The Voyage Out
eager eyes, in the depths of which he thought he detected some
disappointment, or dissatisfaction.
“Good-night,” he said.
“There are heaps of things I want to say to you still,” she said. “And
I’m going to, some time. I suppose you must go to bed now?”
“Yes,” said Hewet. “I’m half asleep.” He left her still sitting by
herself in the empty hall.
“Why is it that they _won’t_ be honest?” he muttered to himself as he
went upstairs. Why was it that relations between different people were
so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous
that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an
instinct to be examined carefully and probably crushed? What had Evelyn
really wished to say to him? What was she feeling left alone in the
empty hall? The mystery of life and the unreality even of one’s own
sensations overcame him as he walked down the corridor which led to his
room. It was dimly lighted, but sufficiently for him to see a figure in
a bright dressing-gown pass swiftly in front of him, the figure of a
woman crossing from one room to another.
CHAPTER XV
Whether too slight or too vague the ties that bind people casually
meeting in a hotel at midnight, they possess one advantage at least
over the bonds which unite the elderly, who have lived together once
and so must live for ever. Slight they may be, but vivid and genuine,
merely because the power to break them is within the grasp of each, and
there is no reason for continuance except a true desire that continue
they shall. When two people have been married for years they seem to
become unconscious of each other’s bodily presence so that they move as
if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered,
and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without
its loneliness. The joint lives of Ridley and Helen had arrived at this
stage of community, and it was often necessary for one or the other to
recall with an effort whether a thing had been said or only thought,
shared or dreamt in private. At four o’clock in the afternoon two or
three days later Mrs. Ambrose was standing brushing her hair, while her
husband was in the dressing-room which opened out of her room, and
occasionally, through the cascade of water—he was washing his face—she
caught exclamations, “So it goes on year after year; I wish, I wish, I
wish I could make an end of it,” to which she paid no attention.
“It’s white? Or only brown?” Thus she herself murmured, examining a
hair which gleamed suspiciously among the brown. She pulled it out and
laid it on the dressing-table. She was criticising her own appearance,
or rather approving of it, standing a little way back from the glass
and looking at her own face with superb pride and melancholy, when her
husband appeared in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, his face half
obscured by a towel.
“You often tell me I don’t notice things,” he remarked.
“Tell me if this is a white hair, then?” she replied. She laid the hair
on his hand.
“There’s not a white hair on your head,” he exclaimed.
“Ah, Ridley, I begin to doubt,” she sighed; and bowed her head under
his eyes so that he might judge, but the inspection produced only a
kiss where the line of parting ran, and husband and wife then proceeded
to move about the room, casually murmuring.
“What was that you were saying?” Helen remarked, after an interval of
conversation which no third person could have understood.
“Rachel—you ought to keep an eye upon Rachel,” he observed
significantly, and Helen, though she went on brushing her hair, looked
at him. His observations were apt to be true.
“Young gentlemen don’t interest themselves in young women’s education
without a motive,” he remarked.
“Oh, Hirst,” said Helen.
“Hirst and Hewet, they’re all the same to me—all covered with spots,”
he replied. “He advises her to read Gibbon. Did you know that?”
Helen did not know that, but she would not allow herself inferior to
her husband in powers of observation. She merely said:
“Nothing would surprise me. Even that dreadful flying man we met at the
dance—even Mr. Dalloway—even—”
“I advise you to be circumspect,” said Ridley. “There’s Willoughby,
remember—Willoughby”; he pointed at a letter.
Helen looked with a sigh at an envelope which lay upon her
dressing-table. Yes, there lay Willoughby, curt, inexpressive,
perpetually jocular, robbing a whole continent of mystery, enquiring
after his daughter’s manners and morals—hoping she wasn’t a bore, and
bidding them pack her off to him on board the very next ship if she
were—and then grateful and affectionate with suppressed emotion, and
then half a page about his own triumphs over wretched little natives
who went on strike and refused to load his ships, until he roared
English oaths at them, “popping my head out of the window just as I
was, in my shirt sleeves. The beggars had the sense to scatter.”
“If Theresa married Willoughby,” she remarked, turning the page with a
hairpin, “one doesn’t see what’s to prevent Rachel—”
But Ridley was now off on grievances of his own connected with the
washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits of
Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man, and
yet Ridley couldn’t simply point at the door and tell him to go. The
truth of it was, they saw too many people. And so on and so on, more
conjugal talk pattering softly and unintelligibly, until they were both
ready to go down to tea.
The first thing that caught Helen’s eye as she came downstairs was a
carriage at the door, filled with skirts and feathers nodding on the
tops of hats. She had only time to gain the drawing-room before two
names were oddly mispronounced by the Spanish maid, and Mrs. Thornbury
came in slightly in advance of Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing.
“Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing,” said Mrs. Thornbury, with a wave of her hand.
“A friend of our common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry.”
Mrs. Flushing shook hands energetically. She was a woman of forty
perhaps, very well set up and erect, splendidly robust, though not as
tall as the upright carriage of her body made her appear.
She looked Helen straight in the face and said, “You have a charmin’
house.”
