The Voyage Out
sometimes obliged to, from a wish not to give offence—his niece, for
example, had been married the other day—he walked into the middle of
the room, said “Ha! ha!” as loud as ever he could, considered that he
had done his duty, and walked away again. Mrs. Thornbury protested. She
was going to give a party directly she got back, and they were all to
be invited, and she should set people to watch Mr. Pepper, and if she
heard that he had been caught saying “Ha! ha!” she would—she would do
something very dreadful indeed to him. Arthur Venning suggested that
what she must do was to rig up something in the nature of a surprise—a
portrait, for example, of a nice old lady in a lace cap, concealing a
bath of cold water, which at a signal could be sprung on Pepper’s head;
or they’d have a chair which shot him twenty feet high directly he sat
on it.
Susan laughed. She had done her tea; she was feeling very well
contented, partly because she had been playing tennis brilliantly, and
then every one was so nice; she was beginning to find it so much easier
to talk, and to hold her own even with quite clever people, for somehow
clever people did not frighten her any more. Even Mr. Hirst, whom she
had disliked when she first met him, really wasn’t disagreeable; and,
poor man, he always looked so ill; perhaps he was in love; perhaps he
had been in love with Rachel—she really shouldn’t wonder; or perhaps it
was Evelyn—she was of course very attractive to men. Leaning forward,
she went on with the conversation. She said that she thought that the
reason why parties were so dull was mainly because gentlemen will not
dress: even in London, she stated, it struck her very much how people
don’t think it necessary to dress in the evening, and of course if they
don’t dress in London they won’t dress in the country. It was really
quite a treat at Christmas-time when there were the Hunt balls, and the
gentlemen wore nice red coats, but Arthur didn’t care for dancing, so
she supposed that they wouldn’t go even to the ball in their little
country town. She didn’t think that people who were fond of one sport
often care for another, although her father was an exception. But then
he was an exception in every way—such a gardener, and he knew all about
birds and animals, and of course he was simply adored by all the old
women in the village, and at the same time what he really liked best
was a book. You always knew where to find him if he were wanted; he
would be in his study with a book. Very likely it would be an old, old
book, some fusty old thing that no one else would dream of reading. She
used to tell him that he would have made a first-rate old bookworm if
only he hadn’t had a family of six to support, and six children, she
added, charmingly confident of universal sympathy, didn’t leave one
much time for being a bookworm.
Still talking about her father, of whom she was very proud, she rose,
for Arthur upon looking at his watch found that it was time they went
back again to the tennis court. The others did not move.
“They’re very happy!” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking benignantly after
them. Rachel agreed; they seemed to be so certain of themselves; they
seemed to know exactly what they wanted.
“D’you think they _are_ happy?” Evelyn murmured to Terence in an
undertone, and she hoped that he would say that he did not think them
happy; but, instead, he said that they must go too—go home, for they
were always being late for meals, and Mrs. Ambrose, who was very stern
and particular, didn’t like that. Evelyn laid hold of Rachel’s skirt
and protested. Why should they go? It was still early, and she had so
many things to say to them. “No,” said Terence, “we must go, because we
walk so slowly. We stop and look at things, and we talk.”
“What d’you talk about?” Evelyn enquired, upon which he laughed and
said that they talked about everything.
Mrs. Thornbury went with them to the gate, trailing very slowly and
gracefully across the grass and the gravel, and talking all the time
about flowers and birds. She told them that she had taken up the study
of botany since her daughter married, and it was wonderful what a
number of flowers there were which she had never seen, although she had
lived in the country all her life and she was now seventy-two. It was a
good thing to have some occupation which was quite independent of other
people, she said, when one got old. But the odd thing was that one
never felt old. She always felt that she was twenty-five, not a day
more or a day less, but, of course, one couldn’t expect other people to
agree to that.
“It must be very wonderful to be twenty-five, and not merely to imagine
that you’re twenty-five,” she said, looking from one to the other with
her smooth, bright glance. “It must be very wonderful, very wonderful
indeed.” She stood talking to them at the gate for a long time; she
seemed reluctant that they should go.
CHAPTER XXV
The afternoon was very hot, so hot that the breaking of the waves on
the shore sounded like the repeated sigh of some exhausted creature,
and even on the terrace under an awning the bricks were hot, and the
air danced perpetually over the short dry grass. The red flowers in the
stone basins were drooping with the heat, and the white blossoms which
had been so smooth and thick only a few weeks ago were now dry, and
their edges were curled and yellow. Only the stiff and hostile plants
of the south, whose fleshy leaves seemed to be grown upon spines, still
remained standing upright and defied the sun to beat them down. It was
too hot to talk, and it was not easy to find any book that would
withstand the power of the sun. Many books had been tried and then let
fall, and now Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the
words of Milton had substance and shape, so that it was not necessary
to understand what he was saying; one could merely listen to his words;
one could almost handle them.
