The Voyage Out
They were not ordinary people. She would attribute wisdom to Mrs.
Elliot, beauty to Susan Warrington, a splendid vitality to Evelyn M.,
because Terence spoke to them. As unreflecting and pervasive were the
moods of depression. Her mind was as the landscape outside when dark
beneath clouds and straitly lashed by wind and hail. Again she would
sit passive in her chair exposed to pain, and Helen’s fantastical or
gloomy words were like so many darts goading her to cry out against the
hardness of life. Best of all were the moods when for no reason again
this stress of feeling slackened, and life went on as usual, only with
a joy and colour in its events that was unknown before; they had a
significance like that which she had seen in the tree: the nights were
black bars separating her from the days; she would have liked to run
all the days into one long continuity of sensation. Although these
moods were directly or indirectly caused by the presence of Terence or
the thought of him, she never said to herself that she was in love with
him, or considered what was to happen if she continued to feel such
things, so that Helen’s image of the river sliding on to the waterfall
had a great likeness to the facts, and the alarm which Helen sometimes
felt was justified.
In her curious condition of unanalysed sensations she was incapable of
making a plan which should have any effect upon her state of mind. She
abandoned herself to the mercy of accidents, missing Terence one day,
meeting him the next, receiving his letters always with a start of
surprise. Any woman experienced in the progress of courtship would have
come by certain opinions from all this which would have given her at
least a theory to go upon; but no one had ever been in love with
Rachel, and she had never been in love with any one. Moreover, none of
the books she read, from _Wuthering Heights_ to _Man and Superman_, and
the plays of Ibsen, suggested from their analysis of love that what
their heroines felt was what she was feeling now. It seemed to her that
her sensations had no name.
She met Terence frequently. When they did not meet, he was apt to send
a note with a book or about a book, for he had not been able after all
to neglect that approach to intimacy. But sometimes he did not come or
did not write for several days at a time. Again when they met their
meeting might be one of inspiriting joy or of harassing despair. Over
all their partings hung the sense of interruption, leaving them both
unsatisfied, though ignorant that the other shared the feeling.
If Rachel was ignorant of her own feelings, she was even more
completely ignorant of his. At first he moved as a god; as she came to
know him better he was still the centre of light, but combined with
this beauty a wonderful power of making her daring and confident of
herself. She was conscious of emotions and powers which she had never
suspected in herself, and of a depth in the world hitherto unknown.
When she thought of their relationship she saw rather than reasoned,
representing her view of what Terence felt by a picture of him drawn
across the room to stand by her side. This passage across the room
amounted to a physical sensation, but what it meant she did not know.
Thus the time went on, wearing a calm, bright look upon its surface.
Letters came from England, letters came from Willoughby, and the days
accumulated their small events which shaped the year. Superficially,
three odes of Pindar were mended, Helen covered about five inches of
her embroidery, and St. John completed the first two acts of a play. He
and Rachel being now very good friends, he read them aloud to her, and
she was so genuinely impressed by the skill of his rhythms and the
variety of his adjectives, as well as by the fact that he was Terence’s
friend, that he began to wonder whether he was not intended for
literature rather than for law. It was a time of profound thought and
sudden revelations for more than one couple, and several single people.
A Sunday came, which no one in the villa with the exception of Rachel
and the Spanish maid proposed to recognise. Rachel still went to
church, because she had never, according to Helen, taken the trouble to
think about it. Since they had celebrated the service at the hotel she
went there expecting to get some pleasure from her passage across the
garden and through the hall of the hotel, although it was very doubtful
whether she would see Terence, or at any rate have the chance of
speaking to him.
As the greater number of visitors at the hotel were English, there was
almost as much difference between Sunday and Wednesday as there is in
England, and Sunday appeared here as there, the mute black ghost or
penitent spirit of the busy weekday. The English could not pale the
sunshine, but they could in some miraculous way slow down the hours,
dull the incidents, lengthen the meals, and make even the servants and
page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety. The best clothes which
every one put on helped the general effect; it seemed that no lady
could sit down without bending a clean starched petticoat, and no
gentleman could breathe without a sudden crackle from a stiff
shirt-front. As the hands of the clock neared eleven, on this
particular Sunday, various people tended to draw together in the hall,
clasping little red-leaved books in their hands. The clock marked a few
minutes to the hour when a stout black figure passed through the hall
with a preoccupied expression, as though he would rather not recognise
salutations, although aware of them, and disappeared down the corridor
which led from it.
“Mr. Bax,” Mrs. Thornbury whispered.
The little group of people then began to move off in the same direction
as the stout black figure. Looked at in an odd way by people who made
no effort to join them, they moved with one exception slowly and
consciously towards the stairs. Mrs. Flushing was the exception. She
came running downstairs, strode across the hall, joined the procession
much out of breath, demanding of Mrs. Thornbury in an agitated whisper,
“Where, where?”
