’d understand what it is that makes me and men
like me politicians. You asked me a moment ago whether I’d done what I
set out to do. Well, when I consider my life, there is one fact I admit
that I’m proud of; owing to me some thousands of girls in
Lancashire—and many thousands to come after them—can spend an hour
every day in the open air which their mothers had to spend over their
looms. I’m prouder of that, I own, than I should be of writing Keats
and Shelley into the bargain!”

It became painful to Rachel to be one of those who write Keats and
Shelley. She liked Richard Dalloway, and warmed as he warmed. He seemed
to mean what he said.

“I know nothing!” she exclaimed.

“It’s far better that you should know nothing,” he said paternally,
“and you wrong yourself, I’m sure. You play very nicely, I’m told, and
I’ve no doubt you’ve read heaps of learned books.”

Elderly banter would no longer check her.

“You talk of unity,” she said. “You ought to make me understand.”

“I never allow my wife to talk politics,” he said seriously. “For this
reason. It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are,
both to fight and to have ideals. If I have preserved mine, as I am
thankful to say that in great measure I have, it is due to the fact
that I have been able to come home to my wife in the evening and to
find that she has spent her day in calling, music, play with the
children, domestic duties—what you will; her illusions have not been
destroyed. She gives me courage to go on. The strain of public life is
very great,” he added.

This made him appear a battered martyr, parting every day with some of
the finest gold, in the service of mankind.

“I can’t think,” Rachel exclaimed, “how any one does it!”

“Explain, Miss Vinrace,” said Richard. “This is a matter I want to
clear up.”

His kindness was genuine, and she determined to take the chance he gave
her, although to talk to a man of such worth and authority made her
heart beat.

“It seems to me like this,” she began, doing her best first to
recollect and then to expose her shivering private visions.

“There’s an old widow in her room, somewhere, let us suppose in the
suburbs of Leeds.”

Richard bent his head to show that he accepted the widow.

“In London you’re spending your life, talking, writing things, getting
bills through, missing what seems natural. The result of it all is that
she goes to her cupboard and finds a little more tea, a few lumps of
sugar, or a little less tea and a newspaper. Widows all over the
country I admit do this. Still, there’s the mind of the widow—the
affections; those you leave untouched. But you waste you own.”

“If the widow goes to her cupboard and finds it bare,” Richard
answered, “her spiritual outlook we may admit will be affected. If I
may pick holes in your philosophy, Miss Vinrace, which has its merits,
I would point out that a human being is not a set of compartments, but
an organism. Imagination, Miss Vinrace; use your imagination; that’s
where you young Liberals fail. Conceive the world as a whole. Now for
your second point; when you assert that in trying to set the house in
order for the benefit of the young generation I am wasting my higher
capabilities, I totally disagree with you. I can conceive no more
exalted aim—to be the citizen of the Empire. Look at it in this way,
Miss Vinrace; conceive the state as a complicated machine; we citizens
are parts of that machine; some fulfil more important duties; others
(perhaps I am one of them) serve only to connect some obscure parts of
the mechanism, concealed from the public eye. Yet if the meanest screw
fails in its task, the proper working of the whole is imperilled.”

It was impossible to combine the image of a lean black widow, gazing
out of her window, and longing for some one to talk to, with the image
of a vast machine, such as one sees at South Kensington, thumping,
thumping, thumping. The attempt at communication had been a failure.

“We don’t seem to understand each other,” she said.

“Shall I say something that will make you very angry?” he replied.

“It won’t,” said Rachel.

“Well, then; no woman has what I may call the political instinct. You
have very great virtues; I am the first, I hope, to admit that; but I
have never met a woman who even saw what is meant by statesmanship. I
am going to make you still more angry. I hope that I never shall meet
such a woman. Now, Miss Vinrace, are we enemies for life?”

Vanity, irritation, and a thrusting desire to be understood, urged her
to make another attempt.

“Under the streets, in the sewers, in the wires, in the telephones,
there is something alive; is that what you mean? In things like
dust-carts, and men mending roads? You feel that all the time when you
walk about London, and when you turn on a tap and the water comes?”

“Certainly,” said Richard. “I understand you to mean that the whole of
modern society is based upon cooperative effort. If only more people
would realise that, Miss Vinrace, there would be fewer of your old
widows in solitary lodgings!”

Rachel considered.

“Are you a Liberal or are you a Conservative?” she asked.

“I call myself a Conservative for convenience sake,” said Richard,
smiling. “But there is more in common between the two parties than
people generally allow.”

There was a pause, which did not come on Rachel’s side from any lack of
things to say; as usual she could not say them, and was further
confused by the fact that the time for talking probably ran short. She
was haunted by absurd jumbled ideas—how, if one went back far enough,
everything perhaps was intelligible; everything was in common; for the
mammoths who pastured in the fields of Richmond High Street had turned
into paving stones and boxes full of ribbon, and her aunts.

“Did you say you lived in the country when you were a child?” she
asked.

Crude as her manners seemed to him, Richard was flattered. There could
be no doubt that her interest was genuine.

“I did,” he smiled.

“And what happened?” she asked. “Or do I ask too many questions?”

“I’m flattered, I assure you. But—let me see—what happened? Well,
riding, lessons, sisters. There was an enchanted rubbish heap, I
remember, where all kinds of queer things happened. Odd, what things
impress children! I can remember the look of the place to this day.
It’s a fallacy to think that children are happy. They’re not; they’re
unhappy. I’ve never suffered so much as I did when I was a child.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I didn’t get on well with my father,” said Richard shortly. “He was a
very able man, but hard. Well—it makes one determined not to sin in
that way oneself. Children never forget injustice. They forgive heaps
of things grown-up people mind; but that sin is the unpardonable sin.
Mind you—I daresay I was a difficult child to manage; but when I think
what I was ready to give! No, I was more sinned against than sinning.
And then I went to school, where I did very fairly well; and and then,
as I say, my father sent me to both universities. . . . D’you know,
Miss Vinrace, you’ve made me think? How little, after all, one can tell
anybody about one’s life! Here I sit; there you sit; both, I doubt not,
chock-full of the most interesting experiences, ideas, emotions; yet
how communicate? I’ve told you what every second person you meet might
tell you.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s the way of saying things, isn’t it,
not the things?”

“True,” said Richard. “Perfectly true.” He paused. “When I look back
over my life—I’m forty-two—what are the great facts that stand out?
What were the revelations, if I may call them so? The misery of the
poor and—” (he hesitated and pitched over) “love!”

Upon that word he lowered his voice; it was a word that seemed to
unveil the skies for Rachel.

“It’s an odd thing to say to a young lady,” he continued. “But have you
any idea what—what I mean by that? No, of course not. I don’t use the
word in a conventional sense. I use it as young men use it. Girls are
kept very ignorant, aren’t they? Perhaps it’s wise—perhaps—You _don’t_
know?”

He spoke as if he had lost consciousness of what he was saying.

“No; I don’t,” she said, scarcely speaking above her breath.

“Warships, Dick! Over there! Look!” Clarissa, released from Mr. Grice,
appreciative of all his seaweeds, skimmed towards them, gesticulating.

She had sighted two sinister grey vessels, low in the water, and bald
as bone, one closely following the other with the look of eyeless
beasts seeking their prey. Consciousness returned to Richard instantly.

“By George!” he exclaimed, and stood shielding his eyes.

“Ours, Dick?” said Clarissa.

“The Mediterranean Fleet,” he answered.

The _Euphrosyne_ was slowly dipping her flag. Richard raised his hat.
Convulsively Clarissa squeezed Rachel’s hand.

“Aren’t you glad to be English!” she said.

The warships drew past, casting a curious effect of discipline and
sadness upon the waters, and it was not until they were again invisible
that people spoke to each other naturally. At lunch the talk was all of
valour and death, and the magnificent qualities of British admirals.
Clarissa quoted one poet, Willoughby quoted another. Life on board a
man-of-war was splendid, so they agreed, and sailors, whenever one met
them, were quite especially nice and simple.

This being so, no one liked it when Helen remarked that it seemed to
her as wrong to keep sailors as to keep a Zoo, and that as for dying on
a battle-field, surely it was time we ceased to praise courage—“or to
write bad poetry about it,” snarled Pepper.

But Helen was really wondering why Rachel, sitting silent, looked so
queer and flushed.




CHAPTER V


She was not able to follow up her observations, however, or to come to
any conclusion, for by one of those accidents which are liable to
happen at sea, the whole course of their lives was now put out of
order.

Even at tea the floor rose beneath their feet and pitched too low
again, and at dinner the ship seemed to groan and strain as though a
lash were descending. She who had been a broad-backed dray-horse, upon
whose hind-quarters pierrots might waltz, became a colt in a field. The
plates slanted away from the knives, and Mrs. Dalloway’s face blanched
for a second as she helped herself and saw the potatoes roll this way
and that. Willoughby, of course, extolled the virtues of his ship, and
quoted what had been said of her by experts and distinguished
passengers, for he loved his own possessions. Still, dinner was uneasy,
and directly the ladies were alone Clarissa owned that she would be
better off in bed, and went, smiling bravely.

Next morning the storm was on them, and no politeness could ignore it.
Mrs. Dalloway stayed in her room. Richard faced three meals, eating
valiantly at each; but at the third, certain glazed asparagus swimming
in oil finally conquered him.

“That beats me,” he said, and withdrew.

“Now we are alone once more,” remarked William Pepper, looking round
the table; but no one was ready to engage him in talk, and the meal
ended in silence.

On the following day they met—but as flying leaves meet in the air.
Sick they were not; but the wind propelled them hastily into rooms,
violently downstairs. They passed each other gasping on deck; they
shouted across tables. They wore fur coats; and Helen was never seen
without a bandanna on her head. For comfort they retreated to their
cabins, where with tightly wedged feet they let the ship bounce and
tumble. Their sensations were the sensations of potatoes in a sack on a
galloping horse. The world outside was merely a violent grey tumult.
For two days they had a perfect rest from their old emotions. Rachel
had just enough consciousness to suppose herself a donkey on the summit
of a moor in a hail-storm, with its coat blown into furrows; then she
became a wizened tree, perpetually driven back by the salt Atlantic
gale.

Helen, on the other hand, staggered to Mrs. Dalloway’s door, knocked,
could not be heard for the slamming of doors and the battering of wind,
and entered.

There were basins, of course. Mrs. Dalloway lay half-raised on a
pillow, and did not open her eyes. Then she murmured, “Oh, Dick, is
that you?”

Helen shouted—for she was thrown against the washstand—“How are you?”

Clarissa opened one eye. It gave her an incredibly dissipated
appearance. “Awful!” she gasped. Her lips were white inside.

Planting her feet wide, Helen contrived to pour champagne into a
tumbler with a tooth-brush in it.

“Champagne,” she said.

“There’s a tooth-brush in it,” murmured Clarissa, and smiled; it might
have been the contortion of one weeping. She drank.

“Disgusting,” she whispered, indicating the basins. Relics of humour
still played over her face like moonshine.

“Want more?” Helen shouted. Speech was again beyond Clarissa’s reach.
The wind laid the ship shivering on her side. Pale agonies crossed Mrs.
Dalloway in waves. When the curtains flapped, grey lights puffed across
her. Between the spasms of the storm, Helen made the curtain fast,
shook the pillows, stretched the bed-clothes, and smoothed the hot
nostrils and forehead with cold scent.

“You _are_ good!” Clarissa gasped. “Horrid mess!”

She was trying to apologise for white underclothes fallen and scattered
on the floor. For one second she opened a single eye, and saw that the
room was tidy.

“That’s nice,” she gasped.

Helen left her; far, far away she knew that she felt a kind of liking
for Mrs. Dalloway. She could not help respecting her spirit and her
desire, even in the throes of sickness, for a tidy bedroom. Her
petticoats, however, rose above her knees.

Quite suddenly the storm relaxed its grasp. It happened at tea; the
expected paroxysm of the blast gave out just as it reached its climax
and dwindled away, and the ship instead of taking the usual plunge went
steadily. The monotonous order of plunging and rising, roaring and
relaxing, was interfered with, and every one at table looked up and
felt something loosen within them. The strain was slackened and human
feelings began to peep again, as they do when daylight shows at the end
of a tunnel.

“Try a turn with me,” Ridley called across to Rachel.

“Foolish!” cried Helen, but they went stumbling up the ladder. Choked
by the wind their spirits rose with a rush, for on the skirts of all
the grey tumult was a misty spot of gold. Instantly the world dropped
into shape; they were no longer atoms flying in the void, but people
riding a triumphant ship on the back of the sea. Wind and space were
banished; the world floated like an apple in a tub, and the mind of
man, which had been unmoored also, once more attached itself to the old
beliefs.

Having scrambled twice round the ship and received many sound cuffs
from the wind, they saw a sailor’s face positively shine golden. They
looked, and beheld a complete yellow circle of sun; next minute it was
traversed by sailing stands of cloud, and then completely hidden. By
breakfast the next morning, however, the sky was swept clean, the
waves, although steep, were blue, and after their view of the strange
under-world, inhabited by phantoms, people began to live among tea-pots
and loaves of bread with greater zest than ever.

Richard and Clarissa, however, still remained on the borderland. She
did not attempt to sit up; her husband stood on his feet, contemplated
his waistcoat and trousers, shook his head, and then lay down again.
The inside of his brain was still rising and falling like the sea on
the stage. At four o’clock he woke from sleep and saw the sunlight make
a vivid angle across the red plush curtains and the grey tweed
trousers. The ordinary world outside slid into his mind, and by the
time he was dressed he was an English gentleman again.

He stood beside his wife. She pulled him down to her by the lapel of
his coat, kissed him, and held him fast for a minute.

“Go and get a breath of air, Dick,” she said. “You look quite washed
out. . . . How nice you smell! . . . And be polite to that woman. She
was so kind to me.”

Thereupon Mrs. Dalloway turned to the cool side of her pillow, terribly
flattened but still invincible.

Richard found Helen talking to her brother-in-law, over two dishes of
yellow cake and smooth bread and butter.

“You look very ill!” she exclaimed on seeing him. “Come and have some
tea.”

He remarked that the hands that moved about the cups were beautiful.

“I hear you’ve been very good to my wife,” he said. “She’s had an awful
time of it. You came in and fed her with champagne. Were you among the
saved yourself?”

“I? Oh, I haven’t been sick for twenty years—sea-sick, I mean.”

“There are three stages of convalescence, I always say,” broke in the
hearty voice of Willoughby. “The milk stage, the bread-and-butter
stage, and the roast-beef stage. I should say you were at the
bread-and-butter stage.” He handed him the plate.

“Now, I should advise a hearty tea, then a brisk walk on deck; and by
dinner-time you’ll be clamouring for beef, eh?” He went off laughing,
excusing himself on the score of business.

“What a splendid fellow he is!” said Richard. “Always keen on
something.”

“Yes,” said Helen, “he’s always been like that.”

“This is a great undertaking of his,” Richard continued. “It’s a
business that won’t stop with ships, I should say. We shall see him in
Parliament, or I’m much mistaken. He’s the kind of man we want in
Parliament—the man who has done things.”

But Helen was not much interested in her brother-in-law.

“I expect your head’s aching, isn’t it?” she asked, pouring a fresh
cup.

“Well, it is,” said Richard. “It’s humiliating to find what a slave one
is to one’s body in this world. D’you know, I can never work without a
kettle on the hob. As often as not I don’t drink tea, but I must feel
that I can if I want to.”

“That’s very bad for you,” said Helen.

“It shortens one’s life; but I’m afraid, Mrs. Ambrose, we politicians
must make up our minds to that at the outset. We’ve got to burn the
candle at both ends, or—”

“You’ve cooked your goose!” said Helen brightly.

“We can’t make you take us seriously, Mrs. Ambrose,” he protested. “May
I ask how you’ve spent your time? Reading—philosophy?” (He saw the
black book.) “Metaphysics and fishing!” he exclaimed. “If I had to live
again I believe I should devote myself to one or the other.” He began
turning the pages.

“‘Good, then, is indefinable,’” he read out. “How jolly to think that’s
going on still! ‘So far as I know there is only one ethical writer,
Professor Henry Sidgwick, who has clearly recognised and stated this
fact.’ That’s just the kind of thing we used to talk about when we were
boys. I can remember arguing until five in the morning with Duffy—now
Secretary for India—pacing round and round those cloisters until we
decided it was too late to go to bed, and we went for a ride instead.
Whether we ever came to any conclusion—that’s another matter. Still,
it’s the arguing that counts. It’s things like that that stand out in
life. Nothing’s been quite so vivid since. It’s the philosophers, it’s
the scholars,” he continued, “they’re the people who pass the torch,
who keep the light burning by which we live. Being a politician doesn’t
necessarily blind one to that, Mrs. Ambrose.”

“No. Why should it?” said Helen. “But can you remember if your wife
takes sugar?”

She lifted the tray and went off with it to Mrs. Dalloway.

Richard twisted a muffler twice round his throat and struggled up on
deck. His body, which had grown white and tender in a dark room,
tingled all over in the fresh air. He felt himself a man undoubtedly in
the prime of life. Pride glowed in his eye as he let the wind buffet
him and stood firm. With his head slightly lowered he sheered round
corners, strode uphill, and met the blast. There was a collision. For a
second he could not see what the body was he had run into. “Sorry.”
“Sorry.” It was Rachel who apologised. They both laughed, too much
blown about to speak. She drove open the door of her room and stepped
into its calm. In order to speak to her, it was necessary that Richard
should follow. They stood in a whirlpool of wind; papers began flying
round in circles, the door crashed to, and they tumbled, laughing, into
chairs. Richard sat upon Bach.

“My word! What a tempest!” he exclaimed.

“Fine, isn’t it?” said Rachel. Certainly the struggle and wind had
given her a decision she lacked; red was in her cheeks, and her hair
was down.

“Oh, what fun!” he cried. “What am I sitting on? Is this your room? How
jolly!” “There—sit there,” she commanded. Cowper slid once more.

“How jolly to meet again,” said Richard. “It seems an age. _Cowper’s
Letters_? . . . Bach? . . . _Wuthering Heights_? . . . Is this where
you meditate on the world, and then come out and pose poor politicians
with questions? In the intervals of sea-sickness I’ve thought a lot of
our talk. I assure you, you made me think.”

“I made you think! But why?”

“What solitary icebergs we are, Miss Vinrace! How little we can
communicate! There are lots of things I should like to tell you
about—to hear your opinion of. Have you ever read Burke?”

“Burke?” she repeated. “Who was Burke?”

“No? Well, then I shall make a point of sending you a copy. _The Speech
on the French Revolution_—_The American Rebellion_? Which shall it be,
I wonder?” He noted something in his pocket-book. “And then you must
write and tell me what you think of it. This reticence—this
isolation—that’s what’s the matter with modern life! Now, tell me about
yourself. What are your interests and occupations? I should imagine
that you were a person with very strong interests. Of course you are!
Good God! When I think of the age we live in, with its opportunities
and possibilities, the mass of things to be done and enjoyed—why
haven’t we ten lives instead of one? But about yourself?”

“You see, I’m a woman,” said Rachel.

“I know—I know,” said Richard, throwing his head back, and drawing his
fingers across his eyes.

“How strange to be a woman! A young and beautiful woman,” he continued
sententiously, “has the whole world at her feet. That’s true, Miss
Vinrace. You have an inestimable power—for good or for evil. What
couldn’t you do—” he broke off.

“What?” asked Rachel.

“You have beauty,” he said. The ship lurched. Rachel fell slightly
forward. Richard took her in his arms and kissed her. Holding her
tight, he kissed her passionately, so that she felt the hardness of his
body and the roughness of his cheek printed upon hers. She fell back in
her chair, with tremendous beats of the heart, each of which sent black
waves across her eyes. He clasped his forehead in his hands.

“You tempt me,” he said. The tone of his voice was terrifying. He
seemed choked in fright. They were both trembling. Rachel stood up and
went. Her head was cold, her knees shaking, and the physical pain of
the emotion was so great that she could only keep herself moving above
the great leaps of her heart. She leant upon the rail of the ship, and
gradually ceased to feel, for a chill of body and mind crept over her.
Far out between the waves little black and white sea-birds were riding.
Rising and falling with smooth and graceful movements in the hollows of
the waves they seemed singularly detached and unconcerned.

“You’re peaceful,” she said. She became peaceful too, at the same time
possessed with a strange exultation. Life seemed to hold infinite
possibilities she had never guessed at. She leant upon the rail and
looked over the troubled grey waters, where the sunlight was fitfully
scattered upon the crests of the waves, until she was cold and
absolutely calm again. Nevertheless something wonderful had happened.

At dinner, however, she did not feel exalted, but merely uncomfortable,
as if she and Richard had seen something together which is hidden in
ordinary life, so that they did not like to look at each other. Richard
slid his eyes over her uneasily once, and never looked at her again.
Formal platitudes were manufactured with effort, but Willoughby was
kindled.

“Beef for Mr. Dalloway!” he shouted. “Come now—after that walk you’re
at the beef stage, Dalloway!”

Wonderful masculine stories followed about Bright and Disraeli and
coalition governments, wonderful stories which made the people at the
dinner-table seem featureless and small. After dinner, sitting alone
with Rachel under the great swinging lamp, Helen was struck by her
pallor. It once more occurred to her that there was something strange
in the girl’s behaviour.

“You look tired. Are you tired?” she asked.

“Not tired,” said Rachel. “Oh, yes, I suppose I am tired.”

Helen advised bed, and she went, not seeing Richard again. She must
have been very tired for she fell asleep at once, but after an hour or
two of dreamless sleep, she dreamt. She dreamt that she was walking
down a long tunnel, which grew so narrow by degrees that she could
touch the damp bricks on either side. At length the tunnel opened and
became a vault; she found herself trapped in it, bricks meeting her
wherever she turned, alone with a little deformed man who squatted on
the floor gibbering, with long nails. His face was pitted and like the
face of an animal. The wall behind him oozed with damp, which collected
into drops and slid down. Still and cold as death she lay, not daring
to move, until she broke the agony by tossing herself across the bed,
and woke crying “Oh!”

Light showed her the familiar things: her clothes, fallen off the
chair; the water jug gleaming white; but the horror did not go at once.
She felt herself pursued, so that she got up and actually locked her
door. A voice moaned for her; eyes desired her. All night long
barbarian men harassed the ship; they came scuffling down the passages,
and stopped to snuffle at her door. She could not sleep again.




CHAPTER VI


“That’s the tragedy of life—as I always say!” said Mrs. Dalloway.
“Beginning things and having to end them. Still, I’m not going to let
_this_ end, if you’re willing.” It was the morning, the sea was calm,
and the ship once again was anchored not far from another shore.

She was dressed in her long fur cloak, with the veils wound around her
head, and once more the rich boxes stood on top of each other so that
the scene of a few days back seemed to be repeated.

“D’you suppose we shall ever meet in London?” said Ridley ironically.
“You’ll have forgotten all about me by the time you step out there.”

He pointed to the shore of the little bay, where they could now see the
separate trees with moving branches.

“How horrid you are!” she laughed. “Rachel’s coming to see me
anyhow—the instant you get back,” she said, pressing Rachel’s arm.
“Now—you’ve no excuse!”

With a silver pencil she wrote her name and address on the flyleaf of
_Persuasion_, and gave the book to Rachel. Sailors were shouldering the
luggage, and people were beginning to congregate. There were Captain
Cobbold, Mr. Grice, Willoughby, Helen, and an obscure grateful man in a
blue jersey.

“Oh, it’s time,” said Clarissa. “Well, good-bye. I _do_ like you,” she
murmured as she kissed Rachel. People in the way made it unnecessary
for Richard to shake Rachel by the hand; he managed to look at her very
stiffly for a second before he followed his wife down the ship’s side.

The boat separating from the vessel made off towards the land, and for
some minutes Helen, Ridley, and Rachel leant over the rail, watching.
Once Mrs. Dalloway turned and waved; but the boat steadily grew smaller
and smaller until it ceased to rise and fall, and nothing could be seen
save two resolute backs.

“Well, that’s over,” said Ridley after a long silence. “We shall never
see _them_ again,” he added, turning to go to his books. A feeling of
emptiness and melancholy came over them; they knew in their hearts that
it was over, and that they had parted for ever, and the knowledge
filled them with far greater depression than the length of their
acquaintance seemed to justify. Even as the boat pulled away they could
feel other sights and sounds beginning to take the place of the
Dalloways, and the feeling was so unpleasant that they tried to resist
it. For so, too, would they be forgotten.

In much the same way as Mrs. Chailey downstairs was sweeping the
withered rose-leaves off the dressing-table, so Helen was anxious to
make things straight again after the visitors had gone. Rachel’s
obvious languor and listlessness made her an easy prey, and indeed
Helen had devised a kind of trap. That something had happened she now
felt pretty certain; moreover, she had come to think that they had been
strangers long enough; she wished to know what the girl was like,
partly of course because Rachel showed no disposition to be known. So,
as they turned from the rail, she said:

“Come and talk to me instead of practising,” and led the way to the
sheltered side where the deck-chairs were stretched in the sun. Rachel
followed her indifferently. Her mind was absorbed by Richard; by the
extreme strangeness of what had happened, and by a thousand feelings of
which she had not been conscious before. She made scarcely any attempt
to listen to what Helen was saying, as Helen indulged in commonplaces
to begin with. While Mrs. Ambrose arranged her embroidery, sucked her
silk, and threaded her needle, she lay back gazing at the horizon.

“Did you like those people?” Helen asked her casually.

“Yes,” she replied blankly.

“You talked to him, didn’t you?”

She said nothing for a minute.

“He kissed me,” she said without any change of tone.

Helen started, looked at her, but could not make out what she felt.

“M-m-m’yes,” she said, after a pause. “I thought he was that kind of
man.”

“What kind of man?” said Rachel.

“Pompous and sentimental.”

“I like him,” said Rachel.

“So you really didn’t mind?”

For the first time since Helen had known her Rachel’s eyes lit up
brightly.

“I did mind,” she said vehemently. “I dreamt. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Tell me what happened,” said Helen. She had to keep her lips from
twitching as she listened to Rachel’s story. It was poured out abruptly
with great seriousness and no sense of humour.

“We talked about politics. He told me what he had done for the poor
somewhere. I asked him all sorts of questions. He told me about his own
life. The day before yesterday, after the storm, he came in to see me.
It happened then, quite suddenly. He kissed me. I don’t know why.” As
she spoke she grew flushed. “I was a good deal excited,” she continued.
“But I didn’t mind till afterwards; when—” she paused, and saw the
figure of the bloated little man again—“I became terrified.”

From the look in her eyes it was evident she was again terrified. Helen
was really at a loss what to say. From the little she knew of Rachel’s
upbringing she supposed that she had been kept entirely ignorant as to
the relations of men with women. With a shyness which she felt with
women and not with men she did not like to explain simply what these
are. Therefore she took the other course and belittled the whole
affair.

“Oh, well,” she said, “He was a silly creature, and if I were you, I’d
think no more about it.”

“No,” said Rachel, sitting bolt upright, “I shan’t do that. I shall
think about it all day and all night until I find out exactly what it
does mean.”

“Don’t you ever read?” Helen asked tentatively.

“_Cowper’s Letters_—that kind of thing. Father gets them for me or my
Aunts.”

Helen could hardly restrain herself from saying out loud what she
thought of a man who brought up his daughter so that at the age of
twenty-four she scarcely knew that men desired women and was terrified
by a kiss. She had good reason to fear that Rachel had made herself
incredibly ridiculous.

“You don’t know many men?” she asked.

“Mr. Pepper,” said Rachel ironically.

“So no one’s ever wanted to marry you?”

“No,” she answered ingenuously.

Helen reflected that as, from what she had said, Rachel certainly would
think these things out, it might be as well to help her.

“You oughtn’t to be frightened,” she said. “It’s the most natural thing
in the world. Men will want to kiss you, just as they’ll want to marry
you. The pity is to get things out of proportion. It’s like noticing
the noises people make when they eat, or men spitting; or, in short,
any small thing that gets on one’s nerves.”

Rachel seemed to be inattentive to these remarks.

“Tell me,” she said suddenly, “what are those women in Piccadilly?”

“In Picadilly? They are prostituted,” said Helen.

“It _is_ terrifying—it _is_ disgusting,” Rachel asserted, as if she
included Helen in the hatred.

“It is,” said Helen. “But—”

“I did like him,” Rachel mused, as if speaking to herself. “I wanted to
talk to him; I wanted to know what he’d done. The women in Lancashire—”

It seemed to her as she recalled their talk that there was something
lovable about Richard, good in their attempted friendship, and
strangely piteous in the way they had parted.

The softening of her mood was apparent to Helen.

“You see,” she said, “you must take things as they are; and if you want
friendship with men you must run risks. Personally,” she continued,
breaking into a smile, “I think it’s worth it; I don’t mind being
kissed; I’m rather jealous, I believe, that Mr. Dalloway kissed you and
didn’t kiss me. Though,” she added, “he bored me considerably.”

But Rachel did not return the smile or dismiss the whole affair, as
Helen meant her to. Her mind was working very quickly, inconsistently
and painfully. Helen’s words hewed down great blocks which had stood
there always, and the light which came in was cold. After sitting for a
time with fixed eyes, she burst out:

“So that’s why I can’t walk alone!”

By this new light she saw her life for the first time a creeping
hedged-in thing, driven cautiously between high walls, here turned
aside, there plunged in darkness, made dull and crippled for ever—her
life that was the only chance she had—a thousand words and actions
became plain to her.

“Because men are brutes! I hate men!” she exclaimed.

“I thought you said you liked him?” said Helen.

“I liked him, and I liked being kissed,” she answered, as if that only
added more difficulties to her problem.

Helen was surprised to see how genuine both shock and problem were, but
she could think of no way of easing the difficulty except by going on
talking. She wanted to make her niece talk, and so to understand why
this rather dull, kindly, plausible politician had made so deep an
impression on her, for surely at the age of twenty-four this was not
natural.

“And did you like Mrs. Dalloway too?” she asked.

As she spoke she saw Rachel redden; for she remembered silly things she
had said, and also, it occurred to her that she treated this exquisite
woman rather badly, for Mrs. Dalloway had said that she loved her
husband.

“She was quite nice, but a thimble-pated creature,” Helen continued. “I
never heard such nonsense! Chitter-chatter-chitter-chatter—fish and the
Greek alphabet—never listened to a word any one said—chock-full of
idiotic theories about the way to bring up children—I’d far rather talk
to him any day. He was pompous, but he did at least understand what was
said to him.”

The glamour insensibly faded a little both from Richard and Clarissa.
They had not been so wonderful after all, then, in the eyes of a mature
person.

“It’s very difficult to know what people are like,” Rachel remarked,
and Helen saw with pleasure that she spoke more naturally. “I suppose I
was taken in.”

There was little doubt about that according to Helen, but she
restrained herself and said aloud:

“One has to make experiments.”

“And they _were_ nice,” said Rachel. “They were extraordinarily
interesting.” She tried to recall the image of the world as a live
thing that Richard had given her, with drains like nerves, and bad
houses like patches of diseased skin. She recalled his
watch-words—Unity—Imagination, and saw again the bubbles meeting in her
tea-cup as he spoke of sisters and canaries, boyhood and his father,
her small world becoming wonderfully enlarged.

“But all people don’t seem to you equally interesting, do they?” asked
Mrs. Ambrose.

Rachel explained that most people had hitherto been symbols; but that
when they talked to one they ceased to be symbols, and became—“I could
listen to them for ever!” she exclaimed. She then jumped up,
disappeared downstairs for a minute, and came back with a fat red book.

“_Who’s Who_,” she said, laying it upon Helen’s knee and turning the
pages. “It gives short lives of people—for instance: ‘Sir Roland Beal;
born 1852; parents from Moffatt; educated at Rugby; passed first into
R.E.; married 1878 the daughter of T. Fishwick; served in the
Bechuanaland Expedition 1884-85 (honourably mentioned). Clubs: United
Service, Naval and Military. Recreations: an enthusiastic curler.’”

Sitting on the deck at Helen’s feet she went on turning the pages and
reading biographies of bankers, writers, clergymen, sailors, surgeons,
judges, professors, statesmen, editors, philanthropists, merchants, and
actresses; what clubs they belonged to, where they lived, what games
they played, and how many acres they owned.

She became absorbed in the book.

Helen meanwhile stitched at her embroidery and thought over the things
they had said. Her conclusion was that she would very much like to show
her niece, if it were possible, how to live, or as she put it, how to
be a reasonable person. She thought that there must be something wrong
in this confusion between politics and kissing politicians, and that an
elder person ought to be able to help.

“I quite agree,” she said, “that people are very interesting; only—”
Rachel, putting her finger between the pages, looked up enquiringly.

“Only I think you ought to discriminate,” she ended. “It’s a pity to be
intimate with people who are—well, rather second-rate, like the
Dalloways, and to find it out later.”

“But how does one know?” Rachel asked.

“I really can’t tell you,” replied Helen candidly, after a moment’s
thought. “You’ll have to find out for yourself. But try and—Why don’t
you call me Helen?” she added. “‘Aunt’s’ a horrid name. I never liked
my Aunts.”

“I should like to call you Helen,” Rachel answered.

“D’you think me very unsympathetic?”

Rachel reviewed the points which Helen had certainly failed to
understand; they arose chiefly from the difference of nearly twenty
years in age between them, which made Mrs. Ambrose appear too humorous
and cool in a matter of such moment.

“No,” she said. “Some things you don’t understand, of course.”

“Of course,” Helen agreed. “So now you can go ahead and be a person on
your own account,” she added.

The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting
thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the
wind, flashed into Rachel’s mind, and she became profoundly excited at
the thought of living.

“I can by m-m-myself,” she stammered, “in spite of you, in spite of the
Dalloways, and Mr. Pepper, and Father, and my Aunts, in spite of
these?” She swept her hand across a whole page of statesmen and
soldiers.

“In spite of them all,” said Helen gravely. She then put down her
needle, and explained a plan which had come into her head as they
talked. Instead of wandering on down the Amazons until she reached some
sulphurous tropical port, where one had to lie within doors all day
beating off insects with a fan, the sensible thing to do surely was to
spend the season with them in their villa by the seaside, where among
other advantages Mrs. Ambrose herself would be at hand to—“After all,
Rachel,” she broke off, “it’s silly to pretend that because there’s
twenty years’ difference between us we therefore can’t talk to each
other like human beings.”

“No; because we like each other,” said Rachel.

“Yes,” Mrs. Ambrose agreed.

That fact, together with other facts, had been made clear by their
twenty minutes’ talk, although how they had come to these conclusions
they could not have said.

However they were come by, they were sufficiently serious to send Mrs.
Ambrose a day or two later in search of her brother-in-law. She found
him sitting in his room working, applying a stout blue pencil
authoritatively to bundles of filmy paper. Papers lay to left and to
right of him, there were great envelopes so gorged with papers that
they spilt papers on to the table. Above him hung a photograph of a
woman’s head. The need of sitting absolutely still before a Cockney
photographer had given her lips a queer little pucker, and her eyes for
the same reason looked as though she thought the whole situation
ridiculous. Nevertheless it was the head of an individual and
interesting woman, who would no doubt have turned and laughed at
Willoughby if she could have caught his eye; but when he looked up at
her he sighed profoundly. In his mind this work of his, the great
factories at Hull which showed like mountains at night, the ships that
crossed the ocean punctually, the schemes for combining this and that
and building up a solid mass of industry, was all an offering to her;
he laid his success at her feet; and was always thinking how to educate
his daughter so that Theresa might be glad. He was a very ambitious
man; and although he had not been particularly kind to her while she
lived, as Helen thought, he now believed that she watched him from
Heaven, and inspired what was good in him.

Mrs. Ambrose apologised for the interruption, and asked whether she
might speak to him about a plan of hers. Would he consent to leave his
daughter with them when they landed, instead of taking her on up the
Amazons?

“We would take great care of her,” she added, “and we should really
like it.”

Willoughby looked very grave and carefully laid aside his papers.

“She’s a good girl,” he said at length. “There is a likeness?”—he
nodded his head at the photograph of Theresa and sighed. Helen looked
at Theresa pursing up her lips before the Cockney photographer. It
suggested her in an absurd human way, and she felt an intense desire to
share some joke.

“She’s the only thing that’s left to me,” sighed Willoughby. “We go on
year after year without talking about these things—” He broke off. “But
it’s better so. Only life’s very hard.”

Helen was sorry for him, and patted him on the shoulder, but she felt
uncomfortable when her brother-in-law expressed his feelings, and took
refuge in praising Rachel, and explaining why she thought her plan
might be a good one.

“True,” said Willoughby when she had done. “The social conditions are
bound to be primitive. I should be out a good deal. I agreed because
she wished it. And of course I have complete confidence in you. . . .
You see, Helen,” he continued, becoming confidential, “I want to bring
her up as her mother would have wished. I don’t hold with these modern
views—any more than you do, eh? She’s a nice quiet girl, devoted to her
music—a little less of _that_ would do no harm. Still, it’s kept her
happy, and we lead a very quiet life at Richmond. I should like her to
begin to see more people. I want to take her about with me when I get
home. I’ve half a mind to rent a house in London, leaving my sisters at
Richmond, and take her to see one or two people who’d be kind to her
for my sake. I’m beginning to realise,” he continued, stretching
himself out, “that all this is tending to Parliament, Helen. It’s the
only way to get things done as one wants them done. I talked to
Dalloway about it. In that case, of course, I should want Rachel to be
able to take more part in things. A certain amount of entertaining
would be necessary—dinners, an occasional evening party. One’s
constituents like to be fed, I believe. In all these ways Rachel could
be of great help to me. So,” he wound up, “I should be very glad, if we
arrange this visit (which must be upon a business footing, mind), if
you could see your way to helping my girl, bringing her out—she’s a
little shy now,—making a woman of her, the kind of woman her mother
would have liked her to be,” he ended, jerking his head at the
photograph.

Willoughby’s selfishness, though consistent as Helen saw with real
affection for his daughter, made her determined to have the girl to
stay with her, even if she had to promise a complete course of
instruction in the feminine graces. She could not help laughing at the
notion of it—Rachel a Tory hostess!—and marvelling as she left him at
the astonishing ignorance of a father.

Rachel, when consulted, showed less enthusiasm than Helen could have
wished. One moment she was eager, the next doubtful. Visions of a great
river, now blue, now yellow in the tropical sun and crossed by bright
birds, now white in the moon, now deep in shade with moving trees and
canoes sliding out from the tangled banks, beset her. Helen promised a
river. Then she did not want to leave her father. That feeling seemed
genuine too, but in the end Helen prevailed, although when she had won
her case she was beset by doubts, and more than once regretted the
impulse which had entangled her with the fortunes of another human
being.




CHAPTER VII


From a distance the _Euphrosyne_ looked very small. Glasses were turned
upon her from the decks of great liners, and she was pronounced a
tramp, a cargo-boat, or one of those wretched little passenger steamers
where people rolled about among the cattle on deck. The insect-like
figures of Dalloways, Ambroses, and Vinraces were also derided, both
from the extreme smallness of their persons and the doubt which only
strong glasses could dispel as to whether they were really live
creatures or only lumps on the rigging. Mr. Pepper with all his
learning had been mistaken for a cormorant, and then, as unjustly,
transformed into a cow. At night, indeed, when the waltzes were
swinging in the saloon, and gifted passengers reciting, the little
ship—shrunk to a few beads of light out among the dark waves, and one
high in air upon the mast-head—seemed something mysterious and
impressive to heated partners resting from the dance. She became a ship
passing in the night—an emblem of the loneliness of human life, an
occasion for queer confidences and sudden appeals for sympathy.

On and on she went, by day and by night, following her path, until one
morning broke and showed the land. Losing its shadow-like appearance it
became first cleft and mountainous, next coloured grey and purple, next
scattered with white blocks which gradually separated themselves, and
then, as the progress of the ship acted upon the view like a
field-glass of increasing power, became streets of houses. By nine
o’clock the _Euphrosyne_ had taken up her position in the middle of a
great bay; she dropped her anchor; immediately, as if she were a
recumbent giant requiring examination, small boats came swarming about
her. She rang with cries; men jumped on to her; her deck was thumped by
feet. The lonely little island was invaded from all quarters at once,
and after four weeks of silence it was bewildering to hear human
speech. Mrs. Ambrose alone heeded none of this stir. She was pale with
suspense while the boat with mail bags was making towards them.
Absorbed in her letters she did not notice that she had left the
_Euphrosyne_, and felt no sadness when the ship lifted up her voice and
bellowed thrice like a cow separated from its calf.

“The children are well!” she exclaimed. Mr. Pepper, who sat opposite
with a great mound of bag and rug upon his knees, said, “Gratifying.”
Rachel, to whom the end of the voyage meant a complete change of
perspective, was too much bewildered by the approach of the shore to
realise what children were well or why it was gratifying. Helen went on
reading.

Moving very slowly, and rearing absurdly high over each wave, the
little boat was now approaching a white crescent of sand. Behind this
was a deep green valley, with distinct hills on either side. On the
slope of the right-hand hill white houses with brown roofs were
settled, like nesting sea-birds, and at intervals cypresses striped the
hill with black bars. Mountains whose sides were flushed with red, but
whose crowns were bald, rose as a pinnacle, half-concealing another
pinnacle behind it. The hour being still early, the whole view was
exquisitely light and airy; the blues and greens of sky and tree were
intense but not sultry. As they drew nearer and could distinguish
details, the effect of the earth with its minute objects and colours
and different forms of life was overwhelming after four weeks of the
sea, and kept them silent.

“Three hundred years odd,” said Mr. Pepper meditatively at length.

As nobody said, “What?” he merely extracted a bottle and swallowed a
pill. The piece of information that died within him was to the effect
that three hundred years ago five Elizabethan barques had anchored
where the _Euphrosyne_ now floated. Half-drawn up upon the beach lay an
equal number of Spanish galleons, unmanned, for the country was still a
virgin land behind a veil. Slipping across the water, the English
sailors bore away bars of silver, bales of linen, timbers of cedar
wood, golden crucifixes knobbed with emeralds. When the Spaniards came
down from their drinking, a fight ensued, the two parties churning up
the sand, and driving each other into the surf. The Spaniards, bloated
with fine living upon the fruits of the miraculous land, fell in heaps;
but the hardy Englishmen, tawny with sea-voyaging, hairy for lack of
razors, with muscles like wire, fangs greedy for flesh, and fingers
itching for gold, despatched the wounded, drove the dying into the sea,
and soon reduced the natives to a state of superstitious wonderment.
Here a settlement was made; women were imported; children grew. All
seemed to favour the expansion of the British Empire, and had there
been men like Richard Dalloway in the time of Charles the First, the
map would undoubtedly be red where it is now an odious green. But it
must be supposed that the political mind of that age lacked
imagination, and, merely for want of a few thousand pounds and a few
thousand men, the spark died that should have been a conflagration.
From the interior came Indians with subtle poisons, naked bodies, and
painted idols; from the sea came vengeful Spaniards and rapacious
Portuguese; exposed to all these enemies (though the climate proved
wonderfully kind and the earth abundant) the English dwindled away and
all but disappeared. Somewhere about the middle of the seventeenth
century a single sloop watched its season and slipped out by night,
bearing within it all that was left of the great British colony, a few
men, a few women, and perhaps a dozen dusky children. English history
then denies all knowledge of the place. Owing to one cause and another
civilisation shifted its centre to a spot some four or five hundred
miles to the south, and to-day Santa Marina is not much larger than it
was three hundred years ago. In population it is a happy compromise,
for Portuguese fathers wed Indian mothers, and their children
intermarry with the Spanish. Although they get their ploughs from
Manchester, they make their coats from their own sheep, their silk from
their own worms, and their furniture from their own cedar trees, so
that in arts and industries the place is still much where it was in
Elizabethan days.

The reasons which had drawn the English across the sea to found a small
colony within the last ten years are not so easily described, and will
never perhaps be recorded in history books. Granted facility of travel,
peace, good trade, and so on, there was besides a kind of
dissatisfaction among the English with the older countries and the
enormous accumulations of carved stone, stained glass, and rich brown
painting which they offered to the tourist. The movement in search of
something new was of course infinitely small, affecting only a handful
of well-to-do people. It began by a few schoolmasters serving their
passage out to South America as the pursers of tramp steamers. They
returned in time for the summer term, when their stories of the
splendours and hardships of life at sea, the humours of sea-captains,
the wonders of night and dawn, and the marvels of the place delighted
outsiders, and sometimes found their way into print. The country itself
taxed all their powers of description, for they said it was much bigger
than Italy, and really nobler than Greece. Again, they declared that
the natives were strangely beautiful, very big in stature, dark,
passionate, and quick to seize the knife. The place seemed new and full
of new forms of beauty, in proof of which they showed handkerchiefs
which the women had worn round their heads, and primitive carvings
coloured bright greens and blues. Somehow or other, as fashions do, the
fashion spread; an old monastery was quickly turned into a hotel, while
a famous line of steamships altered its route for the convenience of
passengers.

Oddly enough it happened that the least satisfactory of Helen Ambrose’s
brothers had been sent out years before to make his fortune, at any
rate to keep clear of race-horses, in the very spot which had now
become so popular. Often, leaning upon the column in the verandah, he
had watched the English ships with English schoolmasters for pursers
steaming into the bay. Having at length earned enough to take a
holiday, and being sick of the place, he proposed to put his villa, on
the slope of the mountain, at his sister’s disposal. She, too, had been
a little stirred by the talk of a new world, where there was always sun
and never a fog, which went on around her, and the chance, when they
were planning where to spend the winter out of England, seemed too good
to be missed. For these reasons she determined to accept Willoughby’s
offer of free passages on his ship, to place the children with their
grand-parents, and to do the thing thoroughly while she was about it.

Taking seats in a carriage drawn by long-tailed horses with pheasants’
feathers erect between their ears, the Ambroses, Mr. Pepper, and Rachel
rattled out of the harbour. The day increased in heat as they drove up
the hill. The road passed through the town, where men seemed to be
beating brass and crying “Water,” where the passage was blocked by
mules and cleared by whips and curses, where the women walked barefoot,
their heads balancing baskets, and cripples hastily displayed mutilated
members; it issued among steep green fields, not so green but that the
earth showed through. Great trees now shaded all but the centre of the
road, and a mountain stream, so shallow and so swift that it plaited
itself into strands as it ran, raced along the edge. Higher they went,
until Ridley and Rachel walked behind; next they turned along a lane
scattered with stones, where Mr. Pepper raised his stick and silently
indicated a shrub, bearing among sparse leaves a voluminous purple
blossom; and at a rickety canter the last stage of the way was
accomplished.

The villa was a roomy white house, which, as is the case with most
continental houses, looked to an English eye frail, ramshackle, and
absurdly frivolous, more like a pagoda in a tea-garden than a place
where one slept. The garden called urgently for the services of
gardener. Bushes waved their branches across the paths, and the blades
of grass, with spaces of earth between them, could be counted. In the
circular piece of ground in front of the verandah were two cracked
vases, from which red flowers drooped, with a stone fountain between
them, now parched in the sun. The circular garden led to a long garden,
where the gardener’s shears had scarcely been, unless now and then,
when he cut a bough of blossom for his beloved. A few tall trees shaded
it, and round bushes with wax-like flowers mobbed their heads together
in a row. A garden smoothly laid with turf, divided by thick hedges,
with raised beds of bright flowers, such as we keep within walls in
England, would have been out of place upon the side of this bare hill.
There was no ugliness to shut out, and the villa looked straight across
the shoulder of a slope, ribbed with olive trees, to the sea.

The indecency of the whole place struck Mrs. Chailey forcibly. There
were no blinds to shut out the sun, nor was there any furniture to
speak of for the sun to spoil. Standing in the bare stone hall, and
surveying a staircase of superb breadth, but cracked and carpetless,
she further ventured the opinion that there were rats, as large as
terriers at home, and that if one put one’s foot down with any force
one would come through the floor. As for hot water—at this point her
investigations left her speechless.

“Poor creature!” she murmured to the sallow Spanish servant-girl who
came out with the pigs and hens to receive them, “no wonder you hardly
look like a human being!” Maria accepted the compliment with an
exquisite Spanish grace. In Chailey’s opinion they would have done
better to stay on board an English ship, but none knew better than she
that her duty commanded her to stay.

When they were settled in, and in train to find daily occupation, there
was some speculation as to the reasons which induced Mr. Pepper to
stay, taking up his lodging in the Ambroses’ house. Efforts had been
made for some days before landing to impress upon him the advantages of
the Amazons.

“That great stream!” Helen would begin, gazing as if she saw a
visionary cascade, “I’ve a good mind to go with you myself,
Willoughby—only I can’t. Think of the sunsets and the moonrises—I
believe the colours are unimaginable.”

“There are wild peacocks,” Rachel hazarded.

“And marvellous creatures in the water,” Helen asserted.

“One might discover a new reptile,” Rachel continued.

“There’s certain to be a revolution, I’m told,” Helen urged.

The effect of these subterfuges was a little dashed by Ridley, who,
after regarding Pepper for some moments, sighed aloud, “Poor fellow!”
and inwardly speculated upon the unkindness of women.

He stayed, however, in apparent contentment for six days, playing with
a microscope and a notebook in one of the many sparsely furnished
sitting-rooms, but on the evening of the seventh day, as they sat at
dinner, he appeared more restless than usual. The dinner-table was set
between two long windows which were left uncurtained by Helen’s orders.
Darkness fell as sharply as a knife in this climate, and the town then
sprang out in circles and lines of bright dots beneath them. Buildings
which never showed by day showed by night, and the sea flowed right
over the land judging by the moving lights of the steamers. The sight
fulfilled the same purpose as an orchestra in a London restaurant, and
silence had its setting. William Pepper observed it for some time; he
put on his spectacles to contemplate the scene.

“I’ve identified the big block to the left,” he observed, and pointed
with his fork at a square formed by several rows of lights.

“One should infer that they can cook vegetables,” he added.

“An hotel?” said Helen.

“Once a monastery,” said Mr. Pepper.

Nothing more was said then, but, the day after, Mr. Pepper returned
from a midday walk, and stood silently before Helen who was reading in
the verandah.

“I’ve taken a room over there,” he said.

“You’re not going?” she exclaimed.

“On the whole—yes,” he remarked. “No private cook _can_ cook
vegetables.”

Knowing his dislike of questions, which she to some extent shared,
Helen asked no more. Still, an uneasy suspicion lurked in her mind that
William was hiding a wound. She flushed to think that her words, or her
husband’s, or Rachel’s had penetrated and stung. She was half-moved to
cry, “Stop, William; explain!” and would have returned to the subject
at luncheon if William had not shown himself inscrutable and chill,
lifting fragments of salad on the point of his fork, with the gesture
of a man pronging seaweed, detecting gravel, suspecting germs.

“If you all die of typhoid I won’t be responsible!” he snapped.

“If you die of dulness, neither will I,” Helen echoed in her heart.

She reflected that she had never yet asked him whether he had been in
love. They had got further and further from that subject instead of
drawing nearer to it, and she could not help feeling it a relief when
William Pepper, with all his knowledge, his microscope, his note-books,
his genuine kindliness and good sense, but a certain dryness of soul,
took his departure. Also she could not help feeling it sad that
friendships should end thus, although in this case to have the room
empty was something of a comfort, and she tried to console herself with
the reflection that one never knows how far other people feel the
things they might be supposed to feel.




CHAPTER VIII


The next few months passed away, as many years can pass away, without
definite events, and yet, if suddenly disturbed, it would be seen that
such months or years had a character unlike others. The three months
which had passed had brought them to the beginning of March. The
climate had kept its promise, and the change of season from winter to
spring had made very little difference, so that Helen, who was sitting
in the drawing-room with a pen in her hand, could keep the windows open
though a great fire of logs burnt on one side of her. Below, the sea
was still blue and the roofs still brown and white, though the day was
fading rapidly. It was dusk in the room, which, large and empty at all
times, now appeared larger and emptier than usual. Her own figure, as
she sat writing with a pad on her knee, shared the general effect of
size and lack of detail, for the flames which ran along the branches,
suddenly devouring little green tufts, burnt intermittently and sent
irregular illuminations across her face and the plaster walls. There
were no pictures on the walls but here and there boughs laden with
heavy-petalled flowers spread widely against them. Of the books fallen
on the bare floor and heaped upon the large table, it was only possible
in this light to trace the outline.

Mrs. Ambrose was writing a very long letter. Beginning “Dear Bernard,”
it went on to describe what had been happening in the Villa San
Gervasio during the past three months, as, for instance, that they had
had the British Consul to dinner, and had been taken over a Spanish
man-of-war, and had seen a great many processions and religious
festivals, which were so beautiful that Mrs. Ambrose couldn’t conceive
why, if people must have a religion, they didn’t all become Roman
Catholics. They had made several expeditions though none of any length.
It was worth coming if only for the sake of the flowering trees which
grew wild quite near the house, and the amazing colours of sea and
earth. The earth, instead of being brown, was red, purple, green. “You
won’t believe me,” she added, “there is no colour like it in England.”
She adopted, indeed, a condescending tone towards that poor island,
which was now advancing chilly crocuses and nipped violets in nooks, in
copses, in cosy corners, tended by rosy old gardeners in mufflers, who
were always touching their hats and bobbing obsequiously. She went on
to deride the islanders themselves. Rumours of London all in a ferment
over a General Election had reached them even out here. “It seems
incredible,” she went on, “that people should care whether Asquith is
in or Austen Chamberlain out, and while you scream yourselves hoarse
about politics you let the only people who are trying for something
good starve or simply laugh at them. When have you ever encouraged a
living artist? Or bought his best work? Why are you all so ugly and so
servile? Here the servants are human beings. They talk to one as if
they were equals. As far as I can tell there are no aristocrats.”

Perhaps it was the mention of aristocrats that reminded her of Richard
Dalloway and Rachel, for she ran on with the same penful to describe
her niece.

“It’s an odd fate that has put me in charge of a girl,” she wrote,
“considering that I have never got on well with women, or had much to
do with them. However, I must retract some of the things that I have
said against them. If they were properly educated I don’t see why they
shouldn’t be much the same as men—as satisfactory I mean; though, of
course, very different. The question is, how should one educate them.
The present method seems to me abominable. This girl, though
twenty-four, had never heard that men desired women, and, until I
explained it, did not know how children were born. Her ignorance upon
other matters as important” (here Mrs. Ambrose’s letter may not be
quoted) . . . “was complete. It seems to me not merely foolish but
criminal to bring people up like that. Let alone the suffering to them,
it explains why women are what they are—the wonder is they’re no worse.
I have taken it upon myself to enlighten her, and now, though still a
good deal prejudiced and liable to exaggerate, she is more or less a
reasonable human being. Keeping them ignorant, of course, defeats its
own object, and when they begin to understand they take it all much too
seriously. My brother-in-law really deserved a catastrophe—which he
won’t get. I now pray for a young man to come to my help; some one, I
mean, who would talk to her openly, and prove how absurd most of her
ideas about life are. Unluckily such men seem almost as rare as the
women. The English colony certainly doesn’t provide one; artists,
merchants, cultivated people—they are stupid, conventional, and
flirtatious. . . .” She ceased, and with her pen in her hand sat
looking into the fire, making the logs into caves and mountains, for it
had grown too dark to go on writing. Moreover, the house began to stir
as the hour of dinner approached; she could hear the plates being
chinked in the dining-room next door, and Chailey instructing the
Spanish girl where to put things down in vigorous English. The bell
rang; she rose, met Ridley and Rachel outside, and they all went in to
dinner.

Three months had made but little difference in the appearance either of
Ridley or Rachel; yet a keen observer might have thought that the girl
was more definite and self-confident in her manner than before. Her
skin was brown, her eyes certainly brighter, and she attended to what
was said as though she might be going to contradict it. The meal began
with the comfortable silence of people who are quite at their ease
together. Then Ridley, leaning on his elbow and looking out of the
window, observed that it was a lovely night.

“Yes,” said Helen. She added, “The season’s begun,” looking at the
lights beneath them. She asked Maria in Spanish whether the hotel was
not filling up with visitors. Maria informed her with pride that there
would come a time when it was positively difficult to buy eggs—the
shopkeepers would not mind what prices they asked; they would get them,
at any rate, from the English.

“That’s an English steamer in the bay,” said Rachel, looking at a
triangle of lights below. “She came in early this morning.”

“Then we may hope for some letters and send ours back,” said Helen.

For some reason the mention of letters always made Ridley groan, and
the rest of the meal passed in a brisk argument between husband and
wife as to whether he was or was not wholly ignored by the entire
civilised world.

“Considering the last batch,” said Helen, “you deserve beating. You
were asked to lecture, you were offered a degree, and some silly woman
praised not only your books but your beauty—she said he was what
Shelley would have been if Shelley had lived to fifty-five and grown a
beard. Really, Ridley, I think you’re the vainest man I know,” she
ended, rising from the table, “which I may tell you is saying a good
deal.”

Finding her letter lying before the fire she added a few lines to it,
and then announced that she was going to take the letters now—Ridley
must bring his—and Rachel?

“I hope you’ve written to your Aunts? It’s high time.”

The women put on cloaks and hats, and after inviting Ridley to come
with them, which he emphatically refused to do, exclaiming that Rachel
he expected to be a fool, but Helen surely knew better, they turned to
go. He stood over the fire gazing into the depths of the looking-glass,
and compressing his face into the likeness of a commander surveying a
field of battle, or a martyr watching the flames lick his toes, rather
than that of a secluded Professor.

Helen laid hold of his beard.

“Am I a fool?” she said.

“Let me go, Helen.”

“Am I a fool?” she repeated.

“Vile woman!” he exclaimed, and kissed her.

“We’ll leave you to your vanities,” she called back as they went out of
the door.

It was a beautiful evening, still light enough to see a long way down
the road, though the stars were coming out. The pillar-box was let into
a high yellow wall where the lane met the road, and having dropped the
letters into it, Helen was for turning back.

“No, no,” said Rachel, taking her by the wrist. “We’re going to see
life. You promised.”

“Seeing life” was the phrase they used for their habit of strolling
through the town after dark. The social life of Santa Marina was
carried on almost entirely by lamp-light, which the warmth of the
nights and the scents culled from flowers made pleasant enough. The
young women, with their hair magnificently swept in coils, a red flower
behind the ear, sat on the doorsteps, or issued out on to balconies,
while the young men ranged up and down beneath, shouting up a greeting
from time to time and stopping here and there to enter into amorous
talk. At the open windows merchants could be seen making up the day’s
account, and older women lifting jars from shelf to shelf. The streets
were full of people, men for the most part, who interchanged their
views of the world as they walked, or gathered round the wine-tables at
the street corner, where an old cripple was twanging his guitar
strings, while a poor girl cried her passionate song in the gutter. The
two Englishwomen excited some friendly curiosity, but no one molested
them.

Helen sauntered on, observing the different people in their shabby
clothes, who seemed so careless and so natural, with satisfaction.

“Just think of the Mall to-night!” she exclaimed at length. “It’s the
fifteenth of March. Perhaps there’s a Court.” She thought of the crowd
waiting in the cold spring air to see the grand carriages go by. “It’s
very cold, if it’s not raining,” she said. “First there are men selling
picture postcards; then there are wretched little shop-girls with round
bandboxes; then there are bank clerks in tail coats; and then—any
number of dressmakers. People from South Kensington drive up in a hired
fly; officials have a pair of bays; earls, on the other hand, are
allowed one footman to stand up behind; dukes have two, royal dukes—so
I was told—have three; the king, I suppose, can have as many as he
likes. And the people believe in it!”

Out here it seemed as though the people of England must be shaped in
the body like the kings and queens, knights and pawns of the
chessboard, so strange were their differences, so marked and so
implicitly believed in.

They had to part in order to circumvent a crowd.

“They believe in God,” said Rachel as they regained each other. She
meant that the people in the crowd believed in Him; for she remembered
the crosses with bleeding plaster figures that stood where foot-paths
joined, and the inexplicable mystery of a service in a Roman Catholic
church.

“We shall never understand!” she sighed.

They had walked some way and it was now night, but they could see a
large iron gate a little way farther down the road on their left.

“Do you mean to go right up to the hotel?” Helen asked.

Rachel gave the gate a push; it swung open, and, seeing no one about
and judging that nothing was private in this country, they walked
straight on. An avenue of trees ran along the road, which was
completely straight. The trees suddenly came to an end; the road turned
a corner, and they found themselves confronted by a large square
building. They had come out upon the broad terrace which ran round the
hotel and were only a few feet distant from the windows. A row of long
windows opened almost to the ground. They were all of them uncurtained,
and all brilliantly lighted, so that they could see everything inside.
Each window revealed a different section of the life of the hotel. They
drew into one of the broad columns of shadow which separated the
windows and gazed in. They found themselves just outside the
dining-room. It was being swept; a waiter was eating a bunch of grapes
with his leg across the corner of a table. Next door was the kitchen,
where they were washing up; white cooks were dipping their arms into
cauldrons, while the waiters made their meal voraciously off broken
meats, sopping up the gravy with bits of crumb. Moving on, they became
lost in a plantation of bushes, and then suddenly found themselves
outside the drawing-room, where the ladies and gentlemen, having dined
well, lay back in deep arm-chairs, occasionally speaking or turning
over the pages of magazines. A thin woman was flourishing up and down
the piano.

“What is a dahabeeyah, Charles?” the distinct voice of a widow, seated
in an arm-chair by the window, asked her son.

It was the end of the piece, and his answer was lost in the general
clearing of throats and tapping of knees.

“They’re all old in this room,” Rachel whispered.

Creeping on, they found that the next window revealed two men in
shirt-sleeves playing billiards with two young ladies.

“He pinched my arm!” the plump young woman cried, as she missed her
stroke.

“Now you two—no ragging,” the young man with the red face reproved
them, who was marking.

“Take care or we shall be seen,” whispered Helen, plucking Rachel by
the arm. Incautiously her head had risen to the middle of the window.

Turning the corner they came to the largest room in the hotel, which
was supplied with four windows, and was called the Lounge, although it
was really a hall. Hung with armour and native embroideries, furnished
with divans and screens, which shut off convenient corners, the room
was less formal than the others, and was evidently the haunt of youth.
Signor Rodriguez, whom they knew to be the manager of the hotel, stood
quite near them in the doorway surveying the scene—the gentlemen
lounging in chairs, the couples leaning over coffee-cups, the game of
cards in the centre under profuse clusters of electric light. He was
congratulating himself upon the enterprise which had turned the
refectory, a cold stone room with pots on trestles, into the most
comfortable room in the house. The hotel was very full, and proved his
wisdom in decreeing that no hotel can flourish without a lounge.

The people were scattered about in couples or parties of four, and
either they were actually better acquainted, or the informal room made
their manners easier. Through the open window came an uneven humming
sound like that which rises from a flock of sheep pent within hurdles
at dusk. The card-party occupied the centre of the foreground.

Helen and Rachel watched them play for some minutes without being able
to distinguish a word. Helen was observing one of the men intently. He
was a lean, somewhat cadaverous man of about her own age, whose profile
was turned to them, and he was the partner of a highly-coloured girl,
obviously English by birth.

Suddenly, in the strange way in which some words detach themselves from
the rest, they heard him say quite distinctly:—

“All you want is practice, Miss Warrington; courage and practice—one’s
no good without the other.”

“Hughling Elliot! Of course!” Helen exclaimed. She ducked her head
immediately, for at the sound of his name he looked up. The game went
on for a few minutes, and was then broken up by the approach of a
wheeled chair, containing a voluminous old lady who paused by the table
and said:—

“Better luck to-night, Susan?”

“All the luck’s on our side,” said a young man who until now had kept
his back turned to the window. He appeared to be rather stout, and had
a thick crop of hair.

“Luck, Mr. Hewet?” said his partner, a middle-aged lady with
spectacles. “I assure you, Mrs. Paley, our success is due solely to our
brilliant play.”

“Unless I go to bed early I get practically no sleep at all,” Mrs.
Paley was heard to explain, as if to justify her seizure of Susan, who
got up and proceeded to wheel the chair to the door.

“They’ll get some one else to take my place,” she said cheerfully. But
she was wrong. No attempt was made to find another player, and after
the young man had built three stories of a card-house, which fell down,
the players strolled off in different directions.

Mr. Hewet turned his full face towards the window. They could see that
he had large eyes obscured by glasses; his complexion was rosy, his
lips clean-shaven; and, seen among ordinary people, it appeared to be
an interesting face. He came straight towards them, but his eyes were
fixed not upon the eavesdroppers but upon a spot where the curtain hung
in folds.

“Asleep?” he said.

Helen and Rachel started to think that some one had been sitting near
to them unobserved all the time. There were legs in the shadow. A
melancholy voice issued from above them.

“Two women,” it said.

A scuffling was heard on the gravel. The women had fled. They did not
stop running until they felt certain that no eye could penetrate the
darkness and the hotel was only a square shadow in the distance, with
red holes regularly cut in it.




CHAPTER IX


An hour passed, and the downstairs rooms at the hotel grew dim and were
almost deserted, while the little box-like squares above them were
brilliantly irradiated. Some forty or fifty people were going to bed.
The thump of jugs set down on the floor above could be heard and the
clink of china, for there was not as thick a partition between the
rooms as one might wish, so Miss Allan, the elderly lady who had been
playing bridge, determined, giving the wall a smart rap with her
knuckles. It was only matchboard, she decided, run up to make many
little rooms of one large one. Her grey petticoats slipped to the
ground, and, stooping, she folded her clothes with neat, if not loving
fingers, screwed her hair into a plait, wound her father’s great gold
watch, and opened the complete works of Wordsworth. She was reading the
“Prelude,” partly because she always read the “Prelude” abroad, and
partly because she was engaged in writing a short _Primer of English
Literature_—_Beowulf to Swinburne_—which would have a paragraph on
Wordsworth. She was deep in the fifth book, stopping indeed to pencil a
note, when a pair of boots dropped, one after another, on the floor
above her. She looked up and speculated. Whose boots were they, she
wondered. She then became aware of a swishing sound next door—a woman,
clearly, putting away her dress. It was succeeded by a gentle tapping
sound, such as that which accompanies hair-dressing. It was very
difficult to keep her attention fixed upon the “Prelude.” Was it Susan
Warrington tapping? She forced herself, however, to read to the end of
the book, when she placed a mark between the pages, sighed contentedly,
and then turned out the light.

Very different was the room through the wall, though as like in shape
as one egg-box is like another. As Miss Allan read her book, Susan
Warrington was brushing her hair. Ages have consecrated this hour, and
the most majestic of all domestic actions, to talk of love between
women; but Miss Warrington being alone could not talk; she could only
look with extreme solicitude at her own face in the glass. She turned
her head from side to side, tossing heavy locks now this way now that;
and then withdrew a pace or two, and considered herself seriously.

“I’m nice-looking,” she determined. “Not pretty—possibly,” she drew
herself up a little. “Yes—most people would say I was handsome.”

She was really wondering what Arthur Venning would say she was. Her
feeling about him was decidedly queer. She would not admit to herself
that she was in love with him or that she wanted to marry him, yet she
spent every minute when she was alone in wondering what he thought of
her, and in comparing what they had done to-day with what they had done
the day before.

