The Voyage Out
man who lived in an old windmill six miles out of Cambridge. He lived
the perfect life, according to St. John, very lonely, very simple,
caring only for the truth of things, always ready to talk, and
extraordinarily modest, though his mind was of the greatest.
“Don’t you think,” said St. John, when he had done describing him,
“that kind of thing makes this kind of thing rather flimsy? Did you
notice at tea how poor old Hewet had to change the conversation? How
they were all ready to pounce upon me because they thought I was going
to say something improper? It wasn’t anything, really. If Bennett had
been there he’d have said exactly what he meant to say, or he’d have
got up and gone. But there’s something rather bad for the character in
that—I mean if one hasn’t got Bennett’s character. It’s inclined to
make one bitter. Should you say that I was bitter?”
Helen did not answer, and he continued:
“Of course I am, disgustingly bitter, and it’s a beastly thing to be.
But the worst of me is that I’m so envious. I envy every one. I can’t
endure people who do things better than I do—perfectly absurd things
too—waiters balancing piles of plates—even Arthur, because Susan’s in
love with him. I want people to like me, and they don’t. It’s partly my
appearance, I expect,” he continued, “though it’s an absolute lie to
say I’ve Jewish blood in me—as a matter of fact we’ve been in Norfolk,
Hirst of Hirstbourne Hall, for three centuries at least. It must be
awfully soothing to be like you—every one liking one at once.”
“I assure you they don’t,” Helen laughed.
“They do,” said Hirst with conviction. “In the first place, you’re the
most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen; in the second, you have an
exceptionally nice nature.”
If Hirst had looked at her instead of looking intently at his teacup he
would have seen Helen blush, partly with pleasure, partly with an
impulse of affection towards the young man who had seemed, and would
seem again, so ugly and so limited. She pitied him, for she suspected
that he suffered, and she was interested in him, for many of the things
he said seemed to her true; she admired the morality of youth, and yet
she felt imprisoned. As if her instinct were to escape to something
brightly coloured and impersonal, which she could hold in her hands,
she went into the house and returned with her embroidery. But he was
not interested in her embroidery; he did not even look at it.
“About Miss Vinrace,” he began,—“oh, look here, do let’s be St. John
and Helen, and Rachel and Terence—what’s she like? Does she reason,
does she feel, or is she merely a kind of footstool?”
“Oh no,” said Helen, with great decision. From her observations at tea
she was inclined to doubt whether Hirst was the person to educate
Rachel. She had gradually come to be interested in her niece, and fond
of her; she disliked some things about her very much, she was amused by
others; but she felt her, on the whole, a live if unformed human being,
experimental, and not always fortunate in her experiments, but with
powers of some kind, and a capacity for feeling. Somewhere in the
depths of her, too, she was bound to Rachel by the indestructible if
inexplicable ties of sex. “She seems vague, but she’s a will of her
own,” she said, as if in the interval she had run through her
qualities.
The embroidery, which was a matter for thought, the design being
difficult and the colours wanting consideration, brought lapses into
the dialogue when she seemed to be engrossed in her skeins of silk, or,
with head a little drawn back and eyes narrowed, considered the effect
of the whole. Thus she merely said, “Um-m-m” to St. John’s next remark,
“I shall ask her to go for a walk with me.”
Perhaps he resented this division of attention. He sat silent watching
Helen closely.
“You’re absolutely happy,” he proclaimed at last.
“Yes?” Helen enquired, sticking in her needle.
“Marriage, I suppose,” said St. John.
“Yes,” said Helen, gently drawing her needle out.
“Children?” St. John enquired.
“Yes,” said Helen, sticking her needle in again. “I don’t know why I’m
happy,” she suddenly laughed, looking him full in the face. There was a
considerable pause.
“There’s an abyss between us,” said St. John. His voice sounded as if
it issued from the depths of a cavern in the rocks. “You’re infinitely
simpler than I am. Women always are, of course. That’s the difficulty.
One never knows how a woman gets there. Supposing all the time you’re
thinking, ‘Oh, what a morbid young man!’”
Helen sat and looked at him with her needle in her hand. From her
position she saw his head in front of the dark pyramid of a
magnolia-tree. With one foot raised on the rung of a chair, and her
elbow out in the attitude for sewing, her own figure possessed the
sublimity of a woman’s of the early world, spinning the thread of
fate—the sublimity possessed by many women of the present day who fall
into the attitude required by scrubbing or sewing. St. John looked at
her.
“I suppose you’ve never paid any a compliment in the course of your
life,” he said irrelevantly.
“I spoil Ridley rather,” Helen considered.
“I’m going to ask you point blank—do you like me?”
After a certain pause, she replied, “Yes, certainly.”
“Thank God!” he exclaimed. “That’s one mercy. You see,” he continued
with emotion, “I’d rather you liked me than any one I’ve ever met.”
“What about the five philosophers?” said Helen, with a laugh, stitching
firmly and swiftly at her canvas. “I wish you’d describe them.”
