The Voyage Out
the proper method of making roads. Beginning with the Greeks, who had,
he said, many difficulties to contend with, he continued with the
Romans, passed to England and the right method, which speedily became
the wrong method, and wound up with such a fury of denunciation
directed against the road-makers of the present day in general, and the
road-makers of Richmond Park in particular, where Mr. Pepper had the
habit of cycling every morning before breakfast, that the spoons fairly
jingled against the coffee cups, and the insides of at least four rolls
mounted in a heap beside Mr. Pepper’s plate.
“Pebbles!” he concluded, viciously dropping another bread pellet upon
the heap. “The roads of England are mended with pebbles! ‘With the
first heavy rainfall,’ I’ve told ’em, ‘your road will be a swamp.’
Again and again my words have proved true. But d’you suppose they
listen to me when I tell ’em so, when I point out the consequences, the
consequences to the public purse, when I recommend ’em to read
Coryphaeus? No, Mrs. Ambrose, you will form no just opinion of the
stupidity of mankind until you have sat upon a Borough Council!” The
little man fixed her with a glance of ferocious energy.
“I have had servants,” said Mrs. Ambrose, concentrating her gaze. “At
this moment I have a nurse. She’s a good woman as they go, but she’s
determined to make my children pray. So far, owing to great care on my
part, they think of God as a kind of walrus; but now that my back’s
turned—Ridley,” she demanded, swinging round upon her husband, “what
shall we do if we find them saying the Lord’s Prayer when we get home
again?”
Ridley made the sound which is represented by “Tush.” But Willoughby,
whose discomfort as he listened was manifested by a slight movement
rocking of his body, said awkwardly, “Oh, surely, Helen, a little
religion hurts nobody.”
“I would rather my children told lies,” she replied, and while
Willoughby was reflecting that his sister-in-law was even more
eccentric than he remembered, pushed her chair back and swept upstairs.
In a second they heard her calling back, “Oh, look! We’re out at sea!”
They followed her on to the deck. All the smoke and the houses had
disappeared, and the ship was out in a wide space of sea very fresh and
clear though pale in the early light. They had left London sitting on
its mud. A very thin line of shadow tapered on the horizon, scarcely
thick enough to stand the burden of Paris, which nevertheless rested
upon it. They were free of roads, free of mankind, and the same
exhilaration at their freedom ran through them all. The ship was making
her way steadily through small waves which slapped her and then fizzled
like effervescing water, leaving a little border of bubbles and foam on
either side. The colourless October sky above was thinly clouded as if
by the trail of wood-fire smoke, and the air was wonderfully salt and
brisk. Indeed it was too cold to stand still. Mrs. Ambrose drew her arm
within her husband’s, and as they moved off it could be seen from the
way in which her sloping cheek turned up to his that she had something
private to communicate. They went a few paces and Rachel saw them kiss.
Down she looked into the depth of the sea. While it was slightly
disturbed on the surface by the passage of the _Euphrosyne_, beneath it
was green and dim, and it grew dimmer and dimmer until the sand at the
bottom was only a pale blur. One could scarcely see the black ribs of
wrecked ships, or the spiral towers made by the burrowings of great
eels, or the smooth green-sided monsters who came by flickering this
way and that.
—“And, Rachel, if any one wants me, I’m busy till one,” said her
father, enforcing his words as he often did, when he spoke to his
daughter, by a smart blow upon the shoulder.
“Until one,” he repeated. “And you’ll find yourself some employment,
eh? Scales, French, a little German, eh? There’s Mr. Pepper who knows
more about separable verbs than any man in Europe, eh?” and he went off
laughing. Rachel laughed, too, as indeed she had laughed ever since she
could remember, without thinking it funny, but because she admired her
father.
But just as she was turning with a view perhaps to finding some
employment, she was intercepted by a woman who was so broad and so
thick that to be intercepted by her was inevitable. The discreet
tentative way in which she moved, together with her sober black dress,
showed that she belonged to the lower orders; nevertheless she took up
a rock-like position, looking about her to see that no gentry were near
before she delivered her message, which had reference to the state of
the sheets, and was of the utmost gravity.
“How ever we’re to get through this voyage, Miss Rachel, I really can’t
tell,” she began with a shake of her head. “There’s only just sheets
enough to go round, and the master’s has a rotten place you could put
your fingers through. And the counterpanes. Did you notice the
counterpanes? I thought to myself a poor person would have been ashamed
of them. The one I gave Mr. Pepper was hardly fit to cover a dog. . . .
No, Miss Rachel, they could _not_ be mended; they’re only fit for dust
sheets. Why, if one sewed one’s finger to the bone, one would have
one’s work undone the next time they went to the laundry.”
Her voice in its indignation wavered as if tears were near.
There was nothing for it but to descend and inspect a large pile of
linen heaped upon a table. Mrs. Chailey handled the sheets as if she
knew each by name, character, and constitution. Some had yellow stains,
others had places where the threads made long ladders; but to the
ordinary eye they looked much as sheets usually do look, very chill,
white, cold, and irreproachably clean.
Suddenly Mrs. Chailey, turning from the subject of sheets, dismissing
them entirely, clenched her fists on the top of them, and proclaimed,
“And you couldn’t ask a living creature to sit where I sit!”
