The Voyage Out
Rachel and Evelyn then began to listen to what Susan was saying.
“There’s the ordering and the dogs and the garden, and the children
coming to be taught,” her voice proceeded rhythmically as if checking
the list, “and my tennis, and the village, and letters to write for
father, and a thousand little things that don’t sound much; but I never
have a moment to myself, and when I go to bed, I’m so sleepy I’m off
before my head touches the pillow. Besides I like to be a great deal
with my Aunts—I’m a great bore, aren’t I, Aunt Emma?” (she smiled at
old Mrs. Paley, who with head slightly drooped was regarding the cake
with speculative affection), “and father has to be very careful about
chills in winter which means a great deal of running about, because he
won’t look after himself, any more than you will, Arthur! So it all
mounts up!”
Her voice mounted too, in a mild ecstasy of satisfaction with her life
and her own nature. Rachel suddenly took a violent dislike to Susan,
ignoring all that was kindly, modest, and even pathetic about her. She
appeared insincere and cruel; she saw her grown stout and prolific, the
kind blue eyes now shallow and watery, the bloom of the cheeks
congealed to a network of dry red canals.
Helen turned to her. “Did you go to church?” she asked. She had won her
sixpence and seemed making ready to go.
“Yes,” said Rachel. “For the last time,” she added.
In preparing to put on her gloves, Helen dropped one.
“You’re not going?” Evelyn asked, taking hold of one glove as if to
keep them.
“It’s high time we went,” said Helen. “Don’t you see how silent every
one’s getting—?”
A silence had fallen upon them all, caused partly by one of the
accidents of talk, and partly because they saw some one approaching.
Helen could not see who it was, but keeping her eyes fixed upon Rachel
observed something which made her say to herself, “So it’s Hewet.” She
drew on her gloves with a curious sense of the significance of the
moment. Then she rose, for Mrs. Flushing had seen Hewet too, and was
demanding information about rivers and boats which showed that the
whole conversation would now come over again.
Rachel followed her, and they walked in silence down the avenue. In
spite of what Helen had seen and understood, the feeling that was
uppermost in her mind was now curiously perverse; if she went on this
expedition, she would not be able to have a bath, the effort appeared
to her to be great and disagreeable.
“It’s so unpleasant, being cooped up with people one hardly knows,” she
remarked. “People who mind being seen naked.”
“You don’t mean to go?” Rachel asked.
The intensity with which this was spoken irritated Mrs. Ambrose.
“I don’t mean to go, and I don’t mean not to go,” she replied. She
became more and more casual and indifferent.
“After all, I daresay we’ve seen all there is to be seen; and there’s
the bother of getting there, and whatever they may say it’s bound to be
vilely uncomfortable.”
For some time Rachel made no reply; but every sentence Helen spoke
increased her bitterness. At last she broke out—
“Thank God, Helen, I’m not like you! I sometimes think you don’t think
or feel or care to do anything but exist! You’re like Mr. Hirst. You
see that things are bad, and you pride yourself on saying so. It’s what
you call being honest; as a matter of fact it’s being lazy, being dull,
being nothing. You don’t help; you put an end to things.”
Helen smiled as if she rather enjoyed the attack.
“Well?” she enquired.
“It seems to me bad—that’s all,” Rachel replied.
“Quite likely,” said Helen.
At any other time Rachel would probably have been silenced by her
Aunt’s candour; but this afternoon she was not in the mood to be
silenced by any one. A quarrel would be welcome.
“You’re only half alive,” she continued.
“Is that because I didn’t accept Mr. Flushing’s invitation?” Helen
asked, “or do you always think that?”
At the moment it appeared to Rachel that she had always seen the same
faults in Helen, from the very first night on board the _Euphrosyne_,
in spite of her beauty, in spite of her magnanimity and their love.
“Oh, it’s only what’s the matter with every one!” she exclaimed. “No
one feels—no one does anything but hurt. I tell you, Helen, the world’s
bad. It’s an agony, living, wanting—”
Here she tore a handful of leaves from a bush and crushed them to
control herself.
“The lives of these people,” she tried to explain, “the aimlessness,
the way they live. One goes from one to another, and it’s all the same.
One never gets what one wants out of any of them.”
Her emotional state and her confusion would have made her an easy prey
if Helen had wished to argue or had wished to draw confidences. But
instead of talking she fell into a profound silence as they walked on.
Aimless, trivial, meaningless, oh no—what she had seen at tea made it
impossible for her to believe that. The little jokes, the chatter, the
inanities of the afternoon had shrivelled up before her eyes.
Underneath the likings and spites, the comings together and partings,
great things were happening—terrible things, because they were so
great. Her sense of safety was shaken, as if beneath twigs and dead
leaves she had seen the movement of a snake. It seemed to her that a
moment’s respite was allowed, a moment’s make-believe, and then again
the profound and reasonless law asserted itself, moulding them all to
its liking, making and destroying.
