The Voyage Out
complicated that he had never yet been able to bring himself to say
that he was glad that they were going to be married. He saw their
faults so clearly, and the inferior nature of a great deal of their
feeling for each other, and he expected that their love would not last.
He looked at them again, and, very strangely, for he was so used to
thinking that he seldom saw anything, the look of them filled him with
a simple emotion of affection in which there were some traces of pity
also. What, after all, did people’s faults matter in comparison with
what was good in them? He resolved that he would now tell them what he
felt. He quickened his pace and came up with them just as they reached
the corner where the lane joined the main road. They stood still and
began to laugh at him, and to ask him whether the gastric juices—but he
stopped them and began to speak very quickly and stiffly.
“D’you remember the morning after the dance?” he demanded. “It was here
we sat, and you talked nonsense, and Rachel made little heaps of
stones. I, on the other hand, had the whole meaning of life revealed to
me in a flash.” He paused for a second, and drew his lips together in a
tight little purse. “Love,” he said. “It seems to me to explain
everything. So, on the whole, I’m very glad that you two are going to
be married.” He then turned round abruptly, without looking at them,
and walked back to the villa. He felt both exalted and ashamed of
himself for having thus said what he felt. Probably they were laughing
at him, probably they thought him a fool, and, after all, had he really
said what he felt?
It was true that they laughed when he was gone; but the dispute about
Helen which had become rather sharp, ceased, and they became peaceful
and friendly.
CHAPTER XXIV
They reached the hotel rather early in the afternoon, so that most
people were still lying down, or sitting speechless in their bedrooms,
and Mrs. Thornbury, although she had asked them to tea, was nowhere to
be seen. They sat down, therefore, in the shady hall, which was almost
empty, and full of the light swishing sounds of air going to and fro in
a large empty space. Yes, this arm-chair was the same arm-chair in
which Rachel had sat that afternoon when Evelyn came up, and this was
the magazine she had been looking at, and this the very picture, a
picture of New York by lamplight. How odd it seemed—nothing had
changed.
By degrees a certain number of people began to come down the stairs and
to pass through the hall, and in this dim light their figures possessed
a sort of grace and beauty, although they were all unknown people.
Sometimes they went straight through and out into the garden by the
swing door, sometimes they stopped for a few minutes and bent over the
tables and began turning over the newspapers. Terence and Rachel sat
watching them through their half-closed eyelids—the Johnsons, the
Parkers, the Baileys, the Simmons’, the Lees, the Morleys, the
Campbells, the Gardiners. Some were dressed in white flannels and were
carrying racquets under their arms, some were short, some tall, some
were only children, and some perhaps were servants, but they all had
their standing, their reason for following each other through the hall,
their money, their position, whatever it might be. Terence soon gave up
looking at them, for he was tired; and, closing his eyes, he fell half
asleep in his chair. Rachel watched the people for some time longer;
she was fascinated by the certainty and the grace of their movements,
and by the inevitable way in which they seemed to follow each other,
and loiter and pass on and disappear. But after a time her thoughts
wandered, and she began to think of the dance, which had been held in
this room, only then the room itself looked quite different. Glancing
round, she could hardly believe that it was the same room. It had
looked so bare and so bright and formal on that night when they came
into it out of the darkness; it had been filled, too, with little red,
excited faces, always moving, and people so brightly dressed and so
animated that they did not seem in the least like real people, nor did
you feel that you could talk to them. And now the room was dim and
quiet, and beautiful silent people passed through it, to whom you could
go and say anything you liked. She felt herself amazingly secure as she
sat in her arm-chair, and able to review not only the night of the
dance, but the entire past, tenderly and humorously, as if she had been
turning in a fog for a long time, and could now see exactly where she
had turned. For the methods by which she had reached her present
position, seemed to her very strange, and the strangest thing about
them was that she had not known where they were leading her. That was
the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what
one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always
unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another
and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one
reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this
process that people called living. Perhaps, then, every one really knew
as she knew now where they were going; and things formed themselves
into a pattern not only for her, but for them, and in that pattern lay
satisfaction and meaning. When she looked back she could see that a
meaning of some kind was apparent in the lives of her aunts, and in the
brief visit of the Dalloways whom she would never see again, and in the
life of her father.
The sound of Terence, breathing deep in his slumber, confirmed her in
her calm. She was not sleepy although she did not see anything very
distinctly, but although the figures passing through the hall became
vaguer and vaguer, she believed that they all knew exactly where they
were going, and the sense of their certainty filled her with comfort.