“He didn’t ask me to play, but he certainly followed me into the hall,”
she meditated, summing up the evening. She was thirty years of age, and
owing to the number of her sisters and the seclusion of life in a
country parsonage had as yet had no proposal of marriage. The hour of
confidences was often a sad one, and she had been known to jump into
bed, treating her hair unkindly, feeling herself overlooked by life in
comparison with others. She was a big, well-made woman, the red lying
upon her cheeks in patches that were too well defined, but her serious
anxiety gave her a kind of beauty.

She was just about to pull back the bed-clothes when she exclaimed,
“Oh, but I’m forgetting,” and went to her writing-table. A brown volume
lay there stamped with the figure of the year. She proceeded to write
in the square ugly hand of a mature child, as she wrote daily year
after year, keeping the diaries, though she seldom looked at them.

“A.M.—Talked to Mrs. H. Elliot about country neighbours. She knows the
Manns; also the Selby-Carroways. How small the world is! Like her. Read
a chapter of _Miss Appleby’s Adventure_ to Aunt E. P.M.—Played
lawn-tennis with Mr. Perrott and Evelyn M. Don’t _like_ Mr. P. Have a
feeling that he is not ‘quite,’ though clever certainly. Beat them. Day
splendid, view wonderful. One gets used to no trees, though much too
bare at first. Cards after dinner. Aunt E. cheerful, though twingy, she
says. Mem.: _ask about damp sheets_.”

She knelt in prayer, and then lay down in bed, tucking the blankets
comfortably about her, and in a few minutes her breathing showed that
she was asleep. With its profoundly peaceful sighs and hesitations it
resembled that of a cow standing up to its knees all night through in
the long grass.

A glance into the next room revealed little more than a nose, prominent
above the sheets. Growing accustomed to the darkness, for the windows
were open and showed grey squares with splinters of starlight, one
could distinguish a lean form, terribly like the body of a dead person,
the body indeed of William Pepper, asleep too. Thirty-six,
thirty-seven, thirty-eight—here were three Portuguese men of business,
asleep presumably, since a snore came with the regularity of a great
ticking clock. Thirty-nine was a corner room, at the end of the
passage, but late though it was—“One” struck gently downstairs—a line
of light under the door showed that some one was still awake.

“How late you are, Hugh!” a woman, lying in bed, said in a peevish but
solicitous voice. Her husband was brushing his teeth, and for some
moments did not answer.

“You should have gone to sleep,” he replied. “I was talking to
Thornbury.”

“But you know that I never can sleep when I’m waiting for you,” she
said.

To that he made no answer, but only remarked, “Well then, we’ll turn
out the light.” They were silent.

The faint but penetrating pulse of an electric bell could now be heard
in the corridor. Old Mrs. Paley, having woken hungry but without her
spectacles, was summoning her maid to find the biscuit-box. The maid
having answered the bell, drearily respectful even at this hour though
muffled in a mackintosh, the passage was left in silence. Downstairs
all was empty and dark; but on the upper floor a light still burnt in
the room where the boots had dropped so heavily above Miss Allan’s
head. Here was the gentleman who, a few hours previously, in the shade
of the curtain, had seemed to consist entirely of legs. Deep in an
arm-chair he was reading the third volume of Gibbon’s _History of the
Decline and Fall of Rome_ by candle-light. As he read he knocked the
ash automatically, now and again, from his cigarette and turned the
page, while a whole procession of splendid sentences entered his
capacious brow and went marching through his brain in order. It seemed
likely that this process might continue for an hour or more, until the
entire regiment had shifted its quarters, had not the door opened, and
the young man, who was inclined to be stout, come in with large naked
feet.

“Oh, Hirst, what I forgot to say was—”

“Two minutes,” said Hirst, raising his finger.

He safely stowed away the last words of the paragraph.

“What was it you forgot to say?” he asked.

“D’you think you _do_ make enough allowance for feelings?” asked Mr.
Hewet. He had again forgotten what he had meant to say.

After intense contemplation of the immaculate Gibbon Mr. Hirst smiled
at the question of his friend. He laid aside his book and considered.

“I should call yours a singularly untidy mind,” he observed. “Feelings?
Aren’t they just what we do allow for? We put love up there, and all
the rest somewhere down below.” With his left hand he indicated the top
of a pyramid, and with his right the base.

“But you didn’t get out of bed to tell me that,” he added severely.

“I got out of bed,” said Hewet vaguely, “merely to talk I suppose.”

“Meanwhile I shall undress,” said Hirst. When naked of all but his
shirt, and bent over the basin, Mr. Hirst no longer impressed one with
the majesty of his intellect, but with the pathos of his young yet ugly
body, for he stooped, and he was so thin that there were dark lines
between the different bones of his neck and shoulders.

“Women interest me,” said Hewet, who, sitting on the bed with his chin
resting on his knees, paid no attention to the undressing of Mr. Hirst.

“They’re so stupid,” said Hirst. “You’re sitting on my pyjamas.”

“I suppose they _are_ stupid?” Hewet wondered.

“There can’t be two opinions about that, I imagine,” said Hirst,
hopping briskly across the room, “unless you’re in love—that fat woman
Warrington?” he enquired.

“Not one fat woman—all fat women,” Hewet sighed.

“The women I saw to-night were not fat,” said Hirst, who was taking
advantage of Hewet’s company to cut his toe-nails.

“Describe them,” said Hewet.

“You know I can’t describe things!” said Hirst. “They were much like
other women, I should think. They always are.”

“No; that’s where we differ,” said Hewet. “I say everything’s
different. No two people are in the least the same. Take you and me
now.”

“So I used to think once,” said Hirst. “But now they’re all types.
Don’t take us,—take this hotel. You could draw circles round the whole
lot of them, and they’d never stray outside.”

(“You can kill a hen by doing that”), Hewet murmured.

“Mr. Hughling Elliot, Mrs. Hughling Elliot, Miss Allan, Mr. and Mrs.
Thornbury—one circle,” Hirst continued. “Miss Warrington, Mr. Arthur
Venning, Mr. Perrott, Evelyn M. another circle; then there are a whole
lot of natives; finally ourselves.”

“Are we all alone in our circle?” asked Hewet.

“Quite alone,” said Hirst. “You try to get out, but you can’t. You only
make a mess of things by trying.”

“I’m not a hen in a circle,” said Hewet. “I’m a dove on a tree-top.”

“I wonder if this is what they call an ingrowing toe-nail?” said Hirst,
examining the big toe on his left foot.

“I flit from branch to branch,” continued Hewet. “The world is
profoundly pleasant.” He lay back on the bed, upon his arms.

“I wonder if it’s really nice to be as vague as you are?” asked Hirst,
looking at him. “It’s the lack of continuity—that’s what’s so odd about
you,” he went on. “At the age of twenty-seven, which is nearly thirty,
you seem to have drawn no conclusions. A party of old women excites you
still as though you were three.”

Hewet contemplated the angular young man who was neatly brushing the
rims of his toe-nails into the fire-place in silence for a moment.

“I respect you, Hirst,” he remarked.

“I envy you—some things,” said Hirst. “One: your capacity for not
thinking; two: people like you better than they like me. Women like
you, I suppose.”

“I wonder whether that isn’t really what matters most?” said Hewet.
Lying now flat on the bed he waved his hand in vague circles above him.

“Of course it is,” said Hirst. “But that’s not the difficulty. The
difficulty is, isn’t it, to find an appropriate object?”

“There are no female hens in your circle?” asked Hewet.

“Not the ghost of one,” said Hirst.

Although they had known each other for three years Hirst had never yet
heard the true story of Hewet’s loves. In general conversation it was
taken for granted that they were many, but in private the subject was
allowed to lapse. The fact that he had money enough to do no work, and
that he had left Cambridge after two terms owing to a difference with
the authorities, and had then travelled and drifted, made his life
strange at many points where his friends’ lives were much of a piece.

“I don’t see your circles—I don’t see them,” Hewet continued. “I see a
thing like a teetotum spinning in and out—knocking into things—dashing
from side to side—collecting numbers—more and more and more, till the
whole place is thick with them. Round and round they go—out there, over
the rim—out of sight.”

His fingers showed that the waltzing teetotums had spun over the edge
of the counterpane and fallen off the bed into infinity.

“Could you contemplate three weeks alone in this hotel?” asked Hirst,
after a moment’s pause.

Hewet proceeded to think.

“The truth of it is that one never is alone, and one never is in
company,” he concluded.

“Meaning?” said Hirst.

“Meaning? Oh, something about bubbles—auras—what d’you call ’em? You
can’t see my bubble; I can’t see yours; all we see of each other is a
speck, like the wick in the middle of that flame. The flame goes about
with us everywhere; it’s not ourselves exactly, but what we feel; the
world is short, or people mainly; all kinds of people.”

“A nice streaky bubble yours must be!” said Hirst.

“And supposing my bubble could run into some one else’s bubble—”

“And they both burst?” put in Hirst.

“Then—then—then—” pondered Hewet, as if to himself, “it would be an
e-nor-mous world,” he said, stretching his arms to their full width, as
though even so they could hardly clasp the billowy universe, for when
he was with Hirst he always felt unusually sanguine and vague.

“I don’t think you altogether as foolish as I used to, Hewet,” said
Hirst. “You don’t know what you mean but you try to say it.”

“But aren’t you enjoying yourself here?” asked Hewet.

“On the whole—yes,” said Hirst. “I like observing people. I like
looking at things. This country is amazingly beautiful. Did you notice
how the top of the mountain turned yellow to-night? Really we must take
our lunch and spend the day out. You’re getting disgustingly fat.” He
pointed at the calf of Hewet’s bare leg.

“We’ll get up an expedition,” said Hewet energetically. “We’ll ask the
entire hotel. We’ll hire donkeys and—”

“Oh, Lord!” said Hirst, “do shut it! I can see Miss Warrington and Miss
Allan and Mrs. Elliot and the rest squatting on the stones and
quacking, ‘How jolly!’”

“We’ll ask Venning and Perrott and Miss Murgatroyd—every one we can lay
hands on,” went on Hewet. “What’s the name of the little old
grasshopper with the eyeglasses? Pepper?—Pepper shall lead us.”

“Thank God, you’ll never get the donkeys,” said Hirst.

“I must make a note of that,” said Hewet, slowly dropping his feet to
the floor. “Hirst escorts Miss Warrington; Pepper advances alone on a
white ass; provisions equally distributed—or shall we hire a mule? The
matrons—there’s Mrs. Paley, by Jove!—share a carriage.”

“That’s where you’ll go wrong,” said Hirst. “Putting virgins among
matrons.”

“How long should you think that an expedition like that would take,
Hirst?” asked Hewet.

“From twelve to sixteen hours I would say,” said Hirst. “The time
usually occupied by a first confinement.”

“It will need considerable organisation,” said Hewet. He was now
padding softly round the room, and stopped to stir the books on the
table. They lay heaped one upon another.

“We shall want some poets too,” he remarked. “Not Gibbon; no; d’you
happen to have _Modern Love_ or _John Donne_? You see, I contemplate
pauses when people get tired of looking at the view, and then it would
be nice to read something rather difficult aloud.”

“Mrs. Paley _will_ enjoy herself,” said Hirst.

“Mrs. Paley will enjoy it certainly,” said Hewet. “It’s one of the
saddest things I know—the way elderly ladies cease to read poetry. And
yet how appropriate this is:

I speak as one who plumbs
    Life’s dim profound,
One who at length can sound
    Clear views and certain.
But—after love what comes?
    A scene that lours,
A few sad vacant hours,
    And then, the Curtain.


I daresay Mrs. Paley is the only one of us who can really understand
that.”

“We’ll ask her,” said Hirst. “Please, Hewet, if you must go to bed,
draw my curtain. Few things distress me more than the moonlight.”

Hewet retreated, pressing the poems of Thomas Hardy beneath his arm,
and in their beds next door to each other both the young men were soon
asleep.

Between the extinction of Hewet’s candle and the rising of a dusky
Spanish boy who was the first to survey the desolation of the hotel in
the early morning, a few hours of silence intervened. One could almost
hear a hundred people breathing deeply, and however wakeful and
restless it would have been hard to escape sleep in the middle of so
much sleep. Looking out of the windows, there was only darkness to be
seen. All over the shadowed half of the world people lay prone, and a
few flickering lights in empty streets marked the places where their
cities were built. Red and yellow omnibuses were crowding each other in
Piccadilly; sumptuous women were rocking at a standstill; but here in
the darkness an owl flitted from tree to tree, and when the breeze
lifted the branches the moon flashed as if it were a torch. Until all
people should awake again the houseless animals were abroad, the tigers
and the stags, and the elephants coming down in the darkness to drink
at pools. The wind at night blowing over the hills and woods was purer
and fresher than the wind by day, and the earth, robbed of detail, more
mysterious than the earth coloured and divided by roads and fields. For
six hours this profound beauty existed, and then as the east grew
whiter and whiter the ground swam to the surface, the roads were
revealed, the smoke rose and the people stirred, and the sun shone upon
the windows of the hotel at Santa Marina until they were uncurtained,
and the gong blaring all through the house gave notice of breakfast.

Directly breakfast was over, the ladies as usual circled vaguely,
picking up papers and putting them down again, about the hall.

“And what are you going to do to-day?” asked Mrs. Elliot drifting up
against Miss Warrington.

Mrs. Elliot, the wife of Hughling the Oxford Don, was a short woman,
whose expression was habitually plaintive. Her eyes moved from thing to
thing as though they never found anything sufficiently pleasant to rest
upon for any length of time.

“I’m going to try to get Aunt Emma out into the town,” said Susan.
“She’s not seen a thing yet.”

“I call it so spirited of her at her age,” said Mrs. Elliot, “coming
all this way from her own fireside.”

“Yes, we always tell her she’ll die on board ship,” Susan replied. “She
was born on one,” she added.

“In the old days,” said Mrs. Elliot, “a great many people were. I
always pity the poor women so! We’ve got a lot to complain of!” She
shook her head. Her eyes wandered about the table, and she remarked
irrelevantly, “The poor little Queen of Holland! Newspaper reporters
practically, one may say, at her bedroom door!”

“Were you talking of the Queen of Holland?” said the pleasant voice of
Miss Allan, who was searching for the thick pages of _The Times_ among
a litter of thin foreign sheets.

“I always envy any one who lives in such an excessively flat country,”
she remarked.

“How very strange!” said Mrs. Elliot. “I find a flat country so
depressing.”

“I’m afraid you can’t be very happy here then, Miss Allan,” said Susan.

“On the contrary,” said Miss Allan, “I am exceedingly fond of
mountains.” Perceiving _The Times_ at some distance, she moved off to
secure it.

“Well, I must find my husband,” said Mrs. Elliot, fidgeting away.

“And I must go to my aunt,” said Miss Warrington, and taking up the
duties of the day they moved away.

Whether the flimsiness of foreign sheets and the coarseness of their
type is any proof of frivolity and ignorance, there is no doubt that
English people scarce consider news read there as news, any more than a
programme bought from a man in the street inspires confidence in what
it says. A very respectable elderly pair, having inspected the long
tables of newspapers, did not think it worth their while to read more
than the headlines.

“The debate on the fifteenth should have reached us by now,” Mrs.
Thornbury murmured. Mr. Thornbury, who was beautifully clean and had
red rubbed into his handsome worn face like traces of paint on a
weather-beaten wooden figure, looked over his glasses and saw that Miss
Allan had _The Times_.

The couple therefore sat themselves down in arm-chairs and waited.

“Ah, there’s Mr. Hewet,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “Mr. Hewet,” she
continued, “do come and sit by us. I was telling my husband how much
you reminded me of a dear old friend of mine—Mary Umpleby. She was a
most delightful woman, I assure you. She grew roses. We used to stay
with her in the old days.”

“No young man likes to have it said that he resembles an elderly
spinster,” said Mr. Thornbury.

“On the contrary,” said Mr. Hewet, “I always think it a compliment to
remind people of some one else. But Miss Umpleby—why did she grow
roses?”

“Ah, poor thing,” said Mrs. Thornbury, “that’s a long story. She had
gone through dreadful sorrows. At one time I think she would have lost
her senses if it hadn’t been for her garden. The soil was very much
against her—a blessing in disguise; she had to be up at dawn—out in all
weathers. And then there are creatures that eat roses. But she
triumphed. She always did. She was a brave soul.” She sighed deeply but
at the same time with resignation.

“I did not realise that I was monopolising the paper,” said Miss Allan,
coming up to them.

“We were so anxious to read about the debate,” said Mrs. Thornbury,
accepting it on behalf of her husband.

“One doesn’t realise how interesting a debate can be until one has sons
in the navy. My interests are equally balanced, though; I have sons in
the army too; and one son who makes speeches at the Union—my baby!”

“Hirst would know him, I expect,” said Hewet.

“Mr. Hirst has such an interesting face,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “But I
feel one ought to be very clever to talk to him. Well, William?” she
enquired, for Mr. Thornbury grunted.

“They’re making a mess of it,” said Mr. Thornbury. He had reached the
second column of the report, a spasmodic column, for the Irish members
had been brawling three weeks ago at Westminster over a question of
naval efficiency. After a disturbed paragraph or two, the column of
print once more ran smoothly.

“You have read it?” Mrs. Thornbury asked Miss Allan.

“No, I am ashamed to say I have only read about the discoveries in
Crete,” said Miss Allan.

“Oh, but I would give so much to realise the ancient world!” cried Mrs.
Thornbury. “Now that we old people are alone,—we’re on our second
honeymoon,—I am really going to put myself to school again. After all
we are _founded_ on the past, aren’t we, Mr. Hewet? My soldier son says
that there is still a great deal to be learnt from Hannibal. One ought
to know so much more than one does. Somehow when I read the paper, I
begin with the debates first, and, before I’ve done, the door always
opens—we’re a very large party at home—and so one never does think
enough about the ancients and all they’ve done for us. But _you_ begin
at the beginning, Miss Allan.”

“When I think of the Greeks I think of them as naked black men,” said
Miss Allan, “which is quite incorrect, I’m sure.”

“And you, Mr. Hirst?” said Mrs. Thornbury, perceiving that the gaunt
young man was near. “I’m sure you read everything.”

“I confine myself to cricket and crime,” said Hirst. “The worst of
coming from the upper classes,” he continued, “is that one’s friends
are never killed in railway accidents.”

Mr. Thornbury threw down the paper, and emphatically dropped his
eyeglasses. The sheets fell in the middle of the group, and were eyed
by them all.

“It’s not gone well?” asked his wife solicitously.

Hewet picked up one sheet and read, “A lady was walking yesterday in
the streets of Westminster when she perceived a cat in the window of a
deserted house. The famished animal—”

“I shall be out of it anyway,” Mr. Thornbury interrupted peevishly.

“Cats are often forgotten,” Miss Allan remarked.

“Remember, William, the Prime Minister has reserved his answer,” said
Mrs. Thornbury.

“At the age of eighty, Mr. Joshua Harris of Eeles Park, Brondesbury,
has had a son,” said Hirst.

“. . . The famished animal, which had been noticed by workmen for some
days, was rescued, but—by Jove! it bit the man’s hand to pieces!”

“Wild with hunger, I suppose,” commented Miss Allan.

“You’re all neglecting the chief advantage of being abroad,” said Mr.
Hughling Elliot, who had joined the group. “You might read your news in
French, which is equivalent to reading no news at all.”

Mr. Elliot had a profound knowledge of Coptic, which he concealed as
far as possible, and quoted French phrases so exquisitely that it was
hard to believe that he could also speak the ordinary tongue. He had an
immense respect for the French.

“Coming?” he asked the two young men. “We ought to start before it’s
really hot.”

“I beg of you not to walk in the heat, Hugh,” his wife pleaded, giving
him an angular parcel enclosing half a chicken and some raisins.

“Hewet will be our barometer,” said Mr. Elliot. “He will melt before I
shall.” Indeed, if so much as a drop had melted off his spare ribs, the
bones would have lain bare. The ladies were left alone now, surrounding
_The Times_ which lay upon the floor. Miss Allan looked at her father’s
watch.

“Ten minutes to eleven,” she observed.

“Work?” asked Mrs. Thornbury.

“Work,” replied Miss Allan.

“What a fine creature she is!” murmured Mrs. Thornbury, as the square
figure in its manly coat withdrew.

“And I’m sure she has a hard life,” sighed Mrs. Elliot.

“Oh, it _is_ a hard life,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “Unmarried
women—earning their livings—it’s the hardest life of all.”

“Yet she seems pretty cheerful,” said Mrs. Elliot.

“It must be very interesting,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “I envy her her
knowledge.”

“But that isn’t what women want,” said Mrs. Elliot.

“I’m afraid it’s all a great many can hope to have,” sighed Mrs.
Thornbury. “I believe that there are more of us than ever now. Sir
Harley Lethbridge was telling me only the other day how difficult it is
to find boys for the navy—partly because of their teeth, it is true.
And I have heard young women talk quite openly of—”

“Dreadful, dreadful!” exclaimed Mrs. Elliot. “The crown, as one may
call it, of a woman’s life. I, who know what it is to be childless—”
she sighed and ceased.

“But we must not be hard,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “The conditions are so
much changed since I was a young woman.”

“Surely _maternity_ does not change,” said Mrs. Elliot.

“In some ways we can learn a great deal from the young,” said Mrs.
Thornbury. “I learn so much from my own daughters.”

“I believe that Hughling really doesn’t mind,” said Mrs. Elliot. “But
then he has his work.”

“Women without children can do so much for the children of others,”
observed Mrs. Thornbury gently.

“I sketch a great deal,” said Mrs. Elliot, “but that isn’t really an
occupation. It’s so disconcerting to find girls just beginning doing
better than one does oneself! And nature’s difficult—very difficult!”

“Are there not institutions—clubs—that you could help?” asked Mrs.
Thornbury.

“They are so exhausting,” said Mrs. Elliot. “I look strong, because of
my colour; but I’m not; the youngest of eleven never is.”

“If the mother is careful before,” said Mrs. Thornbury judicially,
“there is no reason why the size of the family should make any
difference. And there is no training like the training that brothers
and sisters give each other. I am sure of that. I have seen it with my
own children. My eldest boy Ralph, for instance—”

But Mrs. Elliot was inattentive to the elder lady’s experience, and her
eyes wandered about the hall.

“My mother had two miscarriages, I know,” she said suddenly. “The first
because she met one of those great dancing bears—they shouldn’t be
allowed; the other—it was a horrid story—our cook had a child and there
was a dinner party. So I put my dyspepsia down to that.”

“And a miscarriage is so much worse than a confinement,” Mrs. Thornbury
murmured absentmindedly, adjusting her spectacles and picking up _The
Times_. Mrs. Elliot rose and fluttered away.

When she had heard what one of the million voices speaking in the paper
had to say, and noticed that a cousin of hers had married a clergyman
at Minehead—ignoring the drunken women, the golden animals of Crete,
the movements of battalions, the dinners, the reforms, the fires, the
indignant, the learned and benevolent, Mrs. Thornbury went upstairs to
write a letter for the mail.

The paper lay directly beneath the clock, the two together seeming to
represent stability in a changing world. Mr. Perrott passed through;
Mr. Venning poised for a second on the edge of a table. Mrs. Paley was
wheeled past. Susan followed. Mr. Venning strolled after her.
Portuguese military families, their clothes suggesting late rising in
untidy bedrooms, trailed across, attended by confidential nurses
carrying noisy children. As midday drew on, and the sun beat straight
upon the roof, an eddy of great flies droned in a circle; iced drinks
were served under the palms; the long blinds were pulled down with a
shriek, turning all the light yellow. The clock now had a silent hall
to tick in, and an audience of four or five somnolent merchants. By
degrees white figures with shady hats came in at the door, admitting a
wedge of the hot summer day, and shutting it out again. After resting
in the dimness for a minute, they went upstairs. Simultaneously, the
clock wheezed one, and the gong sounded, beginning softly, working
itself into a frenzy, and ceasing. There was a pause. Then all those
who had gone upstairs came down; cripples came, planting both feet on
the same step lest they should slip; prim little girls came, holding
the nurse’s finger; fat old men came still buttoning waistcoats. The
gong had been sounded in the garden, and by degrees recumbent figures
rose and strolled in to eat, since the time had come for them to feed
again. There were pools and bars of shade in the garden even at midday,
where two or three visitors could lie working or talking at their ease.

Owing to the heat of the day, luncheon was generally a silent meal,
when people observed their neighbors and took stock of any new faces
there might be, hazarding guesses as to who they were and what they
did. Mrs. Paley, although well over seventy and crippled in the legs,
enjoyed her food and the peculiarities of her fellow-beings. She was
seated at a small table with Susan.

“I shouldn’t like to say what _she_ is!” she chuckled, surveying a tall
woman dressed conspicuously in white, with paint in the hollows of her
cheeks, who was always late, and always attended by a shabby female
follower, at which remark Susan blushed, and wondered why her aunt said
such things.

Lunch went on methodically, until each of the seven courses was left in
fragments and the fruit was merely a toy, to be peeled and sliced as a
child destroys a daisy, petal by petal. The food served as an
extinguisher upon any faint flame of the human spirit that might
survive the midday heat, but Susan sat in her room afterwards, turning
over and over the delightful fact that Mr. Venning had come to her in
the garden, and had sat there quite half an hour while she read aloud
to her aunt. Men and women sought different corners where they could
lie unobserved, and from two to four it might be said without
exaggeration that the hotel was inhabited by bodies without souls.
Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly
demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the
hungry hours. Towards four o’clock the human spirit again began to lick
the body, as a flame licks a black promontory of coal. Mrs. Paley felt
it unseemly to open her toothless jaw so widely, though there was no
one near, and Mrs. Elliot surveyed her round flushed face anxiously in
the looking-glass.

Half an hour later, having removed the traces of sleep, they met each
other in the hall, and Mrs. Paley observed that she was going to have
her tea.

“You like your tea too, don’t you?” she said, and invited Mrs. Elliot,
whose husband was still out, to join her at a special table which she
had placed for her under a tree.

“A little silver goes a long way in this country,” she chuckled.

She sent Susan back to fetch another cup.

“They have such excellent biscuits here,” she said, contemplating a
plateful. “Not sweet biscuits, which I don’t like—dry biscuits . . .
Have you been sketching?”

“Oh, I’ve done two or three little daubs,” said Mrs. Elliot, speaking
rather louder than usual. “But it’s so difficult after Oxfordshire,
where there are so many trees. The light’s so strong here. Some people
admire it, I know, but I find it very fatiguing.”

“I really don’t need cooking, Susan,” said Mrs. Paley, when her niece
returned. “I must trouble you to move me.” Everything had to be moved.
Finally the old lady was placed so that the light wavered over her, as
though she were a fish in a net. Susan poured out tea, and was just
remarking that they were having hot weather in Wiltshire too, when Mr.
Venning asked whether he might join them.

“It’s so nice to find a young man who doesn’t despise tea,” said Mrs.
Paley, regaining her good humour. “One of my nephews the other day
asked for a glass of sherry—at five o’clock! I told him he could get it
at the public house round the corner, but not in my drawing room.”

“I’d rather go without lunch than tea,” said Mr. Venning. “That’s not
strictly true. I want both.”

Mr. Venning was a dark young man, about thirty-two years of age, very
slapdash and confident in his manner, although at this moment obviously
a little excited. His friend Mr. Perrott was a barrister, and as Mr.
Perrott refused to go anywhere without Mr. Venning it was necessary,
when Mr. Perrott came to Santa Marina about a Company, for Mr. Venning
to come too. He was a barrister also, but he loathed a profession which
kept him indoors over books, and directly his widowed mother died he
was going, so he confided to Susan, to take up flying seriously, and
become partner in a large business for making aeroplanes. The talk
rambled on. It dealt, of course, with the beauties and singularities of
the place, the streets, the people, and the quantities of unowned
yellow dogs.

“Don’t you think it dreadfully cruel the way they treat dogs in this
country?” asked Mrs. Paley.

“I’d have ’em all shot,” said Mr. Venning.

“Oh, but the darling puppies,” said Susan.

“Jolly little chaps,” said Mr. Venning. “Look here, you’ve got nothing
to eat.” A great wedge of cake was handed Susan on the point of a
trembling knife. Her hand trembled too as she took it.

“I have such a dear dog at home,” said Mrs. Elliot.

“My parrot can’t stand dogs,” said Mrs. Paley, with the air of one
making a confidence. “I always suspect that he (or she) was teased by a
dog when I was abroad.”

“You didn’t get far this morning, Miss Warrington,” said Mr. Venning.

“It was hot,” she answered. Their conversation became private, owing to
Mrs. Paley’s deafness and the long sad history which Mrs. Elliot had
embarked upon of a wire-haired terrier, white with just one black spot,
belonging to an uncle of hers, which had committed suicide. “Animals do
commit suicide,” she sighed, as if she asserted a painful fact.

“Couldn’t we explore the town this evening?” Mr. Venning suggested.

“My aunt—” Susan began.

“You deserve a holiday,” he said. “You’re always doing things for other
people.”

“But that’s my life,” she said, under cover of refilling the teapot.

“That’s no one’s life,” he returned, “no young person’s. You’ll come?”

“I should like to come,” she murmured.

At this moment Mrs. Elliot looked up and exclaimed, “Oh, Hugh! He’s
bringing some one,” she added.

“He would like some tea,” said Mrs. Paley. “Susan, run and get some
cups—there are the two young men.”

“We’re thirsting for tea,” said Mr. Elliot. “You know Mr. Ambrose,
Hilda? We met on the hill.”

“He dragged me in,” said Ridley, “or I should have been ashamed. I’m
dusty and dirty and disagreeable.” He pointed to his boots which were
white with dust, while a dejected flower drooping in his buttonhole,
like an exhausted animal over a gate, added to the effect of length and
untidiness. He was introduced to the others. Mr. Hewet and Mr. Hirst
brought chairs, and tea began again, Susan pouring cascades of water
from pot to pot, always cheerfully, and with the competence of long
use.

“My wife’s brother,” Ridley explained to Hilda, whom he failed to
remember, “has a house here, which he has lent us. I was sitting on a
rock thinking of nothing at all when Elliot started up like a fairy in
a pantomime.”

“Our chicken got into the salt,” Hewet said dolefully to Susan. “Nor is
it true that bananas include moisture as well as sustenance.”

Hirst was already drinking.

“We’ve been cursing you,” said Ridley in answer to Mrs. Elliot’s kind
enquiries about his wife. “You tourists eat up all the eggs, Helen
tells me. That’s an eye-sore too”—he nodded his head at the hotel.
“Disgusting luxury, I call it. We live with pigs in the drawing-room.”

“The food is not at all what it ought to be, considering the price,”
said Mrs. Paley seriously. “But unless one goes to a hotel where is one
to go to?”

“Stay at home,” said Ridley. “I often wish I had! Everyone ought to
stay at home. But, of course, they won’t.”

Mrs. Paley conceived a certain grudge against Ridley, who seemed to be
criticising her habits after an acquaintance of five minutes.

“I believe in foreign travel myself,” she stated, “if one knows one’s
native land, which I think I can honestly say I do. I should not allow
any one to travel until they had visited Kent and Dorsetshire—Kent for
the hops, and Dorsetshire for its old stone cottages. There is nothing
to compare with them here.”

“Yes—I always think that some people like the flat and other people
like the downs,” said Mrs. Elliot rather vaguely.

Hirst, who had been eating and drinking without interruption, now lit a
cigarette, and observed, “Oh, but we’re all agreed by this time that
nature’s a mistake. She’s either very ugly, appallingly uncomfortable,
or absolutely terrifying. I don’t know which alarms me most—a cow or a
tree. I once met a cow in a field by night. The creature looked at me.
I assure you it turned my hair grey. It’s a disgrace that the animals
should be allowed to go at large.”

“And what did the cow think of _him_?” Venning mumbled to Susan, who
immediately decided in her own mind that Mr. Hirst was a dreadful young
man, and that although he had such an air of being clever he probably
wasn’t as clever as Arthur, in the ways that really matter.

“Wasn’t it Wilde who discovered the fact that nature makes no allowance
for hip-bones?” enquired Hughling Elliot. He knew by this time exactly
what scholarships and distinction Hirst enjoyed, and had formed a very
high opinion of his capacities.

But Hirst merely drew his lips together very tightly and made no reply.

Ridley conjectured that it was now permissible for him to take his
leave. Politeness required him to thank Mrs. Elliot for his tea, and to
add, with a wave of his hand, “You must come up and see us.”

The wave included both Hirst and Hewet, and Hewet answered, “I should
like it immensely.”

The party broke up, and Susan, who had never felt so happy in her life,
was just about to start for her walk in the town with Arthur, when Mrs.
Paley beckoned her back. She could not understand from the book how
Double Demon patience is played; and suggested that if they sat down
and worked it out together it would fill up the time nicely before
dinner.




CHAPTER X


Among the promises which Mrs. Ambrose had made her niece should she
stay was a room cut off from the rest of the house, large, private—a
room in which she could play, read, think, defy the world, a fortress
as well as a sanctuary. Rooms, she knew, became more like worlds than
rooms at the age of twenty-four. Her judgment was correct, and when she
shut the door Rachel entered an enchanted place, where the poets sang
and things fell into their right proportions. Some days after the
vision of the hotel by night she was sitting alone, sunk in an
arm-chair, reading a brightly-covered red volume lettered on the back
_Works of Henrik Ibsen_. Music was open on the piano, and books of
music rose in two jagged pillars on the floor; but for the moment music
was deserted.

Far from looking bored or absent-minded, her eyes were concentrated
almost sternly upon the page, and from her breathing, which was slow
but repressed, it could be seen that her whole body was constrained by
the working of her mind. At last she shut the book sharply, lay back,
and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the
transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

“What I want to know,” she said aloud, “is this: What is the truth?
What’s the truth of it all?” She was speaking partly as herself, and
partly as the heroine of the play she had just read. The landscape
outside, because she had seen nothing but print for the space of two
hours, now appeared amazingly solid and clear, but although there were
men on the hill washing the trunks of olive trees with a white liquid,
for the moment she herself was the most vivid thing in it—an heroic
statue in the middle of the foreground, dominating the view. Ibsen’s
plays always left her in that condition. She acted them for days at a
time, greatly to Helen’s amusement; and then it would be Meredith’s
turn and she became Diana of the Crossways. But Helen was aware that it
was not all acting, and that some sort of change was taking place in
the human being. When Rachel became tired of the rigidity of her pose
on the back of the chair, she turned round, slid comfortably down into
it, and gazed out over the furniture through the window opposite which
opened on the garden. (Her mind wandered away from Nora, but she went
on thinking of things that the book suggested to her, of women and
life.)

During the three months she had been here she had made up considerably,
as Helen meant she should, for time spent in interminable walks round
sheltered gardens, and the household gossip of her aunts. But Mrs.
Ambrose would have been the first to disclaim any influence, or indeed
any belief that to influence was within her power. She saw her less
shy, and less serious, which was all to the good, and the violent leaps
and the interminable mazes which had led to that result were usually
not even guessed at by her. Talk was the medicine she trusted to, talk
about everything, talk that was free, unguarded, and as candid as a
habit of talking with men made natural in her own case. Nor did she
encourage those habits of unselfishness and amiability founded upon
insincerity which are put at so high a value in mixed households of men
and women. She desired that Rachel should think, and for this reason
offered books and discouraged too entire a dependence upon Bach and
Beethoven and Wagner. But when Mrs. Ambrose would have suggested Defoe,
Maupassant, or some spacious chronicle of family life, Rachel chose
modern books, books in shiny yellow covers, books with a great deal of
gilding on the back, which were tokens in her aunt’s eyes of harsh
wrangling and disputes about facts which had no such importance as the
moderns claimed for them. But she did not interfere. Rachel read what
she chose, reading with the curious literalness of one to whom written
sentences are unfamiliar, and handling words as though they were made
of wood, separately of great importance, and possessed of shapes like
tables or chairs. In this way she came to conclusions, which had to be
remodelled according to the adventures of the day, and were indeed
recast as liberally as any one could desire, leaving always a small
grain of belief behind them.

Ibsen was succeeded by a novel such as Mrs. Ambrose detested, whose
purpose was to distribute the guilt of a woman’s downfall upon the
right shoulders; a purpose which was achieved, if the reader’s
discomfort were any proof of it. She threw the book down, looked out of
the window, turned away from the window, and relapsed into an
arm-chair.

The morning was hot, and the exercise of reading left her mind
contracting and expanding like the main-spring of a clock, and the
small noises of midday, which one can ascribe to no definite cause, in
a regular rhythm. It was all very real, very big, very impersonal, and
after a moment or two she began to raise her first finger and to let it
fall on the arm of her chair so as to bring back to herself some
consciousness of her own existence. She was next overcome by the
unspeakable queerness of the fact that she should be sitting in an
arm-chair, in the morning, in the middle of the world. Who were the
people moving in the house—moving things from one place to another? And
life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and
vanishing, as in time she would vanish, though the furniture in the
room would remain. Her dissolution became so complete that she could
not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly still, listening and
looking always at the same spot. It became stranger and stranger. She
was overcome with awe that things should exist at all. . . . She forgot
that she had any fingers to raise. . . . The things that existed were
so immense and so desolate. . . . She continued to be conscious of
these vast masses of substance for a long stretch of time, the clock
still ticking in the midst of the universal silence.

“Come in,” she said mechanically, for a string in her brain seemed to
be pulled by a persistent knocking at the door. With great slowness the
door opened and a tall human being came towards her, holding out her
arm and saying:

“What am I to say to this?”

The utter absurdity of a woman coming into a room with a piece of paper
in her hand amazed Rachel.

“I don’t know what to answer, or who Terence Hewet is,” Helen
continued, in the toneless voice of a ghost. She put a paper before
Rachel on which were written the incredible words:

DEAR MRS. AMBROSE—I am getting up a picnic for next Friday, when we
propose to start at eleven-thirty if the weather is fine, and to make
the ascent of Monte Rosa. It will take some time, but the view should
be magnificent. It would give me great pleasure if you and Miss Vinrace
would consent to be of the party.—Yours sincerely,


TERENCE HEWET


Rachel read the words aloud to make herself believe in them. For the
same reason she put her hand on Helen’s shoulder.

“Books—books—books,” said Helen, in her absent-minded way. “More new
books—I wonder what you find in them. . . .”

For the second time Rachel read the letter, but to herself. This time,
instead of seeming vague as ghosts, each word was astonishingly
prominent; they came out as the tops of mountains come through a mist.
_Friday_—_eleven-thirty_—_Miss Vinrace_. The blood began to run in her
veins; she felt her eyes brighten.

“We must go,” she said, rather surprising Helen by her decision. “We
must certainly go”—such was the relief of finding that things still
happened, and indeed they appeared the brighter for the mist
surrounding them.

“Monte Rosa—that’s the mountain over there, isn’t it?” said Helen; “but
Hewet—who’s he? One of the young men Ridley met, I suppose. Shall I say
yes, then? It may be dreadfully dull.”

She took the letter back and went, for the messenger was waiting for
her answer.

The party which had been suggested a few nights ago in Mr. Hirst’s
bedroom had taken shape and was the source of great satisfaction to Mr.
Hewet, who had seldom used his practical abilities, and was pleased to
find them equal to the strain. His invitations had been universally
accepted, which was the more encouraging as they had been issued
against Hirst’s advice to people who were very dull, not at all suited
to each other, and sure not to come.

“Undoubtedly,” he said, as he twirled and untwirled a note signed Helen
Ambrose, “the gifts needed to make a great commander have been absurdly
overrated. About half the intellectual effort which is needed to review
a book of modern poetry has enabled me to get together seven or eight
people, of opposite sexes, at the same spot at the same hour on the
same day. What else is generalship, Hirst? What more did Wellington do
on the field of Waterloo? It’s like counting the number of pebbles of a
path, tedious but not difficult.”

He was sitting in his bedroom, one leg over the arm of the chair, and
Hirst was writing a letter opposite. Hirst was quick to point out that
all the difficulties remained.

“For instance, here are two women you’ve never seen. Suppose one of
them suffers from mountain-sickness, as my sister does, and the other—”

“Oh, the women are for you,” Hewet interrupted. “I asked them solely
for your benefit. What you want, Hirst, you know, is the society of
young women of your own age. You don’t know how to get on with women,
which is a great defect, considering that half the world consists of
women.”

Hirst groaned that he was quite aware of that.

But Hewet’s complacency was a little chilled as he walked with Hirst to
the place where a general meeting had been appointed. He wondered why
on earth he had asked these people, and what one really expected to get
from bunching human beings up together.

“Cows,” he reflected, “draw together in a field; ships in a calm; and
we’re just the same when we’ve nothing else to do. But why do we do
it?—is it to prevent ourselves from seeing to the bottom of things” (he
stopped by a stream and began stirring it with his walking-stick and
clouding the water with mud), “making cities and mountains and whole
universes out of nothing, or do we really love each other, or do we, on
the other hand, live in a state of perpetual uncertainty, knowing
nothing, leaping from moment to moment as from world to world?—which
is, on the whole, the view _I_ incline to.”

He jumped over the stream; Hirst went round and joined him, remarking
that he had long ceased to look for the reason of any human action.

Half a mile further, they came to a group of plane trees and the
salmon-pink farmhouse standing by the stream which had been chosen as
meeting-place. It was a shady spot, lying conveniently just where the
hill sprung out from the flat. Between the thin stems of the plane
trees the young men could see little knots of donkeys pasturing, and a
tall woman rubbing the nose of one of them, while another woman was
kneeling by the stream lapping water out of her palms.

As they entered the shady place, Helen looked up and then held out her
hand.

“I must introduce myself,” she said. “I am Mrs. Ambrose.”

Having shaken hands, she said, “That’s my niece.”

Rachel approached awkwardly. She held out her hand, but withdrew it.
“It’s all wet,” she said.

Scarcely had they spoken, when the first carriage drew up.

The donkeys were quickly jerked into attention, and the second carriage
arrived. By degrees the grove filled with people—the Elliots, the
Thornburys, Mr. Venning and Susan, Miss Allan, Evelyn Murgatroyd, and
Mr. Perrott. Mr. Hirst acted the part of hoarse energetic sheep-dog. By
means of a few words of caustic Latin he had the animals marshalled,
and by inclining a sharp shoulder he lifted the ladies. “What Hewet
fails to understand,” he remarked, “is that we must break the back of
the ascent before midday.” He was assisting a young lady, by name
Evelyn Murgatroyd, as he spoke. She rose light as a bubble to her seat.
With a feather drooping from a broad-brimmed hat, in white from top to
toe, she looked like a gallant lady of the time of Charles the First
leading royalist troops into action.

“Ride with me,” she commanded; and, as soon as Hirst had swung himself
across a mule, the two started, leading the cavalcade.

“You’re not to call me Miss Murgatroyd. I hate it,” she said. “My
name’s Evelyn. What’s yours?”

“St. John,” he said.

“I like that,” said Evelyn. “And what’s your friend’s name?”

“His initials being R. S. T., we call him Monk,” said Hirst.

“Oh, you’re all too clever,” she said. “Which way? Pick me a branch.
Let’s canter.”

She gave her donkey a sharp cut with a switch and started forward. The
full and romantic career of Evelyn Murgatroyd is best hit off by her
own words, “Call me Evelyn and I’ll call you St. John.” She said that
on very slight provocation—her surname was enough—but although a great
many young men had answered her already with considerable spirit she
went on saying it and making choice of none. But her donkey stumbled to
a jog-trot, and she had to ride in advance alone, for the path when it
began to ascend one of the spines of the hill became narrow and
scattered with stones. The cavalcade wound on like a jointed
caterpillar, tufted with the white parasols of the ladies, and the
panama hats of the gentlemen. At one point where the ground rose
sharply, Evelyn M. jumped off, threw her reins to the native boy, and
adjured St. John Hirst to dismount too. Their example was followed by
those who felt the need of stretching.

“I don’t see any need to get off,” said Miss Allan to Mrs. Elliot just
behind her, “considering the difficulty I had getting on.”

“These little donkeys stand anything, _n’est-ce pas_?” Mrs. Elliot
addressed the guide, who obligingly bowed his head.

“Flowers,” said Helen, stooping to pick the lovely little bright
flowers which grew separately here and there. “You pinch their leaves
and then they smell,” she said, laying one on Miss Allan’s knee.

“Haven’t we met before?” asked Miss Allan, looking at her.

“I was taking it for granted,” Helen laughed, for in the confusion of
meeting they had not been introduced.

“How sensible!” chirped Mrs. Elliot. “That’s just what one would always
like—only unfortunately it’s not possible.”

“Not possible?” said Helen. “Everything’s possible. Who knows what
mayn’t happen before night-fall?” she continued, mocking the poor
lady’s timidity, who depended so implicitly upon one thing following
another that the mere glimpse of a world where dinner could be
disregarded, or the table moved one inch from its accustomed place,
filled her with fears for her own stability.

Higher and higher they went, becoming separated from the world. The
world, when they turned to look back, flattened itself out, and was
marked with squares of thin green and grey.

“Towns are very small,” Rachel remarked, obscuring the whole of Santa
Marina and its suburbs with one hand. The sea filled in all the angles
of the coast smoothly, breaking in a white frill, and here and there
ships were set firmly in the blue. The sea was stained with purple and
green blots, and there was a glittering line upon the rim where it met
the sky. The air was very clear and silent save for the sharp noise of
grasshoppers and the hum of bees, which sounded loud in the ear as they
shot past and vanished. The party halted and sat for a time in a quarry
on the hillside.

“Amazingly clear,” exclaimed St. John, identifying one cleft in the
land after another.

Evelyn M. sat beside him, propping her chin on her hand. She surveyed
the view with a certain look of triumph.

“D’you think Garibaldi was ever up here?” she asked Mr. Hirst. Oh, if
she had been his bride! If, instead of a picnic party, this was a party
of patriots, and she, red-shirted like the rest, had lain among grim
men, flat on the turf, aiming her gun at the white turrets beneath
them, screening her eyes to pierce through the smoke! So thinking, her
foot stirred restlessly, and she exclaimed:

“I don’t call this _life_, do you?”

“What do you call life?” said St. John.

“Fighting—revolution,” she said, still gazing at the doomed city. “You
only care for books, I know.”

“You’re quite wrong,” said St. John.

“Explain,” she urged, for there were no guns to be aimed at bodies, and
she turned to another kind of warfare.

“What do I care for? People,” he said.

“Well, I _am_ surprised!” she exclaimed. “You look so awfully serious.
Do let’s be friends and tell each other what we’re like. I hate being
cautious, don’t you?”

But St. John was decidedly cautious, as she could see by the sudden
constriction of his lips, and had no intention of revealing his soul to
a young lady. “The ass is eating my hat,” he remarked, and stretched
out for it instead of answering her. Evelyn blushed very slightly and
then turned with some impetuosity upon Mr. Perrott, and when they
mounted again it was Mr. Perrott who lifted her to her seat.

“When one has laid the eggs one eats the omelette,” said Hughling
Elliot, exquisitely in French, a hint to the rest of them that it was
time to ride on again.

The midday sun which Hirst had foretold was beginning to beat down
hotly. The higher they got the more of the sky appeared, until the
mountain was only a small tent of earth against an enormous blue
background. The English fell silent; the natives who walked beside the
donkeys broke into queer wavering songs and tossed jokes from one to
the other. The way grew very steep, and each rider kept his eyes fixed
on the hobbling curved form of the rider and donkey directly in front
of him. Rather more strain was being put upon their bodies than is
quite legitimate in a party of pleasure, and Hewet overheard one or two
slightly grumbling remarks.

“Expeditions in such heat are perhaps a little unwise,” Mrs. Elliot
murmured to Miss Allan.

But Miss Allan returned, “I always like to get to the top”; and it was
true, although she was a big woman, stiff in the joints, and unused to
donkey-riding, but as her holidays were few she made the most of them.

The vivacious white figure rode well in front; she had somehow
possessed herself of a leafy branch and wore it round her hat like a
garland. They went on for a few minutes in silence.

“The view will be wonderful,” Hewet assured them, turning round in his
saddle and smiling encouragement. Rachel caught his eye and smiled too.
They struggled on for some time longer, nothing being heard but the
clatter of hooves striving on the loose stones. Then they saw that
Evelyn was off her ass, and that Mr. Perrott was standing in the
attitude of a statesman in Parliament Square, stretching an arm of
stone towards the view. A little to the left of them was a low ruined
wall, the stump of an Elizabethan watch-tower.

“I couldn’t have stood it much longer,” Mrs. Elliot confided to Mrs.
Thornbury, but the excitement of being at the top in another moment and
seeing the view prevented any one from answering her. One after another
they came out on the flat space at the top and stood overcome with
wonder. Before them they beheld an immense space—grey sands running
into forest, and forest merging in mountains, and mountains washed by
air, the infinite distances of South America. A river ran across the
plain, as flat as the land, and appearing quite as stationary. The
effect of so much space was at first rather chilling. They felt
themselves very small, and for some time no one said anything. Then
Evelyn exclaimed, “Splendid!” She took hold of the hand that was next
her; it chanced to be Miss Allan’s hand.

“North—South—East—West,” said Miss Allan, jerking her head slightly
towards the points of the compass.

Hewet, who had gone a little in front, looked up at his guests as if to
justify himself for having brought them. He observed how strangely the
people standing in a row with their figures bent slightly forward and
their clothes plastered by the wind to the shape of their bodies
resembled naked statues. On their pedestal of earth they looked
unfamiliar and noble, but in another moment they had broken their rank,
and he had to see to the laying out of food. Hirst came to his help,
and they handed packets of chicken and bread from one to another.

As St. John gave Helen her packet she looked him full in the face and
said:

“Do you remember—two women?”

He looked at her sharply.

“I do,” he answered.

“So you’re the two women!” Hewet exclaimed, looking from Helen to
Rachel.

“Your lights tempted us,” said Helen. “We watched you playing cards,
but we never knew that we were being watched.”

“It was like a thing in a play,” Rachel added.

“And Hirst couldn’t describe you,” said Hewet.

It was certainly odd to have seen Helen and to find nothing to say
about her.

Hughling Elliot put up his eyeglass and grasped the situation.

“I don’t know of anything more dreadful,” he said, pulling at the joint
of a chicken’s leg, “than being seen when one isn’t conscious of it.
One feels sure one has been caught doing something ridiculous—looking
at one’s tongue in a hansom, for instance.”

Now the others ceased to look at the view, and drawing together sat
down in a circle round the baskets.

“And yet those little looking-glasses in hansoms have a fascination of
their own,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “One’s features look so different when
one can only see a bit of them.”

“There will soon be very few hansom cabs left,” said Mrs. Elliot. “And
four-wheeled cabs—I assure you even at Oxford it’s almost impossible to
get a four-wheeled cab.”

“I wonder what happens to the horses,” said Susan.

“Veal pie,” said Arthur.

“It’s high time that horses should become extinct anyhow,” said Hirst.
“They’re distressingly ugly, besides being vicious.”

But Susan, who had been brought up to understand that the horse is the
noblest of God’s creatures, could not agree, and Venning thought Hirst
an unspeakable ass, but was too polite not to continue the
conversation.

“When they see us falling out of aeroplanes they get some of their own
back, I expect,” he remarked.

“You fly?” said old Mr. Thornbury, putting on his spectacles to look at
him.

“I hope to, some day,” said Arthur.

Here flying was discussed at length, and Mrs. Thornbury delivered an
opinion which was almost a speech to the effect that it would be quite
necessary in time of war, and in England we were terribly behind-hand.
“If I were a young fellow,” she concluded, “I should certainly
qualify.” It was odd to look at the little elderly lady, in her grey
coat and skirt, with a sandwich in her hand, her eyes lighting up with
zeal as she imagined herself a young man in an aeroplane. For some
reason, however, the talk did not run easily after this, and all they
said was about drink and salt and the view. Suddenly Miss Allan, who
was seated with her back to the ruined wall, put down her sandwich,
picked something off her neck, and remarked, “I’m covered with little
creatures.” It was true, and the discovery was very welcome. The ants
were pouring down a glacier of loose earth heaped between the stones of
the ruin—large brown ants with polished bodies. She held out one on the
back of her hand for Helen to look at.

“Suppose they sting?” said Helen.

“They will not sting, but they may infest the victuals,” said Miss
Allan, and measures were taken at once to divert the ants from their
course. At Hewet’s suggestion it was decided to adopt the methods of
modern warfare against an invading army. The table-cloth represented
the invaded country, and round it they built barricades of baskets, set
up the wine bottles in a rampart, made fortifications of bread and dug
fosses of salt. When an ant got through it was exposed to a fire of
bread-crumbs, until Susan pronounced that that was cruel, and rewarded
those brave spirits with spoil in the shape of tongue. Playing this
game they lost their stiffness, and even became unusually daring, for
Mr. Perrott, who was very shy, said, “Permit me,” and removed an ant
from Evelyn’s neck.

“It would be no laughing matter really,” said Mrs. Elliot
confidentially to Mrs. Thornbury, “if an ant did get between the vest
and the skin.”

The noise grew suddenly more clamorous, for it was discovered that a
long line of ants had found their way on to the table-cloth by a back
entrance, and if success could be gauged by noise, Hewet had every
reason to think his party a success. Nevertheless he became, for no
reason at all, profoundly depressed.

“They are not satisfactory; they are ignoble,” he thought, surveying
his guests from a little distance, where he was gathering together the
plates. He glanced at them all, stooping and swaying and gesticulating
round the table-cloth. Amiable and modest, respectable in many ways,
lovable even in their contentment and desire to be kind, how mediocre
they all were, and capable of what insipid cruelty to one another!
There was Mrs. Thornbury, sweet but trivial in her maternal egoism;
Mrs. Elliot, perpetually complaining of her lot; her husband a mere pea
in a pod; and Susan—she had no self, and counted neither one way nor
the other; Venning was as honest and as brutal as a schoolboy; poor old
Thornbury merely trod his round like a horse in a mill; and the less
one examined into Evelyn’s character the better, he suspected. Yet
these were the people with money, and to them rather than to others was
given the management of the world. Put among them some one more vital,
who cared for life or for beauty, and what an agony, what a waste would
they inflict on him if he tried to share with them and not to scourge!

“There’s Hirst,” he concluded, coming to the figure of his friend; with
his usual little frown of concentration upon his forehead he was
peeling the skin off a banana. “And he’s as ugly as sin.” For the
ugliness of St. John Hirst, and the limitations that went with it, he
made the rest in some way responsible. It was their fault that he had
to live alone. Then he came to Helen, attracted to her by the sound of
her laugh. She was laughing at Miss Allan. “You wear combinations in
this heat?” she said in a voice which was meant to be private. He liked
the look of her immensely, not so much her beauty, but her largeness
and simplicity, which made her stand out from the rest like a great
stone woman, and he passed on in a gentler mood. His eye fell upon
Rachel. She was lying back rather behind the others resting on one
elbow; she might have been thinking precisely the same thoughts as
Hewet himself. Her eyes were fixed rather sadly but not intently upon
the row of people opposite her. Hewet crawled up to her on his knees,
with a piece of bread in his hand.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

She was a little startled, but answered directly, “Human beings.”




CHAPTER XI


One after another they rose and stretched themselves, and in a few
minutes divided more or less into two separate parties. One of these
parties was dominated by Hughling Elliot and Mrs. Thornbury, who,
having both read the same books and considered the same questions, were
now anxious to name the places beneath them and to hang upon them
stores of information about navies and armies, political parties,
natives and mineral products—all of which combined, they said, to prove
that South America was the country of the future.

Evelyn M. listened with her bright blue eyes fixed upon the oracles.

“How it makes one long to be a man!” she exclaimed.

Mr. Perrott answered, surveying the plain, that a country with a future
was a very fine thing.

“If I were you,” said Evelyn, turning to him and drawing her glove
vehemently through her fingers, “I’d raise a troop and conquer some
great territory and make it splendid. You’d want women for that. I’d
love to start life from the very beginning as it ought to be—nothing
squalid—but great halls and gardens and splendid men and women. But
you—you only like Law Courts!”

“And would you really be content without pretty frocks and sweets and
all the things young ladies like?” asked Mr. Perrott, concealing a
certain amount of pain beneath his ironical manner.

“I’m not a young lady,” Evelyn flashed; she bit her underlip. “Just
because I like splendid things you laugh at me. Why are there no men
like Garibaldi now?” she demanded.

“Look here,” said Mr. Perrott, “you don’t give me a chance. You think
we ought to begin things fresh. Good. But I don’t see precisely—conquer
a territory? They’re all conquered already, aren’t they?”

“It’s not any territory in particular,” Evelyn explained. “It’s the
idea, don’t you see? We lead such tame lives. And I feel sure you’ve
got splendid things in you.”

Hewet saw the scars and hollows in Mr. Perrott’s sagacious face relax
pathetically. He could imagine the calculations which even then went on
within his mind, as to whether he would be justified in asking a woman
to marry him, considering that he made no more than five hundred a year
at the Bar, owned no private means, and had an invalid sister to
support. Mr. Perrott again knew that he was not “quite,” as Susan
stated in her diary; not quite a gentleman she meant, for he was the
son of a grocer in Leeds, had started life with a basket on his back,
and now, though practically indistinguishable from a born gentleman,
showed his origin to keen eyes in an impeccable neatness of dress, lack
of freedom in manner, extreme cleanliness of person, and a certain
indescribable timidity and precision with his knife and fork which
might be the relic of days when meat was rare, and the way of handling
it by no means gingerly.

The two parties who were strolling about and losing their unity now
came together, and joined each other in a long stare over the yellow
and green patches of the heated landscape below. The hot air danced
across it, making it impossible to see the roofs of a village on the
plain distinctly. Even on the top of the mountain where a breeze played
lightly, it was very hot, and the heat, the food, the immense space,
and perhaps some less well-defined cause produced a comfortable
drowsiness and a sense of happy relaxation in them. They did not say
much, but felt no constraint in being silent.

“Suppose we go and see what’s to be seen over there?” said Arthur to
Susan, and the pair walked off together, their departure certainly
sending some thrill of emotion through the rest.

“An odd lot, aren’t they?” said Arthur. “I thought we should never get
’em all to the top. But I’m glad we came, by Jove! I wouldn’t have
missed this for something.”

“I don’t _like_ Mr. Hirst,” said Susan inconsequently. “I suppose he’s
very clever, but why should clever people be so—I expect he’s awfully
nice, really,” she added, instinctively qualifying what might have
seemed an unkind remark.

“Hirst? Oh, he’s one of these learned chaps,” said Arthur
indifferently. “He don’t look as if he enjoyed it. You should hear him
talking to Elliot. It’s as much as I can do to follow ’em at all. . . .
I was never good at my books.”

With these sentences and the pauses that came between them they reached
a little hillock, on the top of which grew several slim trees.

“D’you mind if we sit down here?” said Arthur, looking about him. “It’s
jolly in the shade—and the view—” They sat down, and looked straight
ahead of them in silence for some time.

“But I do envy those clever chaps sometimes,” Arthur remarked. “I don’t
suppose they ever . . .” He did not finish his sentence.

“I can’t see why you should envy them,” said Susan, with great
sincerity.

“Odd things happen to one,” said Arthur. “One goes along smoothly
enough, one thing following another, and it’s all very jolly and plain
sailing, and you think you know all about it, and suddenly one doesn’t
know where one is a bit, and everything seems different from what it
used to seem. Now to-day, coming up that path, riding behind you, I
seemed to see everything as if—” he paused and plucked a piece of grass
up by the roots. He scattered the little lumps of earth which were
sticking to the roots—“As if it had a kind of meaning. You’ve made the
difference to me,” he jerked out, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell
you. I’ve felt it ever since I knew you. . . . It’s because I love
you.”

Even while they had been saying commonplace things Susan had been
conscious of the excitement of intimacy, which seemed not only to lay
bare something in her, but in the trees and the sky, and the progress
of his speech which seemed inevitable was positively painful to her,
for no human being had ever come so close to her before.

She was struck motionless as his speech went on, and her heart gave
great separate leaps at the last words. She sat with her fingers curled
round a stone, looking straight in front of her down the mountain over
the plain. So then, it had actually happened to her, a proposal of
marriage.

Arthur looked round at her; his face was oddly twisted. She was drawing
her breath with such difficulty that she could hardly answer.

“You might have known.” He seized her in his arms; again and again and
again they clasped each other, murmuring inarticulately.

“Well,” sighed Arthur, sinking back on the ground, “that’s the most
wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me.” He looked as if he were
trying to put things seen in a dream beside real things.

There was a long silence.

“It’s the most perfect thing in the world,” Susan stated, very gently
and with great conviction. It was no longer merely a proposal of
marriage, but of marriage with Arthur, with whom she was in love.

In the silence that followed, holding his hand tightly in hers, she
prayed to God that she might make him a good wife.

“And what will Mr. Perrott say?” she asked at the end of it.

“Dear old fellow,” said Arthur who, now that the first shock was over,
was relaxing into an enormous sense of pleasure and contentment. “We
must be very nice to him, Susan.”

He told her how hard Perrott’s life had been, and how absurdly devoted
he was to Arthur himself. He went on to tell her about his mother, a
widow lady, of strong character. In return Susan sketched the portraits
of her own family—Edith in particular, her youngest sister, whom she
loved better than any one else, “except you, Arthur. . . . Arthur,” she
continued, “what was it that you first liked me for?”

“It was a buckle you wore one night at sea,” said Arthur, after due
consideration. “I remember noticing—it’s an absurd thing to
notice!—that you didn’t take peas, because I don’t either.”

From this they went on to compare their more serious tastes, or rather
Susan ascertained what Arthur cared about, and professed herself very
fond of the same thing. They would live in London, perhaps have a
cottage in the country near Susan’s family, for they would find it
strange without her at first. Her mind, stunned to begin with, now flew
to the various changes that her engagement would make—how delightful it
would be to join the ranks of the married women—no longer to hang on to
groups of girls much younger than herself—to escape the long solitude
of an old maid’s life. Now and then her amazing good fortune overcame
her, and she turned to Arthur with an exclamation of love.

They lay in each other’s arms and had no notion that they were
observed. Yet two figures suddenly appeared among the trees above them.
“Here’s shade,” began Hewet, when Rachel suddenly stopped dead. They
saw a man and woman lying on the ground beneath them, rolling slightly
this way and that as the embrace tightened and slackened. The man then
sat upright and the woman, who now appeared to be Susan Warrington, lay
back upon the ground, with her eyes shut and an absorbed look upon her
face, as though she were not altogether conscious. Nor could you tell
from her expression whether she was happy, or had suffered something.
When Arthur again turned to her, butting her as a lamb butts a ewe,
Hewet and Rachel retreated without a word. Hewet felt uncomfortably
shy.

“I don’t like that,” said Rachel after a moment.

“I can remember not liking it either,” said Hewet. “I can remember—”
but he changed his mind and continued in an ordinary tone of voice,
“Well, we may take it for granted that they’re engaged. D’you think
he’ll ever fly, or will she put a stop to that?”

But Rachel was still agitated; she could not get away from the sight
they had just seen. Instead of answering Hewet she persisted.

“Love’s an odd thing, isn’t it, making one’s heart beat.”

“It’s so enormously important, you see,” Hewet replied. “Their lives
are now changed for ever.”

“And it makes one sorry for them too,” Rachel continued, as though she
were tracing the course of her feelings. “I don’t know either of them,
but I could almost burst into tears. That’s silly, isn’t it?”

“Just because they’re in love,” said Hewet. “Yes,” he added after a
moment’s consideration, “there’s something horribly pathetic about it,
I agree.”

And now, as they had walked some way from the grove of trees, and had
come to a rounded hollow very tempting to the back, they proceeded to
sit down, and the impression of the lovers lost some of its force,
though a certain intensity of vision, which was probably the result of
the sight, remained with them. As a day upon which any emotion has been
repressed is different from other days, so this day was now different,
merely because they had seen other people at a crisis of their lives.

“A great encampment of tents they might be,” said Hewet, looking in
front of him at the mountains. “Isn’t it like a water-colour too—you
know the way water-colours dry in ridges all across the paper—I’ve been
wondering what they looked like.”

His eyes became dreamy, as though he were matching things, and reminded
Rachel in their colour of the green flesh of a snail. She sat beside
him looking at the mountains too. When it became painful to look any
longer, the great size of the view seeming to enlarge her eyes beyond
their natural limit, she looked at the ground; it pleased her to
scrutinise this inch of the soil of South America so minutely that she
noticed every grain of earth and made it into a world where she was
endowed with the supreme power. She bent a blade of grass, and set an
insect on the utmost tassel of it, and wondered if the insect realised
his strange adventure, and thought how strange it was that she should
have bent that tassel rather than any other of the million tassels.

“You’ve never told me your name,” said Hewet suddenly. “Miss Somebody
Vinrace. . . . I like to know people’s Christian names.”

“Rachel,” she replied.

“Rachel,” he repeated. “I have an aunt called Rachel, who put the life
of Father Damien into verse. She is a religious fanatic—the result of
the way she was brought up, down in Northamptonshire, never seeing a
soul. Have you any aunts?”

“I live with them,” said Rachel.

“And I wonder what they’re doing now?” Hewet enquired.

“They are probably buying wool,” Rachel determined. She tried to
describe them. “They are small, rather pale women,” she began, “very
clean. We live in Richmond. They have an old dog, too, who will only
eat the marrow out of bones. . . . They are always going to church.
They tidy their drawers a good deal.” But here she was overcome by the
difficulty of describing people.

“It’s impossible to believe that it’s all going on still!” she
exclaimed.

The sun was behind them and two long shadows suddenly lay upon the
ground in front of them, one waving because it was made by a skirt, and
the other stationary, because thrown by a pair of legs in trousers.

“You look very comfortable!” said Helen’s voice above them.

“Hirst,” said Hewet, pointing at the scissorlike shadow; he then rolled
round to look up at them.

“There’s room for us all here,” he said.

When Hirst had seated himself comfortably, he said:

“Did you congratulate the young couple?”

It appeared that, coming to the same spot a few minutes after Hewet and
Rachel, Helen and Hirst had seen precisely the same thing.

“No, we didn’t congratulate them,” said Hewet. “They seemed very
happy.”

“Well,” said Hirst, pursing up his lips, “so long as I needn’t marry
either of them—”

“We were very much moved,” said Hewet.

“I thought you would be,” said Hirst. “Which was it, Monk? The thought
of the immortal passions, or the thought of new-born males to keep the
Roman Catholics out? I assure you,” he said to Helen, “he’s capable of
being moved by either.”

Rachel was a good deal stung by his banter, which she felt to be
directed equally against them both, but she could think of no repartee.

“Nothing moves Hirst,” Hewet laughed; he did not seem to be stung at
all. “Unless it were a transfinite number falling in love with a finite
one—I suppose such things do happen, even in mathematics.”

“On the contrary,” said Hirst with a touch of annoyance, “I consider
myself a person of very strong passions.” It was clear from the way he
spoke that he meant it seriously; he spoke of course for the benefit of
the ladies.

