The Voyage Out
“and I’d keep you free. We’d be free together. We’d share everything
together. No happiness would be like ours. No lives would compare with
ours.” He opened his arms wide as if to hold her and the world in one
embrace.
No longer able to consider marriage, or to weigh coolly what her nature
was, or how it would be if they lived together, he dropped to the
ground and sat absorbed in the thought of her, and soon tormented by
the desire to be in her presence again.
CHAPTER XIX
But Hewet need not have increased his torments by imagining that Hirst
was still talking to Rachel. The party very soon broke up, the
Flushings going in one direction, Hirst in another, and Rachel
remaining in the hall, pulling the illustrated papers about, turning
from one to another, her movements expressing the unformed restless
desire in her mind. She did not know whether to go or to stay, though
Mrs. Flushing had commanded her to appear at tea. The hall was empty,
save for Miss Willett who was playing scales with her fingers upon a
sheet of sacred music, and the Carters, an opulent couple who disliked
the girl, because her shoe laces were untied, and she did not look
sufficiently cheery, which by some indirect process of thought led them
to think that she would not like them. Rachel certainly would not have
liked them, if she had seen them, for the excellent reason that Mr.
Carter waxed his moustache, and Mrs. Carter wore bracelets, and they
were evidently the kind of people who would not like her; but she was
too much absorbed by her own restlessness to think or to look.
She was turning over the slippery pages of an American magazine, when
the hall door swung, a wedge of light fell upon the floor, and a small
white figure upon whom the light seemed focussed, made straight across
the room to her.
“What! You here?” Evelyn exclaimed. “Just caught a glimpse of you at
lunch; but you wouldn’t condescend to look at _me_.”
It was part of Evelyn’s character that in spite of many snubs which she
received or imagined, she never gave up the pursuit of people she
wanted to know, and in the long run generally succeeded in knowing them
and even in making them like her.
She looked round her. “I hate this place. I hate these people,” she
said. “I wish you’d come up to my room with me. I do want to talk to
you.”
As Rachel had no wish to go or to stay, Evelyn took her by the wrist
and drew her out of the hall and up the stairs. As they went upstairs
two steps at a time, Evelyn, who still kept hold of Rachel’s hand,
ejaculated broken sentences about not caring a hang what people said.
“Why should one, if one knows one’s right? And let ’em all go to
blazes! Them’s my opinions!”
She was in a state of great excitement, and the muscles of her arms
were twitching nervously. It was evident that she was only waiting for
the door to shut to tell Rachel all about it. Indeed, directly they
were inside her room, she sat on the end of the bed and said, “I
suppose you think I’m mad?”
Rachel was not in the mood to think clearly about any one’s state of
mind. She was however in the mood to say straight out whatever occurred
to her without fear of the consequences.
“Somebody’s proposed to you,” she remarked.
“How on earth did you guess that?” Evelyn exclaimed, some pleasure
mingling with her surprise. “Do as I look as if I’d just had a
proposal?”
“You look as if you had them every day,” Rachel replied.
“But I don’t suppose I’ve had more than you’ve had,” Evelyn laughed
rather insincerely.
“I’ve never had one.”
“But you will—lots—it’s the easiest thing in the world—But that’s not
what’s happened this afternoon exactly. It’s—Oh, it’s a muddle, a
detestable, horrible, disgusting muddle!”
She went to the wash-stand and began sponging her cheeks with cold
water; for they were burning hot. Still sponging them and trembling
slightly she turned and explained in the high pitched voice of nervous
excitement: “Alfred Perrott says I’ve promised to marry him, and I say
I never did. Sinclair says he’ll shoot himself if I don’t marry him,
and I say, ‘Well, shoot yourself!’ But of course he doesn’t—they never
do. And Sinclair got hold of me this afternoon and began bothering me
to give an answer, and accusing me of flirting with Alfred Perrott, and
told me I’d no heart, and was merely a Siren, oh, and quantities of
pleasant things like that. So at last I said to him, ‘Well, Sinclair,
you’ve said enough now. You can just let me go.’ And then he caught me
and kissed me—the disgusting brute—I can still feel his nasty hairy
face just there—as if he’d any right to, after what he’d said!”
She sponged a spot on her left cheek energetically.
“I’ve never met a man that was fit to compare with a woman!” she cried;
“they’ve no dignity, they’ve no courage, they’ve nothing but their
beastly passions and their brute strength! Would any woman have behaved
like that—if a man had said he didn’t want her? We’ve too much
self-respect; we’re infinitely finer than they are.”
She walked about the room, dabbing her wet cheeks with a towel. Tears
were now running down with the drops of cold water.
“It makes me angry,” she explained, drying her eyes.
Rachel sat watching her. She did not think of Evelyn’s position; she
only thought that the world was full of people in torment.
“There’s only one man here I really like,” Evelyn continued; “Terence
Hewet. One feels as if one could trust him.”
At these words Rachel suffered an indescribable chill; her heart seemed
to be pressed together by cold hands.
“Why?” she asked. “Why can you trust him?”
“I don’t know,” said Evelyn. “Don’t you have feelings about people?
