The Voyage Out
“Partly because you’re a woman,” he replied. When he said this, Rachel,
who had become oblivious of anything, and had reverted to a childlike
state of interest and pleasure, lost her freedom and became
self-conscious. She felt herself at once singular and under
observation, as she felt with St. John Hirst. She was about to launch
into an argument which would have made them both feel bitterly against
each other, and to define sensations which had no such importance as
words were bound to give them when Hewet led her thoughts in a
different direction.
“I’ve often walked along the streets where people live all in a row,
and one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on earth
the women were doing inside,” he said. “Just consider: it’s the
beginning of the twentieth century, and until a few years ago no woman
had ever come out by herself and said things at all. There it was going
on in the background, for all those thousands of years, this curious
silent unrepresented life. Of course we’re always writing about
women—abusing them, or jeering at them, or worshipping them; but it’s
never come from women themselves. I believe we still don’t know in the
least how they live, or what they feel, or what they do precisely. If
one’s a man, the only confidences one gets are from young women about
their love affairs. But the lives of women of forty, of unmarried
women, of working women, of women who keep shops and bring up children,
of women like your aunts or Mrs. Thornbury or Miss Allan—one knows
nothing whatever about them. They won’t tell you. Either they’re
afraid, or they’ve got a way of treating men. It’s the man’s view
that’s represented, you see. Think of a railway train: fifteen
carriages for men who want to smoke. Doesn’t it make your blood boil?
If I were a woman I’d blow some one’s brains out. Don’t you laugh at us
a great deal? Don’t you think it all a great humbug? You, I mean—how
does it all strike you?”
His determination to know, while it gave meaning to their talk,
hampered her; he seemed to press further and further, and made it
appear so important. She took some time to answer, and during that time
she went over and over the course of her twenty-four years, lighting
now on one point, now on another—on her aunts, her mother, her father,
and at last her mind fixed upon her aunts and her father, and she tried
to describe them as at this distance they appeared to her.
They were very much afraid of her father. He was a great dim force in
the house, by means of which they held on to the great world which is
represented every morning in the _Times_. But the real life of the
house was something quite different from this. It went on independently
of Mr. Vinrace, and tended to hide itself from him. He was
good-humoured towards them, but contemptuous. She had always taken it
for granted that his point of view was just, and founded upon an ideal
scale of things where the life of one person was absolutely more
important than the life of another, and that in that scale they were of
much less importance than he was. But did she really believe that?
Hewet’s words made her think. She always submitted to her father, just
as they did, but it was her aunts who influenced her really; her aunts
who built up the fine, closely woven substance of their life at home.
They were less splendid but more natural than her father was. All her
rages had been against them; it was their world with its four meals,
its punctuality, and servants on the stairs at half-past ten, that she
examined so closely and wanted so vehemently to smash to atoms.
Following these thoughts she looked up and said:
“And there’s a sort of beauty in it—there they are at Richmond at this
very moment building things up. They’re all wrong, perhaps, but there’s
a sort of beauty in it,” she repeated. “It’s so unconscious, so modest.
And yet they feel things. They do mind if people die. Old spinsters are
always doing things. I don’t quite know what they do. Only that was
what I felt when I lived with them. It was very real.”
She reviewed their little journeys to and fro, to Walworth, to
charwomen with bad legs, to meetings for this and that, their minute
acts of charity and unselfishness which flowered punctually from a
definite view of what they ought to do, their friendships, their tastes
and habits; she saw all these things like grains of sand falling,
falling through innumerable days, making an atmosphere and building up
a solid mass, a background. Hewet observed her as she considered this.
“Were you happy?” he demanded.
Again she had become absorbed in something else, and he called her back
to an unusually vivid consciousness of herself.
“I was both,” she replied. “I was happy and I was miserable. You’ve no
conception what it’s like—to be a young woman.” She looked straight at
him. “There are terrors and agonies,” she said, keeping her eye on him
as if to detect the slightest hint of laughter.
“I can believe it,” he said. He returned her look with perfect
sincerity.
“Women one sees in the streets,” she said.
“Prostitutes?”
“Men kissing one.”
He nodded his head.
“You were never told?”
She shook her head.
“And then,” she began and stopped. Here came in the great space of life
into which no one had ever penetrated. All that she had been saying
about her father and her aunts and walks in Richmond Park, and what
they did from hour to hour, was merely on the surface. Hewet was
watching her. Did he demand that she should describe that also? Why did
he sit so near and keep his eye on her? Why did they not have done with
this searching and agony? Why did they not kiss each other simply? She
wished to kiss him. But all the time she went on spinning out words.
