The Voyage Out
grasshoppers and the hum of bees, which sounded loud in the ear as they
shot past and vanished. The party halted and sat for a time in a quarry
on the hillside.
“Amazingly clear,” exclaimed St. John, identifying one cleft in the
land after another.
Evelyn M. sat beside him, propping her chin on her hand. She surveyed
the view with a certain look of triumph.
“D’you think Garibaldi was ever up here?” she asked Mr. Hirst. Oh, if
she had been his bride! If, instead of a picnic party, this was a party
of patriots, and she, red-shirted like the rest, had lain among grim
men, flat on the turf, aiming her gun at the white turrets beneath
them, screening her eyes to pierce through the smoke! So thinking, her
foot stirred restlessly, and she exclaimed:
“I don’t call this _life_, do you?”
“What do you call life?” said St. John.
“Fighting—revolution,” she said, still gazing at the doomed city. “You
only care for books, I know.”
“You’re quite wrong,” said St. John.
“Explain,” she urged, for there were no guns to be aimed at bodies, and
she turned to another kind of warfare.
“What do I care for? People,” he said.
“Well, I _am_ surprised!” she exclaimed. “You look so awfully serious.
Do let’s be friends and tell each other what we’re like. I hate being
cautious, don’t you?”
But St. John was decidedly cautious, as she could see by the sudden
constriction of his lips, and had no intention of revealing his soul to
a young lady. “The ass is eating my hat,” he remarked, and stretched
out for it instead of answering her. Evelyn blushed very slightly and
then turned with some impetuosity upon Mr. Perrott, and when they
mounted again it was Mr. Perrott who lifted her to her seat.
“When one has laid the eggs one eats the omelette,” said Hughling
Elliot, exquisitely in French, a hint to the rest of them that it was
time to ride on again.
The midday sun which Hirst had foretold was beginning to beat down
hotly. The higher they got the more of the sky appeared, until the
mountain was only a small tent of earth against an enormous blue
background. The English fell silent; the natives who walked beside the
donkeys broke into queer wavering songs and tossed jokes from one to
the other. The way grew very steep, and each rider kept his eyes fixed
on the hobbling curved form of the rider and donkey directly in front
of him. Rather more strain was being put upon their bodies than is
quite legitimate in a party of pleasure, and Hewet overheard one or two
slightly grumbling remarks.
“Expeditions in such heat are perhaps a little unwise,” Mrs. Elliot
murmured to Miss Allan.
But Miss Allan returned, “I always like to get to the top”; and it was
true, although she was a big woman, stiff in the joints, and unused to
donkey-riding, but as her holidays were few she made the most of them.
The vivacious white figure rode well in front; she had somehow
possessed herself of a leafy branch and wore it round her hat like a
garland. They went on for a few minutes in silence.
“The view will be wonderful,” Hewet assured them, turning round in his
saddle and smiling encouragement. Rachel caught his eye and smiled too.
They struggled on for some time longer, nothing being heard but the
clatter of hooves striving on the loose stones. Then they saw that
Evelyn was off her ass, and that Mr. Perrott was standing in the
attitude of a statesman in Parliament Square, stretching an arm of
stone towards the view. A little to the left of them was a low ruined
wall, the stump of an Elizabethan watch-tower.
“I couldn’t have stood it much longer,” Mrs. Elliot confided to Mrs.
Thornbury, but the excitement of being at the top in another moment and
seeing the view prevented any one from answering her. One after another
they came out on the flat space at the top and stood overcome with
wonder. Before them they beheld an immense space—grey sands running
into forest, and forest merging in mountains, and mountains washed by
air, the infinite distances of South America. A river ran across the
plain, as flat as the land, and appearing quite as stationary. The
effect of so much space was at first rather chilling. They felt
themselves very small, and for some time no one said anything. Then
Evelyn exclaimed, “Splendid!” She took hold of the hand that was next
her; it chanced to be Miss Allan’s hand.
“North—South—East—West,” said Miss Allan, jerking her head slightly
towards the points of the compass.
Hewet, who had gone a little in front, looked up at his guests as if to
justify himself for having brought them. He observed how strangely the
people standing in a row with their figures bent slightly forward and
their clothes plastered by the wind to the shape of their bodies
resembled naked statues. On their pedestal of earth they looked
unfamiliar and noble, but in another moment they had broken their rank,
and he had to see to the laying out of food. Hirst came to his help,
and they handed packets of chicken and bread from one to another.
As St. John gave Helen her packet she looked him full in the face and
said:
“Do you remember—two women?”
He looked at her sharply.
“I do,” he answered.
“So you’re the two women!” Hewet exclaimed, looking from Helen to
Rachel.
“Your lights tempted us,” said Helen. “We watched you playing cards,
but we never knew that we were being watched.”
“It was like a thing in a play,” Rachel added.
“And Hirst couldn’t describe you,” said Hewet.
It was certainly odd to have seen Helen and to find nothing to say
about her.
Hughling Elliot put up his eyeglass and grasped the situation.
“I don’t know of anything more dreadful,” he said, pulling at the joint
of a chicken’s leg, “than being seen when one isn’t conscious of it.
One feels sure one has been caught doing something ridiculous—looking
at one’s tongue in a hansom, for instance.”
