The Voyage Out
having both read the same books and considered the same questions, were
now anxious to name the places beneath them and to hang upon them
stores of information about navies and armies, political parties,
natives and mineral products—all of which combined, they said, to prove
that South America was the country of the future.
Evelyn M. listened with her bright blue eyes fixed upon the oracles.
“How it makes one long to be a man!” she exclaimed.
Mr. Perrott answered, surveying the plain, that a country with a future
was a very fine thing.
“If I were you,” said Evelyn, turning to him and drawing her glove
vehemently through her fingers, “I’d raise a troop and conquer some
great territory and make it splendid. You’d want women for that. I’d
love to start life from the very beginning as it ought to be—nothing
squalid—but great halls and gardens and splendid men and women. But
you—you only like Law Courts!”
“And would you really be content without pretty frocks and sweets and
all the things young ladies like?” asked Mr. Perrott, concealing a
certain amount of pain beneath his ironical manner.
“I’m not a young lady,” Evelyn flashed; she bit her underlip. “Just
because I like splendid things you laugh at me. Why are there no men
like Garibaldi now?” she demanded.
“Look here,” said Mr. Perrott, “you don’t give me a chance. You think
we ought to begin things fresh. Good. But I don’t see precisely—conquer
a territory? They’re all conquered already, aren’t they?”
“It’s not any territory in particular,” Evelyn explained. “It’s the
idea, don’t you see? We lead such tame lives. And I feel sure you’ve
got splendid things in you.”
Hewet saw the scars and hollows in Mr. Perrott’s sagacious face relax
pathetically. He could imagine the calculations which even then went on
within his mind, as to whether he would be justified in asking a woman
to marry him, considering that he made no more than five hundred a year
at the Bar, owned no private means, and had an invalid sister to
support. Mr. Perrott again knew that he was not “quite,” as Susan
stated in her diary; not quite a gentleman she meant, for he was the
son of a grocer in Leeds, had started life with a basket on his back,
and now, though practically indistinguishable from a born gentleman,
showed his origin to keen eyes in an impeccable neatness of dress, lack
of freedom in manner, extreme cleanliness of person, and a certain
indescribable timidity and precision with his knife and fork which
might be the relic of days when meat was rare, and the way of handling
it by no means gingerly.
The two parties who were strolling about and losing their unity now
came together, and joined each other in a long stare over the yellow
and green patches of the heated landscape below. The hot air danced
across it, making it impossible to see the roofs of a village on the
plain distinctly. Even on the top of the mountain where a breeze played
lightly, it was very hot, and the heat, the food, the immense space,
and perhaps some less well-defined cause produced a comfortable
drowsiness and a sense of happy relaxation in them. They did not say
much, but felt no constraint in being silent.
“Suppose we go and see what’s to be seen over there?” said Arthur to
Susan, and the pair walked off together, their departure certainly
sending some thrill of emotion through the rest.
“An odd lot, aren’t they?” said Arthur. “I thought we should never get
’em all to the top. But I’m glad we came, by Jove! I wouldn’t have
missed this for something.”
“I don’t _like_ Mr. Hirst,” said Susan inconsequently. “I suppose he’s
very clever, but why should clever people be so—I expect he’s awfully
nice, really,” she added, instinctively qualifying what might have
seemed an unkind remark.
“Hirst? Oh, he’s one of these learned chaps,” said Arthur
indifferently. “He don’t look as if he enjoyed it. You should hear him
talking to Elliot. It’s as much as I can do to follow ’em at all. . . .
I was never good at my books.”
With these sentences and the pauses that came between them they reached
a little hillock, on the top of which grew several slim trees.
“D’you mind if we sit down here?” said Arthur, looking about him. “It’s
jolly in the shade—and the view—” They sat down, and looked straight
ahead of them in silence for some time.
“But I do envy those clever chaps sometimes,” Arthur remarked. “I don’t
suppose they ever . . .” He did not finish his sentence.
“I can’t see why you should envy them,” said Susan, with great
sincerity.
“Odd things happen to one,” said Arthur. “One goes along smoothly
enough, one thing following another, and it’s all very jolly and plain
sailing, and you think you know all about it, and suddenly one doesn’t
know where one is a bit, and everything seems different from what it
used to seem. Now to-day, coming up that path, riding behind you, I
seemed to see everything as if—” he paused and plucked a piece of grass
up by the roots. He scattered the little lumps of earth which were
sticking to the roots—“As if it had a kind of meaning. You’ve made the
difference to me,” he jerked out, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell
you. I’ve felt it ever since I knew you. . . . It’s because I love
you.”
Even while they had been saying commonplace things Susan had been
conscious of the excitement of intimacy, which seemed not only to lay
bare something in her, but in the trees and the sky, and the progress
of his speech which seemed inevitable was positively painful to her,
for no human being had ever come so close to her before.
She was struck motionless as his speech went on, and her heart gave
great separate leaps at the last words. She sat with her fingers curled
round a stone, looking straight in front of her down the mountain over
the plain. So then, it had actually happened to her, a proposal of
marriage.