“A girl is more lonely than a boy. No one cares in the least what she
does. Nothing’s expected of her. Unless one’s very pretty people don’t
listen to what you say. . . . And that is what I like,” she added
energetically, as if the memory were very happy. “I like walking in
Richmond Park and singing to myself and knowing it doesn’t matter a
damn to anybody. I like seeing things go on—as we saw you that night
when you didn’t see us—I love the freedom of it—it’s like being the
wind or the sea.” She turned with a curious fling of her hands and
looked at the sea. It was still very blue, dancing away as far as the
eye could reach, but the light on it was yellower, and the clouds were
turning flamingo red.
A feeling of intense depression crossed Hewet’s mind as she spoke. It
seemed plain that she would never care for one person rather than
another; she was evidently quite indifferent to him; they seemed to
come very near, and then they were as far apart as ever again; and her
gesture as she turned away had been oddly beautiful.
“Nonsense,” he said abruptly. “You like people. You like admiration.
Your real grudge against Hirst is that he doesn’t admire you.”
She made no answer for some time. Then she said:
“That’s probably true. Of course I like people—I like almost every one
I’ve ever met.”
She turned her back on the sea and regarded Hewet with friendly if
critical eyes. He was good-looking in the sense that he had always had
a sufficiency of beef to eat and fresh air to breathe. His head was
big; the eyes were also large; though generally vague they could be
forcible; and the lips were sensitive. One might account him a man of
considerable passion and fitful energy, likely to be at the mercy of
moods which had little relation to facts; at once tolerant and
fastidious. The breadth of his forehead showed capacity for thought.
The interest with which Rachel looked at him was heard in her voice.
“What novels do you write?” she asked.
“I want to write a novel about Silence,” he said; “the things people
don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.” He sighed. “However, you
don’t care,” he continued. He looked at her almost severely. “Nobody
cares. All you read a novel for is to see what sort of person the
writer is, and, if you know him, which of his friends he’s put in. As
for the novel itself, the whole conception, the way one’s seen the
thing, felt about it, make it stand in relation to other things, not
one in a million cares for that. And yet I sometimes wonder whether
there’s anything else in the whole world worth doing. These other
people,” he indicated the hotel, “are always wanting something they
can’t get. But there’s an extraordinary satisfaction in writing, even
in the attempt to write. What you said just now is true: one doesn’t
want to be things; one wants merely to be allowed to see them.”
Some of the satisfaction of which he spoke came into his face as he
gazed out to sea.
It was Rachel’s turn now to feel depressed. As he talked of writing he
had become suddenly impersonal. He might never care for any one; all
that desire to know her and get at her, which she had felt pressing on
her almost painfully, had completely vanished.
“Are you a good writer?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m not first-rate, of course; I’m good second-rate;
about as good as Thackeray, I should say.”
Rachel was amazed. For one thing it amazed her to hear Thackeray called
second-rate; and then she could not widen her point of view to believe
that there could be great writers in existence at the present day, or
if there were, that any one she knew could be a great writer, and his
self-confidence astounded her, and he became more and more remote.
“My other novel,” Hewet continued, “is about a young man who is
obsessed by an idea—the idea of being a gentleman. He manages to exist
at Cambridge on a hundred pounds a year. He has a coat; it was once a
very good coat. But the trousers—they’re not so good. Well, he goes up
to London, gets into good society, owing to an early-morning adventure
on the banks of the Serpentine. He is led into telling lies—my idea,
you see, is to show the gradual corruption of the soul—calls himself
the son of some great landed proprietor in Devonshire. Meanwhile the
coat becomes older and older, and he hardly dares to wear the trousers.
Can’t you imagine the wretched man, after some splendid evening of
debauchery, contemplating these garments—hanging them over the end of
the bed, arranging them now in full light, now in shade, and wondering
whether they will survive him, or he will survive them? Thoughts of
suicide cross his mind. He has a friend, too, a man who somehow
subsists upon selling small birds, for which he sets traps in the
fields near Uxbridge. They’re scholars, both of them. I know one or two
wretched starving creatures like that who quote Aristotle at you over a
fried herring and a pint of porter. Fashionable life, too, I have to
represent at some length, in order to show my hero under all
circumstances. Lady Theo Bingham Bingley, whose bay mare he had the
good fortune to stop, is the daughter of a very fine old Tory peer. I’m
going to describe the kind of parties I once went to—the fashionable
intellectuals, you know, who like to have the latest book on their
tables. They give parties, river parties, parties where you play games.
There’s no difficulty in conceiving incidents; the difficulty is to put
them into shape—not to get run away with, as Lady Theo was. It ended
disastrously for her, poor woman, for the book, as I planned it, was
going to end in profound and sordid respectability. Disowned by her
father, she marries my hero, and they live in a snug little villa
outside Croydon, in which town he is set up as a house agent. He never
succeeds in becoming a real gentleman after all. That’s the interesting
part of it. Does it seem to you the kind of book you’d like to read?”
he enquired; “or perhaps you’d like my Stuart tragedy better,” he
continued, without waiting for her to answer him. “My idea is that