The Voyage Out
speak to her, and stirred a desire to talk, which irritated him because
he did not know how to begin. He glanced at her, and she seemed to him
very remote and inexplicable, very young and chaste. He drew a sigh,
and began.
“About books now. What have you read? Just Shakespeare and the Bible?”
“I haven’t read many classics,” Rachel stated. She was slightly annoyed
by his jaunty and rather unnatural manner, while his masculine
acquirements induced her to take a very modest view of her own power.
“D’you mean to tell me you’ve reached the age of twenty-four without
reading Gibbon?” he demanded.
“Yes, I have,” she answered.
“Mon Dieu!” he exclaimed, throwing out his hands. “You must begin
to-morrow. I shall send you my copy. What I want to know is—” he looked
at her critically. “You see, the problem is, can one really talk to
you? Have you got a mind, or are you like the rest of your sex? You
seem to me absurdly young compared with men of your age.”
Rachel looked at him but said nothing.
“About Gibbon,” he continued. “D’you think you’ll be able to appreciate
him? He’s the test, of course. It’s awfully difficult to tell about
women,” he continued, “how much, I mean, is due to lack of training,
and how much is native incapacity. I don’t see myself why you shouldn’t
understand—only I suppose you’ve led an absurd life until now—you’ve
just walked in a crocodile, I suppose, with your hair down your back.”
The music was again beginning. Hirst’s eye wandered about the room in
search of Mrs. Ambrose. With the best will in the world he was
conscious that they were not getting on well together.
“I’d like awfully to lend you books,” he said, buttoning his gloves,
and rising from his seat. “We shall meet again. I’m going to leave you
now.”
He got up and left her.
Rachel looked round. She felt herself surrounded, like a child at a
party, by the faces of strangers all hostile to her, with hooked noses
and sneering, indifferent eyes. She was by a window, she pushed it open
with a jerk. She stepped out into the garden. Her eyes swam with tears
of rage.
“Damn that man!” she exclaimed, having acquired some of Helen’s words.
“Damn his insolence!”
She stood in the middle of the pale square of light which the window
she had opened threw upon the grass. The forms of great black trees
rose massively in front of her. She stood still, looking at them,
shivering slightly with anger and excitement. She heard the trampling
and swinging of the dancers behind her, and the rhythmic sway of the
waltz music.
“There are trees,” she said aloud. Would the trees make up for St. John
Hirst? She would be a Persian princess far from civilisation, riding
her horse upon the mountains alone, and making her women sing to her in
the evening, far from all this, from the strife and men and women—a
form came out of the shadow; a little red light burnt high up in its
blackness.
“Miss Vinrace, is it?” said Hewet, peering at her. “You were dancing
with Hirst?”
“He’s made me furious!” she cried vehemently. “No one’s any right to be
insolent!”
“Insolent?” Hewet repeated, taking his cigar from his mouth in
surprise. “Hirst—insolent?”
“It’s insolent to—” said Rachel, and stopped. She did not know exactly
why she had been made so angry. With a great effort she pulled herself
together.
“Oh, well,” she added, the vision of Helen and her mockery before her,
“I dare say I’m a fool.” She made as though she were going back into
the ballroom, but Hewet stopped her.
“Please explain to me,” he said. “I feel sure Hirst didn’t mean to hurt
you.”
When Rachel tried to explain, she found it very difficult. She could
not say that she found the vision of herself walking in a crocodile
with her hair down her back peculiarly unjust and horrible, nor could
she explain why Hirst’s assumption of the superiority of his nature and
experience had seemed to her not only galling but terrible—as if a gate
had clanged in her face. Pacing up and down the terrace beside Hewet
she said bitterly:
“It’s no good; we should live separate; we cannot understand each
other; we only bring out what’s worst.”
Hewet brushed aside her generalisation as to the natures of the two
sexes, for such generalisations bored him and seemed to him generally
untrue. But, knowing Hirst, he guessed fairly accurately what had
happened, and, though secretly much amused, was determined that Rachel
should not store the incident away in her mind to take its place in the
view she had of life.
“Now you’ll hate him,” he said, “which is wrong. Poor old Hirst—he
can’t help his method. And really, Miss Vinrace, he was doing his best;
he was paying you a compliment—he was trying—he was trying—” he could
not finish for the laughter that overcame him.
Rachel veered round suddenly and laughed out too. She saw that there
was something ridiculous about Hirst, and perhaps about herself.
“It’s his way of making friends, I suppose,” she laughed. “Well—I shall
do my part. I shall begin—‘Ugly in body, repulsive in mind as you are,
Mr. Hirst—’”
“Hear, hear!” cried Hewet. “That’s the way to treat him. You see, Miss
Vinrace, you must make allowances for Hirst. He’s lived all his life in
front of a looking-glass, so to speak, in a beautiful panelled room,
hung with Japanese prints and lovely old chairs and tables, just one
splash of colour, you know, in the right place,—between the windows I
think it is,—and there he sits hour after hour with his toes on the
fender, talking about philosophy and God and his liver and his heart
and the hearts of his friends. They’re all broken. You can’t expect him
to be at his best in a ballroom. He wants a cosy, smoky, masculine
place, where he can stretch his legs out, and only speak when he’s got
something to say. For myself, I find it rather dreary. But I do respect
it. They’re all so much in earnest. They do take the serious things
very seriously.”