Hirst had no particular wish to describe them, but when he began to
consider them he found himself soothed and strengthened. Far away on
the other side of the world as they were, in smoky rooms, and grey
medieval courts, they appeared remarkable figures, free-spoken men with
whom one could be at ease; incomparably more subtle in emotion than the
people here. They gave him, certainly, what no woman could give him,
not Helen even. Warming at the thought of them, he went on to lay his
case before Mrs. Ambrose. Should he stay on at Cambridge or should he
go to the Bar? One day he thought one thing, another day another. Helen
listened attentively. At last, without any preface, she pronounced her
decision.
“Leave Cambridge and go to the Bar,” she said. He pressed her for her
reasons.
“I think you’d enjoy London more,” she said. It did not seem a very
subtle reason, but she appeared to think it sufficient. She looked at
him against the background of flowering magnolia. There was something
curious in the sight. Perhaps it was that the heavy wax-like flowers
were so smooth and inarticulate, and his face—he had thrown his hat
away, his hair was rumpled, he held his eye-glasses in his hand, so
that a red mark appeared on either side of his nose—was so worried and
garrulous. It was a beautiful bush, spreading very widely, and all the
time she had sat there talking she had been noticing the patches of
shade and the shape of the leaves, and the way the great white flowers
sat in the midst of the green. She had noticed it half-consciously,
nevertheless the pattern had become part of their talk. She laid down
her sewing, and began to walk up and down the garden, and Hirst rose
too and paced by her side. He was rather disturbed, uncomfortable, and
full of thought. Neither of them spoke.
The sun was beginning to go down, and a change had come over the
mountains, as if they were robbed of their earthly substance, and
composed merely of intense blue mist. Long thin clouds of flamingo red,
with edges like the edges of curled ostrich feathers, lay up and down
the sky at different altitudes. The roofs of the town seemed to have
sunk lower than usual; the cypresses appeared very black between the
roofs, and the roofs themselves were brown and white. As usual in the
evening, single cries and single bells became audible rising from
beneath.
St. John stopped suddenly.
“Well, you must take the responsibility,” he said. “I’ve made up my
mind; I shall go to the Bar.”
His words were very serious, almost emotional; they recalled Helen
after a second’s hesitation.
“I’m sure you’re right,” she said warmly, and shook the hand he held
out. “You’ll be a great man, I’m certain.”
Then, as if to make him look at the scene, she swept her hand round the
immense circumference of the view. From the sea, over the roofs of the
town, across the crests of the mountains, over the river and the plain,
and again across the crests of the mountains it swept until it reached
the villa, the garden, the magnolia-tree, and the figures of Hirst and
herself standing together, when it dropped to her side.
CHAPTER XVI
Hewet and Rachel had long ago reached the particular place on the edge
of the cliff where, looking down into the sea, you might chance on
jelly-fish and dolphins. Looking the other way, the vast expanse of
land gave them a sensation which is given by no view, however extended,
in England; the villages and the hills there having names, and the
farthest horizon of hills as often as not dipping and showing a line of
mist which is the sea; here the view was one of infinite sun-dried
earth, earth pointed in pinnacles, heaped in vast barriers, earth
widening and spreading away and away like the immense floor of the sea,
earth chequered by day and by night, and partitioned into different
lands, where famous cities were founded, and the races of men changed
from dark savages to white civilised men, and back to dark savages
again. Perhaps their English blood made this prospect uncomfortably
impersonal and hostile to them, for having once turned their faces that
way they next turned them to the sea, and for the rest of the time sat
looking at the sea. The sea, though it was a thin and sparkling water
here, which seemed incapable of surge or anger, eventually narrowed
itself, clouded its pure tint with grey, and swirled through narrow
channels and dashed in a shiver of broken waters against massive
granite rocks. It was this sea that flowed up to the mouth of the
Thames; and the Thames washed the roots of the city of London.
Hewet’s thoughts had followed some such course as this, for the first
thing he said as they stood on the edge of the cliff was—
“I’d like to be in England!”
Rachel lay down on her elbow, and parted the tall grasses which grew on
the edge, so that she might have a clear view. The water was very calm;
rocking up and down at the base of the cliff, and so clear that one
could see the red of the stones at the bottom of it. So it had been at
the birth of the world, and so it had remained ever since. Probably no
human being had ever broken that water with boat or with body. Obeying
some impulse, she determined to mar that eternity of peace, and threw
the largest pebble she could find. It struck the water, and the ripples
spread out and out. Hewet looked down too.
“It’s wonderful,” he said, as they widened and ceased. The freshness
and the newness seemed to him wonderful. He threw a pebble next. There
was scarcely any sound.
“But England,” Rachel murmured in the absorbed tone of one whose eyes
are concentrated upon some sight. “What d’you want with England?”
“My friends chiefly,” he said, “and all the things one does.”
He could look at Rachel without her noticing it. She was still absorbed
in the water and the exquisitely pleasant sensations which a little
depth of the sea washing over rocks suggests. He noticed that she was
wearing a dress of deep blue colour, made of a soft thin cotton stuff,
which clung to the shape of her body. It was a body with the angles and
hollows of a young woman’s body not yet developed, but in no way
distorted, and thus interesting and even lovable. Raising his eyes
Hewet observed her head; she had taken her hat off, and the face rested