The Voyage Out
my opinion they preserve all that we admire in the eighteenth century,
with the advantage, in the majority of cases, that they are personally
clean. Not that one would insult old Lady Barborough by calling her
clean. How often d’you think, Hilda,” he called out to his wife, “her
ladyship takes a bath?”
“I should hardly like to say, Hugh,” Mrs. Elliot tittered, “but wearing
puce velvet, as she does even on the hottest August day, it somehow
doesn’t show.”
“Pepper, you have me,” said Mr. Elliot. “My chess is even worse than I
remembered.” He accepted his defeat with great equanimity, because he
really wished to talk.
He drew his chair beside Mr. Wilfrid Flushing, the newcomer.
“Are these at all in your line?” he asked, pointing at a case in front
of them, where highly polished crosses, jewels, and bits of embroidery,
the work of the natives, were displayed to tempt visitors.
“Shams, all of them,” said Mr. Flushing briefly. “This rug, now, isn’t
at all bad.” He stopped and picked up a piece of the rug at their feet.
“Not old, of course, but the design is quite in the right tradition.
Alice, lend me your brooch. See the difference between the old work and
the new.”
A lady, who was reading with great concentration, unfastened her brooch
and gave it to her husband without looking at him or acknowledging the
tentative bow which Mr. Elliot was desirous of giving her. If she had
listened, she might have been amused by the reference to old Lady
Barborough, her great-aunt, but, oblivious of her surroundings, she
went on reading.
The clock, which had been wheezing for some minutes like an old man
preparing to cough, now struck nine. The sound slightly disturbed
certain somnolent merchants, government officials, and men of
independent means who were lying back in their chairs, chatting,
smoking, ruminating about their affairs, with their eyes half shut;
they raised their lids for an instant at the sound and then closed them
again. They had the appearance of crocodiles so fully gorged by their
last meal that the future of the world gives them no anxiety whatever.
The only disturbance in the placid bright room was caused by a large
moth which shot from light to light, whizzing over elaborate heads of
hair, and causing several young women to raise their hands nervously
and exclaim, “Some one ought to kill it!”
Absorbed in their own thoughts, Hewet and Hirst had not spoken for a
long time.
When the clock struck, Hirst said:
“Ah, the creatures begin to stir. . . .” He watched them raise
themselves, look about them, and settle down again. “What I abhor most
of all,” he concluded, “is the female breast. Imagine being Venning and
having to get into bed with Susan! But the really repulsive thing is
that they feel nothing at all—about what I do when I have a hot bath.
They’re gross, they’re absurd, they’re utterly intolerable!”
So saying, and drawing no reply from Hewet, he proceeded to think about
himself, about science, about Cambridge, about the Bar, about Helen and
what she thought of him, until, being very tired, he was nodding off to
sleep.
Suddenly Hewet woke him up.
“How d’you know what you feel, Hirst?”
“Are you in love?” asked Hirst. He put in his eyeglass.
“Don’t be a fool,” said Hewet.
“Well, I’ll sit down and think about it,” said Hirst. “One really ought
to. If these people would only think about things, the world would be a
far better place for us all to live in. Are you trying to think?”
That was exactly what Hewet had been doing for the last half-hour, but
he did not find Hirst sympathetic at the moment.
“I shall go for a walk,” he said.
“Remember we weren’t in bed last night,” said Hirst with a prodigious
yawn.
Hewet rose and stretched himself.
“I want to go and get a breath of air,” he said.
An unusual feeling had been bothering him all the evening and
forbidding him to settle into any one train of thought. It was
precisely as if he had been in the middle of a talk which interested
him profoundly when some one came up and interrupted him. He could not
finish the talk, and the longer he sat there the more he wanted to
finish it. As the talk that had been interrupted was a talk with
Rachel, he had to ask himself why he felt this, and why he wanted to go
on talking to her. Hirst would merely say that he was in love with her.
But he was not in love with her. Did love begin in that way, with the
wish to go on talking? No. It always began in his case with definite
physical sensations, and these were now absent, he did not even find
her physically attractive. There was something, of course, unusual
about her—she was young, inexperienced, and inquisitive, they had been
more open with each other than was usually possible. He always found
girls interesting to talk to, and surely these were good reasons why he
should wish to go on talking to her; and last night, what with the
crowd and the confusion, he had only been able to begin to talk to her.
What was she doing now? Lying on a sofa and looking at the ceiling,
perhaps. He could imagine her doing that, and Helen in an arm-chair,
with her hands on the arm of it, so—looking ahead of her, with her
great big eyes—oh no, they’d be talking, of course, about the dance.
But suppose Rachel was going away in a day or two, suppose this was the
end of her visit, and her father had arrived in one of the steamers
anchored in the bay,—it was intolerable to know so little. Therefore he
exclaimed, “How d’you know what you feel, Hirst?” to stop himself from
thinking.
