The Voyage Out
there’s a certain quality of beauty in the past, which the ordinary
historical novelist completely ruins by his absurd conventions. The
moon becomes the Regent of the Skies. People clap spurs to their
horses, and so on. I’m going to treat people as though they were
exactly the same as we are. The advantage is that, detached from modern
conditions, one can make them more intense and more abstract than
people who live as we do.”
Rachel had listened to all this with attention, but with a certain
amount of bewilderment. They both sat thinking their own thoughts.
“I’m not like Hirst,” said Hewet, after a pause; he spoke meditatively;
“I don’t see circles of chalk between people’s feet. I sometimes wish I
did. It seems to me so tremendously complicated and confused. One can’t
come to any decision at all; one’s less and less capable of making
judgments. D’you find that? And then one never knows what any one
feels. We’re all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine
anything more ludicrous than one person’s opinion of another person?
One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn’t know.”
As he said this he was leaning on his elbow arranging and rearranging
in the grass the stones which had represented Rachel and her aunts at
luncheon. He was speaking as much to himself as to Rachel. He was
reasoning against the desire, which had returned with intensity, to
take her in his arms; to have done with indirectness; to explain
exactly what he felt. What he said was against his belief; all the
things that were important about her he knew; he felt them in the air
around them; but he said nothing; he went on arranging the stones.
“I like you; d’you like me?” Rachel suddenly observed.
“I like you immensely,” Hewet replied, speaking with the relief of a
person who is unexpectedly given an opportunity of saying what he wants
to say. He stopped moving the pebbles.
“Mightn’t we call each other Rachel and Terence?” he asked.
“Terence,” Rachel repeated. “Terence—that’s like the cry of an owl.”
She looked up with a sudden rush of delight, and in looking at Terence
with eyes widened by pleasure she was struck by the change that had
come over the sky behind them. The substantial blue day had faded to a
paler and more ethereal blue; the clouds were pink, far away and
closely packed together; and the peace of evening had replaced the heat
of the southern afternoon, in which they had started on their walk.
“It must be late!” she exclaimed.
It was nearly eight o’clock.
“But eight o’clock doesn’t count here, does it?” Terence asked, as they
got up and turned inland again. They began to walk rather quickly down
the hill on a little path between the olive trees.
They felt more intimate because they shared the knowledge of what eight
o’clock in Richmond meant. Terence walked in front, for there was not
room for them side by side.
“What I want to do in writing novels is very much what you want to do
when you play the piano, I expect,” he began, turning and speaking over
his shoulder. “We want to find out what’s behind things, don’t we?—Look
at the lights down there,” he continued, “scattered about anyhow.
Things I feel come to me like lights. . . . I want to combine them. . .
. Have you ever seen fireworks that make figures? . . . I want to make
figures. . . . Is that what you want to do?”
Now they were out on the road and could walk side by side.
“When I play the piano? Music is different. . . . But I see what you
mean.” They tried to invent theories and to make their theories agree.
As Hewet had no knowledge of music, Rachel took his stick and drew
figures in the thin white dust to explain how Bach wrote his fugues.
“My musical gift was ruined,” he explained, as they walked on after one
of these demonstrations, “by the village organist at home, who had
invented a system of notation which he tried to teach me, with the
result that I never got to the tune-playing at all. My mother thought
music wasn’t manly for boys; she wanted me to kill rats and
birds—that’s the worst of living in the country. We live in Devonshire.
It’s the loveliest place in the world. Only—it’s always difficult at
home when one’s grown up. I’d like you to know one of my sisters. . . .
Oh, here’s your gate—” He pushed it open. They paused for a moment. She
could not ask him to come in. She could not say that she hoped they
would meet again; there was nothing to be said, and so without a word
she went through the gate, and was soon invisible. Directly Hewet lost
sight of her, he felt the old discomfort return, even more strongly
than before. Their talk had been interrupted in the middle, just as he
was beginning to say the things he wanted to say. After all, what had
they been able to say? He ran his mind over the things they had said,
the random, unnecessary things which had eddied round and round and
used up all the time, and drawn them so close together and flung them
so far apart, and left him in the end unsatisfied, ignorant still of
what she felt and of what she was like. What was the use of talking,
talking, merely talking?
CHAPTER XVII
It was now the height of the season, and every ship that came from
England left a few people on the shores of Santa Marina who drove up to
the hotel. The fact that the Ambroses had a house where one could
escape momentarily from the slightly inhuman atmosphere of an hotel was
a source of genuine pleasure not only to Hirst and Hewet, but to the
Elliots, the Thornburys, the Flushings, Miss Allan, Evelyn M., together
with other people whose identity was so little developed that the
Ambroses did not discover that they possessed names. By degrees there
was established a kind of correspondence between the two houses, the
big and the small, so that at most hours of the day one house could
guess what was going on in the other, and the words “the villa” and
“the hotel” called up the idea of two separate systems of life.