For the moment she was as detached and disinterested as if she had no
longer any lot in life, and she thought that she could now accept
anything that came to her without being perplexed by the form in which
it appeared. What was there to frighten or to perplex in the prospect
of life? Why should this insight ever again desert her? The world was
in truth so large, so hospitable, and after all it was so simple.
“Love,” St. John had said, “that seems to explain it all.” Yes, but it
was not the love of man for woman, of Terence for Rachel. Although they
sat so close together, they had ceased to be little separate bodies;
they had ceased to struggle and desire one another. There seemed to be
peace between them. It might be love, but it was not the love of man
for woman.
Through her half-closed eyelids she watched Terence lying back in his
chair, and she smiled as she saw how big his mouth was, and his chin so
small, and his nose curved like a switchback with a knob at the end.
Naturally, looking like that he was lazy, and ambitious, and full of
moods and faults. She remembered their quarrels, and in particular how
they had been quarreling about Helen that very afternoon, and she
thought how often they would quarrel in the thirty, or forty, or fifty
years in which they would be living in the same house together,
catching trains together, and getting annoyed because they were so
different. But all this was superficial, and had nothing to do with the
life that went on beneath the eyes and the mouth and the chin, for that
life was independent of her, and independent of everything else. So
too, although she was going to marry him and to live with him for
thirty, or forty, or fifty years, and to quarrel, and to be so close to
him, she was independent of him; she was independent of everything
else. Nevertheless, as St. John said, it was love that made her
understand this, for she had never felt this independence, this calm,
and this certainty until she fell in love with him, and perhaps this
too was love. She wanted nothing else.
For perhaps two minutes Miss Allan had been standing at a little
distance looking at the couple lying back so peacefully in their
arm-chairs. She could not make up her mind whether to disturb them or
not, and then, seeming to recollect something, she came across the
hall. The sound of her approach woke Terence, who sat up and rubbed his
eyes. He heard Miss Allan talking to Rachel.
“Well,” she was saying, “this is very nice. It is very nice indeed.
Getting engaged seems to be quite the fashion. It cannot often happen
that two couples who have never seen each other before meet in the same
hotel and decide to get married.” Then she paused and smiled, and
seemed to have nothing more to say, so that Terence rose and asked her
whether it was true that she had finished her book. Some one had said
that she had really finished it. Her face lit up; she turned to him
with a livelier expression than usual.
“Yes, I think I can fairly say I have finished it,” she said. “That is,
omitting Swinburne—Beowulf to Browning—I rather like the two B’s
myself. Beowulf to Browning,” she repeated, “I think that is the kind
of title which might catch one’s eye on a railway book-stall.”
She was indeed very proud that she had finished her book, for no one
knew what an amount of determination had gone to the making of it. Also
she thought that it was a good piece of work, and, considering what
anxiety she had been in about her brother while she wrote it, she could
not resist telling them a little more about it.
“I must confess,” she continued, “that if I had known how many classics
there are in English literature, and how verbose the best of them
contrive to be, I should never have undertaken the work. They only
allow one seventy thousand words, you see.”
“Only seventy thousand words!” Terence exclaimed.
“Yes, and one has to say something about everybody,” Miss Allan added.
“That is what I find so difficult, saying something different about
everybody.” Then she thought that she had said enough about herself,
and she asked whether they had come down to join the tennis tournament.
“The young people are very keen about it. It begins again in half an
hour.”
Her gaze rested benevolently upon them both, and, after a momentary
pause, she remarked, looking at Rachel as if she had remembered
something that would serve to keep her distinct from other people.
“You’re the remarkable person who doesn’t like ginger.” But the
kindness of the smile in her rather worn and courageous face made them
feel that although she would scarcely remember them as individuals, she
had laid upon them the burden of the new generation.
“And in that I quite agree with her,” said a voice behind; Mrs.
Thornbury had overheard the last few words about not liking ginger.
“It’s associated in my mind with a horrid old aunt of ours (poor thing,
she suffered dreadfully, so it isn’t fair to call her horrid) who used
to give it to us when we were small, and we never had the courage to
tell her we didn’t like it. We just had to put it out in the
shrubbery—she had a big house near Bath.”
They began moving slowly across the hall, when they were stopped by the
impact of Evelyn, who dashed into them, as though in running downstairs
to catch them her legs had got beyond her control.
“Well,” she exclaimed, with her usual enthusiasm, seizing Rachel by the
arm, “I call this splendid! I guessed it was going to happen from the
very beginning! I saw you two were made for each other. Now you’ve just
got to tell me all about it—when’s it to be, where are you going to
live—are you both tremendously happy?”
But the attention of the group was diverted to Mrs. Elliot, who was
passing them with her eager but uncertain movement, carrying in her
hands a plate and an empty hot-water bottle. She would have passed