“By the way, Hirst,” said Hewet, after a pause, “I have a terrible
confession to make. Your book—the poems of Wordsworth, which if you
remember I took off your table just as we were starting, and certainly
put in my pocket here—”

“Is lost,” Hirst finished for him.

“I consider that there is still a chance,” Hewet urged, slapping
himself to right and left, “that I never did take it after all.”

“No,” said Hirst. “It is here.” He pointed to his breast.

“Thank God,” Hewet exclaimed. “I need no longer feel as though I’d
murdered a child!”

“I should think you were always losing things,” Helen remarked, looking
at him meditatively.

“I don’t lose things,” said Hewet. “I mislay them. That was the reason
why Hirst refused to share a cabin with me on the voyage out.”

“You came out together?” Helen enquired.

“I propose that each member of this party now gives a short
biographical sketch of himself or herself,” said Hirst, sitting
upright. “Miss Vinrace, you come first; begin.”

Rachel stated that she was twenty-four years of age, the daughter of a
ship-owner, that she had never been properly educated; played the
piano, had no brothers or sisters, and lived at Richmond with aunts,
her mother being dead.

“Next,” said Hirst, having taken in these facts; he pointed at Hewet.
“I am the son of an English gentleman. I am twenty-seven,” Hewet began.
“My father was a fox-hunting squire. He died when I was ten in the
hunting field. I can remember his body coming home, on a shutter I
suppose, just as I was going down to tea, and noticing that there was
jam for tea, and wondering whether I should be allowed—”

“Yes; but keep to the facts,” Hirst put in.

“I was educated at Winchester and Cambridge, which I had to leave after
a time. I have done a good many things since—”

“Profession?”

“None—at least—”

“Tastes?”

“Literary. I’m writing a novel.”

“Brothers and sisters?”

“Three sisters, no brother, and a mother.”

“Is that all we’re to hear about you?” said Helen. She stated that she
was very old—forty last October, and her father had been a solicitor in
the city who had gone bankrupt, for which reason she had never had much
education—they lived in one place after another—but an elder brother
used to lend her books.

“If I were to tell you everything—” she stopped and smiled. “It would
take too long,” she concluded. “I married when I was thirty, and I have
two children. My husband is a scholar. And now—it’s your turn,” she
nodded at Hirst.

“You’ve left out a great deal,” he reproved her. “My name is St. John
Alaric Hirst,” he began in a jaunty tone of voice. “I’m twenty-four
years old. I’m the son of the Reverend Sidney Hirst, vicar of Great
Wappyng in Norfolk. Oh, I got scholarships
everywhere—Westminster—King’s. I’m now a fellow of King’s. Don’t it
sound dreary? Parents both alive (alas). Two brothers and one sister.
I’m a very distinguished young man,” he added.

“One of the three, or is it five, most distinguished men in England,”
Hewet remarked.

“Quite correct,” said Hirst.

“That’s all very interesting,” said Helen after a pause. “But of course
we’ve left out the only questions that matter. For instance, are we
Christians?”

“I am not,” “I am not,” both the young men replied.

“I am,” Rachel stated.

“You believe in a personal God?” Hirst demanded, turning round and
fixing her with his eyeglasses.

“I believe—I believe,” Rachel stammered, “I believe there are things we
don’t know about, and the world might change in a minute and anything
appear.”

At this Helen laughed outright. “Nonsense,” she said. “You’re not a
Christian. You’ve never thought what you are.—And there are lots of
other questions,” she continued, “though perhaps we can’t ask them
yet.” Although they had talked so freely they were all uncomfortably
conscious that they really knew nothing about each other.

“The important questions,” Hewet pondered, “the really interesting
ones. I doubt that one ever does ask them.”

Rachel, who was slow to accept the fact that only a very few things can
be said even by people who know each other well, insisted on knowing
what he meant.

“Whether we’ve ever been in love?” she enquired. “Is that the kind of
question you mean?”

Again Helen laughed at her, benignantly strewing her with handfuls of
the long tasselled grass, for she was so brave and so foolish.

“Oh, Rachel,” she cried. “It’s like having a puppy in the house having
you with one—a puppy that brings one’s underclothes down into the
hall.”

But again the sunny earth in front of them was crossed by fantastic
wavering figures, the shadows of men and women.

“There they are!” exclaimed Mrs. Elliot. There was a touch of
peevishness in her voice. “And we’ve had _such_ a hunt to find you. Do
you know what the time is?”

Mrs. Elliot and Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury now confronted them; Mrs. Elliot
was holding out her watch, and playfully tapping it upon the face.
Hewet was recalled to the fact that this was a party for which he was
responsible, and he immediately led them back to the watch-tower, where
they were to have tea before starting home again. A bright crimson
scarf fluttered from the top of the wall, which Mr. Perrott and Evelyn
were tying to a stone as the others came up. The heat had changed just
so far that instead of sitting in the shadow they sat in the sun, which
was still hot enough to paint their faces red and yellow, and to colour
great sections of the earth beneath them.

“There’s nothing half so nice as tea!” said Mrs. Thornbury, taking her
cup.

“Nothing,” said Helen. “Can’t you remember as a child chopping up hay—”
she spoke much more quickly than usual, and kept her eye fixed upon
Mrs. Thornbury, “and pretending it was tea, and getting scolded by the
nurses—why I can’t imagine, except that nurses are such brutes, won’t
allow pepper instead of salt though there’s no earthly harm in it.
Weren’t your nurses just the same?”

During this speech Susan came into the group, and sat down by Helen’s
side. A few minutes later Mr. Venning strolled up from the opposite
direction. He was a little flushed, and in the mood to answer
hilariously whatever was said to him.

“What have you been doing to that old chap’s grave?” he asked, pointing
to the red flag which floated from the top of the stones.

“We have tried to make him forget his misfortune in having died three
hundred years ago,” said Mr. Perrott.

“It would be awful—to be dead!” ejaculated Evelyn M.

“To be dead?” said Hewet. “I don’t think it would be awful. It’s quite
easy to imagine. When you go to bed to-night fold your hands so—breathe
slower and slower—” He lay back with his hands clasped upon his breast,
and his eyes shut, “Now,” he murmured in an even monotonous voice, “I
shall never, never, never move again.” His body, lying flat among them,
did for a moment suggest death.

“This is a horrible exhibition, Mr. Hewet!” cried Mrs. Thornbury.

“More cake for us!” said Arthur.

“I assure you there’s nothing horrible about it,” said Hewet, sitting
up and laying hands upon the cake.

“It’s so natural,” he repeated. “People with children should make them
do that exercise every night. . . . Not that I look forward to being
dead.”

“And when you allude to a grave,” said Mr. Thornbury, who spoke almost
for the first time, “have you any authority for calling that ruin a
grave? I am quite with you in refusing to accept the common
interpretation which declares it to be the remains of an Elizabethan
watch-tower—any more than I believe that the circular mounds or barrows
which we find on the top of our English downs were camps. The
antiquaries call everything a camp. I am always asking them, Well then,
where do you think our ancestors kept their cattle? Half the camps in
England are merely the ancient pound or barton as we call it in my part
of the world. The argument that no one would keep his cattle in such
exposed and inaccessible spots has no weight at all, if you reflect
that in those days a man’s cattle were his capital, his stock-in-trade,
his daughter’s dowries. Without cattle he was a serf, another man’s
man. . . .” His eyes slowly lost their intensity, and he muttered a few
concluding words under his breath, looking curiously old and forlorn.

Hughling Elliot, who might have been expected to engage the old
gentleman in argument, was absent at the moment. He now came up holding
out a large square of cotton upon which a fine design was printed in
pleasant bright colours that made his hand look pale.

“A bargain,” he announced, laying it down on the cloth. “I’ve just
bought it from the big man with the ear-rings. Fine, isn’t it? It
wouldn’t suit every one, of course, but it’s just the thing—isn’t it,
Hilda?—for Mrs. Raymond Parry.”

“Mrs. Raymond Parry!” cried Helen and Mrs. Thornbury at the same
moment.

They looked at each other as though a mist hitherto obscuring their
faces had been blown away.

“Ah—you have been to those wonderful parties too?” Mrs. Elliot asked
with interest.

Mrs. Parry’s drawing-room, though thousands of miles away, behind a
vast curve of water on a tiny piece of earth, came before their eyes.
They who had had no solidity or anchorage before seemed to be attached
to it somehow, and at once grown more substantial. Perhaps they had
been in the drawing-room at the same moment; perhaps they had passed
each other on the stairs; at any rate they knew some of the same
people. They looked one another up and down with new interest. But they
could do no more than look at each other, for there was no time to
enjoy the fruits of the discovery. The donkeys were advancing, and it
was advisable to begin the descent immediately, for the night fell so
quickly that it would be dark before they were home again.

Accordingly, remounting in order, they filed off down the hillside.
Scraps of talk came floating back from one to another. There were jokes
to begin with, and laughter; some walked part of the way, and picked
flowers, and sent stones bounding before them.

“Who writes the best Latin verse in your college, Hirst?” Mr. Elliot
called back incongruously, and Mr. Hirst returned that he had no idea.

The dusk fell as suddenly as the natives had warned them, the hollows
of the mountain on either side filling up with darkness and the path
becoming so dim that it was surprising to hear the donkeys’ hooves
still striking on hard rock. Silence fell upon one, and then upon
another, until they were all silent, their minds spilling out into the
deep blue air. The way seemed shorter in the dark than in the day; and
soon the lights of the town were seen on the flat far beneath them.

Suddenly some one cried, “Ah!”

In a moment the slow yellow drop rose again from the plain below; it
rose, paused, opened like a flower, and fell in a shower of drops.

“Fireworks,” they cried.

Another went up more quickly; and then another; they could almost hear
it twist and roar.

“Some Saint’s day, I suppose,” said a voice. The rush and embrace of
the rockets as they soared up into the air seemed like the fiery way in
which lovers suddenly rose and united, leaving the crowd gazing up at
them with strained white faces. But Susan and Arthur, riding down the
hill, never said a word to each other, and kept accurately apart.

Then the fireworks became erratic, and soon they ceased altogether, and
the rest of the journey was made almost in darkness, the mountain being
a great shadow behind them, and bushes and trees little shadows which
threw darkness across the road. Among the plane-trees they separated,
bundling into carriages and driving off, without saying good-night, or
saying it only in a half-muffled way.

It was so late that there was no time for normal conversation between
their arrival at the hotel and their retirement to bed. But Hirst
wandered into Hewet’s room with a collar in his hand.

“Well, Hewet,” he remarked, on the crest of a gigantic yawn, “that was
a great success, I consider.” He yawned. “But take care you’re not
landed with that young woman. . . . I don’t really like young women. .
. .”

Hewet was too much drugged by hours in the open air to make any reply.
In fact every one of the party was sound asleep within ten minutes or
so of each other, with the exception of Susan Warrington. She lay for a
considerable time looking blankly at the wall opposite, her hands
clasped above her heart, and her light burning by her side. All
articulate thought had long ago deserted her; her heart seemed to have
grown to the size of a sun, and to illuminate her entire body, shedding
like the sun a steady tide of warmth.

“I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy,” she repeated. “I love every one. I’m
happy.”




CHAPTER XII


When Susan’s engagement had been approved at home, and made public to
any one who took an interest in it at the hotel—and by this time the
society at the hotel was divided so as to point to invisible
chalk-marks such as Mr. Hirst had described, the news was felt to
justify some celebration—an expedition? That had been done already. A
dance then. The advantage of a dance was that it abolished one of those
long evenings which were apt to become tedious and lead to absurdly
early hours in spite of bridge.

Two or three people standing under the erect body of the stuffed
leopard in the hall very soon had the matter decided. Evelyn slid a
pace or two this way and that, and pronounced that the floor was
excellent. Signor Rodriguez informed them of an old Spaniard who
fiddled at weddings—fiddled so as to make a tortoise waltz; and his
daughter, although endowed with eyes as black as coal-scuttles, had the
same power over the piano. If there were any so sick or so surly as to
prefer sedentary occupations on the night in question to spinning and
watching others spin, the drawing-room and billiard-room were theirs.
Hewet made it his business to conciliate the outsiders as much as
possible. To Hirst’s theory of the invisible chalk-marks he would pay
no attention whatever. He was treated to a snub or two, but, in reward,
found obscure lonely gentlemen delighted to have this opportunity of
talking to their kind, and the lady of doubtful character showed every
symptom of confiding her case to him in the near future. Indeed it was
made quite obvious to him that the two or three hours between dinner
and bed contained an amount of unhappiness, which was really pitiable,
so many people had not succeeded in making friends.

It was settled that the dance was to be on Friday, one week after the
engagement, and at dinner Hewet declared himself satisfied.

“They’re all coming!” he told Hirst. “Pepper!” he called, seeing
William Pepper slip past in the wake of the soup with a pamphlet
beneath his arm, “We’re counting on you to open the ball.”

“You will certainly put sleep out of the question,” Pepper returned.

“You are to take the floor with Miss Allan,” Hewet continued,
consulting a sheet of pencilled notes.

Pepper stopped and began a discourse upon round dances, country dances,
morris dances, and quadrilles, all of which are entirely superior to
the bastard waltz and spurious polka which have ousted them most
unjustly in contemporary popularity—when the waiters gently pushed him
on to his table in the corner.

The dining-room at this moment had a certain fantastic resemblance to a
farmyard scattered with grain on which bright pigeons kept descending.
Almost all the ladies wore dresses which they had not yet displayed,
and their hair rose in waves and scrolls so as to appear like carved
wood in Gothic churches rather than hair. The dinner was shorter and
less formal than usual, even the waiters seeming to be affected with
the general excitement. Ten minutes before the clock struck nine the
committee made a tour through the ballroom. The hall, when emptied of
its furniture, brilliantly lit, adorned with flowers whose scent tinged
the air, presented a wonderful appearance of ethereal gaiety.

“It’s like a starlit sky on an absolutely cloudless night,” Hewet
murmured, looking about him, at the airy empty room.

“A heavenly floor, anyhow,” Evelyn added, taking a run and sliding two
or three feet along.

“What about those curtains?” asked Hirst. The crimson curtains were
drawn across the long windows. “It’s a perfect night outside.”

“Yes, but curtains inspire confidence,” Miss Allan decided. “When the
ball is in full swing it will be time to draw them. We might even open
the windows a little. . . . If we do it now elderly people will imagine
there are draughts.”

Her wisdom had come to be recognised, and held in respect. Meanwhile as
they stood talking, the musicians were unwrapping their instruments,
and the violin was repeating again and again a note struck upon the
piano. Everything was ready to begin.

After a few minutes’ pause, the father, the daughter, and the
son-in-law who played the horn flourished with one accord. Like the
rats who followed the piper, heads instantly appeared in the doorway.
There was another flourish; and then the trio dashed spontaneously into
the triumphant swing of the waltz. It was as though the room were
instantly flooded with water. After a moment’s hesitation first one
couple, then another, leapt into mid-stream, and went round and round
in the eddies. The rhythmic swish of the dancers sounded like a
swirling pool. By degrees the room grew perceptibly hotter. The smell
of kid gloves mingled with the strong scent of flowers. The eddies
seemed to circle faster and faster, until the music wrought itself into
a crash, ceased, and the circles were smashed into little separate
bits. The couples struck off in different directions, leaving a thin
row of elderly people stuck fast to the walls, and here and there a
piece of trimming or a handkerchief or a flower lay upon the floor.
There was a pause, and then the music started again, the eddies
whirled, the couples circled round in them, until there was a crash,
and the circles were broken up into separate pieces.

When this had happened about five times, Hirst, who leant against a
window-frame, like some singular gargoyle, perceived that Helen Ambrose
and Rachel stood in the doorway. The crowd was such that they could not
move, but he recognised them by a piece of Helen’s shoulder and a
glimpse of Rachel’s head turning round. He made his way to them; they
greeted him with relief.

“We are suffering the tortures of the damned,” said Helen.

“This is my idea of hell,” said Rachel.

Her eyes were bright and she looked bewildered.

Hewet and Miss Allan, who had been waltzing somewhat laboriously,
paused and greeted the newcomers.

“This _is_ nice,” said Hewet. “But where is Mr. Ambrose?”

“Pindar,” said Helen. “May a married woman who was forty in October
dance? I can’t stand still.” She seemed to fade into Hewet, and they
both dissolved in the crowd.

“We must follow suit,” said Hirst to Rachel, and he took her resolutely
by the elbow. Rachel, without being expert, danced well, because of a
good ear for rhythm, but Hirst had no taste for music, and a few
dancing lessons at Cambridge had only put him into possession of the
anatomy of a waltz, without imparting any of its spirit. A single turn
proved to them that their methods were incompatible; instead of fitting
into each other their bones seemed to jut out in angles making smooth
turning an impossibility, and cutting, moreover, into the circular
progress of the other dancers.

“Shall we stop?” said Hirst. Rachel gathered from his expression that
he was annoyed.

They staggered to seats in the corner, from which they had a view of
the room. It was still surging, in waves of blue and yellow, striped by
the black evening-clothes of the gentlemen.

“An amazing spectacle,” Hirst remarked. “Do you dance much in London?”
They were both breathing fast, and both a little excited, though each
was determined not to show any excitement at all.

“Scarcely ever. Do you?”

“My people give a dance every Christmas.”

“This isn’t half a bad floor,” Rachel said. Hirst did not attempt to
answer her platitude. He sat quite silent, staring at the dancers.
After three minutes the silence became so intolerable to Rachel that
she was goaded to advance another commonplace about the beauty of the
night. Hirst interrupted her ruthlessly.

“Was that all nonsense what you said the other day about being a
Christian and having no education?” he asked.

“It was practically true,” she replied. “But I also play the piano very
well,” she said, “better, I expect than any one in this room. You are
the most distinguished man in England, aren’t you?” she asked shyly.

“One of the three,” he corrected.

Helen whirling past here tossed a fan into Rachel’s lap.

“She is very beautiful,” Hirst remarked.

They were again silent. Rachel was wondering whether he thought her
also nice-looking; St. John was considering the immense difficulty of
talking to girls who had no experience of life. Rachel had obviously
never thought or felt or seen anything, and she might be intelligent or
she might be just like all the rest. But Hewet’s taunt rankled in his
mind—“you don’t know how to get on with women,” and he was determined
to profit by this opportunity. Her evening-clothes bestowed on her just
that degree of unreality and distinction which made it romantic to
speak to her, and stirred a desire to talk, which irritated him because
he did not know how to begin. He glanced at her, and she seemed to him
very remote and inexplicable, very young and chaste. He drew a sigh,
and began.

“About books now. What have you read? Just Shakespeare and the Bible?”

“I haven’t read many classics,” Rachel stated. She was slightly annoyed
by his jaunty and rather unnatural manner, while his masculine
acquirements induced her to take a very modest view of her own power.

“D’you mean to tell me you’ve reached the age of twenty-four without
reading Gibbon?” he demanded.

“Yes, I have,” she answered.

“Mon Dieu!” he exclaimed, throwing out his hands. “You must begin
to-morrow. I shall send you my copy. What I want to know is—” he looked
at her critically. “You see, the problem is, can one really talk to
you? Have you got a mind, or are you like the rest of your sex? You
seem to me absurdly young compared with men of your age.”

Rachel looked at him but said nothing.

“About Gibbon,” he continued. “D’you think you’ll be able to appreciate
him? He’s the test, of course. It’s awfully difficult to tell about
women,” he continued, “how much, I mean, is due to lack of training,
and how much is native incapacity. I don’t see myself why you shouldn’t
understand—only I suppose you’ve led an absurd life until now—you’ve
just walked in a crocodile, I suppose, with your hair down your back.”

The music was again beginning. Hirst’s eye wandered about the room in
search of Mrs. Ambrose. With the best will in the world he was
conscious that they were not getting on well together.

“I’d like awfully to lend you books,” he said, buttoning his gloves,
and rising from his seat. “We shall meet again. I’m going to leave you
now.”

He got up and left her.

Rachel looked round. She felt herself surrounded, like a child at a
party, by the faces of strangers all hostile to her, with hooked noses
and sneering, indifferent eyes. She was by a window, she pushed it open
with a jerk. She stepped out into the garden. Her eyes swam with tears
of rage.

“Damn that man!” she exclaimed, having acquired some of Helen’s words.
“Damn his insolence!”

She stood in the middle of the pale square of light which the window
she had opened threw upon the grass. The forms of great black trees
rose massively in front of her. She stood still, looking at them,
shivering slightly with anger and excitement. She heard the trampling
and swinging of the dancers behind her, and the rhythmic sway of the
waltz music.

“There are trees,” she said aloud. Would the trees make up for St. John
Hirst? She would be a Persian princess far from civilisation, riding
her horse upon the mountains alone, and making her women sing to her in
the evening, far from all this, from the strife and men and women—a
form came out of the shadow; a little red light burnt high up in its
blackness.

“Miss Vinrace, is it?” said Hewet, peering at her. “You were dancing
with Hirst?”

“He’s made me furious!” she cried vehemently. “No one’s any right to be
insolent!”

“Insolent?” Hewet repeated, taking his cigar from his mouth in
surprise. “Hirst—insolent?”

“It’s insolent to—” said Rachel, and stopped. She did not know exactly
why she had been made so angry. With a great effort she pulled herself
together.

“Oh, well,” she added, the vision of Helen and her mockery before her,
“I dare say I’m a fool.” She made as though she were going back into
the ballroom, but Hewet stopped her.

“Please explain to me,” he said. “I feel sure Hirst didn’t mean to hurt
you.”

When Rachel tried to explain, she found it very difficult. She could
not say that she found the vision of herself walking in a crocodile
with her hair down her back peculiarly unjust and horrible, nor could
she explain why Hirst’s assumption of the superiority of his nature and
experience had seemed to her not only galling but terrible—as if a gate
had clanged in her face. Pacing up and down the terrace beside Hewet
she said bitterly:

“It’s no good; we should live separate; we cannot understand each
other; we only bring out what’s worst.”

Hewet brushed aside her generalisation as to the natures of the two
sexes, for such generalisations bored him and seemed to him generally
untrue. But, knowing Hirst, he guessed fairly accurately what had
happened, and, though secretly much amused, was determined that Rachel
should not store the incident away in her mind to take its place in the
view she had of life.

“Now you’ll hate him,” he said, “which is wrong. Poor old Hirst—he
can’t help his method. And really, Miss Vinrace, he was doing his best;
he was paying you a compliment—he was trying—he was trying—” he could
not finish for the laughter that overcame him.

Rachel veered round suddenly and laughed out too. She saw that there
was something ridiculous about Hirst, and perhaps about herself.

“It’s his way of making friends, I suppose,” she laughed. “Well—I shall
do my part. I shall begin—‘Ugly in body, repulsive in mind as you are,
Mr. Hirst—’”

“Hear, hear!” cried Hewet. “That’s the way to treat him. You see, Miss
Vinrace, you must make allowances for Hirst. He’s lived all his life in
front of a looking-glass, so to speak, in a beautiful panelled room,
hung with Japanese prints and lovely old chairs and tables, just one
splash of colour, you know, in the right place,—between the windows I
think it is,—and there he sits hour after hour with his toes on the
fender, talking about philosophy and God and his liver and his heart
and the hearts of his friends. They’re all broken. You can’t expect him
to be at his best in a ballroom. He wants a cosy, smoky, masculine
place, where he can stretch his legs out, and only speak when he’s got
something to say. For myself, I find it rather dreary. But I do respect
it. They’re all so much in earnest. They do take the serious things
very seriously.”

The description of Hirst’s way of life interested Rachel so much that
she almost forgot her private grudge against him, and her respect
revived.

“They are really very clever then?” she asked.

“Of course they are. So far as brains go I think it’s true what he said
the other day; they’re the cleverest people in England. But—you ought
to take him in hand,” he added. “There’s a great deal more in him
than’s ever been got at. He wants some one to laugh at him. . . . The
idea of Hirst telling you that you’ve had no experiences! Poor old
Hirst!”

They had been pacing up and down the terrace while they talked, and now
one by one the dark windows were uncurtained by an invisible hand, and
panes of light fell regularly at equal intervals upon the grass. They
stopped to look in at the drawing-room, and perceived Mr. Pepper
writing alone at a table.

“There’s Pepper writing to his aunt,” said Hewet. “She must be a very
remarkable old lady, eighty-five he tells me, and he takes her for
walking tours in the New Forest. . . . Pepper!” he cried, rapping on
the window. “Go and do your duty. Miss Allan expects you.”

When they came to the windows of the ballroom, the swing of the dancers
and the lilt of the music was irresistible.

“Shall we?” said Hewet, and they clasped hands and swept off
magnificently into the great swirling pool. Although this was only the
second time they had met, the first time they had seen a man and woman
kissing each other, and the second time Mr. Hewet had found that a
young woman angry is very like a child. So that when they joined hands
in the dance they felt more at their ease than is usual.

It was midnight and the dance was now at its height. Servants were
peeping in at the windows; the garden was sprinkled with the white
shapes of couples sitting out. Mrs. Thornbury and Mrs. Elliot sat side
by side under a palm tree, holding fans, handkerchiefs, and brooches
deposited in their laps by flushed maidens. Occasionally they exchanged
comments.

“Miss Warrington _does_ look happy,” said Mrs. Elliot; they both
smiled; they both sighed.

“He has a great deal of character,” said Mrs. Thornbury, alluding to
Arthur.

“And character is what one wants,” said Mrs. Elliot. “Now that young
man is _clever_ enough,” she added, nodding at Hirst, who came past
with Miss Allan on his arm.

“He does not look strong,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “His complexion is not
good.—Shall I tear it off?” she asked, for Rachel had stopped,
conscious of a long strip trailing behind her.

“I hope you are enjoying yourselves?” Hewet asked the ladies.

“This is a very familiar position for me!” smiled Mrs. Thornbury. “I
have brought out five daughters—and they all loved dancing! You love it
too, Miss Vinrace?” she asked, looking at Rachel with maternal eyes. “I
know I did when I was your age. How I used to beg my mother to let me
stay—and now I sympathise with the poor mothers—but I sympathise with
the daughters too!”

She smiled sympathetically, and at the same time rather keenly, at
Rachel.

“They seem to find a great deal to say to each other,” said Mrs.
Elliot, looking significantly at the backs of the couple as they turned
away. “Did you notice at the picnic? He was the only person who could
make her utter.”

“Her father is a very interesting man,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “He has
one of the largest shipping businesses in Hull. He made a very able
reply, you remember, to Mr. Asquith at the last election. It is so
interesting to find that a man of his experience is a strong
Protectionist.”

She would have liked to discuss politics, which interested her more
than personalities, but Mrs. Elliot would only talk about the Empire in
a less abstract form.

“I hear there are dreadful accounts from England about the rats,” she
said. “A sister-in-law, who lives at Norwich, tells me it has been
quite unsafe to order poultry. The plague—you see. It attacks the rats,
and through them other creatures.”

“And the local authorities are not taking proper steps?” asked Mrs.
Thornbury.

“That she does not say. But she describes the attitude of the educated
people—who should know better—as callous in the extreme. Of course, my
sister-in-law is one of those active modern women, who always takes
things up, you know—the kind of woman one admires, though one does not
feel, at least I do not feel—but then she has a constitution of iron.”

Mrs. Elliot, brought back to the consideration of her own delicacy,
here sighed.

“A very animated face,” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at Evelyn M. who
had stopped near them to pin tight a scarlet flower at her breast. It
would not stay, and, with a spirited gesture of impatience, she thrust
it into her partner’s button-hole. He was a tall melancholy youth, who
received the gift as a knight might receive his lady’s token.

“Very trying to the eyes,” was Mrs. Eliot’s next remark, after watching
the yellow whirl in which so few of the whirlers had either name or
character for her, for a few minutes. Bursting out of the crowd, Helen
approached them, and took a vacant chair.

“May I sit by you?” she said, smiling and breathing fast. “I suppose I
ought to be ashamed of myself,” she went on, sitting down, “at my age.”

Her beauty, now that she was flushed and animated, was more expansive
than usual, and both the ladies felt the same desire to touch her.

“I _am_ enjoying myself,” she panted. “Movement—isn’t it amazing?”

“I have always heard that nothing comes up to dancing if one is a good
dancer,” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at her with a smile.

Helen swayed slightly as if she sat on wires.

“I could dance for ever!” she said. “They ought to let themselves go
more!” she exclaimed. “They ought to leap and swing. Look! How they
mince!”

“Have you seen those wonderful Russian dancers?” began Mrs. Elliot. But
Helen saw her partner coming and rose as the moon rises. She was half
round the room before they took their eyes off her, for they could not
help admiring her, although they thought it a little odd that a woman
of her age should enjoy dancing.

Directly Helen was left alone for a minute she was joined by St. John
Hirst, who had been watching for an opportunity.

“Should you mind sitting out with me?” he asked. “I’m quite incapable
of dancing.” He piloted Helen to a corner which was supplied with two
arm-chairs, and thus enjoyed the advantage of semi-privacy. They sat
down, and for a few minutes Helen was too much under the influence of
dancing to speak.

“Astonishing!” she exclaimed at last. “What sort of shape can she think
her body is?” This remark was called forth by a lady who came past
them, waddling rather than walking, and leaning on the arm of a stout
man with globular green eyes set in a fat white face. Some support was
necessary, for she was very stout, and so compressed that the upper
part of her body hung considerably in advance of her feet, which could
only trip in tiny steps, owing to the tightness of the skirt round her
ankles. The dress itself consisted of a small piece of shiny yellow
satin, adorned here and there indiscriminately with round shields of
blue and green beads made to imitate hues of a peacock’s breast. On the
summit of a frothy castle of hair a purple plume stood erect, while her
short neck was encircled by a black velvet ribbon knobbed with gems,
and golden bracelets were tightly wedged into the flesh of her fat
gloved arms. She had the face of an impertinent but jolly little pig,
mottled red under a dusting of powder.

St. John could not join in Helen’s laughter.

“It makes me sick,” he declared. “The whole thing makes me sick. . . .
Consider the minds of those people—their feelings. Don’t you agree?”

“I always make a vow never to go to another party of any description,”
Helen replied, “and I always break it.”

She leant back in her chair and looked laughingly at the young man. She
could see that he was genuinely cross, if at the same time slightly
excited.

“However,” he said, resuming his jaunty tone, “I suppose one must just
make up one’s mind to it.”

“To what?”

“There never will be more than five people in the world worth talking
to.”

Slowly the flush and sparkle in Helen’s face died away, and she looked
as quiet and as observant as usual.

“Five people?” she remarked. “I should say there were more than five.”

“You’ve been very fortunate, then,” said Hirst. “Or perhaps I’ve been
very unfortunate.” He became silent.

“Should you say I was a difficult kind of person to get on with?” he
asked sharply.

“Most clever people are when they’re young,” Helen replied.

“And of course I am—immensely clever,” said Hirst. “I’m infinitely
cleverer than Hewet. It’s quite possible,” he continued in his
curiously impersonal manner, “that I’m going to be one of the people
who really matter. That’s utterly different from being clever, though
one can’t expect one’s family to see it,” he added bitterly.

Helen thought herself justified in asking, “Do you find your family
difficult to get on with?”

“Intolerable. . . . They want me to be a peer and a privy councillor.
I’ve come out here partly in order to settle the matter. It’s got to be
settled. Either I must go to the bar, or I must stay on in Cambridge.
Of course, there are obvious drawbacks to each, but the arguments
certainly do seem to me in favour of Cambridge. This kind of thing!” he
waved his hand at the crowded ballroom. “Repulsive. I’m conscious of
great powers of affection too. I’m not susceptible, of course, in the
way Hewet is. I’m very fond of a few people. I think, for example, that
there’s something to be said for my mother, though she is in many ways
so deplorable. . . . At Cambridge, of course, I should inevitably
become the most important man in the place, but there are other reasons
why I dread Cambridge—” he ceased.

“Are you finding me a dreadful bore?” he asked. He changed curiously
from a friend confiding in a friend to a conventional young man at a
party.

“Not in the least,” said Helen. “I like it very much.”

“You can’t think,” he exclaimed, speaking almost with emotion, “what a
difference it makes finding someone to talk to! Directly I saw you I
felt you might possibly understand me. I’m very fond of Hewet, but he
hasn’t the remotest idea what I’m like. You’re the only woman I’ve ever
met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say
a thing.”

The next dance was beginning; it was the Barcarolle out of Hoffman,
which made Helen beat her toe in time to it; but she felt that after
such a compliment it was impossible to get up and go, and, besides
being amused, she was really flattered, and the honesty of his conceit
attracted her. She suspected that he was not happy, and was
sufficiently feminine to wish to receive confidences.

“I’m very old,” she sighed.

“The odd thing is that I don’t find you old at all,” he replied. “I
feel as though we were exactly the same age. Moreover—” here he
hesitated, but took courage from a glance at her face, “I feel as if I
could talk quite plainly to you as one does to a man—about the
relations between the sexes, about . . . and . . .”

In spite of his certainty a slight redness came into his face as he
spoke the last two words.

She reassured him at once by the laugh with which she exclaimed, “I
should hope so!”

He looked at her with real cordiality, and the lines which were drawn
about his nose and lips slackened for the first time.

“Thank God!” he exclaimed. “Now we can behave like civilised human
beings.”

Certainly a barrier which usually stands fast had fallen, and it was
possible to speak of matters which are generally only alluded to
between men and women when doctors are present, or the shadow of death.
In five minutes he was telling her the history of his life. It was
long, for it was full of extremely elaborate incidents, which led on to
a discussion of the principles on which morality is founded, and thus
to several very interesting matters, which even in this ballroom had to
be discussed in a whisper, lest one of the pouter pigeon ladies or
resplendent merchants should overhear them, and proceed to demand that
they should leave the place. When they had come to an end, or, to speak
more accurately, when Helen intimated by a slight slackening of her
attention that they had sat there long enough, Hirst rose, exclaiming,
“So there’s no reason whatever for all this mystery!”

“None, except that we are English people,” she answered. She took his
arm and they crossed the ball-room, making their way with difficulty
between the spinning couples, who were now perceptibly dishevelled, and
certainly to a critical eye by no means lovely in their shapes. The
excitement of undertaking a friendship and the length of their talk had
made them hungry, and they went in search of food to the dining-room,
which was now full of people eating at little separate tables. In the
doorway they met Rachel, going up to dance again with Arthur Venning.
She was flushed and looked very happy, and Helen was struck by the fact
that in this mood she was certainly more attractive than the generality
of young women. She had never noticed it so clearly before.

“Enjoying yourself?” she asked, as they stopped for a second.

“Miss Vinrace,” Arthur answered for her, “has just made a confession;
she’d no idea that dances could be so delightful.”

“Yes!” Rachel exclaimed. “I’ve changed my view of life completely!”

“You don’t say so!” Helen mocked. They passed on.

“That’s typical of Rachel,” she said. “She changes her view of life
about every other day. D’you know, I believe you’re just the person I
want,” she said, as they sat down, “to help me complete her education?
She’s been brought up practically in a nunnery. Her father’s too
absurd. I’ve been doing what I can—but I’m too old, and I’m a woman.
Why shouldn’t you talk to her—explain things to her—talk to her, I
mean, as you talk to me?”

“I have made one attempt already this evening,” said St. John. “I
rather doubt that it was successful. She seems to me so very young and
inexperienced. I have promised to lend her Gibbon.”

“It’s not Gibbon exactly,” Helen pondered. “It’s the facts of life, I
think—d’you see what I mean? What really goes on, what people feel,
although they generally try to hide it? There’s nothing to be
frightened of. It’s so much more beautiful than the pretences—always
more interesting—always better, I should say, than _that_ kind of
thing.”

She nodded her head at a table near them, where two girls and two young
men were chaffing each other very loudly, and carrying on an arch
insinuating dialogue, sprinkled with endearments, about, it seemed, a
pair of stockings or a pair of legs. One of the girls was flirting a
fan and pretending to be shocked, and the sight was very unpleasant,
partly because it was obvious that the girls were secretly hostile to
each other.

“In my old age, however,” Helen sighed, “I’m coming to think that it
doesn’t much matter in the long run what one does: people always go
their own way—nothing will ever influence them.” She nodded her head at
the supper party.

But St. John did not agree. He said that he thought one could really
make a great deal of difference by one’s point of view, books and so
on, and added that few things at the present time mattered more than
the enlightenment of women. He sometimes thought that almost everything
was due to education.

In the ballroom, meanwhile, the dancers were being formed into squares
for the lancers. Arthur and Rachel, Susan and Hewet, Miss Allan and
Hughling Elliot found themselves together.

Miss Allan looked at her watch.

“Half-past one,” she stated. “And I have to despatch Alexander Pope
to-morrow.”

“Pope!” snorted Mr. Elliot. “Who reads Pope, I should like to know? And
as for reading about him—No, no, Miss Allan; be persuaded you will
benefit the world much more by dancing than by writing.” It was one of
Mr. Elliot’s affectations that nothing in the world could compare with
the delights of dancing—nothing in the world was so tedious as
literature. Thus he sought pathetically enough to ingratiate himself
with the young, and to prove to them beyond a doubt that though married
to a ninny of a wife, and rather pale and bent and careworn by his
weight of learning, he was as much alive as the youngest of them all.

“It’s a question of bread and butter,” said Miss Allan calmly.
“However, they seem to expect me.” She took up her position and pointed
a square black toe.

“Mr. Hewet, you bow to me.” It was evident at once that Miss Allan was
the only one of them who had a thoroughly sound knowledge of the
figures of the dance.

After the lancers there was a waltz; after the waltz a polka; and then
a terrible thing happened; the music, which had been sounding regularly
with five-minute pauses, stopped suddenly. The lady with the great dark
eyes began to swathe her violin in silk, and the gentleman placed his
horn carefully in its case. They were surrounded by couples imploring
them in English, in French, in Spanish, of one more dance, one only; it
was still early. But the old man at the piano merely exhibited his
watch and shook his head. He turned up the collar of his coat and
produced a red silk muffler, which completely dashed his festive
appearance. Strange as it seemed, the musicians were pale and
heavy-eyed; they looked bored and prosaic, as if the summit of their
desire was cold meat and beer, succeeded immediately by bed.

Rachel was one of those who had begged them to continue. When they
refused she began turning over the sheets of dance music which lay upon
the piano. The pieces were generally bound in coloured covers, with
pictures on them of romantic scenes—gondoliers astride on the crescent
of the moon, nuns peering through the bars of a convent window, or
young women with their hair down pointing a gun at the stars. She
remembered that the general effect of the music to which they had
danced so gaily was one of passionate regret for dead love and the
innocent years of youth; dreadful sorrows had always separated the
dancers from their past happiness.

“No wonder they get sick of playing stuff like this,” she remarked
reading a bar or two; “they’re really hymn tunes, played very fast,
with bits out of Wagner and Beethoven.”

“Do you play? Would you play? Anything, so long as we can dance to it!”
From all sides her gift for playing the piano was insisted upon, and
she had to consent. As very soon she had played the only pieces of
dance music she could remember, she went on to play an air from a
sonata by Mozart.

“But that’s not a dance,” said some one pausing by the piano.

“It is,” she replied, emphatically nodding her head. “Invent the
steps.” Sure of her melody she marked the rhythm boldly so as to
simplify the way. Helen caught the idea; seized Miss Allan by the arm,
and whirled round the room, now curtseying, now spinning round, now
tripping this way and that like a child skipping through a meadow.

“This is the dance for people who don’t know how to dance!” she cried.
The tune changed to a minuet; St. John hopped with incredible swiftness
first on his left leg, then on his right; the tune flowed melodiously;
Hewet, swaying his arms and holding out the tails of his coat, swam
down the room in imitation of the voluptuous dreamy dance of an Indian
maiden dancing before her Rajah. The tune marched; and Miss Allen
advanced with skirts extended and bowed profoundly to the engaged pair.
Once their feet fell in with the rhythm they showed a complete lack of
self-consciousness. From Mozart Rachel passed without stopping to old
English hunting songs, carols, and hymn tunes, for, as she had
observed, any good tune, with a little management, became a tune one
could dance to. By degrees every person in the room was tripping and
turning in pairs or alone. Mr. Pepper executed an ingenious pointed
step derived from figure-skating, for which he once held some local
championship; while Mrs. Thornbury tried to recall an old country dance
which she had seen danced by her father’s tenants in Dorsetshire in the
old days. As for Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, they gallopaded round and round
the room with such impetuosity that the other dancers shivered at their
approach. Some people were heard to criticise the performance as a
romp; to others it was the most enjoyable part of the evening.

“Now for the great round dance!” Hewet shouted. Instantly a gigantic
circle was formed, the dancers holding hands and shouting out, “D’you
ken John Peel,” as they swung faster and faster and faster, until the
strain was too great, and one link of the chain—Mrs. Thornbury—gave
way, and the rest went flying across the room in all directions, to
land upon the floor or the chairs or in each other’s arms as seemed
most convenient.

Rising from these positions, breathless and unkempt, it struck them for
the first time that the electric lights pricked the air very vainly,
and instinctively a great many eyes turned to the windows. Yes—there
was the dawn. While they had been dancing the night had passed, and it
had come. Outside, the mountains showed very pure and remote; the dew
was sparkling on the grass, and the sky was flushed with blue, save for
the pale yellows and pinks in the East. The dancers came crowding to
the windows, pushed them open, and here and there ventured a foot upon
the grass.

“How silly the poor old lights look!” said Evelyn M. in a curiously
subdued tone of voice. “And ourselves; it isn’t becoming.” It was true;
the untidy hair, and the green and yellow gems, which had seemed so
festive half an hour ago, now looked cheap and slovenly. The
complexions of the elder ladies suffered terribly, and, as if conscious
that a cold eye had been turned upon them, they began to say good-night
and to make their way up to bed.

Rachel, though robbed of her audience, had gone on playing to herself.
From John Peel she passed to Bach, who was at this time the subject of
her intense enthusiasm, and one by one some of the younger dancers came
in from the garden and sat upon the deserted gilt chairs round the
piano, the room being now so clear that they turned out the lights. As
they sat and listened, their nerves were quieted; the heat and soreness
of their lips, the result of incessant talking and laughing, was
smoothed away. They sat very still as if they saw a building with
spaces and columns succeeding each other rising in the empty space.
Then they began to see themselves and their lives, and the whole of
human life advancing very nobly under the direction of the music. They
felt themselves ennobled, and when Rachel stopped playing they desired
nothing but sleep.

Susan rose. “I think this has been the happiest night of my life!” she
exclaimed. “I do adore music,” she said, as she thanked Rachel. “It
just seems to say all the things one can’t say oneself.” She gave a
nervous little laugh and looked from one to another with great
benignity, as though she would like to say something but could not find
the words in which to express it. “Every one’s been so kind—so very
kind,” she said. Then she too went to bed.

The party having ended in the very abrupt way in which parties do end,
Helen and Rachel stood by the door with their cloaks on, looking for a
carriage.

“I suppose you realise that there are no carriages left?” said St.
John, who had been out to look. “You must sleep here.”

“Oh, no,” said Helen; “we shall walk.”

“May we come too?” Hewet asked. “We can’t go to bed. Imagine lying
among bolsters and looking at one’s washstand on a morning like this—Is
that where you live?” They had begun to walk down the avenue, and he
turned and pointed at the white and green villa on the hillside, which
seemed to have its eyes shut.

“That’s not a light burning, is it?” Helen asked anxiously.

“It’s the sun,” said St. John. The upper windows had each a spot of
gold on them.

“I was afraid it was my husband, still reading Greek,” she said. “All
this time he’s been editing _Pindar_.”

They passed through the town and turned up the steep road, which was
perfectly clear, though still unbordered by shadows. Partly because
they were tired, and partly because the early light subdued them, they
scarcely spoke, but breathed in the delicious fresh air, which seemed
to belong to a different state of life from the air at midday. When
they came to the high yellow wall, where the lane turned off from the
road, Helen was for dismissing the two young men.

“You’ve come far enough,” she said. “Go back to bed.”

But they seemed unwilling to move.

“Let’s sit down a moment,” said Hewet. He spread his coat on the
ground. “Let’s sit down and consider.” They sat down and looked out
over the bay; it was very still, the sea was rippling faintly, and
lines of green and blue were beginning to stripe it. There were no
sailing boats as yet, but a steamer was anchored in the bay, looking
very ghostly in the mist; it gave one unearthly cry, and then all was
silent.

Rachel occupied herself in collecting one grey stone after another and
building them into a little cairn; she did it very quietly and
carefully.

“And so you’ve changed your view of life, Rachel?” said Helen.

Rachel added another stone and yawned. “I don’t remember,” she said, “I
feel like a fish at the bottom of the sea.” She yawned again. None of
these people possessed any power to frighten her out here in the dawn,
and she felt perfectly familiar even with Mr. Hirst.

“My brain, on the contrary,” said Hirst, “is in a condition of abnormal
activity.” He sat in his favourite position with his arms binding his
legs together and his chin resting on the top of his knees. “I see
through everything—absolutely everything. Life has no more mysteries
for me.” He spoke with conviction, but did not appear to wish for an
answer. Near though they sat, and familiar though they felt, they
seemed mere shadows to each other.

“And all those people down there going to sleep,” Hewet began dreamily,
“thinking such different things,—Miss Warrington, I suppose, is now on
her knees; the Elliots are a little startled, it’s not often _they_ get
out of breath, and they want to get to sleep as quickly as possible;
then there’s the poor lean young man who danced all night with Evelyn;
he’s putting his flower in water and asking himself, ‘Is this
love?’—and poor old Perrott, I daresay, can’t get to sleep at all, and
is reading his favourite Greek book to console himself—and the
others—no, Hirst,” he wound up, “I don’t find it simple at all.”

“I have a key,” said Hirst cryptically. His chin was still upon his
knees and his eyes fixed in front of him.

A silence followed. Then Helen rose and bade them good-night. “But,”
she said, “remember that you’ve got to come and see us.”

They waved good-night and parted, but the two young men did not go back
to the hotel; they went for a walk, during which they scarcely spoke,
and never mentioned the names of the two women, who were, to a
considerable extent, the subject of their thoughts. They did not wish
to share their impressions. They returned to the hotel in time for
breakfast.




CHAPTER XIII


There were many rooms in the villa, but one room which possessed a
character of its own because the door was always shut, and no sound of
music or laughter issued from it. Every one in the house was vaguely
conscious that something went on behind that door, and without in the
least knowing what it was, were influenced in their own thoughts by the
knowledge that if the passed it the door would be shut, and if they
made a noise Mr. Ambrose inside would be disturbed. Certain acts
therefore possessed merit, and others were bad, so that life became
more harmonious and less disconnected than it would have been had Mr.
Ambrose given up editing _Pindar_, and taken to a nomad existence, in
and out of every room in the house. As it was, every one was conscious
that by observing certain rules, such as punctuality and quiet, by
cooking well, and performing other small duties, one ode after another
was satisfactorily restored to the world, and they shared the
continuity of the scholar’s life. Unfortunately, as age puts one
barrier between human beings, and learning another, and sex a third,
Mr. Ambrose in his study was some thousand miles distant from the
nearest human being, who in this household was inevitably a woman. He
sat hour after hour among white-leaved books, alone like an idol in an
empty church, still except for the passage of his hand from one side of
the sheet to another, silent save for an occasional choke, which drove
him to extend his pipe a moment in the air. As he worked his way
further and further into the heart of the poet, his chair became more
and more deeply encircled by books, which lay open on the floor, and
could only be crossed by a careful process of stepping, so delicate
that his visitors generally stopped and addressed him from the
outskirts.

On the morning after the dance, however, Rachel came into her uncle’s
room and hailed him twice, “Uncle Ridley,” before he paid her any
attention.

At length he looked over his spectacles.

“Well?” he asked.

“I want a book,” she replied. “Gibbon’s _History of the Roman Empire_.
May I have it?”

She watched the lines on her uncle’s face gradually rearrange
themselves at her question. It had been smooth as a mask before she
spoke.

“Please say that again,” said her uncle, either because he had not
heard or because he had not understood.

She repeated the same words and reddened slightly as she did so.

“Gibbon! What on earth d’you want him for?” he enquired.

“Somebody advised me to read it,” Rachel stammered.

“But I don’t travel about with a miscellaneous collection of
eighteenth-century historians!” her uncle exclaimed. “Gibbon! Ten big
volumes at least.”

Rachel said that she was sorry to interrupt, and was turning to go.

“Stop!” cried her uncle. He put down his pipe, placed his book on one
side, and rose and led her slowly round the room, holding her by the
arm. “Plato,” he said, laying one finger on the first of a row of small
dark books, “and Jorrocks next door, which is wrong. Sophocles, Swift.
You don’t care for German commentators, I presume. French, then. You
read French? You should read Balzac. Then we come to Wordsworth and
Coleridge, Pope, Johnson, Addison, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats. One
thing leads to another. Why is Marlowe here? Mrs. Chailey, I presume.
But what’s the use of reading if you don’t read Greek? After all, if
you read Greek, you need never read anything else, pure waste of
time—pure waste of time,” thus speaking half to himself, with quick
movements of his hands; they had come round again to the circle of
books on the floor, and their progress was stopped.

“Well,” he demanded, “which shall it be?”

“Balzac,” said Rachel, “or have you the _Speech on the American
Revolution_, Uncle Ridley?”

“_The Speech on the American Revolution_?” he asked. He looked at her
very keenly again. “Another young man at the dance?”

“No. That was Mr. Dalloway,” she confessed.

“Good Lord!” he flung back his head in recollection of Mr. Dalloway.

She chose for herself a volume at random, submitted it to her uncle,
who, seeing that it was _La Cousine bette_, bade her throw it away if
she found it too horrible, and was about to leave him when he demanded
whether she had enjoyed her dance?

He then wanted to know what people did at dances, seeing that he had
only been to one thirty-five years ago, when nothing had seemed to him
more meaningless and idiotic. Did they enjoy turning round and round to
the screech of a fiddle? Did they talk, and say pretty things, and if
so, why didn’t they do it, under reasonable conditions? As for
himself—he sighed and pointed at the signs of industry lying all about
him, which, in spite of his sigh, filled his face with such
satisfaction that his niece thought good to leave. On bestowing a kiss
she was allowed to go, but not until she had bound herself to learn at
any rate the Greek alphabet, and to return her French novel when done
with, upon which something more suitable would be found for her.

As the rooms in which people live are apt to give off something of the
same shock as their faces when seen for the first time, Rachel walked
very slowly downstairs, lost in wonder at her uncle, and his books, and
his neglect of dances, and his queer, utterly inexplicable, but
apparently satisfactory view of life, when her eye was caught by a note
with her name on it lying in the hall. The address was written in a
small strong hand unknown to her, and the note, which had no beginning,
ran:—

I send the first volume of Gibbon as I promised. Personally I find
little to be said for the moderns, but I’m going to send you Wedekind
when I’ve done him. Donne? Have you read Webster and all that set? I
envy you reading them for the first time. Completely exhausted after
last night. And you?


The flourish of initials which she took to be St. J. A. H., wound up
the letter. She was very much flattered that Mr. Hirst should have
remembered her, and fulfilled his promise so quickly.

There was still an hour to luncheon, and with Gibbon in one hand, and
Balzac in the other she strolled out of the gate and down the little
path of beaten mud between the olive trees on the slope of the hill. It
was too hot for climbing hills, but along the valley there were trees
and a grass path running by the river bed. In this land where the
population was centred in the towns it was possible to lose sight of
civilisation in a very short time, passing only an occasional
farmhouse, where the women were handling red roots in the courtyard; or
a little boy lying on his elbows on the hillside surrounded by a flock
of black strong-smelling goats. Save for a thread of water at the
bottom, the river was merely a deep channel of dry yellow stones. On
the bank grew those trees which Helen had said it was worth the voyage
out merely to see. April had burst their buds, and they bore large
blossoms among their glossy green leaves with petals of a thick
wax-like substance coloured an exquisite cream or pink or deep crimson.
But filled with one of those unreasonable exultations which start
generally from an unknown cause, and sweep whole countries and skies
into their embrace, she walked without seeing. The night was
encroaching upon the day. Her ears hummed with the tunes she had played
the night before; she sang, and the singing made her walk faster and
faster. She did not see distinctly where she was going, the trees and
the landscape appearing only as masses of green and blue, with an
occasional space of differently coloured sky. Faces of people she had
seen last night came before her; she heard their voices; she stopped
singing, and began saying things over again or saying things
differently, or inventing things that might have been said. The
constraint of being among strangers in a long silk dress made it
unusually exciting to stride thus alone. Hewet, Hirst, Mr. Venning,
Miss Allan, the music, the light, the dark trees in the garden, the
dawn,—as she walked they went surging round in her head, a tumultuous
background from which the present moment, with its opportunity of doing
exactly as she liked, sprung more wonderfully vivid even than the night
before.

So she might have walked until she had lost all knowledge of her way,
had it not been for the interruption of a tree, which, although it did
not grow across her path, stopped her as effectively as if the branches
had struck her in the face. It was an ordinary tree, but to her it
appeared so strange that it might have been the only tree in the world.
Dark was the trunk in the middle, and the branches sprang here and
there, leaving jagged intervals of light between them as distinctly as
if it had but that second risen from the ground. Having seen a sight
that would last her for a lifetime, and for a lifetime would preserve
that second, the tree once more sank into the ordinary ranks of trees,
and she was able to seat herself in its shade and to pick the red
flowers with the thin green leaves which were growing beneath it. She
laid them side by side, flower to flower and stalk to stalk, caressing
them for walking alone. Flowers and even pebbles in the earth had their
own life and disposition, and brought back the feelings of a child to
whom they were companions. Looking up, her eye was caught by the line
of the mountains flying out energetically across the sky like the lash
of a curling whip. She looked at the pale distant sky, and the high
bare places on the mountain-tops lying exposed to the sun. When she sat
down she had dropped her books on to the earth at her feet, and now she
looked down on them lying there, so square in the grass, a tall stem
bending over and tickling the smooth brown cover of Gibbon, while the
mottled blue Balzac lay naked in the sun. With a feeling that to open
and read would certainly be a surprising experience, she turned the
historian’s page and read that—

His generals, in the early part of his reign, attempted the reduction
of Aethiopia and Arabia Felix. They marched near a thousand miles to
the south of the tropic; but the heat of the climate soon repelled the
invaders and protected the unwarlike natives of those sequestered
regions. . . . The northern countries of Europe scarcely deserved the
expense and labour of conquest. The forests and morasses of Germany
were filled with a hardy race of barbarians, who despised life when it
was separated from freedom.


Never had any words been so vivid and so beautiful—Arabia
Felix—Aethiopia. But those were not more noble than the others, hardy
barbarians, forests, and morasses. They seemed to drive roads back to
the very beginning of the world, on either side of which the
populations of all times and countries stood in avenues, and by passing
down them all knowledge would be hers, and the book of the world turned
back to the very first page. Such was her excitement at the
possibilities of knowledge now opening before her that she ceased to
read, and a breeze turning the page, the covers of Gibbon gently
ruffled and closed together. She then rose again and walked on. Slowly
her mind became less confused and sought the origins of her exaltation,
which were twofold and could be limited by an effort to the persons of
Mr. Hirst and Mr. Hewet. Any clear analysis of them was impossible
owing to the haze of wonder in which they were enveloped. She could not
reason about them as about people whose feelings went by the same rule
as her own did, and her mind dwelt on them with a kind of physical
pleasure such as is caused by the contemplation of bright things
hanging in the sun. From them all life seemed to radiate; the very
words of books were steeped in radiance. She then became haunted by a
suspicion which she was so reluctant to face that she welcomed a trip
and stumble over the grass because thus her attention was dispersed,
but in a second it had collected itself again. Unconsciously she had
been walking faster and faster, her body trying to outrun her mind; but
she was now on the summit of a little hillock of earth which rose above
the river and displayed the valley. She was no longer able to juggle
with several ideas, but must deal with the most persistent, and a kind
of melancholy replaced her excitement. She sank down on to the earth
clasping her knees together, and looking blankly in front of her. For
some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and
closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone.

“What is it to be in love?” she demanded, after a long silence; each
word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown
sea. Hypnotised by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the
discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time
longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and with her two books
beneath her arm returned home again, much as a soldier prepared for
battle.




CHAPTER XIV


The sun of that same day going down, dusk was saluted as usual at the
hotel by an instantaneous sparkle of electric lights. The hours between
dinner and bedtime were always difficult enough to kill, and the night
after the dance they were further tarnished by the peevishness of
dissipation. Certainly, in the opinion of Hirst and Hewet, who lay back
in long arm-chairs in the middle of the hall, with their coffee-cups
beside them, and their cigarettes in their hands, the evening was
unusually dull, the women unusually badly dressed, the men unusually
fatuous. Moreover, when the mail had been distributed half an hour ago
there were no letters for either of the two young men. As every other
person, practically, had received two or three plump letters from
England, which they were now engaged in reading, this seemed hard, and
prompted Hirst to make the caustic remark that the animals had been
fed. Their silence, he said, reminded him of the silence in the
lion-house when each beast holds a lump of raw meat in its paws. He
went on, stimulated by this comparison, to liken some to
hippopotamuses, some to canary birds, some to swine, some to parrots,
and some to loathsome reptiles curled round the half-decayed bodies of
sheep. The intermittent sounds—now a cough, now a horrible wheezing or
throat-clearing, now a little patter of conversation—were just, he
declared, what you hear if you stand in the lion-house when the bones
are being mauled. But these comparisons did not rouse Hewet, who, after
a careless glance round the room, fixed his eyes upon a thicket of
native spears which were so ingeniously arranged as to run their points
at you whichever way you approached them. He was clearly oblivious of
his surroundings; whereupon Hirst, perceiving that Hewet’s mind was a
complete blank, fixed his attention more closely upon his
fellow-creatures. He was too far from them, however, to hear what they
were saying, but it pleased him to construct little theories about them
from their gestures and appearance.

Mrs. Thornbury had received a great many letters. She was completely
engrossed in them. When she had finished a page she handed it to her
husband, or gave him the sense of what she was reading in a series of
short quotations linked together by a sound at the back of her throat.
“Evie writes that George has gone to Glasgow. ‘He finds Mr. Chadbourne
so nice to work with, and we hope to spend Christmas together, but I
should not like to move Betty and Alfred any great distance (no, quite
right), though it is difficult to imagine cold weather in this heat. .
. . Eleanor and Roger drove over in the new trap. . . . Eleanor
certainly looked more like herself than I’ve seen her since the winter.
She has put Baby on three bottles now, which I’m sure is wise (I’m sure
it is too), and so gets better nights. . . . My hair still falls out. I
find it on the pillow! But I am cheered by hearing from Tottie Hall
Green. . . . Muriel is in Torquay enjoying herself greatly at dances.
She _is_ going to show her black pug after all.’ . . . A line from
Herbert—so busy, poor fellow! Ah! Margaret says, ‘Poor old Mrs.
Fairbank died on the eighth, quite suddenly in the conservatory, only a
maid in the house, who hadn’t the presence of mind to lift her up,
which they think might have saved her, but the doctor says it might
have come at any moment, and one can only feel thankful that it was in
the house and not in the street (I should think so!). The pigeons have
increased terribly, just as the rabbits did five years ago . . .’”
While she read her husband kept nodding his head very slightly, but
very steadily in sign of approval.

Near by, Miss Allan was reading her letters too. They were not
altogether pleasant, as could be seen from the slight rigidity which
came over her large fine face as she finished reading them and replaced
them neatly in their envelopes. The lines of care and responsibility on
her face made her resemble an elderly man rather than a woman. The
letters brought her news of the failure of last year’s fruit crop in
New Zealand, which was a serious matter, for Hubert, her only brother,
made his living on a fruit farm, and if it failed again, of course, he
would throw up his place, come back to England, and what were they to
do with him this time? The journey out here, which meant the loss of a
term’s work, became an extravagance and not the just and wonderful
holiday due to her after fifteen years of punctual lecturing and
correcting essays upon English literature. Emily, her sister, who was a
teacher also, wrote: “We ought to be prepared, though I have no doubt
Hubert will be more reasonable this time.” And then went on in her
sensible way to say that she was enjoying a very jolly time in the
Lakes. “They are looking exceedingly pretty just now. I have seldom
seen the trees so forward at this time of year. We have taken our lunch
out several days. Old Alice is as young as ever, and asks after every
one affectionately. The days pass very quickly, and term will soon be
here. Political prospects _not_ good, I think privately, but do not
like to damp Ellen’s enthusiasm. Lloyd George has taken the Bill up,
but so have many before now, and we are where we are; but trust to find
myself mistaken. Anyhow, we have our work cut out for us. . . . Surely
Meredith lacks the _human_ note one likes in W. W.?” she concluded, and
went on to discuss some questions of English literature which Miss
Allan had raised in her last letter.

At a little distance from Miss Allan, on a seat shaded and made
semi-private by a thick clump of palm trees, Arthur and Susan were
reading each other’s letters. The big slashing manuscripts of
hockey-playing young women in Wiltshire lay on Arthur’s knee, while
Susan deciphered tight little legal hands which rarely filled more than
a page, and always conveyed the same impression of jocular and breezy
goodwill.

“I do hope Mr. Hutchinson will like me, Arthur,” she said, looking up.

“Who’s your loving Flo?” asked Arthur.

“Flo Graves—the girl I told you about, who was engaged to that dreadful
Mr. Vincent,” said Susan. “Is Mr. Hutchinson married?” she asked.

Already her mind was busy with benevolent plans for her friends, or
rather with one magnificent plan—which was simple too—they were all to
get married—at once—directly she got back. Marriage, marriage that was
the right thing, the only thing, the solution required by every one she
knew, and a great part of her meditations was spent in tracing every
instance of discomfort, loneliness, ill-health, unsatisfied ambition,
restlessness, eccentricity, taking things up and dropping them again,
public speaking, and philanthropic activity on the part of men and
particularly on the part of women to the fact that they wanted to
marry, were trying to marry, and had not succeeded in getting married.
If, as she was bound to own, these symptoms sometimes persisted after
marriage, she could only ascribe them to the unhappy law of nature
which decreed that there was only one Arthur Venning, and only one
Susan who could marry him. Her theory, of course, had the merit of
being fully supported by her own case. She had been vaguely
uncomfortable at home for two or three years now, and a voyage like
this with her selfish old aunt, who paid her fare but treated her as
servant and companion in one, was typical of the kind of thing people
expected of her. Directly she became engaged, Mrs. Paley behaved with
instinctive respect, positively protested when Susan as usual knelt
down to lace her shoes, and appeared really grateful for an hour of
Susan’s company where she had been used to exact two or three as her
right. She therefore foresaw a life of far greater comfort than she had
been used to, and the change had already produced a great increase of
warmth in her feelings towards other people.

It was close on twenty years now since Mrs. Paley had been able to lace
her own shoes or even to see them, the disappearance of her feet having
coincided more or less accurately with the death of her husband, a man
of business, soon after which event Mrs. Paley began to grow stout. She
was a selfish, independent old woman, possessed of a considerable
income, which she spent upon the upkeep of a house that needed seven
servants and a charwoman in Lancaster Gate, and another with a garden
and carriage-horses in Surrey. Susan’s engagement relieved her of the
one great anxiety of her life—that her son Christopher should “entangle
himself” with his cousin. Now that this familiar source of interest was
removed, she felt a little low and inclined to see more in Susan than
she used to. She had decided to give her a very handsome wedding
present, a cheque for two hundred, two hundred and fifty, or possibly,
conceivably—it depended upon the under-gardener and Huths’ bill for
doing up the drawing-room—three hundred pounds sterling.

She was thinking of this very question, revolving the figures, as she
sat in her wheeled chair with a table spread with cards by her side.
The Patience had somehow got into a muddle, and she did not like to
call for Susan to help her, as Susan seemed to be busy with Arthur.

“She’s every right to expect a handsome present from me, of course,”
she thought, looking vaguely at the leopard on its hind legs, “and I’ve
no doubt she does! Money goes a long way with every one. The young are
very selfish. If I were to die, nobody would miss me but Dakyns, and
she’ll be consoled by the will! However, I’ve got no reason to
complain. . . . I can still enjoy myself. I’m not a burden to any-one.
. . . I like a great many things a good deal, in spite of my legs.”

Being slightly depressed, however, she went on to think of the only
people she had known who had not seemed to her at all selfish or fond
of money, who had seemed to her somehow rather finer than the general
run; people she willingly acknowledged, who were finer than she was.
There were only two of them. One was her brother, who had been drowned
before her eyes, the other was a girl, her greatest friend, who had
died in giving birth to her first child. These things had happened some
fifty years ago.

“They ought not to have died,” she thought. “However, they did—and we
selfish old creatures go on.” The tears came to her eyes; she felt a
genuine regret for them, a kind of respect for their youth and beauty,
and a kind of shame for herself; but the tears did not fall; and she
opened one of those innumerable novels which she used to pronounce good
or bad, or pretty middling, or really wonderful. “I can’t think how
people come to imagine such things,” she would say, taking off her
spectacles and looking up with the old faded eyes, that were becoming
ringed with white.

Just behind the stuffed leopard Mr. Elliot was playing chess with Mr.
Pepper. He was being defeated, naturally, for Mr. Pepper scarcely took
his eyes off the board, and Mr. Elliot kept leaning back in his chair
and throwing out remarks to a gentleman who had only arrived the night
before, a tall handsome man, with a head resembling the head of an
intellectual ram. After a few remarks of a general nature had passed,
they were discovering that they knew some of the same people, as indeed
had been obvious from their appearance directly they saw each other.

“Ah yes, old Truefit,” said Mr. Elliot. “He has a son at Oxford. I’ve
often stayed with them. It’s a lovely old Jacobean house. Some
exquisite Greuzes—one or two Dutch pictures which the old boy kept in
the cellars. Then there were stacks upon stacks of prints. Oh, the dirt
in that house! He was a miser, you know. The boy married a daughter of
Lord Pinwells. I know them too. The collecting mania tends to run in
families. This chap collects buckles—men’s shoe-buckles they must be,
in use between the years 1580 and 1660; the dates mayn’t be right, but
fact’s as I say. Your true collector always has some unaccountable fad
of that kind. On other points he’s as level-headed as a breeder of
shorthorns, which is what he happens to be. Then the Pinwells, as you
probably know, have their share of eccentricity too. Lady Maud, for
instance—” he was interrupted here by the necessity of considering his
move,—“Lady Maud has a horror of cats and clergymen, and people with
big front teeth. I’ve heard her shout across a table, ‘Keep your mouth
shut, Miss Smith; they’re as yellow as carrots!’ across a table, mind
you. To me she’s always been civility itself. She dabbles in
literature, likes to collect a few of us in her drawing-room, but
mention a clergyman, a bishop even, nay, the Archbishop himself, and
she gobbles like a turkey-cock. I’ve been told it’s a family
feud—something to do with an ancestor in the reign of Charles the
First. Yes,” he continued, suffering check after check, “I always like
to know something of the grandmothers of our fashionable young men. In
my opinion they preserve all that we admire in the eighteenth century,
with the advantage, in the majority of cases, that they are personally
clean. Not that one would insult old Lady Barborough by calling her
clean. How often d’you think, Hilda,” he called out to his wife, “her
ladyship takes a bath?”

