The Voyage Out
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