But Hirst did not help him, and the other people with their aimless
movements and their unknown lives were disturbing, so that he longed
for the empty darkness. The first thing he looked for when he stepped
out of the hall door was the light of the Ambroses’ villa. When he had
definitely decided that a certain light apart from the others higher up
the hill was their light, he was considerably reassured. There seemed
to be at once a little stability in all this incoherence. Without any
definite plan in his head, he took the turning to the right and walked
through the town and came to the wall by the meeting of the roads,
where he stopped. The booming of the sea was audible. The dark-blue
mass of the mountains rose against the paler blue of the sky. There was
no moon, but myriads of stars, and lights were anchored up and down in
the dark waves of earth all round him. He had meant to go back, but the
single light of the Ambroses’ villa had now become three separate
lights, and he was tempted to go on. He might as well make sure that
Rachel was still there. Walking fast, he soon stood by the iron gate of
their garden, and pushed it open; the outline of the house suddenly
appeared sharply before his eyes, and the thin column of the verandah
cutting across the palely lit gravel of the terrace. He hesitated. At
the back of the house some one was rattling cans. He approached the
front; the light on the terrace showed him that the sitting-rooms were
on that side. He stood as near the light as he could by the corner of
the house, the leaves of a creeper brushing his face. After a moment he
could hear a voice. The voice went on steadily; it was not talking, but
from the continuity of the sound it was a voice reading aloud. He crept
a little closer; he crumpled the leaves together so as to stop their
rustling about his ears. It might be Rachel’s voice. He left the shadow
and stepped into the radius of the light, and then heard a sentence
spoken quite distinctly.
“And there we lived from the year 1860 to 1895, the happiest years of
my parents’ lives, and there in 1862 my brother Maurice was born, to
the delight of his parents, as he was destined to be the delight of all
who knew him.”
The voice quickened, and the tone became conclusive rising slightly in
pitch, as if these words were at the end of the chapter. Hewet drew
back again into the shadow. There was a long silence. He could just
hear chairs being moved inside. He had almost decided to go back, when
suddenly two figures appeared at the window, not six feet from him.
“It was Maurice Fielding, of course, that your mother was engaged to,”
said Helen’s voice. She spoke reflectively, looking out into the dark
garden, and thinking evidently as much of the look of the night as of
what she was saying.
“Mother?” said Rachel. Hewet’s heart leapt, and he noticed the fact.
Her voice, though low, was full of surprise.
“You didn’t know that?” said Helen.
“I never knew there’d been any one else,” said Rachel. She was clearly
surprised, but all they said was said low and inexpressively, because
they were speaking out into the cool dark night.
“More people were in love with her than with any one I’ve ever known,”
Helen stated. “She had that power—she enjoyed things. She wasn’t
beautiful, but—I was thinking of her last night at the dance. She got
on with every kind of person, and then she made it all so
amazingly—funny.”
It appeared that Helen was going back into the past, choosing her words
deliberately, comparing Theresa with the people she had known since
Theresa died.
“I don’t know how she did it,” she continued, and ceased, and there was
a long pause, in which a little owl called first here, then there, as
it moved from tree to tree in the garden.
“That’s so like Aunt Lucy and Aunt Katie,” said Rachel at last. “They
always make out that she was very sad and very good.”
“Then why, for goodness’ sake, did they do nothing but criticize her
when she was alive?” said Helen. Very gentle their voices sounded, as
if they fell through the waves of the sea.
“If I were to die to-morrow . . .” she began.
The broken sentences had an extraordinary beauty and detachment in
Hewet’s ears, and a kind of mystery too, as though they were spoken by
people in their sleep.
“No, Rachel,” Helen’s voice continued, “I’m not going to walk in the
garden; it’s damp—it’s sure to be damp; besides, I see at least a dozen
toads.”
“Toads? Those are stones, Helen. Come out. It’s nicer out. The flowers
smell,” Rachel replied.
Hewet drew still farther back. His heart was beating very quickly.
Apparently Rachel tried to pull Helen out on to the terrace, and Helen
resisted. There was a certain amount of scuffling, entreating,
resisting, and laughter from both of them. Then a man’s form appeared.
Hewet could not hear what they were all saying. In a minute they had
gone in; he could hear bolts grating then; there was dead silence, and
all the lights went out.
He turned away, still crumpling and uncrumpling a handful of leaves
which he had torn from the wall. An exquisite sense of pleasure and
relief possessed him; it was all so solid and peaceful after the ball
at the hotel, whether he was in love with them or not, and he was not
in love with them; no, but it was good that they should be alive.
After standing still for a minute or two he turned and began to walk
towards the gate. With the movement of his body, the excitement, the
romance and the richness of life crowded into his brain. He shouted out
a line of poetry, but the words escaped him, and he stumbled among
lines and fragments of lines which had no meaning at all except for the
beauty of the words. He shut the gate, and ran swinging from side to
side down the hill, shouting any nonsense that came into his head.
“Here am I,” he cried rhythmically, as his feet pounded to the left and
to the right, “plunging along, like an elephant in the jungle,
stripping the branches as I go (he snatched at the twigs of a bush at
the roadside), roaring innumerable words, lovely words about
innumerable things, running downhill and talking nonsense aloud to
myself about roads and leaves and lights and women coming out into the