“I should hardly like to say, Hugh,” Mrs. Elliot tittered, “but wearing
puce velvet, as she does even on the hottest August day, it somehow
doesn’t show.”

“Pepper, you have me,” said Mr. Elliot. “My chess is even worse than I
remembered.” He accepted his defeat with great equanimity, because he
really wished to talk.

He drew his chair beside Mr. Wilfrid Flushing, the newcomer.

“Are these at all in your line?” he asked, pointing at a case in front
of them, where highly polished crosses, jewels, and bits of embroidery,
the work of the natives, were displayed to tempt visitors.

“Shams, all of them,” said Mr. Flushing briefly. “This rug, now, isn’t
at all bad.” He stopped and picked up a piece of the rug at their feet.
“Not old, of course, but the design is quite in the right tradition.
Alice, lend me your brooch. See the difference between the old work and
the new.”

A lady, who was reading with great concentration, unfastened her brooch
and gave it to her husband without looking at him or acknowledging the
tentative bow which Mr. Elliot was desirous of giving her. If she had
listened, she might have been amused by the reference to old Lady
Barborough, her great-aunt, but, oblivious of her surroundings, she
went on reading.

The clock, which had been wheezing for some minutes like an old man
preparing to cough, now struck nine. The sound slightly disturbed
certain somnolent merchants, government officials, and men of
independent means who were lying back in their chairs, chatting,
smoking, ruminating about their affairs, with their eyes half shut;
they raised their lids for an instant at the sound and then closed them
again. They had the appearance of crocodiles so fully gorged by their
last meal that the future of the world gives them no anxiety whatever.
The only disturbance in the placid bright room was caused by a large
moth which shot from light to light, whizzing over elaborate heads of
hair, and causing several young women to raise their hands nervously
and exclaim, “Some one ought to kill it!”

Absorbed in their own thoughts, Hewet and Hirst had not spoken for a
long time.

When the clock struck, Hirst said:

“Ah, the creatures begin to stir. . . .” He watched them raise
themselves, look about them, and settle down again. “What I abhor most
of all,” he concluded, “is the female breast. Imagine being Venning and
having to get into bed with Susan! But the really repulsive thing is
that they feel nothing at all—about what I do when I have a hot bath.
They’re gross, they’re absurd, they’re utterly intolerable!”

So saying, and drawing no reply from Hewet, he proceeded to think about
himself, about science, about Cambridge, about the Bar, about Helen and
what she thought of him, until, being very tired, he was nodding off to
sleep.

Suddenly Hewet woke him up.

“How d’you know what you feel, Hirst?”

“Are you in love?” asked Hirst. He put in his eyeglass.

“Don’t be a fool,” said Hewet.

“Well, I’ll sit down and think about it,” said Hirst. “One really ought
to. If these people would only think about things, the world would be a
far better place for us all to live in. Are you trying to think?”

That was exactly what Hewet had been doing for the last half-hour, but
he did not find Hirst sympathetic at the moment.

“I shall go for a walk,” he said.

“Remember we weren’t in bed last night,” said Hirst with a prodigious
yawn.

Hewet rose and stretched himself.

“I want to go and get a breath of air,” he said.

An unusual feeling had been bothering him all the evening and
forbidding him to settle into any one train of thought. It was
precisely as if he had been in the middle of a talk which interested
him profoundly when some one came up and interrupted him. He could not
finish the talk, and the longer he sat there the more he wanted to
finish it. As the talk that had been interrupted was a talk with
Rachel, he had to ask himself why he felt this, and why he wanted to go
on talking to her. Hirst would merely say that he was in love with her.
But he was not in love with her. Did love begin in that way, with the
wish to go on talking? No. It always began in his case with definite
physical sensations, and these were now absent, he did not even find
her physically attractive. There was something, of course, unusual
about her—she was young, inexperienced, and inquisitive, they had been
more open with each other than was usually possible. He always found
girls interesting to talk to, and surely these were good reasons why he
should wish to go on talking to her; and last night, what with the
crowd and the confusion, he had only been able to begin to talk to her.
What was she doing now? Lying on a sofa and looking at the ceiling,
perhaps. He could imagine her doing that, and Helen in an arm-chair,
with her hands on the arm of it, so—looking ahead of her, with her
great big eyes—oh no, they’d be talking, of course, about the dance.
But suppose Rachel was going away in a day or two, suppose this was the
end of her visit, and her father had arrived in one of the steamers
anchored in the bay,—it was intolerable to know so little. Therefore he
exclaimed, “How d’you know what you feel, Hirst?” to stop himself from
thinking.

But Hirst did not help him, and the other people with their aimless
movements and their unknown lives were disturbing, so that he longed
for the empty darkness. The first thing he looked for when he stepped
out of the hall door was the light of the Ambroses’ villa. When he had
definitely decided that a certain light apart from the others higher up
the hill was their light, he was considerably reassured. There seemed
to be at once a little stability in all this incoherence. Without any
definite plan in his head, he took the turning to the right and walked
through the town and came to the wall by the meeting of the roads,
where he stopped. The booming of the sea was audible. The dark-blue
mass of the mountains rose against the paler blue of the sky. There was
no moon, but myriads of stars, and lights were anchored up and down in
the dark waves of earth all round him. He had meant to go back, but the
single light of the Ambroses’ villa had now become three separate
lights, and he was tempted to go on. He might as well make sure that
Rachel was still there. Walking fast, he soon stood by the iron gate of
their garden, and pushed it open; the outline of the house suddenly
appeared sharply before his eyes, and the thin column of the verandah
cutting across the palely lit gravel of the terrace. He hesitated. At
the back of the house some one was rattling cans. He approached the
front; the light on the terrace showed him that the sitting-rooms were
on that side. He stood as near the light as he could by the corner of
the house, the leaves of a creeper brushing his face. After a moment he
could hear a voice. The voice went on steadily; it was not talking, but
from the continuity of the sound it was a voice reading aloud. He crept
a little closer; he crumpled the leaves together so as to stop their
rustling about his ears. It might be Rachel’s voice. He left the shadow
and stepped into the radius of the light, and then heard a sentence
spoken quite distinctly.

“And there we lived from the year 1860 to 1895, the happiest years of
my parents’ lives, and there in 1862 my brother Maurice was born, to
the delight of his parents, as he was destined to be the delight of all
who knew him.”

The voice quickened, and the tone became conclusive rising slightly in
pitch, as if these words were at the end of the chapter. Hewet drew
back again into the shadow. There was a long silence. He could just
hear chairs being moved inside. He had almost decided to go back, when
suddenly two figures appeared at the window, not six feet from him.

“It was Maurice Fielding, of course, that your mother was engaged to,”
said Helen’s voice. She spoke reflectively, looking out into the dark
garden, and thinking evidently as much of the look of the night as of
what she was saying.

“Mother?” said Rachel. Hewet’s heart leapt, and he noticed the fact.
Her voice, though low, was full of surprise.

“You didn’t know that?” said Helen.

“I never knew there’d been any one else,” said Rachel. She was clearly
surprised, but all they said was said low and inexpressively, because
they were speaking out into the cool dark night.

“More people were in love with her than with any one I’ve ever known,”
Helen stated. “She had that power—she enjoyed things. She wasn’t
beautiful, but—I was thinking of her last night at the dance. She got
on with every kind of person, and then she made it all so
amazingly—funny.”

It appeared that Helen was going back into the past, choosing her words
deliberately, comparing Theresa with the people she had known since
Theresa died.

“I don’t know how she did it,” she continued, and ceased, and there was
a long pause, in which a little owl called first here, then there, as
it moved from tree to tree in the garden.

“That’s so like Aunt Lucy and Aunt Katie,” said Rachel at last. “They
always make out that she was very sad and very good.”

“Then why, for goodness’ sake, did they do nothing but criticize her
when she was alive?” said Helen. Very gentle their voices sounded, as
if they fell through the waves of the sea.

“If I were to die to-morrow . . .” she began.

The broken sentences had an extraordinary beauty and detachment in
Hewet’s ears, and a kind of mystery too, as though they were spoken by
people in their sleep.

“No, Rachel,” Helen’s voice continued, “I’m not going to walk in the
garden; it’s damp—it’s sure to be damp; besides, I see at least a dozen
toads.”

“Toads? Those are stones, Helen. Come out. It’s nicer out. The flowers
smell,” Rachel replied.

Hewet drew still farther back. His heart was beating very quickly.
Apparently Rachel tried to pull Helen out on to the terrace, and Helen
resisted. There was a certain amount of scuffling, entreating,
resisting, and laughter from both of them. Then a man’s form appeared.
Hewet could not hear what they were all saying. In a minute they had
gone in; he could hear bolts grating then; there was dead silence, and
all the lights went out.

He turned away, still crumpling and uncrumpling a handful of leaves
which he had torn from the wall. An exquisite sense of pleasure and
relief possessed him; it was all so solid and peaceful after the ball
at the hotel, whether he was in love with them or not, and he was not
in love with them; no, but it was good that they should be alive.

After standing still for a minute or two he turned and began to walk
towards the gate. With the movement of his body, the excitement, the
romance and the richness of life crowded into his brain. He shouted out
a line of poetry, but the words escaped him, and he stumbled among
lines and fragments of lines which had no meaning at all except for the
beauty of the words. He shut the gate, and ran swinging from side to
side down the hill, shouting any nonsense that came into his head.
“Here am I,” he cried rhythmically, as his feet pounded to the left and
to the right, “plunging along, like an elephant in the jungle,
stripping the branches as I go (he snatched at the twigs of a bush at
the roadside), roaring innumerable words, lovely words about
innumerable things, running downhill and talking nonsense aloud to
myself about roads and leaves and lights and women coming out into the
darkness—about women—about Rachel, about Rachel.” He stopped and drew a
deep breath. The night seemed immense and hospitable, and although so
dark there seemed to be things moving down there in the harbour and
movement out at sea. He gazed until the darkness numbed him, and then
he walked on quickly, still murmuring to himself. “And I ought to be in
bed, snoring and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. Dreams and realities,
dreams and realities, dreams and realities,” he repeated all the way up
the avenue, scarcely knowing what he said, until he reached the front
door. Here he paused for a second, and collected himself before he
opened the door.

His eyes were dazed, his hands very cold, and his brain excited and yet
half asleep. Inside the door everything was as he had left it except
that the hall was now empty. There were the chairs turning in towards
each other where people had sat talking, and the empty glasses on
little tables, and the newspapers scattered on the floor. As he shut
the door he felt as if he were enclosed in a square box, and instantly
shrivelled up. It was all very bright and very small. He stopped for a
minute by the long table to find a paper which he had meant to read,
but he was still too much under the influence of the dark and the fresh
air to consider carefully which paper it was or where he had seen it.

As he fumbled vaguely among the papers he saw a figure cross the tail
of his eye, coming downstairs. He heard the swishing sound of skirts,
and to his great surprise, Evelyn M. came up to him, laid her hand on
the table as if to prevent him from taking up a paper, and said:

“You’re just the person I wanted to talk to.” Her voice was a little
unpleasant and metallic, her eyes were very bright, and she kept them
fixed upon him.

“To talk to me?” he repeated. “But I’m half asleep.”

“But I think you understand better than most people,” she answered, and
sat down on a little chair placed beside a big leather chair so that
Hewet had to sit down beside her.

“Well?” he said. He yawned openly, and lit a cigarette. He could not
believe that this was really happening to him. “What is it?”

“Are you really sympathetic, or is it just a pose?” she demanded.

“It’s for you to say,” he replied. “I’m interested, I think.” He still
felt numb all over and as if she was much too close to him.

“Any one can be interested!” she cried impatiently. “Your friend Mr.
Hirst’s interested, I daresay however, I do believe in you. You look as
if you’d got a nice sister, somehow.” She paused, picking at some
sequins on her knees, and then, as if she had made up her mind, she
started off, “Anyhow, I’m going to ask your advice. D’you ever get into
a state where you don’t know your own mind? That’s the state I’m in
now. You see, last night at the dance Raymond Oliver,—he’s the tall
dark boy who looks as if he had Indian blood in him, but he says he’s
not really,—well, we were sitting out together, and he told me all
about himself, how unhappy he is at home, and how he hates being out
here. They’ve put him into some beastly mining business. He says it’s
beastly—I should like it, I know, but that’s neither here nor there.
And I felt awfully sorry for him, one couldn’t help being sorry for
him, and when he asked me to let him kiss me, I did. I don’t see any
harm in that, do you? And then this morning he said he’d thought I
meant something more, and I wasn’t the sort to let any one kiss me. And
we talked and talked. I daresay I was very silly, but one can’t help
liking people when one’s sorry for them. I do like him most awfully—”
She paused. “So I gave him half a promise, and then, you see, there’s
Alfred Perrott.”

“Oh, Perrott,” said Hewet.

“We got to know each other on that picnic the other day,” she
continued. “He seemed so lonely, especially as Arthur had gone off with
Susan, and one couldn’t help guessing what was in his mind. So we had
quite a long talk when you were looking at the ruins, and he told me
all about his life, and his struggles, and how fearfully hard it had
been. D’you know, he was a boy in a grocer’s shop and took parcels to
people’s houses in a basket? That interested me awfully, because I
always say it doesn’t matter how you’re born if you’ve got the right
stuff in you. And he told me about his sister who’s paralysed, poor
girl, and one can see she’s a great trial, though he’s evidently very
devoted to her. I must say I do admire people like that! I don’t expect
you do because you’re so clever. Well, last night we sat out in the
garden together, and I couldn’t help seeing what he wanted to say, and
comforting him a little, and telling him I did care—I really do—only,
then, there’s Raymond Oliver. What I want you to tell me is, can one be
in love with two people at once, or can’t one?”

She became silent, and sat with her chin on her hands, looking very
intent, as if she were facing a real problem which had to be discussed
between them.

“I think it depends what sort of person you are,” said Hewet. He looked
at her. She was small and pretty, aged perhaps twenty-eight or
twenty-nine, but though dashing and sharply cut, her features expressed
nothing very clearly, except a great deal of spirit and good health.

“Who are you, what are you; you see, I know nothing about you,” he
continued.

“Well, I was coming to that,” said Evelyn M. She continued to rest her
chin on her hands and to look intently ahead of her. “I’m the daughter
of a mother and no father, if that interests you,” she said. “It’s not
a very nice thing to be. It’s what often happens in the country. She
was a farmer’s daughter, and he was rather a swell—the young man up at
the great house. He never made things straight—never married her—though
he allowed us quite a lot of money. His people wouldn’t let him. Poor
father! I can’t help liking him. Mother wasn’t the sort of woman who
could keep him straight, anyhow. He was killed in the war. I believe
his men worshipped him. They say great big troopers broke down and
cried over his body on the battlefield. I wish I’d known him. Mother
had all the life crushed out of her. The world—” She clenched her fist.
“Oh, people can be horrid to a woman like that!” She turned upon Hewet.

“Well,” she said, “d’you want to know any more about me?”

“But you?” he asked, “Who looked after you?”

“I’ve looked after myself mostly,” she laughed. “I’ve had splendid
friends. I do like people! That’s the trouble. What would you do if you
liked two people, both of them tremendously, and you couldn’t tell
which most?”

“I should go on liking them—I should wait and see. Why not?”

“But one has to make up one’s mind,” said Evelyn. “Or are you one of
the people who doesn’t believe in marriages and all that? Look
here—this isn’t fair, I do all the telling, and you tell nothing.
Perhaps you’re the same as your friend”—she looked at him suspiciously;
“perhaps you don’t like me?”

“I don’t know you,” said Hewet.

“I know when I like a person directly I see them! I knew I liked you
the very first night at dinner. Oh dear,” she continued impatiently,
“what a lot of bother would be saved if only people would say the
things they think straight out! I’m made like that. I can’t help it.”

“But don’t you find it leads to difficulties?” Hewet asked.

“That’s men’s fault,” she answered. “They always drag it in—love, I
mean.”

“And so you’ve gone on having one proposal after another,” said Hewet.

“I don’t suppose I’ve had more proposals than most women,” said Evelyn,
but she spoke without conviction.

“Five, six, ten?” Hewet ventured.

Evelyn seemed to intimate that perhaps ten was the right figure, but
that it really was not a high one.

“I believe you’re thinking me a heartless flirt,” she protested. “But I
don’t care if you are. I don’t care what any one thinks of me. Just
because one’s interested and likes to be friends with men, and talk to
them as one talks to women, one’s called a flirt.”

“But Miss Murgatroyd—”

“I wish you’d call me Evelyn,” she interrupted.

“After ten proposals do you honestly think that men are the same as
women?”

“Honestly, honestly,—how I hate that word! It’s always used by prigs,”
cried Evelyn. “Honestly I think they ought to be. That’s what’s so
disappointing. Every time one thinks it’s not going to happen, and
every time it does.”

“The pursuit of Friendship,” said Hewet. “The title of a comedy.”

“You’re horrid,” she cried. “You don’t care a bit really. You might be
Mr. Hirst.”

“Well,” said Hewet, “let’s consider. Let us consider—” He paused,
because for the moment he could not remember what it was that they had
to consider. He was far more interested in her than in her story, for
as she went on speaking his numbness had disappeared, and he was
conscious of a mixture of liking, pity, and distrust. “You’ve promised
to marry both Oliver and Perrott?” he concluded.

“Not exactly promised,” said Evelyn. “I can’t make up my mind which I
really like best. Oh how I detest modern life!” she flung off. “It must
have been so much easier for the Elizabethans! I thought the other day
on that mountain how I’d have liked to be one of those colonists, to
cut down trees and make laws and all that, instead of fooling about
with all these people who think one’s just a pretty young lady. Though
I’m not. I really might _do_ something.” She reflected in silence for a
minute. Then she said:

“I’m afraid right down in my heart that Alfred Perrot _won’t_ do. He’s
not strong, is he?”

“Perhaps he couldn’t cut down a tree,” said Hewet. “Have you never
cared for anybody?” he asked.

“I’ve cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them,” she said. “I
suppose I’m too fastidious. All my life I’ve wanted somebody I could
look up to, somebody great and big and splendid. Most men are so
small.”

“What d’you mean by splendid?” Hewet asked. “People are—nothing more.”

Evelyn was puzzled.

“We don’t care for people because of their qualities,” he tried to
explain. “It’s just them that we care for,”—he struck a match—“just
that,” he said, pointing to the flames.

“I see what you mean,” she said, “but I don’t agree. I do know why I
care for people, and I think I’m hardly ever wrong. I see at once what
they’ve got in them. Now I think you must be rather splendid; but not
Mr. Hirst.”

Hewlet shook his head.

“He’s not nearly so unselfish, or so sympathetic, or so big, or so
understanding,” Evelyn continued.

Hewet sat silent, smoking his cigarette.

“I should hate cutting down trees,” he remarked.

“I’m not trying to flirt with you, though I suppose you think I am!”
Evelyn shot out. “I’d never have come to you if I’d thought you’d
merely think odious things of me!” The tears came into her eyes.

“Do you never flirt?” he asked.

“Of course I don’t,” she protested. “Haven’t I told you? I want
friendship; I want to care for some one greater and nobler than I am,
and if they fall in love with me it isn’t my fault; I don’t want it; I
positively hate it.”

Hewet could see that there was very little use in going on with the
conversation, for it was obvious that Evelyn did not wish to say
anything in particular, but to impress upon him an image of herself,
being, for some reason which she would not reveal, unhappy, or
insecure. He was very tired, and a pale waiter kept walking
ostentatiously into the middle of the room and looking at them
meaningly.

“They want to shut up,” he said. “My advice is that you should tell
Oliver and Perrott to-morrow that you’ve made up your mind that you
don’t mean to marry either of them. I’m certain you don’t. If you
change your mind you can always tell them so. They’re both sensible
men; they’ll understand. And then all this bother will be over.” He got
up.

But Evelyn did not move. She sat looking up at him with her bright
eager eyes, in the depths of which he thought he detected some
disappointment, or dissatisfaction.

“Good-night,” he said.

“There are heaps of things I want to say to you still,” she said. “And
I’m going to, some time. I suppose you must go to bed now?”

“Yes,” said Hewet. “I’m half asleep.” He left her still sitting by
herself in the empty hall.

“Why is it that they _won’t_ be honest?” he muttered to himself as he
went upstairs. Why was it that relations between different people were
so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous
that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an
instinct to be examined carefully and probably crushed? What had Evelyn
really wished to say to him? What was she feeling left alone in the
empty hall? The mystery of life and the unreality even of one’s own
sensations overcame him as he walked down the corridor which led to his
room. It was dimly lighted, but sufficiently for him to see a figure in
a bright dressing-gown pass swiftly in front of him, the figure of a
woman crossing from one room to another.




CHAPTER XV


Whether too slight or too vague the ties that bind people casually
meeting in a hotel at midnight, they possess one advantage at least
over the bonds which unite the elderly, who have lived together once
and so must live for ever. Slight they may be, but vivid and genuine,
merely because the power to break them is within the grasp of each, and
there is no reason for continuance except a true desire that continue
they shall. When two people have been married for years they seem to
become unconscious of each other’s bodily presence so that they move as
if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered,
and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without
its loneliness. The joint lives of Ridley and Helen had arrived at this
stage of community, and it was often necessary for one or the other to
recall with an effort whether a thing had been said or only thought,
shared or dreamt in private. At four o’clock in the afternoon two or
three days later Mrs. Ambrose was standing brushing her hair, while her
husband was in the dressing-room which opened out of her room, and
occasionally, through the cascade of water—he was washing his face—she
caught exclamations, “So it goes on year after year; I wish, I wish, I
wish I could make an end of it,” to which she paid no attention.

“It’s white? Or only brown?” Thus she herself murmured, examining a
hair which gleamed suspiciously among the brown. She pulled it out and
laid it on the dressing-table. She was criticising her own appearance,
or rather approving of it, standing a little way back from the glass
and looking at her own face with superb pride and melancholy, when her
husband appeared in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, his face half
obscured by a towel.

“You often tell me I don’t notice things,” he remarked.

“Tell me if this is a white hair, then?” she replied. She laid the hair
on his hand.

“There’s not a white hair on your head,” he exclaimed.

“Ah, Ridley, I begin to doubt,” she sighed; and bowed her head under
his eyes so that he might judge, but the inspection produced only a
kiss where the line of parting ran, and husband and wife then proceeded
to move about the room, casually murmuring.

“What was that you were saying?” Helen remarked, after an interval of
conversation which no third person could have understood.

“Rachel—you ought to keep an eye upon Rachel,” he observed
significantly, and Helen, though she went on brushing her hair, looked
at him. His observations were apt to be true.

“Young gentlemen don’t interest themselves in young women’s education
without a motive,” he remarked.

“Oh, Hirst,” said Helen.

“Hirst and Hewet, they’re all the same to me—all covered with spots,”
he replied. “He advises her to read Gibbon. Did you know that?”

Helen did not know that, but she would not allow herself inferior to
her husband in powers of observation. She merely said:

“Nothing would surprise me. Even that dreadful flying man we met at the
dance—even Mr. Dalloway—even—”

“I advise you to be circumspect,” said Ridley. “There’s Willoughby,
remember—Willoughby”; he pointed at a letter.

Helen looked with a sigh at an envelope which lay upon her
dressing-table. Yes, there lay Willoughby, curt, inexpressive,
perpetually jocular, robbing a whole continent of mystery, enquiring
after his daughter’s manners and morals—hoping she wasn’t a bore, and
bidding them pack her off to him on board the very next ship if she
were—and then grateful and affectionate with suppressed emotion, and
then half a page about his own triumphs over wretched little natives
who went on strike and refused to load his ships, until he roared
English oaths at them, “popping my head out of the window just as I
was, in my shirt sleeves. The beggars had the sense to scatter.”

“If Theresa married Willoughby,” she remarked, turning the page with a
hairpin, “one doesn’t see what’s to prevent Rachel—”

But Ridley was now off on grievances of his own connected with the
washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits of
Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man, and
yet Ridley couldn’t simply point at the door and tell him to go. The
truth of it was, they saw too many people. And so on and so on, more
conjugal talk pattering softly and unintelligibly, until they were both
ready to go down to tea.

The first thing that caught Helen’s eye as she came downstairs was a
carriage at the door, filled with skirts and feathers nodding on the
tops of hats. She had only time to gain the drawing-room before two
names were oddly mispronounced by the Spanish maid, and Mrs. Thornbury
came in slightly in advance of Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing.

“Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing,” said Mrs. Thornbury, with a wave of her hand.
“A friend of our common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry.”

Mrs. Flushing shook hands energetically. She was a woman of forty
perhaps, very well set up and erect, splendidly robust, though not as
tall as the upright carriage of her body made her appear.

She looked Helen straight in the face and said, “You have a charmin’
house.”

She had a strongly marked face, her eyes looked straight at you, and
though naturally she was imperious in her manner she was nervous at the
same time. Mrs. Thornbury acted as interpreter, making things smooth
all round by a series of charming commonplace remarks.

“I’ve taken it upon myself, Mr. Ambrose,” she said, “to promise that
you will be so kind as to give Mrs. Flushing the benefit of your
experience. I’m sure no one here knows the country as well as you do.
No one takes such wonderful long walks. No one, I’m sure, has your
encyclopaedic knowledge upon every subject. Mr. Wilfrid Flushing is a
collector. He has discovered really beautiful things already. I had no
notion that the peasants were so artistic—though of course in the
past—”

“Not old things—new things,” interrupted Mrs. Flushing curtly. “That
is, if he takes my advice.”

The Ambroses had not lived for many years in London without knowing
something of a good many people, by name at least, and Helen remembered
hearing of the Flushings. Mr. Flushing was a man who kept an old
furniture shop; he had always said he would not marry because most
women have red cheeks, and would not take a house because most houses
have narrow staircases, and would not eat meat because most animals
bleed when they are killed; and then he had married an eccentric
aristocratic lady, who certainly was not pale, who looked as if she ate
meat, who had forced him to do all the things he most disliked—and this
then was the lady. Helen looked at her with interest. They had moved
out into the garden, where the tea was laid under a tree, and Mrs.
Flushing was helping herself to cherry jam. She had a peculiar jerking
movement of the body when she spoke, which caused the canary-coloured
plume on her hat to jerk too. Her small but finely-cut and vigorous
features, together with the deep red of lips and cheeks, pointed to
many generations of well-trained and well-nourished ancestors behind
her.

“Nothin’ that’s more than twenty years old interests me,” she
continued. “Mouldy old pictures, dirty old books, they stick ’em in
museums when they’re only fit for burnin’.”

“I quite agree,” Helen laughed. “But my husband spends his life in
digging up manuscripts which nobody wants.” She was amused by Ridley’s
expression of startled disapproval.

“There’s a clever man in London called John who paints ever so much
better than the old masters,” Mrs. Flushing continued. “His pictures
excite me—nothin’ that’s old excites me.”

“But even his pictures will become old,” Mrs. Thornbury intervened.

“Then I’ll have ’em burnt, or I’ll put it in my will,” said Mrs.
Flushing.

“And Mrs. Flushing lived in one of the most beautiful old houses in
England—Chillingley,” Mrs. Thornbury explained to the rest of them.

“If I’d my way I’d burn that to-morrow,” Mrs. Flushing laughed. She had
a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless.

“What does any sane person want with those great big houses?” she
demanded. “If you go downstairs after dark you’re covered with black
beetles, and the electric lights always goin’ out. What would you do if
spiders came out of the tap when you turned on the hot water?” she
demanded, fixing her eye on Helen.

Mrs. Ambrose shrugged her shoulders with a smile.

“This is what I like,” said Mrs. Flushing. She jerked her head at the
Villa. “A little house in a garden. I had one once in Ireland. One
could lie in bed in the mornin’ and pick roses outside the window with
one’s toes.”

“And the gardeners, weren’t they surprised?” Mrs. Thornbury enquired.

“There were no gardeners,” Mrs. Flushing chuckled. “Nobody but me and
an old woman without any teeth. You know the poor in Ireland lose their
teeth after they’re twenty. But you wouldn’t expect a politician to
understand that—Arthur Balfour wouldn’t understand that.”

Ridley sighed that he never expected any one to understand anything,
least of all politicians.

“However,” he concluded, “there’s one advantage I find in extreme old
age—nothing matters a hang except one’s food and one’s digestion. All I
ask is to be left alone to moulder away in solitude. It’s obvious that
the world’s going as fast as it can to—the Nethermost Pit, and all I
can do is to sit still and consume as much of my own smoke as
possible.” He groaned, and with a melancholy glance laid the jam on his
bread, for he felt the atmosphere of this abrupt lady distinctly
unsympathetic.

“I always contradict my husband when he says that,” said Mrs. Thornbury
sweetly. “You men! Where would you be if it weren’t for the women!”

“Read the _Symposium_,” said Ridley grimly.

“_Symposium_?” cried Mrs. Flushing. “That’s Latin or Greek? Tell me, is
there a good translation?”

“No,” said Ridley. “You will have to learn Greek.”

Mrs. Flushing cried, “Ah, ah, ah! I’d rather break stones in the road.
I always envy the men who break stones and sit on those nice little
heaps all day wearin’ spectacles. I’d infinitely rather break stones
than clean out poultry runs, or feed the cows, or—”

Here Rachel came up from the lower garden with a book in her hand.

“What’s that book?” said Ridley, when she had shaken hands.

“It’s Gibbon,” said Rachel as she sat down.

“_The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_?” said Mrs. Thornbury. “A
very wonderful book, I know. My dear father was always quoting it at
us, with the result that we resolved never to read a line.”

“Gibbon the historian?” enquired Mrs. Flushing. “I connect him with
some of the happiest hours of my life. We used to lie in bed and read
Gibbon—about the massacres of the Christians, I remember—when we were
supposed to be asleep. It’s no joke, I can tell you, readin’ a great
big book, in double columns, by a night-light, and the light that comes
through a chink in the door. Then there were the moths—tiger moths,
yellow moths, and horrid cockchafers. Louisa, my sister, would have the
window open. I wanted it shut. We fought every night of our lives over
that window. Have you ever seen a moth dyin’ in a night-light?” she
enquired.

Again there was an interruption. Hewet and Hirst appeared at the
drawing-room window and came up to the tea-table.

Rachel’s heart beat hard. She was conscious of an extraordinary
intensity in everything, as though their presence stripped some cover
off the surface of things; but the greetings were remarkably
commonplace.

“Excuse me,” said Hirst, rising from his chair directly he had sat
down. He went into the drawing-room, and returned with a cushion which
he placed carefully upon his seat.

“Rheumatism,” he remarked, as he sat down for the second time.

“The result of the dance?” Helen enquired.

“Whenever I get at all run down I tend to be rheumatic,” Hirst stated.
He bent his wrist back sharply. “I hear little pieces of chalk grinding
together!”

Rachel looked at him. She was amused, and yet she was respectful; if
such a thing could be, the upper part of her face seemed to laugh, and
the lower part to check its laughter.

Hewet picked up the book that lay on the ground.

“You like this?” he asked in an undertone.

“No, I don’t like it,” she replied. She had indeed been trying all the
afternoon to read it, and for some reason the glory which she had
perceived at first had faded, and, read as she would, she could not
grasp the meaning with her mind.

“It goes round, round, round, like a roll of oil-cloth,” she hazarded.
Evidently she meant Hewet alone to hear her words, but Hirst demanded,
“What d’you mean?”

She was instantly ashamed of her figure of speech, for she could not
explain it in words of sober criticism.

“Surely it’s the most perfect style, so far as style goes, that’s ever
been invented,” he continued. “Every sentence is practically perfect,
and the wit—”

“Ugly in body, repulsive in mind,” she thought, instead of thinking
about Gibbon’s style. “Yes, but strong, searching, unyielding in mind.”
She looked at his big head, a disproportionate part of which was
occupied by the forehead, and at the direct, severe eyes.

“I give you up in despair,” he said. He meant it lightly, but she took
it seriously, and believed that her value as a human being was lessened
because she did not happen to admire the style of Gibbon. The others
were talking now in a group about the native villages which Mrs.
Flushing ought to visit.

“I despair too,” she said impetuously. “How are you going to judge
people merely by their minds?”

“You agree with my spinster Aunt, I expect,” said St. John in his
jaunty manner, which was always irritating because it made the person
he talked to appear unduly clumsy and in earnest. “‘Be good, sweet
maid’—I thought Mr. Kingsley and my Aunt were now obsolete.”

“One can be very nice without having read a book,” she asserted. Very
silly and simple her words sounded, and laid her open to derision.

“Did I ever deny it?” Hirst enquired, raising his eyebrows.

Most unexpectedly Mrs. Thornbury here intervened, either because it was
her mission to keep things smooth or because she had long wished to
speak to Mr. Hirst, feeling as she did that young men were her sons.

“I have lived all my life with people like your Aunt, Mr. Hirst,” she
said, leaning forward in her chair. Her brown squirrel-like eyes became
even brighter than usual. “They have never heard of Gibbon. They only
care for their pheasants and their peasants. They are great big men who
look so fine on horseback, as people must have done, I think, in the
days of the great wars. Say what you like against them—they are animal,
they are unintellectual; they don’t read themselves, and they don’t
want others to read, but they are some of the finest and the kindest
human beings on the face of the earth! You would be surprised at some
of the stories I could tell. You have never guessed, perhaps, at all
the romances that go on in the heart of the country. There are the
people, I feel, among whom Shakespeare will be born if he is ever born
again. In those old houses, up among the Downs—”

“My Aunt,” Hirst interrupted, “spends her life in East Lambeth among
the degraded poor. I only quoted my Aunt because she is inclined to
persecute people she calls ‘intellectual,’ which is what I suspect Miss
Vinrace of doing. It’s all the fashion now. If you’re clever it’s
always taken for granted that you’re completely without sympathy,
understanding, affection—all the things that really matter. Oh, you
Christians! You’re the most conceited, patronising, hypocritical set of
old humbugs in the kingdom! Of course,” he continued, “I’m the first to
allow your country gentlemen great merits. For one thing, they’re
probably quite frank about their passions, which we are not. My father,
who is a clergyman in Norfolk, says that there is hardly a squire in
the country who does not—”

“But about Gibbon?” Hewet interrupted. The look of nervous tension
which had come over every face was relaxed by the interruption.

“You find him monotonous, I suppose. But you know—” He opened the book,
and began searching for passages to read aloud, and in a little time he
found a good one which he considered suitable. But there was nothing in
the world that bored Ridley more than being read aloud to, and he was
besides scrupulously fastidious as to the dress and behaviour of
ladies. In the space of fifteen minutes he had decided against Mrs.
Flushing on the ground that her orange plume did not suit her
complexion, that she spoke too loud, that she crossed her legs, and
finally, when he saw her accept a cigarette that Hewet offered her, he
jumped up, exclaiming something about “bar parlours,” and left them.
Mrs. Flushing was evidently relieved by his departure. She puffed her
cigarette, stuck her legs out, and examined Helen closely as to the
character and reputation of their common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry. By
a series of little strategems she drove her to define Mrs. Parry as
somewhat elderly, by no means beautiful, very much made up—an insolent
old harridan, in short, whose parties were amusing because one met odd
people; but Helen herself always pitied poor Mr. Parry, who was
understood to be shut up downstairs with cases full of gems, while his
wife enjoyed herself in the drawing-room. “Not that I believe what
people say against her—although she hints, of course—” Upon which Mrs.
Flushing cried out with delight:

“She’s my first cousin! Go on—go on!”

When Mrs. Flushing rose to go she was obviously delighted with her new
acquaintances. She made three or four different plans for meeting or
going on an expedition, or showing Helen the things they had bought, on
her way to the carriage. She included them all in a vague but
magnificent invitation.

As Helen returned to the garden again, Ridley’s words of warning came
into her head, and she hesitated a moment and looked at Rachel sitting
between Hirst and Hewet. But she could draw no conclusions, for Hewet
was still reading Gibbon aloud, and Rachel, for all the expression she
had, might have been a shell, and his words water rubbing against her
ears, as water rubs a shell on the edge of a rock.

Hewet’s voice was very pleasant. When he reached the end of the period
Hewet stopped, and no one volunteered any criticism.

“I do adore the aristocracy!” Hirst exclaimed after a moment’s pause.
“They’re so amazingly unscrupulous. None of us would dare to behave as
that woman behaves.”

“What I like about them,” said Helen as she sat down, “is that they’re
so well put together. Naked, Mrs. Flushing would be superb. Dressed as
she dresses, it’s absurd, of course.”

“Yes,” said Hirst. A shade of depression crossed his face. “I’ve never
weighed more than ten stone in my life,” he said, “which is ridiculous,
considering my height, and I’ve actually gone down in weight since we
came here. I daresay that accounts for the rheumatism.” Again he jerked
his wrist back sharply, so that Helen might hear the grinding of the
chalk stones. She could not help smiling.

“It’s no laughing matter for me, I assure you,” he protested. “My
mother’s a chronic invalid, and I’m always expecting to be told that
I’ve got heart disease myself. Rheumatism always goes to the heart in
the end.”

“For goodness’ sake, Hirst,” Hewet protested; “one might think you were
an old cripple of eighty. If it comes to that, I had an aunt who died
of cancer myself, but I put a bold face on it—” He rose and began
tilting his chair backwards and forwards on its hind legs. “Is any one
here inclined for a walk?” he said. “There’s a magnificent walk, up
behind the house. You come out on to a cliff and look right down into
the sea. The rocks are all red; you can see them through the water. The
other day I saw a sight that fairly took my breath away—about twenty
jelly-fish, semi-transparent, pink, with long streamers, floating on
the top of the waves.”

“Sure they weren’t mermaids?” said Hirst. “It’s much too hot to climb
uphill.” He looked at Helen, who showed no signs of moving.

“Yes, it’s too hot,” Helen decided.

There was a short silence.

“I’d like to come,” said Rachel.

“But she might have said that anyhow,” Helen thought to herself as
Hewet and Rachel went away together, and Helen was left alone with St.
John, to St. John’s obvious satisfaction.

He may have been satisfied, but his usual difficulty in deciding that
one subject was more deserving of notice than another prevented him
from speaking for some time. He sat staring intently at the head of a
dead match, while Helen considered—so it seemed from the expression of
her eyes—something not closely connected with the present moment.

At last St. John exclaimed, “Damn! Damn everything! Damn everybody!” he
added. “At Cambridge there are people to talk to.”

“At Cambridge there are people to talk to,” Helen echoed him,
rhythmically and absent-mindedly. Then she woke up. “By the way, have
you settled what you’re going to do—is it to be Cambridge or the Bar?”

He pursed his lips, but made no immediate answer, for Helen was still
slightly inattentive. She had been thinking about Rachel and which of
the two young men she was likely to fall in love with, and now sitting
opposite to Hirst she thought, “He’s ugly. It’s a pity they’re so
ugly.”

She did not include Hewet in this criticism; she was thinking of the
clever, honest, interesting young men she knew, of whom Hirst was a
good example, and wondering whether it was necessary that thought and
scholarship should thus maltreat their bodies, and should thus elevate
their minds to a very high tower from which the human race appeared to
them like rats and mice squirming on the flat.

“And the future?” she reflected, vaguely envisaging a race of men
becoming more and more like Hirst, and a race of women becoming more
and more like Rachel. “Oh no,” she concluded, glancing at him, “one
wouldn’t marry you. Well, then, the future of the race is in the hands
of Susan and Arthur; no—that’s dreadful. Of farm labourers; no—not of
the English at all, but of Russians and Chinese.” This train of thought
did not satisfy her, and was interrupted by St. John, who began again:

“I wish you knew Bennett. He’s the greatest man in the world.”

“Bennett?” she enquired. Becoming more at ease, St. John dropped the
concentrated abruptness of his manner, and explained that Bennett was a
man who lived in an old windmill six miles out of Cambridge. He lived
the perfect life, according to St. John, very lonely, very simple,
caring only for the truth of things, always ready to talk, and
extraordinarily modest, though his mind was of the greatest.

“Don’t you think,” said St. John, when he had done describing him,
“that kind of thing makes this kind of thing rather flimsy? Did you
notice at tea how poor old Hewet had to change the conversation? How
they were all ready to pounce upon me because they thought I was going
to say something improper? It wasn’t anything, really. If Bennett had
been there he’d have said exactly what he meant to say, or he’d have
got up and gone. But there’s something rather bad for the character in
that—I mean if one hasn’t got Bennett’s character. It’s inclined to
make one bitter. Should you say that I was bitter?”

Helen did not answer, and he continued:

“Of course I am, disgustingly bitter, and it’s a beastly thing to be.
But the worst of me is that I’m so envious. I envy every one. I can’t
endure people who do things better than I do—perfectly absurd things
too—waiters balancing piles of plates—even Arthur, because Susan’s in
love with him. I want people to like me, and they don’t. It’s partly my
appearance, I expect,” he continued, “though it’s an absolute lie to
say I’ve Jewish blood in me—as a matter of fact we’ve been in Norfolk,
Hirst of Hirstbourne Hall, for three centuries at least. It must be
awfully soothing to be like you—every one liking one at once.”

“I assure you they don’t,” Helen laughed.

“They do,” said Hirst with conviction. “In the first place, you’re the
most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen; in the second, you have an
exceptionally nice nature.”

If Hirst had looked at her instead of looking intently at his teacup he
would have seen Helen blush, partly with pleasure, partly with an
impulse of affection towards the young man who had seemed, and would
seem again, so ugly and so limited. She pitied him, for she suspected
that he suffered, and she was interested in him, for many of the things
he said seemed to her true; she admired the morality of youth, and yet
she felt imprisoned. As if her instinct were to escape to something
brightly coloured and impersonal, which she could hold in her hands,
she went into the house and returned with her embroidery. But he was
not interested in her embroidery; he did not even look at it.

“About Miss Vinrace,” he began,—“oh, look here, do let’s be St. John
and Helen, and Rachel and Terence—what’s she like? Does she reason,
does she feel, or is she merely a kind of footstool?”

“Oh no,” said Helen, with great decision. From her observations at tea
she was inclined to doubt whether Hirst was the person to educate
Rachel. She had gradually come to be interested in her niece, and fond
of her; she disliked some things about her very much, she was amused by
others; but she felt her, on the whole, a live if unformed human being,
experimental, and not always fortunate in her experiments, but with
powers of some kind, and a capacity for feeling. Somewhere in the
depths of her, too, she was bound to Rachel by the indestructible if
inexplicable ties of sex. “She seems vague, but she’s a will of her
own,” she said, as if in the interval she had run through her
qualities.

The embroidery, which was a matter for thought, the design being
difficult and the colours wanting consideration, brought lapses into
the dialogue when she seemed to be engrossed in her skeins of silk, or,
with head a little drawn back and eyes narrowed, considered the effect
of the whole. Thus she merely said, “Um-m-m” to St. John’s next remark,
“I shall ask her to go for a walk with me.”

Perhaps he resented this division of attention. He sat silent watching
Helen closely.

“You’re absolutely happy,” he proclaimed at last.

“Yes?” Helen enquired, sticking in her needle.

“Marriage, I suppose,” said St. John.

“Yes,” said Helen, gently drawing her needle out.

“Children?” St. John enquired.

“Yes,” said Helen, sticking her needle in again. “I don’t know why I’m
happy,” she suddenly laughed, looking him full in the face. There was a
considerable pause.

“There’s an abyss between us,” said St. John. His voice sounded as if
it issued from the depths of a cavern in the rocks. “You’re infinitely
simpler than I am. Women always are, of course. That’s the difficulty.
One never knows how a woman gets there. Supposing all the time you’re
thinking, ‘Oh, what a morbid young man!’”

Helen sat and looked at him with her needle in her hand. From her
position she saw his head in front of the dark pyramid of a
magnolia-tree. With one foot raised on the rung of a chair, and her
elbow out in the attitude for sewing, her own figure possessed the
sublimity of a woman’s of the early world, spinning the thread of
fate—the sublimity possessed by many women of the present day who fall
into the attitude required by scrubbing or sewing. St. John looked at
her.

“I suppose you’ve never paid any a compliment in the course of your
life,” he said irrelevantly.

“I spoil Ridley rather,” Helen considered.

“I’m going to ask you point blank—do you like me?”

After a certain pause, she replied, “Yes, certainly.”

“Thank God!” he exclaimed. “That’s one mercy. You see,” he continued
with emotion, “I’d rather you liked me than any one I’ve ever met.”

“What about the five philosophers?” said Helen, with a laugh, stitching
firmly and swiftly at her canvas. “I wish you’d describe them.”

Hirst had no particular wish to describe them, but when he began to
consider them he found himself soothed and strengthened. Far away on
the other side of the world as they were, in smoky rooms, and grey
medieval courts, they appeared remarkable figures, free-spoken men with
whom one could be at ease; incomparably more subtle in emotion than the
people here. They gave him, certainly, what no woman could give him,
not Helen even. Warming at the thought of them, he went on to lay his
case before Mrs. Ambrose. Should he stay on at Cambridge or should he
go to the Bar? One day he thought one thing, another day another. Helen
listened attentively. At last, without any preface, she pronounced her
decision.

“Leave Cambridge and go to the Bar,” she said. He pressed her for her
reasons.

“I think you’d enjoy London more,” she said. It did not seem a very
subtle reason, but she appeared to think it sufficient. She looked at
him against the background of flowering magnolia. There was something
curious in the sight. Perhaps it was that the heavy wax-like flowers
were so smooth and inarticulate, and his face—he had thrown his hat
away, his hair was rumpled, he held his eye-glasses in his hand, so
that a red mark appeared on either side of his nose—was so worried and
garrulous. It was a beautiful bush, spreading very widely, and all the
time she had sat there talking she had been noticing the patches of
shade and the shape of the leaves, and the way the great white flowers
sat in the midst of the green. She had noticed it half-consciously,
nevertheless the pattern had become part of their talk. She laid down
her sewing, and began to walk up and down the garden, and Hirst rose
too and paced by her side. He was rather disturbed, uncomfortable, and
full of thought. Neither of them spoke.

The sun was beginning to go down, and a change had come over the
mountains, as if they were robbed of their earthly substance, and
composed merely of intense blue mist. Long thin clouds of flamingo red,
with edges like the edges of curled ostrich feathers, lay up and down
the sky at different altitudes. The roofs of the town seemed to have
sunk lower than usual; the cypresses appeared very black between the
roofs, and the roofs themselves were brown and white. As usual in the
evening, single cries and single bells became audible rising from
beneath.

St. John stopped suddenly.

“Well, you must take the responsibility,” he said. “I’ve made up my
mind; I shall go to the Bar.”

His words were very serious, almost emotional; they recalled Helen
after a second’s hesitation.

“I’m sure you’re right,” she said warmly, and shook the hand he held
out. “You’ll be a great man, I’m certain.”

Then, as if to make him look at the scene, she swept her hand round the
immense circumference of the view. From the sea, over the roofs of the
town, across the crests of the mountains, over the river and the plain,
and again across the crests of the mountains it swept until it reached
the villa, the garden, the magnolia-tree, and the figures of Hirst and
herself standing together, when it dropped to her side.




CHAPTER XVI


Hewet and Rachel had long ago reached the particular place on the edge
of the cliff where, looking down into the sea, you might chance on
jelly-fish and dolphins. Looking the other way, the vast expanse of
land gave them a sensation which is given by no view, however extended,
in England; the villages and the hills there having names, and the
farthest horizon of hills as often as not dipping and showing a line of
mist which is the sea; here the view was one of infinite sun-dried
earth, earth pointed in pinnacles, heaped in vast barriers, earth
widening and spreading away and away like the immense floor of the sea,
earth chequered by day and by night, and partitioned into different
lands, where famous cities were founded, and the races of men changed
from dark savages to white civilised men, and back to dark savages
again. Perhaps their English blood made this prospect uncomfortably
impersonal and hostile to them, for having once turned their faces that
way they next turned them to the sea, and for the rest of the time sat
looking at the sea. The sea, though it was a thin and sparkling water
here, which seemed incapable of surge or anger, eventually narrowed
itself, clouded its pure tint with grey, and swirled through narrow
channels and dashed in a shiver of broken waters against massive
granite rocks. It was this sea that flowed up to the mouth of the
Thames; and the Thames washed the roots of the city of London.

Hewet’s thoughts had followed some such course as this, for the first
thing he said as they stood on the edge of the cliff was—

“I’d like to be in England!”

Rachel lay down on her elbow, and parted the tall grasses which grew on
the edge, so that she might have a clear view. The water was very calm;
rocking up and down at the base of the cliff, and so clear that one
could see the red of the stones at the bottom of it. So it had been at
the birth of the world, and so it had remained ever since. Probably no
human being had ever broken that water with boat or with body. Obeying
some impulse, she determined to mar that eternity of peace, and threw
the largest pebble she could find. It struck the water, and the ripples
spread out and out. Hewet looked down too.

“It’s wonderful,” he said, as they widened and ceased. The freshness
and the newness seemed to him wonderful. He threw a pebble next. There
was scarcely any sound.

“But England,” Rachel murmured in the absorbed tone of one whose eyes
are concentrated upon some sight. “What d’you want with England?”

“My friends chiefly,” he said, “and all the things one does.”

He could look at Rachel without her noticing it. She was still absorbed
in the water and the exquisitely pleasant sensations which a little
depth of the sea washing over rocks suggests. He noticed that she was
wearing a dress of deep blue colour, made of a soft thin cotton stuff,
which clung to the shape of her body. It was a body with the angles and
hollows of a young woman’s body not yet developed, but in no way
distorted, and thus interesting and even lovable. Raising his eyes
Hewet observed her head; she had taken her hat off, and the face rested
on her hand. As she looked down into the sea, her lips were slightly
parted. The expression was one of childlike intentness, as if she were
watching for a fish to swim past over the clear red rocks. Nevertheless
her twenty-four years of life had given her a look of reserve. Her
hand, which lay on the ground, the fingers curling slightly in, was
well shaped and competent; the square-tipped and nervous fingers were
the fingers of a musician. With something like anguish Hewet realised
that, far from being unattractive, her body was very attractive to him.
She looked up suddenly. Her eyes were full of eagerness and interest.

“You write novels?” she asked.

For the moment he could not think what he was saying. He was overcome
with the desire to hold her in his arms.

“Oh yes,” he said. “That is, I want to write them.”

She would not take her large grey eyes off his face.

“Novels,” she repeated. “Why do you write novels? You ought to write
music. Music, you see”—she shifted her eyes, and became less desirable
as her brain began to work, inflicting a certain change upon her
face—“music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at
once. With writing it seems to me there’s so much”—she paused for an
expression, and rubbed her fingers in the earth—“scratching on the
matchbox. Most of the time when I was reading Gibbon this afternoon I
was horribly, oh infernally, damnably bored!” She gave a shake of
laughter, looking at Hewet, who laughed too.

“_I_ shan’t lend you books,” he remarked.

“Why is it,” Rachel continued, “that I can laugh at Mr. Hirst to you,
but not to his face? At tea I was completely overwhelmed, not by his
ugliness—by his mind.” She enclosed a circle in the air with her hands.
She realised with a great sense of comfort how easily she could talk to
Hewet, those thorns or ragged corners which tear the surface of some
relationships being smoothed away.

“So I observed,” said Hewet. “That’s a thing that never ceases to amaze
me.” He had recovered his composure to such an extent that he could
light and smoke a cigarette, and feeling her ease, became happy and
easy himself.

“The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women, have for
men,” he went on. “I believe we must have the sort of power over you
that we’re said to have over horses. They see us three times as big as
we are or they’d never obey us. For that very reason, I’m inclined to
doubt that you’ll ever do anything even when you have the vote.” He
looked at her reflectively. She appeared very smooth and sensitive and
young. “It’ll take at least six generations before you’re sufficiently
thick-skinned to go into law courts and business offices. Consider what
a bully the ordinary man is,” he continued, “the ordinary hard-working,
rather ambitious solicitor or man of business with a family to bring up
and a certain position to maintain. And then, of course, the daughters
have to give way to the sons; the sons have to be educated; they have
to bully and shove for their wives and families, and so it all comes
over again. And meanwhile there are the women in the background. . . .
Do you really think that the vote will do you any good?”

“The vote?” Rachel repeated. She had to visualise it as a little bit of
paper which she dropped into a box before she understood his question,
and looking at each other they smiled at something absurd in the
question.

“Not to me,” she said. “But I play the piano. . . . Are men really like
that?” she asked, returning to the question that interested her. “I’m
not afraid of you.” She looked at him easily.

“Oh, I’m different,” Hewet replied. “I’ve got between six and seven
hundred a year of my own. And then no one takes a novelist seriously,
thank heavens. There’s no doubt it helps to make up for the drudgery of
a profession if a man’s taken very, very seriously by every one—if he
gets appointments, and has offices and a title, and lots of letters
after his name, and bits of ribbon and degrees. I don’t grudge it ’em,
though sometimes it comes over me—what an amazing concoction! What a
miracle the masculine conception of life is—judges, civil servants,
army, navy, Houses of Parliament, lord mayors—what a world we’ve made
of it! Look at Hirst now. I assure you,” he said, “not a day’s passed
since we came here without a discussion as to whether he’s to stay on
at Cambridge or to go to the Bar. It’s his career—his sacred career.
And if I’ve heard it twenty times, I’m sure his mother and sister have
heard it five hundred times. Can’t you imagine the family conclaves,
and the sister told to run out and feed the rabbits because St. John
must have the school-room to himself—‘St. John’s working,’ ‘St. John
wants his tea brought to him.’ Don’t you know the kind of thing? No
wonder that St. John thinks it a matter of considerable importance. It
is too. He has to earn his living. But St. John’s sister—” Hewet puffed
in silence. “No one takes her seriously, poor dear. She feeds the
rabbits.”

“Yes,” said Rachel. “I’ve fed rabbits for twenty-four years; it seems
odd now.” She looked meditative, and Hewet, who had been talking much
at random and instinctively adopting the feminine point of view, saw
that she would now talk about herself, which was what he wanted, for so
they might come to know each other.

She looked back meditatively upon her past life.

“How do you spend your day?” he asked.

She meditated still. When she thought of their day it seemed to her it
was cut into four pieces by their meals. These divisions were
absolutely rigid, the contents of the day having to accommodate
themselves within the four rigid bars. Looking back at her life, that
was what she saw.

“Breakfast nine; luncheon one; tea five; dinner eight,” she said.

“Well,” said Hewet, “what d’you do in the morning?”

“I need to play the piano for hours and hours.”

“And after luncheon?”

“Then I went shopping with one of my aunts. Or we went to see some one,
or we took a message; or we did something that had to be done—the taps
might be leaking. They visit the poor a good deal—old char-women with
bad legs, women who want tickets for hospitals. Or I used to walk in
the park by myself. And after tea people sometimes called; or in summer
we sat in the garden or played croquet; in winter I read aloud, while
they worked; after dinner I played the piano and they wrote letters. If
father was at home we had friends of his to dinner, and about once a
month we went up to the play. Every now and then we dined out;
sometimes I went to a dance in London, but that was difficult because
of getting back. The people we saw were old family friends, and
relations, but we didn’t see many people. There was the clergyman, Mr.
Pepper, and the Hunts. Father generally wanted to be quiet when he came
home, because he works very hard at Hull. Also my aunts aren’t very
strong. A house takes up a lot of time if you do it properly. Our
servants were always bad, and so Aunt Lucy used to do a good deal in
the kitchen, and Aunt Clara, I think, spent most of the morning dusting
the drawing-room and going through the linen and silver. Then there
were the dogs. They had to be exercised, besides being washed and
brushed. Now Sandy’s dead, but Aunt Clara has a very old cockatoo that
came from India. Everything in our house,” she exclaimed, “comes from
somewhere! It’s full of old furniture, not really old, Victorian,
things mother’s family had or father’s family had, which they didn’t
like to get rid of, I suppose, though we’ve really no room for them.
It’s rather a nice house,” she continued, “except that it’s a little
dingy—dull I should say.” She called up before her eyes a vision of the
drawing-room at home; it was a large oblong room, with a square window
opening on the garden. Green plush chairs stood against the wall; there
was a heavy carved book-case, with glass doors, and a general
impression of faded sofa covers, large spaces of pale green, and
baskets with pieces of wool-work dropping out of them. Photographs from
old Italian masterpieces hung on the walls, and views of Venetian
bridges and Swedish waterfalls which members of the family had seen
years ago. There were also one or two portraits of fathers and
grandmothers, and an engraving of John Stuart Mill, after the picture
by Watts. It was a room without definite character, being neither
typically and openly hideous, nor strenuously artistic, nor really
comfortable. Rachel roused herself from the contemplation of this
familiar picture.

“But this isn’t very interesting for you,” she said, looking up.

“Good Lord!” Hewet exclaimed. “I’ve never been so much interested in my
life.” She then realised that while she had been thinking of Richmond,
his eyes had never left her face. The knowledge of this excited her.

“Go on, please go on,” he urged. “Let’s imagine it’s a Wednesday.
You’re all at luncheon. You sit there, and Aunt Lucy there, and Aunt
Clara here”; he arranged three pebbles on the grass between them.

“Aunt Clara carves the neck of lamb,” Rachel continued. She fixed her
gaze upon the pebbles. “There’s a very ugly yellow china stand in front
of me, called a dumb waiter, on which are three dishes, one for
biscuits, one for butter, and one for cheese. There’s a pot of ferns.
Then there’s Blanche the maid, who snuffles because of her nose. We
talk—oh yes, it’s Aunt Lucy’s afternoon at Walworth, so we’re rather
quick over luncheon. She goes off. She has a purple bag, and a black
notebook. Aunt Clara has what they call a G.F.S. meeting in the
drawing-room on Wednesday, so I take the dogs out. I go up Richmond
Hill, along the terrace, into the park. It’s the 18th of April—the same
day as it is here. It’s spring in England. The ground is rather damp.
However, I cross the road and get on to the grass and we walk along,
and I sing as I always do when I’m alone, until we come to the open
place where you can see the whole of London beneath you on a clear day.
Hampstead Church spire there, Westminster Cathedral over there, and
factory chimneys about here. There’s generally a haze over the low
parts of London; but it’s often blue over the park when London’s in a
mist. It’s the open place that the balloons cross going over to
Hurlingham. They’re pale yellow. Well, then, it smells very good,
particularly if they happen to be burning wood in the keeper’s lodge
which is there. I could tell you now how to get from place to place,
and exactly what trees you’d pass, and where you’d cross the roads. You
see, I played there when I was small. Spring is good, but it’s best in
the autumn when the deer are barking; then it gets dusky, and I go back
through the streets, and you can’t see people properly; they come past
very quick, you just see their faces and then they’re gone—that’s what
I like—and no one knows in the least what you’re doing—”

“But you have to be back for tea, I suppose?” Hewet checked her.

“Tea? Oh yes. Five o’clock. Then I say what I’ve done, and my aunts say
what they’ve done, and perhaps some one comes in: Mrs. Hunt, let’s
suppose. She’s an old lady with a lame leg. She has or she once had
eight children; so we ask after them. They’re all over the world; so we
ask where they are, and sometimes they’re ill, or they’re stationed in
a cholera district, or in some place where it only rains once in five
months. Mrs. Hunt,” she said with a smile, “had a son who was hugged to
death by a bear.”

Here she stopped and looked at Hewet to see whether he was amused by
the same things that amused her. She was reassured. But she thought it
necessary to apologise again; she had been talking too much.

“You can’t conceive how it interests me,” he said. Indeed, his
cigarette had gone out, and he had to light another.

“Why does it interest you?” she asked.

“Partly because you’re a woman,” he replied. When he said this, Rachel,
who had become oblivious of anything, and had reverted to a childlike
state of interest and pleasure, lost her freedom and became
self-conscious. She felt herself at once singular and under
observation, as she felt with St. John Hirst. She was about to launch
into an argument which would have made them both feel bitterly against
each other, and to define sensations which had no such importance as
words were bound to give them when Hewet led her thoughts in a
different direction.

“I’ve often walked along the streets where people live all in a row,
and one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on earth
the women were doing inside,” he said. “Just consider: it’s the
beginning of the twentieth century, and until a few years ago no woman
had ever come out by herself and said things at all. There it was going
on in the background, for all those thousands of years, this curious
silent unrepresented life. Of course we’re always writing about
women—abusing them, or jeering at them, or worshipping them; but it’s
never come from women themselves. I believe we still don’t know in the
least how they live, or what they feel, or what they do precisely. If
one’s a man, the only confidences one gets are from young women about
their love affairs. But the lives of women of forty, of unmarried
women, of working women, of women who keep shops and bring up children,
of women like your aunts or Mrs. Thornbury or Miss Allan—one knows
nothing whatever about them. They won’t tell you. Either they’re
afraid, or they’ve got a way of treating men. It’s the man’s view
that’s represented, you see. Think of a railway train: fifteen
carriages for men who want to smoke. Doesn’t it make your blood boil?
If I were a woman I’d blow some one’s brains out. Don’t you laugh at us
a great deal? Don’t you think it all a great humbug? You, I mean—how
does it all strike you?”

His determination to know, while it gave meaning to their talk,
hampered her; he seemed to press further and further, and made it
appear so important. She took some time to answer, and during that time
she went over and over the course of her twenty-four years, lighting
now on one point, now on another—on her aunts, her mother, her father,
and at last her mind fixed upon her aunts and her father, and she tried
to describe them as at this distance they appeared to her.

They were very much afraid of her father. He was a great dim force in
the house, by means of which they held on to the great world which is
represented every morning in the _Times_. But the real life of the
house was something quite different from this. It went on independently
of Mr. Vinrace, and tended to hide itself from him. He was
good-humoured towards them, but contemptuous. She had always taken it
for granted that his point of view was just, and founded upon an ideal
scale of things where the life of one person was absolutely more
important than the life of another, and that in that scale they were of
much less importance than he was. But did she really believe that?
Hewet’s words made her think. She always submitted to her father, just
as they did, but it was her aunts who influenced her really; her aunts
who built up the fine, closely woven substance of their life at home.
They were less splendid but more natural than her father was. All her
rages had been against them; it was their world with its four meals,
its punctuality, and servants on the stairs at half-past ten, that she
examined so closely and wanted so vehemently to smash to atoms.
Following these thoughts she looked up and said:

“And there’s a sort of beauty in it—there they are at Richmond at this
very moment building things up. They’re all wrong, perhaps, but there’s
a sort of beauty in it,” she repeated. “It’s so unconscious, so modest.
And yet they feel things. They do mind if people die. Old spinsters are
always doing things. I don’t quite know what they do. Only that was
what I felt when I lived with them. It was very real.”

She reviewed their little journeys to and fro, to Walworth, to
charwomen with bad legs, to meetings for this and that, their minute
acts of charity and unselfishness which flowered punctually from a
definite view of what they ought to do, their friendships, their tastes
and habits; she saw all these things like grains of sand falling,
falling through innumerable days, making an atmosphere and building up
a solid mass, a background. Hewet observed her as she considered this.

“Were you happy?” he demanded.

Again she had become absorbed in something else, and he called her back
to an unusually vivid consciousness of herself.

“I was both,” she replied. “I was happy and I was miserable. You’ve no
conception what it’s like—to be a young woman.” She looked straight at
him. “There are terrors and agonies,” she said, keeping her eye on him
as if to detect the slightest hint of laughter.

“I can believe it,” he said. He returned her look with perfect
sincerity.

“Women one sees in the streets,” she said.

“Prostitutes?”

“Men kissing one.”

He nodded his head.

“You were never told?”

She shook her head.

“And then,” she began and stopped. Here came in the great space of life
into which no one had ever penetrated. All that she had been saying
about her father and her aunts and walks in Richmond Park, and what
they did from hour to hour, was merely on the surface. Hewet was
watching her. Did he demand that she should describe that also? Why did
he sit so near and keep his eye on her? Why did they not have done with
this searching and agony? Why did they not kiss each other simply? She
wished to kiss him. But all the time she went on spinning out words.

“A girl is more lonely than a boy. No one cares in the least what she
does. Nothing’s expected of her. Unless one’s very pretty people don’t
listen to what you say. . . . And that is what I like,” she added
energetically, as if the memory were very happy. “I like walking in
Richmond Park and singing to myself and knowing it doesn’t matter a
damn to anybody. I like seeing things go on—as we saw you that night
when you didn’t see us—I love the freedom of it—it’s like being the
wind or the sea.” She turned with a curious fling of her hands and
looked at the sea. It was still very blue, dancing away as far as the
eye could reach, but the light on it was yellower, and the clouds were
turning flamingo red.

A feeling of intense depression crossed Hewet’s mind as she spoke. It
seemed plain that she would never care for one person rather than
another; she was evidently quite indifferent to him; they seemed to
come very near, and then they were as far apart as ever again; and her
gesture as she turned away had been oddly beautiful.

“Nonsense,” he said abruptly. “You like people. You like admiration.
Your real grudge against Hirst is that he doesn’t admire you.”

She made no answer for some time. Then she said:

“That’s probably true. Of course I like people—I like almost every one
I’ve ever met.”

She turned her back on the sea and regarded Hewet with friendly if
critical eyes. He was good-looking in the sense that he had always had
a sufficiency of beef to eat and fresh air to breathe. His head was
big; the eyes were also large; though generally vague they could be
forcible; and the lips were sensitive. One might account him a man of
considerable passion and fitful energy, likely to be at the mercy of
moods which had little relation to facts; at once tolerant and
fastidious. The breadth of his forehead showed capacity for thought.
The interest with which Rachel looked at him was heard in her voice.

“What novels do you write?” she asked.

“I want to write a novel about Silence,” he said; “the things people
don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.” He sighed. “However, you
don’t care,” he continued. He looked at her almost severely. “Nobody
cares. All you read a novel for is to see what sort of person the
writer is, and, if you know him, which of his friends he’s put in. As
for the novel itself, the whole conception, the way one’s seen the
thing, felt about it, make it stand in relation to other things, not
one in a million cares for that. And yet I sometimes wonder whether
there’s anything else in the whole world worth doing. These other
people,” he indicated the hotel, “are always wanting something they
can’t get. But there’s an extraordinary satisfaction in writing, even
in the attempt to write. What you said just now is true: one doesn’t
want to be things; one wants merely to be allowed to see them.”

Some of the satisfaction of which he spoke came into his face as he
gazed out to sea.

It was Rachel’s turn now to feel depressed. As he talked of writing he
had become suddenly impersonal. He might never care for any one; all
that desire to know her and get at her, which she had felt pressing on
her almost painfully, had completely vanished.

“Are you a good writer?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m not first-rate, of course; I’m good second-rate;
about as good as Thackeray, I should say.”

Rachel was amazed. For one thing it amazed her to hear Thackeray called
second-rate; and then she could not widen her point of view to believe
that there could be great writers in existence at the present day, or
if there were, that any one she knew could be a great writer, and his
self-confidence astounded her, and he became more and more remote.