Arthur looked round at her; his face was oddly twisted. She was drawing
her breath with such difficulty that she could hardly answer.
“You might have known.” He seized her in his arms; again and again and
again they clasped each other, murmuring inarticulately.
“Well,” sighed Arthur, sinking back on the ground, “that’s the most
wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me.” He looked as if he were
trying to put things seen in a dream beside real things.
There was a long silence.
“It’s the most perfect thing in the world,” Susan stated, very gently
and with great conviction. It was no longer merely a proposal of
marriage, but of marriage with Arthur, with whom she was in love.
In the silence that followed, holding his hand tightly in hers, she
prayed to God that she might make him a good wife.
“And what will Mr. Perrott say?” she asked at the end of it.
“Dear old fellow,” said Arthur who, now that the first shock was over,
was relaxing into an enormous sense of pleasure and contentment. “We
must be very nice to him, Susan.”
He told her how hard Perrott’s life had been, and how absurdly devoted
he was to Arthur himself. He went on to tell her about his mother, a
widow lady, of strong character. In return Susan sketched the portraits
of her own family—Edith in particular, her youngest sister, whom she
loved better than any one else, “except you, Arthur. . . . Arthur,” she
continued, “what was it that you first liked me for?”
“It was a buckle you wore one night at sea,” said Arthur, after due
consideration. “I remember noticing—it’s an absurd thing to
notice!—that you didn’t take peas, because I don’t either.”
From this they went on to compare their more serious tastes, or rather
Susan ascertained what Arthur cared about, and professed herself very
fond of the same thing. They would live in London, perhaps have a
cottage in the country near Susan’s family, for they would find it
strange without her at first. Her mind, stunned to begin with, now flew
to the various changes that her engagement would make—how delightful it
would be to join the ranks of the married women—no longer to hang on to
groups of girls much younger than herself—to escape the long solitude
of an old maid’s life. Now and then her amazing good fortune overcame
her, and she turned to Arthur with an exclamation of love.
They lay in each other’s arms and had no notion that they were
observed. Yet two figures suddenly appeared among the trees above them.
“Here’s shade,” began Hewet, when Rachel suddenly stopped dead. They
saw a man and woman lying on the ground beneath them, rolling slightly
this way and that as the embrace tightened and slackened. The man then
sat upright and the woman, who now appeared to be Susan Warrington, lay
back upon the ground, with her eyes shut and an absorbed look upon her
face, as though she were not altogether conscious. Nor could you tell
from her expression whether she was happy, or had suffered something.
When Arthur again turned to her, butting her as a lamb butts a ewe,
Hewet and Rachel retreated without a word. Hewet felt uncomfortably
shy.
“I don’t like that,” said Rachel after a moment.
“I can remember not liking it either,” said Hewet. “I can remember—”
but he changed his mind and continued in an ordinary tone of voice,
“Well, we may take it for granted that they’re engaged. D’you think
he’ll ever fly, or will she put a stop to that?”
But Rachel was still agitated; she could not get away from the sight
they had just seen. Instead of answering Hewet she persisted.
“Love’s an odd thing, isn’t it, making one’s heart beat.”
“It’s so enormously important, you see,” Hewet replied. “Their lives
are now changed for ever.”
“And it makes one sorry for them too,” Rachel continued, as though she
were tracing the course of her feelings. “I don’t know either of them,
but I could almost burst into tears. That’s silly, isn’t it?”
“Just because they’re in love,” said Hewet. “Yes,” he added after a
moment’s consideration, “there’s something horribly pathetic about it,
I agree.”
And now, as they had walked some way from the grove of trees, and had
come to a rounded hollow very tempting to the back, they proceeded to
sit down, and the impression of the lovers lost some of its force,
though a certain intensity of vision, which was probably the result of
the sight, remained with them. As a day upon which any emotion has been
repressed is different from other days, so this day was now different,
merely because they had seen other people at a crisis of their lives.
“A great encampment of tents they might be,” said Hewet, looking in
front of him at the mountains. “Isn’t it like a water-colour too—you
know the way water-colours dry in ridges all across the paper—I’ve been
wondering what they looked like.”
His eyes became dreamy, as though he were matching things, and reminded
Rachel in their colour of the green flesh of a snail. She sat beside
him looking at the mountains too. When it became painful to look any
longer, the great size of the view seeming to enlarge her eyes beyond
their natural limit, she looked at the ground; it pleased her to
scrutinise this inch of the soil of South America so minutely that she
noticed every grain of earth and made it into a world where she was
endowed with the supreme power. She bent a blade of grass, and set an
insect on the utmost tassel of it, and wondered if the insect realised
his strange adventure, and thought how strange it was that she should
have bent that tassel rather than any other of the million tassels.
“You’ve never told me your name,” said Hewet suddenly. “Miss Somebody
Vinrace. . . . I like to know people’s Christian names.”
“Rachel,” she replied.
“Rachel,” he repeated. “I have an aunt called Rachel, who put the life
of Father Damien into verse. She is a religious fanatic—the result of
the way she was brought up, down in Northamptonshire, never seeing a