The Voyage Out
Helen saw her partner coming and rose as the moon rises. She was half
round the room before they took their eyes off her, for they could not
help admiring her, although they thought it a little odd that a woman
of her age should enjoy dancing.
Directly Helen was left alone for a minute she was joined by St. John
Hirst, who had been watching for an opportunity.
“Should you mind sitting out with me?” he asked. “I’m quite incapable
of dancing.” He piloted Helen to a corner which was supplied with two
arm-chairs, and thus enjoyed the advantage of semi-privacy. They sat
down, and for a few minutes Helen was too much under the influence of
dancing to speak.
“Astonishing!” she exclaimed at last. “What sort of shape can she think
her body is?” This remark was called forth by a lady who came past
them, waddling rather than walking, and leaning on the arm of a stout
man with globular green eyes set in a fat white face. Some support was
necessary, for she was very stout, and so compressed that the upper
part of her body hung considerably in advance of her feet, which could
only trip in tiny steps, owing to the tightness of the skirt round her
ankles. The dress itself consisted of a small piece of shiny yellow
satin, adorned here and there indiscriminately with round shields of
blue and green beads made to imitate hues of a peacock’s breast. On the
summit of a frothy castle of hair a purple plume stood erect, while her
short neck was encircled by a black velvet ribbon knobbed with gems,
and golden bracelets were tightly wedged into the flesh of her fat
gloved arms. She had the face of an impertinent but jolly little pig,
mottled red under a dusting of powder.
St. John could not join in Helen’s laughter.
“It makes me sick,” he declared. “The whole thing makes me sick. . . .
Consider the minds of those people—their feelings. Don’t you agree?”
“I always make a vow never to go to another party of any description,”
Helen replied, “and I always break it.”
She leant back in her chair and looked laughingly at the young man. She
could see that he was genuinely cross, if at the same time slightly
excited.
“However,” he said, resuming his jaunty tone, “I suppose one must just
make up one’s mind to it.”
“To what?”
“There never will be more than five people in the world worth talking
to.”
Slowly the flush and sparkle in Helen’s face died away, and she looked
as quiet and as observant as usual.
“Five people?” she remarked. “I should say there were more than five.”
“You’ve been very fortunate, then,” said Hirst. “Or perhaps I’ve been
very unfortunate.” He became silent.
“Should you say I was a difficult kind of person to get on with?” he
asked sharply.
“Most clever people are when they’re young,” Helen replied.
“And of course I am—immensely clever,” said Hirst. “I’m infinitely
cleverer than Hewet. It’s quite possible,” he continued in his
curiously impersonal manner, “that I’m going to be one of the people
who really matter. That’s utterly different from being clever, though
one can’t expect one’s family to see it,” he added bitterly.
Helen thought herself justified in asking, “Do you find your family
difficult to get on with?”
“Intolerable. . . . They want me to be a peer and a privy councillor.
I’ve come out here partly in order to settle the matter. It’s got to be
settled. Either I must go to the bar, or I must stay on in Cambridge.
Of course, there are obvious drawbacks to each, but the arguments
certainly do seem to me in favour of Cambridge. This kind of thing!” he
waved his hand at the crowded ballroom. “Repulsive. I’m conscious of
great powers of affection too. I’m not susceptible, of course, in the
way Hewet is. I’m very fond of a few people. I think, for example, that
there’s something to be said for my mother, though she is in many ways
so deplorable. . . . At Cambridge, of course, I should inevitably
become the most important man in the place, but there are other reasons
why I dread Cambridge—” he ceased.
“Are you finding me a dreadful bore?” he asked. He changed curiously
from a friend confiding in a friend to a conventional young man at a
party.
“Not in the least,” said Helen. “I like it very much.”
“You can’t think,” he exclaimed, speaking almost with emotion, “what a
difference it makes finding someone to talk to! Directly I saw you I
felt you might possibly understand me. I’m very fond of Hewet, but he
hasn’t the remotest idea what I’m like. You’re the only woman I’ve ever
met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say
a thing.”
The next dance was beginning; it was the Barcarolle out of Hoffman,
which made Helen beat her toe in time to it; but she felt that after
such a compliment it was impossible to get up and go, and, besides
being amused, she was really flattered, and the honesty of his conceit
attracted her. She suspected that he was not happy, and was
sufficiently feminine to wish to receive confidences.
“I’m very old,” she sighed.
“The odd thing is that I don’t find you old at all,” he replied. “I
feel as though we were exactly the same age. Moreover—” here he
hesitated, but took courage from a glance at her face, “I feel as if I
could talk quite plainly to you as one does to a man—about the
relations between the sexes, about . . . and . . .”
In spite of his certainty a slight redness came into his face as he
spoke the last two words.
She reassured him at once by the laugh with which she exclaimed, “I
should hope so!”
He looked at her with real cordiality, and the lines which were drawn
about his nose and lips slackened for the first time.
“Thank God!” he exclaimed. “Now we can behave like civilised human
beings.”
Certainly a barrier which usually stands fast had fallen, and it was
possible to speak of matters which are generally only alluded to
between men and women when doctors are present, or the shadow of death.