“My other novel,” Hewet continued, “is about a young man who is
obsessed by an idea—the idea of being a gentleman. He manages to exist
at Cambridge on a hundred pounds a year. He has a coat; it was once a
very good coat. But the trousers—they’re not so good. Well, he goes up
to London, gets into good society, owing to an early-morning adventure
on the banks of the Serpentine. He is led into telling lies—my idea,
you see, is to show the gradual corruption of the soul—calls himself
the son of some great landed proprietor in Devonshire. Meanwhile the
coat becomes older and older, and he hardly dares to wear the trousers.
Can’t you imagine the wretched man, after some splendid evening of
debauchery, contemplating these garments—hanging them over the end of
the bed, arranging them now in full light, now in shade, and wondering
whether they will survive him, or he will survive them? Thoughts of
suicide cross his mind. He has a friend, too, a man who somehow
subsists upon selling small birds, for which he sets traps in the
fields near Uxbridge. They’re scholars, both of them. I know one or two
wretched starving creatures like that who quote Aristotle at you over a
fried herring and a pint of porter. Fashionable life, too, I have to
represent at some length, in order to show my hero under all
circumstances. Lady Theo Bingham Bingley, whose bay mare he had the
good fortune to stop, is the daughter of a very fine old Tory peer. I’m
going to describe the kind of parties I once went to—the fashionable
intellectuals, you know, who like to have the latest book on their
tables. They give parties, river parties, parties where you play games.
There’s no difficulty in conceiving incidents; the difficulty is to put
them into shape—not to get run away with, as Lady Theo was. It ended
disastrously for her, poor woman, for the book, as I planned it, was
going to end in profound and sordid respectability. Disowned by her
father, she marries my hero, and they live in a snug little villa
outside Croydon, in which town he is set up as a house agent. He never
succeeds in becoming a real gentleman after all. That’s the interesting
part of it. Does it seem to you the kind of book you’d like to read?”
he enquired; “or perhaps you’d like my Stuart tragedy better,” he
continued, without waiting for her to answer him. “My idea is that
there’s a certain quality of beauty in the past, which the ordinary
historical novelist completely ruins by his absurd conventions. The
moon becomes the Regent of the Skies. People clap spurs to their
horses, and so on. I’m going to treat people as though they were
exactly the same as we are. The advantage is that, detached from modern
conditions, one can make them more intense and more abstract than
people who live as we do.”

Rachel had listened to all this with attention, but with a certain
amount of bewilderment. They both sat thinking their own thoughts.

“I’m not like Hirst,” said Hewet, after a pause; he spoke meditatively;
“I don’t see circles of chalk between people’s feet. I sometimes wish I
did. It seems to me so tremendously complicated and confused. One can’t
come to any decision at all; one’s less and less capable of making
judgments. D’you find that? And then one never knows what any one
feels. We’re all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine
anything more ludicrous than one person’s opinion of another person?
One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn’t know.”

As he said this he was leaning on his elbow arranging and rearranging
in the grass the stones which had represented Rachel and her aunts at
luncheon. He was speaking as much to himself as to Rachel. He was
reasoning against the desire, which had returned with intensity, to
take her in his arms; to have done with indirectness; to explain
exactly what he felt. What he said was against his belief; all the
things that were important about her he knew; he felt them in the air
around them; but he said nothing; he went on arranging the stones.

“I like you; d’you like me?” Rachel suddenly observed.

“I like you immensely,” Hewet replied, speaking with the relief of a
person who is unexpectedly given an opportunity of saying what he wants
to say. He stopped moving the pebbles.

“Mightn’t we call each other Rachel and Terence?” he asked.

“Terence,” Rachel repeated. “Terence—that’s like the cry of an owl.”

She looked up with a sudden rush of delight, and in looking at Terence
with eyes widened by pleasure she was struck by the change that had
come over the sky behind them. The substantial blue day had faded to a
paler and more ethereal blue; the clouds were pink, far away and
closely packed together; and the peace of evening had replaced the heat
of the southern afternoon, in which they had started on their walk.

“It must be late!” she exclaimed.

It was nearly eight o’clock.

“But eight o’clock doesn’t count here, does it?” Terence asked, as they
got up and turned inland again. They began to walk rather quickly down
the hill on a little path between the olive trees.

They felt more intimate because they shared the knowledge of what eight
o’clock in Richmond meant. Terence walked in front, for there was not
room for them side by side.

“What I want to do in writing novels is very much what you want to do
when you play the piano, I expect,” he began, turning and speaking over
his shoulder. “We want to find out what’s behind things, don’t we?—Look
at the lights down there,” he continued, “scattered about anyhow.
Things I feel come to me like lights. . . . I want to combine them. . .
. Have you ever seen fireworks that make figures? . . . I want to make
figures. . . . Is that what you want to do?”

Now they were out on the road and could walk side by side.

“When I play the piano? Music is different. . . . But I see what you
mean.” They tried to invent theories and to make their theories agree.
As Hewet had no knowledge of music, Rachel took his stick and drew
figures in the thin white dust to explain how Bach wrote his fugues.

“My musical gift was ruined,” he explained, as they walked on after one
of these demonstrations, “by the village organist at home, who had
invented a system of notation which he tried to teach me, with the
result that I never got to the tune-playing at all. My mother thought
music wasn’t manly for boys; she wanted me to kill rats and
birds—that’s the worst of living in the country. We live in Devonshire.
It’s the loveliest place in the world. Only—it’s always difficult at
home when one’s grown up. I’d like you to know one of my sisters. . . .
Oh, here’s your gate—” He pushed it open. They paused for a moment. She
could not ask him to come in. She could not say that she hoped they
would meet again; there was nothing to be said, and so without a word
she went through the gate, and was soon invisible. Directly Hewet lost
sight of her, he felt the old discomfort return, even more strongly
than before. Their talk had been interrupted in the middle, just as he
was beginning to say the things he wanted to say. After all, what had
they been able to say? He ran his mind over the things they had said,
the random, unnecessary things which had eddied round and round and
used up all the time, and drawn them so close together and flung them
so far apart, and left him in the end unsatisfied, ignorant still of
what she felt and of what she was like. What was the use of talking,
talking, merely talking?




CHAPTER XVII


It was now the height of the season, and every ship that came from
England left a few people on the shores of Santa Marina who drove up to
the hotel. The fact that the Ambroses had a house where one could
escape momentarily from the slightly inhuman atmosphere of an hotel was
a source of genuine pleasure not only to Hirst and Hewet, but to the
Elliots, the Thornburys, the Flushings, Miss Allan, Evelyn M., together
with other people whose identity was so little developed that the
Ambroses did not discover that they possessed names. By degrees there
was established a kind of correspondence between the two houses, the
big and the small, so that at most hours of the day one house could
guess what was going on in the other, and the words “the villa” and
“the hotel” called up the idea of two separate systems of life.
Acquaintances showed signs of developing into friends, for that one tie
to Mrs. Parry’s drawing-room had inevitably split into many other ties
attached to different parts of England, and sometimes these alliances
seemed cynically fragile, and sometimes painfully acute, lacking as
they did the supporting background of organised English life. One night
when the moon was round between the trees, Evelyn M. told Helen the
story of her life, and claimed her everlasting friendship; on another
occasion, merely because of a sigh, or a pause, or a word thoughtlessly
dropped, poor Mrs. Elliot left the villa half in tears, vowing never
again to meet the cold and scornful woman who had insulted her, and in
truth, meet again they never did. It did not seem worth while to piece
together so slight a friendship.

Hewet, indeed, might have found excellent material at this time up at
the villa for some chapters in the novel which was to be called
“Silence, or the Things People don’t say.” Helen and Rachel had become
very silent. Having detected, as she thought, a secret, and judging
that Rachel meant to keep it from her, Mrs. Ambrose respected it
carefully, but from that cause, though unintentionally, a curious
atmosphere of reserve grew up between them. Instead of sharing their
views upon all subjects, and plunging after an idea wherever it might
lead, they spoke chiefly in comment upon the people they saw, and the
secret between them made itself felt in what they said even of
Thornburys and Elliots. Always calm and unemotional in her judgments,
Mrs. Ambrose was now inclined to be definitely pessimistic. She was not
severe upon individuals so much as incredulous of the kindness of
destiny, fate, what happens in the long run, and apt to insist that
this was generally adverse to people in proportion as they deserved
well. Even this theory she was ready to discard in favour of one which
made chaos triumphant, things happening for no reason at all, and every
one groping about in illusion and ignorance. With a certain pleasure
she developed these views to her niece, taking a letter from home as
her test: which gave good news, but might just as well have given bad.
How did she know that at this very moment both her children were not
lying dead, crushed by motor omnibuses? “It’s happening to somebody:
why shouldn’t it happen to me?” she would argue, her face taking on the
stoical expression of anticipated sorrow. However sincere these views
may have been, they were undoubtedly called forth by the irrational
state of her niece’s mind. It was so fluctuating, and went so quickly
from joy to despair, that it seemed necessary to confront it with some
stable opinion which naturally became dark as well as stable. Perhaps
Mrs. Ambrose had some idea that in leading the talk into these quarters
she might discover what was in Rachel’s mind, but it was difficult to
judge, for sometimes she would agree with the gloomiest thing that was
said, at other times she refused to listen, and rammed Helen’s theories
down her throat with laughter, chatter, ridicule of the wildest, and
fierce bursts of anger even at what she called the “croaking of a raven
in the mud.”

“It’s hard enough without that,” she asserted.

“What’s hard?” Helen demanded.

“Life,” she replied, and then they both became silent.

Helen might draw her own conclusions as to why life was hard, as to why
an hour later, perhaps, life was something so wonderful and vivid that
the eyes of Rachel beholding it were positively exhilarating to a
spectator. True to her creed, she did not attempt to interfere,
although there were enough of those weak moments of depression to make
it perfectly easy for a less scrupulous person to press through and
know all, and perhaps Rachel was sorry that she did not choose. All
these moods ran themselves into one general effect, which Helen
compared to the sliding of a river, quick, quicker, quicker still, as
it races to a waterfall. Her instinct was to cry out Stop! but even had
there been any use in crying Stop! she would have refrained, thinking
it best that things should take their way, the water racing because the
earth was shaped to make it race.

It seemed that Rachel herself had no suspicion that she was watched, or
that there was anything in her manner likely to draw attention to her.
What had happened to her she did not know. Her mind was very much in
the condition of the racing water to which Helen compared it. She
wanted to see Terence; she was perpetually wishing to see him when he
was not there; it was an agony to miss seeing him; agonies were strewn
all about her day on account of him, but she never asked herself what
this force driving through her life arose from. She thought of no
result any more than a tree perpetually pressed downwards by the wind
considers the result of being pressed downwards by the wind.

During the two or three weeks which had passed since their walk, half a
dozen notes from him had accumulated in her drawer. She would read
them, and spend the whole morning in a daze of happiness; the sunny
land outside the window being no less capable of analysing its own
colour and heat than she was of analysing hers. In these moods she
found it impossible to read or play the piano, even to move being
beyond her inclination. The time passed without her noticing it. When
it was dark she was drawn to the window by the lights of the hotel. A
light that went in and out was the light in Terence’s window: there he
sat, reading perhaps, or now he was walking up and down pulling out one
book after another; and now he was seated in his chair again, and she
tried to imagine what he was thinking about. The steady lights marked
the rooms where Terence sat with people moving round him. Every one who
stayed in the hotel had a peculiar romance and interest about them.
They were not ordinary people. She would attribute wisdom to Mrs.
Elliot, beauty to Susan Warrington, a splendid vitality to Evelyn M.,
because Terence spoke to them. As unreflecting and pervasive were the
moods of depression. Her mind was as the landscape outside when dark
beneath clouds and straitly lashed by wind and hail. Again she would
sit passive in her chair exposed to pain, and Helen’s fantastical or
gloomy words were like so many darts goading her to cry out against the
hardness of life. Best of all were the moods when for no reason again
this stress of feeling slackened, and life went on as usual, only with
a joy and colour in its events that was unknown before; they had a
significance like that which she had seen in the tree: the nights were
black bars separating her from the days; she would have liked to run
all the days into one long continuity of sensation. Although these
moods were directly or indirectly caused by the presence of Terence or
the thought of him, she never said to herself that she was in love with
him, or considered what was to happen if she continued to feel such
things, so that Helen’s image of the river sliding on to the waterfall
had a great likeness to the facts, and the alarm which Helen sometimes
felt was justified.

In her curious condition of unanalysed sensations she was incapable of
making a plan which should have any effect upon her state of mind. She
abandoned herself to the mercy of accidents, missing Terence one day,
meeting him the next, receiving his letters always with a start of
surprise. Any woman experienced in the progress of courtship would have
come by certain opinions from all this which would have given her at
least a theory to go upon; but no one had ever been in love with
Rachel, and she had never been in love with any one. Moreover, none of
the books she read, from _Wuthering Heights_ to _Man and Superman_, and
the plays of Ibsen, suggested from their analysis of love that what
their heroines felt was what she was feeling now. It seemed to her that
her sensations had no name.

She met Terence frequently. When they did not meet, he was apt to send
a note with a book or about a book, for he had not been able after all
to neglect that approach to intimacy. But sometimes he did not come or
did not write for several days at a time. Again when they met their
meeting might be one of inspiriting joy or of harassing despair. Over
all their partings hung the sense of interruption, leaving them both
unsatisfied, though ignorant that the other shared the feeling.

If Rachel was ignorant of her own feelings, she was even more
completely ignorant of his. At first he moved as a god; as she came to
know him better he was still the centre of light, but combined with
this beauty a wonderful power of making her daring and confident of
herself. She was conscious of emotions and powers which she had never
suspected in herself, and of a depth in the world hitherto unknown.
When she thought of their relationship she saw rather than reasoned,
representing her view of what Terence felt by a picture of him drawn
across the room to stand by her side. This passage across the room
amounted to a physical sensation, but what it meant she did not know.

Thus the time went on, wearing a calm, bright look upon its surface.
Letters came from England, letters came from Willoughby, and the days
accumulated their small events which shaped the year. Superficially,
three odes of Pindar were mended, Helen covered about five inches of
her embroidery, and St. John completed the first two acts of a play. He
and Rachel being now very good friends, he read them aloud to her, and
she was so genuinely impressed by the skill of his rhythms and the
variety of his adjectives, as well as by the fact that he was Terence’s
friend, that he began to wonder whether he was not intended for
literature rather than for law. It was a time of profound thought and
sudden revelations for more than one couple, and several single people.

A Sunday came, which no one in the villa with the exception of Rachel
and the Spanish maid proposed to recognise. Rachel still went to
church, because she had never, according to Helen, taken the trouble to
think about it. Since they had celebrated the service at the hotel she
went there expecting to get some pleasure from her passage across the
garden and through the hall of the hotel, although it was very doubtful
whether she would see Terence, or at any rate have the chance of
speaking to him.

As the greater number of visitors at the hotel were English, there was
almost as much difference between Sunday and Wednesday as there is in
England, and Sunday appeared here as there, the mute black ghost or
penitent spirit of the busy weekday. The English could not pale the
sunshine, but they could in some miraculous way slow down the hours,
dull the incidents, lengthen the meals, and make even the servants and
page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety. The best clothes which
every one put on helped the general effect; it seemed that no lady
could sit down without bending a clean starched petticoat, and no
gentleman could breathe without a sudden crackle from a stiff
shirt-front. As the hands of the clock neared eleven, on this
particular Sunday, various people tended to draw together in the hall,
clasping little red-leaved books in their hands. The clock marked a few
minutes to the hour when a stout black figure passed through the hall
with a preoccupied expression, as though he would rather not recognise
salutations, although aware of them, and disappeared down the corridor
which led from it.

“Mr. Bax,” Mrs. Thornbury whispered.

The little group of people then began to move off in the same direction
as the stout black figure. Looked at in an odd way by people who made
no effort to join them, they moved with one exception slowly and
consciously towards the stairs. Mrs. Flushing was the exception. She
came running downstairs, strode across the hall, joined the procession
much out of breath, demanding of Mrs. Thornbury in an agitated whisper,
“Where, where?”

“We are all going,” said Mrs. Thornbury gently, and soon they were
descending the stairs two by two. Rachel was among the first to
descend. She did not see that Terence and Hirst came in at the rear
possessed of no black volume, but of one thin book bound in light-blue
cloth, which St. John carried under his arm.

The chapel was the old chapel of the monks. It was a profound cool
place where they had said Mass for hundreds of years, and done penance
in the cold moonlight, and worshipped old brown pictures and carved
saints which stood with upraised hands of blessing in the hollows in
the walls. The transition from Catholic to Protestant worship had been
bridged by a time of disuse, when there were no services, and the place
was used for storing jars of oil, liqueur, and deck-chairs; the hotel
flourishing, some religious body had taken the place in hand, and it
was now fitted out with a number of glazed yellow benches,
claret-coloured footstools; it had a small pulpit, and a brass eagle
carrying the Bible on its back, while the piety of different women had
supplied ugly squares of carpet, and long strips of embroidery heavily
wrought with monograms in gold.

As the congregation entered they were met by mild sweet chords issuing
from a harmonium, where Miss Willett, concealed from view by a baize
curtain, struck emphatic chords with uncertain fingers. The sound
spread through the chapel as the rings of water spread from a fallen
stone. The twenty or twenty-five people who composed the congregation
first bowed their heads and then sat up and looked about them. It was
very quiet, and the light down here seemed paler than the light above.
The usual bows and smiles were dispensed with, but they recognised each
other. The Lord’s Prayer was read over them. As the childlike battle of
voices rose, the congregation, many of whom had only met on the
staircase, felt themselves pathetically united and well-disposed
towards each other. As if the prayer were a torch applied to fuel, a
smoke seemed to rise automatically and fill the place with the ghosts
of innumerable services on innumerable Sunday mornings at home. Susan
Warrington in particular was conscious of the sweetest sense of
sisterhood, as she covered her face with her hands and saw slips of
bent backs through the chinks between her fingers. Her emotions rose
calmly and evenly, approving of herself and of life at the same time.
It was all so quiet and so good. But having created this peaceful
atmosphere Mr. Bax suddenly turned the page and read a psalm. Though he
read it with no change of voice the mood was broken.

“Be merciful unto me, O God,” he read, “for man goeth about to devour
me: he is daily fighting and troubling me. . . . They daily mistake my
words: all that they imagine is to do me evil. They hold all together
and keep themselves close. . . . Break their teeth, O God, in their
mouths; smite the jaw-bones of the lions, O Lord: let them fall away
like water that runneth apace; and when they shoot their arrows let
them be rooted out.”

Nothing in Susan’s experience at all corresponded with this, and as she
had no love of language she had long ceased to attend to such remarks,
although she followed them with the same kind of mechanical respect
with which she heard many of Lear’s speeches read aloud. Her mind was
still serene and really occupied with praise of her own nature and
praise of God, that is of the solemn and satisfactory order of the
world.

But it could be seen from a glance at their faces that most of the
others, the men in particular, felt the inconvenience of the sudden
intrusion of this old savage. They looked more secular and critical as
they listened to the ravings of the old black man with a cloth round
his loins cursing with vehement gesture by a camp-fire in the desert.
After that there was a general sound of pages being turned as if they
were in class, and then they read a little bit of the Old Testament
about making a well, very much as school boys translate an easy passage
from the _Anabasis_ when they have shut up their French grammar. Then
they returned to the New Testament and the sad and beautiful figure of
Christ. While Christ spoke they made another effort to fit his
interpretation of life upon the lives they lived, but as they were all
very different, some practical, some ambitious, some stupid, some wild
and experimental, some in love, and others long past any feeling except
a feeling of comfort, they did very different things with the words of
Christ.

From their faces it seemed that for the most part they made no effort
at all, and, recumbent as it were, accepted the ideas the words gave as
representing goodness, in the same way, no doubt, as one of those
industrious needlewomen had accepted the bright ugly pattern on her mat
as beauty.

Whatever the reason might be, for the first time in her life, instead
of slipping at once into some curious pleasant cloud of emotion, too
familiar to be considered, Rachel listened critically to what was being
said. By the time they had swung in an irregular way from prayer to
psalm, from psalm to history, from history to poetry, and Mr. Bax was
giving out his text, she was in a state of acute discomfort. Such was
the discomfort she felt when forced to sit through an unsatisfactory
piece of music badly played. Tantalised, enraged by the clumsy
insensitiveness of the conductor, who put the stress on the wrong
places, and annoyed by the vast flock of the audience tamely praising
and acquiescing without knowing or caring, so she was now tantalised
and enraged, only here, with eyes half-shut and lips pursed together,
the atmosphere of forced solemnity increased her anger. All round her
were people pretending to feel what they did not feel, while somewhere
above her floated the idea which they could none of them grasp, which
they pretended to grasp, always escaping out of reach, a beautiful
idea, an idea like a butterfly. One after another, vast and hard and
cold, appeared to her the churches all over the world where this
blundering effort and misunderstanding were perpetually going on, great
buildings, filled with innumerable men and women, not seeing clearly,
who finally gave up the effort to see, and relapsed tamely into praise
and acquiescence, half-shutting their eyes and pursing up their lips.
The thought had the same sort of physical discomfort as is caused by a
film of mist always coming between the eyes and the printed page. She
did her best to brush away the film and to conceive something to be
worshipped as the service went on, but failed, always misled by the
voice of Mr. Bax saying things which misrepresented the idea, and by
the patter of baaing inexpressive human voices falling round her like
damp leaves. The effort was tiring and dispiriting. She ceased to
listen, and fixed her eyes on the face of a woman near her, a hospital
nurse, whose expression of devout attention seemed to prove that she
was at any rate receiving satisfaction. But looking at her carefully
she came to the conclusion that the hospital nurse was only slavishly
acquiescent, and that the look of satisfaction was produced by no
splendid conception of God within her. How, indeed, could she conceive
anything far outside her own experience, a woman with a commonplace
face like hers, a little round red face, upon which trivial duties and
trivial spites had drawn lines, whose weak blue eyes saw without
intensity or individuality, whose features were blurred, insensitive,
and callous? She was adoring something shallow and smug, clinging to
it, so the obstinate mouth witnessed, with the assiduity of a limpet;
nothing would tear her from her demure belief in her own virtue and the
virtues of her religion. She was a limpet, with the sensitive side of
her stuck to a rock, for ever dead to the rush of fresh and beautiful
things past her. The face of this single worshipper became printed on
Rachel’s mind with an impression of keen horror, and she had it
suddenly revealed to her what Helen meant and St. John meant when they
proclaimed their hatred of Christianity. With the violence that now
marked her feelings, she rejected all that she had implicitly believed.

Meanwhile Mr. Bax was half-way through the second lesson. She looked at
him. He was a man of the world with supple lips and an agreeable
manner, he was indeed a man of much kindliness and simplicity, though
by no means clever, but she was not in the mood to give any one credit
for such qualities, and examined him as though he were an epitome of
all the vices of his service.

Right at the back of the chapel Mrs. Flushing, Hirst, and Hewet sat in
a row in a very different frame of mind. Hewet was staring at the roof
with his legs stuck out in front of him, for as he had never tried to
make the service fit any feeling or idea of his, he was able to enjoy
the beauty of the language without hindrance. His mind was occupied
first with accidental things, such as the women’s hair in front of him,
the light on the faces, then with the words which seemed to him
magnificent, and then more vaguely with the characters of the other
worshippers. But when he suddenly perceived Rachel, all these thoughts
were driven out of his head, and he thought only of her. The psalms,
the prayers, the Litany, and the sermon were all reduced to one
chanting sound which paused, and then renewed itself, a little higher
or a little lower. He stared alternately at Rachel and at the ceiling,
but his expression was now produced not by what he saw but by something
in his mind. He was almost as painfully disturbed by his thoughts as
she was by hers.

Early in the service Mrs. Flushing had discovered that she had taken up
a Bible instead of a prayer-book, and, as she was sitting next to
Hirst, she stole a glance over his shoulder. He was reading steadily in
the thin pale-blue volume. Unable to understand, she peered closer,
upon which Hirst politely laid the book before her, pointing to the
first line of a Greek poem and then to the translation opposite.

“What’s that?” she whispered inquisitively.

“Sappho,” he replied. “The one Swinburne did—the best thing that’s ever
been written.”

Mrs. Flushing could not resist such an opportunity. She gulped down the
Ode to Aphrodite during the Litany, keeping herself with difficulty
from asking when Sappho lived, and what else she wrote worth reading,
and contriving to come in punctually at the end with “the forgiveness
of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and the life everlastin’. Amen.”

Meanwhile Hirst took out an envelope and began scribbling on the back
of it. When Mr. Bax mounted the pulpit he shut up Sappho with his
envelope between the pages, settled his spectacles, and fixed his gaze
intently upon the clergyman. Standing in the pulpit he looked very
large and fat; the light coming through the greenish unstained
window-glass made his face appear smooth and white like a very large
egg.

He looked round at all the faces looking mildly up at him, although
some of them were the faces of men and women old enough to be his
grandparents, and gave out his text with weighty significance. The
argument of the sermon was that visitors to this beautiful land,
although they were on a holiday, owed a duty to the natives. It did
not, in truth, differ very much from a leading article upon topics of
general interest in the weekly newspapers. It rambled with a kind of
amiable verbosity from one heading to another, suggesting that all
human beings are very much the same under their skins, illustrating
this by the resemblance of the games which little Spanish boys play to
the games little boys in London streets play, observing that very small
things do influence people, particularly natives; in fact, a very dear
friend of Mr. Bax’s had told him that the success of our rule in India,
that vast country, largely depended upon the strict code of politeness
which the English adopted towards the natives, which led to the remark
that small things were not necessarily small, and that somehow to the
virtue of sympathy, which was a virtue never more needed than to-day,
when we lived in a time of experiment and upheaval—witness the
aeroplane and wireless telegraph, and there were other problems which
hardly presented themselves to our fathers, but which no man who called
himself a man could leave unsettled. Here Mr. Bax became more
definitely clerical, if it were possible, he seemed to speak with a
certain innocent craftiness, as he pointed out that all this laid a
special duty upon earnest Christians. What men were inclined to say now
was, “Oh, that fellow—he’s a parson.” What we want them to say is,
“He’s a good fellow”—in other words, “He is my brother.” He exhorted
them to keep in touch with men of the modern type; they must sympathise
with their multifarious interests in order to keep before their eyes
that whatever discoveries were made there was one discovery which could
not be superseded, which was indeed as much of a necessity to the most
successful and most brilliant of them all as it had been to their
fathers. The humblest could help; the least important things had an
influence (here his manner became definitely priestly and his remarks
seemed to be directed to women, for indeed Mr. Bax’s congregations were
mainly composed of women, and he was used to assigning them their
duties in his innocent clerical campaigns). Leaving more definite
instruction, he passed on, and his theme broadened into a peroration
for which he drew a long breath and stood very upright,—“As a drop of
water, detached, alone, separate from others, falling from the cloud
and entering the great ocean, alters, so scientists tell us, not only
the immediate spot in the ocean where it falls, but all the myriad
drops which together compose the great universe of waters, and by this
means alters the configuration of the globe and the lives of millions
of sea creatures, and finally the lives of the men and women who seek
their living upon the shores—as all this is within the compass of a
single drop of water, such as any rain shower sends in millions to lose
themselves in the earth, to lose themselves we say, but we know very
well that the fruits of the earth could not flourish without them—so is
a marvel comparable to this within the reach of each one of us, who
dropping a little word or a little deed into the great universe alters
it; yea, it is a solemn thought, _alters_ it, for good or for evil, not
for one instant, or in one vicinity, but throughout the entire race,
and for all eternity.” Whipping round as though to avoid applause, he
continued with the same breath, but in a different tone of voice,—“And
now to God the Father . . .”

He gave his blessing, and then, while the solemn chords again issued
from the harmonium behind the curtain, the different people began
scraping and fumbling and moving very awkwardly and consciously towards
the door. Half-way upstairs, at a point where the light and sounds of
the upper world conflicted with the dimness and the dying hymn-tune of
the under, Rachel felt a hand drop upon her shoulder.

“Miss Vinrace,” Mrs. Flushing whispered peremptorily, “stay to
luncheon. It’s such a dismal day. They don’t even give one beef for
luncheon. Please stay.”

Here they came out into the hall, where once more the little band was
greeted with curious respectful glances by the people who had not gone
to church, although their clothing made it clear that they approved of
Sunday to the very verge of going to church. Rachel felt unable to
stand any more of this particular atmosphere, and was about to say she
must go back, when Terence passed them, drawn along in talk with Evelyn
M. Rachel thereupon contented herself with saying that the people
looked very respectable, which negative remark Mrs. Flushing
interpreted to mean that she would stay.

“English people abroad!” she returned with a vivid flash of malice.
“Ain’t they awful! But we won’t stay here,” she continued, plucking at
Rachel’s arm. “Come up to my room.”

She bore her past Hewet and Evelyn and the Thornburys and the Elliots.
Hewet stepped forward.

“Luncheon—” he began.

“Miss Vinrace has promised to lunch with me,” said Mrs. Flushing, and
began to pound energetically up the staircase, as though the middle
classes of England were in pursuit. She did not stop until she had
slammed her bedroom door behind them.

“Well, what did you think of it?” she demanded, panting slightly.

All the disgust and horror which Rachel had been accumulating burst
forth beyond her control.

“I thought it the most loathsome exhibition I’d ever seen!” she broke
out. “How can they—how dare they—what do you mean by it—Mr. Bax,
hospital nurses, old men, prostitutes, disgusting—”

She hit off the points she remembered as fast as she could, but she was
too indignant to stop to analyse her feelings. Mrs. Flushing watched
her with keen gusto as she stood ejaculating with emphatic movements of
her head and hands in the middle of the room.

“Go on, go on, do go on,” she laughed, clapping her hands. “It’s
delightful to hear you!”

“But why do you go?” Rachel demanded.

“I’ve been every Sunday of my life ever since I can remember,” Mrs.
Flushing chuckled, as though that were a reason by itself.

Rachel turned abruptly to the window. She did not know what it was that
had put her into such a passion; the sight of Terence in the hall had
confused her thoughts, leaving her merely indignant. She looked
straight at their own villa, half-way up the side of the mountain. The
most familiar view seen framed through glass has a certain unfamiliar
distinction, and she grew calm as she gazed. Then she remembered that
she was in the presence of some one she did not know well, and she
turned and looked at Mrs. Flushing. Mrs. Flushing was still sitting on
the edge of the bed, looking up, with her lips parted, so that her
strong white teeth showed in two rows.

“Tell me,” she said, “which d’you like best, Mr. Hewet or Mr. Hirst?”

“Mr. Hewet,” Rachel replied, but her voice did not sound natural.

“Which is the one who reads Greek in church?” Mrs. Flushing demanded.

It might have been either of them and while Mrs. Flushing proceeded to
describe them both, and to say that both frightened her, but one
frightened her more than the other, Rachel looked for a chair. The
room, of course, was one of the largest and most luxurious in the
hotel. There were a great many arm-chairs and settees covered in brown
holland, but each of these was occupied by a large square piece of
yellow cardboard, and all the pieces of cardboard were dotted or lined
with spots or dashes of bright oil paint.

“But you’re not to look at those,” said Mrs. Flushing as she saw
Rachel’s eye wander. She jumped up, and turned as many as she could,
face downwards, upon the floor. Rachel, however, managed to possess
herself of one of them, and, with the vanity of an artist, Mrs.
Flushing demanded anxiously, “Well, well?”

“It’s a hill,” Rachel replied. There could be no doubt that Mrs.
Flushing had represented the vigorous and abrupt fling of the earth up
into the air; you could almost see the clods flying as it whirled.

Rachel passed from one to another. They were all marked by something of
the jerk and decision of their maker; they were all perfectly untrained
onslaughts of the brush upon some half-realised idea suggested by hill
or tree; and they were all in some way characteristic of Mrs. Flushing.

“I see things movin’,” Mrs. Flushing explained. “So”—she swept her hand
through a yard of the air. She then took up one of the cardboards which
Rachel had laid aside, seated herself on a stool, and began to flourish
a stump of charcoal. While she occupied herself in strokes which seemed
to serve her as speech serves others, Rachel, who was very restless,
looked about her.

“Open the wardrobe,” said Mrs. Flushing after a pause, speaking
indistinctly because of a paint-brush in her mouth, “and look at the
things.”

As Rachel hesitated, Mrs. Flushing came forward, still with a
paint-brush in her mouth, flung open the wings of her wardrobe, and
tossed a quantity of shawls, stuffs, cloaks, embroideries, on to the
bed. Rachel began to finger them. Mrs. Flushing came up once more, and
dropped a quantity of beads, brooches, earrings, bracelets, tassels,
and combs among the draperies. Then she went back to her stool and
began to paint in silence. The stuffs were coloured and dark and pale;
they made a curious swarm of lines and colours upon the counterpane,
with the reddish lumps of stone and peacocks’ feathers and clear pale
tortoise-shell combs lying among them.

“The women wore them hundreds of years ago, they wear ’em still,” Mrs.
Flushing remarked. “My husband rides about and finds ’em; they don’t
know what they’re worth, so we get ’em cheap. And we shall sell ’em to
smart women in London,” she chuckled, as though the thought of these
ladies and their absurd appearance amused her. After painting for some
minutes, she suddenly laid down her brush and fixed her eyes upon
Rachel.

“I tell you what I want to do,” she said. “I want to go up there and
see things for myself. It’s silly stayin’ here with a pack of old maids
as though we were at the seaside in England. I want to go up the river
and see the natives in their camps. It’s only a matter of ten days
under canvas. My husband’s done it. One would lie out under the trees
at night and be towed down the river by day, and if we saw anythin’
nice we’d shout out and tell ’em to stop.” She rose and began piercing
the bed again and again with a long golden pin, as she watched to see
what effect her suggestion had upon Rachel.

“We must make up a party,” she went on. “Ten people could hire a
launch. Now you’ll come, and Mrs. Ambrose’ll come, and will Mr. Hirst
and t’other gentleman come? Where’s a pencil?”

She became more and more determined and excited as she evolved her
plan. She sat on the edge of the bed and wrote down a list of surnames,
which she invariably spelt wrong. Rachel was enthusiastic, for indeed
the idea was immeasurably delightful to her. She had always had a great
desire to see the river, and the name of Terence threw a lustre over
the prospect, which made it almost too good to come true. She did what
she could to help Mrs. Flushing by suggesting names, helping her to
spell them, and counting up the days of the week upon her fingers. As
Mrs. Flushing wanted to know all she could tell her about the birth and
pursuits of every person she suggested, and threw in wild stories of
her own as to the temperaments and habits of artists, and people of the
same name who used to come to Chillingley in the old days, but were
doubtless not the same, though they too were very clever men interested
in Egyptology, the business took some time.

At last Mrs. Flushing sought her diary for help, the method of
reckoning dates on the fingers proving unsatisfactory. She opened and
shut every drawer in her writing-table, and then cried furiously,
“Yarmouth! Yarmouth! Drat the woman! She’s always out of the way when
she’s wanted!”

At this moment the luncheon gong began to work itself into its midday
frenzy. Mrs. Flushing rang her bell violently. The door was opened by a
handsome maid who was almost as upright as her mistress.

“Oh, Yarmouth,” said Mrs. Flushing, “just find my diary and see where
ten days from now would bring us to, and ask the hall porter how many
men ’ud be wanted to row eight people up the river for a week, and what
it ’ud cost, and put it on a slip of paper and leave it on my
dressing-table. Now—” she pointed at the door with a superb forefinger
so that Rachel had to lead the way.

“Oh, and Yarmouth,” Mrs. Flushing called back over her shoulder. “Put
those things away and hang ’em in their right places, there’s a good
girl, or it fusses Mr. Flushin’.”

To all of which Yarmouth merely replied, “Yes, ma’am.”

As they entered the long dining-room it was obvious that the day was
still Sunday, although the mood was slightly abating. The Flushings’
table was set by the side in the window, so that Mrs. Flushing could
scrutinise each figure as it entered, and her curiosity seemed to be
intense.

“Old Mrs. Paley,” she whispered as the wheeled chair slowly made its
way through the door, Arthur pushing behind. “Thornburys” came next.
“That nice woman,” she nudged Rachel to look at Miss Allan. “What’s her
name?” The painted lady who always came in late, tripping into the room
with a prepared smile as though she came out upon a stage, might well
have quailed before Mrs. Flushing’s stare, which expressed her steely
hostility to the whole tribe of painted ladies. Next came the two young
men whom Mrs. Flushing called collectively the Hirsts. They sat down
opposite, across the gangway.

Mr. Flushing treated his wife with a mixture of admiration and
indulgence, making up by the suavity and fluency of his speech for the
abruptness of hers. While she darted and ejaculated he gave Rachel a
sketch of the history of South American art. He would deal with one of
his wife’s exclamations, and then return as smoothly as ever to his
theme. He knew very well how to make a luncheon pass agreeably, without
being dull or intimate. He had formed the opinion, so he told Rachel,
that wonderful treasures lay hid in the depths of the land; the things
Rachel had seen were merely trifles picked up in the course of one
short journey. He thought there might be giant gods hewn out of stone
in the mountain-side; and colossal figures standing by themselves in
the middle of vast green pasture lands, where none but natives had ever
trod. Before the dawn of European art he believed that the primitive
huntsmen and priests had built temples of massive stone slabs, had
formed out of the dark rocks and the great cedar trees majestic figures
of gods and of beasts, and symbols of the great forces, water, air, and
forest among which they lived. There might be prehistoric towns, like
those in Greece and Asia, standing in open places among the trees,
filled with the works of this early race. Nobody had been there;
scarcely anything was known. Thus talking and displaying the most
picturesque of his theories, Rachel’s attention was fixed upon him.

She did not see that Hewet kept looking at her across the gangway,
between the figures of waiters hurrying past with plates. He was
inattentive, and Hirst was finding him also very cross and
disagreeable. They had touched upon all the usual topics—upon politics
and literature, gossip and Christianity. They had quarrelled over the
service, which was every bit as fine as Sappho, according to Hewet; so
that Hirst’s paganism was mere ostentation. Why go to church, he
demanded, merely in order to read Sappho? Hirst observed that he had
listened to every word of the sermon, as he could prove if Hewet would
like a repetition of it; and he went to church in order to realise the
nature of his Creator, which he had done very vividly that morning,
thanks to Mr. Bax, who had inspired him to write three of the most
superb lines in English literature, an invocation to the Deity.

“I wrote ’em on the back of the envelope of my aunt’s last letter,” he
said, and pulled it from between the pages of Sappho.

“Well, let’s hear them,” said Hewet, slightly mollified by the prospect
of a literary discussion.

“My dear Hewet, do you wish us both to be flung out of the hotel by an
enraged mob of Thornburys and Elliots?” Hirst enquired. “The merest
whisper would be sufficient to incriminate me for ever. God!” he broke
out, “what’s the use of attempting to write when the world’s peopled by
such damned fools? Seriously, Hewet, I advise you to give up
literature. What’s the good of it? There’s your audience.”

He nodded his head at the tables where a very miscellaneous collection
of Europeans were now engaged in eating, in some cases in gnawing, the
stringy foreign fowls. Hewet looked, and grew more out of temper than
ever. Hirst looked too. His eyes fell upon Rachel, and he bowed to her.

“I rather think Rachel’s in love with me,” he remarked, as his eyes
returned to his plate. “That’s the worst of friendships with young
women—they tend to fall in love with one.”

To that Hewet made no answer whatever, and sat singularly still. Hirst
did not seem to mind getting no answer, for he returned to Mr. Bax
again, quoting the peroration about the drop of water; and when Hewet
scarcely replied to these remarks either, he merely pursed his lips,
chose a fig, and relapsed quite contentedly into his own thoughts, of
which he always had a very large supply. When luncheon was over they
separated, taking their cups of coffee to different parts of the hall.

From his chair beneath the palm-tree Hewet saw Rachel come out of the
dining-room with the Flushings; he saw them look round for chairs, and
choose three in a corner where they could go on talking in private. Mr.
Flushing was now in the full tide of his discourse. He produced a sheet
of paper upon which he made drawings as he went on with his talk. He
saw Rachel lean over and look, pointing to this and that with her
finger. Hewet unkindly compared Mr. Flushing, who was extremely well
dressed for a hot climate, and rather elaborate in his manner, to a
very persuasive shop-keeper. Meanwhile, as he sat looking at them, he
was entangled in the Thornburys and Miss Allan, who, after hovering
about for a minute or two, settled in chairs round him, holding their
cups in their hands. They wanted to know whether he could tell them
anything about Mr. Bax. Mr. Thornbury as usual sat saying nothing,
looking vaguely ahead of him, occasionally raising his eye-glasses, as
if to put them on, but always thinking better of it at the last moment,
and letting them fall again. After some discussion, the ladies put it
beyond a doubt that Mr. Bax was not the son of Mr. William Bax. There
was a pause. Then Mrs. Thornbury remarked that she was still in the
habit of saying Queen instead of King in the National Anthem. There was
another pause. Then Miss Allan observed reflectively that going to
church abroad always made her feel as if she had been to a sailor’s
funeral.

There was then a very long pause, which threatened to be final, when,
mercifully, a bird about the size of a magpie, but of a metallic blue
colour, appeared on the section of the terrace that could be seen from
where they sat. Mrs. Thornbury was led to enquire whether we should
like it if all our rooks were blue—“What do _you_ think, William?” she
asked, touching her husband on the knee.

“If all our rooks were blue,” he said,—he raised his glasses; he
actually placed them on his nose—“they would not live long in
Wiltshire,” he concluded; he dropped his glasses to his side again. The
three elderly people now gazed meditatively at the bird, which was so
obliging as to stay in the middle of the view for a considerable space
of time, thus making it unnecessary for them to speak again. Hewet
began to wonder whether he might not cross over to the Flushings’
corner, when Hirst appeared from the background, slipped into a chair
by Rachel’s side, and began to talk to her with every appearance of
familiarity. Hewet could stand it no longer. He rose, took his hat and
dashed out of doors.




CHAPTER XVIII


Everything he saw was distasteful to him. He hated the blue and white,
the intensity and definiteness, the hum and heat of the south; the
landscape seemed to him as hard and as romantic as a cardboard
background on the stage, and the mountain but a wooden screen against a
sheet painted blue. He walked fast in spite of the heat of the sun.

Two roads led out of the town on the eastern side; one branched off
towards the Ambroses’ villa, the other struck into the country,
eventually reaching a village on the plain, but many footpaths, which
had been stamped in the earth when it was wet, led off from it, across
great dry fields, to scattered farm-houses, and the villas of rich
natives. Hewet stepped off the road on to one of these, in order to
avoid the hardness and heat of the main road, the dust of which was
always being raised in small clouds by carts and ramshackle flies which
carried parties of festive peasants, or turkeys swelling unevenly like
a bundle of air balls beneath a net, or the brass bedstead and black
wooden boxes of some newly wedded pair.

The exercise indeed served to clear away the superficial irritations of
the morning, but he remained miserable. It seemed proved beyond a doubt
that Rachel was indifferent to him, for she had scarcely looked at him,
and she had talked to Mr. Flushing with just the same interest with
which she talked to him. Finally, Hirst’s odious words flicked his mind
like a whip, and he remembered that he had left her talking to Hirst.
She was at this moment talking to him, and it might be true, as he
said, that she was in love with him. He went over all the evidence for
this supposition—her sudden interest in Hirst’s writing, her way of
quoting his opinions respectfully, or with only half a laugh; her very
nickname for him, “the great Man,” might have some serious meaning in
it. Supposing that there were an understanding between them, what would
it mean to him?

“Damn it all!” he demanded, “am I in love with her?” To that he could
only return himself one answer. He certainly was in love with her, if
he knew what love meant. Ever since he had first seen her he had been
interested and attracted, more and more interested and attracted, until
he was scarcely able to think of anything except Rachel. But just as he
was sliding into one of the long feasts of meditation about them both,
he checked himself by asking whether he wanted to marry her? That was
the real problem, for these miseries and agonies could not be endured,
and it was necessary that he should make up his mind. He instantly
decided that he did not want to marry any one. Partly because he was
irritated by Rachel the idea of marriage irritated him. It immediately
suggested the picture of two people sitting alone over the fire; the
man was reading, the woman sewing. There was a second picture. He saw a
man jump up, say good-night, leave the company and hasten away with the
quiet secret look of one who is stealing to certain happiness. Both
these pictures were very unpleasant, and even more so was a third
picture, of husband and wife and friend; and the married people
glancing at each other as though they were content to let something
pass unquestioned, being themselves possessed of the deeper truth.
Other pictures—he was walking very fast in his irritation, and they
came before him without any conscious effort, like pictures on a
sheet—succeeded these. Here were the worn husband and wife sitting with
their children round them, very patient, tolerant, and wise. But that
too, was an unpleasant picture. He tried all sorts of pictures, taking
them from the lives of friends of his, for he knew many different
married couples; but he saw them always, walled up in a warm firelit
room. When, on the other hand, he began to think of unmarried people,
he saw them active in an unlimited world; above all, standing on the
same ground as the rest, without shelter or advantage. All the most
individual and humane of his friends were bachelors and spinsters;
indeed he was surprised to find that the women he most admired and knew
best were unmarried women. Marriage seemed to be worse for them than it
was for men. Leaving these general pictures he considered the people
whom he had been observing lately at the hotel. He had often revolved
these questions in his mind, as he watched Susan and Arthur, or Mr. and
Mrs. Thornbury, or Mr. and Mrs. Elliot. He had observed how the shy
happiness and surprise of the engaged couple had gradually been
replaced by a comfortable, tolerant state of mind, as if they had
already done with the adventure of intimacy and were taking up their
parts. Susan used to pursue Arthur about with a sweater, because he had
one day let slip that a brother of his had died of pneumonia. The sight
amused him, but was not pleasant if you substituted Terence and Rachel
for Arthur and Susan; and Arthur was far less eager to get you in a
corner and talk about flying and the mechanics of aeroplanes. They
would settle down. He then looked at the couples who had been married
for several years. It was true that Mrs. Thornbury had a husband, and
that for the most part she was wonderfully successful in bringing him
into the conversation, but one could not imagine what they said to each
other when they were alone. There was the same difficulty with regard
to the Elliots, except that they probably bickered openly in private.
They sometimes bickered in public, though these disagreements were
painfully covered over by little insincerities on the part of the wife,
who was afraid of public opinion, because she was much stupider than
her husband, and had to make efforts to keep hold of him. There could
be no doubt, he decided, that it would have been far better for the
world if these couples had separated. Even the Ambroses, whom he
admired and respected profoundly—in spite of all the love between them,
was not their marriage too a compromise? She gave way to him; she
spoilt him; she arranged things for him; she who was all truth to
others was not true to her husband, was not true to her friends if they
came in conflict with her husband. It was a strange and piteous flaw in
her nature. Perhaps Rachel had been right, then, when she said that
night in the garden, “We bring out what’s worst in each other—we should
live separate.”

No, Rachel had been utterly wrong! Every argument seemed to be against
undertaking the burden of marriage until he came to Rachel’s argument,
which was manifestly absurd. From having been the pursued, he turned
and became the pursuer. Allowing the case against marriage to lapse, he
began to consider the peculiarities of character which had led to her
saying that. Had she meant it? Surely one ought to know the character
of the person with whom one might spend all one’s life; being a
novelist, let him try to discover what sort of person she was. When he
was with her he could not analyse her qualities, because he seemed to
know them instinctively, but when he was away from her it sometimes
seemed to him that he did not know her at all. She was young, but she
was also old; she had little self-confidence, and yet she was a good
judge of people. She was happy; but what made her happy? If they were
alone and the excitement had worn off, and they had to deal with the
ordinary facts of the day, what would happen? Casting his eye upon his
own character, two things appeared to him: that he was very unpunctual,
and that he disliked answering notes. As far as he knew Rachel was
inclined to be punctual, but he could not remember that he had ever
seen her with a pen in her hand. Let him next imagine a dinner-party,
say at the Crooms, and Wilson, who had taken her down, talking about
the state of the Liberal party. She would say—of course she was
absolutely ignorant of politics. Nevertheless she was intelligent
certainly, and honest too. Her temper was uncertain—that he had
noticed—and she was not domestic, and she was not easy, and she was not
quiet, or beautiful, except in some dresses in some lights. But the
great gift she had was that she understood what was said to her; there
had never been any one like her for talking to. You could say
anything—you could say everything, and yet she was never servile. Here
he pulled himself up, for it seemed to him suddenly that he knew less
about her than about any one. All these thoughts had occurred to him
many times already; often had he tried to argue and reason; and again
he had reached the old state of doubt. He did not know her, and he did
not know what she felt, or whether they could live together, or whether
he wanted to marry her, and yet he was in love with her.

Supposing he went to her and said (he slackened his pace and began to
speak aloud, as if he were speaking to Rachel):

“I worship you, but I loathe marriage, I hate its smugness, its safety,
its compromise, and the thought of you interfering in my work,
hindering me; what would you answer?”

He stopped, leant against the trunk of a tree, and gazed without seeing
them at some stones scattered on the bank of the dry river-bed. He saw
Rachel’s face distinctly, the grey eyes, the hair, the mouth; the face
that could look so many things—plain, vacant, almost insignificant, or
wild, passionate, almost beautiful, yet in his eyes was always the same
because of the extraordinary freedom with which she looked at him, and
spoke as she felt. What would she answer? What did she feel? Did she
love him, or did she feel nothing at all for him or for any other man,
being, as she had said that afternoon, free, like the wind or the sea?

“Oh, you’re free!” he exclaimed, in exultation at the thought of her,
“and I’d keep you free. We’d be free together. We’d share everything
together. No happiness would be like ours. No lives would compare with
ours.” He opened his arms wide as if to hold her and the world in one
embrace.

No longer able to consider marriage, or to weigh coolly what her nature
was, or how it would be if they lived together, he dropped to the
ground and sat absorbed in the thought of her, and soon tormented by
the desire to be in her presence again.




CHAPTER XIX


But Hewet need not have increased his torments by imagining that Hirst
was still talking to Rachel. The party very soon broke up, the
Flushings going in one direction, Hirst in another, and Rachel
remaining in the hall, pulling the illustrated papers about, turning
from one to another, her movements expressing the unformed restless
desire in her mind. She did not know whether to go or to stay, though
Mrs. Flushing had commanded her to appear at tea. The hall was empty,
save for Miss Willett who was playing scales with her fingers upon a
sheet of sacred music, and the Carters, an opulent couple who disliked
the girl, because her shoe laces were untied, and she did not look
sufficiently cheery, which by some indirect process of thought led them
to think that she would not like them. Rachel certainly would not have
liked them, if she had seen them, for the excellent reason that Mr.
Carter waxed his moustache, and Mrs. Carter wore bracelets, and they
were evidently the kind of people who would not like her; but she was
too much absorbed by her own restlessness to think or to look.

She was turning over the slippery pages of an American magazine, when
the hall door swung, a wedge of light fell upon the floor, and a small
white figure upon whom the light seemed focussed, made straight across
the room to her.

“What! You here?” Evelyn exclaimed. “Just caught a glimpse of you at
lunch; but you wouldn’t condescend to look at _me_.”

It was part of Evelyn’s character that in spite of many snubs which she
received or imagined, she never gave up the pursuit of people she
wanted to know, and in the long run generally succeeded in knowing them
and even in making them like her.

She looked round her. “I hate this place. I hate these people,” she
said. “I wish you’d come up to my room with me. I do want to talk to
you.”

As Rachel had no wish to go or to stay, Evelyn took her by the wrist
and drew her out of the hall and up the stairs. As they went upstairs
two steps at a time, Evelyn, who still kept hold of Rachel’s hand,
ejaculated broken sentences about not caring a hang what people said.
“Why should one, if one knows one’s right? And let ’em all go to
blazes! Them’s my opinions!”

She was in a state of great excitement, and the muscles of her arms
were twitching nervously. It was evident that she was only waiting for
the door to shut to tell Rachel all about it. Indeed, directly they
were inside her room, she sat on the end of the bed and said, “I
suppose you think I’m mad?”

Rachel was not in the mood to think clearly about any one’s state of
mind. She was however in the mood to say straight out whatever occurred
to her without fear of the consequences.

“Somebody’s proposed to you,” she remarked.

“How on earth did you guess that?” Evelyn exclaimed, some pleasure
mingling with her surprise. “Do as I look as if I’d just had a
proposal?”

“You look as if you had them every day,” Rachel replied.

“But I don’t suppose I’ve had more than you’ve had,” Evelyn laughed
rather insincerely.

“I’ve never had one.”

“But you will—lots—it’s the easiest thing in the world—But that’s not
what’s happened this afternoon exactly. It’s—Oh, it’s a muddle, a
detestable, horrible, disgusting muddle!”

She went to the wash-stand and began sponging her cheeks with cold
water; for they were burning hot. Still sponging them and trembling
slightly she turned and explained in the high pitched voice of nervous
excitement: “Alfred Perrott says I’ve promised to marry him, and I say
I never did. Sinclair says he’ll shoot himself if I don’t marry him,
and I say, ‘Well, shoot yourself!’ But of course he doesn’t—they never
do. And Sinclair got hold of me this afternoon and began bothering me
to give an answer, and accusing me of flirting with Alfred Perrott, and
told me I’d no heart, and was merely a Siren, oh, and quantities of
pleasant things like that. So at last I said to him, ‘Well, Sinclair,
you’ve said enough now. You can just let me go.’ And then he caught me
and kissed me—the disgusting brute—I can still feel his nasty hairy
face just there—as if he’d any right to, after what he’d said!”

She sponged a spot on her left cheek energetically.

“I’ve never met a man that was fit to compare with a woman!” she cried;
“they’ve no dignity, they’ve no courage, they’ve nothing but their
beastly passions and their brute strength! Would any woman have behaved
like that—if a man had said he didn’t want her? We’ve too much
self-respect; we’re infinitely finer than they are.”

She walked about the room, dabbing her wet cheeks with a towel. Tears
were now running down with the drops of cold water.

“It makes me angry,” she explained, drying her eyes.

Rachel sat watching her. She did not think of Evelyn’s position; she
only thought that the world was full of people in torment.

“There’s only one man here I really like,” Evelyn continued; “Terence
Hewet. One feels as if one could trust him.”

At these words Rachel suffered an indescribable chill; her heart seemed
to be pressed together by cold hands.

“Why?” she asked. “Why can you trust him?”

“I don’t know,” said Evelyn. “Don’t you have feelings about people?
Feelings you’re absolutely certain are right? I had a long talk with
Terence the other night. I felt we were really friends after that.
There’s something of a woman in him—” She paused as though she were
thinking of very intimate things that Terence had told her, so at least
Rachel interpreted her gaze.

She tried to force herself to say, “Has he proposed to you?” but the
question was too tremendous, and in another moment Evelyn was saying
that the finest men were like women, and women were nobler than men—for
example, one couldn’t imagine a woman like Lillah Harrison thinking a
mean thing or having anything base about her.

“How I’d like you to know her!” she exclaimed.

She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry. Her
eyes had regained their usual expression of keen vitality, and she
seemed to have forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion. “Lillah
runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford Road,” she continued.
“She started it, managed it, did everything off her own bat, and it’s
now the biggest of its kind in England. You can’t think what those
women are like—and their homes. But she goes among them at all hours of
the day and night. I’ve often been with her. . . . That’s what’s the
matter with us. . . . We don’t _do_ things. What do you _do_?” she
demanded, looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical smile. Rachel had
scarcely listened to any of this, and her expression was vacant and
unhappy. She had conceived an equal dislike for Lillah Harrison and her
work in the Deptford Road, and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love
affairs.

“I play,” she said with an affection of stolid composure.

“That’s about it!” Evelyn laughed. “We none of us do anything but play.
And that’s why women like Lillah Harrison, who’s worth twenty of you
and me, have to work themselves to the bone. But I’m tired of playing,”
she went on, lying flat on the bed, and raising her arms above her
head. Thus stretched out, she looked more diminutive than ever.

“I’m going to do something. I’ve got a splendid idea. Look here, you
must join. I’m sure you’ve got any amount of stuff in you, though you
look—well, as if you’d lived all your life in a garden.” She sat up,
and began to explain with animation. “I belong to a club in London. It
meets every Saturday, so it’s called the Saturday Club. We’re supposed
to talk about art, but I’m sick of talking about art—what’s the good of
it? With all kinds of real things going on round one? It isn’t as if
they’d got anything to say about art, either. So what I’m going to tell
’em is that we’ve talked enough about art, and we’d better talk about
life for a change. Questions that really matter to people’s lives, the
White Slave Traffic, Women Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on. And
when we’ve made up our mind what we want to do we could form ourselves
into a society for doing it. . . . I’m certain that if people like
ourselves were to take things in hand instead of leaving it to
policemen and magistrates, we could put a stop to—prostitution”—she
lowered her voice at the ugly word—“in six months. My idea is that men
and women ought to join in these matters. We ought to go into
Piccadilly and stop one of these poor wretches and say: ‘Now, look
here, I’m no better than you are, and I don’t pretend to be any better,
but you’re doing what you know to be beastly, and I won’t have you
doing beastly things, because we’re all the same under our skins, and
if you do a beastly thing it does matter to me.’ That’s what Mr. Bax
was saying this morning, and it’s true, though you clever people—you’re
clever too, aren’t you?—don’t believe it.”

When Evelyn began talking—it was a fact she often regretted—her
thoughts came so quickly that she never had any time to listen to other
people’s thoughts. She continued without more pause than was needed for
taking breath.

“I don’t see why the Saturday club people shouldn’t do a really great
work in that way,” she went on. “Of course it would want organisation,
some one to give their life to it, but I’m ready to do that. My
notion’s to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas
take care of themselves. What’s wrong with Lillah—if there is anything
wrong—is that she thinks of Temperance first and the women afterwards.
Now there’s one thing I’ll say to my credit,” she continued; “I’m not
intellectual or artistic or anything of that sort, but I’m jolly
human.” She slipped off the bed and sat on the floor, looking up at
Rachel. She searched up into her face as if she were trying to read
what kind of character was concealed behind the face. She put her hand
on Rachel’s knee.

“It _is_ being human that counts, isn’t it?” she continued. “Being
real, whatever Mr. Hirst may say. Are you real?”

Rachel felt much as Terence had felt that Evelyn was too close to her,
and that there was something exciting in this closeness, although it
was also disagreeable. She was spared the need of finding an answer to
the question, for Evelyn proceeded, “Do you _believe_ in anything?”

In order to put an end to the scrutiny of these bright blue eyes, and
to relieve her own physical restlessness, Rachel pushed back her chair
and exclaimed, “In everything!” and began to finger different objects,
the books on the table, the photographs, the freshly leaved plant with
the stiff bristles, which stood in a large earthenware pot in the
window.

“I believe in the bed, in the photographs, in the pot, in the balcony,
in the sun, in Mrs. Flushing,” she remarked, still speaking recklessly,
with something at the back of her mind forcing her to say the things
that one usually does not say. “But I don’t believe in God, I don’t
believe in Mr. Bax, I don’t believe in the hospital nurse. I don’t
believe—” She took up a photograph and, looking at it, did not finish
her sentence.

“That’s my mother,” said Evelyn, who remained sitting on the floor
binding her knees together with her arms, and watching Rachel
curiously.

Rachel considered the portrait. “Well, I don’t much believe in her,”
she remarked after a time in a low tone of voice.

Mrs. Murgatroyd looked indeed as if the life had been crushed out of
her; she knelt on a chair, gazing piteously from behind the body of a
Pomeranian dog which she clasped to her cheek, as if for protection.

“And that’s my dad,” said Evelyn, for there were two photographs in one
frame. The second photograph represented a handsome soldier with high
regular features and a heavy black moustache; his hand rested on the
hilt of his sword; there was a decided likeness between him and Evelyn.

“And it’s because of them,” said Evelyn, “that I’m going to help the
other women. You’ve heard about me, I suppose? They weren’t married,
you see; I’m not anybody in particular. I’m not a bit ashamed of it.
They loved each other anyhow, and that’s more than most people can say
of their parents.”

Rachel sat down on the bed, with the two pictures in her hands, and
compared them—the man and the woman who had, so Evelyn said, loved each
other. That fact interested her more than the campaign on behalf of
unfortunate women which Evelyn was once more beginning to describe. She
looked again from one to the other.

“What d’you think it’s like,” she asked, as Evelyn paused for a minute,
“being in love?”

“Have you never been in love?” Evelyn asked. “Oh no—one’s only got to
look at you to see that,” she added. She considered. “I really was in
love once,” she said. She fell into reflection, her eyes losing their
bright vitality and approaching something like an expression of
tenderness. “It was heavenly!—while it lasted. The worst of it is it
don’t last, not with me. That’s the bother.”

She went on to consider the difficulty with Alfred and Sinclair about
which she had pretended to ask Rachel’s advice. But she did not want
advice; she wanted intimacy. When she looked at Rachel, who was still
looking at the photographs on the bed, she could not help seeing that
Rachel was not thinking about her. What was she thinking about, then?
Evelyn was tormented by the little spark of life in her which was
always trying to work through to other people, and was always being
rebuffed. Falling silent she looked at her visitor, her shoes, her
stockings, the combs in her hair, all the details of her dress in
short, as though by seizing every detail she might get closer to the
life within.

Rachel at last put down the photographs, walked to the window and
remarked, “It’s odd. People talk as much about love as they do about
religion.”

“I wish you’d sit down and talk,” said Evelyn impatiently.

Instead Rachel opened the window, which was made in two long panes, and
looked down into the garden below.

“That’s where we got lost the first night,” she said. “It must have
been in those bushes.”

“They kill hens down there,” said Evelyn. “They cut their heads off
with a knife—disgusting! But tell me—what—”

“I’d like to explore the hotel,” Rachel interrupted. She drew her head
in and looked at Evelyn, who still sat on the floor.

“It’s just like other hotels,” said Evelyn.

That might be, although every room and passage and chair in the place
had a character of its own in Rachel’s eyes; but she could not bring
herself to stay in one place any longer. She moved slowly towards the
door.

“What is it you want?” said Evelyn. “You make me feel as if you were
always thinking of something you don’t say. . . . Do say it!”

But Rachel made no response to this invitation either. She stopped with
her fingers on the handle of the door, as if she remembered that some
sort of pronouncement was due from her.

“I suppose you’ll marry one of them,” she said, and then turned the
handle and shut the door behind her. She walked slowly down the
passage, running her hand along the wall beside her. She did not think
which way she was going, and therefore walked down a passage which only
led to a window and a balcony. She looked down at the kitchen premises,
the wrong side of the hotel life, which was cut off from the right side
by a maze of small bushes. The ground was bare, old tins were scattered
about, and the bushes wore towels and aprons upon their heads to dry.
Every now and then a waiter came out in a white apron and threw rubbish
on to a heap. Two large women in cotton dresses were sitting on a bench
with blood-smeared tin trays in front of them and yellow bodies across
their knees. They were plucking the birds, and talking as they plucked.
Suddenly a chicken came floundering, half flying, half running into the
space, pursued by a third woman whose age could hardly be under eighty.
Although wizened and unsteady on her legs she kept up the chase, egged
on by the laughter of the others; her face was expressive of furious
rage, and as she ran she swore in Spanish. Frightened by hand-clapping
here, a napkin there, the bird ran this way and that in sharp angles,
and finally fluttered straight at the old woman, who opened her scanty
grey skirts to enclose it, dropped upon it in a bundle, and then
holding it out cut its head off with an expression of vindictive energy
and triumph combined. The blood and the ugly wriggling fascinated
Rachel, so that although she knew that some one had come up behind and
was standing beside her, she did not turn round until the old woman had
settled down on the bench beside the others. Then she looked up
sharply, because of the ugliness of what she had seen. It was Miss
Allan who stood beside her.

“Not a pretty sight,” said Miss Allan, “although I daresay it’s really
more humane than our method. . . . I don’t believe you’ve ever been in
my room,” she added, and turned away as if she meant Rachel to follow
her. Rachel followed, for it seemed possible that each new person might
remove the mystery which burdened her.

The bedrooms at the hotel were all on the same pattern, save that some
were larger and some smaller; they had a floor of dark red tiles; they
had a high bed, draped in mosquito curtains; they had each a
writing-table and a dressing-table, and a couple of arm-chairs. But
directly a box was unpacked the rooms became very different, so that
Miss Allan’s room was very unlike Evelyn’s room. There were no
variously coloured hatpins on her dressing-table; no scent-bottles; no
narrow curved pairs of scissors; no great variety of shoes and boots;
no silk petticoats lying on the chairs. The room was extremely neat.
There seemed to be two pairs of everything. The writing-table, however,
was piled with manuscript, and a table was drawn out to stand by the
arm-chair on which were two separate heaps of dark library books, in
which there were many slips of paper sticking out at different degrees
of thickness. Miss Allan had asked Rachel to come in out of kindness,
thinking that she was waiting about with nothing to do. Moreover, she
liked young women, for she had taught many of them, and having received
so much hospitality from the Ambroses she was glad to be able to repay
a minute part of it. She looked about accordingly for something to show
her. The room did not provide much entertainment. She touched her
manuscript. “Age of Chaucer; Age of Elizabeth; Age of Dryden,” she
reflected; “I’m glad there aren’t many more ages. I’m still in the
middle of the eighteenth century. Won’t you sit down, Miss Vinrace? The
chair, though small, is firm. . . . Euphues. The germ of the English
novel,” she continued, glancing at another page. “Is that the kind of
thing that interests you?”

She looked at Rachel with great kindness and simplicity, as though she
would do her utmost to provide anything she wished to have. This
expression had a remarkable charm in a face otherwise much lined with
care and thought.

“Oh no, it’s music with you, isn’t it?” she continued, recollecting,
“and I generally find that they don’t go together. Sometimes of course
we have prodigies—” She was looking about her for something and now saw
a jar on the mantelpiece which she reached down and gave to Rachel. “If
you put your finger into this jar you may be able to extract a piece of
preserved ginger. Are you a prodigy?”

But the ginger was deep and could not be reached.

“Don’t bother,” she said, as Miss Allan looked about for some other
implement. “I daresay I shouldn’t like preserved ginger.”

“You’ve never tried?” enquired Miss Allan. “Then I consider that it is
your duty to try now. Why, you may add a new pleasure to life, and as
you are still young—” She wondered whether a button-hook would do. “I
make it a rule to try everything,” she said. “Don’t you think it would
be very annoying if you tasted ginger for the first time on your
death-bed, and found you never liked anything so much? I should be so
exceedingly annoyed that I think I should get well on that account
alone.”

She was now successful, and a lump of ginger emerged on the end of the
button-hook. While she went to wipe the button-hook, Rachel bit the
ginger and at once cried, “I must spit it out!”

“Are you sure you have really tasted it?” Miss Allan demanded.

For answer Rachel threw it out of the window.

“An experience anyhow,” said Miss Allan calmly. “Let me see—I have
nothing else to offer you, unless you would like to taste this.” A
small cupboard hung above her bed, and she took out of it a slim
elegant jar filled with a bright green fluid.

“Crême de Menthe,” she said. “Liqueur, you know. It looks as if I
drank, doesn’t it? As a matter of fact it goes to prove what an
exceptionally abstemious person I am. I’ve had that jar for
six-and-twenty years,” she added, looking at it with pride, as she
tipped it over, and from the height of the liquid it could be seen that
the bottle was still untouched.

“Twenty-six years?” Rachel exclaimed.

Miss Allan was gratified, for she had meant Rachel to be surprised.

