The Voyage Out
“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