In five minutes he was telling her the history of his life. It was
long, for it was full of extremely elaborate incidents, which led on to
a discussion of the principles on which morality is founded, and thus
to several very interesting matters, which even in this ballroom had to
be discussed in a whisper, lest one of the pouter pigeon ladies or
resplendent merchants should overhear them, and proceed to demand that
they should leave the place. When they had come to an end, or, to speak
more accurately, when Helen intimated by a slight slackening of her
attention that they had sat there long enough, Hirst rose, exclaiming,
“So there’s no reason whatever for all this mystery!”
“None, except that we are English people,” she answered. She took his
arm and they crossed the ball-room, making their way with difficulty
between the spinning couples, who were now perceptibly dishevelled, and
certainly to a critical eye by no means lovely in their shapes. The
excitement of undertaking a friendship and the length of their talk had
made them hungry, and they went in search of food to the dining-room,
which was now full of people eating at little separate tables. In the
doorway they met Rachel, going up to dance again with Arthur Venning.
She was flushed and looked very happy, and Helen was struck by the fact
that in this mood she was certainly more attractive than the generality
of young women. She had never noticed it so clearly before.
“Enjoying yourself?” she asked, as they stopped for a second.
“Miss Vinrace,” Arthur answered for her, “has just made a confession;
she’d no idea that dances could be so delightful.”
“Yes!” Rachel exclaimed. “I’ve changed my view of life completely!”
“You don’t say so!” Helen mocked. They passed on.
“That’s typical of Rachel,” she said. “She changes her view of life
about every other day. D’you know, I believe you’re just the person I
want,” she said, as they sat down, “to help me complete her education?
She’s been brought up practically in a nunnery. Her father’s too
absurd. I’ve been doing what I can—but I’m too old, and I’m a woman.
Why shouldn’t you talk to her—explain things to her—talk to her, I
mean, as you talk to me?”
“I have made one attempt already this evening,” said St. John. “I
rather doubt that it was successful. She seems to me so very young and
inexperienced. I have promised to lend her Gibbon.”
“It’s not Gibbon exactly,” Helen pondered. “It’s the facts of life, I
think—d’you see what I mean? What really goes on, what people feel,
although they generally try to hide it? There’s nothing to be
frightened of. It’s so much more beautiful than the pretences—always
more interesting—always better, I should say, than _that_ kind of
thing.”
She nodded her head at a table near them, where two girls and two young
men were chaffing each other very loudly, and carrying on an arch
insinuating dialogue, sprinkled with endearments, about, it seemed, a
pair of stockings or a pair of legs. One of the girls was flirting a
fan and pretending to be shocked, and the sight was very unpleasant,
partly because it was obvious that the girls were secretly hostile to
each other.
“In my old age, however,” Helen sighed, “I’m coming to think that it
doesn’t much matter in the long run what one does: people always go
their own way—nothing will ever influence them.” She nodded her head at
the supper party.
But St. John did not agree. He said that he thought one could really
make a great deal of difference by one’s point of view, books and so
on, and added that few things at the present time mattered more than
the enlightenment of women. He sometimes thought that almost everything
was due to education.
In the ballroom, meanwhile, the dancers were being formed into squares
for the lancers. Arthur and Rachel, Susan and Hewet, Miss Allan and
Hughling Elliot found themselves together.
Miss Allan looked at her watch.
“Half-past one,” she stated. “And I have to despatch Alexander Pope
to-morrow.”
“Pope!” snorted Mr. Elliot. “Who reads Pope, I should like to know? And
as for reading about him—No, no, Miss Allan; be persuaded you will
benefit the world much more by dancing than by writing.” It was one of
Mr. Elliot’s affectations that nothing in the world could compare with
the delights of dancing—nothing in the world was so tedious as
literature. Thus he sought pathetically enough to ingratiate himself
with the young, and to prove to them beyond a doubt that though married
to a ninny of a wife, and rather pale and bent and careworn by his
weight of learning, he was as much alive as the youngest of them all.
“It’s a question of bread and butter,” said Miss Allan calmly.
“However, they seem to expect me.” She took up her position and pointed
a square black toe.
“Mr. Hewet, you bow to me.” It was evident at once that Miss Allan was
the only one of them who had a thoroughly sound knowledge of the
figures of the dance.
After the lancers there was a waltz; after the waltz a polka; and then
a terrible thing happened; the music, which had been sounding regularly
with five-minute pauses, stopped suddenly. The lady with the great dark
eyes began to swathe her violin in silk, and the gentleman placed his
horn carefully in its case. They were surrounded by couples imploring
them in English, in French, in Spanish, of one more dance, one only; it
was still early. But the old man at the piano merely exhibited his
watch and shook his head. He turned up the collar of his coat and
produced a red silk muffler, which completely dashed his festive
appearance. Strange as it seemed, the musicians were pale and
heavy-eyed; they looked bored and prosaic, as if the summit of their
desire was cold meat and beer, succeeded immediately by bed.
Rachel was one of those who had begged them to continue. When they
refused she began turning over the sheets of dance music which lay upon