She had a strongly marked face, her eyes looked straight at you, and
though naturally she was imperious in her manner she was nervous at the
same time. Mrs. Thornbury acted as interpreter, making things smooth
all round by a series of charming commonplace remarks.
“I’ve taken it upon myself, Mr. Ambrose,” she said, “to promise that
you will be so kind as to give Mrs. Flushing the benefit of your
experience. I’m sure no one here knows the country as well as you do.
No one takes such wonderful long walks. No one, I’m sure, has your
encyclopaedic knowledge upon every subject. Mr. Wilfrid Flushing is a
collector. He has discovered really beautiful things already. I had no
notion that the peasants were so artistic—though of course in the
past—”
“Not old things—new things,” interrupted Mrs. Flushing curtly. “That
is, if he takes my advice.”
The Ambroses had not lived for many years in London without knowing
something of a good many people, by name at least, and Helen remembered
hearing of the Flushings. Mr. Flushing was a man who kept an old
furniture shop; he had always said he would not marry because most
women have red cheeks, and would not take a house because most houses
have narrow staircases, and would not eat meat because most animals
bleed when they are killed; and then he had married an eccentric
aristocratic lady, who certainly was not pale, who looked as if she ate
meat, who had forced him to do all the things he most disliked—and this
then was the lady. Helen looked at her with interest. They had moved
out into the garden, where the tea was laid under a tree, and Mrs.
Flushing was helping herself to cherry jam. She had a peculiar jerking
movement of the body when she spoke, which caused the canary-coloured
plume on her hat to jerk too. Her small but finely-cut and vigorous
features, together with the deep red of lips and cheeks, pointed to
many generations of well-trained and well-nourished ancestors behind
her.
“Nothin’ that’s more than twenty years old interests me,” she
continued. “Mouldy old pictures, dirty old books, they stick ’em in
museums when they’re only fit for burnin’.”
“I quite agree,” Helen laughed. “But my husband spends his life in
digging up manuscripts which nobody wants.” She was amused by Ridley’s
expression of startled disapproval.
“There’s a clever man in London called John who paints ever so much
better than the old masters,” Mrs. Flushing continued. “His pictures
excite me—nothin’ that’s old excites me.”
“But even his pictures will become old,” Mrs. Thornbury intervened.
“Then I’ll have ’em burnt, or I’ll put it in my will,” said Mrs.
Flushing.
“And Mrs. Flushing lived in one of the most beautiful old houses in
England—Chillingley,” Mrs. Thornbury explained to the rest of them.
“If I’d my way I’d burn that to-morrow,” Mrs. Flushing laughed. She had
a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless.
“What does any sane person want with those great big houses?” she
demanded. “If you go downstairs after dark you’re covered with black
beetles, and the electric lights always goin’ out. What would you do if
spiders came out of the tap when you turned on the hot water?” she
demanded, fixing her eye on Helen.
Mrs. Ambrose shrugged her shoulders with a smile.
“This is what I like,” said Mrs. Flushing. She jerked her head at the
Villa. “A little house in a garden. I had one once in Ireland. One
could lie in bed in the mornin’ and pick roses outside the window with
one’s toes.”
“And the gardeners, weren’t they surprised?” Mrs. Thornbury enquired.
“There were no gardeners,” Mrs. Flushing chuckled. “Nobody but me and
an old woman without any teeth. You know the poor in Ireland lose their
teeth after they’re twenty. But you wouldn’t expect a politician to
understand that—Arthur Balfour wouldn’t understand that.”
Ridley sighed that he never expected any one to understand anything,
least of all politicians.
“However,” he concluded, “there’s one advantage I find in extreme old
age—nothing matters a hang except one’s food and one’s digestion. All I
ask is to be left alone to moulder away in solitude. It’s obvious that
the world’s going as fast as it can to—the Nethermost Pit, and all I
can do is to sit still and consume as much of my own smoke as
possible.” He groaned, and with a melancholy glance laid the jam on his
bread, for he felt the atmosphere of this abrupt lady distinctly
unsympathetic.
“I always contradict my husband when he says that,” said Mrs. Thornbury
sweetly. “You men! Where would you be if it weren’t for the women!”
“Read the _Symposium_,” said Ridley grimly.
“_Symposium_?” cried Mrs. Flushing. “That’s Latin or Greek? Tell me, is
there a good translation?”
“No,” said Ridley. “You will have to learn Greek.”
Mrs. Flushing cried, “Ah, ah, ah! I’d rather break stones in the road.
I always envy the men who break stones and sit on those nice little
heaps all day wearin’ spectacles. I’d infinitely rather break stones
than clean out poultry runs, or feed the cows, or—”
Here Rachel came up from the lower garden with a book in her hand.
“What’s that book?” said Ridley, when she had shaken hands.
“It’s Gibbon,” said Rachel as she sat down.
“_The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_?” said Mrs. Thornbury. “A
very wonderful book, I know. My dear father was always quoting it at
us, with the result that we resolved never to read a line.”
“Gibbon the historian?” enquired Mrs. Flushing. “I connect him with
some of the happiest hours of my life. We used to lie in bed and read