The Voyage Out
on her hand. As she looked down into the sea, her lips were slightly
parted. The expression was one of childlike intentness, as if she were
watching for a fish to swim past over the clear red rocks. Nevertheless
her twenty-four years of life had given her a look of reserve. Her
hand, which lay on the ground, the fingers curling slightly in, was
well shaped and competent; the square-tipped and nervous fingers were
the fingers of a musician. With something like anguish Hewet realised
that, far from being unattractive, her body was very attractive to him.
She looked up suddenly. Her eyes were full of eagerness and interest.
“You write novels?” she asked.
For the moment he could not think what he was saying. He was overcome
with the desire to hold her in his arms.
“Oh yes,” he said. “That is, I want to write them.”
She would not take her large grey eyes off his face.
“Novels,” she repeated. “Why do you write novels? You ought to write
music. Music, you see”—she shifted her eyes, and became less desirable
as her brain began to work, inflicting a certain change upon her
face—“music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at
once. With writing it seems to me there’s so much”—she paused for an
expression, and rubbed her fingers in the earth—“scratching on the
matchbox. Most of the time when I was reading Gibbon this afternoon I
was horribly, oh infernally, damnably bored!” She gave a shake of
laughter, looking at Hewet, who laughed too.
“_I_ shan’t lend you books,” he remarked.
“Why is it,” Rachel continued, “that I can laugh at Mr. Hirst to you,
but not to his face? At tea I was completely overwhelmed, not by his
ugliness—by his mind.” She enclosed a circle in the air with her hands.
She realised with a great sense of comfort how easily she could talk to
Hewet, those thorns or ragged corners which tear the surface of some
relationships being smoothed away.
“So I observed,” said Hewet. “That’s a thing that never ceases to amaze
me.” He had recovered his composure to such an extent that he could
light and smoke a cigarette, and feeling her ease, became happy and
easy himself.
“The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women, have for
men,” he went on. “I believe we must have the sort of power over you
that we’re said to have over horses. They see us three times as big as
we are or they’d never obey us. For that very reason, I’m inclined to
doubt that you’ll ever do anything even when you have the vote.” He
looked at her reflectively. She appeared very smooth and sensitive and
young. “It’ll take at least six generations before you’re sufficiently
thick-skinned to go into law courts and business offices. Consider what
a bully the ordinary man is,” he continued, “the ordinary hard-working,
rather ambitious solicitor or man of business with a family to bring up
and a certain position to maintain. And then, of course, the daughters
have to give way to the sons; the sons have to be educated; they have
to bully and shove for their wives and families, and so it all comes
over again. And meanwhile there are the women in the background. . . .
Do you really think that the vote will do you any good?”
“The vote?” Rachel repeated. She had to visualise it as a little bit of
paper which she dropped into a box before she understood his question,
and looking at each other they smiled at something absurd in the
question.
“Not to me,” she said. “But I play the piano. . . . Are men really like
that?” she asked, returning to the question that interested her. “I’m
not afraid of you.” She looked at him easily.
“Oh, I’m different,” Hewet replied. “I’ve got between six and seven
hundred a year of my own. And then no one takes a novelist seriously,
thank heavens. There’s no doubt it helps to make up for the drudgery of
a profession if a man’s taken very, very seriously by every one—if he
gets appointments, and has offices and a title, and lots of letters
after his name, and bits of ribbon and degrees. I don’t grudge it ’em,
though sometimes it comes over me—what an amazing concoction! What a
miracle the masculine conception of life is—judges, civil servants,
army, navy, Houses of Parliament, lord mayors—what a world we’ve made
of it! Look at Hirst now. I assure you,” he said, “not a day’s passed
since we came here without a discussion as to whether he’s to stay on
at Cambridge or to go to the Bar. It’s his career—his sacred career.
And if I’ve heard it twenty times, I’m sure his mother and sister have
heard it five hundred times. Can’t you imagine the family conclaves,
and the sister told to run out and feed the rabbits because St. John
must have the school-room to himself—‘St. John’s working,’ ‘St. John
wants his tea brought to him.’ Don’t you know the kind of thing? No
wonder that St. John thinks it a matter of considerable importance. It
is too. He has to earn his living. But St. John’s sister—” Hewet puffed
in silence. “No one takes her seriously, poor dear. She feeds the
rabbits.”
“Yes,” said Rachel. “I’ve fed rabbits for twenty-four years; it seems
odd now.” She looked meditative, and Hewet, who had been talking much
at random and instinctively adopting the feminine point of view, saw
that she would now talk about herself, which was what he wanted, for so
they might come to know each other.
She looked back meditatively upon her past life.
“How do you spend your day?” he asked.
She meditated still. When she thought of their day it seemed to her it
was cut into four pieces by their meals. These divisions were
absolutely rigid, the contents of the day having to accommodate
themselves within the four rigid bars. Looking back at her life, that
was what she saw.
“Breakfast nine; luncheon one; tea five; dinner eight,” she said.
“Well,” said Hewet, “what d’you do in the morning?”
“I need to play the piano for hours and hours.”
“And after luncheon?”
