The Voyage Out
enjoy the fruits of the discovery. The donkeys were advancing, and it
was advisable to begin the descent immediately, for the night fell so
quickly that it would be dark before they were home again.
Accordingly, remounting in order, they filed off down the hillside.
Scraps of talk came floating back from one to another. There were jokes
to begin with, and laughter; some walked part of the way, and picked
flowers, and sent stones bounding before them.
“Who writes the best Latin verse in your college, Hirst?” Mr. Elliot
called back incongruously, and Mr. Hirst returned that he had no idea.
The dusk fell as suddenly as the natives had warned them, the hollows
of the mountain on either side filling up with darkness and the path
becoming so dim that it was surprising to hear the donkeys’ hooves
still striking on hard rock. Silence fell upon one, and then upon
another, until they were all silent, their minds spilling out into the
deep blue air. The way seemed shorter in the dark than in the day; and
soon the lights of the town were seen on the flat far beneath them.
Suddenly some one cried, “Ah!”
In a moment the slow yellow drop rose again from the plain below; it
rose, paused, opened like a flower, and fell in a shower of drops.
“Fireworks,” they cried.
Another went up more quickly; and then another; they could almost hear
it twist and roar.
“Some Saint’s day, I suppose,” said a voice. The rush and embrace of
the rockets as they soared up into the air seemed like the fiery way in
which lovers suddenly rose and united, leaving the crowd gazing up at
them with strained white faces. But Susan and Arthur, riding down the
hill, never said a word to each other, and kept accurately apart.
Then the fireworks became erratic, and soon they ceased altogether, and
the rest of the journey was made almost in darkness, the mountain being
a great shadow behind them, and bushes and trees little shadows which
threw darkness across the road. Among the plane-trees they separated,
bundling into carriages and driving off, without saying good-night, or
saying it only in a half-muffled way.
It was so late that there was no time for normal conversation between
their arrival at the hotel and their retirement to bed. But Hirst
wandered into Hewet’s room with a collar in his hand.
“Well, Hewet,” he remarked, on the crest of a gigantic yawn, “that was
a great success, I consider.” He yawned. “But take care you’re not
landed with that young woman. . . . I don’t really like young women. .
. .”
Hewet was too much drugged by hours in the open air to make any reply.
In fact every one of the party was sound asleep within ten minutes or
so of each other, with the exception of Susan Warrington. She lay for a
considerable time looking blankly at the wall opposite, her hands
clasped above her heart, and her light burning by her side. All
articulate thought had long ago deserted her; her heart seemed to have
grown to the size of a sun, and to illuminate her entire body, shedding
like the sun a steady tide of warmth.
“I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy,” she repeated. “I love every one. I’m
happy.”
CHAPTER XII
When Susan’s engagement had been approved at home, and made public to
any one who took an interest in it at the hotel—and by this time the
society at the hotel was divided so as to point to invisible
chalk-marks such as Mr. Hirst had described, the news was felt to
justify some celebration—an expedition? That had been done already. A
dance then. The advantage of a dance was that it abolished one of those
long evenings which were apt to become tedious and lead to absurdly
early hours in spite of bridge.
Two or three people standing under the erect body of the stuffed
leopard in the hall very soon had the matter decided. Evelyn slid a
pace or two this way and that, and pronounced that the floor was
excellent. Signor Rodriguez informed them of an old Spaniard who
fiddled at weddings—fiddled so as to make a tortoise waltz; and his
daughter, although endowed with eyes as black as coal-scuttles, had the
same power over the piano. If there were any so sick or so surly as to
prefer sedentary occupations on the night in question to spinning and
watching others spin, the drawing-room and billiard-room were theirs.
Hewet made it his business to conciliate the outsiders as much as
possible. To Hirst’s theory of the invisible chalk-marks he would pay
no attention whatever. He was treated to a snub or two, but, in reward,
found obscure lonely gentlemen delighted to have this opportunity of
talking to their kind, and the lady of doubtful character showed every
symptom of confiding her case to him in the near future. Indeed it was
made quite obvious to him that the two or three hours between dinner
and bed contained an amount of unhappiness, which was really pitiable,
so many people had not succeeded in making friends.
It was settled that the dance was to be on Friday, one week after the
engagement, and at dinner Hewet declared himself satisfied.
“They’re all coming!” he told Hirst. “Pepper!” he called, seeing
William Pepper slip past in the wake of the soup with a pamphlet
beneath his arm, “We’re counting on you to open the ball.”
“You will certainly put sleep out of the question,” Pepper returned.
“You are to take the floor with Miss Allan,” Hewet continued,
consulting a sheet of pencilled notes.
Pepper stopped and began a discourse upon round dances, country dances,
morris dances, and quadrilles, all of which are entirely superior to
the bastard waltz and spurious polka which have ousted them most
unjustly in contemporary popularity—when the waiters gently pushed him
on to his table in the corner.
The dining-room at this moment had a certain fantastic resemblance to a
farmyard scattered with grain on which bright pigeons kept descending.
