The Voyage Out
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