The Voyage Out
sea. They took it for granted that the sea was calm; and there was no
need, as there is in many houses when the creeper taps on the bedroom
windows, for the couples to murmur before they kiss, “Think of the
ships to-night,” or “Thank Heaven, I’m not the man in the lighthouse!”
For all they imagined, the ships when they vanished on the sky-line
dissolved, like snow in water. The grown-up view, indeed, was not much
clearer than the view of the little creatures in bathing drawers who
were trotting in to the foam all along the coasts of England, and
scooping up buckets full of water. They saw white sails or tufts of
smoke pass across the horizon, and if you had said that these were
waterspouts, or the petals of white sea flowers, they would have
agreed.
The people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England.
Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a very small
island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned.
One figured them first swarming about like aimless ants, and almost
pressing each other over the edge; and then, as the ship withdrew, one
figured them making a vain clamour, which, being unheard, either
ceased, or rose into a brawl. Finally, when the ship was out of sight
of land, it became plain that the people of England were completely
mute. The disease attacked other parts of the earth; Europe shrank,
Asia shrank, Africa and America shrank, until it seemed doubtful
whether the ship would ever run against any of those wrinkled little
rocks again. But, on the other hand, an immense dignity had descended
upon her; she was an inhabitant of the great world, which has so few
inhabitants, travelling all day across an empty universe, with veils
drawn before her and behind. She was more lonely than the caravan
crossing the desert; she was infinitely more mysterious, moving by her
own power and sustained by her own resources. The sea might give her
death or some unexampled joy, and none would know of it. She was a
bride going forth to her husband, a virgin unknown of men; in her vigor
and purity she might be likened to all beautiful things, for as a ship
she had a life of her own.
Indeed if they had not been blessed in their weather, one blue day
being bowled up after another, smooth, round, and flawless, Mrs.
Ambrose would have found it very dull. As it was, she had her
embroidery frame set up on deck, with a little table by her side on
which lay open a black volume of philosophy. She chose a thread from
the vari-coloured tangle that lay in her lap, and sewed red into the
bark of a tree, or yellow into the river torrent. She was working at a
great design of a tropical river running through a tropical forest,
where spotted deer would eventually browse upon masses of fruit,
bananas, oranges, and giant pomegranates, while a troop of naked
natives whirled darts into the air. Between the stitches she looked to
one side and read a sentence about the Reality of Matter, or the Nature
of Good. Round her men in blue jerseys knelt and scrubbed the boards,
or leant over the rails and whistled, and not far off Mr. Pepper sat
cutting up roots with a penknife. The rest were occupied in other parts
of the ship: Ridley at his Greek—he had never found quarters more to
his liking; Willoughby at his documents, for he used a voyage to work
off arrears of business; and Rachel—Helen, between her sentences of
philosophy, wondered sometimes what Rachel _did_ do with herself? She
meant vaguely to go and see. They had scarcely spoken two words to each
other since that first evening; they were polite when they met, but
there had been no confidence of any kind. Rachel seemed to get on very
well with her father—much better, Helen thought, than she ought to—and
was as ready to let Helen alone as Helen was to let her alone.
At that moment Rachel was sitting in her room doing absolutely nothing.
When the ship was full this apartment bore some magnificent title and
was the resort of elderly sea-sick ladies who left the deck to their
youngsters. By virtue of the piano, and a mess of books on the floor,
Rachel considered it her room, and there she would sit for hours
playing very difficult music, reading a little German, or a little
English when the mood took her, and doing—as at this moment—absolutely
nothing.
The way she had been educated, joined to a fine natural indolence, was
of course partly the reason of it, for she had been educated as the
majority of well-to-do girls in the last part of the nineteenth century
were educated. Kindly doctors and gentle old professors had taught her
the rudiments of about ten different branches of knowledge, but they
would as soon have forced her to go through one piece of drudgery
thoroughly as they would have told her that her hands were dirty. The
one hour or the two hours weekly passed very pleasantly, partly owing
to the other pupils, partly to the fact that the window looked upon the
back of a shop, where figures appeared against the red windows in
winter, partly to the accidents that are bound to happen when more than
two people are in the same room together. But there was no subject in
the world which she knew accurately. Her mind was in the state of an
intelligent man’s in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; she
would believe practically anything she was told, invent reasons for
anything she said. The shape of the earth, the history of the world,
how trains worked, or money was invested, what laws were in force,
which people wanted what, and why they wanted it, the most elementary
idea of a system in modern life—none of this had been imparted to her
by any of her professors or mistresses. But this system of education
had one great advantage. It did not teach anything, but it put no
obstacle in the way of any real talent that the pupil might chance to
have. Rachel, being musical, was allowed to learn nothing but music;
she became a fanatic about music. All the energies that might have gone
into languages, science, or literature, that might have made her
friends, or shown her the world, poured straight into music. Finding
her teachers inadequate, she had practically taught herself. At the age
of twenty-four she knew as much about music as most people do when they
are thirty; and could play as well as nature allowed her to, which, as
became daily more obvious, was a really generous allowance. If this one
definite gift was surrounded by dreams and ideas of the most
extravagant and foolish description, no one was any the wiser.
