The Voyage Out
wrong words, made her seem more than normally incompetent for her
years. Mrs. Ambrose, who had been speaking much at random, now
reflected that she certainly did not look forward to the intimacy of
three or four weeks on board ship which was threatened. Women of her
own age usually boring her, she supposed that girls would be worse. She
glanced at Rachel again. Yes! how clear it was that she would be
vacillating, emotional, and when you said something to her it would
make no more lasting impression than the stroke of a stick upon water.
There was nothing to take hold of in girls—nothing hard, permanent,
satisfactory. Did Willoughby say three weeks, or did he say four? She
tried to remember.
At this point, however, the door opened and a tall burly man entered
the room, came forward and shook Helen’s hand with an emotional kind of
heartiness, Willoughby himself, Rachel’s father, Helen’s
brother-in-law. As a great deal of flesh would have been needed to make
a fat man of him, his frame being so large, he was not fat; his face
was a large framework too, looking, by the smallness of the features
and the glow in the hollow of the cheek, more fitted to withstand
assaults of the weather than to express sentiments and emotions, or to
respond to them in others.
“It is a great pleasure that you have come,” he said, “for both of us.”
Rachel murmured in obedience to her father’s glance.
“We’ll do our best to make you comfortable. And Ridley. We think it an
honour to have charge of him. Pepper’ll have some one to contradict
him—which I daren’t do. You find this child grown, don’t you? A young
woman, eh?”
Still holding Helen’s hand he drew his arm round Rachel’s shoulder,
thus making them come uncomfortably close, but Helen forbore to look.
“You think she does us credit?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” said Helen.
“Because we expect great things of her,” he continued, squeezing his
daughter’s arm and releasing her. “But about you now.” They sat down
side by side on the little sofa. “Did you leave the children well?
They’ll be ready for school, I suppose. Do they take after you or
Ambrose? They’ve got good heads on their shoulders, I’ll be bound?”
At this Helen immediately brightened more than she had yet done, and
explained that her son was six and her daughter ten. Everybody said
that her boy was like her and her girl like Ridley. As for brains, they
were quick brats, she thought, and modestly she ventured on a little
story about her son,—how left alone for a minute he had taken the pat
of butter in his fingers, run across the room with it, and put it on
the fire—merely for the fun of the thing, a feeling which she could
understand.
“And you had to show the young rascal that these tricks wouldn’t do,
eh?”
“A child of six? I don’t think they matter.”
“I’m an old-fashioned father.”
“Nonsense, Willoughby; Rachel knows better.”
Much as Willoughby would doubtless have liked his daughter to praise
him she did not; her eyes were unreflecting as water, her fingers still
toying with the fossilised fish, her mind absent. The elder people went
on to speak of arrangements that could be made for Ridley’s comfort—a
table placed where he couldn’t help looking at the sea, far from
boilers, at the same time sheltered from the view of people passing.
Unless he made this a holiday, when his books were all packed, he would
have no holiday whatever; for out at Santa Marina Helen knew, by
experience, that he would work all day; his boxes, she said, were
packed with books.
“Leave it to me—leave it to me!” said Willoughby, obviously intending
to do much more than she asked of him. But Ridley and Mr. Pepper were
heard fumbling at the door.
“How are you, Vinrace?” said Ridley, extending a limp hand as he came
in, as though the meeting were melancholy to both, but on the whole
more so to him.
Willoughby preserved his heartiness, tempered by respect. For the
moment nothing was said.
“We looked in and saw you laughing,” Helen remarked. “Mr. Pepper had
just told a very good story.”
“Pish. None of the stories were good,” said her husband peevishly.
“Still a severe judge, Ridley?” enquired Mr. Vinrace.
“We bored you so that you left,” said Ridley, speaking directly to his
wife.
As this was quite true Helen did not attempt to deny it, and her next
remark, “But didn’t they improve after we’d gone?” was unfortunate, for
her husband answered with a droop of his shoulders, “If possible they
got worse.”
The situation was now one of considerable discomfort for every one
concerned, as was proved by a long interval of constraint and silence.
Mr. Pepper, indeed, created a diversion of a kind by leaping on to his
seat, both feet tucked under him, with the action of a spinster who
detects a mouse, as the draught struck at his ankles. Drawn up there,
sucking at his cigar, with his arms encircling his knees, he looked
like the image of Buddha, and from this elevation began a discourse,
addressed to nobody, for nobody had called for it, upon the unplumbed
depths of ocean. He professed himself surprised to learn that although
Mr. Vinrace possessed ten ships, regularly plying between London and
Buenos Aires, not one of them was bidden to investigate the great white
monsters of the lower waters.
“No, no,” laughed Willoughby, “the monsters of the earth are too many
for me!”
Rachel was heard to sigh, “Poor little goats!”
“If it weren’t for the goats there’d be no music, my dear; music
depends upon goats,” said her father rather sharply, and Mr. Pepper
went on to describe the white, hairless, blind monsters lying curled on
the ridges of sand at the bottom of the sea, which would explode if you
brought them to the surface, their sides bursting asunder and
scattering entrails to the winds when released from pressure, with
considerable detail and with such show of knowledge, that Ridley was
disgusted, and begged him to stop.