Feelings you’re absolutely certain are right? I had a long talk with
Terence the other night. I felt we were really friends after that.
There’s something of a woman in him—” She paused as though she were
thinking of very intimate things that Terence had told her, so at least
Rachel interpreted her gaze.
She tried to force herself to say, “Has he proposed to you?” but the
question was too tremendous, and in another moment Evelyn was saying
that the finest men were like women, and women were nobler than men—for
example, one couldn’t imagine a woman like Lillah Harrison thinking a
mean thing or having anything base about her.
“How I’d like you to know her!” she exclaimed.
She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry. Her
eyes had regained their usual expression of keen vitality, and she
seemed to have forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion. “Lillah
runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford Road,” she continued.
“She started it, managed it, did everything off her own bat, and it’s
now the biggest of its kind in England. You can’t think what those
women are like—and their homes. But she goes among them at all hours of
the day and night. I’ve often been with her. . . . That’s what’s the
matter with us. . . . We don’t _do_ things. What do you _do_?” she
demanded, looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical smile. Rachel had
scarcely listened to any of this, and her expression was vacant and
unhappy. She had conceived an equal dislike for Lillah Harrison and her
work in the Deptford Road, and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love
affairs.
“I play,” she said with an affection of stolid composure.
“That’s about it!” Evelyn laughed. “We none of us do anything but play.
And that’s why women like Lillah Harrison, who’s worth twenty of you
and me, have to work themselves to the bone. But I’m tired of playing,”
she went on, lying flat on the bed, and raising her arms above her
head. Thus stretched out, she looked more diminutive than ever.
“I’m going to do something. I’ve got a splendid idea. Look here, you
must join. I’m sure you’ve got any amount of stuff in you, though you
look—well, as if you’d lived all your life in a garden.” She sat up,
and began to explain with animation. “I belong to a club in London. It
meets every Saturday, so it’s called the Saturday Club. We’re supposed
to talk about art, but I’m sick of talking about art—what’s the good of
it? With all kinds of real things going on round one? It isn’t as if
they’d got anything to say about art, either. So what I’m going to tell
’em is that we’ve talked enough about art, and we’d better talk about
life for a change. Questions that really matter to people’s lives, the
White Slave Traffic, Women Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on. And
when we’ve made up our mind what we want to do we could form ourselves
into a society for doing it. . . . I’m certain that if people like
ourselves were to take things in hand instead of leaving it to
policemen and magistrates, we could put a stop to—prostitution”—she
lowered her voice at the ugly word—“in six months. My idea is that men
and women ought to join in these matters. We ought to go into
Piccadilly and stop one of these poor wretches and say: ‘Now, look
here, I’m no better than you are, and I don’t pretend to be any better,
but you’re doing what you know to be beastly, and I won’t have you
doing beastly things, because we’re all the same under our skins, and
if you do a beastly thing it does matter to me.’ That’s what Mr. Bax
was saying this morning, and it’s true, though you clever people—you’re
clever too, aren’t you?—don’t believe it.”
When Evelyn began talking—it was a fact she often regretted—her
thoughts came so quickly that she never had any time to listen to other
people’s thoughts. She continued without more pause than was needed for
taking breath.
“I don’t see why the Saturday club people shouldn’t do a really great
work in that way,” she went on. “Of course it would want organisation,
some one to give their life to it, but I’m ready to do that. My
notion’s to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas
take care of themselves. What’s wrong with Lillah—if there is anything
wrong—is that she thinks of Temperance first and the women afterwards.
Now there’s one thing I’ll say to my credit,” she continued; “I’m not
intellectual or artistic or anything of that sort, but I’m jolly
human.” She slipped off the bed and sat on the floor, looking up at
Rachel. She searched up into her face as if she were trying to read
what kind of character was concealed behind the face. She put her hand
on Rachel’s knee.
“It _is_ being human that counts, isn’t it?” she continued. “Being
real, whatever Mr. Hirst may say. Are you real?”
Rachel felt much as Terence had felt that Evelyn was too close to her,
and that there was something exciting in this closeness, although it
was also disagreeable. She was spared the need of finding an answer to
the question, for Evelyn proceeded, “Do you _believe_ in anything?”
In order to put an end to the scrutiny of these bright blue eyes, and
to relieve her own physical restlessness, Rachel pushed back her chair
and exclaimed, “In everything!” and began to finger different objects,
the books on the table, the photographs, the freshly leaved plant with
the stiff bristles, which stood in a large earthenware pot in the
window.
“I believe in the bed, in the photographs, in the pot, in the balcony,
in the sun, in Mrs. Flushing,” she remarked, still speaking recklessly,
with something at the back of her mind forcing her to say the things
that one usually does not say. “But I don’t believe in God, I don’t
believe in Mr. Bax, I don’t believe in the hospital nurse. I don’t
believe—” She took up a photograph and, looking at it, did not finish
her sentence.
“That’s my mother,” said Evelyn, who remained sitting on the floor
binding her knees together with her arms, and watching Rachel
curiously.
Rachel considered the portrait. “Well, I don’t much believe in her,”
she remarked after a time in a low tone of voice.