The Voyage Out
“You’d forgotten completely about me,” Terence reproached her, taking
her arm and beginning to pace the deck, “and I never forget you.”
“Oh, no,” she whispered, she had not forgotten, only the stars—the
night—the dark—
“You’re like a bird half asleep in its nest, Rachel. You’re asleep.
You’re talking in your sleep.”
Half asleep, and murmuring broken words, they stood in the angle made
by the bow of the boat. It slipped on down the river. Now a bell struck
on the bridge, and they heard the lapping of water as it rippled away
on either side, and once a bird startled in its sleep creaked, flew on
to the next tree, and was silent again. The darkness poured down
profusely, and left them with scarcely any feeling of life, except that
they were standing there together in the darkness.
CHAPTER XXII
The darkness fell, but rose again, and as each day spread widely over
the earth and parted them from the strange day in the forest when they
had been forced to tell each other what they wanted, this wish of
theirs was revealed to other people, and in the process became slightly
strange to themselves. Apparently it was not anything unusual that had
happened; it was that they had become engaged to marry each other. The
world, which consisted for the most part of the hotel and the villa,
expressed itself glad on the whole that two people should marry, and
allowed them to see that they were not expected to take part in the
work which has to be done in order that the world shall go on, but
might absent themselves for a time. They were accordingly left alone
until they felt the silence as if, playing in a vast church, the door
had been shut on them. They were driven to walk alone, and sit alone,
to visit secret places where the flowers had never been picked and the
trees were solitary. In solitude they could express those beautiful but
too vast desires which were so oddly uncomfortable to the ears of other
men and women—desires for a world, such as their own world which
contained two people seemed to them to be, where people knew each other
intimately and thus judged each other by what was good, and never
quarrelled, because that was waste of time.
They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun, or
sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed. They were no longer
embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning which could not express
itself; they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers down a
twisting river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner is turned;
the unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable, and in many
ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious, for it was refreshingly
solid, and called out effort, and effort under such circumstances was
not effort but delight.
While Rachel played the piano, Terence sat near her, engaged, as far as
the occasional writing of a word in pencil testified, in shaping the
world as it appeared to him now that he and Rachel were going to be
married. It was different certainly. The book called _Silence_ would
not now be the same book that it would have been. He would then put
down his pencil and stare in front of him, and wonder in what respects
the world was different—it had, perhaps, more solidity, more coherence,
more importance, greater depth. Why, even the earth sometimes seemed to
him very deep; not carved into hills and cities and fields, but heaped
in great masses. He would look out of the window for ten minutes at a
time; but no, he did not care for the earth swept of human beings. He
liked human beings—he liked them, he suspected, better than Rachel did.
There she was, swaying enthusiastically over her music, quite forgetful
of him,—but he liked that quality in her. He liked the impersonality
which it produced in her. At last, having written down a series of
little sentences, with notes of interrogation attached to them, he
observed aloud, “‘Women—under the heading Women I’ve written:
“‘Not really vainer than men. Lack of self-confidence at the base of
most serious faults. Dislike of own sex traditional, or founded on
fact? Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an optimist, because
they don’t think.’ What do you say, Rachel?” He paused with his pencil
in his hand and a sheet of paper on his knee.
Rachel said nothing. Up and up the steep spiral of a very late
Beethoven sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined
staircase, energetically at first, then more laboriously advancing her
feet with effort until she could go no higher and returned with a run
to begin at the very bottom again.
“‘Again, it’s the fashion now to say that women are more practical and
less idealistic than men, also that they have considerable organising
ability but no sense of honour’—query, what is meant by masculine term,
honour?—what corresponds to it in your sex? Eh?”
Attacking her staircase once more, Rachel again neglected this
opportunity of revealing the secrets of her sex. She had, indeed,
advanced so far in the pursuit of wisdom that she allowed these secrets
to rest undisturbed; it seemed to be reserved for a later generation to
discuss them philosophically.
Crashing down a final chord with her left hand, she exclaimed at last,
swinging round upon him:
“No, Terence, it’s no good; here am I, the best musician in South
America, not to speak of Europe and Asia, and I can’t play a note
because of you in the room interrupting me every other second.”
“You don’t seem to realise that that’s what I’ve been aiming at for the
last half-hour,” he remarked. “I’ve no objection to nice simple
tunes—indeed, I find them very helpful to my literary composition, but
that kind of thing is merely like an unfortunate old dog going round on
its hind legs in the rain.”
He began turning over the little sheets of note-paper which were
scattered on the table, conveying the congratulations of their friends.