“When I went to Dresden six-and-twenty years ago,” she said, “a certain
friend of mine announced her intention of making me a present. She
thought that in the event of shipwreck or accident a stimulant might be
useful. However, as I had no occasion for it, I gave it back on my
return. On the eve of any foreign journey the same bottle always makes
its appearance, with the same note; on my return in safety it is always
handed back. I consider it a kind of charm against accidents. Though I
was once detained twenty-four hours by an accident to the train in
front of me, I have never met with any accident myself. Yes,” she
continued, now addressing the bottle, “we have seen many climes and
cupboards together, have we not? I intend one of these days to have a
silver label made with an inscription. It is a gentleman, as you may
observe, and his name is Oliver. . . . I do not think I could forgive
you, Miss Vinrace, if you broke my Oliver,” she said, firmly taking the
bottle out of Rachel’s hands and replacing it in the cupboard.

Rachel was swinging the bottle by the neck. She was interested by Miss
Allan to the point of forgetting the bottle.

“Well,” she exclaimed, “I do think that odd; to have had a friend for
twenty-six years, and a bottle, and—to have made all those journeys.”

“Not at all; I call it the reverse of odd,” Miss Allan replied. “I
always consider myself the most ordinary person I know. It’s rather
distinguished to be as ordinary as I am. I forget—are you a prodigy, or
did you say you were not a prodigy?”

She smiled at Rachel very kindly. She seemed to have known and
experienced so much, as she moved cumbrously about the room, that
surely there must be balm for all anguish in her words, could one
induce her to have recourse to them. But Miss Allan, who was now
locking the cupboard door, showed no signs of breaking the reticence
which had snowed her under for years. An uncomfortable sensation kept
Rachel silent; on the one hand, she wished to whirl high and strike a
spark out of the cool pink flesh; on the other she perceived there was
nothing to be done but to drift past each other in silence.

“I’m not a prodigy. I find it very difficult to say what I mean—” she
observed at length.

“It’s a matter of temperament, I believe,” Miss Allan helped her.
“There are some people who have no difficulty; for myself I find there
are a great many things I simply cannot say. But then I consider myself
very slow. One of my colleagues now, knows whether she likes you or
not—let me see, how does she do it?—by the way you say good-morning at
breakfast. It is sometimes a matter of years before I can make up my
mind. But most young people seem to find it easy?”

“Oh no,” said Rachel. “It’s hard!”

Miss Allan looked at Rachel quietly, saying nothing; she suspected that
there were difficulties of some kind. Then she put her hand to the back
of her head, and discovered that one of the grey coils of hair had come
loose.

“I must ask you to be so kind as to excuse me,” she said, rising, “if I
do my hair. I have never yet found a satisfactory type of hairpin. I
must change my dress, too, for the matter of that; and I should be
particularly glad of your assistance, because there is a tiresome set
of hooks which I _can_ fasten for myself, but it takes from ten to
fifteen minutes; whereas with your help—”

She slipped off her coat and skirt and blouse, and stood doing her hair
before the glass, a massive homely figure, her petticoat being so short
that she stood on a pair of thick slate-grey legs.

“People say youth is pleasant; I myself find middle age far
pleasanter,” she remarked, removing hair pins and combs, and taking up
her brush. When it fell loose her hair only came down to her neck.

“When one was young,” she continued, “things could seem so very serious
if one was made that way. . . . And now my dress.”

In a wonderfully short space of time her hair had been reformed in its
usual loops. The upper half of her body now became dark green with
black stripes on it; the skirt, however, needed hooking at various
angles, and Rachel had to kneel on the floor, fitting the eyes to the
hooks.

“Our Miss Johnson used to find life very unsatisfactory, I remember,”
Miss Allan continued. She turned her back to the light. “And then she
took to breeding guinea-pigs for their spots, and became absorbed in
that. I have just heard that the yellow guinea-pig has had a black
baby. We had a bet of sixpence on about it. She will be very
triumphant.”

The skirt was fastened. She looked at herself in the glass with the
curious stiffening of her face generally caused by looking in the
glass.

“Am I in a fit state to encounter my fellow-beings?” she asked. “I
forget which way it is—but they find black animals very rarely have
coloured babies—it may be the other way round. I have had it so often
explained to me that it is very stupid of me to have forgotten again.”

She moved about the room acquiring small objects with quiet force, and
fixing them about her—a locket, a watch and chain, a heavy gold
bracelet, and the parti-coloured button of a suffrage society. Finally,
completely equipped for Sunday tea, she stood before Rachel, and smiled
at her kindly. She was not an impulsive woman, and her life had
schooled her to restrain her tongue. At the same time, she was
possessed of an amount of good-will towards others, and in particular
towards the young, which often made her regret that speech was so
difficult.

“Shall we descend?” she said.

She put one hand upon Rachel’s shoulder, and stooping, picked up a pair
of walking-shoes with the other, and placed them neatly side by side
outside her door. As they walked down the passage they passed many
pairs of boots and shoes, some black and some brown, all side by side,
and all different, even to the way in which they lay together.

“I always think that people are so like their boots,” said Miss Allan.
“That is Mrs. Paley’s—” but as she spoke the door opened, and Mrs.
Paley rolled out in her chair, equipped also for tea.

She greeted Miss Allan and Rachel.

“I was just saying that people are so like their boots,” said Miss
Allan. Mrs. Paley did not hear. She repeated it more loudly still. Mrs.
Paley did not hear. She repeated it a third time. Mrs. Paley heard, but
she did not understand. She was apparently about to repeat it for the
fourth time, when Rachel suddenly said something inarticulate, and
disappeared down the corridor. This misunderstanding, which involved a
complete block in the passage, seemed to her unbearable. She walked
quickly and blindly in the opposite direction, and found herself at the
end of a _cul de sac_. There was a window, and a table and a chair in
the window, and upon the table stood a rusty inkstand, an ashtray, an
old copy of a French newspaper, and a pen with a broken nib. Rachel sat
down, as if to study the French newspaper, but a tear fell on the
blurred French print, raising a soft blot. She lifted her head sharply,
exclaiming aloud, “It’s intolerable!” Looking out of the window with
eyes that would have seen nothing even had they not been dazed by
tears, she indulged herself at last in violent abuse of the entire day.
It had been miserable from start to finish; first, the service in the
chapel; then luncheon; then Evelyn; then Miss Allan; then old Mrs.
Paley blocking up the passage. All day long she had been tantalized and
put off. She had now reached one of those eminences, the result of some
crisis, from which the world is finally displayed in its true
proportions. She disliked the look of it immensely—churches,
politicians, misfits, and huge impostures—men like Mr. Dalloway, men
like Mr. Bax, Evelyn and her chatter, Mrs. Paley blocking up the
passage. Meanwhile the steady beat of her own pulse represented the hot
current of feeling that ran down beneath; beating, struggling,
fretting. For the time, her own body was the source of all the life in
the world, which tried to burst forth here—there—and was repressed now
by Mr. Bax, now by Evelyn, now by the imposition of ponderous
stupidity, the weight of the entire world. Thus tormented, she would
twist her hands together, for all things were wrong, all people stupid.
Vaguely seeing that there were people down in the garden beneath she
represented them as aimless masses of matter, floating hither and
thither, without aim except to impede her. What were they doing, those
other people in the world?

“Nobody knows,” she said. The force of her rage was beginning to spend
itself, and the vision of the world which had been so vivid became dim.

“It’s a dream,” she murmured. She considered the rusty inkstand, the
pen, the ash-tray, and the old French newspaper. These small and
worthless objects seemed to her to represent human lives.

“We’re asleep and dreaming,” she repeated. But the possibility which
now suggested itself that one of the shapes might be the shape of
Terence roused her from her melancholy lethargy. She became as restless
as she had been before she sat down. She was no longer able to see the
world as a town laid out beneath her. It was covered instead by a haze
of feverish red mist. She had returned to the state in which she had
been all day. Thinking was no escape. Physical movement was the only
refuge, in and out of rooms, in and out of people’s minds, seeking she
knew not what. Therefore she rose, pushed back the table, and went
downstairs. She went out of the hall door, and, turning the corner of
the hotel, found herself among the people whom she had seen from the
window. But owing to the broad sunshine after shaded passages, and to
the substance of living people after dreams, the group appeared with
startling intensity, as though the dusty surface had been peeled off
everything, leaving only the reality and the instant. It had the look
of a vision printed on the dark at night. White and grey and purple
figures were scattered on the green, round wicker tables, in the middle
the flame of the tea-urn made the air waver like a faulty sheet of
glass, a massive green tree stood over them as if it were a moving
force held at rest. As she approached, she could hear Evelyn’s voice
repeating monotonously, “Here then—here—good doggie, come here”; for a
moment nothing seemed to happen; it all stood still, and then she
realised that one of the figures was Helen Ambrose; and the dust again
began to settle.

The group indeed had come together in a miscellaneous way; one
tea-table joining to another tea-table, and deck-chairs serving to
connect two groups. But even at a distance it could be seen that Mrs.
Flushing, upright and imperious, dominated the party. She was talking
vehemently to Helen across the table.

“Ten days under canvas,” she was saying. “No comforts. If you want
comforts, don’t come. But I may tell you, if you don’t come you’ll
regret it all your life. You say yes?”

At this moment Mrs. Flushing caught sight of Rachel.

“Ah, there’s your niece. She’s promised. You’re coming, aren’t you?”
Having adopted the plan, she pursued it with the energy of a child.

Rachel took her part with eagerness.

“Of course I’m coming. So are you, Helen. And Mr. Pepper too.” As she
sat she realised that she was surrounded by people she knew, but that
Terence was not among them. From various angles people began saying
what they thought of the proposed expedition. According to some it
would be hot, but the nights would be cold; according to others, the
difficulties would lie rather in getting a boat, and in speaking the
language. Mrs. Flushing disposed of all objections, whether due to man
or due to nature, by announcing that her husband would settle all that.

Meanwhile Mr. Flushing quietly explained to Helen that the expedition
was really a simple matter; it took five days at the outside; and the
place—a native village—was certainly well worth seeing before she
returned to England. Helen murmured ambiguously, and did not commit
herself to one answer rather than to another.

The tea-party, however, included too many different kinds of people for
general conversation to flourish; and from Rachel’s point of view
possessed the great advantage that it was quite unnecessary for her to
talk. Over there Susan and Arthur were explaining to Mrs. Paley that an
expedition had been proposed; and Mrs. Paley having grasped the fact,
gave the advice of an old traveller that they should take nice canned
vegetables, fur cloaks, and insect powder. She leant over to Mrs.
Flushing and whispered something which from the twinkle in her eyes
probably had reference to bugs. Then Helen was reciting “Toll for the
Brave” to St. John Hirst, in order apparently to win a sixpence which
lay upon the table; while Mr. Hughling Elliot imposed silence upon his
section of the audience by his fascinating anecdote of Lord Curzon and
the undergraduate’s bicycle. Mrs. Thornbury was trying to remember the
name of a man who might have been another Garibaldi, and had written a
book which they ought to read; and Mr. Thornbury recollected that he
had a pair of binoculars at anybody’s service. Miss Allan meanwhile
murmured with the curious intimacy which a spinster often achieves with
dogs, to the fox-terrier which Evelyn had at last induced to come over
to them. Little particles of dust or blossom fell on the plates now and
then when the branches sighed above. Rachel seemed to see and hear a
little of everything, much as a river feels the twigs that fall into it
and sees the sky above, but her eyes were too vague for Evelyn’s
liking. She came across, and sat on the ground at Rachel’s feet.

“Well?” she asked suddenly. “What are you thinking about?”

“Miss Warrington,” Rachel replied rashly, because she had to say
something. She did indeed see Susan murmuring to Mrs. Elliot, while
Arthur stared at her with complete confidence in his own love. Both
Rachel and Evelyn then began to listen to what Susan was saying.

“There’s the ordering and the dogs and the garden, and the children
coming to be taught,” her voice proceeded rhythmically as if checking
the list, “and my tennis, and the village, and letters to write for
father, and a thousand little things that don’t sound much; but I never
have a moment to myself, and when I go to bed, I’m so sleepy I’m off
before my head touches the pillow. Besides I like to be a great deal
with my Aunts—I’m a great bore, aren’t I, Aunt Emma?” (she smiled at
old Mrs. Paley, who with head slightly drooped was regarding the cake
with speculative affection), “and father has to be very careful about
chills in winter which means a great deal of running about, because he
won’t look after himself, any more than you will, Arthur! So it all
mounts up!”

Her voice mounted too, in a mild ecstasy of satisfaction with her life
and her own nature. Rachel suddenly took a violent dislike to Susan,
ignoring all that was kindly, modest, and even pathetic about her. She
appeared insincere and cruel; she saw her grown stout and prolific, the
kind blue eyes now shallow and watery, the bloom of the cheeks
congealed to a network of dry red canals.

Helen turned to her. “Did you go to church?” she asked. She had won her
sixpence and seemed making ready to go.

“Yes,” said Rachel. “For the last time,” she added.

In preparing to put on her gloves, Helen dropped one.

“You’re not going?” Evelyn asked, taking hold of one glove as if to
keep them.

“It’s high time we went,” said Helen. “Don’t you see how silent every
one’s getting—?”

A silence had fallen upon them all, caused partly by one of the
accidents of talk, and partly because they saw some one approaching.
Helen could not see who it was, but keeping her eyes fixed upon Rachel
observed something which made her say to herself, “So it’s Hewet.” She
drew on her gloves with a curious sense of the significance of the
moment. Then she rose, for Mrs. Flushing had seen Hewet too, and was
demanding information about rivers and boats which showed that the
whole conversation would now come over again.

Rachel followed her, and they walked in silence down the avenue. In
spite of what Helen had seen and understood, the feeling that was
uppermost in her mind was now curiously perverse; if she went on this
expedition, she would not be able to have a bath, the effort appeared
to her to be great and disagreeable.

“It’s so unpleasant, being cooped up with people one hardly knows,” she
remarked. “People who mind being seen naked.”

“You don’t mean to go?” Rachel asked.

The intensity with which this was spoken irritated Mrs. Ambrose.

“I don’t mean to go, and I don’t mean not to go,” she replied. She
became more and more casual and indifferent.

“After all, I daresay we’ve seen all there is to be seen; and there’s
the bother of getting there, and whatever they may say it’s bound to be
vilely uncomfortable.”

For some time Rachel made no reply; but every sentence Helen spoke
increased her bitterness. At last she broke out—

“Thank God, Helen, I’m not like you! I sometimes think you don’t think
or feel or care to do anything but exist! You’re like Mr. Hirst. You
see that things are bad, and you pride yourself on saying so. It’s what
you call being honest; as a matter of fact it’s being lazy, being dull,
being nothing. You don’t help; you put an end to things.”

Helen smiled as if she rather enjoyed the attack.

“Well?” she enquired.

“It seems to me bad—that’s all,” Rachel replied.

“Quite likely,” said Helen.

At any other time Rachel would probably have been silenced by her
Aunt’s candour; but this afternoon she was not in the mood to be
silenced by any one. A quarrel would be welcome.

“You’re only half alive,” she continued.

“Is that because I didn’t accept Mr. Flushing’s invitation?” Helen
asked, “or do you always think that?”

At the moment it appeared to Rachel that she had always seen the same
faults in Helen, from the very first night on board the _Euphrosyne_,
in spite of her beauty, in spite of her magnanimity and their love.

“Oh, it’s only what’s the matter with every one!” she exclaimed. “No
one feels—no one does anything but hurt. I tell you, Helen, the world’s
bad. It’s an agony, living, wanting—”

Here she tore a handful of leaves from a bush and crushed them to
control herself.

“The lives of these people,” she tried to explain, “the aimlessness,
the way they live. One goes from one to another, and it’s all the same.
One never gets what one wants out of any of them.”

Her emotional state and her confusion would have made her an easy prey
if Helen had wished to argue or had wished to draw confidences. But
instead of talking she fell into a profound silence as they walked on.
Aimless, trivial, meaningless, oh no—what she had seen at tea made it
impossible for her to believe that. The little jokes, the chatter, the
inanities of the afternoon had shrivelled up before her eyes.
Underneath the likings and spites, the comings together and partings,
great things were happening—terrible things, because they were so
great. Her sense of safety was shaken, as if beneath twigs and dead
leaves she had seen the movement of a snake. It seemed to her that a
moment’s respite was allowed, a moment’s make-believe, and then again
the profound and reasonless law asserted itself, moulding them all to
its liking, making and destroying.

She looked at Rachel walking beside her, still crushing the leaves in
her fingers and absorbed in her own thoughts. She was in love, and she
pitied her profoundly. But she roused herself from these thoughts and
apologised. “I’m very sorry,” she said, “but if I’m dull, it’s my
nature, and it can’t be helped.” If it was a natural defect, however,
she found an easy remedy, for she went on to say that she thought Mr.
Flushing’s scheme a very good one, only needing a little consideration,
which it appeared she had given it by the time they reached home. By
that time they had settled that if anything more was said, they would
accept the invitation.




CHAPTER XX


When considered in detail by Mr. Flushing and Mrs. Ambrose the
expedition proved neither dangerous nor difficult. They found also that
it was not even unusual. Every year at this season English people made
parties which steamed a short way up the river, landed, and looked at
the native village, bought a certain number of things from the natives,
and returned again without damage done to mind or body. When it was
discovered that six people really wished the same thing the
arrangements were soon carried out.

Since the time of Elizabeth very few people had seen the river, and
nothing has been done to change its appearance from what it was to the
eyes of the Elizabethan voyagers. The time of Elizabeth was only
distant from the present time by a moment of space compared with the
ages which had passed since the water had run between those banks, and
the green thickets swarmed there, and the small trees had grown to huge
wrinkled trees in solitude. Changing only with the change of the sun
and the clouds, the waving green mass had stood there for century after
century, and the water had run between its banks ceaselessly, sometimes
washing away earth and sometimes the branches of trees, while in other
parts of the world one town had risen upon the ruins of another town,
and the men in the towns had become more and more articulate and unlike
each other. A few miles of this river were visible from the top of the
mountain where some weeks before the party from the hotel had
picnicked. Susan and Arthur had seen it as they kissed each other, and
Terence and Rachel as they sat talking about Richmond, and Evelyn and
Perrott as they strolled about, imagining that they were great captains
sent to colonise the world. They had seen the broad blue mark across
the sand where it flowed into the sea, and the green cloud of trees
mass themselves about it farther up, and finally hide its waters
altogether from sight. At intervals for the first twenty miles or so
houses were scattered on the bank; by degrees the houses became huts,
and, later still, there was neither hut nor house, but trees and grass,
which were seen only by hunters, explorers, or merchants, marching or
sailing, but making no settlement.

By leaving Santa Marina early in the morning, driving twenty miles and
riding eight, the party, which was composed finally of six English
people, reached the river-side as the night fell. They came cantering
through the trees—Mr. and Mrs. Flushing, Helen Ambrose, Rachel,
Terence, and St. John. The tired little horses then stopped
automatically, and the English dismounted. Mrs. Flushing strode to the
river-bank in high spirits. The day had been long and hot, but she had
enjoyed the speed and the open air; she had left the hotel which she
hated, and she found the company to her liking. The river was swirling
past in the darkness; they could just distinguish the smooth moving
surface of the water, and the air was full of the sound of it. They
stood in an empty space in the midst of great tree-trunks, and out
there a little green light moving slightly up and down showed them
where the steamer lay in which they were to embark.

When they all stood upon its deck they found that it was a very small
boat which throbbed gently beneath them for a few minutes, and then
shoved smoothly through the water. They seemed to be driving into the
heart of the night, for the trees closed in front of them, and they
could hear all round them the rustling of leaves. The great darkness
had the usual effect of taking away all desire for communication by
making their words sound thin and small; and, after walking round the
deck three or four times, they clustered together, yawning deeply, and
looking at the same spot of deep gloom on the banks. Murmuring very low
in the rhythmical tone of one oppressed by the air, Mrs. Flushing began
to wonder where they were to sleep, for they could not sleep
downstairs, they could not sleep in a doghole smelling of oil, they
could not sleep on deck, they could not sleep—She yawned profoundly. It
was as Helen had foreseen; the question of nakedness had risen already,
although they were half asleep, and almost invisible to each other.
With St. John’s help she stretched an awning, and persuaded Mrs.
Flushing that she could take off her clothes behind this, and that no
one would notice if by chance some part of her which had been concealed
for forty-five years was laid bare to the human eye. Mattresses were
thrown down, rugs provided, and the three women lay near each other in
the soft open air.

The gentlemen, having smoked a certain number of cigarettes, dropped
the glowing ends into the river, and looked for a time at the ripples
wrinkling the black water beneath them, undressed too, and lay down at
the other end of the boat. They were very tired, and curtained from
each other by the darkness. The light from one lantern fell upon a few
ropes, a few planks of the deck, and the rail of the boat, but beyond
that there was unbroken darkness, no light reached their faces, or the
trees which were massed on the sides of the river.

Soon Wilfrid Flushing slept, and Hirst slept. Hewet alone lay awake
looking straight up into the sky. The gentle motion and the black
shapes that were drawn ceaselessly across his eyes had the effect of
making it impossible for him to think. Rachel’s presence so near him
lulled thought asleep. Being so near him, only a few paces off at the
other end of the boat, she made it as impossible for him to think about
her as it would have been impossible to see her if she had stood quite
close to him, her forehead against his forehead. In some strange way
the boat became identified with himself, and just as it would have been
useless for him to get up and steer the boat, so was it useless for him
to struggle any longer with the irresistible force of his own feelings.
He was drawn on and on away from all he knew, slipping over barriers
and past landmarks into unknown waters as the boat glided over the
smooth surface of the river. In profound peace, enveloped in deeper
unconsciousness than had been his for many nights, he lay on deck
watching the tree-tops change their position slightly against the sky,
and arch themselves, and sink and tower huge, until he passed from
seeing them into dreams where he lay beneath the shadow of the vast
trees, looking up into the sky.

When they woke next morning they had gone a considerable way up the
river; on the right was a high yellow bank of sand tufted with trees,
on the left a swamp quivering with long reeds and tall bamboos on the
top of which, swaying slightly, perched vivid green and yellow birds.
The morning was hot and still. After breakfast they drew chairs
together and sat in an irregular semicircle in the bow. An awning above
their heads protected them from the heat of the sun, and the breeze
which the boat made aired them softly. Mrs. Flushing was already
dotting and striping her canvas, her head jerking this way and that
with the action of a bird nervously picking up grain; the others had
books or pieces of paper or embroidery on their knees, at which they
looked fitfully and again looked at the river ahead. At one point Hewet
read part of a poem aloud, but the number of moving things entirely
vanquished his words. He ceased to read, and no one spoke. They moved
on under the shelter of the trees. There was now a covey of red birds
feeding on one of the little islets to the left, or again a blue-green
parrot flew shrieking from tree to tree. As they moved on the country
grew wilder and wilder. The trees and the undergrowth seemed to be
strangling each other near the ground in a multitudinous wrestle; while
here and there a splendid tree towered high above the swarm, shaking
its thin green umbrellas lightly in the upper air. Hewet looked at his
books again. The morning was peaceful as the night had been, only it
was very strange because he could see it was light, and he could see
Rachel and hear her voice and be near to her. He felt as if he were
waiting, as if somehow he were stationary among things that passed over
him and around him, voices, people’s bodies, birds, only Rachel too was
waiting with him. He looked at her sometimes as if she must know that
they were waiting together, and being drawn on together, without being
able to offer any resistance. Again he read from his book:

Whoever you are holding me now in your hand,
Without one thing all will be useless.


A bird gave a wild laugh, a monkey chuckled a malicious question, and,
as fire fades in the hot sunshine, his words flickered and went out.

By degrees as the river narrowed, and the high sandbanks fell to level
ground thickly grown with trees, the sounds of the forest could be
heard. It echoed like a hall. There were sudden cries; and then long
spaces of silence, such as there are in a cathedral when a boy’s voice
has ceased and the echo of it still seems to haunt about the remote
places of the roof. Once Mr. Flushing rose and spoke to a sailor, and
even announced that some time after luncheon the steamer would stop,
and they could walk a little way through the forest.

“There are tracks all through the trees there,” he explained. “We’re no
distance from civilisation yet.”

He scrutinised his wife’s painting. Too polite to praise it openly, he
contented himself with cutting off one half of the picture with one
hand, and giving a flourish in the air with the other.

“God!” Hirst exclaimed, staring straight ahead. “Don’t you think it’s
amazingly beautiful?”

“Beautiful?” Helen enquired. It seemed a strange little word, and Hirst
and herself both so small that she forgot to answer him.

Hewet felt that he must speak.

“That’s where the Elizabethans got their style,” he mused, staring into
the profusion of leaves and blossoms and prodigious fruits.

“Shakespeare? I hate Shakespeare!” Mrs. Flushing exclaimed; and Wilfrid
returned admiringly, “I believe you’re the only person who dares to say
that, Alice.” But Mrs. Flushing went on painting. She did not appear to
attach much value to her husband’s compliment, and painted steadily,
sometimes muttering a half-audible word or groan.

The morning was now very hot.

“Look at Hirst!” Mr. Flushing whispered. His sheet of paper had slipped
on to the deck, his head lay back, and he drew a long snoring breath.

Terence picked up the sheet of paper and spread it out before Rachel.
It was a continuation of the poem on God which he had begun in the
chapel, and it was so indecent that Rachel did not understand half of
it although she saw that it was indecent. Hewet began to fill in words
where Hirst had left spaces, but he soon ceased; his pencil rolled on
deck. Gradually they approached nearer and nearer to the bank on the
right-hand side, so that the light which covered them became definitely
green, falling through a shade of green leaves, and Mrs. Flushing set
aside her sketch and stared ahead of her in silence. Hirst woke up;
they were then called to luncheon, and while they ate it, the steamer
came to a standstill a little way out from the bank. The boat which was
towed behind them was brought to the side, and the ladies were helped
into it.

For protection against boredom, Helen put a book of memoirs beneath her
arm, and Mrs. Flushing her paint-box, and, thus equipped, they allowed
themselves to be set on shore on the verge of the forest.

They had not strolled more than a few hundred yards along the track
which ran parallel with the river before Helen professed to find it was
unbearably hot. The river breeze had ceased, and a hot steamy
atmosphere, thick with scents, came from the forest.

“I shall sit down here,” she announced, pointing to the trunk of a tree
which had fallen long ago and was now laced across and across by
creepers and thong-like brambles. She seated herself, opened her
parasol, and looked at the river which was barred by the stems of
trees. She turned her back to the trees which disappeared in black
shadow behind her.

“I quite agree,” said Mrs. Flushing, and proceeded to undo her
paint-box. Her husband strolled about to select an interesting point of
view for her. Hirst cleared a space on the ground by Helen’s side, and
seated himself with great deliberation, as if he did not mean to move
until he had talked to her for a long time. Terence and Rachel were
left standing by themselves without occupation. Terence saw that the
time had come as it was fated to come, but although he realised this he
was completely calm and master of himself. He chose to stand for a few
moments talking to Helen, and persuading her to leave her seat. Rachel
joined him too in advising her to come with them.

“Of all the people I’ve ever met,” he said, “you’re the least
adventurous. You might be sitting on green chairs in Hyde Park. Are you
going to sit there the whole afternoon? Aren’t you going to walk?”

“Oh, no,” said Helen, “one’s only got to use one’s eye. There’s
everything here—everything,” she repeated in a drowsy tone of voice.
“What will you gain by walking?”

“You’ll be hot and disagreeable by tea-time, we shall be cool and
sweet,” put in Hirst. Into his eyes as he looked up at them had come
yellow and green reflections from the sky and the branches, robbing
them of their intentness, and he seemed to think what he did not say.
It was thus taken for granted by them both that Terence and Rachel
proposed to walk into the woods together; with one look at each other
they turned away.

“Good-bye!” cried Rachel.

“Good-by. Beware of snakes,” Hirst replied. He settled himself still
more comfortably under the shade of the fallen tree and Helen’s figure.
As they went, Mr. Flushing called after them, “We must start in an
hour. Hewet, please remember that. An hour.”

Whether made by man, or for some reason preserved by nature, there was
a wide pathway striking through the forest at right angles to the
river. It resembled a drive in an English forest, save that tropical
bushes with their sword-like leaves grew at the side, and the ground
was covered with an unmarked springy moss instead of grass, starred
with little yellow flowers. As they passed into the depths of the
forest the light grew dimmer, and the noises of the ordinary world were
replaced by those creaking and sighing sounds which suggest to the
traveller in a forest that he is walking at the bottom of the sea. The
path narrowed and turned; it was hedged in by dense creepers which
knotted tree to tree, and burst here and there into star-shaped crimson
blossoms. The sighing and creaking up above were broken every now and
then by the jarring cry of some startled animal. The atmosphere was
close and the air came at them in languid puffs of scent. The vast
green light was broken here and there by a round of pure yellow
sunlight which fell through some gap in the immense umbrella of green
above, and in these yellow spaces crimson and black butterflies were
circling and settling. Terence and Rachel hardly spoke.

Not only did the silence weigh upon them, but they were both unable to
frame any thoughts. There was something between them which had to be
spoken of. One of them had to begin, but which of them was it to be?
Then Hewet picked up a red fruit and threw it as high as he could. When
it dropped, he would speak. They heard the flapping of great wings;
they heard the fruit go pattering through the leaves and eventually
fall with a thud. The silence was again profound.

“Does this frighten you?” Terence asked when the sound of the fruit
falling had completely died away.

“No,” she answered. “I like it.”

She repeated “I like it.” She was walking fast, and holding herself
more erect than usual. There was another pause.

“You like being with me?” Terence asked.

“Yes, with you,” she replied.

He was silent for a moment. Silence seemed to have fallen upon the
world.

“That is what I have felt ever since I knew you,” he replied. “We are
happy together.” He did not seem to be speaking, or she to be hearing.

“Very happy,” she answered.

They continued to walk for some time in silence. Their steps
unconsciously quickened.

“We love each other,” Terence said.

“We love each other,” she repeated.

The silence was then broken by their voices which joined in tones of
strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words. Faster and faster they
walked; simultaneously they stopped, clasped each other in their arms,
then releasing themselves, dropped to the earth. They sat side by side.
Sounds stood out from the background making a bridge across their
silence; they heard the swish of the trees and some beast croaking in a
remote world.

“We love each other,” Terence repeated, searching into her face. Their
faces were both very pale and quiet, and they said nothing. He was
afraid to kiss her again. By degrees she drew close to him, and rested
against him. In this position they sat for some time. She said
“Terence” once; he answered “Rachel.”

“Terrible—terrible,” she murmured after another pause, but in saying
this she was thinking as much of the persistent churning of the water
as of her own feeling. On and on it went in the distance, the senseless
and cruel churning of the water. She observed that the tears were
running down Terence’s cheeks.

The next movement was on his part. A very long time seemed to have
passed. He took out his watch.

“Flushing said an hour. We’ve been gone more than half an hour.”

“And it takes that to get back,” said Rachel. She raised herself very
slowly. When she was standing up she stretched her arms and drew a deep
breath, half a sigh, half a yawn. She appeared to be very tired. Her
cheeks were white. “Which way?” she asked.

“There,” said Terence.

They began to walk back down the mossy path again. The sighing and
creaking continued far overhead, and the jarring cries of animals. The
butterflies were circling still in the patches of yellow sunlight. At
first Terence was certain of his way, but as they walked he became
doubtful. They had to stop to consider, and then to return and start
once more, for although he was certain of the direction of the river he
was not certain of striking the point where they had left the others.
Rachel followed him, stopping where he stopped, turning where he
turned, ignorant of the way, ignorant why he stopped or why he turned.

“I don’t want to be late,” he said, “because—” He put a flower into her
hand and her fingers closed upon it quietly. “We’re so late—so late—so
horribly late,” he repeated as if he were talking in his sleep.
“Ah—this is right. We turn here.”

They found themselves again in the broad path, like the drive in the
English forest, where they had started when they left the others. They
walked on in silence as people walking in their sleep, and were oddly
conscious now and again of the mass of their bodies. Then Rachel
exclaimed suddenly, “Helen!”

In the sunny space at the edge of the forest they saw Helen still
sitting on the tree-trunk, her dress showing very white in the sun,
with Hirst still propped on his elbow by her side. They stopped
instinctively. At the sight of other people they could not go on. They
stood hand in hand for a minute or two in silence. They could not bear
to face other people.

“But we must go on,” Rachel insisted at last, in the curious dull tone
of voice in which they had both been speaking, and with a great effort
they forced themselves to cover the short distance which lay between
them and the pair sitting on the tree-trunk.

As they approached, Helen turned round and looked at them. She looked
at them for some time without speaking, and when they were close to her
she said quietly:

“Did you meet Mr. Flushing? He has gone to find you. He thought you
must be lost, though I told him you weren’t lost.”

Hirst half turned round and threw his head back so that he looked at
the branches crossing themselves in the air above him.

“Well, was it worth the effort?” he enquired dreamily.

Hewet sat down on the grass by his side and began to fan himself.

Rachel had balanced herself near Helen on the end of the tree trunk.

“Very hot,” she said.

“You look exhausted anyhow,” said Hirst.

“It’s fearfully close in those trees,” Helen remarked, picking up her
book and shaking it free from the dried blades of grass which had
fallen between the leaves. Then they were all silent, looking at the
river swirling past in front of them between the trunks of the trees
until Mr. Flushing interrupted them. He broke out of the trees a
hundred yards to the left, exclaiming sharply:

“Ah, so you found the way after all. But it’s late—much later than we
arranged, Hewet.”

He was slightly annoyed, and in his capacity as leader of the
expedition, inclined to be dictatorial. He spoke quickly, using
curiously sharp, meaningless words.

“Being late wouldn’t matter normally, of course,” he said, “but when
it’s a question of keeping the men up to time—”

He gathered them together and made them come down to the river-bank,
where the boat was waiting to row them out to the steamer.

The heat of the day was going down, and over their cups of tea the
Flushings tended to become communicative. It seemed to Terence as he
listened to them talking, that existence now went on in two different
layers. Here were the Flushings talking, talking somewhere high up in
the air above him, and he and Rachel had dropped to the bottom of the
world together. But with something of a child’s directness, Mrs.
Flushing had also the instinct which leads a child to suspect what its
elders wish to keep hidden. She fixed Terence with her vivid blue eyes
and addressed herself to him in particular. What would he do, she
wanted to know, if the boat ran upon a rock and sank.

“Would you care for anythin’ but savin’ yourself? Should I? No, no,”
she laughed, “not one scrap—don’t tell me. There’s only two creatures
the ordinary woman cares about,” she continued, “her child and her dog;
and I don’t believe it’s even two with men. One reads a lot about
love—that’s why poetry’s so dull. But what happens in real life, eh? It
ain’t love!” she cried.

Terence murmured something unintelligible. Mr. Flushing, however, had
recovered his urbanity. He was smoking a cigarette, and he now answered
his wife.

“You must always remember, Alice,” he said, “that your upbringing was
very unnatural—unusual, I should say. They had no mother,” he
explained, dropping something of the formality of his tone; “and a
father—he was a very delightful man, I’ve no doubt, but he cared only
for racehorses and Greek statues. Tell them about the bath, Alice.”

“In the stable-yard,” said Mrs. Flushing. “Covered with ice in winter.
We had to get in; if we didn’t, we were whipped. The strong ones
lived—the others died. What you call survival of the fittest—a most
excellent plan, I daresay, if you’ve thirteen children!”

“And all this going on in the heart of England, in the nineteenth
century!” Mr. Flushing exclaimed, turning to Helen.

“I’d treat my children just the same if I had any,” said Mrs. Flushing.

Every word sounded quite distinctly in Terence’s ears; but what were
they saying, and who were they talking to, and who were they, these
fantastic people, detached somewhere high up in the air? Now that they
had drunk their tea, they rose and leant over the bow of the boat. The
sun was going down, and the water was dark and crimson. The river had
widened again, and they were passing a little island set like a dark
wedge in the middle of the stream. Two great white birds with red
lights on them stood there on stilt-like legs, and the beach of the
island was unmarked, save by the skeleton print of birds’ feet. The
branches of the trees on the bank looked more twisted and angular than
ever, and the green of the leaves was lurid and splashed with gold.
Then Hirst began to talk, leaning over the bow.

“It makes one awfully queer, don’t you find?” he complained. “These
trees get on one’s nerves—it’s all so crazy. God’s undoubtedly mad.
What sane person could have conceived a wilderness like this, and
peopled it with apes and alligators? I should go mad if I lived
here—raving mad.”

Terence attempted to answer him, but Mrs. Ambrose replied instead. She
bade him look at the way things massed themselves—look at the amazing
colours, look at the shapes of the trees. She seemed to be protecting
Terence from the approach of the others.

“Yes,” said Mr. Flushing. “And in my opinion,” he continued, “the
absence of population to which Hirst objects is precisely the
significant touch. You must admit, Hirst, that a little Italian town
even would vulgarise the whole scene, would detract from the
vastness—the sense of elemental grandeur.” He swept his hands towards
the forest, and paused for a moment, looking at the great green mass,
which was now falling silent. “I own it makes us seem pretty small—us,
not them.” He nodded his head at a sailor who leant over the side
spitting into the river. “And that, I think, is what my wife feels, the
essential superiority of the peasant—” Under cover of Mr. Flushing’s
words, which continued now gently reasoning with St. John and
persuading him, Terence drew Rachel to the side, pointing ostensibly to
a great gnarled tree-trunk which had fallen and lay half in the water.
He wished, at any rate, to be near her, but he found that he could say
nothing. They could hear Mr. Flushing flowing on, now about his wife,
now about art, now about the future of the country, little meaningless
words floating high in air. As it was becoming cold he began to pace
the deck with Hirst. Fragments of their talk came out distinctly as
they passed—art, emotion, truth, reality.

“Is it true, or is it a dream?” Rachel murmured, when they had passed.

“It’s true, it’s true,” he replied.

But the breeze freshened, and there was a general desire for movement.
When the party rearranged themselves under cover of rugs and cloaks,
Terence and Rachel were at opposite ends of the circle, and could not
speak to each other. But as the dark descended, the words of the others
seemed to curl up and vanish as the ashes of burnt paper, and left them
sitting perfectly silent at the bottom of the world. Occasional starts
of exquisite joy ran through them, and then they were peaceful again.




CHAPTER XXI


Thanks to Mr. Flushing’s discipline, the right stages of the river were
reached at the right hours, and when next morning after breakfast the
chairs were again drawn out in a semicircle in the bow, the launch was
within a few miles of the native camp which was the limit of the
journey. Mr. Flushing, as he sat down, advised them to keep their eyes
fixed on the left bank, where they would soon pass a clearing, and in
that clearing, was a hut where Mackenzie, the famous explorer, had died
of fever some ten years ago, almost within reach of
civilisation—Mackenzie, he repeated, the man who went farther inland
than any one’s been yet. Their eyes turned that way obediently. The
eyes of Rachel saw nothing. Yellow and green shapes did, it is true,
pass before them, but she only knew that one was large and another
small; she did not know that they were trees. These directions to look
here and there irritated her, as interruptions irritate a person
absorbed in thought, although she was not thinking of anything. She was
annoyed with all that was said, and with the aimless movements of
people’s bodies, because they seemed to interfere with her and to
prevent her from speaking to Terence. Very soon Helen saw her staring
moodily at a coil of rope, and making no effort to listen. Mr. Flushing
and St. John were engaged in more or less continuous conversation about
the future of the country from a political point of view, and the
degree to which it had been explored; the others, with their legs
stretched out, or chins poised on the hands, gazed in silence.

Mrs. Ambrose looked and listened obediently enough, but inwardly she
was prey to an uneasy mood not readily to be ascribed to any one cause.
Looking on shore as Mr. Flushing bade her, she thought the country very
beautiful, but also sultry and alarming. She did not like to feel
herself the victim of unclassified emotions, and certainly as the
launch slipped on and on, in the hot morning sun, she felt herself
unreasonably moved. Whether the unfamiliarity of the forest was the
cause of it, or something less definite, she could not determine. Her
mind left the scene and occupied itself with anxieties for Ridley, for
her children, for far-off things, such as old age and poverty and
death. Hirst, too, was depressed. He had been looking forward to this
expedition as to a holiday, for, once away from the hotel, surely
wonderful things would happen, instead of which nothing happened, and
here they were as uncomfortable, as restrained, as self-conscious as
ever. That, of course, was what came of looking forward to anything;
one was always disappointed. He blamed Wilfrid Flushing, who was so
well dressed and so formal; he blamed Hewet and Rachel. Why didn’t they
talk? He looked at them sitting silent and self-absorbed, and the sight
annoyed him. He supposed that they were engaged, or about to become
engaged, but instead of being in the least romantic or exciting, that
was as dull as everything else; it annoyed him, too, to think that they
were in love. He drew close to Helen and began to tell her how
uncomfortable his night had been, lying on the deck, sometimes too hot,
sometimes too cold, and the stars so bright that he couldn’t get to
sleep. He had lain awake all night thinking, and when it was light
enough to see, he had written twenty lines of his poem on God, and the
awful thing was that he’d practically proved the fact that God did not
exist. He did not see that he was teasing her, and he went on to wonder
what would happen if God did exist—“an old gentleman in a beard and a
long blue dressing gown, extremely testy and disagreeable as he’s bound
to be? Can you suggest a rhyme? God, rod, sod—all used; any others?”

Although he spoke much as usual, Helen could have seen, had she looked,
that he was also impatient and disturbed. But she was not called upon
to answer, for Mr. Flushing now exclaimed “There!” They looked at the
hut on the bank, a desolate place with a large rent in the roof, and
the ground round it yellow, scarred with fires and scattered with rusty
open tins.

“Did they find his dead body there?” Mrs. Flushing exclaimed, leaning
forward in her eagerness to see the spot where the explorer had died.

“They found his body and his skins and a notebook,” her husband
replied. But the boat had soon carried them on and left the place
behind.

It was so hot that they scarcely moved, except now to change a foot,
or, again, to strike a match. Their eyes, concentrated upon the bank,
were full of the same green reflections, and their lips were slightly
pressed together as though the sights they were passing gave rise to
thoughts, save that Hirst’s lips moved intermittently as half
consciously he sought rhymes for God. Whatever the thoughts of the
others, no one said anything for a considerable space. They had grown
so accustomed to the wall of trees on either side that they looked up
with a start when the light suddenly widened out and the trees came to
an end.

“It almost reminds one of an English park,” said Mr. Flushing.

Indeed no change could have been greater. On both banks of the river
lay an open lawn-like space, grass covered and planted, for the
gentleness and order of the place suggested human care, with graceful
trees on the top of little mounds. As far as they could gaze, this lawn
rose and sank with the undulating motion of an old English park. The
change of scene naturally suggested a change of position, grateful to
most of them. They rose and leant over the rail.

“It might be Arundel or Windsor,” Mr. Flushing continued, “if you cut
down that bush with the yellow flowers; and, by Jove, look!”

Rows of brown backs paused for a moment and then leapt with a motion as
if they were springing over waves out of sight. For a moment no one of
them could believe that they had really seen live animals in the open—a
herd of wild deer, and the sight aroused a childlike excitement in
them, dissipating their gloom.

“I’ve never in my life seen anything bigger than a hare!” Hirst
exclaimed with genuine excitement. “What an ass I was not to bring my
Kodak!”

Soon afterwards the launch came gradually to a standstill, and the
captain explained to Mr. Flushing that it would be pleasant for the
passengers if they now went for a stroll on shore; if they chose to
return within an hour, he would take them on to the village; if they
chose to walk—it was only a mile or two farther on—he would meet them
at the landing-place.

The matter being settled, they were once more put on shore: the
sailors, producing raisins and tobacco, leant upon the rail and watched
the six English, whose coats and dresses looked so strange upon the
green, wander off. A joke that was by no means proper set them all
laughing, and then they turned round and lay at their ease upon the
deck.

Directly they landed, Terence and Rachel drew together slightly in
advance of the others.

“Thank God!” Terence exclaimed, drawing a long breath. “At last we’re
alone.”

“And if we keep ahead we can talk,” said Rachel.

Nevertheless, although their position some yards in advance of the
others made it possible for them to say anything they chose, they were
both silent.

“You love me?” Terence asked at length, breaking the silence painfully.
To speak or to be silent was equally an effort, for when they were
silent they were keenly conscious of each other’s presence, and yet
words were either too trivial or too large.

She murmured inarticulately, ending, “And you?”

“Yes, yes,” he replied; but there were so many things to be said, and
now that they were alone it seemed necessary to bring themselves still
more near, and to surmount a barrier which had grown up since they had
last spoken. It was difficult, frightening even, oddly embarrassing. At
one moment he was clear-sighted, and, at the next, confused.

“Now I’m going to begin at the beginning,” he said resolutely. “I’m
going to tell you what I ought to have told you before. In the first
place, I’ve never been in love with other women, but I’ve had other
women. Then I’ve great faults. I’m very lazy, I’m moody—” He persisted,
in spite of her exclamation, “You’ve got to know the worst of me. I’m
lustful. I’m overcome by a sense of futility—incompetence. I ought
never to have asked you to marry me, I expect. I’m a bit of a snob; I’m
ambitious—”

“Oh, our faults!” she cried. “What do they matter?” Then she demanded,
“Am I in love—is this being in love—are we to marry each other?”

Overcome by the charm of her voice and her presence, he exclaimed, “Oh,
you’re free, Rachel. To you, time will make no difference, or marriage
or—”

The voices of the others behind them kept floating, now farther, now
nearer, and Mrs. Flushing’s laugh rose clearly by itself.

“Marriage?” Rachel repeated.

The shouts were renewed behind, warning them that they were bearing too
far to the left. Improving their course, he continued, “Yes, marriage.”
The feeling that they could not be united until she knew all about him
made him again endeavour to explain.

“All that’s been bad in me, the things I’ve put up with—the second
best—”

She murmured, considered her own life, but could not describe how it
looked to her now.

“And the loneliness!” he continued. A vision of walking with her
through the streets of London came before his eyes. “We will go for
walks together,” he said. The simplicity of the idea relieved them, and
for the first time they laughed. They would have liked had they dared
to take each other by the hand, but the consciousness of eyes fixed on
them from behind had not yet deserted them.

“Books, people, sights—Mrs. Nutt, Greeley, Hutchinson,” Hewet murmured.

With every word the mist which had enveloped them, making them seem
unreal to each other, since the previous afternoon melted a little
further, and their contact became more and more natural. Up through the
sultry southern landscape they saw the world they knew appear clearer
and more vividly than it had ever appeared before. As upon that
occasion at the hotel when she had sat in the window, the world once
more arranged itself beneath her gaze very vividly and in its true
proportions. She glanced curiously at Terence from time to time,
observing his grey coat and his purple tie; observing the man with whom
she was to spend the rest of her life.

After one of these glances she murmured, “Yes, I’m in love. There’s no
doubt; I’m in love with you.”

Nevertheless, they remained uncomfortably apart; drawn so close
together, as she spoke, that there seemed no division between them, and
the next moment separate and far away again. Feeling this painfully,
she exclaimed, “It will be a fight.”

But as she looked at him she perceived from the shape of his eyes, the
lines about his mouth, and other peculiarities that he pleased her, and
she added:

“Where I want to fight, you have compassion. You’re finer than I am;
you’re much finer.”

He returned her glance and smiled, perceiving, much as she had done,
the very small individual things about her which made her delightful to
him. She was his for ever. This barrier being surmounted, innumerable
delights lay before them both.

“I’m not finer,” he answered. “I’m only older, lazier; a man, not a
woman.”

“A man,” she repeated, and a curious sense of possession coming over
her, it struck her that she might now touch him; she put out her hand
and lightly touched his cheek. His fingers followed where hers had
been, and the touch of his hand upon his face brought back the
overpowering sense of unreality. This body of his was unreal; the whole
world was unreal.

“What’s happened?” he began. “Why did I ask you to marry me? How did it
happen?”

“Did you ask me to marry you?” she wondered. They faded far away from
each other, and neither of them could remember what had been said.

“We sat upon the ground,” he recollected.

“We sat upon the ground,” she confirmed him. The recollection of
sitting upon the ground, such as it was, seemed to unite them again,
and they walked on in silence, their minds sometimes working with
difficulty and sometimes ceasing to work, their eyes alone perceiving
the things round them. Now he would attempt again to tell her his
faults, and why he loved her; and she would describe what she had felt
at this time or at that time, and together they would interpret her
feeling. So beautiful was the sound of their voices that by degrees
they scarcely listened to the words they framed. Long silences came
between their words, which were no longer silences of struggle and
confusion but refreshing silences, in which trivial thoughts moved
easily. They began to speak naturally of ordinary things, of the
flowers and the trees, how they grew there so red, like garden flowers
at home, and there bent and crooked like the arm of a twisted old man.

Very gently and quietly, almost as if it were the blood singing in her
veins, or the water of the stream running over stones, Rachel became
conscious of a new feeling within her. She wondered for a moment what
it was, and then said to herself, with a little surprise at recognising
in her own person so famous a thing:

“This is happiness, I suppose.” And aloud to Terence she spoke, “This
is happiness.”

On the heels of her words he answered, “This is happiness,” upon which
they guessed that the feeling had sprung in both of them the same time.
They began therefore to describe how this felt and that felt, how like
it was and yet how different; for they were very different.

Voices crying behind them never reached through the waters in which
they were now sunk. The repetition of Hewet’s name in short, dissevered
syllables was to them the crack of a dry branch or the laughter of a
bird. The grasses and breezes sounding and murmuring all round them,
they never noticed that the swishing of the grasses grew louder and
louder, and did not cease with the lapse of the breeze. A hand dropped
abrupt as iron on Rachel’s shoulder; it might have been a bolt from
heaven. She fell beneath it, and the grass whipped across her eyes and
filled her mouth and ears. Through the waving stems she saw a figure,
large and shapeless against the sky. Helen was upon her. Rolled this
way and that, now seeing only forests of green, and now the high blue
heaven; she was speechless and almost without sense. At last she lay
still, all the grasses shaken round her and before her by her panting.
Over her loomed two great heads, the heads of a man and woman, of
Terence and Helen.

Both were flushed, both laughing, and the lips were moving; they came
together and kissed in the air above her. Broken fragments of speech
came down to her on the ground. She thought she heard them speak of
love and then of marriage. Raising herself and sitting up, she too
realised Helen’s soft body, the strong and hospitable arms, and
happiness swelling and breaking in one vast wave. When this fell away,
and the grasses once more lay low, and the sky became horizontal, and
the earth rolled out flat on each side, and the trees stood upright,
she was the first to perceive a little row of human figures standing
patiently in the distance. For the moment she could not remember who
they were.

“Who are they?” she asked, and then recollected.

Falling into line behind Mr. Flushing, they were careful to leave at
least three yards’ distance between the toe of his boot and the rim of
her skirt.

He led them across a stretch of green by the river-bank and then
through a grove of trees, and bade them remark the signs of human
habitation, the blackened grass, the charred tree-stumps, and there,
through the trees, strange wooden nests, drawn together in an arch
where the trees drew apart, the village which was the goal of their
journey.

Stepping cautiously, they observed the women, who were squatting on the
ground in triangular shapes, moving their hands, either plaiting straw
or in kneading something in bowls. But when they had looked for a
moment undiscovered, they were seen, and Mr. Flushing, advancing into
the centre of the clearing, was engaged in talk with a lean majestic
man, whose bones and hollows at once made the shapes of the
Englishman’s body appear ugly and unnatural. The women took no notice
of the strangers, except that their hands paused for a moment and their
long narrow eyes slid round and fixed upon them with the motionless
inexpressive gaze of those removed from each other far far beyond the
plunge of speech. Their hands moved again, but the stare continued. It
followed them as they walked, as they peered into the huts where they
could distinguish guns leaning in the corner, and bowls upon the floor,
and stacks of rushes; in the dusk the solemn eyes of babies regarded
them, and old women stared out too. As they sauntered about, the stare
followed them, passing over their legs, their bodies, their heads,
curiously not without hostility, like the crawl of a winter fly. As she
drew apart her shawl and uncovered her breast to the lips of her baby,
the eyes of a woman never left their faces, although they moved
uneasily under her stare, and finally turned away, rather than stand
there looking at her any longer. When sweetmeats were offered them,
they put out great red hands to take them, and felt themselves treading
cumbrously like tight-coated soldiers among these soft instinctive
people. But soon the life of the village took no notice of them; they
had become absorbed in it. The women’s hands became busy again with the
straw; their eyes dropped. If they moved, it was to fetch something
from the hut, or to catch a straying child, or to cross the space with
a jar balanced on their heads; if they spoke, it was to cry some harsh
unintelligible cry. Voices rose when a child was beaten, and fell
again; voices rose in song, which slid up a little way and down a
little way, and settled again upon the same low and melancholy note.
Seeking each other, Terence and Rachel drew together under a tree.
Peaceful, and even beautiful at first, the sight of the women, who had
given up looking at them, made them now feel very cold and melancholy.

“Well,” Terence sighed at length, “it makes us seem insignificant,
doesn’t it?”

Rachel agreed. So it would go on for ever and ever, she said, those
women sitting under the trees, the trees and the river. They turned
away and began to walk through the trees, leaning, without fear of
discovery, upon each other’s arms. They had not gone far before they
began to assure each other once more that they were in love, were
happy, were content; but why was it so painful being in love, why was
there so much pain in happiness?

The sight of the village indeed affected them all curiously though all
differently. St. John had left the others and was walking slowly down
to the river, absorbed in his own thoughts, which were bitter and
unhappy, for he felt himself alone; and Helen, standing by herself in
the sunny space among the native women, was exposed to presentiments of
disaster. The cries of the senseless beasts rang in her ears high and
low in the air, as they ran from tree-trunk to tree-top. How small the
little figures looked wandering through the trees! She became acutely
conscious of the little limbs, the thin veins, the delicate flesh of
men and women, which breaks so easily and lets the life escape compared
with these great trees and deep waters. A falling branch, a foot that
slips, and the earth has crushed them or the water drowned them. Thus
thinking, she kept her eyes anxiously fixed upon the lovers, as if by
doing so she could protect them from their fate. Turning, she found the
Flushings by her side.

They were talking about the things they had bought and arguing whether
they were really old, and whether there were not signs here and there
of European influence. Helen was appealed to. She was made to look at a
brooch, and then at a pair of ear-rings. But all the time she blamed
them for having come on this expedition, for having ventured too far
and exposed themselves. Then she roused herself and tried to talk, but
in a few moments she caught herself seeing a picture of a boat upset on
the river in England, at midday. It was morbid, she knew, to imagine
such things; nevertheless she sought out the figures of the others
between the trees, and whenever she saw them she kept her eyes fixed on
them, so that she might be able to protect them from disaster.

But when the sun went down and the steamer turned and began to steam
back towards civilisation, again her fears were calmed. In the
semi-darkness the chairs on deck and the people sitting in them were
angular shapes, the mouth being indicated by a tiny burning spot, and
the arm by the same spot moving up or down as the cigar or cigarette
was lifted to and from the lips. Words crossed the darkness, but, not
knowing where they fell, seemed to lack energy and substance. Deep
sighs proceeded regularly, although with some attempt at suppression,
from the large white mound which represented the person of Mrs.
Flushing. The day had been long and very hot, and now that all the
colours were blotted out the cool night air seemed to press soft
fingers upon the eyelids, sealing them down. Some philosophical remark
directed, apparently, at St. John Hirst missed its aim, and hung so
long suspended in the air until it was engulfed by a yawn, that it was
considered dead, and this gave the signal for stirring of legs and
murmurs about sleep. The white mound moved, finally lengthened itself
and disappeared, and after a few turns and paces St. John and Mr.
Flushing withdrew, leaving the three chairs still occupied by three
silent bodies. The light which came from a lamp high on the mast and a
sky pale with stars left them with shapes but without features; but
even in this darkness the withdrawal of the others made them feel each
other very near, for they were all thinking of the same thing. For some
time no one spoke, then Helen said with a sigh, “So you’re both very
happy?”

As if washed by the air her voice sounded more spiritual and softer
than usual. Voices at a little distance answered her, “Yes.”

Through the darkness she was looking at them both, and trying to
distinguish him. What was there for her to say? Rachel had passed
beyond her guardianship. A voice might reach her ears, but never again
would it carry as far as it had carried twenty-four hours ago.
Nevertheless, speech seemed to be due from her before she went to bed.
She wished to speak, but she felt strangely old and depressed.

“D’you realise what you’re doing?” she demanded. “She’s young, you’re
both young; and marriage—” Here she ceased. They begged her, however,
to continue, with such earnestness in their voices, as if they only
craved advice, that she was led to add:

“Marriage! well, it’s not easy.”

“That’s what we want to know,” they answered, and she guessed that now
they were looking at each other.

“It depends on both of you,” she stated. Her face was turned towards
Terence, and although he could hardly see her, he believed that her
words really covered a genuine desire to know more about him. He raised
himself from his semi-recumbent position and proceeded to tell her what
she wanted to know. He spoke as lightly as he could in order to take
away her depression.

“I’m twenty-seven, and I’ve about seven hundred a year,” he began. “My
temper is good on the whole, and health excellent, though Hirst detects
a gouty tendency. Well, then, I think I’m very intelligent.” He paused
as if for confirmation.

Helen agreed.

“Though, unfortunately, rather lazy. I intend to allow Rachel to be a
fool if she wants to, and—Do you find me on the whole satisfactory in
other respects?” he asked shyly.

“Yes, I like what I know of you,” Helen replied. “But then—one knows so
little.”

“We shall live in London,” he continued, “and—” With one voice they
suddenly enquired whether she did not think them the happiest people
that she had ever known.

“Hush,” she checked them, “Mrs. Flushing, remember. She’s behind us.”

Then they fell silent, and Terence and Rachel felt instinctively that
their happiness had made her sad, and, while they were anxious to go on
talking about themselves, they did not like to.

“We’ve talked too much about ourselves,” Terence said. “Tell us—”

“Yes, tell us—” Rachel echoed. They were both in the mood to believe
that every one was capable of saying something very profound.

“What can I tell you?” Helen reflected, speaking more to herself in a
rambling style than as a prophetess delivering a message. She forced
herself to speak.

“After all, though I scold Rachel, I’m not much wiser myself. I’m
older, of course, I’m half-way through, and you’re just beginning. It’s
puzzling—sometimes, I think, disappointing; the great things aren’t as
great, perhaps, as one expects—but it’s interesting—Oh, yes, you’re
certain to find it interesting—And so it goes on,” they became
conscious here of the procession of dark trees into which, as far as
they could see, Helen was now looking, “and there are pleasures where
one doesn’t expect them (you must write to your father), and you’ll be
very happy, I’ve no doubt. But I must go to bed, and if you are
sensible you will follow in ten minutes, and so,” she rose and stood
before them, almost featureless and very large, “Good-night.” She
passed behind the curtain.

After sitting in silence for the greater part of the ten minutes she
allowed them, they rose and hung over the rail. Beneath them the smooth
black water slipped away very fast and silently. The spark of a
cigarette vanished behind them. “A beautiful voice,” Terence murmured.

Rachel assented. Helen had a beautiful voice.

After a silence she asked, looking up into the sky, “Are we on the deck
of a steamer on a river in South America? Am I Rachel, are you
Terence?”

The great black world lay round them. As they were drawn smoothly along
it seemed possessed of immense thickness and endurance. They could
discern pointed tree-tops and blunt rounded tree-tops. Raising their
eyes above the trees, they fixed them on the stars and the pale border
of sky above the trees. The little points of frosty light infinitely
far away drew their eyes and held them fixed, so that it seemed as if
they stayed a long time and fell a great distance when once more they
realised their hands grasping the rail and their separate bodies
standing side by side.

“You’d forgotten completely about me,” Terence reproached her, taking
her arm and beginning to pace the deck, “and I never forget you.”

“Oh, no,” she whispered, she had not forgotten, only the stars—the
night—the dark—

“You’re like a bird half asleep in its nest, Rachel. You’re asleep.
You’re talking in your sleep.”

Half asleep, and murmuring broken words, they stood in the angle made
by the bow of the boat. It slipped on down the river. Now a bell struck
on the bridge, and they heard the lapping of water as it rippled away
on either side, and once a bird startled in its sleep creaked, flew on
to the next tree, and was silent again. The darkness poured down
profusely, and left them with scarcely any feeling of life, except that
they were standing there together in the darkness.




CHAPTER XXII


The darkness fell, but rose again, and as each day spread widely over
the earth and parted them from the strange day in the forest when they
had been forced to tell each other what they wanted, this wish of
theirs was revealed to other people, and in the process became slightly
strange to themselves. Apparently it was not anything unusual that had
happened; it was that they had become engaged to marry each other. The
world, which consisted for the most part of the hotel and the villa,
expressed itself glad on the whole that two people should marry, and
allowed them to see that they were not expected to take part in the
work which has to be done in order that the world shall go on, but
might absent themselves for a time. They were accordingly left alone
until they felt the silence as if, playing in a vast church, the door
had been shut on them. They were driven to walk alone, and sit alone,
to visit secret places where the flowers had never been picked and the
trees were solitary. In solitude they could express those beautiful but
too vast desires which were so oddly uncomfortable to the ears of other
men and women—desires for a world, such as their own world which
contained two people seemed to them to be, where people knew each other
intimately and thus judged each other by what was good, and never
quarrelled, because that was waste of time.

They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun, or
sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed. They were no longer
embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning which could not express
itself; they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers down a
twisting river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner is turned;
the unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable, and in many
ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious, for it was refreshingly
solid, and called out effort, and effort under such circumstances was
not effort but delight.

While Rachel played the piano, Terence sat near her, engaged, as far as
the occasional writing of a word in pencil testified, in shaping the
world as it appeared to him now that he and Rachel were going to be
married. It was different certainly. The book called _Silence_ would
not now be the same book that it would have been. He would then put
down his pencil and stare in front of him, and wonder in what respects
the world was different—it had, perhaps, more solidity, more coherence,
more importance, greater depth. Why, even the earth sometimes seemed to
him very deep; not carved into hills and cities and fields, but heaped
in great masses. He would look out of the window for ten minutes at a
time; but no, he did not care for the earth swept of human beings. He
liked human beings—he liked them, he suspected, better than Rachel did.
There she was, swaying enthusiastically over her music, quite forgetful
of him,—but he liked that quality in her. He liked the impersonality
which it produced in her. At last, having written down a series of
little sentences, with notes of interrogation attached to them, he
observed aloud, “‘Women—under the heading Women I’ve written:

“‘Not really vainer than men. Lack of self-confidence at the base of
most serious faults. Dislike of own sex traditional, or founded on
fact? Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an optimist, because
they don’t think.’ What do you say, Rachel?” He paused with his pencil
in his hand and a sheet of paper on his knee.

Rachel said nothing. Up and up the steep spiral of a very late
Beethoven sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined
staircase, energetically at first, then more laboriously advancing her
feet with effort until she could go no higher and returned with a run
to begin at the very bottom again.

“‘Again, it’s the fashion now to say that women are more practical and
less idealistic than men, also that they have considerable organising
ability but no sense of honour’—query, what is meant by masculine term,
honour?—what corresponds to it in your sex? Eh?”

Attacking her staircase once more, Rachel again neglected this
opportunity of revealing the secrets of her sex. She had, indeed,
advanced so far in the pursuit of wisdom that she allowed these secrets
to rest undisturbed; it seemed to be reserved for a later generation to
discuss them philosophically.

Crashing down a final chord with her left hand, she exclaimed at last,
swinging round upon him:

“No, Terence, it’s no good; here am I, the best musician in South
America, not to speak of Europe and Asia, and I can’t play a note
because of you in the room interrupting me every other second.”

“You don’t seem to realise that that’s what I’ve been aiming at for the
last half-hour,” he remarked. “I’ve no objection to nice simple
tunes—indeed, I find them very helpful to my literary composition, but
that kind of thing is merely like an unfortunate old dog going round on
its hind legs in the rain.”

He began turning over the little sheets of note-paper which were
scattered on the table, conveying the congratulations of their friends.

“‘—all possible wishes for all possible happiness,’” he read; “correct,
but not very vivid, are they?”

“They’re sheer nonsense!” Rachel exclaimed. “Think of words compared
with sounds!” she continued. “Think of novels and plays and histories—”
Perched on the edge of the table, she stirred the red and yellow
volumes contemptuously. She seemed to herself to be in a position where
she could despise all human learning. Terence looked at them too.

“God, Rachel, you do read trash!” he exclaimed. “And you’re behind the
times too, my dear. No one dreams of reading this kind of thing
now—antiquated problem plays, harrowing descriptions of life in the
east end—oh, no, we’ve exploded all that. Read poetry, Rachel, poetry,
poetry, poetry!”

Picking up one of the books, he began to read aloud, his intention
being to satirise the short sharp bark of the writer’s English; but she
paid no attention, and after an interval of meditation exclaimed:

“Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed entirely
of vast blocks of matter, and that we’re nothing but patches of light—”
she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering over the carpet and up the
wall—“like that?”

“No,” said Terence, “I feel solid; immensely solid; the legs of my
chair might be rooted in the bowels of the earth. But at Cambridge, I
can remember, there were times when one fell into ridiculous states of
semi-coma about five o’clock in the morning. Hirst does now, I
expect—oh, no, Hirst wouldn’t.”

Rachel continued, “The day your note came, asking us to go on the
picnic, I was sitting where you’re sitting now, thinking that; I wonder
if I could think that again? I wonder if the world’s changed? and if
so, when it’ll stop changing, and which is the real world?”

“When I first saw you,” he began, “I thought you were like a creature
who’d lived all its life among pearls and old bones. Your hands were
wet, d’you remember, and you never said a word until I gave you a bit
of bread, and then you said, ‘Human Beings!’”

“And I thought you—a prig,” she recollected. “No; that’s not quite it.
There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I thought you and St.
John were like those ants—very big, very ugly, very energetic, with all
your virtues on your backs. However, when I talked to you I liked you—”

“You fell in love with me,” he corrected her. “You were in love with me
all the time, only you didn’t know it.”

“No, I never fell in love with you,” she asserted.

“Rachel—what a lie—didn’t you sit here looking at my window—didn’t you
wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun—?”

“No,” she repeated, “I never fell in love, if falling in love is what
people say it is, and it’s the world that tells the lies and I tell the
truth. Oh, what lies—what lies!”

She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from Mr.
Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington. It
was strange, considering how very different these people were, that
they used almost the same sentences when they wrote to congratulate her
upon her engagement.

That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever
feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they
were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church service had
done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done; and if they
didn’t feel a thing why did they go and pretend to? The simplicity and
arrogance and hardness of her youth, now concentrated into a single
spark as it was by her love of him, puzzled Terence; being engaged had
not that effect on him; the world was different, but not in that way;
he still wanted the things he had always wanted, and in particular he
wanted the companionship of other people more than ever perhaps. He
took the letters out of her hand, and protested:

“Of course they’re absurd, Rachel; of course they say things just
because other people say them, but even so, what a nice woman Miss
Allan is; you can’t deny that; and Mrs. Thornbury too; she’s got too
many children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone to the
bad instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees—hasn’t she
a kind of beauty—of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say? Isn’t
she rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river
going on and on and on? By the way, Ralph’s been made governor of the
Carroway Islands—the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn’t
it?”