From all this Helen drew her own conclusions, which were gloomy enough.
Pepper was a bore; Rachel was an unlicked girl, no doubt prolific of
confidences, the very first of which would be: “You see, I don’t get on
with my father.” Willoughby, as usual, loved his business and built his
Empire, and between them all she would be considerably bored. Being a
woman of action, however, she rose, and said that for her part she was
going to bed. At the door she glanced back instinctively at Rachel,
expecting that as two of the same sex they would leave the room
together. Rachel rose, looked vaguely into Helen’s face, and remarked
with her slight stammer, “I’m going out to t-t-triumph in the wind.”
Mrs. Ambrose’s worst suspicions were confirmed; she went down the
passage lurching from side to side, and fending off the wall now with
her right arm, now with her left; at each lurch she exclaimed
emphatically, “Damn!”
CHAPTER II
Uncomfortable as the night, with its rocking movement, and salt smells,
may have been, and in one case undoubtedly was, for Mr. Pepper had
insufficient clothes upon his bed, the breakfast next morning wore a
kind of beauty. The voyage had begun, and had begun happily with a soft
blue sky, and a calm sea. The sense of untapped resources, things to
say as yet unsaid, made the hour significant, so that in future years
the entire journey perhaps would be represented by this one scene, with
the sound of sirens hooting in the river the night before, somehow
mixing in.
The table was cheerful with apples and bread and eggs. Helen handed
Willoughby the butter, and as she did so cast her eye on him and
reflected, “And she married you, and she was happy, I suppose.”
She went off on a familiar train of thought, leading on to all kinds of
well-known reflections, from the old wonder, why Theresa had married
Willoughby?
“Of course, one sees all that,” she thought, meaning that one sees that
he is big and burly, and has a great booming voice, and a fist and a
will of his own; “but—” here she slipped into a fine analysis of him
which is best represented by one word, “sentimental,” by which she
meant that he was never simple and honest about his feelings. For
example, he seldom spoke of the dead, but kept anniversaries with
singular pomp. She suspected him of nameless atrocities with regard to
his daughter, as indeed she had always suspected him of bullying his
wife. Naturally she fell to comparing her own fortunes with the
fortunes of her friend, for Willoughby’s wife had been perhaps the one
woman Helen called friend, and this comparison often made the staple of
their talk. Ridley was a scholar, and Willoughby was a man of business.
Ridley was bringing out the third volume of Pindar when Willoughby was
launching his first ship. They built a new factory the very year the
commentary on Aristotle—was it?—appeared at the University Press. “And
Rachel,” she looked at her, meaning, no doubt, to decide the argument,
which was otherwise too evenly balanced, by declaring that Rachel was
not comparable to her own children. “She really might be six years
old,” was all she said, however, this judgment referring to the smooth
unmarked outline of the girl’s face, and not condemning her otherwise,
for if Rachel were ever to think, feel, laugh, or express herself,
instead of dropping milk from a height as though to see what kind of
drops it made, she might be interesting though never exactly pretty.
She was like her mother, as the image in a pool on a still summer’s day
is like the vivid flushed face that hangs over it.
Meanwhile Helen herself was under examination, though not from either
of her victims. Mr. Pepper considered her; and his meditations, carried
on while he cut his toast into bars and neatly buttered them, took him
through a considerable stretch of autobiography. One of his penetrating
glances assured him that he was right last night in judging that Helen
was beautiful. Blandly he passed her the jam. She was talking nonsense,
but not worse nonsense than people usually do talk at breakfast, the
cerebral circulation, as he knew to his cost, being apt to give trouble
at that hour. He went on saying “No” to her, on principle, for he never
yielded to a woman on account of her sex. And here, dropping his eyes
to his plate, he became autobiographical. He had not married himself
for the sufficient reason that he had never met a woman who commanded
his respect. Condemned to pass the susceptible years of youth in a
railway station in Bombay, he had seen only coloured women, military
women, official women; and his ideal was a woman who could read Greek,
if not Persian, was irreproachably fair in the face, and able to
understand the small things he let fall while undressing. As it was he
had contracted habits of which he was not in the least ashamed. Certain
odd minutes every day went to learning things by heart; he never took a
ticket without noting the number; he devoted January to Petronius,
February to Catullus, March to the Etruscan vases perhaps; anyhow he
had done good work in India, and there was nothing to regret in his
life except the fundamental defects which no wise man regrets, when the
present is still his. So concluding he looked up suddenly and smiled.
Rachel caught his eye.
“And now you’ve chewed something thirty-seven times, I suppose?” she
thought, but said politely aloud, “Are your legs troubling you to-day,
Mr. Pepper?”
“My shoulder blades?” he asked, shifting them painfully. “Beauty has no
effect upon uric acid that I’m aware of,” he sighed, contemplating the
round pane opposite, through which the sky and sea showed blue. At the
same time he took a little parchment volume from his pocket and laid it
on the table. As it was clear that he invited comment, Helen asked him
the name of it. She got the name; but she got also a disquisition upon