“‘—all possible wishes for all possible happiness,’” he read; “correct,
but not very vivid, are they?”
“They’re sheer nonsense!” Rachel exclaimed. “Think of words compared
with sounds!” she continued. “Think of novels and plays and histories—”
Perched on the edge of the table, she stirred the red and yellow
volumes contemptuously. She seemed to herself to be in a position where
she could despise all human learning. Terence looked at them too.
“God, Rachel, you do read trash!” he exclaimed. “And you’re behind the
times too, my dear. No one dreams of reading this kind of thing
now—antiquated problem plays, harrowing descriptions of life in the
east end—oh, no, we’ve exploded all that. Read poetry, Rachel, poetry,
poetry, poetry!”
Picking up one of the books, he began to read aloud, his intention
being to satirise the short sharp bark of the writer’s English; but she
paid no attention, and after an interval of meditation exclaimed:
“Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed entirely
of vast blocks of matter, and that we’re nothing but patches of light—”
she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering over the carpet and up the
wall—“like that?”
“No,” said Terence, “I feel solid; immensely solid; the legs of my
chair might be rooted in the bowels of the earth. But at Cambridge, I
can remember, there were times when one fell into ridiculous states of
semi-coma about five o’clock in the morning. Hirst does now, I
expect—oh, no, Hirst wouldn’t.”
Rachel continued, “The day your note came, asking us to go on the
picnic, I was sitting where you’re sitting now, thinking that; I wonder
if I could think that again? I wonder if the world’s changed? and if
so, when it’ll stop changing, and which is the real world?”
“When I first saw you,” he began, “I thought you were like a creature
who’d lived all its life among pearls and old bones. Your hands were
wet, d’you remember, and you never said a word until I gave you a bit
of bread, and then you said, ‘Human Beings!’”
“And I thought you—a prig,” she recollected. “No; that’s not quite it.
There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I thought you and St.
John were like those ants—very big, very ugly, very energetic, with all
your virtues on your backs. However, when I talked to you I liked you—”
“You fell in love with me,” he corrected her. “You were in love with me
all the time, only you didn’t know it.”
“No, I never fell in love with you,” she asserted.
“Rachel—what a lie—didn’t you sit here looking at my window—didn’t you
wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun—?”
“No,” she repeated, “I never fell in love, if falling in love is what
people say it is, and it’s the world that tells the lies and I tell the
truth. Oh, what lies—what lies!”
She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from Mr.
Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington. It
was strange, considering how very different these people were, that
they used almost the same sentences when they wrote to congratulate her
upon her engagement.
That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever
feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they
were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church service had
done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done; and if they
didn’t feel a thing why did they go and pretend to? The simplicity and
arrogance and hardness of her youth, now concentrated into a single
spark as it was by her love of him, puzzled Terence; being engaged had
not that effect on him; the world was different, but not in that way;
he still wanted the things he had always wanted, and in particular he
wanted the companionship of other people more than ever perhaps. He
took the letters out of her hand, and protested:
“Of course they’re absurd, Rachel; of course they say things just
because other people say them, but even so, what a nice woman Miss
Allan is; you can’t deny that; and Mrs. Thornbury too; she’s got too
many children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone to the
bad instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees—hasn’t she
a kind of beauty—of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say? Isn’t
she rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river
going on and on and on? By the way, Ralph’s been made governor of the
Carroway Islands—the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn’t
it?”
But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast majority of
the affairs of the world went on unconnected by a single thread with
her own destiny.
“I won’t have eleven children,” she asserted; “I won’t have the eyes of
an old woman. She looks at one up and down, up and down, as if one were
a horse.”
“We must have a son and we must have a daughter,” said Terence, putting
down the letters, “because, let alone the inestimable advantage of
being our children, they’d be so well brought up.” They went on to
sketch an outline of the ideal education—how their daughter should be
required from infancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard painted
blue, to suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too
practical; and their son—he should be taught to laugh at great men,
that is, at distinguished successful men, at men who wore ribands and
rose to the tops of their trees. He should in no way resemble (Rachel
added) St. John Hirst.
At this Terence professed the greatest admiration for St. John Hirst.
Dwelling upon his good qualities he became seriously convinced of them;
he had a mind like a torpedo, he declared, aimed at falsehood. Where
should we all be without him and his like? Choked in weeds; Christians,
bigots,—why, Rachel herself, would be a slave with a fan to sing songs
to men when they felt drowsy.
“But you’ll never see it!” he exclaimed; “because with all your virtues