There is a gentle nymph not far from hence,
he read,
That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream.
Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure;
Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine,
That had the sceptre from his father Brute.
The words, in spite of what Terence had said, seemed to be laden with
meaning, and perhaps it was for this reason that it was painful to
listen to them; they sounded strange; they meant different things from
what they usually meant. Rachel at any rate could not keep her
attention fixed upon them, but went off upon curious trains of thought
suggested by words such as “curb” and “Locrine” and “Brute,” which
brought unpleasant sights before her eyes, independently of their
meaning. Owing to the heat and the dancing air the garden too looked
strange—the trees were either too near or too far, and her head almost
certainly ached. She was not quite certain, and therefore she did not
know, whether to tell Terence now, or to let him go on reading. She
decided that she would wait until he came to the end of a stanza, and
if by that time she had turned her head this way and that, and it ached
in every position undoubtedly, she would say very calmly that her head
ached.
Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber dropping hair,
Listen for dear honour’s sake,
Goddess of the silver lake,
Listen and save!
But her head ached; it ached whichever way she turned it.
She sat up and said as she had determined, “My head aches so that I
shall go indoors.” He was half-way through the next verse, but he
dropped the book instantly.
“Your head aches?” he repeated.
For a few moments they sat looking at one another in silence, holding
each other’s hands. During this time his sense of dismay and
catastrophe were almost physically painful; all round him he seemed to
hear the shiver of broken glass which, as it fell to earth, left him
sitting in the open air. But at the end of two minutes, noticing that
she was not sharing his dismay, but was only rather more languid and
heavy-eyed than usual, he recovered, fetched Helen, and asked her to
tell him what they had better do, for Rachel had a headache.
Mrs. Ambrose was not discomposed, but advised that she should go to
bed, and added that she must expect her head to ache if she sat up to
all hours and went out in the heat, but a few hours in bed would cure
it completely. Terence was unreasonably reassured by her words, as he
had been unreasonably depressed the moment before. Helen’s sense seemed
to have much in common with the ruthless good sense of nature, which
avenged rashness by a headache, and, like nature’s good sense, might be
depended upon.
Rachel went to bed; she lay in the dark, it seemed to her, for a very
long time, but at length, waking from a transparent kind of sleep, she
saw the windows white in front of her, and recollected that some time
before she had gone to bed with a headache, and that Helen had said it
would be gone when she woke. She supposed, therefore, that she was now
quite well again. At the same time the wall of her room was painfully
white, and curved slightly, instead of being straight and flat. Turning
her eyes to the window, she was not reassured by what she saw there.
The movement of the blind as it filled with air and blew slowly out,
drawing the cord with a little trailing sound along the floor, seemed
to her terrifying, as if it were the movement of an animal in the room.
She shut her eyes, and the pulse in her head beat so strongly that each
thump seemed to tread upon a nerve, piercing her forehead with a little
stab of pain. It might not be the same headache, but she certainly had
a headache. She turned from side to side, in the hope that the coolness
of the sheets would cure her, and that when she next opened her eyes to
look the room would be as usual. After a considerable number of vain
experiments, she resolved to put the matter beyond a doubt. She got out
of bed and stood upright, holding on to the brass ball at the end of
the bedstead. Ice-cold at first, it soon became as hot as the palm of
her hand, and as the pains in her head and body and the instability of
the floor proved that it would be far more intolerable to stand and
walk than to lie in bed, she got into bed again; but though the change
was refreshing at first, the discomfort of bed was soon as great as the
discomfort of standing up. She accepted the idea that she would have to
stay in bed all day long, and as she laid her head on the pillow,
relinquished the happiness of the day.
When Helen came in an hour or two later, suddenly stopped her cheerful
words, looked startled for a second and then unnaturally calm, the fact
that she was ill was put beyond a doubt. It was confirmed when the
whole household knew of it, when the song that some one was singing in
the garden stopped suddenly, and when Maria, as she brought water,
slipped past the bed with averted eyes. There was all the morning to
get through, and then all the afternoon, and at intervals she made an
effort to cross over into the ordinary world, but she found that her
heat and discomfort had put a gulf between her world and the ordinary
world which she could not bridge. At one point the door opened, and
Helen came in with a little dark man who had—it was the chief thing she
noticed about him—very hairy hands. She was drowsy and intolerably hot,
and as he seemed shy and obsequious she scarcely troubled to answer
him, although she understood that he was a doctor. At another point the
door opened and Terence came in very gently, smiling too steadily, as
she realised, for it to be natural. He sat down and talked to her,
stroking her hands until it became irksome to her to lie any more in