Mrs. Chailey was expected to sit in a cabin which was large enough, but
too near the boilers, so that after five minutes she could hear her
heart “go,” she complained, putting her hand above it, which was a
state of things that Mrs. Vinrace, Rachel’s mother, would never have
dreamt of inflicting—Mrs. Vinrace, who knew every sheet in her house,
and expected of every one the best they could do, but no more.
It was the easiest thing in the world to grant another room, and the
problem of sheets simultaneously and miraculously solved itself, the
spots and ladders not being past cure after all, but—
“Lies! Lies! Lies!” exclaimed the mistress indignantly, as she ran up
on to the deck. “What’s the use of telling me lies?”
In her anger that a woman of fifty should behave like a child and come
cringing to a girl because she wanted to sit where she had not leave to
sit, she did not think of the particular case, and, unpacking her
music, soon forgot all about the old woman and her sheets.
Mrs. Chailey folded her sheets, but her expression testified to
flatness within. The world no longer cared about her, and a ship was
not a home. When the lamps were lit yesterday, and the sailors went
tumbling above her head, she had cried; she would cry this evening; she
would cry to-morrow. It was not home. Meanwhile she arranged her
ornaments in the room which she had won too easily. They were strange
ornaments to bring on a sea voyage—china pugs, tea-sets in miniature,
cups stamped floridly with the arms of the city of Bristol, hair-pin
boxes crusted with shamrock, antelopes’ heads in coloured plaster,
together with a multitude of tiny photographs, representing downright
workmen in their Sunday best, and women holding white babies. But there
was one portrait in a gilt frame, for which a nail was needed, and
before she sought it Mrs. Chailey put on her spectacles and read what
was written on a slip of paper at the back:
“This picture of her mistress is given to Emma Chailey by Willoughby
Vinrace in gratitude for thirty years of devoted service.”
Tears obliterated the words and the head of the nail.
“So long as I can do something for your family,” she was saying, as she
hammered at it, when a voice called melodiously in the passage:
“Mrs. Chailey! Mrs. Chailey!”
Chailey instantly tidied her dress, composed her face, and opened the
door.
“I’m in a fix,” said Mrs. Ambrose, who was flushed and out of breath.
“You know what gentlemen are. The chairs too high—the tables too
low—there’s six inches between the floor and the door. What I want’s a
hammer, an old quilt, and have you such a thing as a kitchen table?
Anyhow, between us”—she now flung open the door of her husband’s
sitting room, and revealed Ridley pacing up and down, his forehead all
wrinkled, and the collar of his coat turned up.
“It’s as though they’d taken pains to torment me!” he cried, stopping
dead. “Did I come on this voyage in order to catch rheumatism and
pneumonia? Really one might have credited Vinrace with more sense. My
dear,” Helen was on her knees under a table, “you are only making
yourself untidy, and we had much better recognise the fact that we are
condemned to six weeks of unspeakable misery. To come at all was the
height of folly, but now that we are here I suppose that I can face it
like a man. My diseases of course will be increased—I feel already
worse than I did yesterday, but we’ve only ourselves to thank, and the
children happily—”
“Move! Move! Move!” cried Helen, chasing him from corner to corner with
a chair as though he were an errant hen. “Out of the way, Ridley, and
in half an hour you’ll find it ready.”
She turned him out of the room, and they could hear him groaning and
swearing as he went along the passage.
“I daresay he isn’t very strong,” said Mrs. Chailey, looking at Mrs.
Ambrose compassionately, as she helped to shift and carry.
“It’s books,” sighed Helen, lifting an armful of sad volumes from the
floor to the shelf. “Greek from morning to night. If ever Miss Rachel
marries, Chailey, pray that she may marry a man who doesn’t know his
ABC.”
The preliminary discomforts and harshnesses, which generally make the
first days of a sea voyage so cheerless and trying to the temper, being
somehow lived through, the succeeding days passed pleasantly enough.
October was well advanced, but steadily burning with a warmth that made
the early months of the summer appear very young and capricious. Great
tracts of the earth lay now beneath the autumn sun, and the whole of
England, from the bald moors to the Cornish rocks, was lit up from dawn
to sunset, and showed in stretches of yellow, green, and purple. Under
that illumination even the roofs of the great towns glittered. In
thousands of small gardens, millions of dark-red flowers were blooming,
until the old ladies who had tended them so carefully came down the
paths with their scissors, snipped through their juicy stalks, and laid
them upon cold stone ledges in the village church. Innumerable parties
of picnickers coming home at sunset cried, “Was there ever such a day
as this?” “It’s you,” the young men whispered; “Oh, it’s you,” the
young women replied. All old people and many sick people were drawn,
were it only for a foot or two, into the open air, and prognosticated
pleasant things about the course of the world. As for the confidences
and expressions of love that were heard not only in cornfields but in
lamplit rooms, where the windows opened on the garden, and men with
cigars kissed women with grey hairs, they were not to be counted. Some
said that the sky was an emblem of the life to come. Long-tailed birds
clattered and screamed, and crossed from wood to wood, with golden eyes
in their plumage.
But while all this went on by land, very few people thought about the