The Voyage Out
Gibbon—about the massacres of the Christians, I remember—when we were
supposed to be asleep. It’s no joke, I can tell you, readin’ a great
big book, in double columns, by a night-light, and the light that comes
through a chink in the door. Then there were the moths—tiger moths,
yellow moths, and horrid cockchafers. Louisa, my sister, would have the
window open. I wanted it shut. We fought every night of our lives over
that window. Have you ever seen a moth dyin’ in a night-light?” she
enquired.
Again there was an interruption. Hewet and Hirst appeared at the
drawing-room window and came up to the tea-table.
Rachel’s heart beat hard. She was conscious of an extraordinary
intensity in everything, as though their presence stripped some cover
off the surface of things; but the greetings were remarkably
commonplace.
“Excuse me,” said Hirst, rising from his chair directly he had sat
down. He went into the drawing-room, and returned with a cushion which
he placed carefully upon his seat.
“Rheumatism,” he remarked, as he sat down for the second time.
“The result of the dance?” Helen enquired.
“Whenever I get at all run down I tend to be rheumatic,” Hirst stated.
He bent his wrist back sharply. “I hear little pieces of chalk grinding
together!”
Rachel looked at him. She was amused, and yet she was respectful; if
such a thing could be, the upper part of her face seemed to laugh, and
the lower part to check its laughter.
Hewet picked up the book that lay on the ground.
“You like this?” he asked in an undertone.
“No, I don’t like it,” she replied. She had indeed been trying all the
afternoon to read it, and for some reason the glory which she had
perceived at first had faded, and, read as she would, she could not
grasp the meaning with her mind.
“It goes round, round, round, like a roll of oil-cloth,” she hazarded.
Evidently she meant Hewet alone to hear her words, but Hirst demanded,
“What d’you mean?”
She was instantly ashamed of her figure of speech, for she could not
explain it in words of sober criticism.
“Surely it’s the most perfect style, so far as style goes, that’s ever
been invented,” he continued. “Every sentence is practically perfect,
and the wit—”
“Ugly in body, repulsive in mind,” she thought, instead of thinking
about Gibbon’s style. “Yes, but strong, searching, unyielding in mind.”
She looked at his big head, a disproportionate part of which was
occupied by the forehead, and at the direct, severe eyes.
“I give you up in despair,” he said. He meant it lightly, but she took
it seriously, and believed that her value as a human being was lessened
because she did not happen to admire the style of Gibbon. The others
were talking now in a group about the native villages which Mrs.
Flushing ought to visit.
“I despair too,” she said impetuously. “How are you going to judge
people merely by their minds?”
“You agree with my spinster Aunt, I expect,” said St. John in his
jaunty manner, which was always irritating because it made the person
he talked to appear unduly clumsy and in earnest. “‘Be good, sweet
maid’—I thought Mr. Kingsley and my Aunt were now obsolete.”
“One can be very nice without having read a book,” she asserted. Very
silly and simple her words sounded, and laid her open to derision.
“Did I ever deny it?” Hirst enquired, raising his eyebrows.
Most unexpectedly Mrs. Thornbury here intervened, either because it was
her mission to keep things smooth or because she had long wished to
speak to Mr. Hirst, feeling as she did that young men were her sons.
“I have lived all my life with people like your Aunt, Mr. Hirst,” she
said, leaning forward in her chair. Her brown squirrel-like eyes became
even brighter than usual. “They have never heard of Gibbon. They only
care for their pheasants and their peasants. They are great big men who
look so fine on horseback, as people must have done, I think, in the
days of the great wars. Say what you like against them—they are animal,
they are unintellectual; they don’t read themselves, and they don’t
want others to read, but they are some of the finest and the kindest
human beings on the face of the earth! You would be surprised at some
of the stories I could tell. You have never guessed, perhaps, at all
the romances that go on in the heart of the country. There are the
people, I feel, among whom Shakespeare will be born if he is ever born
again. In those old houses, up among the Downs—”
“My Aunt,” Hirst interrupted, “spends her life in East Lambeth among
the degraded poor. I only quoted my Aunt because she is inclined to
persecute people she calls ‘intellectual,’ which is what I suspect Miss
Vinrace of doing. It’s all the fashion now. If you’re clever it’s
always taken for granted that you’re completely without sympathy,
understanding, affection—all the things that really matter. Oh, you
Christians! You’re the most conceited, patronising, hypocritical set of
old humbugs in the kingdom! Of course,” he continued, “I’m the first to
allow your country gentlemen great merits. For one thing, they’re
probably quite frank about their passions, which we are not. My father,
who is a clergyman in Norfolk, says that there is hardly a squire in
the country who does not—”
“But about Gibbon?” Hewet interrupted. The look of nervous tension
which had come over every face was relaxed by the interruption.
“You find him monotonous, I suppose. But you know—” He opened the book,
and began searching for passages to read aloud, and in a little time he
found a good one which he considered suitable. But there was nothing in
the world that bored Ridley more than being read aloud to, and he was
besides scrupulously fastidious as to the dress and behaviour of
ladies. In the space of fifteen minutes he had decided against Mrs.
Flushing on the ground that her orange plume did not suit her
complexion, that she spoke too loud, that she crossed her legs, and
finally, when he saw her accept a cigarette that Hewet offered her, he
jumped up, exclaiming something about “bar parlours,” and left them.