But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast majority of
the affairs of the world went on unconnected by a single thread with
her own destiny.

“I won’t have eleven children,” she asserted; “I won’t have the eyes of
an old woman. She looks at one up and down, up and down, as if one were
a horse.”

“We must have a son and we must have a daughter,” said Terence, putting
down the letters, “because, let alone the inestimable advantage of
being our children, they’d be so well brought up.” They went on to
sketch an outline of the ideal education—how their daughter should be
required from infancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard painted
blue, to suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too
practical; and their son—he should be taught to laugh at great men,
that is, at distinguished successful men, at men who wore ribands and
rose to the tops of their trees. He should in no way resemble (Rachel
added) St. John Hirst.

At this Terence professed the greatest admiration for St. John Hirst.
Dwelling upon his good qualities he became seriously convinced of them;
he had a mind like a torpedo, he declared, aimed at falsehood. Where
should we all be without him and his like? Choked in weeds; Christians,
bigots,—why, Rachel herself, would be a slave with a fan to sing songs
to men when they felt drowsy.

“But you’ll never see it!” he exclaimed; “because with all your virtues
you don’t, and you never will, care with every fibre of your being for
the pursuit of truth! You’ve no respect for facts, Rachel; you’re
essentially feminine.” She did not trouble to deny it, nor did she
think good to produce the one unanswerable argument against the merits
which Terence admired. St. John Hirst said that she was in love with
him; she would never forgive that; but the argument was not one to
appeal to a man.

“But I like him,” she said, and she thought to herself that she also
pitied him, as one pities those unfortunate people who are outside the
warm mysterious globe full of changes and miracles in which we
ourselves move about; she thought that it must be very dull to be St.
John Hirst.

She summed up what she felt about him by saying that she would not kiss
him supposing he wished it, which was not likely.

As if some apology were due to Hirst for the kiss which she then
bestowed upon him, Terence protested:

“And compared with Hirst I’m a perfect Zany.”

The clock here struck twelve instead of eleven.

“We’re wasting the morning—I ought to be writing my book, and you ought
to be answering these.”

“We’ve only got twenty-one whole mornings left,” said Rachel. “And my
father’ll be here in a day or two.”

However, she drew a pen and paper towards her and began to write
laboriously,

“My dear Evelyn—”

Terence, meanwhile, read a novel which some one else had written, a
process which he found essential to the composition of his own. For a
considerable time nothing was to be heard but the ticking of the clock
and the fitful scratch of Rachel’s pen, as she produced phrases which
bore a considerable likeness to those which she had condemned. She was
struck by it herself, for she stopped writing and looked up; looked at
Terence deep in the arm-chair, looked at the different pieces of
furniture, at her bed in the corner, at the window-pane which showed
the branches of a tree filled in with sky, heard the clock ticking, and
was amazed at the gulf which lay between all that and her sheet of
paper. Would there ever be a time when the world was one and
indivisible? Even with Terence himself—how far apart they could be, how
little she knew what was passing in his brain now! She then finished
her sentence, which was awkward and ugly, and stated that they were
“both very happy, and going to be married in the autumn probably and
hope to live in London, where we hope you will come and see us when we
get back.” Choosing “affectionately,” after some further speculation,
rather than sincerely, she signed the letter and was doggedly beginning
on another when Terence remarked, quoting from his book:

“Listen to this, Rachel. ‘It is probable that Hugh’ (he’s the hero, a
literary man), ‘had not realised at the time of his marriage, any more
than the young man of parts and imagination usually does realise, the
nature of the gulf which separates the needs and desires of the male
from the needs and desires of the female. . . . At first they had been
very happy. The walking tour in Switzerland had been a time of jolly
companionship and stimulating revelations for both of them. Betty had
proved herself the ideal comrade. . . . They had shouted _Love in the
Valley_ to each other across the snowy slopes of the Riffelhorn’ (and
so on, and so on—I’ll skip the descriptions). . . . ‘But in London,
after the boy’s birth, all was changed. Betty was an admirable mother;
but it did not take her long to find out that motherhood, as that
function is understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did
not absorb the whole of her energies. She was young and strong, with
healthy limbs and a body and brain that called urgently for exercise. .
. .’ (In short she began to give tea-parties.) . . . ‘Coming in late
from this singular talk with old Bob Murphy in his smoky, book-lined
room, where the two men had each unloosened his soul to the other, with
the sound of the traffic humming in his ears, and the foggy London sky
slung tragically across his mind . . . he found women’s hats dotted
about among his papers. Women’s wraps and absurd little feminine shoes
and umbrellas were in the hall. . . . Then the bills began to come in.
. . . He tried to speak frankly to her. He found her lying on the great
polar-bear skin in their bedroom, half-undressed, for they were dining
with the Greens in Wilton Crescent, the ruddy firelight making the
diamonds wink and twinkle on her bare arms and in the delicious curve
of her breast—a vision of adorable femininity. He forgave her all.’
(Well, this goes from bad to worse, and finally about fifty pages
later, Hugh takes a week-end ticket to Swanage and ‘has it out with
himself on the downs above Corfe.’ . . . Here there’s fifteen pages or
so which we’ll skip. The conclusion is . . .) ‘They were different.
Perhaps, in the far future, when generations of men had struggled and
failed as he must now struggle and fail, woman would be, indeed, what
she now made a pretence of being—the friend and companion—not the enemy
and parasite of man.’

“The end of it is, you see, Hugh went back to his wife, poor fellow. It
was his duty, as a married man. Lord, Rachel,” he concluded, “will it
be like that when we’re married?”

Instead of answering him she asked,

“Why don’t people write about the things they do feel?”

“Ah, that’s the difficulty!” he sighed, tossing the book away.

“Well, then, what will it be like when we’re married? What are the
things people do feel?”

She seemed doubtful.

“Sit on the floor and let me look at you,” he commanded. Resting her
chin on his knee, she looked straight at him.

He examined her curiously.

“You’re not beautiful,” he began, “but I like your face. I like the way
your hair grows down in a point, and your eyes too—they never see
anything. Your mouth’s too big, and your cheeks would be better if they
had more colour in them. But what I like about your face is that it
makes one wonder what the devil you’re thinking about—it makes me want
to do that—” He clenched his fist and shook it so near her that she
started back, “because now you look as if you’d blow my brains out.
There are moments,” he continued, “when, if we stood on a rock
together, you’d throw me into the sea.”

Hypnotised by the force of his eyes in hers, she repeated, “If we stood
on a rock together—”

To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven
about the roots of the world—the idea was incoherently delightful. She
sprang up, and began moving about the room, bending and thrusting aside
the chairs and tables as if she were indeed striking through the
waters. He watched her with pleasure; she seemed to be cleaving a
passage for herself, and dealing triumphantly with the obstacles which
would hinder their passage through life.

“It does seem possible!” he exclaimed, “though I’ve always thought it
the most unlikely thing in the world—I shall be in love with you all my
life, and our marriage will be the most exciting thing that’s ever been
done! We’ll never have a moment’s peace—” He caught her in his arms as
she passed him, and they fought for mastery, imagining a rock, and the
sea heaving beneath them. At last she was thrown to the floor, where
she lay gasping, and crying for mercy.

“I’m a mermaid! I can swim,” she cried, “so the game’s up.” Her dress
was torn across, and peace being established, she fetched a needle and
thread and began to mend the tear.

“And now,” she said, “be quiet and tell me about the world; tell me
about everything that’s ever happened, and I’ll tell you—let me see,
what can I tell you?—I’ll tell you about Miss Montgomerie and the river
party. She was left, you see, with one foot in the boat, and the other
on shore.”

They had spent much time already in thus filling out for the other the
course of their past lives, and the characters of their friends and
relations, so that very soon Terence knew not only what Rachel’s aunts
might be expected to say upon every occasion, but also how their
bedrooms were furnished, and what kind of bonnets they wore. He could
sustain a conversation between Mrs. Hunt and Rachel, and carry on a
tea-party including the Rev. William Johnson and Miss Macquoid, the
Christian Scientists, with remarkable likeness to the truth. But he had
known many more people, and was far more highly skilled in the art of
narrative than Rachel was, whose experiences were, for the most part,
of a curiously childlike and humorous kind, so that it generally fell
to her lot to listen and ask questions.

He told her not only what had happened, but what he had thought and
felt, and sketched for her portraits which fascinated her of what other
men and women might be supposed to be thinking and feeling, so that she
became very anxious to go back to England, which was full of people,
where she could merely stand in the streets and look at them. According
to him, too, there was an order, a pattern which made life reasonable,
or if that word was foolish, made it of deep interest anyhow, for
sometimes it seemed possible to understand why things happened as they
did. Nor were people so solitary and uncommunicative as she believed.
She should look for vanity—for vanity was a common quality—first in
herself, and then in Helen, in Ridley, in St. John, they all had their
share of it—and she would find it in ten people out of every twelve she
met; and once linked together by one such tie she would find them not
separate and formidable, but practically indistinguishable, and she
would come to love them when she found that they were like herself.

If she denied this, she must defend her belief that human beings were
as various as the beasts at the Zoo, which had stripes and manes, and
horns and humps; and so, wrestling over the entire list of their
acquaintances, and diverging into anecdote and theory and speculation,
they came to know each other. The hours passed quickly, and seemed to
them full to leaking-point. After a night’s solitude they were always
ready to begin again.

The virtues which Mrs. Ambrose had once believed to exist in free talk
between men and women did in truth exist for both of them, although not
quite in the measure she prescribed. Far more than upon the nature of
sex they dwelt upon the nature of poetry, but it was true that talk
which had no boundaries deepened and enlarged the strangely small
bright view of a girl. In return for what he could tell her she brought
him such curiosity and sensitiveness of perception, that he was led to
doubt whether any gift bestowed by much reading and living was quite
the equal of that for pleasure and pain. What would experience give her
after all, except a kind of ridiculous formal balance, like that of a
drilled dog in the street? He looked at her face and wondered how it
would look in twenty years’ time, when the eyes had dulled, and the
forehead wore those little persistent wrinkles which seem to show that
the middle-aged are facing something hard which the young do not see?
What would the hard thing be for them, he wondered? Then his thoughts
turned to their life in England.

The thought of England was delightful, for together they would see the
old things freshly; it would be England in June, and there would be
June nights in the country; and the nightingales singing in the lanes,
into which they could steal when the room grew hot; and there would be
English meadows gleaming with water and set with stolid cows, and
clouds dipping low and trailing across the green hills. As he sat in
the room with her, he wished very often to be back again in the thick
of life, doing things with Rachel.

He crossed to the window and exclaimed, “Lord, how good it is to think
of lanes, muddy lanes, with brambles and nettles, you know, and real
grass fields, and farmyards with pigs and cows, and men walking beside
carts with pitchforks—there’s nothing to compare with that here—look at
the stony red earth, and the bright blue sea, and the glaring white
houses—how tired one gets of it! And the air, without a stain or a
wrinkle. I’d give anything for a sea mist.”

Rachel, too, had been thinking of the English country: the flat land
rolling away to the sea, and the woods and the long straight roads,
where one can walk for miles without seeing any one, and the great
church towers and the curious houses clustered in the valleys, and the
birds, and the dusk, and the rain falling against the windows.

“But London, London’s the place,” Terence continued. They looked
together at the carpet, as though London itself were to be seen there
lying on the floor, with all its spires and pinnacles pricking through
the smoke.

“On the whole, what I should like best at this moment,” Terence
pondered, “would be to find myself walking down Kingsway, by those big
placards, you know, and turning into the Strand. Perhaps I might go and
look over Waterloo Bridge for a moment. Then I’d go along the Strand
past the shops with all the new books in them, and through the little
archway into the Temple. I always like the quiet after the uproar. You
hear your own footsteps suddenly quite loud. The Temple’s very
pleasant. I think I should go and see if I could find dear old
Hodgkin—the man who writes books about Van Eyck, you know. When I left
England he was very sad about his tame magpie. He suspected that a man
had poisoned it. And then Russell lives on the next staircase. I think
you’d like him. He’s a passion for Handel. Well, Rachel,” he concluded,
dismissing the vision of London, “we shall be doing that together in
six weeks’ time, and it’ll be the middle of June then—and June in
London—my God! how pleasant it all is!”

“And we’re certain to have it too,” she said. “It isn’t as if we were
expecting a great deal—only to walk about and look at things.”

“Only a thousand a year and perfect freedom,” he replied. “How many
people in London d’you think have that?”

“And now you’ve spoilt it,” she complained. “Now we’ve got to think of
the horrors.” She looked grudgingly at the novel which had once caused
her perhaps an hour’s discomfort, so that she had never opened it
again, but kept it on her table, and looked at it occasionally, as some
medieval monk kept a skull, or a crucifix to remind him of the frailty
of the body.

“Is it true, Terence,” she demanded, “that women die with bugs crawling
across their faces?”

“I think it’s very probable,” he said. “But you must admit, Rachel,
that we so seldom think of anything but ourselves that an occasional
twinge is really rather pleasant.”

Accusing him of an affection of cynicism which was just as bad as
sentimentality itself, she left her position by his side and knelt upon
the window sill, twisting the curtain tassels between her fingers. A
vague sense of dissatisfaction filled her.

“What’s so detestable in this country,” she exclaimed, “is the
blue—always blue sky and blue sea. It’s like a curtain—all the things
one wants are on the other side of that. I want to know what’s going on
behind it. I hate these divisions, don’t you, Terence? One person all
in the dark about another person. Now I liked the Dalloways,” she
continued, “and they’re gone. I shall never see them again. Just by
going on a ship we cut ourselves off entirely from the rest of the
world. I want to see England there—London there—all sorts of people—why
shouldn’t one? why should one be shut up all by oneself in a room?”

While she spoke thus half to herself and with increasing vagueness,
because her eye was caught by a ship that had just come into the bay,
she did not see that Terence had ceased to stare contentedly in front
of him, and was looking at her keenly and with dissatisfaction. She
seemed to be able to cut herself adrift from him, and to pass away to
unknown places where she had no need of him. The thought roused his
jealousy.

“I sometimes think you’re not in love with me and never will be,” he
said energetically. She started and turned round at his words.

“I don’t satisfy you in the way you satisfy me,” he continued. “There’s
something I can’t get hold of in you. You don’t want me as I want
you—you’re always wanting something else.”

He began pacing up and down the room.

“Perhaps I ask too much,” he went on. “Perhaps it isn’t really possible
to have what I want. Men and women are too different. You can’t
understand—you don’t understand—”

He came up to where she stood looking at him in silence.

It seemed to her now that what he was saying was perfectly true, and
that she wanted many more things than the love of one human being—the
sea, the sky. She turned again and looked at the distant blue, which
was so smooth and serene where the sky met the sea; she could not
possibly want only one human being.

“Or is it only this damnable engagement?” he continued. “Let’s be
married here, before we go back—or is it too great a risk? Are we sure
we want to marry each other?”

They began pacing up and down the room, but although they came very
near each other in their pacing, they took care not to touch each
other. The hopelessness of their position overcame them both. They were
impotent; they could never love each other sufficiently to overcome all
these barriers, and they could never be satisfied with less. Realising
this with intolerable keenness she stopped in front of him and
exclaimed:

“Let’s break it off, then.”

The words did more to unite them than any amount of argument. As if
they stood on the edge of a precipice they clung together. They knew
that they could not separate; painful and terrible it might be, but
they were joined for ever. They lapsed into silence, and after a time
crept together in silence. Merely to be so close soothed them, and
sitting side by side the divisions disappeared, and it seemed as if the
world were once more solid and entire, and as if, in some strange way,
they had grown larger and stronger.

It was long before they moved, and when they moved it was with great
reluctance. They stood together in front of the looking-glass, and with
a brush tried to make themselves look as if they had been feeling
nothing all the morning, neither pain nor happiness. But it chilled
them to see themselves in the glass, for instead of being vast and
indivisible they were really very small and separate, the size of the
glass leaving a large space for the reflection of other things.




CHAPTER XXIII


But no brush was able to efface completely the expression of happiness,
so that Mrs. Ambrose could not treat them when they came downstairs as
if they had spent the morning in a way that could be discussed
naturally. This being so, she joined in the world’s conspiracy to
consider them for the time incapacitated from the business of life,
struck by their intensity of feeling into enmity against life, and
almost succeeded in dismissing them from her thoughts.

She reflected that she had done all that it was necessary to do in
practical matters. She had written a great many letters, and had
obtained Willoughby’s consent. She had dwelt so often upon Mr. Hewet’s
prospects, his profession, his birth, appearance, and temperament, that
she had almost forgotten what he was really like. When she refreshed
herself by a look at him, she used to wonder again what he was like,
and then, concluding that they were happy at any rate, thought no more
about it.

She might more profitably consider what would happen in three years’
time, or what might have happened if Rachel had been left to explore
the world under her father’s guidance. The result, she was honest
enough to own, might have been better—who knows? She did not disguise
from herself that Terence had faults. She was inclined to think him too
easy and tolerant, just as he was inclined to think her perhaps a
trifle hard—no, it was rather that she was uncompromising. In some ways
she found St. John preferable; but then, of course, he would never have
suited Rachel. Her friendship with St. John was established, for
although she fluctuated between irritation and interest in a way that
did credit to the candour of her disposition, she liked his company on
the whole. He took her outside this little world of love and emotion.
He had a grasp of facts. Supposing, for instance, that England made a
sudden move towards some unknown port on the coast of Morocco, St. John
knew what was at the back of it, and to hear him engaged with her
husband in argument about finance and the balance of power, gave her an
odd sense of stability. She respected their arguments without always
listening to them, much as she respected a solid brick wall, or one of
those immense municipal buildings which, although they compose the
greater part of our cities, have been built day after day and year
after year by unknown hands. She liked to sit and listen, and even felt
a little elated when the engaged couple, after showing their profound
lack of interest, slipped from the room, and were seen pulling flowers
to pieces in the garden. It was not that she was jealous of them, but
she did undoubtedly envy them their great unknown future that lay
before them. Slipping from one such thought to another, she was at the
dining-room with fruit in her hands. Sometimes she stopped to
straighten a candle stooping with the heat, or disturbed some too rigid
arrangement of the chairs. She had reason to suspect that Chailey had
been balancing herself on the top of a ladder with a wet duster during
their absence, and the room had never been quite like itself since.
Returning from the dining-room for the third time, she perceived that
one of the arm-chairs was now occupied by St. John. He lay back in it,
with his eyes half shut, looking, as he always did, curiously buttoned
up in a neat grey suit and fenced against the exuberance of a foreign
climate which might at any moment proceed to take liberties with him.
Her eyes rested on him gently and then passed on over his head. Finally
she took the chair opposite.

“I didn’t want to come here,” he said at last, “but I was positively
driven to it. . . . Evelyn M.,” he groaned.

He sat up, and began to explain with mock solemnity how the detestable
woman was set upon marrying him.

“She pursues me about the place. This morning she appeared in the
smoking-room. All I could do was to seize my hat and fly. I didn’t want
to come, but I couldn’t stay and face another meal with her.”

“Well, we must make the best of it,” Helen replied philosophically. It
was very hot, and they were indifferent to any amount of silence, so
that they lay back in their chairs waiting for something to happen. The
bell rang for luncheon, but there was no sound of movement in the
house. Was there any news? Helen asked; anything in the papers? St.
John shook his head. O yes, he had a letter from home, a letter from
his mother, describing the suicide of the parlour-maid. She was called
Susan Jane, and she came into the kitchen one afternoon, and said that
she wanted cook to keep her money for her; she had twenty pounds in
gold. Then she went out to buy herself a hat. She came in at half-past
five and said that she had taken poison. They had only just time to get
her into bed and call a doctor before she died.

“Well?” Helen enquired.

“There’ll have to be an inquest,” said St. John.

Why had she done it? He shrugged his shoulders. Why do people kill
themselves? Why do the lower orders do any of the things they do do?
Nobody knows. They sat in silence.

“The bell’s run fifteen minutes and they’re not down,” said Helen at
length.

When they appeared, St. John explained why it had been necessary for
him to come to luncheon. He imitated Evelyn’s enthusiastic tone as she
confronted him in the smoking-room. “She thinks there can be nothing
_quite_ so thrilling as mathematics, so I’ve lent her a large work in
two volumes. It’ll be interesting to see what she makes of it.”

Rachel could now afford to laugh at him. She reminded him of Gibbon;
she had the first volume somewhere still; if he were undertaking the
education of Evelyn, that surely was the test; or she had heard that
Burke, upon the American Rebellion—Evelyn ought to read them both
simultaneously. When St. John had disposed of her argument and had
satisfied his hunger, he proceeded to tell them that the hotel was
seething with scandals, some of the most appalling kind, which had
happened in their absence; he was indeed much given to the study of his
kind.

“Evelyn M., for example—but that was told me in confidence.”

“Nonsense!” Terence interposed.

“You’ve heard about poor Sinclair, too?”

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard about Sinclair. He’s retired to his mine with a
revolver. He writes to Evelyn daily that he’s thinking of committing
suicide. I’ve assured her that he’s never been so happy in his life,
and, on the whole, she’s inclined to agree with me.”

“But then she’s entangled herself with Perrott,” St. John continued;
“and I have reason to think, from something I saw in the passage, that
everything isn’t as it should be between Arthur and Susan. There’s a
young female lately arrived from Manchester. A very good thing if it
were broken off, in my opinion. Their married life is something too
horrible to contemplate. Oh, and I distinctly heard old Mrs. Paley
rapping out the most fearful oaths as I passed her bedroom door. It’s
supposed that she tortures her maid in private—it’s practically certain
she does. One can tell it from the look in her eyes.”

“When you’re eighty and the gout tweezes you, you’ll be swearing like a
trooper,” Terence remarked. “You’ll be very fat, very testy, very
disagreeable. Can’t you imagine him—bald as a coot, with a pair of
sponge-bag trousers, a little spotted tie, and a corporation?”

After a pause Hirst remarked that the worst infamy had still to be
told. He addressed himself to Helen.

“They’ve hoofed out the prostitute. One night while we were away that
old numskull Thornbury was doddering about the passages very late.
(Nobody seems to have asked him what _he_ was up to.) He saw the
Signora Lola Mendoza, as she calls herself, cross the passage in her
nightgown. He communicated his suspicions next morning to Elliot, with
the result that Rodriguez went to the woman and gave her twenty-four
hours in which to clear out of the place. No one seems to have enquired
into the truth of the story, or to have asked Thornbury and Elliot what
business it was of theirs; they had it entirely their own way. I
propose that we should all sign a Round Robin, go to Rodriguez in a
body, and insist upon a full enquiry. Something’s got to be done, don’t
you agree?”

Hewet remarked that there could be no doubt as to the lady’s
profession.

“Still,” he added, “it’s a great shame, poor woman; only I don’t see
what’s to be done—”

“I quite agree with you, St. John,” Helen burst out. “It’s monstrous.
The hypocritical smugness of the English makes my blood boil. A man
who’s made a fortune in trade as Mr. Thornbury has is bound to be twice
as bad as any prostitute.”

She respected St. John’s morality, which she took far more seriously
than any one else did, and now entered into a discussion with him as to
the steps that were to be taken to enforce their peculiar view of what
was right. The argument led to some profoundly gloomy statements of a
general nature. Who were they, after all—what authority had they—what
power against the mass of superstition and ignorance? It was the
English, of course; there must be something wrong in the English blood.
Directly you met an English person, of the middle classes, you were
conscious of an indefinable sensation of loathing; directly you saw the
brown crescent of houses above Dover, the same thing came over you. But
unfortunately St. John added, you couldn’t trust these foreigners—

They were interrupted by sounds of strife at the further end of the
table. Rachel appealed to her aunt.

“Terence says we must go to tea with Mrs. Thornbury because she’s been
so kind, but I don’t see it; in fact, I’d rather have my right hand
sawn in pieces—just imagine! the eyes of all those women!”

“Fiddlesticks, Rachel,” Terence replied. “Who wants to look at you?
You’re consumed with vanity! You’re a monster of conceit! Surely,
Helen, you ought to have taught her by this time that she’s a person of
no conceivable importance whatever—not beautiful, or well dressed, or
conspicuous for elegance or intellect, or deportment. A more ordinary
sight than you are,” he concluded, “except for the tear across your
dress has never been seen. However, stay at home if you want to. I’m
going.”

She appealed again to her aunt. It wasn’t the being looked at, she
explained, but the things people were sure to say. The women in
particular. She liked women, but where emotion was concerned they were
as flies on a lump of sugar. They would be certain to ask her
questions. Evelyn M. would say: “Are you in love? Is it nice being in
love?” And Mrs. Thornbury—her eyes would go up and down, up and
down—she shuddered at the thought of it. Indeed, the retirement of
their life since their engagement had made her so sensitive, that she
was not exaggerating her case.

She found an ally in Helen, who proceeded to expound her views of the
human race, as she regarded with complacency the pyramid of variegated
fruits in the centre of the table. It wasn’t that they were cruel, or
meant to hurt, or even stupid exactly; but she had always found that
the ordinary person had so little emotion in his own life that the
scent of it in the lives of others was like the scent of blood in the
nostrils of a bloodhound. Warming to the theme, she continued:

“Directly anything happens—it may be a marriage, or a birth, or a
death—on the whole they prefer it to be a death—every one wants to see
you. They insist upon seeing you. They’ve got nothing to say; they
don’t care a rap for you; but you’ve got to go to lunch or to tea or to
dinner, and if you don’t you’re damned. It’s the smell of blood,” she
continued; “I don’t blame ’em; only they shan’t have mine if I know
it!”

She looked about her as if she had called up a legion of human beings,
all hostile and all disagreeable, who encircled the table, with mouths
gaping for blood, and made it appear a little island of neutral country
in the midst of the enemy’s country.

Her words roused her husband, who had been muttering rhythmically to
himself, surveying his guests and his food and his wife with eyes that
were now melancholy and now fierce, according to the fortunes of the
lady in his ballad. He cut Helen short with a protest. He hated even
the semblance of cynicism in women. “Nonsense, nonsense,” he remarked
abruptly.

Terence and Rachel glanced at each other across the table, which meant
that when they were married they would not behave like that. The
entrance of Ridley into the conversation had a strange effect. It
became at once more formal and more polite. It would have been
impossible to talk quite easily of anything that came into their heads,
and to say the word prostitute as simply as any other word. The talk
now turned upon literature and politics, and Ridley told stories of the
distinguished people he had known in his youth. Such talk was of the
nature of an art, and the personalities and informalities of the young
were silenced. As they rose to go, Helen stopped for a moment, leaning
her elbows on the table.

“You’ve all been sitting here,” she said, “for almost an hour, and you
haven’t noticed my figs, or my flowers, or the way the light comes
through, or anything. I haven’t been listening, because I’ve been
looking at you. You looked very beautiful; I wish you’d go on sitting
for ever.”

She led the way to the drawing-room, where she took up her embroidery,
and began again to dissuade Terence from walking down to the hotel in
this heat. But the more she dissuaded, the more he was determined to
go. He became irritated and obstinate. There were moments when they
almost disliked each other. He wanted other people; he wanted Rachel,
to see them with him. He suspected that Mrs. Ambrose would now try to
dissuade her from going. He was annoyed by all this space and shade and
beauty, and Hirst, recumbent, drooping a magazine from his wrist.

“I’m going,” he repeated. “Rachel needn’t come unless she wants to.”

“If you go, Hewet, I wish you’d make enquiries about the prostitute,”
said Hirst. “Look here,” he added, “I’ll walk half the way with you.”

Greatly to their surprise he raised himself, looked at his watch, and
remarked that, as it was now half an hour since luncheon, the gastric
juices had had sufficient time to secrete; he was trying a system, he
explained, which involved short spells of exercise interspaced by
longer intervals of rest.

“I shall be back at four,” he remarked to Helen, “when I shall lie down
on the sofa and relax all my muscles completely.”

“So you’re going, Rachel?” Helen asked. “You won’t stay with me?”

She smiled, but she might have been sad.

Was she sad, or was she really laughing? Rachel could not tell, and she
felt for the moment very uncomfortable between Helen and Terence. Then
she turned away, saying merely that she would go with Terence, on
condition that he did all the talking.

A narrow border of shadow ran along the road, which was broad enough
for two, but not broad enough for three. St. John therefore dropped a
little behind the pair, and the distance between them increased by
degrees. Walking with a view to digestion, and with one eye upon his
watch, he looked from time to time at the pair in front of him. They
seemed to be so happy, so intimate, although they were walking side by
side much as other people walk. They turned slightly toward each other
now and then, and said something which he thought must be something
very private. They were really disputing about Helen’s character, and
Terence was trying to explain why it was that she annoyed him so much
sometimes. But St. John thought that they were saying things which they
did not want him to hear, and was led to think of his own isolation.
These people were happy, and in some ways he despised them for being
made happy so simply, and in other ways he envied them. He was much
more remarkable than they were, but he was not happy. People never
liked him; he doubted sometimes whether even Helen liked him. To be
simple, to be able to say simply what one felt, without the terrific
self-consciousness which possessed him, and showed him his own face and
words perpetually in a mirror, that would be worth almost any other
gift, for it made one happy. Happiness, happiness, what was happiness?
He was never happy. He saw too clearly the little vices and deceits and
flaws of life, and, seeing them, it seemed to him honest to take notice
of them. That was the reason, no doubt, why people generally disliked
him, and complained that he was heartless and bitter. Certainly they
never told him the things he wanted to be told, that he was nice and
kind, and that they liked him. But it was true that half the sharp
things that he said about them were said because he was unhappy or hurt
himself. But he admitted that he had very seldom told any one that he
cared for them, and when he had been demonstrative, he had generally
regretted it afterwards. His feelings about Terence and Rachel were so
complicated that he had never yet been able to bring himself to say
that he was glad that they were going to be married. He saw their
faults so clearly, and the inferior nature of a great deal of their
feeling for each other, and he expected that their love would not last.
He looked at them again, and, very strangely, for he was so used to
thinking that he seldom saw anything, the look of them filled him with
a simple emotion of affection in which there were some traces of pity
also. What, after all, did people’s faults matter in comparison with
what was good in them? He resolved that he would now tell them what he
felt. He quickened his pace and came up with them just as they reached
the corner where the lane joined the main road. They stood still and
began to laugh at him, and to ask him whether the gastric juices—but he
stopped them and began to speak very quickly and stiffly.

“D’you remember the morning after the dance?” he demanded. “It was here
we sat, and you talked nonsense, and Rachel made little heaps of
stones. I, on the other hand, had the whole meaning of life revealed to
me in a flash.” He paused for a second, and drew his lips together in a
tight little purse. “Love,” he said. “It seems to me to explain
everything. So, on the whole, I’m very glad that you two are going to
be married.” He then turned round abruptly, without looking at them,
and walked back to the villa. He felt both exalted and ashamed of
himself for having thus said what he felt. Probably they were laughing
at him, probably they thought him a fool, and, after all, had he really
said what he felt?

It was true that they laughed when he was gone; but the dispute about
Helen which had become rather sharp, ceased, and they became peaceful
and friendly.




CHAPTER XXIV


They reached the hotel rather early in the afternoon, so that most
people were still lying down, or sitting speechless in their bedrooms,
and Mrs. Thornbury, although she had asked them to tea, was nowhere to
be seen. They sat down, therefore, in the shady hall, which was almost
empty, and full of the light swishing sounds of air going to and fro in
a large empty space. Yes, this arm-chair was the same arm-chair in
which Rachel had sat that afternoon when Evelyn came up, and this was
the magazine she had been looking at, and this the very picture, a
picture of New York by lamplight. How odd it seemed—nothing had
changed.

By degrees a certain number of people began to come down the stairs and
to pass through the hall, and in this dim light their figures possessed
a sort of grace and beauty, although they were all unknown people.
Sometimes they went straight through and out into the garden by the
swing door, sometimes they stopped for a few minutes and bent over the
tables and began turning over the newspapers. Terence and Rachel sat
watching them through their half-closed eyelids—the Johnsons, the
Parkers, the Baileys, the Simmons’, the Lees, the Morleys, the
Campbells, the Gardiners. Some were dressed in white flannels and were
carrying racquets under their arms, some were short, some tall, some
were only children, and some perhaps were servants, but they all had
their standing, their reason for following each other through the hall,
their money, their position, whatever it might be. Terence soon gave up
looking at them, for he was tired; and, closing his eyes, he fell half
asleep in his chair. Rachel watched the people for some time longer;
she was fascinated by the certainty and the grace of their movements,
and by the inevitable way in which they seemed to follow each other,
and loiter and pass on and disappear. But after a time her thoughts
wandered, and she began to think of the dance, which had been held in
this room, only then the room itself looked quite different. Glancing
round, she could hardly believe that it was the same room. It had
looked so bare and so bright and formal on that night when they came
into it out of the darkness; it had been filled, too, with little red,
excited faces, always moving, and people so brightly dressed and so
animated that they did not seem in the least like real people, nor did
you feel that you could talk to them. And now the room was dim and
quiet, and beautiful silent people passed through it, to whom you could
go and say anything you liked. She felt herself amazingly secure as she
sat in her arm-chair, and able to review not only the night of the
dance, but the entire past, tenderly and humorously, as if she had been
turning in a fog for a long time, and could now see exactly where she
had turned. For the methods by which she had reached her present
position, seemed to her very strange, and the strangest thing about
them was that she had not known where they were leading her. That was
the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what
one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always
unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another
and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one
reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this
process that people called living. Perhaps, then, every one really knew
as she knew now where they were going; and things formed themselves
into a pattern not only for her, but for them, and in that pattern lay
satisfaction and meaning. When she looked back she could see that a
meaning of some kind was apparent in the lives of her aunts, and in the
brief visit of the Dalloways whom she would never see again, and in the
life of her father.

The sound of Terence, breathing deep in his slumber, confirmed her in
her calm. She was not sleepy although she did not see anything very
distinctly, but although the figures passing through the hall became
vaguer and vaguer, she believed that they all knew exactly where they
were going, and the sense of their certainty filled her with comfort.
For the moment she was as detached and disinterested as if she had no
longer any lot in life, and she thought that she could now accept
anything that came to her without being perplexed by the form in which
it appeared. What was there to frighten or to perplex in the prospect
of life? Why should this insight ever again desert her? The world was
in truth so large, so hospitable, and after all it was so simple.
“Love,” St. John had said, “that seems to explain it all.” Yes, but it
was not the love of man for woman, of Terence for Rachel. Although they
sat so close together, they had ceased to be little separate bodies;
they had ceased to struggle and desire one another. There seemed to be
peace between them. It might be love, but it was not the love of man
for woman.

Through her half-closed eyelids she watched Terence lying back in his
chair, and she smiled as she saw how big his mouth was, and his chin so
small, and his nose curved like a switchback with a knob at the end.
Naturally, looking like that he was lazy, and ambitious, and full of
moods and faults. She remembered their quarrels, and in particular how
they had been quarreling about Helen that very afternoon, and she
thought how often they would quarrel in the thirty, or forty, or fifty
years in which they would be living in the same house together,
catching trains together, and getting annoyed because they were so
different. But all this was superficial, and had nothing to do with the
life that went on beneath the eyes and the mouth and the chin, for that
life was independent of her, and independent of everything else. So
too, although she was going to marry him and to live with him for
thirty, or forty, or fifty years, and to quarrel, and to be so close to
him, she was independent of him; she was independent of everything
else. Nevertheless, as St. John said, it was love that made her
understand this, for she had never felt this independence, this calm,
and this certainty until she fell in love with him, and perhaps this
too was love. She wanted nothing else.

For perhaps two minutes Miss Allan had been standing at a little
distance looking at the couple lying back so peacefully in their
arm-chairs. She could not make up her mind whether to disturb them or
not, and then, seeming to recollect something, she came across the
hall. The sound of her approach woke Terence, who sat up and rubbed his
eyes. He heard Miss Allan talking to Rachel.

“Well,” she was saying, “this is very nice. It is very nice indeed.
Getting engaged seems to be quite the fashion. It cannot often happen
that two couples who have never seen each other before meet in the same
hotel and decide to get married.” Then she paused and smiled, and
seemed to have nothing more to say, so that Terence rose and asked her
whether it was true that she had finished her book. Some one had said
that she had really finished it. Her face lit up; she turned to him
with a livelier expression than usual.

“Yes, I think I can fairly say I have finished it,” she said. “That is,
omitting Swinburne—Beowulf to Browning—I rather like the two B’s
myself. Beowulf to Browning,” she repeated, “I think that is the kind
of title which might catch one’s eye on a railway book-stall.”

She was indeed very proud that she had finished her book, for no one
knew what an amount of determination had gone to the making of it. Also
she thought that it was a good piece of work, and, considering what
anxiety she had been in about her brother while she wrote it, she could
not resist telling them a little more about it.

“I must confess,” she continued, “that if I had known how many classics
there are in English literature, and how verbose the best of them
contrive to be, I should never have undertaken the work. They only
allow one seventy thousand words, you see.”

“Only seventy thousand words!” Terence exclaimed.

“Yes, and one has to say something about everybody,” Miss Allan added.
“That is what I find so difficult, saying something different about
everybody.” Then she thought that she had said enough about herself,
and she asked whether they had come down to join the tennis tournament.
“The young people are very keen about it. It begins again in half an
hour.”

Her gaze rested benevolently upon them both, and, after a momentary
pause, she remarked, looking at Rachel as if she had remembered
something that would serve to keep her distinct from other people.

“You’re the remarkable person who doesn’t like ginger.” But the
kindness of the smile in her rather worn and courageous face made them
feel that although she would scarcely remember them as individuals, she
had laid upon them the burden of the new generation.

“And in that I quite agree with her,” said a voice behind; Mrs.
Thornbury had overheard the last few words about not liking ginger.
“It’s associated in my mind with a horrid old aunt of ours (poor thing,
she suffered dreadfully, so it isn’t fair to call her horrid) who used
to give it to us when we were small, and we never had the courage to
tell her we didn’t like it. We just had to put it out in the
shrubbery—she had a big house near Bath.”

They began moving slowly across the hall, when they were stopped by the
impact of Evelyn, who dashed into them, as though in running downstairs
to catch them her legs had got beyond her control.

“Well,” she exclaimed, with her usual enthusiasm, seizing Rachel by the
arm, “I call this splendid! I guessed it was going to happen from the
very beginning! I saw you two were made for each other. Now you’ve just
got to tell me all about it—when’s it to be, where are you going to
live—are you both tremendously happy?”

But the attention of the group was diverted to Mrs. Elliot, who was
passing them with her eager but uncertain movement, carrying in her
hands a plate and an empty hot-water bottle. She would have passed
them, but Mrs. Thornbury went up and stopped her.

“Thank you, Hughling’s better,” she replied, in answer to Mrs.
Thornbury’s enquiry, “but he’s not an easy patient. He wants to know
what his temperature is, and if I tell him he gets anxious, and if I
don’t tell him he suspects. You know what men are when they’re ill! And
of course there are none of the proper appliances, and, though he seems
very willing and anxious to help” (here she lowered her voice
mysteriously), “one can’t feel that Dr. Rodriguez is the same as a
proper doctor. If you would come and see him, Mr. Hewet,” she added, “I
know it would cheer him up—lying there in bed all day—and the flies—But
I must go and find Angelo—the food here—of course, with an invalid, one
wants things particularly nice.” And she hurried past them in search of
the head waiter. The worry of nursing her husband had fixed a plaintive
frown upon her forehead; she was pale and looked unhappy and more than
usually inefficient, and her eyes wandered more vaguely than ever from
point to point.

“Poor thing!” Mrs. Thornbury exclaimed. She told them that for some
days Hughling Elliot had been ill, and the only doctor available was
the brother of the proprietor, or so the proprietor said, whose right
to the title of doctor was not above suspicion.

“I know how wretched it is to be ill in a hotel,” Mrs. Thornbury
remarked, once more leading the way with Rachel to the garden. “I spent
six weeks on my honeymoon in having typhoid at Venice,” she continued.
“But even so, I look back upon them as some of the happiest weeks in my
life. Ah, yes,” she said, taking Rachel’s arm, “you think yourself
happy now, but it’s nothing to the happiness that comes afterwards. And
I assure you I could find it in my heart to envy you young people!
You’ve a much better time than we had, I may tell you. When I look back
upon it, I can hardly believe how things have changed. When we were
engaged I wasn’t allowed to go for walks with William alone—some one
had always to be in the room with us—I really believe I had to show my
parents all his letters!—though they were very fond of him too. Indeed,
I may say they looked upon him as their own son. It amuses me,” she
continued, “to think how strict they were to us, when I see how they
spoil their grand-children!”

The table was laid under the tree again, and taking her place before
the teacups, Mrs. Thornbury beckoned and nodded until she had collected
quite a number of people, Susan and Arthur and Mr. Pepper, who were
strolling about, waiting for the tournament to begin. A murmuring tree,
a river brimming in the moonlight, Terence’s words came back to Rachel
as she sat drinking the tea and listening to the words which flowed on
so lightly, so kindly, and with such silvery smoothness. This long life
and all these children had left her very smooth; they seemed to have
rubbed away the marks of individuality, and to have left only what was
old and maternal.

“And the things you young people are going to see!” Mrs. Thornbury
continued. She included them all in her forecast, she included them all
in her maternity, although the party comprised William Pepper and Miss
Allan, both of whom might have been supposed to have seen a fair share
of the panorama. “When I see how the world has changed in my lifetime,”
she went on, “I can set no limit to what may happen in the next fifty
years. Ah, no, Mr. Pepper, I don’t agree with you in the least,” she
laughed, interrupting his gloomy remark about things going steadily
from bad to worse. “I know I ought to feel that, but I don’t, I’m
afraid. They’re going to be much better people than we were. Surely
everything goes to prove that. All round me I see women, young women,
women with household cares of every sort, going out and doing things
that we should not have thought it possible to do.”

Mr. Pepper thought her sentimental and irrational like all old women,
but her manner of treating him as if he were a cross old baby baffled
him and charmed him, and he could only reply to her with a curious
grimace which was more a smile than a frown.

“And they remain women,” Mrs. Thornbury added. “They give a great deal
to their children.”

As she said this she smiled slightly in the direction of Susan and
Rachel. They did not like to be included in the same lot, but they both
smiled a little self-consciously, and Arthur and Terence glanced at
each other too. She made them feel that they were all in the same boat
together, and they looked at the women they were going to marry and
compared them. It was inexplicable how any one could wish to marry
Rachel, incredible that any one should be ready to spend his life with
Susan; but singular though the other’s taste must be, they bore each
other no ill-will on account of it; indeed, they liked each other
rather the better for the eccentricity of their choice.

“I really must congratulate you,” Susan remarked, as she leant across
the table for the jam.

There seemed to be no foundation for St. John’s gossip about Arthur and
Susan. Sunburnt and vigorous they sat side by side, with their racquets
across their knees, not saying much but smiling slightly all the time.
Through the thin white clothes which they wore, it was possible to see
the lines of their bodies and legs, the beautiful curves of their
muscles, his leanness and her flesh, and it was natural to think of the
firm-fleshed sturdy children that would be theirs. Their faces had too
little shape in them to be beautiful, but they had clear eyes and an
appearance of great health and power of endurance, for it seemed as if
the blood would never cease to run in his veins, or to lie deeply and
calmly in her cheeks. Their eyes at the present moment were brighter
than usual, and wore the peculiar expression of pleasure and
self-confidence which is seen in the eyes of athletes, for they had
been playing tennis, and they were both first-rate at the game.

Evelyn had not spoken, but she had been looking from Susan to Rachel.
Well—they had both made up their minds very easily, they had done in a
very few weeks what it sometimes seemed to her that she would never be
able to do. Although they were so different, she thought that she could
see in each the same look of satisfaction and completion, the same
calmness of manner, and the same slowness of movement. It was that
slowness, that confidence, that content which she hated, she thought to
herself. They moved so slowly because they were not single but double,
and Susan was attached to Arthur, and Rachel to Terence, and for the
sake of this one man they had renounced all other men, and movement,
and the real things of life. Love was all very well, and those snug
domestic houses, with the kitchen below and the nursery above, which
were so secluded and self-contained, like little islands in the
torrents of the world; but the real things were surely the things that
happened, the causes, the wars, the ideals, which happened in the great
world outside, and went so independently of these women, turning so
quietly and beautifully towards the men. She looked at them sharply. Of
course they were happy and content, but there must be better things
than that. Surely one could get nearer to life, one could get more out
of life, one could enjoy more and feel more than they would ever do.
Rachel in particular looked so young—what could she know of life? She
became restless, and getting up, crossed over to sit beside Rachel. She
reminded her that she had promised to join her club.

“The bother is,” she went on, “that I mayn’t be able to start work
seriously till October. I’ve just had a letter from a friend of mine
whose brother is in business in Moscow. They want me to stay with them,
and as they’re in the thick of all the conspiracies and anarchists,
I’ve a good mind to stop on my way home. It sounds too thrilling.” She
wanted to make Rachel see how thrilling it was. “My friend knows a girl
of fifteen who’s been sent to Siberia for life merely because they
caught her addressing a letter to an anarchist. And the letter wasn’t
from her, either. I’d give all I have in the world to help on a
revolution against the Russian government, and it’s bound to come.”

She looked from Rachel to Terence. They were both a little touched by
the sight of her remembering how lately they had been listening to evil
words about her, and Terence asked her what her scheme was, and she
explained that she was going to found a club—a club for doing things,
really doing them. She became very animated, as she talked on and on,
for she professed herself certain that if once twenty people—no, ten
would be enough if they were keen—set about doing things instead of
talking about doing them, they could abolish almost every evil that
exists. It was brains that were needed. If only people with brains—of
course they would want a room, a nice room, in Bloomsbury preferably,
where they could meet once a week. . . .

As she talked Terence could see the traces of fading youth in her face,
the lines that were being drawn by talk and excitement round her mouth
and eyes, but he did not pity her; looking into those bright, rather
hard, and very courageous eyes, he saw that she did not pity herself,
or feel any desire to exchange her own life for the more refined and
orderly lives of people like himself and St. John, although, as the
years went by, the fight would become harder and harder. Perhaps,
though, she would settle down; perhaps, after all, she would marry
Perrott. While his mind was half occupied with what she was saying, he
thought of her probable destiny, the light clouds of tobacco smoke
serving to obscure his face from her eyes.

Terence smoked and Arthur smoked and Evelyn smoked, so that the air was
full of the mist and fragrance of good tobacco. In the intervals when
no one spoke, they heard far off the low murmur of the sea, as the
waves quietly broke and spread the beach with a film of water, and
withdrew to break again. The cool green light fell through the leaves
of the tree, and there were soft crescents and diamonds of sunshine
upon the plates and the tablecloth. Mrs. Thornbury, after watching them
all for a time in silence, began to ask Rachel kindly questions—When
did they all go back? Oh, they expected her father. She must want to
see her father—there would be a great deal to tell him, and (she looked
sympathetically at Terence) he would be so happy, she felt sure. Years
ago, she continued, it might have been ten or twenty years ago, she
remembered meeting Mr. Vinrace at a party, and, being so much struck by
his face, which was so unlike the ordinary face one sees at a party,
that she had asked who he was, and she was told that it was Mr.
Vinrace, and she had always remembered the name,—an uncommon name,—and
he had a lady with him, a very sweet-looking woman, but it was one of
those dreadful London crushes, where you don’t talk,—you only look at
each other,—and although she had shaken hands with Mr. Vinrace, she
didn’t think they had said anything. She sighed very slightly,
remembering the past.

Then she turned to Mr. Pepper, who had become very dependent on her, so
that he always chose a seat near her, and attended to what she was
saying, although he did not often make any remark of his own.

“You who know everything, Mr. Pepper,” she said, “tell us how did those
wonderful French ladies manage their salons? Did we ever do anything of
the same kind in England, or do you think that there is some reason why
we cannot do it in England?”

Mr. Pepper was pleased to explain very accurately why there has never
been an English salon. There were three reasons, and they were very
good ones, he said. As for himself, when he went to a party, as one was
sometimes obliged to, from a wish not to give offence—his niece, for
example, had been married the other day—he walked into the middle of
the room, said “Ha! ha!” as loud as ever he could, considered that he
had done his duty, and walked away again. Mrs. Thornbury protested. She
was going to give a party directly she got back, and they were all to
be invited, and she should set people to watch Mr. Pepper, and if she
heard that he had been caught saying “Ha! ha!” she would—she would do
something very dreadful indeed to him. Arthur Venning suggested that
what she must do was to rig up something in the nature of a surprise—a
portrait, for example, of a nice old lady in a lace cap, concealing a
bath of cold water, which at a signal could be sprung on Pepper’s head;
or they’d have a chair which shot him twenty feet high directly he sat
on it.

Susan laughed. She had done her tea; she was feeling very well
contented, partly because she had been playing tennis brilliantly, and
then every one was so nice; she was beginning to find it so much easier
to talk, and to hold her own even with quite clever people, for somehow
clever people did not frighten her any more. Even Mr. Hirst, whom she
had disliked when she first met him, really wasn’t disagreeable; and,
poor man, he always looked so ill; perhaps he was in love; perhaps he
had been in love with Rachel—she really shouldn’t wonder; or perhaps it
was Evelyn—she was of course very attractive to men. Leaning forward,
she went on with the conversation. She said that she thought that the
reason why parties were so dull was mainly because gentlemen will not
dress: even in London, she stated, it struck her very much how people
don’t think it necessary to dress in the evening, and of course if they
don’t dress in London they won’t dress in the country. It was really
quite a treat at Christmas-time when there were the Hunt balls, and the
gentlemen wore nice red coats, but Arthur didn’t care for dancing, so
she supposed that they wouldn’t go even to the ball in their little
country town. She didn’t think that people who were fond of one sport
often care for another, although her father was an exception. But then
he was an exception in every way—such a gardener, and he knew all about
birds and animals, and of course he was simply adored by all the old
women in the village, and at the same time what he really liked best
was a book. You always knew where to find him if he were wanted; he
would be in his study with a book. Very likely it would be an old, old
book, some fusty old thing that no one else would dream of reading. She
used to tell him that he would have made a first-rate old bookworm if
only he hadn’t had a family of six to support, and six children, she
added, charmingly confident of universal sympathy, didn’t leave one
much time for being a bookworm.

Still talking about her father, of whom she was very proud, she rose,
for Arthur upon looking at his watch found that it was time they went
back again to the tennis court. The others did not move.

“They’re very happy!” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking benignantly after
them. Rachel agreed; they seemed to be so certain of themselves; they
seemed to know exactly what they wanted.

“D’you think they _are_ happy?” Evelyn murmured to Terence in an
undertone, and she hoped that he would say that he did not think them
happy; but, instead, he said that they must go too—go home, for they
were always being late for meals, and Mrs. Ambrose, who was very stern
and particular, didn’t like that. Evelyn laid hold of Rachel’s skirt
and protested. Why should they go? It was still early, and she had so
many things to say to them. “No,” said Terence, “we must go, because we
walk so slowly. We stop and look at things, and we talk.”

“What d’you talk about?” Evelyn enquired, upon which he laughed and
said that they talked about everything.

Mrs. Thornbury went with them to the gate, trailing very slowly and
gracefully across the grass and the gravel, and talking all the time
about flowers and birds. She told them that she had taken up the study
of botany since her daughter married, and it was wonderful what a
number of flowers there were which she had never seen, although she had
lived in the country all her life and she was now seventy-two. It was a
good thing to have some occupation which was quite independent of other
people, she said, when one got old. But the odd thing was that one
never felt old. She always felt that she was twenty-five, not a day
more or a day less, but, of course, one couldn’t expect other people to
agree to that.

“It must be very wonderful to be twenty-five, and not merely to imagine
that you’re twenty-five,” she said, looking from one to the other with
her smooth, bright glance. “It must be very wonderful, very wonderful
indeed.” She stood talking to them at the gate for a long time; she
seemed reluctant that they should go.




CHAPTER XXV


The afternoon was very hot, so hot that the breaking of the waves on
the shore sounded like the repeated sigh of some exhausted creature,
and even on the terrace under an awning the bricks were hot, and the
air danced perpetually over the short dry grass. The red flowers in the
stone basins were drooping with the heat, and the white blossoms which
had been so smooth and thick only a few weeks ago were now dry, and
their edges were curled and yellow. Only the stiff and hostile plants
of the south, whose fleshy leaves seemed to be grown upon spines, still
remained standing upright and defied the sun to beat them down. It was
too hot to talk, and it was not easy to find any book that would
withstand the power of the sun. Many books had been tried and then let
fall, and now Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the
words of Milton had substance and shape, so that it was not necessary
to understand what he was saying; one could merely listen to his words;
one could almost handle them.

There is a gentle nymph not far from hence,


he read,

That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream.
Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure;
Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine,
That had the sceptre from his father Brute.


The words, in spite of what Terence had said, seemed to be laden with
meaning, and perhaps it was for this reason that it was painful to
listen to them; they sounded strange; they meant different things from
what they usually meant. Rachel at any rate could not keep her
attention fixed upon them, but went off upon curious trains of thought
suggested by words such as “curb” and “Locrine” and “Brute,” which
brought unpleasant sights before her eyes, independently of their
meaning. Owing to the heat and the dancing air the garden too looked
strange—the trees were either too near or too far, and her head almost
certainly ached. She was not quite certain, and therefore she did not
know, whether to tell Terence now, or to let him go on reading. She
decided that she would wait until he came to the end of a stanza, and
if by that time she had turned her head this way and that, and it ached
in every position undoubtedly, she would say very calmly that her head
ached.

Sabrina fair,
    Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
    In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber dropping hair,
Listen for dear honour’s sake,
    Goddess of the silver lake,
    Listen and save!


But her head ached; it ached whichever way she turned it.

She sat up and said as she had determined, “My head aches so that I
shall go indoors.” He was half-way through the next verse, but he
dropped the book instantly.

“Your head aches?” he repeated.

For a few moments they sat looking at one another in silence, holding
each other’s hands. During this time his sense of dismay and
catastrophe were almost physically painful; all round him he seemed to
hear the shiver of broken glass which, as it fell to earth, left him
sitting in the open air. But at the end of two minutes, noticing that
she was not sharing his dismay, but was only rather more languid and
heavy-eyed than usual, he recovered, fetched Helen, and asked her to
tell him what they had better do, for Rachel had a headache.

Mrs. Ambrose was not discomposed, but advised that she should go to
bed, and added that she must expect her head to ache if she sat up to
all hours and went out in the heat, but a few hours in bed would cure
it completely. Terence was unreasonably reassured by her words, as he
had been unreasonably depressed the moment before. Helen’s sense seemed
to have much in common with the ruthless good sense of nature, which
avenged rashness by a headache, and, like nature’s good sense, might be
depended upon.

Rachel went to bed; she lay in the dark, it seemed to her, for a very
long time, but at length, waking from a transparent kind of sleep, she
saw the windows white in front of her, and recollected that some time
before she had gone to bed with a headache, and that Helen had said it
would be gone when she woke. She supposed, therefore, that she was now
quite well again. At the same time the wall of her room was painfully
white, and curved slightly, instead of being straight and flat. Turning
her eyes to the window, she was not reassured by what she saw there.
The movement of the blind as it filled with air and blew slowly out,
drawing the cord with a little trailing sound along the floor, seemed
to her terrifying, as if it were the movement of an animal in the room.
She shut her eyes, and the pulse in her head beat so strongly that each
thump seemed to tread upon a nerve, piercing her forehead with a little
stab of pain. It might not be the same headache, but she certainly had
a headache. She turned from side to side, in the hope that the coolness
of the sheets would cure her, and that when she next opened her eyes to
look the room would be as usual. After a considerable number of vain
experiments, she resolved to put the matter beyond a doubt. She got out
of bed and stood upright, holding on to the brass ball at the end of
the bedstead. Ice-cold at first, it soon became as hot as the palm of
her hand, and as the pains in her head and body and the instability of
the floor proved that it would be far more intolerable to stand and
walk than to lie in bed, she got into bed again; but though the change
was refreshing at first, the discomfort of bed was soon as great as the
discomfort of standing up. She accepted the idea that she would have to
stay in bed all day long, and as she laid her head on the pillow,
relinquished the happiness of the day.

When Helen came in an hour or two later, suddenly stopped her cheerful
words, looked startled for a second and then unnaturally calm, the fact
that she was ill was put beyond a doubt. It was confirmed when the
whole household knew of it, when the song that some one was singing in
the garden stopped suddenly, and when Maria, as she brought water,
slipped past the bed with averted eyes. There was all the morning to
get through, and then all the afternoon, and at intervals she made an
effort to cross over into the ordinary world, but she found that her
heat and discomfort had put a gulf between her world and the ordinary
world which she could not bridge. At one point the door opened, and
Helen came in with a little dark man who had—it was the chief thing she
noticed about him—very hairy hands. She was drowsy and intolerably hot,
and as he seemed shy and obsequious she scarcely troubled to answer
him, although she understood that he was a doctor. At another point the
door opened and Terence came in very gently, smiling too steadily, as
she realised, for it to be natural. He sat down and talked to her,
stroking her hands until it became irksome to her to lie any more in
the same position and she turned round, and when she looked up again
Helen was beside her and Terence had gone. It did not matter; she would
see him to-morrow when things would be ordinary again. Her chief
occupation during the day was to try to remember how the lines went:

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber dropping hair;


and the effort worried her because the adjectives persisted in getting
into the wrong places.

The second day did not differ very much from the first day, except that
her bed had become very important, and the world outside, when she
tried to think of it, appeared distinctly further off. The glassy,
cool, translucent wave was almost visible before her, curling up at the
end of the bed, and as it was refreshingly cool she tried to keep her
mind fixed upon it. Helen was here, and Helen was there all day long;
sometimes she said that it was lunchtime, and sometimes that it was
teatime; but by the next day all landmarks were obliterated, and the
outer world was so far away that the different sounds, such as the
sounds of people moving overhead, could only be ascribed to their cause
by a great effort of memory. The recollection of what she had felt, or
of what she had been doing and thinking three days before, had faded
entirely. On the other hand, every object in the room, and the bed
itself, and her own body with its various limbs and their different
sensations were more and more important each day. She was completely
cut off, and unable to communicate with the rest of the world, isolated
alone with her body.

Hours and hours would pass thus, without getting any further through
the morning, or again a few minutes would lead from broad daylight to
the depths of the night. One evening when the room appeared very dim,
either because it was evening or because the blinds were drawn, Helen
said to her, “Some one is going to sit here to-night. You won’t mind?”

Opening her eyes, Rachel saw not only Helen but a nurse in spectacles,
whose face vaguely recalled something that she had once seen. She had
seen her in the chapel. “Nurse McInnis,” said Helen, and the nurse
smiled steadily as they all did, and said that she did not find many
people who were frightened of her. After waiting for a moment they both
disappeared, and having turned on her pillow Rachel woke to find
herself in the midst of one of those interminable nights which do not
end at twelve, but go on into the double figures—thirteen, fourteen,
and so on until they reach the twenties, and then the thirties, and
then the forties. She realised that there is nothing to prevent nights
from doing this if they choose. At a great distance an elderly woman
sat with her head bent down; Rachel raised herself slightly and saw
with dismay that she was playing cards by the light of a candle which
stood in the hollow of a newspaper. The sight had something
inexplicably sinister about it, and she was terrified and cried out,
upon which the woman laid down her cards and came across the room,
shading the candle with her hands. Coming nearer and nearer across the
great space of the room, she stood at last above Rachel’s head and
said, “Not asleep? Let me make you comfortable.”

She put down the candle and began to arrange the bedclothes. It struck
Rachel that a woman who sat playing cards in a cavern all night long
would have very cold hands, and she shrunk from the touch of them.

“Why, there’s a toe all the way down there!” the woman said, proceeding
to tuck in the bedclothes. Rachel did not realise that the toe was
hers.

“You must try and lie still,” she proceeded, “because if you lie still
you will be less hot, and if you toss about you will make yourself more
hot, and we don’t want you to be any hotter than you are.” She stood
looking down upon Rachel for an enormous length of time.

“And the quieter you lie the sooner you will be well,” she repeated.

Rachel kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the ceiling, and
all her energy was concentrated upon the desire that this shadow should
move. But the shadow and the woman seemed to be eternally fixed above
her. She shut her eyes. When she opened them again several more hours
had passed, but the night still lasted interminably. The woman was
still playing cards, only she sat now in a tunnel under a river, and
the light stood in a little archway in the wall above her. She cried
“Terence!” and the peaked shadow again moved across the ceiling, as the
woman with an enormous slow movement rose, and they both stood still
above her.

“It’s just as difficult to keep you in bed as it was to keep Mr.
Forrest in bed,” the woman said, “and he was such a tall gentleman.”

In order to get rid of this terrible stationary sight Rachel again shut
her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames,
where there were little deformed women sitting in archways playing
cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed with damp,
which collected into drops and slid down the wall. But the little old
women became Helen and Nurse McInnis after a time, standing in the
window together whispering, whispering incessantly.

Meanwhile outside her room the sounds, the movements, and the lives of
the other people in the house went on in the ordinary light of the sun,
throughout the usual succession of hours. When, on the first day of her
illness, it became clear that she would not be absolutely well, for her
temperature was very high, until Friday, that day being Tuesday,
Terence was filled with resentment, not against her, but against the
force outside them which was separating them. He counted up the number
of days that would almost certainly be spoilt for them. He realised,
with an odd mixture of pleasure and annoyance, that, for the first time
in his life, he was so dependent upon another person that his happiness
was in her keeping. The days were completely wasted upon trifling,
immaterial things, for after three weeks of such intimacy and intensity
all the usual occupations were unbearably flat and beside the point.
The least intolerable occupation was to talk to St. John about Rachel’s
illness, and to discuss every symptom and its meaning, and, when this
subject was exhausted, to discuss illness of all kinds, and what caused
them, and what cured them.

Twice every day he went in to sit with Rachel, and twice every day the
same thing happened. On going into her room, which was not very dark,
where the music was lying about as usual, and her books and letters,
his spirits rose instantly. When he saw her he felt completely
reassured. She did not look very ill. Sitting by her side he would tell
her what he had been doing, using his natural voice to speak to her,
only a few tones lower down than usual; but by the time he had sat
there for five minutes he was plunged into the deepest gloom. She was
not the same; he could not bring them back to their old relationship;
but although he knew that it was foolish he could not prevent himself
from endeavouring to bring her back, to make her remember, and when
this failed he was in despair. He always concluded as he left her room
that it was worse to see her than not to see her, but by degrees, as
the day wore on, the desire to see her returned and became almost too
great to be borne.

On Thursday morning when Terence went into her room he felt the usual
increase of confidence. She turned round and made an effort to remember
certain facts from the world that was so many millions of miles away.

“You have come up from the hotel?” she asked.

“No; I’m staying here for the present,” he said. “We’ve just had
luncheon,” he continued, “and the mail has come in. There’s a bundle of
letters for you—letters from England.”

Instead of saying, as he meant her to say, that she wished to see them,
she said nothing for some time.

“You see, there they go, rolling off the edge of the hill,” she said
suddenly.

“Rolling, Rachel? What do you see rolling? There’s nothing rolling.”

“The old woman with the knife,” she replied, not speaking to Terence in
particular, and looking past him. As she appeared to be looking at a
vase on the shelf opposite, he rose and took it down.

“Now they can’t roll any more,” he said cheerfully. Nevertheless she
lay gazing at the same spot, and paid him no further attention although
he spoke to her. He became so profoundly wretched that he could not
endure to sit with her, but wandered about until he found St. John, who
was reading _The Times_ in the verandah. He laid it aside patiently,
and heard all that Terence had to say about delirium. He was very
patient with Terence. He treated him like a child.

By Friday it could not be denied that the illness was no longer an
attack that would pass off in a day or two; it was a real illness that
required a good deal of organisation, and engrossed the attention of at
least five people, but there was no reason to be anxious. Instead of
lasting five days it was going to last ten days. Rodriguez was
understood to say that there were well-known varieties of this illness.
Rodriguez appeared to think that they were treating the illness with
undue anxiety. His visits were always marked by the same show of
confidence, and in his interviews with Terence he always waved aside
his anxious and minute questions with a kind of flourish which seemed
to indicate that they were all taking it much too seriously. He seemed
curiously unwilling to sit down.

“A high temperature,” he said, looking furtively about the room, and
appearing to be more interested in the furniture and in Helen’s
embroidery than in anything else. “In this climate you must expect a
high temperature. You need not be alarmed by that. It is the pulse we
go by” (he tapped his own hairy wrist), “and the pulse continues
excellent.”

Thereupon he bowed and slipped out. The interview was conducted
laboriously upon both sides in French, and this, together with the fact
that he was optimistic, and that Terence respected the medical
profession from hearsay, made him less critical than he would have been
had he encountered the doctor in any other capacity. Unconsciously he
took Rodriguez’ side against Helen, who seemed to have taken an
unreasonable prejudice against him.

When Saturday came it was evident that the hours of the day must be
more strictly organised than they had been. St. John offered his
services; he said that he had nothing to do, and that he might as well
spend the day at the villa if he could be of use. As if they were
starting on a difficult expedition together, they parcelled out their
duties between them, writing out an elaborate scheme of hours upon a
large sheet of paper which was pinned to the drawing-room door. Their
distance from the town, and the difficulty of procuring rare things
with unknown names from the most unexpected places, made it necessary
to think very carefully, and they found it unexpectedly difficult to do
the simple but practical things that were required of them, as if they,
being very tall, were asked to stoop down and arrange minute grains of
sand in a pattern on the ground.

It was St. John’s duty to fetch what was needed from the town, so that
Terence would sit all through the long hot hours alone in the
drawing-room, near the open door, listening for any movement upstairs,
or call from Helen. He always forgot to pull down the blinds, so that
he sat in bright sunshine, which worried him without his knowing what
was the cause of it. The room was terribly stiff and uncomfortable.
There were hats in the chairs, and medicine bottles among the books. He
tried to read, but good books were too good, and bad books were too
bad, and the only thing he could tolerate was the newspaper, which with
its news of London, and the movements of real people who were giving
dinner-parties and making speeches, seemed to give a little background
of reality to what was otherwise mere nightmare. Then, just as his
attention was fixed on the print, a soft call would come from Helen, or
Mrs. Chailey would bring in something which was wanted upstairs, and he
would run up very quietly in his socks, and put the jug on the little
table which stood crowded with jugs and cups outside the bedroom door;
or if he could catch Helen for a moment he would ask, “How is she?”

“Rather restless. . . . On the whole, quieter, I think.”

The answer would be one or the other.

As usual she seemed to reserve something which she did not say, and
Terence was conscious that they disagreed, and, without saying it
aloud, were arguing against each other. But she was too hurried and
pre-occupied to talk.