“Then I went shopping with one of my aunts. Or we went to see some one,
or we took a message; or we did something that had to be done—the taps
might be leaking. They visit the poor a good deal—old char-women with
bad legs, women who want tickets for hospitals. Or I used to walk in
the park by myself. And after tea people sometimes called; or in summer
we sat in the garden or played croquet; in winter I read aloud, while
they worked; after dinner I played the piano and they wrote letters. If
father was at home we had friends of his to dinner, and about once a
month we went up to the play. Every now and then we dined out;
sometimes I went to a dance in London, but that was difficult because
of getting back. The people we saw were old family friends, and
relations, but we didn’t see many people. There was the clergyman, Mr.
Pepper, and the Hunts. Father generally wanted to be quiet when he came
home, because he works very hard at Hull. Also my aunts aren’t very
strong. A house takes up a lot of time if you do it properly. Our
servants were always bad, and so Aunt Lucy used to do a good deal in
the kitchen, and Aunt Clara, I think, spent most of the morning dusting
the drawing-room and going through the linen and silver. Then there
were the dogs. They had to be exercised, besides being washed and
brushed. Now Sandy’s dead, but Aunt Clara has a very old cockatoo that
came from India. Everything in our house,” she exclaimed, “comes from
somewhere! It’s full of old furniture, not really old, Victorian,
things mother’s family had or father’s family had, which they didn’t
like to get rid of, I suppose, though we’ve really no room for them.
It’s rather a nice house,” she continued, “except that it’s a little
dingy—dull I should say.” She called up before her eyes a vision of the
drawing-room at home; it was a large oblong room, with a square window
opening on the garden. Green plush chairs stood against the wall; there
was a heavy carved book-case, with glass doors, and a general
impression of faded sofa covers, large spaces of pale green, and
baskets with pieces of wool-work dropping out of them. Photographs from
old Italian masterpieces hung on the walls, and views of Venetian
bridges and Swedish waterfalls which members of the family had seen
years ago. There were also one or two portraits of fathers and
grandmothers, and an engraving of John Stuart Mill, after the picture
by Watts. It was a room without definite character, being neither
typically and openly hideous, nor strenuously artistic, nor really
comfortable. Rachel roused herself from the contemplation of this
familiar picture.
“But this isn’t very interesting for you,” she said, looking up.
“Good Lord!” Hewet exclaimed. “I’ve never been so much interested in my
life.” She then realised that while she had been thinking of Richmond,
his eyes had never left her face. The knowledge of this excited her.
“Go on, please go on,” he urged. “Let’s imagine it’s a Wednesday.
You’re all at luncheon. You sit there, and Aunt Lucy there, and Aunt
Clara here”; he arranged three pebbles on the grass between them.
“Aunt Clara carves the neck of lamb,” Rachel continued. She fixed her
gaze upon the pebbles. “There’s a very ugly yellow china stand in front
of me, called a dumb waiter, on which are three dishes, one for
biscuits, one for butter, and one for cheese. There’s a pot of ferns.
Then there’s Blanche the maid, who snuffles because of her nose. We
talk—oh yes, it’s Aunt Lucy’s afternoon at Walworth, so we’re rather
quick over luncheon. She goes off. She has a purple bag, and a black
notebook. Aunt Clara has what they call a G.F.S. meeting in the
drawing-room on Wednesday, so I take the dogs out. I go up Richmond
Hill, along the terrace, into the park. It’s the 18th of April—the same
day as it is here. It’s spring in England. The ground is rather damp.
However, I cross the road and get on to the grass and we walk along,
and I sing as I always do when I’m alone, until we come to the open
place where you can see the whole of London beneath you on a clear day.
Hampstead Church spire there, Westminster Cathedral over there, and
factory chimneys about here. There’s generally a haze over the low
parts of London; but it’s often blue over the park when London’s in a
mist. It’s the open place that the balloons cross going over to
Hurlingham. They’re pale yellow. Well, then, it smells very good,
particularly if they happen to be burning wood in the keeper’s lodge
which is there. I could tell you now how to get from place to place,
and exactly what trees you’d pass, and where you’d cross the roads. You
see, I played there when I was small. Spring is good, but it’s best in
the autumn when the deer are barking; then it gets dusky, and I go back
through the streets, and you can’t see people properly; they come past
very quick, you just see their faces and then they’re gone—that’s what
I like—and no one knows in the least what you’re doing—”
“But you have to be back for tea, I suppose?” Hewet checked her.
“Tea? Oh yes. Five o’clock. Then I say what I’ve done, and my aunts say
what they’ve done, and perhaps some one comes in: Mrs. Hunt, let’s
suppose. She’s an old lady with a lame leg. She has or she once had
eight children; so we ask after them. They’re all over the world; so we
ask where they are, and sometimes they’re ill, or they’re stationed in
a cholera district, or in some place where it only rains once in five
months. Mrs. Hunt,” she said with a smile, “had a son who was hugged to
death by a bear.”
Here she stopped and looked at Hewet to see whether he was amused by
the same things that amused her. She was reassured. But she thought it
necessary to apologise again; she had been talking too much.
“You can’t conceive how it interests me,” he said. Indeed, his
cigarette had gone out, and he had to light another.
“Why does it interest you?” she asked.