Mrs. Flushing was evidently relieved by his departure. She puffed her
cigarette, stuck her legs out, and examined Helen closely as to the
character and reputation of their common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry. By
a series of little strategems she drove her to define Mrs. Parry as
somewhat elderly, by no means beautiful, very much made up—an insolent
old harridan, in short, whose parties were amusing because one met odd
people; but Helen herself always pitied poor Mr. Parry, who was
understood to be shut up downstairs with cases full of gems, while his
wife enjoyed herself in the drawing-room. “Not that I believe what
people say against her—although she hints, of course—” Upon which Mrs.
Flushing cried out with delight:
“She’s my first cousin! Go on—go on!”
When Mrs. Flushing rose to go she was obviously delighted with her new
acquaintances. She made three or four different plans for meeting or
going on an expedition, or showing Helen the things they had bought, on
her way to the carriage. She included them all in a vague but
magnificent invitation.
As Helen returned to the garden again, Ridley’s words of warning came
into her head, and she hesitated a moment and looked at Rachel sitting
between Hirst and Hewet. But she could draw no conclusions, for Hewet
was still reading Gibbon aloud, and Rachel, for all the expression she
had, might have been a shell, and his words water rubbing against her
ears, as water rubs a shell on the edge of a rock.
Hewet’s voice was very pleasant. When he reached the end of the period
Hewet stopped, and no one volunteered any criticism.
“I do adore the aristocracy!” Hirst exclaimed after a moment’s pause.
“They’re so amazingly unscrupulous. None of us would dare to behave as
that woman behaves.”
“What I like about them,” said Helen as she sat down, “is that they’re
so well put together. Naked, Mrs. Flushing would be superb. Dressed as
she dresses, it’s absurd, of course.”
“Yes,” said Hirst. A shade of depression crossed his face. “I’ve never
weighed more than ten stone in my life,” he said, “which is ridiculous,
considering my height, and I’ve actually gone down in weight since we
came here. I daresay that accounts for the rheumatism.” Again he jerked
his wrist back sharply, so that Helen might hear the grinding of the
chalk stones. She could not help smiling.
“It’s no laughing matter for me, I assure you,” he protested. “My
mother’s a chronic invalid, and I’m always expecting to be told that
I’ve got heart disease myself. Rheumatism always goes to the heart in
the end.”
“For goodness’ sake, Hirst,” Hewet protested; “one might think you were
an old cripple of eighty. If it comes to that, I had an aunt who died
of cancer myself, but I put a bold face on it—” He rose and began
tilting his chair backwards and forwards on its hind legs. “Is any one
here inclined for a walk?” he said. “There’s a magnificent walk, up
behind the house. You come out on to a cliff and look right down into
the sea. The rocks are all red; you can see them through the water. The
other day I saw a sight that fairly took my breath away—about twenty
jelly-fish, semi-transparent, pink, with long streamers, floating on
the top of the waves.”
“Sure they weren’t mermaids?” said Hirst. “It’s much too hot to climb
uphill.” He looked at Helen, who showed no signs of moving.
“Yes, it’s too hot,” Helen decided.
There was a short silence.
“I’d like to come,” said Rachel.
“But she might have said that anyhow,” Helen thought to herself as
Hewet and Rachel went away together, and Helen was left alone with St.
John, to St. John’s obvious satisfaction.
He may have been satisfied, but his usual difficulty in deciding that
one subject was more deserving of notice than another prevented him
from speaking for some time. He sat staring intently at the head of a
dead match, while Helen considered—so it seemed from the expression of
her eyes—something not closely connected with the present moment.
At last St. John exclaimed, “Damn! Damn everything! Damn everybody!” he
added. “At Cambridge there are people to talk to.”
“At Cambridge there are people to talk to,” Helen echoed him,
rhythmically and absent-mindedly. Then she woke up. “By the way, have
you settled what you’re going to do—is it to be Cambridge or the Bar?”
He pursed his lips, but made no immediate answer, for Helen was still
slightly inattentive. She had been thinking about Rachel and which of
the two young men she was likely to fall in love with, and now sitting
opposite to Hirst she thought, “He’s ugly. It’s a pity they’re so
ugly.”
She did not include Hewet in this criticism; she was thinking of the
clever, honest, interesting young men she knew, of whom Hirst was a
good example, and wondering whether it was necessary that thought and
scholarship should thus maltreat their bodies, and should thus elevate
their minds to a very high tower from which the human race appeared to
them like rats and mice squirming on the flat.
“And the future?” she reflected, vaguely envisaging a race of men
becoming more and more like Hirst, and a race of women becoming more
and more like Rachel. “Oh no,” she concluded, glancing at him, “one
wouldn’t marry you. Well, then, the future of the race is in the hands
of Susan and Arthur; no—that’s dreadful. Of farm labourers; no—not of
the English at all, but of Russians and Chinese.” This train of thought
did not satisfy her, and was interrupted by St. John, who began again:
“I wish you knew Bennett. He’s the greatest man in the world.”
“Bennett?” she enquired. Becoming more at ease, St. John dropped the
concentrated abruptness of his manner, and explained that Bennett was a