The description of Hirst’s way of life interested Rachel so much that
she almost forgot her private grudge against him, and her respect
revived.
“They are really very clever then?” she asked.
“Of course they are. So far as brains go I think it’s true what he said
the other day; they’re the cleverest people in England. But—you ought
to take him in hand,” he added. “There’s a great deal more in him
than’s ever been got at. He wants some one to laugh at him. . . . The
idea of Hirst telling you that you’ve had no experiences! Poor old
Hirst!”
They had been pacing up and down the terrace while they talked, and now
one by one the dark windows were uncurtained by an invisible hand, and
panes of light fell regularly at equal intervals upon the grass. They
stopped to look in at the drawing-room, and perceived Mr. Pepper
writing alone at a table.
“There’s Pepper writing to his aunt,” said Hewet. “She must be a very
remarkable old lady, eighty-five he tells me, and he takes her for
walking tours in the New Forest. . . . Pepper!” he cried, rapping on
the window. “Go and do your duty. Miss Allan expects you.”
When they came to the windows of the ballroom, the swing of the dancers
and the lilt of the music was irresistible.
“Shall we?” said Hewet, and they clasped hands and swept off
magnificently into the great swirling pool. Although this was only the
second time they had met, the first time they had seen a man and woman
kissing each other, and the second time Mr. Hewet had found that a
young woman angry is very like a child. So that when they joined hands
in the dance they felt more at their ease than is usual.
It was midnight and the dance was now at its height. Servants were
peeping in at the windows; the garden was sprinkled with the white
shapes of couples sitting out. Mrs. Thornbury and Mrs. Elliot sat side
by side under a palm tree, holding fans, handkerchiefs, and brooches
deposited in their laps by flushed maidens. Occasionally they exchanged
comments.
“Miss Warrington _does_ look happy,” said Mrs. Elliot; they both
smiled; they both sighed.
“He has a great deal of character,” said Mrs. Thornbury, alluding to
Arthur.
“And character is what one wants,” said Mrs. Elliot. “Now that young
man is _clever_ enough,” she added, nodding at Hirst, who came past
with Miss Allan on his arm.
“He does not look strong,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “His complexion is not
good.—Shall I tear it off?” she asked, for Rachel had stopped,
conscious of a long strip trailing behind her.
“I hope you are enjoying yourselves?” Hewet asked the ladies.
“This is a very familiar position for me!” smiled Mrs. Thornbury. “I
have brought out five daughters—and they all loved dancing! You love it
too, Miss Vinrace?” she asked, looking at Rachel with maternal eyes. “I
know I did when I was your age. How I used to beg my mother to let me
stay—and now I sympathise with the poor mothers—but I sympathise with
the daughters too!”
She smiled sympathetically, and at the same time rather keenly, at
Rachel.
“They seem to find a great deal to say to each other,” said Mrs.
Elliot, looking significantly at the backs of the couple as they turned
away. “Did you notice at the picnic? He was the only person who could
make her utter.”
“Her father is a very interesting man,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “He has
one of the largest shipping businesses in Hull. He made a very able
reply, you remember, to Mr. Asquith at the last election. It is so
interesting to find that a man of his experience is a strong
Protectionist.”
She would have liked to discuss politics, which interested her more
than personalities, but Mrs. Elliot would only talk about the Empire in
a less abstract form.
“I hear there are dreadful accounts from England about the rats,” she
said. “A sister-in-law, who lives at Norwich, tells me it has been
quite unsafe to order poultry. The plague—you see. It attacks the rats,
and through them other creatures.”
“And the local authorities are not taking proper steps?” asked Mrs.
Thornbury.
“That she does not say. But she describes the attitude of the educated
people—who should know better—as callous in the extreme. Of course, my
sister-in-law is one of those active modern women, who always takes
things up, you know—the kind of woman one admires, though one does not
feel, at least I do not feel—but then she has a constitution of iron.”
Mrs. Elliot, brought back to the consideration of her own delicacy,
here sighed.
“A very animated face,” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at Evelyn M. who
had stopped near them to pin tight a scarlet flower at her breast. It
would not stay, and, with a spirited gesture of impatience, she thrust
it into her partner’s button-hole. He was a tall melancholy youth, who
received the gift as a knight might receive his lady’s token.
“Very trying to the eyes,” was Mrs. Eliot’s next remark, after watching
the yellow whirl in which so few of the whirlers had either name or
character for her, for a few minutes. Bursting out of the crowd, Helen
approached them, and took a vacant chair.
“May I sit by you?” she said, smiling and breathing fast. “I suppose I
ought to be ashamed of myself,” she went on, sitting down, “at my age.”
Her beauty, now that she was flushed and animated, was more expansive
than usual, and both the ladies felt the same desire to touch her.
“I _am_ enjoying myself,” she panted. “Movement—isn’t it amazing?”
“I have always heard that nothing comes up to dancing if one is a good
dancer,” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at her with a smile.
Helen swayed slightly as if she sat on wires.
“I could dance for ever!” she said. “They ought to let themselves go
more!” she exclaimed. “They ought to leap and swing. Look! How they
mince!”
“Have you seen those wonderful Russian dancers?” began Mrs. Elliot. But