The strain of listening and the effort of making practical arrangements
and seeing that things worked smoothly, absorbed all Terence’s power.
Involved in this long dreary nightmare, he did not attempt to think
what it amounted to. Rachel was ill; that was all; he must see that
there was medicine and milk, and that things were ready when they were
wanted. Thought had ceased; life itself had come to a standstill.
Sunday was rather worse than Saturday had been, simply because the
strain was a little greater every day, although nothing else had
changed. The separate feelings of pleasure, interest, and pain, which
combine to make up the ordinary day, were merged in one long-drawn
sensation of sordid misery and profound boredom. He had never been so
bored since he was shut up in the nursery alone as a child. The vision
of Rachel as she was now, confused and heedless, had almost obliterated
the vision of her as she had been once long ago; he could hardly
believe that they had ever been happy, or engaged to be married, for
what were feelings, what was there to be felt? Confusion covered every
sight and person, and he seemed to see St. John, Ridley, and the stray
people who came up now and then from the hotel to enquire, through a
mist; the only people who were not hidden in this mist were Helen and
Rodriguez, because they could tell him something definite about Rachel.

Nevertheless the day followed the usual forms. At certain hours they
went into the dining-room, and when they sat round the table they
talked about indifferent things. St. John usually made it his business
to start the talk and to keep it from dying out.

“I’ve discovered the way to get Sancho past the white house,” said St.
John on Sunday at luncheon. “You crackle a piece of paper in his ear,
then he bolts for about a hundred yards, but he goes on quite well
after that.”

“Yes, but he wants corn. You should see that he has corn.”

“I don’t think much of the stuff they give him; and Angelo seems a
dirty little rascal.”

There was then a long silence. Ridley murmured a few lines of poetry
under his breath, and remarked, as if to conceal the fact that he had
done so, “Very hot to-day.”

“Two degrees higher than it was yesterday,” said St. John. “I wonder
where these nuts come from,” he observed, taking a nut out of the
plate, turning it over in his fingers, and looking at it curiously.

“London, I should think,” said Terence, looking at the nut too.

“A competent man of business could make a fortune here in no time,” St.
John continued. “I suppose the heat does something funny to people’s
brains. Even the English go a little queer. Anyhow they’re hopeless
people to deal with. They kept me three-quarters of an hour waiting at
the chemist’s this morning, for no reason whatever.”

There was another long pause. Then Ridley enquired, “Rodriguez seems
satisfied?”

“Quite,” said Terence with decision. “It’s just got to run its course.”
Whereupon Ridley heaved a deep sigh. He was genuinely sorry for every
one, but at the same time he missed Helen considerably, and was a
little aggrieved by the constant presence of the two young men.

They moved back into the drawing-room.

“Look here, Hirst,” said Terence, “there’s nothing to be done for two
hours.” He consulted the sheet pinned to the door. “You go and lie
down. I’ll wait here. Chailey sits with Rachel while Helen has her
luncheon.”

It was asking a good deal of Hirst to tell him to go without waiting
for a sight of Helen. These little glimpses of Helen were the only
respites from strain and boredom, and very often they seemed to make up
for the discomfort of the day, although she might not have anything to
tell them. However, as they were on an expedition together, he had made
up his mind to obey.

Helen was very late in coming down. She looked like a person who has
been sitting for a long time in the dark. She was pale and thinner, and
the expression of her eyes was harassed but determined. She ate her
luncheon quickly, and seemed indifferent to what she was doing. She
brushed aside Terence’s enquiries, and at last, as if he had not
spoken, she looked at him with a slight frown and said:

“We can’t go on like this, Terence. Either you’ve got to find another
doctor, or you must tell Rodriguez to stop coming, and I’ll manage for
myself. It’s no use for him to say that Rachel’s better; she’s not
better; she’s worse.”

Terence suffered a terrific shock, like that which he had suffered when
Rachel said, “My head aches.” He stilled it by reflecting that Helen
was overwrought, and he was upheld in this opinion by his obstinate
sense that she was opposed to him in the argument.

“Do you think she’s in danger?” he asked.

“No one can go on being as ill as that day after day—” Helen replied.
She looked at him, and spoke as if she felt some indignation with
somebody.

“Very well, I’ll talk to Rodriguez this afternoon,” he replied.

Helen went upstairs at once.

Nothing now could assuage Terence’s anxiety. He could not read, nor
could he sit still, and his sense of security was shaken, in spite of
the fact that he was determined that Helen was exaggerating, and that
Rachel was not very ill. But he wanted a third person to confirm him in
his belief.

Directly Rodriguez came down he demanded, “Well, how is she? Do you
think her worse?”

“There is no reason for anxiety, I tell you—none,” Rodriguez replied in
his execrable French, smiling uneasily, and making little movements all
the time as if to get away.

Hewet stood firmly between him and the door. He was determined to see
for himself what kind of man he was. His confidence in the man vanished
as he looked at him and saw his insignificance, his dirty appearance,
his shiftiness, and his unintelligent, hairy face. It was strange that
he had never seen this before.

“You won’t object, of course, if we ask you to consult another doctor?”
he continued.

At this the little man became openly incensed.

“Ah!” he cried. “You have not confidence in me? You object to my
treatment? You wish me to give up the case?”

“Not at all,” Terence replied, “but in serious illness of this kind—”

Rodriguez shrugged his shoulders.

“It is not serious, I assure you. You are overanxious. The young lady
is not seriously ill, and I am a doctor. The lady of course is
frightened,” he sneered. “I understand that perfectly.”

“The name and address of the doctor is—?” Terence continued.

“There is no other doctor,” Rodriguez replied sullenly. “Every one has
confidence in me. Look! I will show you.”

He took out a packet of old letters and began turning them over as if
in search of one that would confute Terence’s suspicions. As he
searched, he began to tell a story about an English lord who had
trusted him—a great English lord, whose name he had, unfortunately,
forgotten.

“There is no other doctor in the place,” he concluded, still turning
over the letters.

“Never mind,” said Terence shortly. “I will make enquiries for myself.”
Rodriguez put the letters back in his pocket.

“Very well,” he remarked. “I have no objection.”

He lifted his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders, as if to repeat that
they took the illness much too seriously and that there was no other
doctor, and slipped out, leaving behind him an impression that he was
conscious that he was distrusted, and that his malice was aroused.

After this Terence could no longer stay downstairs. He went up, knocked
at Rachel’s door, and asked Helen whether he might see her for a few
minutes. He had not seen her yesterday. She made no objection, and went
and sat at a table in the window.

Terence sat down by the bedside. Rachel’s face was changed. She looked
as though she were entirely concentrated upon the effort of keeping
alive. Her lips were drawn, and her cheeks were sunken and flushed,
though without colour. Her eyes were not entirely shut, the lower half
of the white part showing, not as if she saw, but as if they remained
open because she was too much exhausted to close them. She opened them
completely when he kissed her. But she only saw an old woman slicing a
man’s head off with a knife.

“There it falls!” she murmured. She then turned to Terence and asked
him anxiously some question about a man with mules, which he could not
understand. “Why doesn’t he come? Why doesn’t he come?” she repeated.
He was appalled to think of the dirty little man downstairs in
connection with illness like this, and turned instinctively to Helen,
but she was doing something at a table in the window, and did not seem
to realise how great the shock to him must be. He rose to go, for he
could not endure to listen any longer; his heart beat quickly and
painfully with anger and misery. As he passed Helen she asked him in
the same weary, unnatural, but determined voice to fetch her more ice,
and to have the jug outside filled with fresh milk.

When he had done these errands he went to find Hirst. Exhausted and
very hot, St. John had fallen asleep on a bed, but Terence woke him
without scruple.

“Helen thinks she’s worse,” he said. “There’s no doubt she’s
frightfully ill. Rodriguez is useless. We must get another doctor.”

“But there is no other doctor,” said Hirst drowsily, sitting up and
rubbing his eyes.

“Don’t be a damned fool!” Terence exclaimed. “Of course there’s another
doctor, and, if there isn’t, you’ve got to find one. It ought to have
been done days ago. I’m going down to saddle the horse.” He could not
stay still in one place.

In less than ten minutes St. John was riding to the town in the
scorching heat in search of a doctor, his orders being to find one and
bring him back if he had to be fetched in a special train.

“We ought to have done it days ago,” Hewet repeated angrily.

When he went back into the drawing-room he found that Mrs. Flushing was
there, standing very erect in the middle of the room, having arrived,
as people did in these days, by the kitchen or through the garden
unannounced.

“She’s better?” Mrs. Flushing enquired abruptly; they did not attempt
to shake hands.

“No,” said Terence. “If anything, they think she’s worse.”

Mrs. Flushing seemed to consider for a moment or two, looking straight
at Terence all the time.

“Let me tell you,” she said, speaking in nervous jerks, “it’s always
about the seventh day one begins to get anxious. I daresay you’ve been
sittin’ here worryin’ by yourself. You think she’s bad, but any one
comin’ with a fresh eye would see she was better. Mr. Elliot’s had
fever; he’s all right now,” she threw out. “It wasn’t anythin’ she
caught on the expedition. What’s it matter—a few days’ fever? My
brother had fever for twenty-six days once. And in a week or two he was
up and about. We gave him nothin’ but milk and arrowroot—”

Here Mrs. Chailey came in with a message.

“I’m wanted upstairs,” said Terence.

“You see—she’ll be better,” Mrs. Flushing jerked out as he left the
room. Her anxiety to persuade Terence was very great, and when he left
her without saying anything she felt dissatisfied and restless; she did
not like to stay, but she could not bear to go. She wandered from room
to room looking for some one to talk to, but all the rooms were empty.

Terence went upstairs, stood inside the door to take Helen’s
directions, looked over at Rachel, but did not attempt to speak to her.
She appeared vaguely conscious of his presence, but it seemed to
disturb her, and she turned, so that she lay with her back to him.

For six days indeed she had been oblivious of the world outside,
because it needed all her attention to follow the hot, red, quick
sights which passed incessantly before her eyes. She knew that it was
of enormous importance that she should attend to these sights and grasp
their meaning, but she was always being just too late to hear or see
something which would explain it all. For this reason, the
faces,—Helen’s face, the nurse’s, Terence’s, the doctor’s,—which
occasionally forced themselves very close to her, were worrying because
they distracted her attention and she might miss the clue. However, on
the fourth afternoon she was suddenly unable to keep Helen’s face
distinct from the sights themselves; her lips widened as she bent down
over the bed, and she began to gabble unintelligibly like the rest. The
sights were all concerned in some plot, some adventure, some escape.
The nature of what they were doing changed incessantly, although there
was always a reason behind it, which she must endeavour to grasp. Now
they were among trees and savages, now they were on the sea, now they
were on the tops of high towers; now they jumped; now they flew. But
just as the crisis was about to happen, something invariably slipped in
her brain, so that the whole effort had to begin over again. The heat
was suffocating. At last the faces went further away; she fell into a
deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She
saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the
sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors
thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the
bottom of the sea. There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes
light, while every now and then some one turned her over at the bottom
of the sea.

After St. John had spent some hours in the heat of the sun wrangling
with evasive and very garrulous natives, he extracted the information
that there was a doctor, a French doctor, who was at present away on a
holiday in the hills. It was quite impossible, so they said, to find
him. With his experience of the country, St. John thought it unlikely
that a telegram would either be sent or received; but having reduced
the distance of the hill town, in which he was staying, from a hundred
miles to thirty miles, and having hired a carriage and horses, he
started at once to fetch the doctor himself. He succeeded in finding
him, and eventually forced the unwilling man to leave his young wife
and return forthwith. They reached the villa at midday on Tuesday.

Terence came out to receive them, and St. John was struck by the fact
that he had grown perceptibly thinner in the interval; he was white
too; his eyes looked strange. But the curt speech and the sulky
masterful manner of Dr. Lesage impressed them both favourably, although
at the same time it was obvious that he was very much annoyed at the
whole affair. Coming downstairs he gave his directions emphatically,
but it never occurred to him to give an opinion either because of the
presence of Rodriguez who was now obsequious as well as malicious, or
because he took it for granted that they knew already what was to be
known.

“Of course,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders, when Terence asked
him, “Is she very ill?”

They were both conscious of a certain sense of relief when Dr. Lesage
was gone, leaving explicit directions, and promising another visit in a
few hours’ time; but, unfortunately, the rise of their spirits led them
to talk more than usual, and in talking they quarrelled. They
quarrelled about a road, the Portsmouth Road. St. John said that it is
macadamised where it passes Hindhead, and Terence knew as well as he
knew his own name that it is not macadamised at that point. In the
course of the argument they said some very sharp things to each other,
and the rest of the dinner was eaten in silence, save for an occasional
half-stifled reflection from Ridley.

When it grew dark and the lamps were brought in, Terence felt unable to
control his irritation any longer. St. John went to bed in a state of
complete exhaustion, bidding Terence good-night with rather more
affection than usual because of their quarrel, and Ridley retired to
his books. Left alone, Terence walked up and down the room; he stood at
the open window.

The lights were coming out one after another in the town beneath, and
it was very peaceful and cool in the garden, so that he stepped out on
to the terrace. As he stood there in the darkness, able only to see the
shapes of trees through the fine grey light, he was overcome by a
desire to escape, to have done with this suffering, to forget that
Rachel was ill. He allowed himself to lapse into forgetfulness of
everything. As if a wind that had been raging incessantly suddenly fell
asleep, the fret and strain and anxiety which had been pressing on him
passed away. He seemed to stand in an unvexed space of air, on a little
island by himself; he was free and immune from pain. It did not matter
whether Rachel was well or ill; it did not matter whether they were
apart or together; nothing mattered—nothing mattered. The waves beat on
the shore far away, and the soft wind passed through the branches of
the trees, seeming to encircle him with peace and security, with dark
and nothingness. Surely the world of strife and fret and anxiety was
not the real world, but this was the real world, the world that lay
beneath the superficial world, so that, whatever happened, one was
secure. The quiet and peace seemed to lap his body in a fine cool
sheet, soothing every nerve; his mind seemed once more to expand, and
become natural.

But when he had stood thus for a time a noise in the house roused him;
he turned instinctively and went into the drawing-room. The sight of
the lamp-lit room brought back so abruptly all that he had forgotten
that he stood for a moment unable to move. He remembered everything,
the hour, the minute even, what point they had reached, and what was to
come. He cursed himself for making believe for a minute that things
were different from what they are. The night was now harder to face
than ever.

Unable to stay in the empty drawing-room, he wandered out and sat on
the stairs half-way up to Rachel’s room. He longed for some one to talk
to, but Hirst was asleep, and Ridley was asleep; there was no sound in
Rachel’s room. The only sound in the house was the sound of Chailey
moving in the kitchen. At last there was a rustling on the stairs
overhead, and Nurse McInnis came down fastening the links in her cuffs,
in preparation for the night’s watch. Terence rose and stopped her. He
had scarcely spoken to her, but it was possible that she might confirm
him in the belief which still persisted in his own mind that Rachel was
not seriously ill. He told her in a whisper that Dr. Lesage had been
and what he had said.

“Now, Nurse,” he whispered, “please tell me your opinion. Do you
consider that she is very seriously ill? Is she in any danger?”

“The doctor has said—” she began.

“Yes, but I want your opinion. You have had experience of many cases
like this?”

“I could not tell you more than Dr. Lesage, Mr. Hewet,” she replied
cautiously, as though her words might be used against her. “The case is
serious, but you may feel quite certain that we are doing all we can
for Miss Vinrace.” She spoke with some professional self-approbation.
But she realised perhaps that she did not satisfy the young man, who
still blocked her way, for she shifted her feet slightly upon the stair
and looked out of the window where they could see the moon over the
sea.

“If you ask me,” she began in a curiously stealthy tone, “I never like
May for my patients.”

“May?” Terence repeated.

“It may be a fancy, but I don’t like to see anybody fall ill in May,”
she continued. “Things seem to go wrong in May. Perhaps it’s the moon.
They say the moon affects the brain, don’t they, Sir?”

He looked at her but he could not answer her; like all the others, when
one looked at her she seemed to shrivel beneath one’s eyes and become
worthless, malicious, and untrustworthy.

She slipped past him and disappeared.

Though he went to his room he was unable even to take his clothes off.
For a long time he paced up and down, and then leaning out of the
window gazed at the earth which lay so dark against the paler blue of
the sky. With a mixture of fear and loathing he looked at the slim
black cypress trees which were still visible in the garden, and heard
the unfamiliar creaking and grating sounds which show that the earth is
still hot. All these sights and sounds appeared sinister and full of
hostility and foreboding; together with the natives and the nurse and
the doctor and the terrible force of the illness itself they seemed to
be in conspiracy against him. They seemed to join together in their
effort to extract the greatest possible amount of suffering from him.
He could not get used to his pain, it was a revelation to him. He had
never realised before that underneath every action, underneath the life
of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to
be able to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the
edges of all action, eating away the lives of men and women. He thought
for the first time with understanding of words which had before seemed
to him empty: the struggle of life; the hardness of life. Now he knew
for himself that life is hard and full of suffering. He looked at the
scattered lights in the town beneath, and thought of Arthur and Susan,
or Evelyn and Perrott venturing out unwittingly, and by their happiness
laying themselves open to suffering such as this. How did they dare to
love each other, he wondered; how had he himself dared to live as he
had lived, rapidly and carelessly, passing from one thing to another,
loving Rachel as he had loved her? Never again would he feel secure; he
would never believe in the stability of life, or forget what depths of
pain lie beneath small happiness and feelings of content and safety. It
seemed to him as he looked back that their happiness had never been so
great as his pain was now. There had always been something imperfect in
their happiness, something they had wanted and had not been able to
get. It had been fragmentary and incomplete, because they were so young
and had not known what they were doing.

The light of his candle flickered over the boughs of a tree outside the
window, and as the branch swayed in the darkness there came before his
mind a picture of all the world that lay outside his window; he thought
of the immense river and the immense forest, the vast stretches of dry
earth and the plains of the sea that encircled the earth; from the sea
the sky rose steep and enormous, and the air washed profoundly between
the sky and the sea. How vast and dark it must be tonight, lying
exposed to the wind; and in all this great space it was curious to
think how few the towns were, and how small little rings of light, or
single glow-worms he figured them, scattered here and there, among the
swelling uncultivated folds of the world. And in those towns were
little men and women, tiny men and women. Oh, it was absurd, when one
thought of it, to sit here in a little room suffering and caring. What
did anything matter? Rachel, a tiny creature, lay ill beneath him, and
here in his little room he suffered on her account. The nearness of
their bodies in this vast universe, and the minuteness of their bodies,
seemed to him absurd and laughable. Nothing mattered, he repeated; they
had no power, no hope. He leant on the window-sill, thinking, until he
almost forgot the time and the place. Nevertheless, although he was
convinced that it was absurd and laughable, and that they were small
and hopeless, he never lost the sense that these thoughts somehow
formed part of a life which he and Rachel would live together.

Owing perhaps to the change of doctor, Rachel appeared to be rather
better next day. Terribly pale and worn though Helen looked, there was
a slight lifting of the cloud which had hung all these days in her
eyes.

“She talked to me,” she said voluntarily. “She asked me what day of the
week it was, like herself.”

Then suddenly, without any warning or any apparent reason, the tears
formed in her eyes and rolled steadily down her cheeks. She cried with
scarcely any attempt at movement of her features, and without any
attempt to stop herself, as if she did not know that she was crying. In
spite of the relief which her words gave him, Terence was dismayed by
the sight; had everything given way? Were there no limits to the power
of this illness? Would everything go down before it? Helen had always
seemed to him strong and determined, and now she was like a child. He
took her in his arms, and she clung to him like a child, crying softly
and quietly upon his shoulder. Then she roused herself and wiped her
tears away; it was silly to behave like that, she said; very silly, she
repeated, when there could be no doubt that Rachel was better. She
asked Terence to forgive her for her folly. She stopped at the door and
came back and kissed him without saying anything.

On this day indeed Rachel was conscious of what went on round her. She
had come to the surface of the dark, sticky pool, and a wave seemed to
bear her up and down with it; she had ceased to have any will of her
own; she lay on the top of the wave conscious of some pain, but chiefly
of weakness. The wave was replaced by the side of a mountain. Her body
became a drift of melting snow, above which her knees rose in huge
peaked mountains of bare bone. It was true that she saw Helen and saw
her room, but everything had become very pale and semi-transparent.
Sometimes she could see through the wall in front of her. Sometimes
when Helen went away she seemed to go so far that Rachel’s eyes could
hardly follow her. The room also had an odd power of expanding, and
though she pushed her voice out as far as possible until sometimes it
became a bird and flew away, she thought it doubtful whether it ever
reached the person she was talking to. There were immense intervals or
chasms, for things still had the power to appear visibly before her,
between one moment and the next; it sometimes took an hour for Helen to
raise her arm, pausing long between each jerky movement, and pour out
medicine. Helen’s form stooping to raise her in bed appeared of
gigantic size, and came down upon her like the ceiling falling. But for
long spaces of time she would merely lie conscious of her body floating
on the top of the bed and her mind driven to some remote corner of her
body, or escaped and gone flitting round the room. All sights were
something of an effort, but the sight of Terence was the greatest
effort, because he forced her to join mind to body in the desire to
remember something. She did not wish to remember; it troubled her when
people tried to disturb her loneliness; she wished to be alone. She
wished for nothing else in the world.

Although she had cried, Terence observed Helen’s greater hopefulness
with something like triumph; in the argument between them she had made
the first sign of admitting herself in the wrong. He waited for Dr.
Lesage to come down that afternoon with considerable anxiety, but with
the same certainty at the back of his mind that he would in time force
them all to admit that they were in the wrong.

As usual, Dr. Lesage was sulky in his manner and very short in his
answers. To Terence’s demand, “She seems to be better?” he replied,
looking at him in an odd way, “She has a chance of life.”

The door shut and Terence walked across to the window. He leant his
forehead against the pane.

“Rachel,” he repeated to himself. “She has a chance of life. Rachel.”

How could they say these things of Rachel? Had any one yesterday
seriously believed that Rachel was dying? They had been engaged for
four weeks. A fortnight ago she had been perfectly well. What could
fourteen days have done to bring her from that state to this? To
realise what they meant by saying that she had a chance of life was
beyond him, knowing as he did that they were engaged. He turned, still
enveloped in the same dreary mist, and walked towards the door.
Suddenly he saw it all. He saw the room and the garden, and the trees
moving in the air, they could go on without her; she could die. For the
first time since she fell ill he remembered exactly what she looked
like and the way in which they cared for each other. The immense
happiness of feeling her close to him mingled with a more intense
anxiety than he had felt yet. He could not let her die; he could not
live without her. But after a momentary struggle, the curtain fell
again, and he saw nothing and felt nothing clearly. It was all going
on—going on still, in the same way as before. Save for a physical pain
when his heart beat, and the fact that his fingers were icy cold, he
did not realise that he was anxious about anything. Within his mind he
seemed to feel nothing about Rachel or about any one or anything in the
world. He went on giving orders, arranging with Mrs. Chailey, writing
out lists, and every now and then he went upstairs and put something
quietly on the table outside Rachel’s door. That night Dr. Lesage
seemed to be less sulky than usual. He stayed voluntarily for a few
moments, and, addressing St. John and Terence equally, as if he did not
remember which of them was engaged to the young lady, said, “I consider
that her condition to-night is very grave.”

Neither of them went to bed or suggested that the other should go to
bed. They sat in the drawing-room playing picquet with the door open.
St. John made up a bed upon the sofa, and when it was ready insisted
that Terence should lie upon it. They began to quarrel as to who should
lie on the sofa and who should lie upon a couple of chairs covered with
rugs. St. John forced Terence at last to lie down upon the sofa.

“Don’t be a fool, Terence,” he said. “You’ll only get ill if you don’t
sleep.”

“Old fellow,” he began, as Terence still refused, and stopped abruptly,
fearing sentimentality; he found that he was on the verge of tears.

He began to say what he had long been wanting to say, that he was sorry
for Terence, that he cared for him, that he cared for Rachel. Did she
know how much he cared for her—had she said anything, asked perhaps? He
was very anxious to say this, but he refrained, thinking that it was a
selfish question after all, and what was the use of bothering Terence
to talk about such things? He was already half asleep. But St. John
could not sleep at once. If only, he thought to himself, as he lay in
the darkness, something would happen—if only this strain would come to
an end. He did not mind what happened, so long as the succession of
these hard and dreary days was broken; he did not mind if she died. He
felt himself disloyal in not minding it, but it seemed to him that he
had no feelings left.

All night long there was no call or movement, except the opening and
shutting of the bedroom door once. By degrees the light returned into
the untidy room. At six the servants began to move; at seven they crept
downstairs into the kitchen; and half an hour later the day began
again.

Nevertheless it was not the same as the days that had gone before,
although it would have been hard to say in what the difference
consisted. Perhaps it was that they seemed to be waiting for something.
There were certainly fewer things to be done than usual. People drifted
through the drawing-room—Mr. Flushing, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury. They
spoke very apologetically in low tones, refusing to sit down, but
remaining for a considerable time standing up, although the only thing
they had to say was, “Is there anything we can do?” and there was
nothing they could do.

Feeling oddly detached from it all, Terence remembered how Helen had
said that whenever anything happened to you this was how people
behaved. Was she right, or was she wrong? He was too little interested
to frame an opinion of his own. He put things away in his mind, as if
one of these days he would think about them, but not now. The mist of
unreality had deepened and deepened until it had produced a feeling of
numbness all over his body. Was it his body? Were those really his own
hands?

This morning also for the first time Ridley found it impossible to sit
alone in his room. He was very uncomfortable downstairs, and, as he did
not know what was going on, constantly in the way; but he would not
leave the drawing-room. Too restless to read, and having nothing to do,
he began to pace up and down reciting poetry in an undertone. Occupied
in various ways—now in undoing parcels, now in uncorking bottles, now
in writing directions, the sound of Ridley’s song and the beat of his
pacing worked into the minds of Terence and St. John all the morning as
a half comprehended refrain.

They wrestled up, they wrestled down,
    They wrestled sore and still:
The fiend who blinds the eyes of men,
    That night he had his will.

Like stags full spent, among the bent
    They dropped awhile to rest—


“Oh, it’s intolerable!” Hirst exclaimed, and then checked himself, as
if it were a breach of their agreement. Again and again Terence would
creep half-way up the stairs in case he might be able to glean news of
Rachel. But the only news now was of a very fragmentary kind; she had
drunk something; she had slept a little; she seemed quieter. In the
same way, Dr. Lesage confined himself to talking about details, save
once when he volunteered the information that he had just been called
in to ascertain, by severing a vein in the wrist, that an old lady of
eighty-five was really dead. She had a horror of being buried alive.

“It is a horror,” he remarked, “that we generally find in the very old,
and seldom in the young.” They both expressed their interest in what he
told them; it seemed to them very strange. Another strange thing about
the day was that the luncheon was forgotten by all of them until it was
late in the afternoon, and then Mrs. Chailey waited on them, and looked
strange too, because she wore a stiff print dress, and her sleeves were
rolled up above her elbows. She seemed as oblivious of her appearance,
however, as if she had been called out of her bed by a midnight alarm
of fire, and she had forgotten, too, her reserve and her composure; she
talked to them quite familiarly as if she had nursed them and held them
naked on her knee. She assured them over and over again that it was
their duty to eat.

The afternoon, being thus shortened, passed more quickly than they
expected. Once Mrs. Flushing opened the door, but on seeing them shut
it again quickly; once Helen came down to fetch something, but she
stopped as she left the room to look at a letter addressed to her. She
stood for a moment turning it over, and the extraordinary and mournful
beauty of her attitude struck Terence in the way things struck him
now—as something to be put away in his mind and to be thought about
afterwards. They scarcely spoke, the argument between them seeming to
be suspended or forgotten.

Now that the afternoon sun had left the front of the house, Ridley
paced up and down the terrace repeating stanzas of a long poem, in a
subdued but suddenly sonorous voice. Fragments of the poem were wafted
in at the open window as he passed and repassed.

Peor and Baalim
Forsake their Temples dim,
    With that twice batter’d God of Palestine
And mooned Astaroth—


The sound of these words were strangely discomforting to both the young
men, but they had to be borne. As the evening drew on and the red light
of the sunset glittered far away on the sea, the same sense of
desperation attacked both Terence and St. John at the thought that the
day was nearly over, and that another night was at hand. The appearance
of one light after another in the town beneath them produced in Hirst a
repetition of his terrible and disgusting desire to break down and sob.
Then the lamps were brought in by Chailey. She explained that Maria, in
opening a bottle, had been so foolish as to cut her arm badly, but she
had bound it up; it was unfortunate when there was so much work to be
done. Chailey herself limped because of the rheumatism in her feet, but
it appeared to her mere waste of time to take any notice of the unruly
flesh of servants. The evening went on. Dr. Lesage arrived
unexpectedly, and stayed upstairs a very long time. He came down once
and drank a cup of coffee.

“She is very ill,” he said in answer to Ridley’s question. All the
annoyance had by this time left his manner, he was grave and formal,
but at the same time it was full of consideration, which had not marked
it before. He went upstairs again. The three men sat together in the
drawing-room. Ridley was quite quiet now, and his attention seemed to
be thoroughly awakened. Save for little half-voluntary movements and
exclamations that were stifled at once, they waited in complete
silence. It seemed as if they were at last brought together face to
face with something definite.

It was nearly eleven o’clock when Dr. Lesage again appeared in the
room. He approached them very slowly, and did not speak at once. He
looked first at St. John and then at Terence, and said to Terence, “Mr.
Hewet, I think you should go upstairs now.”

Terence rose immediately, leaving the others seated with Dr. Lesage
standing motionless between them.

Chailey was in the passage outside, repeating over and over again,
“It’s wicked—it’s wicked.”

Terence paid her no attention; he heard what she was saying, but it
conveyed no meaning to his mind. All the way upstairs he kept saying to
himself, “This has not happened to me. It is not possible that this has
happened to me.”

He looked curiously at his own hand on the banisters. The stairs were
very steep, and it seemed to take him a long time to surmount them.
Instead of feeling keenly, as he knew that he ought to feel, he felt
nothing at all. When he opened the door he saw Helen sitting by the
bedside. There were shaded lights on the table, and the room, though it
seemed to be full of a great many things, was very tidy. There was a
faint and not unpleasant smell of disinfectants. Helen rose and gave up
her chair to him in silence. As they passed each other their eyes met
in a peculiar level glance, he wondered at the extraordinary clearness
of his eyes, and at the deep calm and sadness that dwelt in them. He
sat down by the bedside, and a moment afterwards heard the door shut
gently behind her. He was alone with Rachel, and a faint reflection of
the sense of relief that they used to feel when they were left alone
possessed him. He looked at her. He expected to find some terrible
change in her, but there was none. She looked indeed very thin, and, as
far as he could see, very tired, but she was the same as she had always
been. Moreover, she saw him and knew him. She smiled at him and said,
“Hullo, Terence.”

The curtain which had been drawn between them for so long vanished
immediately.

“Well, Rachel,” he replied in his usual voice, upon which she opened
her eyes quite widely and smiled with her familiar smile. He kissed her
and took her hand.

“It’s been wretched without you,” he said.

She still looked at him and smiled, but soon a slight look of fatigue
or perplexity came into her eyes and she shut them again.

“But when we’re together we’re perfectly happy,” he said. He continued
to hold her hand.

The light being dim, it was impossible to see any change in her face.
An immense feeling of peace came over Terence, so that he had no wish
to move or to speak. The terrible torture and unreality of the last
days were over, and he had come out now into perfect certainty and
peace. His mind began to work naturally again and with great ease. The
longer he sat there the more profoundly was he conscious of the peace
invading every corner of his soul. Once he held his breath and listened
acutely; she was still breathing; he went on thinking for some time;
they seemed to be thinking together; he seemed to be Rachel as well as
himself; and then he listened again; no, she had ceased to breathe. So
much the better—this was death. It was nothing; it was to cease to
breathe. It was happiness, it was perfect happiness. They had now what
they had always wanted to have, the union which had been impossible
while they lived. Unconscious whether he thought the words or spoke
them aloud, he said, “No two people have ever been so happy as we have
been. No one has ever loved as we have loved.”

It seemed to him that their complete union and happiness filled the
room with rings eddying more and more widely. He had no wish in the
world left unfulfilled. They possessed what could never be taken from
them.

He was not conscious that any one had come into the room, but later,
moments later, or hours later perhaps, he felt an arm behind him. The
arms were round him. He did not want to have arms round him, and the
mysterious whispering voices annoyed him. He laid Rachel’s hand, which
was now cold, upon the counterpane, and rose from his chair, and walked
across to the window. The windows were uncurtained, and showed the
moon, and a long silver pathway upon the surface of the waves.

“Why,” he said, in his ordinary tone of voice, “look at the moon.
There’s a halo round the moon. We shall have rain to-morrow.”

The arms, whether they were the arms of man or of woman, were round him
again; they were pushing him gently towards the door. He turned of his
own accord and walked steadily in advance of the arms, conscious of a
little amusement at the strange way in which people behaved merely
because some one was dead. He would go if they wished it, but nothing
they could do would disturb his happiness.

As he saw the passage outside the room, and the table with the cups and
the plates, it suddenly came over him that here was a world in which he
would never see Rachel again.

“Rachel! Rachel!” he shrieked, trying to rush back to her. But they
prevented him, and pushed him down the passage and into a bedroom far
from her room. Downstairs they could hear the thud of his feet on the
floor, as he struggled to break free; and twice they heard him shout,
“Rachel, Rachel!”




CHAPTER XXVI


For two or three hours longer the moon poured its light through the
empty air. Unbroken by clouds it fell straightly, and lay almost like a
chill white frost over the sea and the earth. During these hours the
silence was not broken, and the only movement was caused by the
movement of trees and branches which stirred slightly, and then the
shadows that lay across the white spaces of the land moved too. In this
profound silence one sound only was audible, the sound of a slight but
continuous breathing which never ceased, although it never rose and
never fell. It continued after the birds had begun to flutter from
branch to branch, and could be heard behind the first thin notes of
their voices. It continued all through the hours when the east
whitened, and grew red, and a faint blue tinged the sky, but when the
sun rose it ceased, and gave place to other sounds.

The first sounds that were heard were little inarticulate cries, the
cries, it seemed, of children or of the very poor, of people who were
very weak or in pain. But when the sun was above the horizon, the air
which had been thin and pale grew every moment richer and warmer, and
the sounds of life became bolder and more full of courage and
authority. By degrees the smoke began to ascend in wavering breaths
over the houses, and these slowly thickened, until they were as round
and straight as columns, and instead of striking upon pale white
blinds, the sun shone upon dark windows, beyond which there was depth
and space.

The sun had been up for many hours, and the great dome of air was
warmed through and glittering with thin gold threads of sunlight,
before any one moved in the hotel. White and massive it stood in the
early light, half asleep with its blinds down.

At about half-past nine Miss Allan came very slowly into the hall, and
walked very slowly to the table where the morning papers were laid, but
she did not put out her hand to take one; she stood still, thinking,
with her head a little sunk upon her shoulders. She looked curiously
old, and from the way in which she stood, a little hunched together and
very massive, you could see what she would be like when she was really
old, how she would sit day after day in her chair looking placidly in
front of her. Other people began to come into the room, and to pass
her, but she did not speak to any of them or even look at them, and at
last, as if it were necessary to do something, she sat down in a chair,
and looked quietly and fixedly in front of her. She felt very old this
morning, and useless too, as if her life had been a failure, as if it
had been hard and laborious to no purpose. She did not want to go on
living, and yet she knew that she would. She was so strong that she
would live to be a very old woman. She would probably live to be
eighty, and as she was now fifty, that left thirty years more for her
to live. She turned her hands over and over in her lap and looked at
them curiously; her old hands, that had done so much work for her.
There did not seem to be much point in it all; one went on, of course
one went on. . . . She looked up to see Mrs. Thornbury standing beside
her, with lines drawn upon her forehead, and her lips parted as if she
were about to ask a question.

Miss Allan anticipated her.

“Yes,” she said. “She died this morning, very early, about three
o’clock.”

Mrs. Thornbury made a little exclamation, drew her lips together, and
the tears rose in her eyes. Through them she looked at the hall which
was now laid with great breadths of sunlight, and at the careless,
casual groups of people who were standing beside the solid arm-chairs
and tables. They looked to her unreal, or as people look who remain
unconscious that some great explosion is about to take place beside
them. But there was no explosion, and they went on standing by the
chairs and the tables. Mrs. Thornbury no longer saw them, but,
penetrating through them as though they were without substance, she saw
the house, the people in the house, the room, the bed in the room, and
the figure of the dead lying still in the dark beneath the sheets. She
could almost see the dead. She could almost hear the voices of the
mourners.

“They expected it?” she asked at length.

Miss Allan could only shake her head.

“I know nothing,” she replied, “except what Mrs. Flushing’s maid told
me. She died early this morning.”

The two women looked at each other with a quiet significant gaze, and
then, feeling oddly dazed, and seeking she did not know exactly what,
Mrs. Thornbury went slowly upstairs and walked quietly along the
passages, touching the wall with her fingers as if to guide herself.
Housemaids were passing briskly from room to room, but Mrs. Thornbury
avoided them; she hardly saw them; they seemed to her to be in another
world. She did not even look up directly when Evelyn stopped her. It
was evident that Evelyn had been lately in tears, and when she looked
at Mrs. Thornbury she began to cry again. Together they drew into the
hollow of a window, and stood there in silence. Broken words formed
themselves at last among Evelyn’s sobs. “It was wicked,” she sobbed,
“it was cruel—they were so happy.”

Mrs. Thornbury patted her on the shoulder.

“It seems hard—very hard,” she said. She paused and looked out over the
slope of the hill at the Ambroses’ villa; the windows were blazing in
the sun, and she thought how the soul of the dead had passed from those
windows. Something had passed from the world. It seemed to her
strangely empty.

“And yet the older one grows,” she continued, her eyes regaining more
than their usual brightness, “the more certain one becomes that there
is a reason. How could one go on if there were no reason?” she asked.

She asked the question of some one, but she did not ask it of Evelyn.
Evelyn’s sobs were becoming quieter. “There must be a reason,” she
said. “It can’t only be an accident. For it was an accident—it need
never have happened.”

Mrs. Thornbury sighed deeply.

“But we must not let ourselves think of that,” she added, “and let us
hope that they don’t either. Whatever they had done it might have been
the same. These terrible illnesses—”

“There’s no reason—I don’t believe there’s any reason at all!” Evelyn
broke out, pulling the blind down and letting it fly back with a little
snap.

“Why should these things happen? Why should people suffer? I honestly
believe,” she went on, lowering her voice slightly, “that Rachel’s in
Heaven, but Terence. . . .”

“What’s the good of it all?” she demanded.

Mrs. Thornbury shook her head slightly but made no reply, and pressing
Evelyn’s hand she went on down the passage. Impelled by a strong desire
to hear something, although she did not know exactly what there was to
hear, she was making her way to the Flushings’ room. As she opened
their door she felt that she had interrupted some argument between
husband and wife. Mrs. Flushing was sitting with her back to the light,
and Mr. Flushing was standing near her, arguing and trying to persuade
her of something.

“Ah, here is Mrs. Thornbury,” he began with some relief in his voice.
“You have heard, of course. My wife feels that she was in some way
responsible. She urged poor Miss Vinrace to come on the expedition. I’m
sure you will agree with me that it is most unreasonable to feel that.
We don’t even know—in fact I think it most unlikely—that she caught her
illness there. These diseases—Besides, she was set on going. She would
have gone whether you asked her or not, Alice.”

“Don’t, Wilfrid,” said Mrs. Flushing, neither moving nor taking her
eyes off the spot on the floor upon which they rested. “What’s the use
of talking? What’s the use—?” She ceased.

“I was coming to ask you,” said Mrs. Thornbury, addressing Wilfrid, for
it was useless to speak to his wife. “Is there anything you think that
one could do? Has the father arrived? Could one go and see?”

The strongest wish in her being at this moment was to be able to do
something for the unhappy people—to see them—to assure them—to help
them. It was dreadful to be so far away from them. But Mr. Flushing
shook his head; he did not think that now—later perhaps one might be
able to help. Here Mrs. Flushing rose stiffly, turned her back to them,
and walked to the dressing-room opposite. As she walked, they could see
her breast slowly rise and slowly fall. But her grief was silent. She
shut the door behind her.

When she was alone by herself she clenched her fists together, and
began beating the back of a chair with them. She was like a wounded
animal. She hated death; she was furious, outraged, indignant with
death, as if it were a living creature. She refused to relinquish her
friends to death. She would not submit to dark and nothingness. She
began to pace up and down, clenching her hands, and making no attempt
to stop the quick tears which raced down her cheeks. She sat still at
last, but she did not submit. She looked stubborn and strong when she
had ceased to cry.

In the next room, meanwhile, Wilfrid was talking to Mrs. Thornbury with
greater freedom now that his wife was not sitting there.

“That’s the worst of these places,” he said. “People will behave as
though they were in England, and they’re not. I’ve no doubt myself that
Miss Vinrace caught the infection up at the villa itself. She probably
ran risks a dozen times a day that might have given her the illness.
It’s absurd to say she caught it with us.”

If he had not been sincerely sorry for them he would have been annoyed.
“Pepper tells me,” he continued, “that he left the house because he
thought them so careless. He says they never washed their vegetables
properly. Poor people! It’s a fearful price to pay. But it’s only what
I’ve seen over and over again—people seem to forget that these things
happen, and then they do happen, and they’re surprised.”

Mrs. Thornbury agreed with him that they had been very careless, and
that there was no reason whatever to think that she had caught the
fever on the expedition; and after talking about other things for a
short time, she left him and went sadly along the passage to her own
room. There must be some reason why such things happen, she thought to
herself, as she shut the door. Only at first it was not easy to
understand what it was. It seemed so strange—so unbelievable. Why, only
three weeks ago—only a fortnight ago, she had seen Rachel; when she
shut her eyes she could almost see her now, the quiet, shy girl who was
going to be married. She thought of all that she would have missed had
she died at Rachel’s age, the children, the married life, the
unimaginable depths and miracles that seemed to her, as she looked
back, to have lain about her, day after day, and year after year. The
stunned feeling, which had been making it difficult for her to think,
gradually gave way to a feeling of the opposite nature; she thought
very quickly and very clearly, and, looking back over all her
experiences, tried to fit them into a kind of order. There was
undoubtedly much suffering, much struggling, but, on the whole, surely
there was a balance of happiness—surely order did prevail. Nor were the
deaths of young people really the saddest things in life—they were
saved so much; they kept so much. The dead—she called to mind those who
had died early, accidentally—were beautiful; she often dreamt of the
dead. And in time Terence himself would come to feel—She got up and
began to wander restlessly about the room.

For an old woman of her age she was very restless, and for one of her
clear, quick mind she was unusually perplexed. She could not settle to
anything, so that she was relieved when the door opened. She went up to
her husband, took him in her arms, and kissed him with unusual
intensity, and then as they sat down together she began to pat him and
question him as if he were a baby, an old, tired, querulous baby. She
did not tell him about Miss Vinrace’s death, for that would only
disturb him, and he was put out already. She tried to discover why he
was uneasy. Politics again? What were those horrid people doing? She
spent the whole morning in discussing politics with her husband, and by
degrees she became deeply interested in what they were saying. But
every now and then what she was saying seemed to her oddly empty of
meaning.

At luncheon it was remarked by several people that the visitors at the
hotel were beginning to leave; there were fewer every day. There were
only forty people at luncheon, instead of the sixty that there had
been. So old Mrs. Paley computed, gazing about her with her faded eyes,
as she took her seat at her own table in the window. Her party
generally consisted of Mr. Perrott as well as Arthur and Susan, and
to-day Evelyn was lunching with them also.

She was unusually subdued. Having noticed that her eyes were red, and
guessing the reason, the others took pains to keep up an elaborate
conversation between themselves. She suffered it to go on for a few
minutes, leaning both elbows on the table, and leaving her soup
untouched, when she exclaimed suddenly, “I don’t know how you feel, but
I can simply think of nothing else!”

The gentlemen murmured sympathetically, and looked grave.

Susan replied, “Yes—isn’t it perfectly awful? When you think what a
nice girl she was—only just engaged, and this need never have
happened—it seems too tragic.” She looked at Arthur as though he might
be able to help her with something more suitable.

“Hard lines,” said Arthur briefly. “But it was a foolish thing to do—to
go up that river.” He shook his head. “They should have known better.
You can’t expect Englishwomen to stand roughing it as the natives do
who’ve been acclimatised. I’d half a mind to warn them at tea that day
when it was being discussed. But it’s no good saying these sort of
things—it only puts people’s backs up—it never makes any difference.”

Old Mrs. Paley, hitherto contented with her soup, here intimated, by
raising one hand to her ear, that she wished to know what was being
said.

“You heard, Aunt Emma, that poor Miss Vinrace has died of the fever,”
Susan informed her gently. She could not speak of death loudly or even
in her usual voice, so that Mrs. Paley did not catch a word. Arthur
came to the rescue.

“Miss Vinrace is dead,” he said very distinctly.

Mrs. Paley merely bent a little towards him and asked, “Eh?”

“Miss Vinrace is dead,” he repeated. It was only by stiffening all the
muscles round his mouth that he could prevent himself from bursting
into laughter, and forced himself to repeat for the third time, “Miss
Vinrace. . . . She’s dead.”

Let alone the difficulty of hearing the exact words, facts that were
outside her daily experience took some time to reach Mrs. Paley’s
consciousness. A weight seemed to rest upon her brain, impeding, though
not damaging its action. She sat vague-eyed for at least a minute
before she realised what Arthur meant.

“Dead?” she said vaguely. “Miss Vinrace dead? Dear me . . . that’s very
sad. But I don’t at the moment remember which she was. We seem to have
made so many new acquaintances here.” She looked at Susan for help. “A
tall dark girl, who just missed being handsome, with a high colour?”

“No,” Susan interposed. “She was—” then she gave it up in despair.
There was no use in explaining that Mrs. Paley was thinking of the
wrong person.

“She ought not to have died,” Mrs. Paley continued. “She looked so
strong. But people will drink the water. I can never make out why. It
seems such a simple thing to tell them to put a bottle of Seltzer water
in your bedroom. That’s all the precaution I’ve ever taken, and I’ve
been in every part of the world, I may say—Italy a dozen times over. .
. . But young people always think they know better, and then they pay
the penalty. Poor thing—I am very sorry for her.” But the difficulty of
peering into a dish of potatoes and helping herself engrossed her
attention.

Arthur and Susan both secretly hoped that the subject was now disposed
of, for there seemed to them something unpleasant in this discussion.
But Evelyn was not ready to let it drop. Why would people never talk
about the things that mattered?

“I don’t believe you care a bit!” she said, turning savagely upon Mr.
Perrott, who had sat all this time in silence.

“I? Oh, yes, I do,” he answered awkwardly, but with obvious sincerity.
Evelyn’s questions made him too feel uncomfortable.

“It seems so inexplicable,” Evelyn continued. “Death, I mean. Why
should she be dead, and not you or I? It was only a fortnight ago that
she was here with the rest of us. What d’you believe?” she demanded of
Mr. Perrott. “D’you believe that things go on, that she’s still
somewhere—or d’you think it’s simply a game—we crumble up to nothing
when we die? I’m positive Rachel’s not dead.”

Mr. Perrott would have said almost anything that Evelyn wanted him to
say, but to assert that he believed in the immortality of the soul was
not in his power. He sat silent, more deeply wrinkled than usual,
crumbling his bread.

Lest Evelyn should next ask him what he believed, Arthur, after making
a pause equivalent to a full stop, started a completely different
topic.

“Supposing,” he said, “a man were to write and tell you that he wanted
five pounds because he had known your grandfather, what would you do?
It was this way. My grandfather—”

“Invented a stove,” said Evelyn. “I know all about that. We had one in
the conservatory to keep the plants warm.”

“Didn’t know I was so famous,” said Arthur. “Well,” he continued,
determined at all costs to spin his story out at length, “the old chap,
being about the second best inventor of his day, and a capable lawyer
too, died, as they always do, without making a will. Now Fielding, his
clerk, with how much justice I don’t know, always claimed that he meant
to do something for him. The poor old boy’s come down in the world
through trying inventions on his own account, lives in Penge over a
tobacconist’s shop. I’ve been to see him there. The question is—must I
stump up or not? What does the abstract spirit of justice require,
Perrott? Remember, I didn’t benefit under my grandfather’s will, and
I’ve no way of testing the truth of the story.”

“I don’t know much about the abstract spirit of justice,” said Susan,
smiling complacently at the others, “but I’m certain of one thing—he’ll
get his five pounds!”

As Mr. Perrott proceeded to deliver an opinion, and Evelyn insisted
that he was much too stingy, like all lawyers, thinking of the letter
and not of the spirit, while Mrs. Paley required to be kept informed
between the courses as to what they were all saying, the luncheon
passed with no interval of silence, and Arthur congratulated himself
upon the tact with which the discussion had been smoothed over.

As they left the room it happened that Mrs. Paley’s wheeled chair ran
into the Elliots, who were coming through the door, as she was going
out. Brought thus to a standstill for a moment, Arthur and Susan
congratulated Hughling Elliot upon his convalescence,—he was down,
cadaverous enough, for the first time,—and Mr. Perrott took occasion to
say a few words in private to Evelyn.

“Would there be any chance of seeing you this afternoon, about
three-thirty say? I shall be in the garden, by the fountain.”

The block dissolved before Evelyn answered. But as she left them in the
hall, she looked at him brightly and said, “Half-past three, did you
say? That’ll suit me.”

She ran upstairs with the feeling of spiritual exaltation and quickened
life which the prospect of an emotional scene always aroused in her.
That Mr. Perrott was again about to propose to her, she had no doubt,
and she was aware that on this occasion she ought to be prepared with a
definite answer, for she was going away in three days’ time. But she
could not bring her mind to bear upon the question. To come to a
decision was very difficult to her, because she had a natural dislike
of anything final and done with; she liked to go on and on—always on
and on. She was leaving, and, therefore, she occupied herself in laying
her clothes out side by side upon the bed. She observed that some were
very shabby. She took the photograph of her father and mother, and,
before she laid it away in her box, she held it for a minute in her
hand. Rachel had looked at it. Suddenly the keen feeling of some one’s
personality, which things that they have owned or handled sometimes
preserves, overcame her; she felt Rachel in the room with her; it was
as if she were on a ship at sea, and the life of the day was as unreal
as the land in the distance. But by degrees the feeling of Rachel’s
presence passed away, and she could no longer realise her, for she had
scarcely known her. But this momentary sensation left her depressed and
fatigued. What had she done with her life? What future was there before
her? What was make-believe, and what was real? Were these proposals and
intimacies and adventures real, or was the contentment which she had
seen on the faces of Susan and Rachel more real than anything she had
ever felt?

She made herself ready to go downstairs, absentmindedly, but her
fingers were so well trained that they did the work of preparing her
almost of their own accord. When she was actually on the way
downstairs, the blood began to circle through her body of its own
accord too, for her mind felt very dull.

Mr. Perrott was waiting for her. Indeed, he had gone straight into the
garden after luncheon, and had been walking up and down the path for
more than half an hour, in a state of acute suspense.

“I’m late as usual!” she exclaimed, as she caught sight of him. “Well,
you must forgive me; I had to pack up. . . . My word! It looks stormy!
And that’s a new steamer in the bay, isn’t it?”

She looked at the bay, in which a steamer was just dropping anchor, the
smoke still hanging about it, while a swift black shudder ran through
the waves. “One’s quite forgotten what rain looks like,” she added.

But Mr. Perrott paid no attention to the steamer or to the weather.

“Miss Murgatroyd,” he began with his usual formality, “I asked you to
come here from a very selfish motive, I fear. I do not think you need
to be assured once more of my feelings; but, as you are leaving so
soon, I felt that I could not let you go without asking you to tell
me—have I any reason to hope that you will ever come to care for me?”

He was very pale, and seemed unable to say any more.

The little gush of vitality which had come into Evelyn as she ran
downstairs had left her, and she felt herself impotent. There was
nothing for her to say; she felt nothing. Now that he was actually
asking her, in his elderly gentle words, to marry him, she felt less
for him than she had ever felt before.

“Let’s sit down and talk it over,” she said rather unsteadily.

Mr. Perrott followed her to a curved green seat under a tree. They
looked at the fountain in front of them, which had long ceased to play.
Evelyn kept looking at the fountain instead of thinking of what she was
saying; the fountain without any water seemed to be the type of her own
being.

“Of course I care for you,” she began, rushing her words out in a
hurry; “I should be a brute if I didn’t. I think you’re quite one of
the nicest people I’ve ever known, and one of the finest too. But I
wish . . . I wish you didn’t care for me in that way. Are you sure you
do?” For the moment she honestly desired that he should say no.

“Quite sure,” said Mr. Perrott.

“You see, I’m not as simple as most women,” Evelyn continued. “I think
I want more. I don’t know exactly what I feel.”

He sat by her, watching her and refraining from speech.

“I sometimes think I haven’t got it in me to care very much for one
person only. Some one else would make you a better wife. I can imagine
you very happy with some one else.”

“If you think that there is any chance that you will come to care for
me, I am quite content to wait,” said Mr. Perrott.

“Well—there’s no hurry, is there?” said Evelyn. “Suppose I thought it
over and wrote and told you when I get back? I’m going to Moscow; I’ll
write from Moscow.”

But Mr. Perrott persisted.

“You cannot give me any kind of idea. I do not ask for a date . . .
that would be most unreasonable.” He paused, looking down at the gravel
path.

As she did not immediately answer, he went on.

“I know very well that I am not—that I have not much to offer you
either in myself or in my circumstances. And I forget; it cannot seem
the miracle to you that it does to me. Until I met you I had gone on in
my own quiet way—we are both very quiet people, my sister and I—quite
content with my lot. My friendship with Arthur was the most important
thing in my life. Now that I know you, all that has changed. You seem
to put such a spirit into everything. Life seems to hold so many
possibilities that I had never dreamt of.”

“That’s splendid!” Evelyn exclaimed, grasping his hand. “Now you’ll go
back and start all kinds of things and make a great name in the world;
and we’ll go on being friends, whatever happens . . . we’ll be great
friends, won’t we?”

“Evelyn!” he moaned suddenly, and took her in his arms, and kissed her.
She did not resent it, although it made little impression on her.

As she sat upright again, she said, “I never see why one shouldn’t go
on being friends—though some people do. And friendships do make a
difference, don’t they? They are the kind of things that matter in
one’s life?”

He looked at her with a bewildered expression as if he did not really
understand what she was saying. With a considerable effort he collected
himself, stood up, and said, “Now I think I have told you what I feel,
and I will only add that I can wait as long as ever you wish.”

Left alone, Evelyn walked up and down the path. What did matter then?
What was the meaning of it all?




CHAPTER XXVII


All that evening the clouds gathered, until they closed entirely over
the blue of the sky. They seemed to narrow the space between earth and
heaven, so that there was no room for the air to move in freely; and
the waves, too, lay flat, and yet rigid, as if they were restrained.
The leaves on the bushes and trees in the garden hung closely together,
and the feeling of pressure and restraint was increased by the short
chirping sounds which came from birds and insects.

So strange were the lights and the silence that the busy hum of voices
which usually filled the dining-room at meal times had distinct gaps in
it, and during these silences the clatter of the knives upon plates
became audible. The first roll of thunder and the first heavy drop
striking the pane caused a little stir.

“It’s coming!” was said simultaneously in many different languages.

There was then a profound silence, as if the thunder had withdrawn into
itself. People had just begun to eat again, when a gust of cold air
came through the open windows, lifting tablecloths and skirts, a light
flashed, and was instantly followed by a clap of thunder right over the
hotel. The rain swished with it, and immediately there were all those
sounds of windows being shut and doors slamming violently which
accompany a storm.

The room grew suddenly several degrees darker, for the wind seemed to
be driving waves of darkness across the earth. No one attempted to eat
for a time, but sat looking out at the garden, with their forks in the
air. The flashes now came frequently, lighting up faces as if they were
going to be photographed, surprising them in tense and unnatural
expressions. The clap followed close and violently upon them. Several
women half rose from their chairs and then sat down again, but dinner
was continued uneasily with eyes upon the garden. The bushes outside
were ruffled and whitened, and the wind pressed upon them so that they
seemed to stoop to the ground. The waiters had to press dishes upon the
diners’ notice; and the diners had to draw the attention of waiters,
for they were all absorbed in looking at the storm. As the thunder
showed no signs of withdrawing, but seemed massed right overhead, while
the lightning aimed straight at the garden every time, an uneasy gloom
replaced the first excitement.

Finishing the meal very quickly, people congregated in the hall, where
they felt more secure than in any other place because they could
retreat far from the windows, and although they heard the thunder, they
could not see anything. A little boy was carried away sobbing in the
arms of his mother.

While the storm continued, no one seemed inclined to sit down, but they
collected in little groups under the central skylight, where they stood
in a yellow atmosphere, looking upwards. Now and again their faces
became white, as the lightning flashed, and finally a terrific crash
came, making the panes of the skylight lift at the joints.

“Ah!” several voices exclaimed at the same moment.

“Something struck,” said a man’s voice.

The rain rushed down. The rain seemed now to extinguish the lightning
and the thunder, and the hall became almost dark.

After a minute or two, when nothing was heard but the rattle of water
upon the glass, there was a perceptible slackening of the sound, and
then the atmosphere became lighter.

“It’s over,” said another voice.

At a touch, all the electric lights were turned on, and revealed a
crowd of people all standing, all looking with rather strained faces up
at the skylight, but when they saw each other in the artificial light
they turned at once and began to move away. For some minutes the rain
continued to rattle upon the skylight, and the thunder gave another
shake or two; but it was evident from the clearing of the darkness and
the light drumming of the rain upon the roof, that the great confused
ocean of air was travelling away from them, and passing high over head
with its clouds and its rods of fire, out to sea. The building, which
had seemed so small in the tumult of the storm, now became as square
and spacious as usual.

As the storm drew away, the people in the hall of the hotel sat down;
and with a comfortable sense of relief, began to tell each other
stories about great storms, and produced in many cases their
occupations for the evening. The chess-board was brought out, and Mr.
Elliot, who wore a stock instead of a collar as a sign of
convalescence, but was otherwise much as usual, challenged Mr. Pepper
to a final contest. Round them gathered a group of ladies with pieces
of needlework, or in default of needlework, with novels, to superintend
the game, much as if they were in charge of two small boys playing
marbles. Every now and then they looked at the board and made some
encouraging remark to the gentlemen.

Mrs. Paley just round the corner had her cards arranged in long ladders
before her, with Susan sitting near to sympathise but not to correct,
and the merchants and the miscellaneous people who had never been
discovered to possess names were stretched in their arm-chairs with
their newspapers on their knees. The conversation in these
circumstances was very gentle, fragmentary, and intermittent, but the
room was full of the indescribable stir of life. Every now and then the
moth, which was now grey of wing and shiny of thorax, whizzed over
their heads, and hit the lamps with a thud.

A young woman put down her needlework and exclaimed, “Poor creature! it
would be kinder to kill it.” But nobody seemed disposed to rouse
himself in order to kill the moth. They watched it dash from lamp to
lamp, because they were comfortable, and had nothing to do.

On the sofa, beside the chess-players, Mrs. Elliot was imparting a new
stitch in knitting to Mrs. Thornbury, so that their heads came very
near together, and were only to be distinguished by the old lace cap
which Mrs. Thornbury wore in the evening. Mrs. Elliot was an expert at
knitting, and disclaimed a compliment to that effect with evident
pride.

“I suppose we’re all proud of something,” she said, “and I’m proud of
my knitting. I think things like that run in families. We all knit
well. I had an uncle who knitted his own socks to the day of his
death—and he did it better than any of his daughters, dear old
gentleman. Now I wonder that you, Miss Allan, who use your eyes so
much, don’t take up knitting in the evenings. You’d find it such a
relief, I should say—such a rest to the eyes—and the bazaars are so
glad of things.” Her voice dropped into the smooth half-conscious tone
of the expert knitter; the words came gently one after another. “As
much as I do I can always dispose of, which is a comfort, for then I
feel that I am not wasting my time—”

Miss Allan, being thus addressed, shut her novel and observed the
others placidly for a time. At last she said, “It is surely not natural
to leave your wife because she happens to be in love with you. But
that—as far as I can make out—is what the gentleman in my story does.”

“Tut, tut, that doesn’t sound good—no, that doesn’t sound at all
natural,” murmured the knitters in their absorbed voices.

“Still, it’s the kind of book people call very clever,” Miss Allan
added.

“_Maternity_—by Michael Jessop—I presume,” Mr. Elliot put in, for he
could never resist the temptation of talking while he played chess.

“D’you know,” said Mrs. Elliot, after a moment, “I don’t think people
_do_ write good novels now—not as good as they used to, anyhow.”

No one took the trouble to agree with her or to disagree with her.
Arthur Venning who was strolling about, sometimes looking at the game,
sometimes reading a page of a magazine, looked at Miss Allan, who was
half asleep, and said humorously, “A penny for your thoughts, Miss
Allan.”

The others looked up. They were glad that he had not spoken to them.
But Miss Allan replied without any hesitation, “I was thinking of my
imaginary uncle. Hasn’t every one got an imaginary uncle?” she
continued. “I have one—a most delightful old gentleman. He’s always
giving me things. Sometimes it’s a gold watch; sometimes it’s a
carriage and pair; sometimes it’s a beautiful little cottage in the New
Forest; sometimes it’s a ticket to the place I most want to see.”

She set them all thinking vaguely of the things they wanted. Mrs.
Elliot knew exactly what she wanted; she wanted a child; and the usual
little pucker deepened on her brow.

“We’re such lucky people,” she said, looking at her husband. “We really
have no wants.” She was apt to say this, partly in order to convince
herself, and partly in order to convince other people. But she was
prevented from wondering how far she carried conviction by the entrance
of Mr. and Mrs. Flushing, who came through the hall and stopped by the
chess-board. Mrs. Flushing looked wilder than ever. A great strand of
black hair looped down across her brow, her cheeks were whipped a dark
blood red, and drops of rain made wet marks upon them.

Mr. Flushing explained that they had been on the roof watching the
storm.

“It was a wonderful sight,” he said. “The lightning went right out over
the sea, and lit up the waves and the ships far away. You can’t think
how wonderful the mountains looked too, with the lights on them, and
the great masses of shadow. It’s all over now.”

He slid down into a chair, becoming interested in the final struggle of
the game.

“And you go back to-morrow?” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at Mrs.
Flushing.

“Yes,” she replied.

“And indeed one is not sorry to go back,” said Mrs. Elliot, assuming an
air of mournful anxiety, “after all this illness.”

“Are you afraid of dyin’?” Mrs. Flushing demanded scornfully.

“I think we are all afraid of that,” said Mrs. Elliot with dignity.

“I suppose we’re all cowards when it comes to the point,” said Mrs.
Flushing, rubbing her cheek against the back of the chair. “I’m sure I
am.”

“Not a bit of it!” said Mr. Flushing, turning round, for Mr. Pepper
took a very long time to consider his move. “It’s not cowardly to wish
to live, Alice. It’s the very reverse of cowardly. Personally, I’d like
to go on for a hundred years—granted, of course, that I had the full
use of my faculties. Think of all the things that are bound to happen!”

“That is what I feel,” Mrs. Thornbury rejoined. “The changes, the
improvements, the inventions—and beauty. D’you know I feel sometimes
that I couldn’t bear to die and cease to see beautiful things about
me?”

“It would certainly be very dull to die before they have discovered
whether there is life in Mars,” Miss Allan added.

“Do you really believe there’s life in Mars?” asked Mrs. Flushing,
turning to her for the first time with keen interest. “Who tells you
that? Some one who knows? D’you know a man called—?”

Here Mrs. Thornbury laid down her knitting, and a look of extreme
solicitude came into her eyes.

“There is Mr. Hirst,” she said quietly.

St. John had just come through the swing door. He was rather blown
about by the wind, and his cheeks looked terribly pale, unshorn, and
cavernous. After taking off his coat he was going to pass straight
through the hall and up to his room, but he could not ignore the
presence of so many people he knew, especially as Mrs. Thornbury rose
and went up to him, holding out her hand. But the shock of the warm
lamp-lit room, together with the sight of so many cheerful human beings
sitting together at their ease, after the dark walk in the rain, and
the long days of strain and horror, overcame him completely. He looked
at Mrs. Thornbury and could not speak.

Every one was silent. Mr. Pepper’s hand stayed upon his Knight. Mrs.
Thornbury somehow moved him to a chair, sat herself beside him, and
with tears in her own eyes said gently, “You have done everything for
your friend.”

Her action set them all talking again as if they had never stopped, and
Mr. Pepper finished the move with his Knight.

“There was nothing to be done,” said St. John. He spoke very slowly.
“It seems impossible—”

He drew his hand across his eyes as if some dream came between him and
the others and prevented him from seeing where he was.

“And that poor fellow,” said Mrs. Thornbury, the tears falling again
down her cheeks.

“Impossible,” St. John repeated.

“Did he have the consolation of knowing—?” Mrs. Thornbury began very
tentatively.

But St. John made no reply. He lay back in his chair, half-seeing the
others, half-hearing what they said. He was terribly tired, and the
light and warmth, the movements of the hands, and the soft
communicative voices soothed him; they gave him a strange sense of
quiet and relief. As he sat there, motionless, this feeling of relief
became a feeling of profound happiness. Without any sense of disloyalty
to Terence and Rachel he ceased to think about either of them. The
movements and the voices seemed to draw together from different parts
of the room, and to combine themselves into a pattern before his eyes;
he was content to sit silently watching the pattern build itself up,
looking at what he hardly saw.

The game was really a good one, and Mr. Pepper and Mr. Elliot were
becoming more and more set upon the struggle. Mrs. Thornbury, seeing
that St. John did not wish to talk, resumed her knitting.

“Lightning again!” Mrs. Flushing suddenly exclaimed. A yellow light
flashed across the blue window, and for a second they saw the green
trees outside. She strode to the door, pushed it open, and stood half
out in the open air.

But the light was only the reflection of the storm which was over. The
rain had ceased, the heavy clouds were blown away, and the air was thin
and clear, although vapourish mists were being driven swiftly across
the moon. The sky was once more a deep and solemn blue, and the shape
of the earth was visible at the bottom of the air, enormous, dark, and
solid, rising into the tapering mass of the mountain, and pricked here
and there on the slopes by the tiny lights of villas. The driving air,
the drone of the trees, and the flashing light which now and again
spread a broad illumination over the earth filled Mrs. Flushing with
exultation. Her breasts rose and fell.

“Splendid! Splendid!” she muttered to herself. Then she turned back
into the hall and exclaimed in a peremptory voice, “Come outside and
see, Wilfrid; it’s wonderful.”

Some half-stirred; some rose; some dropped their balls of wool and
began to stoop to look for them.

“To bed—to bed,” said Miss Allan.

“It was the move with your Queen that gave it away, Pepper,” exclaimed
Mr. Elliot triumphantly, sweeping the pieces together and standing up.
He had won the game.

“What? Pepper beaten at last? I congratulate you!” said Arthur Venning,
who was wheeling old Mrs. Paley to bed.

All these voices sounded gratefully in St. John’s ears as he lay
half-asleep, and yet vividly conscious of everything around him. Across
his eyes passed a procession of objects, black and indistinct, the
figures of people picking up their books, their cards, their balls of
wool, their work-baskets, and passing him one after another on their
way to bed.