The Voyage Out
the same position and she turned round, and when she looked up again
Helen was beside her and Terence had gone. It did not matter; she would
see him to-morrow when things would be ordinary again. Her chief
occupation during the day was to try to remember how the lines went:
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber dropping hair;
and the effort worried her because the adjectives persisted in getting
into the wrong places.
The second day did not differ very much from the first day, except that
her bed had become very important, and the world outside, when she
tried to think of it, appeared distinctly further off. The glassy,
cool, translucent wave was almost visible before her, curling up at the
end of the bed, and as it was refreshingly cool she tried to keep her
mind fixed upon it. Helen was here, and Helen was there all day long;
sometimes she said that it was lunchtime, and sometimes that it was
teatime; but by the next day all landmarks were obliterated, and the
outer world was so far away that the different sounds, such as the
sounds of people moving overhead, could only be ascribed to their cause
by a great effort of memory. The recollection of what she had felt, or
of what she had been doing and thinking three days before, had faded
entirely. On the other hand, every object in the room, and the bed
itself, and her own body with its various limbs and their different
sensations were more and more important each day. She was completely
cut off, and unable to communicate with the rest of the world, isolated
alone with her body.
Hours and hours would pass thus, without getting any further through
the morning, or again a few minutes would lead from broad daylight to
the depths of the night. One evening when the room appeared very dim,
either because it was evening or because the blinds were drawn, Helen
said to her, “Some one is going to sit here to-night. You won’t mind?”
Opening her eyes, Rachel saw not only Helen but a nurse in spectacles,
whose face vaguely recalled something that she had once seen. She had
seen her in the chapel. “Nurse McInnis,” said Helen, and the nurse
smiled steadily as they all did, and said that she did not find many
people who were frightened of her. After waiting for a moment they both
disappeared, and having turned on her pillow Rachel woke to find
herself in the midst of one of those interminable nights which do not
end at twelve, but go on into the double figures—thirteen, fourteen,
and so on until they reach the twenties, and then the thirties, and
then the forties. She realised that there is nothing to prevent nights
from doing this if they choose. At a great distance an elderly woman
sat with her head bent down; Rachel raised herself slightly and saw
with dismay that she was playing cards by the light of a candle which
stood in the hollow of a newspaper. The sight had something
inexplicably sinister about it, and she was terrified and cried out,
upon which the woman laid down her cards and came across the room,
shading the candle with her hands. Coming nearer and nearer across the
great space of the room, she stood at last above Rachel’s head and
said, “Not asleep? Let me make you comfortable.”
She put down the candle and began to arrange the bedclothes. It struck
Rachel that a woman who sat playing cards in a cavern all night long
would have very cold hands, and she shrunk from the touch of them.
“Why, there’s a toe all the way down there!” the woman said, proceeding
to tuck in the bedclothes. Rachel did not realise that the toe was
hers.
“You must try and lie still,” she proceeded, “because if you lie still
you will be less hot, and if you toss about you will make yourself more
hot, and we don’t want you to be any hotter than you are.” She stood
looking down upon Rachel for an enormous length of time.
“And the quieter you lie the sooner you will be well,” she repeated.
Rachel kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the ceiling, and
all her energy was concentrated upon the desire that this shadow should
move. But the shadow and the woman seemed to be eternally fixed above
her. She shut her eyes. When she opened them again several more hours
had passed, but the night still lasted interminably. The woman was
still playing cards, only she sat now in a tunnel under a river, and
the light stood in a little archway in the wall above her. She cried
“Terence!” and the peaked shadow again moved across the ceiling, as the
woman with an enormous slow movement rose, and they both stood still
above her.
“It’s just as difficult to keep you in bed as it was to keep Mr.
Forrest in bed,” the woman said, “and he was such a tall gentleman.”
In order to get rid of this terrible stationary sight Rachel again shut
her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames,
where there were little deformed women sitting in archways playing
cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed with damp,
which collected into drops and slid down the wall. But the little old
women became Helen and Nurse McInnis after a time, standing in the
window together whispering, whispering incessantly.
Meanwhile outside her room the sounds, the movements, and the lives of
the other people in the house went on in the ordinary light of the sun,
throughout the usual succession of hours. When, on the first day of her
illness, it became clear that she would not be absolutely well, for her
temperature was very high, until Friday, that day being Tuesday,
Terence was filled with resentment, not against her, but against the
force outside them which was separating them. He counted up the number
of days that would almost certainly be spoilt for them. He realised,
with an odd mixture of pleasure and annoyance, that, for the first time
in his life, he was so dependent upon another person that his happiness
was in her keeping. The days were completely wasted upon trifling,
immaterial things, for after three weeks of such intimacy and intensity
all the usual occupations were unbearably flat and beside the point.
