The Voyage Out
you don’t, and you never will, care with every fibre of your being for
the pursuit of truth! You’ve no respect for facts, Rachel; you’re
essentially feminine.” She did not trouble to deny it, nor did she
think good to produce the one unanswerable argument against the merits
which Terence admired. St. John Hirst said that she was in love with
him; she would never forgive that; but the argument was not one to
appeal to a man.
“But I like him,” she said, and she thought to herself that she also
pitied him, as one pities those unfortunate people who are outside the
warm mysterious globe full of changes and miracles in which we
ourselves move about; she thought that it must be very dull to be St.
John Hirst.
She summed up what she felt about him by saying that she would not kiss
him supposing he wished it, which was not likely.
As if some apology were due to Hirst for the kiss which she then
bestowed upon him, Terence protested:
“And compared with Hirst I’m a perfect Zany.”
The clock here struck twelve instead of eleven.
“We’re wasting the morning—I ought to be writing my book, and you ought
to be answering these.”
“We’ve only got twenty-one whole mornings left,” said Rachel. “And my
father’ll be here in a day or two.”
However, she drew a pen and paper towards her and began to write
laboriously,
“My dear Evelyn—”
Terence, meanwhile, read a novel which some one else had written, a
process which he found essential to the composition of his own. For a
considerable time nothing was to be heard but the ticking of the clock
and the fitful scratch of Rachel’s pen, as she produced phrases which
bore a considerable likeness to those which she had condemned. She was
struck by it herself, for she stopped writing and looked up; looked at
Terence deep in the arm-chair, looked at the different pieces of
furniture, at her bed in the corner, at the window-pane which showed
the branches of a tree filled in with sky, heard the clock ticking, and
was amazed at the gulf which lay between all that and her sheet of
paper. Would there ever be a time when the world was one and
indivisible? Even with Terence himself—how far apart they could be, how
little she knew what was passing in his brain now! She then finished
her sentence, which was awkward and ugly, and stated that they were
“both very happy, and going to be married in the autumn probably and
hope to live in London, where we hope you will come and see us when we
get back.” Choosing “affectionately,” after some further speculation,
rather than sincerely, she signed the letter and was doggedly beginning
on another when Terence remarked, quoting from his book:
“Listen to this, Rachel. ‘It is probable that Hugh’ (he’s the hero, a
literary man), ‘had not realised at the time of his marriage, any more
than the young man of parts and imagination usually does realise, the
nature of the gulf which separates the needs and desires of the male
from the needs and desires of the female. . . . At first they had been
very happy. The walking tour in Switzerland had been a time of jolly
companionship and stimulating revelations for both of them. Betty had
proved herself the ideal comrade. . . . They had shouted _Love in the
Valley_ to each other across the snowy slopes of the Riffelhorn’ (and
so on, and so on—I’ll skip the descriptions). . . . ‘But in London,
after the boy’s birth, all was changed. Betty was an admirable mother;
but it did not take her long to find out that motherhood, as that
function is understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did
not absorb the whole of her energies. She was young and strong, with
healthy limbs and a body and brain that called urgently for exercise. .
. .’ (In short she began to give tea-parties.) . . . ‘Coming in late
from this singular talk with old Bob Murphy in his smoky, book-lined
room, where the two men had each unloosened his soul to the other, with
the sound of the traffic humming in his ears, and the foggy London sky
slung tragically across his mind . . . he found women’s hats dotted
about among his papers. Women’s wraps and absurd little feminine shoes
and umbrellas were in the hall. . . . Then the bills began to come in.
. . . He tried to speak frankly to her. He found her lying on the great
polar-bear skin in their bedroom, half-undressed, for they were dining
with the Greens in Wilton Crescent, the ruddy firelight making the
diamonds wink and twinkle on her bare arms and in the delicious curve
of her breast—a vision of adorable femininity. He forgave her all.’
(Well, this goes from bad to worse, and finally about fifty pages
later, Hugh takes a week-end ticket to Swanage and ‘has it out with
himself on the downs above Corfe.’ . . . Here there’s fifteen pages or
so which we’ll skip. The conclusion is . . .) ‘They were different.
Perhaps, in the far future, when generations of men had struggled and
failed as he must now struggle and fail, woman would be, indeed, what
she now made a pretence of being—the friend and companion—not the enemy
and parasite of man.’
“The end of it is, you see, Hugh went back to his wife, poor fellow. It
was his duty, as a married man. Lord, Rachel,” he concluded, “will it
be like that when we’re married?”
Instead of answering him she asked,
“Why don’t people write about the things they do feel?”
“Ah, that’s the difficulty!” he sighed, tossing the book away.
“Well, then, what will it be like when we’re married? What are the
things people do feel?”
She seemed doubtful.
“Sit on the floor and let me look at you,” he commanded. Resting her
chin on his knee, she looked straight at him.
He examined her curiously.
