The Voyage Out
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.