The least intolerable occupation was to talk to St. John about Rachel’s
illness, and to discuss every symptom and its meaning, and, when this
subject was exhausted, to discuss illness of all kinds, and what caused
them, and what cured them.
Twice every day he went in to sit with Rachel, and twice every day the
same thing happened. On going into her room, which was not very dark,
where the music was lying about as usual, and her books and letters,
his spirits rose instantly. When he saw her he felt completely
reassured. She did not look very ill. Sitting by her side he would tell
her what he had been doing, using his natural voice to speak to her,
only a few tones lower down than usual; but by the time he had sat
there for five minutes he was plunged into the deepest gloom. She was
not the same; he could not bring them back to their old relationship;
but although he knew that it was foolish he could not prevent himself
from endeavouring to bring her back, to make her remember, and when
this failed he was in despair. He always concluded as he left her room
that it was worse to see her than not to see her, but by degrees, as
the day wore on, the desire to see her returned and became almost too
great to be borne.
On Thursday morning when Terence went into her room he felt the usual
increase of confidence. She turned round and made an effort to remember
certain facts from the world that was so many millions of miles away.
“You have come up from the hotel?” she asked.
“No; I’m staying here for the present,” he said. “We’ve just had
luncheon,” he continued, “and the mail has come in. There’s a bundle of
letters for you—letters from England.”
Instead of saying, as he meant her to say, that she wished to see them,
she said nothing for some time.
“You see, there they go, rolling off the edge of the hill,” she said
suddenly.
“Rolling, Rachel? What do you see rolling? There’s nothing rolling.”
“The old woman with the knife,” she replied, not speaking to Terence in
particular, and looking past him. As she appeared to be looking at a
vase on the shelf opposite, he rose and took it down.
“Now they can’t roll any more,” he said cheerfully. Nevertheless she
lay gazing at the same spot, and paid him no further attention although
he spoke to her. He became so profoundly wretched that he could not
endure to sit with her, but wandered about until he found St. John, who
was reading _The Times_ in the verandah. He laid it aside patiently,
and heard all that Terence had to say about delirium. He was very
patient with Terence. He treated him like a child.
By Friday it could not be denied that the illness was no longer an
attack that would pass off in a day or two; it was a real illness that
required a good deal of organisation, and engrossed the attention of at
least five people, but there was no reason to be anxious. Instead of
lasting five days it was going to last ten days. Rodriguez was
understood to say that there were well-known varieties of this illness.
Rodriguez appeared to think that they were treating the illness with
undue anxiety. His visits were always marked by the same show of
confidence, and in his interviews with Terence he always waved aside
his anxious and minute questions with a kind of flourish which seemed
to indicate that they were all taking it much too seriously. He seemed
curiously unwilling to sit down.
“A high temperature,” he said, looking furtively about the room, and
appearing to be more interested in the furniture and in Helen’s
embroidery than in anything else. “In this climate you must expect a
high temperature. You need not be alarmed by that. It is the pulse we
go by” (he tapped his own hairy wrist), “and the pulse continues
excellent.”
Thereupon he bowed and slipped out. The interview was conducted
laboriously upon both sides in French, and this, together with the fact
that he was optimistic, and that Terence respected the medical
profession from hearsay, made him less critical than he would have been
had he encountered the doctor in any other capacity. Unconsciously he
took Rodriguez’ side against Helen, who seemed to have taken an
unreasonable prejudice against him.
When Saturday came it was evident that the hours of the day must be
more strictly organised than they had been. St. John offered his
services; he said that he had nothing to do, and that he might as well
spend the day at the villa if he could be of use. As if they were
starting on a difficult expedition together, they parcelled out their
duties between them, writing out an elaborate scheme of hours upon a
large sheet of paper which was pinned to the drawing-room door. Their
distance from the town, and the difficulty of procuring rare things
with unknown names from the most unexpected places, made it necessary
to think very carefully, and they found it unexpectedly difficult to do
the simple but practical things that were required of them, as if they,
being very tall, were asked to stoop down and arrange minute grains of
sand in a pattern on the ground.
It was St. John’s duty to fetch what was needed from the town, so that
Terence would sit all through the long hot hours alone in the
drawing-room, near the open door, listening for any movement upstairs,
or call from Helen. He always forgot to pull down the blinds, so that
he sat in bright sunshine, which worried him without his knowing what
was the cause of it. The room was terribly stiff and uncomfortable.
There were hats in the chairs, and medicine bottles among the books. He
tried to read, but good books were too good, and bad books were too
bad, and the only thing he could tolerate was the newspaper, which with