Her education being thus ordinary, her circumstances were no more out
of the common. She was an only child and had never been bullied and
laughed at by brothers and sisters. Her mother having died when she was
eleven, two aunts, the sisters of her father, brought her up, and they
lived for the sake of the air in a comfortable house in Richmond. She
was of course brought up with excessive care, which as a child was for
her health; as a girl and a young woman was for what it seems almost
crude to call her morals. Until quite lately she had been completely
ignorant that for women such things existed. She groped for knowledge
in old books, and found it in repulsive chunks, but she did not
naturally care for books and thus never troubled her head about the
censorship which was exercised first by her aunts, later by her father.
Friends might have told her things, but she had few of her own
age,—Richmond being an awkward place to reach,—and, as it happened, the
only girl she knew well was a religious zealot, who in the fervour of
intimacy talked about God, and the best ways of taking up one’s cross,
a topic only fitfully interesting to one whose mind reached other
stages at other times.
But lying in her chair, with one hand behind her head, the other
grasping the knob on the arm, she was clearly following her thoughts
intently. Her education left her abundant time for thinking. Her eyes
were fixed so steadily upon a ball on the rail of the ship that she
would have been startled and annoyed if anything had chanced to obscure
it for a second. She had begun her meditations with a shout of
laughter, caused by the following translation from _Tristan_:
In shrinking trepidation
His shame he seems to hide
While to the king his relation
He brings the corpse-like Bride.
Seems it so senseless what I say?
She cried that it did, and threw down the book. Next she had picked up
_Cowper’s Letters_, the classic prescribed by her father which had
bored her, so that one sentence chancing to say something about the
smell of broom in his garden, she had thereupon seen the little hall at
Richmond laden with flowers on the day of her mother’s funeral,
smelling so strong that now any flower-scent brought back the sickly
horrible sensation; and so from one scene she passed, half-hearing,
half-seeing, to another. She saw her Aunt Lucy arranging flowers in the
drawing-room.
“Aunt Lucy,” she volunteered, “I don’t like the smell of broom; it
reminds me of funerals.”
“Nonsense, Rachel,” Aunt Lucy replied; “don’t say such foolish things,
dear. I always think it a particularly cheerful plant.”
Lying in the hot sun her mind was fixed upon the characters of her
aunts, their views, and the way they lived. Indeed this was a subject
that lasted her hundreds of morning walks round Richmond Park, and
blotted out the trees and the people and the deer. Why did they do the
things they did, and what did they feel, and what was it all about?
Again she heard Aunt Lucy talking to Aunt Eleanor. She had been that
morning to take up the character of a servant, “And, of course, at
half-past ten in the morning one expects to find the housemaid brushing
the stairs.” How odd! How unspeakably odd! But she could not explain to
herself why suddenly as her aunt spoke the whole system in which they
lived had appeared before her eyes as something quite unfamiliar and
inexplicable, and themselves as chairs or umbrellas dropped about here
and there without any reason. She could only say with her slight
stammer, “Are you f-f-fond of Aunt Eleanor, Aunt Lucy?” to which her
aunt replied, with her nervous hen-like twitter of a laugh, “My dear
child, what questions you do ask!”
“How fond? Very fond!” Rachel pursued.
“I can’t say I’ve ever thought ‘how,’” said Miss Vinrace. “If one cares
one doesn’t think ‘how,’ Rachel,” which was aimed at the niece who had
never yet “come” to her aunts as cordially as they wished.
“But you know I care for you, don’t you, dear, because you’re your
mother’s daughter, if for no other reason, and there _are_ plenty of
other reasons”—and she leant over and kissed her with some emotion, and
the argument was spilt irretrievably about the place like a bucket of
milk.
By these means Rachel reached that stage in thinking, if thinking it
can be called, when the eyes are intent upon a ball or a knob and the
lips cease to move. Her efforts to come to an understanding had only
hurt her aunt’s feelings, and the conclusion must be that it is better
not to try. To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between
oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently. It was
far better to play the piano and forget all the rest. The conclusion
was very welcome. Let these odd men and women—her aunts, the Hunts,
Ridley, Helen, Mr. Pepper, and the rest—be symbols,—featureless but
dignified, symbols of age, of youth, of motherhood, of learning, and
beautiful often as people upon the stage are beautiful. It appeared
that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling
they felt, but that was what music was for. Reality dwelling in what
one saw and felt, but did not talk about, one could accept a system in
which things went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people,