The Voyage Out
“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