“You’re not beautiful,” he began, “but I like your face. I like the way
your hair grows down in a point, and your eyes too—they never see
anything. Your mouth’s too big, and your cheeks would be better if they
had more colour in them. But what I like about your face is that it
makes one wonder what the devil you’re thinking about—it makes me want
to do that—” He clenched his fist and shook it so near her that she
started back, “because now you look as if you’d blow my brains out.
There are moments,” he continued, “when, if we stood on a rock
together, you’d throw me into the sea.”
Hypnotised by the force of his eyes in hers, she repeated, “If we stood
on a rock together—”
To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven
about the roots of the world—the idea was incoherently delightful. She
sprang up, and began moving about the room, bending and thrusting aside
the chairs and tables as if she were indeed striking through the
waters. He watched her with pleasure; she seemed to be cleaving a
passage for herself, and dealing triumphantly with the obstacles which
would hinder their passage through life.
“It does seem possible!” he exclaimed, “though I’ve always thought it
the most unlikely thing in the world—I shall be in love with you all my
life, and our marriage will be the most exciting thing that’s ever been
done! We’ll never have a moment’s peace—” He caught her in his arms as
she passed him, and they fought for mastery, imagining a rock, and the
sea heaving beneath them. At last she was thrown to the floor, where
she lay gasping, and crying for mercy.
“I’m a mermaid! I can swim,” she cried, “so the game’s up.” Her dress
was torn across, and peace being established, she fetched a needle and
thread and began to mend the tear.
“And now,” she said, “be quiet and tell me about the world; tell me
about everything that’s ever happened, and I’ll tell you—let me see,
what can I tell you?—I’ll tell you about Miss Montgomerie and the river
party. She was left, you see, with one foot in the boat, and the other
on shore.”
They had spent much time already in thus filling out for the other the
course of their past lives, and the characters of their friends and
relations, so that very soon Terence knew not only what Rachel’s aunts
might be expected to say upon every occasion, but also how their
bedrooms were furnished, and what kind of bonnets they wore. He could
sustain a conversation between Mrs. Hunt and Rachel, and carry on a
tea-party including the Rev. William Johnson and Miss Macquoid, the
Christian Scientists, with remarkable likeness to the truth. But he had
known many more people, and was far more highly skilled in the art of
narrative than Rachel was, whose experiences were, for the most part,
of a curiously childlike and humorous kind, so that it generally fell
to her lot to listen and ask questions.
He told her not only what had happened, but what he had thought and
felt, and sketched for her portraits which fascinated her of what other
men and women might be supposed to be thinking and feeling, so that she
became very anxious to go back to England, which was full of people,
where she could merely stand in the streets and look at them. According
to him, too, there was an order, a pattern which made life reasonable,
or if that word was foolish, made it of deep interest anyhow, for
sometimes it seemed possible to understand why things happened as they
did. Nor were people so solitary and uncommunicative as she believed.
She should look for vanity—for vanity was a common quality—first in
herself, and then in Helen, in Ridley, in St. John, they all had their
share of it—and she would find it in ten people out of every twelve she
met; and once linked together by one such tie she would find them not
separate and formidable, but practically indistinguishable, and she
would come to love them when she found that they were like herself.
If she denied this, she must defend her belief that human beings were
as various as the beasts at the Zoo, which had stripes and manes, and
horns and humps; and so, wrestling over the entire list of their
acquaintances, and diverging into anecdote and theory and speculation,
they came to know each other. The hours passed quickly, and seemed to
them full to leaking-point. After a night’s solitude they were always
ready to begin again.
The virtues which Mrs. Ambrose had once believed to exist in free talk
between men and women did in truth exist for both of them, although not
quite in the measure she prescribed. Far more than upon the nature of
sex they dwelt upon the nature of poetry, but it was true that talk
which had no boundaries deepened and enlarged the strangely small
bright view of a girl. In return for what he could tell her she brought
him such curiosity and sensitiveness of perception, that he was led to
doubt whether any gift bestowed by much reading and living was quite
the equal of that for pleasure and pain. What would experience give her
after all, except a kind of ridiculous formal balance, like that of a
drilled dog in the street? He looked at her face and wondered how it
would look in twenty years’ time, when the eyes had dulled, and the
forehead wore those little persistent wrinkles which seem to show that
the middle-aged are facing something hard which the young do not see?
What would the hard thing be for them, he wondered? Then his thoughts
turned to their life in England.
The thought of England was delightful, for together they would see the
old things freshly; it would be England in June, and there would be
June nights in the country; and the nightingales singing in the lanes,
into which they could steal when the room grew hot; and there would be
English meadows gleaming with water and set with stolid cows, and
clouds dipping low and trailing across the green hills. As he sat in
the room with her, he wished very often to be back again in the thick
of life, doing things with Rachel.
He crossed to the window and exclaimed, “Lord, how good it is to think
of lanes, muddy lanes, with brambles and nettles, you know, and real