Almost all the ladies wore dresses which they had not yet displayed,
and their hair rose in waves and scrolls so as to appear like carved
wood in Gothic churches rather than hair. The dinner was shorter and
less formal than usual, even the waiters seeming to be affected with
the general excitement. Ten minutes before the clock struck nine the
committee made a tour through the ballroom. The hall, when emptied of
its furniture, brilliantly lit, adorned with flowers whose scent tinged
the air, presented a wonderful appearance of ethereal gaiety.
“It’s like a starlit sky on an absolutely cloudless night,” Hewet
murmured, looking about him, at the airy empty room.
“A heavenly floor, anyhow,” Evelyn added, taking a run and sliding two
or three feet along.
“What about those curtains?” asked Hirst. The crimson curtains were
drawn across the long windows. “It’s a perfect night outside.”
“Yes, but curtains inspire confidence,” Miss Allan decided. “When the
ball is in full swing it will be time to draw them. We might even open
the windows a little. . . . If we do it now elderly people will imagine
there are draughts.”
Her wisdom had come to be recognised, and held in respect. Meanwhile as
they stood talking, the musicians were unwrapping their instruments,
and the violin was repeating again and again a note struck upon the
piano. Everything was ready to begin.
After a few minutes’ pause, the father, the daughter, and the
son-in-law who played the horn flourished with one accord. Like the
rats who followed the piper, heads instantly appeared in the doorway.
There was another flourish; and then the trio dashed spontaneously into
the triumphant swing of the waltz. It was as though the room were
instantly flooded with water. After a moment’s hesitation first one
couple, then another, leapt into mid-stream, and went round and round
in the eddies. The rhythmic swish of the dancers sounded like a
swirling pool. By degrees the room grew perceptibly hotter. The smell
of kid gloves mingled with the strong scent of flowers. The eddies
seemed to circle faster and faster, until the music wrought itself into
a crash, ceased, and the circles were smashed into little separate
bits. The couples struck off in different directions, leaving a thin
row of elderly people stuck fast to the walls, and here and there a
piece of trimming or a handkerchief or a flower lay upon the floor.
There was a pause, and then the music started again, the eddies
whirled, the couples circled round in them, until there was a crash,
and the circles were broken up into separate pieces.
When this had happened about five times, Hirst, who leant against a
window-frame, like some singular gargoyle, perceived that Helen Ambrose
and Rachel stood in the doorway. The crowd was such that they could not
move, but he recognised them by a piece of Helen’s shoulder and a
glimpse of Rachel’s head turning round. He made his way to them; they
greeted him with relief.
“We are suffering the tortures of the damned,” said Helen.
“This is my idea of hell,” said Rachel.
Her eyes were bright and she looked bewildered.
Hewet and Miss Allan, who had been waltzing somewhat laboriously,
paused and greeted the newcomers.
“This _is_ nice,” said Hewet. “But where is Mr. Ambrose?”
“Pindar,” said Helen. “May a married woman who was forty in October
dance? I can’t stand still.” She seemed to fade into Hewet, and they
both dissolved in the crowd.
“We must follow suit,” said Hirst to Rachel, and he took her resolutely
by the elbow. Rachel, without being expert, danced well, because of a
good ear for rhythm, but Hirst had no taste for music, and a few
dancing lessons at Cambridge had only put him into possession of the
anatomy of a waltz, without imparting any of its spirit. A single turn
proved to them that their methods were incompatible; instead of fitting
into each other their bones seemed to jut out in angles making smooth
turning an impossibility, and cutting, moreover, into the circular
progress of the other dancers.
“Shall we stop?” said Hirst. Rachel gathered from his expression that
he was annoyed.
They staggered to seats in the corner, from which they had a view of
the room. It was still surging, in waves of blue and yellow, striped by
the black evening-clothes of the gentlemen.
“An amazing spectacle,” Hirst remarked. “Do you dance much in London?”
They were both breathing fast, and both a little excited, though each
was determined not to show any excitement at all.
“Scarcely ever. Do you?”
“My people give a dance every Christmas.”
“This isn’t half a bad floor,” Rachel said. Hirst did not attempt to
answer her platitude. He sat quite silent, staring at the dancers.
After three minutes the silence became so intolerable to Rachel that
she was goaded to advance another commonplace about the beauty of the
night. Hirst interrupted her ruthlessly.
“Was that all nonsense what you said the other day about being a
Christian and having no education?” he asked.
“It was practically true,” she replied. “But I also play the piano very
well,” she said, “better, I expect than any one in this room. You are
the most distinguished man in England, aren’t you?” she asked shyly.
“One of the three,” he corrected.
Helen whirling past here tossed a fan into Rachel’s lap.
“She is very beautiful,” Hirst remarked.
They were again silent. Rachel was wondering whether he thought her
also nice-looking; St. John was considering the immense difficulty of
talking to girls who had no experience of life. Rachel had obviously
never thought or felt or seen anything, and she might be intelligent or
she might be just like all the rest. But Hewet’s taunt rankled in his
mind—“you don’t know how to get on with women,” and he was determined
to profit by this opportunity. Her evening-clothes bestowed on her just
that degree of unreality and distinction which made it romantic to