“We are all going,” said Mrs. Thornbury gently, and soon they were
descending the stairs two by two. Rachel was among the first to
descend. She did not see that Terence and Hirst came in at the rear
possessed of no black volume, but of one thin book bound in light-blue
cloth, which St. John carried under his arm.
The chapel was the old chapel of the monks. It was a profound cool
place where they had said Mass for hundreds of years, and done penance
in the cold moonlight, and worshipped old brown pictures and carved
saints which stood with upraised hands of blessing in the hollows in
the walls. The transition from Catholic to Protestant worship had been
bridged by a time of disuse, when there were no services, and the place
was used for storing jars of oil, liqueur, and deck-chairs; the hotel
flourishing, some religious body had taken the place in hand, and it
was now fitted out with a number of glazed yellow benches,
claret-coloured footstools; it had a small pulpit, and a brass eagle
carrying the Bible on its back, while the piety of different women had
supplied ugly squares of carpet, and long strips of embroidery heavily
wrought with monograms in gold.
As the congregation entered they were met by mild sweet chords issuing
from a harmonium, where Miss Willett, concealed from view by a baize
curtain, struck emphatic chords with uncertain fingers. The sound
spread through the chapel as the rings of water spread from a fallen
stone. The twenty or twenty-five people who composed the congregation
first bowed their heads and then sat up and looked about them. It was
very quiet, and the light down here seemed paler than the light above.
The usual bows and smiles were dispensed with, but they recognised each
other. The Lord’s Prayer was read over them. As the childlike battle of
voices rose, the congregation, many of whom had only met on the
staircase, felt themselves pathetically united and well-disposed
towards each other. As if the prayer were a torch applied to fuel, a
smoke seemed to rise automatically and fill the place with the ghosts
of innumerable services on innumerable Sunday mornings at home. Susan
Warrington in particular was conscious of the sweetest sense of
sisterhood, as she covered her face with her hands and saw slips of
bent backs through the chinks between her fingers. Her emotions rose
calmly and evenly, approving of herself and of life at the same time.
It was all so quiet and so good. But having created this peaceful
atmosphere Mr. Bax suddenly turned the page and read a psalm. Though he
read it with no change of voice the mood was broken.
“Be merciful unto me, O God,” he read, “for man goeth about to devour
me: he is daily fighting and troubling me. . . . They daily mistake my
words: all that they imagine is to do me evil. They hold all together
and keep themselves close. . . . Break their teeth, O God, in their
mouths; smite the jaw-bones of the lions, O Lord: let them fall away
like water that runneth apace; and when they shoot their arrows let
them be rooted out.”
Nothing in Susan’s experience at all corresponded with this, and as she
had no love of language she had long ceased to attend to such remarks,
although she followed them with the same kind of mechanical respect
with which she heard many of Lear’s speeches read aloud. Her mind was
still serene and really occupied with praise of her own nature and
praise of God, that is of the solemn and satisfactory order of the
world.
But it could be seen from a glance at their faces that most of the
others, the men in particular, felt the inconvenience of the sudden
intrusion of this old savage. They looked more secular and critical as
they listened to the ravings of the old black man with a cloth round
his loins cursing with vehement gesture by a camp-fire in the desert.
After that there was a general sound of pages being turned as if they
were in class, and then they read a little bit of the Old Testament
about making a well, very much as school boys translate an easy passage
from the _Anabasis_ when they have shut up their French grammar. Then
they returned to the New Testament and the sad and beautiful figure of
Christ. While Christ spoke they made another effort to fit his
interpretation of life upon the lives they lived, but as they were all
very different, some practical, some ambitious, some stupid, some wild
and experimental, some in love, and others long past any feeling except
a feeling of comfort, they did very different things with the words of
Christ.
From their faces it seemed that for the most part they made no effort
at all, and, recumbent as it were, accepted the ideas the words gave as
representing goodness, in the same way, no doubt, as one of those
industrious needlewomen had accepted the bright ugly pattern on her mat
as beauty.
Whatever the reason might be, for the first time in her life, instead
of slipping at once into some curious pleasant cloud of emotion, too
familiar to be considered, Rachel listened critically to what was being
said. By the time they had swung in an irregular way from prayer to
psalm, from psalm to history, from history to poetry, and Mr. Bax was
giving out his text, she was in a state of acute discomfort. Such was
the discomfort she felt when forced to sit through an unsatisfactory
piece of music badly played. Tantalised, enraged by the clumsy
insensitiveness of the conductor, who put the stress on the wrong
places, and annoyed by the vast flock of the audience tamely praising
and acquiescing without knowing or caring, so she was now tantalised
and enraged, only here, with eyes half-shut and lips pursed together,