Acquaintances showed signs of developing into friends, for that one tie
to Mrs. Parry’s drawing-room had inevitably split into many other ties
attached to different parts of England, and sometimes these alliances
seemed cynically fragile, and sometimes painfully acute, lacking as
they did the supporting background of organised English life. One night
when the moon was round between the trees, Evelyn M. told Helen the
story of her life, and claimed her everlasting friendship; on another
occasion, merely because of a sigh, or a pause, or a word thoughtlessly
dropped, poor Mrs. Elliot left the villa half in tears, vowing never
again to meet the cold and scornful woman who had insulted her, and in
truth, meet again they never did. It did not seem worth while to piece
together so slight a friendship.
Hewet, indeed, might have found excellent material at this time up at
the villa for some chapters in the novel which was to be called
“Silence, or the Things People don’t say.” Helen and Rachel had become
very silent. Having detected, as she thought, a secret, and judging
that Rachel meant to keep it from her, Mrs. Ambrose respected it
carefully, but from that cause, though unintentionally, a curious
atmosphere of reserve grew up between them. Instead of sharing their
views upon all subjects, and plunging after an idea wherever it might
lead, they spoke chiefly in comment upon the people they saw, and the
secret between them made itself felt in what they said even of
Thornburys and Elliots. Always calm and unemotional in her judgments,
Mrs. Ambrose was now inclined to be definitely pessimistic. She was not
severe upon individuals so much as incredulous of the kindness of
destiny, fate, what happens in the long run, and apt to insist that
this was generally adverse to people in proportion as they deserved
well. Even this theory she was ready to discard in favour of one which
made chaos triumphant, things happening for no reason at all, and every
one groping about in illusion and ignorance. With a certain pleasure
she developed these views to her niece, taking a letter from home as
her test: which gave good news, but might just as well have given bad.
How did she know that at this very moment both her children were not
lying dead, crushed by motor omnibuses? “It’s happening to somebody:
why shouldn’t it happen to me?” she would argue, her face taking on the
stoical expression of anticipated sorrow. However sincere these views
may have been, they were undoubtedly called forth by the irrational
state of her niece’s mind. It was so fluctuating, and went so quickly
from joy to despair, that it seemed necessary to confront it with some
stable opinion which naturally became dark as well as stable. Perhaps
Mrs. Ambrose had some idea that in leading the talk into these quarters
she might discover what was in Rachel’s mind, but it was difficult to
judge, for sometimes she would agree with the gloomiest thing that was
said, at other times she refused to listen, and rammed Helen’s theories
down her throat with laughter, chatter, ridicule of the wildest, and
fierce bursts of anger even at what she called the “croaking of a raven
in the mud.”
“It’s hard enough without that,” she asserted.
“What’s hard?” Helen demanded.
“Life,” she replied, and then they both became silent.
Helen might draw her own conclusions as to why life was hard, as to why
an hour later, perhaps, life was something so wonderful and vivid that
the eyes of Rachel beholding it were positively exhilarating to a
spectator. True to her creed, she did not attempt to interfere,
although there were enough of those weak moments of depression to make
it perfectly easy for a less scrupulous person to press through and
know all, and perhaps Rachel was sorry that she did not choose. All
these moods ran themselves into one general effect, which Helen
compared to the sliding of a river, quick, quicker, quicker still, as
it races to a waterfall. Her instinct was to cry out Stop! but even had
there been any use in crying Stop! she would have refrained, thinking
it best that things should take their way, the water racing because the
earth was shaped to make it race.
It seemed that Rachel herself had no suspicion that she was watched, or
that there was anything in her manner likely to draw attention to her.
What had happened to her she did not know. Her mind was very much in
the condition of the racing water to which Helen compared it. She
wanted to see Terence; she was perpetually wishing to see him when he
was not there; it was an agony to miss seeing him; agonies were strewn
all about her day on account of him, but she never asked herself what
this force driving through her life arose from. She thought of no
result any more than a tree perpetually pressed downwards by the wind
considers the result of being pressed downwards by the wind.
During the two or three weeks which had passed since their walk, half a
dozen notes from him had accumulated in her drawer. She would read
them, and spend the whole morning in a daze of happiness; the sunny
land outside the window being no less capable of analysing its own
colour and heat than she was of analysing hers. In these moods she
found it impossible to read or play the piano, even to move being
beyond her inclination. The time passed without her noticing it. When
it was dark she was drawn to the window by the lights of the hotel. A
light that went in and out was the light in Terence’s window: there he
sat, reading perhaps, or now he was walking up and down pulling out one
book after another; and now he was seated in his chair again, and she
tried to imagine what he was thinking about. The steady lights marked
the rooms where Terence sat with people moving round him. Every one who
stayed in the hotel had a peculiar romance and interest about them.