Now the others ceased to look at the view, and drawing together sat
down in a circle round the baskets.
“And yet those little looking-glasses in hansoms have a fascination of
their own,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “One’s features look so different when
one can only see a bit of them.”
“There will soon be very few hansom cabs left,” said Mrs. Elliot. “And
four-wheeled cabs—I assure you even at Oxford it’s almost impossible to
get a four-wheeled cab.”
“I wonder what happens to the horses,” said Susan.
“Veal pie,” said Arthur.
“It’s high time that horses should become extinct anyhow,” said Hirst.
“They’re distressingly ugly, besides being vicious.”
But Susan, who had been brought up to understand that the horse is the
noblest of God’s creatures, could not agree, and Venning thought Hirst
an unspeakable ass, but was too polite not to continue the
conversation.
“When they see us falling out of aeroplanes they get some of their own
back, I expect,” he remarked.
“You fly?” said old Mr. Thornbury, putting on his spectacles to look at
him.
“I hope to, some day,” said Arthur.
Here flying was discussed at length, and Mrs. Thornbury delivered an
opinion which was almost a speech to the effect that it would be quite
necessary in time of war, and in England we were terribly behind-hand.
“If I were a young fellow,” she concluded, “I should certainly
qualify.” It was odd to look at the little elderly lady, in her grey
coat and skirt, with a sandwich in her hand, her eyes lighting up with
zeal as she imagined herself a young man in an aeroplane. For some
reason, however, the talk did not run easily after this, and all they
said was about drink and salt and the view. Suddenly Miss Allan, who
was seated with her back to the ruined wall, put down her sandwich,
picked something off her neck, and remarked, “I’m covered with little
creatures.” It was true, and the discovery was very welcome. The ants
were pouring down a glacier of loose earth heaped between the stones of
the ruin—large brown ants with polished bodies. She held out one on the
back of her hand for Helen to look at.
“Suppose they sting?” said Helen.
“They will not sting, but they may infest the victuals,” said Miss
Allan, and measures were taken at once to divert the ants from their
course. At Hewet’s suggestion it was decided to adopt the methods of
modern warfare against an invading army. The table-cloth represented
the invaded country, and round it they built barricades of baskets, set
up the wine bottles in a rampart, made fortifications of bread and dug
fosses of salt. When an ant got through it was exposed to a fire of
bread-crumbs, until Susan pronounced that that was cruel, and rewarded
those brave spirits with spoil in the shape of tongue. Playing this
game they lost their stiffness, and even became unusually daring, for
Mr. Perrott, who was very shy, said, “Permit me,” and removed an ant
from Evelyn’s neck.
“It would be no laughing matter really,” said Mrs. Elliot
confidentially to Mrs. Thornbury, “if an ant did get between the vest
and the skin.”
The noise grew suddenly more clamorous, for it was discovered that a
long line of ants had found their way on to the table-cloth by a back
entrance, and if success could be gauged by noise, Hewet had every
reason to think his party a success. Nevertheless he became, for no
reason at all, profoundly depressed.
“They are not satisfactory; they are ignoble,” he thought, surveying
his guests from a little distance, where he was gathering together the
plates. He glanced at them all, stooping and swaying and gesticulating
round the table-cloth. Amiable and modest, respectable in many ways,
lovable even in their contentment and desire to be kind, how mediocre
they all were, and capable of what insipid cruelty to one another!
There was Mrs. Thornbury, sweet but trivial in her maternal egoism;
Mrs. Elliot, perpetually complaining of her lot; her husband a mere pea
in a pod; and Susan—she had no self, and counted neither one way nor
the other; Venning was as honest and as brutal as a schoolboy; poor old
Thornbury merely trod his round like a horse in a mill; and the less
one examined into Evelyn’s character the better, he suspected. Yet
these were the people with money, and to them rather than to others was
given the management of the world. Put among them some one more vital,
who cared for life or for beauty, and what an agony, what a waste would
they inflict on him if he tried to share with them and not to scourge!
“There’s Hirst,” he concluded, coming to the figure of his friend; with
his usual little frown of concentration upon his forehead he was
peeling the skin off a banana. “And he’s as ugly as sin.” For the
ugliness of St. John Hirst, and the limitations that went with it, he
made the rest in some way responsible. It was their fault that he had
to live alone. Then he came to Helen, attracted to her by the sound of
her laugh. She was laughing at Miss Allan. “You wear combinations in
this heat?” she said in a voice which was meant to be private. He liked
the look of her immensely, not so much her beauty, but her largeness
and simplicity, which made her stand out from the rest like a great
stone woman, and he passed on in a gentler mood. His eye fell upon
Rachel. She was lying back rather behind the others resting on one
elbow; she might have been thinking precisely the same thoughts as
Hewet himself. Her eyes were fixed rather sadly but not intently upon
the row of people opposite her. Hewet crawled up to her on his knees,
with a piece of bread in his hand.
“What are you looking at?” he asked.
She was a little startled, but answered directly, “Human beings.”
CHAPTER XI
One after another they rose and stretched themselves, and in a few
minutes divided more or less into two separate parties. One of these
parties was dominated by Hughling Elliot and Mrs. Thornbury, who,