She looked at Rachel walking beside her, still crushing the leaves in
her fingers and absorbed in her own thoughts. She was in love, and she
pitied her profoundly. But she roused herself from these thoughts and
apologised. “I’m very sorry,” she said, “but if I’m dull, it’s my
nature, and it can’t be helped.” If it was a natural defect, however,
she found an easy remedy, for she went on to say that she thought Mr.
Flushing’s scheme a very good one, only needing a little consideration,
which it appeared she had given it by the time they reached home. By
that time they had settled that if anything more was said, they would
accept the invitation.
CHAPTER XX
When considered in detail by Mr. Flushing and Mrs. Ambrose the
expedition proved neither dangerous nor difficult. They found also that
it was not even unusual. Every year at this season English people made
parties which steamed a short way up the river, landed, and looked at
the native village, bought a certain number of things from the natives,
and returned again without damage done to mind or body. When it was
discovered that six people really wished the same thing the
arrangements were soon carried out.
Since the time of Elizabeth very few people had seen the river, and
nothing has been done to change its appearance from what it was to the
eyes of the Elizabethan voyagers. The time of Elizabeth was only
distant from the present time by a moment of space compared with the
ages which had passed since the water had run between those banks, and
the green thickets swarmed there, and the small trees had grown to huge
wrinkled trees in solitude. Changing only with the change of the sun
and the clouds, the waving green mass had stood there for century after
century, and the water had run between its banks ceaselessly, sometimes
washing away earth and sometimes the branches of trees, while in other
parts of the world one town had risen upon the ruins of another town,
and the men in the towns had become more and more articulate and unlike
each other. A few miles of this river were visible from the top of the
mountain where some weeks before the party from the hotel had
picnicked. Susan and Arthur had seen it as they kissed each other, and
Terence and Rachel as they sat talking about Richmond, and Evelyn and
Perrott as they strolled about, imagining that they were great captains
sent to colonise the world. They had seen the broad blue mark across
the sand where it flowed into the sea, and the green cloud of trees
mass themselves about it farther up, and finally hide its waters
altogether from sight. At intervals for the first twenty miles or so
houses were scattered on the bank; by degrees the houses became huts,
and, later still, there was neither hut nor house, but trees and grass,
which were seen only by hunters, explorers, or merchants, marching or
sailing, but making no settlement.
By leaving Santa Marina early in the morning, driving twenty miles and
riding eight, the party, which was composed finally of six English
people, reached the river-side as the night fell. They came cantering
through the trees—Mr. and Mrs. Flushing, Helen Ambrose, Rachel,
Terence, and St. John. The tired little horses then stopped
automatically, and the English dismounted. Mrs. Flushing strode to the
river-bank in high spirits. The day had been long and hot, but she had
enjoyed the speed and the open air; she had left the hotel which she
hated, and she found the company to her liking. The river was swirling
past in the darkness; they could just distinguish the smooth moving
surface of the water, and the air was full of the sound of it. They
stood in an empty space in the midst of great tree-trunks, and out
there a little green light moving slightly up and down showed them
where the steamer lay in which they were to embark.
When they all stood upon its deck they found that it was a very small
boat which throbbed gently beneath them for a few minutes, and then
shoved smoothly through the water. They seemed to be driving into the
heart of the night, for the trees closed in front of them, and they
could hear all round them the rustling of leaves. The great darkness
had the usual effect of taking away all desire for communication by
making their words sound thin and small; and, after walking round the
deck three or four times, they clustered together, yawning deeply, and
looking at the same spot of deep gloom on the banks. Murmuring very low
in the rhythmical tone of one oppressed by the air, Mrs. Flushing began
to wonder where they were to sleep, for they could not sleep
downstairs, they could not sleep in a doghole smelling of oil, they
could not sleep on deck, they could not sleep—She yawned profoundly. It
was as Helen had foreseen; the question of nakedness had risen already,
although they were half asleep, and almost invisible to each other.
With St. John’s help she stretched an awning, and persuaded Mrs.
Flushing that she could take off her clothes behind this, and that no
one would notice if by chance some part of her which had been concealed
for forty-five years was laid bare to the human eye. Mattresses were
thrown down, rugs provided, and the three women lay near each other in
the soft open air.
The gentlemen, having smoked a certain number of cigarettes, dropped
the glowing ends into the river, and looked for a time at the ripples
wrinkling the black water beneath them, undressed too, and lay down at
the other end of the boat. They were very tired, and curtained from
each other by the darkness. The light from one lantern fell upon a few
ropes, a few planks of the deck, and the rail of the boat, but beyond
that there was unbroken darkness, no light reached their faces, or the
trees which were massed on the sides of the river.
Soon Wilfrid Flushing slept, and Hirst slept. Hewet alone lay awake
looking straight up into the sky. The gentle motion and the black
shapes that were drawn ceaselessly across his eyes had the effect of
making it impossible for him to think. Rachel’s presence so near him
lulled thought asleep. Being so near him, only a few paces off at the
other end of the boat, she made it as impossible for him to think about
her as it would have been impossible to see her if she had stood quite
close to him, her forehead against his forehead. In some strange way