The Voyage Out
“You see—she’ll be better,” Mrs. Flushing jerked out as he left the
room. Her anxiety to persuade Terence was very great, and when he left
her without saying anything she felt dissatisfied and restless; she did
not like to stay, but she could not bear to go. She wandered from room
to room looking for some one to talk to, but all the rooms were empty.
Terence went upstairs, stood inside the door to take Helen’s
directions, looked over at Rachel, but did not attempt to speak to her.
She appeared vaguely conscious of his presence, but it seemed to
disturb her, and she turned, so that she lay with her back to him.
For six days indeed she had been oblivious of the world outside,
because it needed all her attention to follow the hot, red, quick
sights which passed incessantly before her eyes. She knew that it was
of enormous importance that she should attend to these sights and grasp
their meaning, but she was always being just too late to hear or see
something which would explain it all. For this reason, the
faces,—Helen’s face, the nurse’s, Terence’s, the doctor’s,—which
occasionally forced themselves very close to her, were worrying because
they distracted her attention and she might miss the clue. However, on
the fourth afternoon she was suddenly unable to keep Helen’s face
distinct from the sights themselves; her lips widened as she bent down
over the bed, and she began to gabble unintelligibly like the rest. The
sights were all concerned in some plot, some adventure, some escape.
The nature of what they were doing changed incessantly, although there
was always a reason behind it, which she must endeavour to grasp. Now
they were among trees and savages, now they were on the sea, now they
were on the tops of high towers; now they jumped; now they flew. But
just as the crisis was about to happen, something invariably slipped in
her brain, so that the whole effort had to begin over again. The heat
was suffocating. At last the faces went further away; she fell into a
deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She
saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the
sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors
thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the
bottom of the sea. There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes
light, while every now and then some one turned her over at the bottom
of the sea.
After St. John had spent some hours in the heat of the sun wrangling
with evasive and very garrulous natives, he extracted the information
that there was a doctor, a French doctor, who was at present away on a
holiday in the hills. It was quite impossible, so they said, to find
him. With his experience of the country, St. John thought it unlikely
that a telegram would either be sent or received; but having reduced
the distance of the hill town, in which he was staying, from a hundred
miles to thirty miles, and having hired a carriage and horses, he
started at once to fetch the doctor himself. He succeeded in finding
him, and eventually forced the unwilling man to leave his young wife
and return forthwith. They reached the villa at midday on Tuesday.
Terence came out to receive them, and St. John was struck by the fact
that he had grown perceptibly thinner in the interval; he was white
too; his eyes looked strange. But the curt speech and the sulky
masterful manner of Dr. Lesage impressed them both favourably, although
at the same time it was obvious that he was very much annoyed at the
whole affair. Coming downstairs he gave his directions emphatically,
but it never occurred to him to give an opinion either because of the
presence of Rodriguez who was now obsequious as well as malicious, or
because he took it for granted that they knew already what was to be
known.
“Of course,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders, when Terence asked
him, “Is she very ill?”
They were both conscious of a certain sense of relief when Dr. Lesage
was gone, leaving explicit directions, and promising another visit in a
few hours’ time; but, unfortunately, the rise of their spirits led them
to talk more than usual, and in talking they quarrelled. They
quarrelled about a road, the Portsmouth Road. St. John said that it is
macadamised where it passes Hindhead, and Terence knew as well as he
knew his own name that it is not macadamised at that point. In the
course of the argument they said some very sharp things to each other,
and the rest of the dinner was eaten in silence, save for an occasional
half-stifled reflection from Ridley.
When it grew dark and the lamps were brought in, Terence felt unable to
control his irritation any longer. St. John went to bed in a state of
complete exhaustion, bidding Terence good-night with rather more
affection than usual because of their quarrel, and Ridley retired to
his books. Left alone, Terence walked up and down the room; he stood at
the open window.
The lights were coming out one after another in the town beneath, and
it was very peaceful and cool in the garden, so that he stepped out on
to the terrace. As he stood there in the darkness, able only to see the
shapes of trees through the fine grey light, he was overcome by a
desire to escape, to have done with this suffering, to forget that
Rachel was ill. He allowed himself to lapse into forgetfulness of
everything. As if a wind that had been raging incessantly suddenly fell
asleep, the fret and strain and anxiety which had been pressing on him
passed away. He seemed to stand in an unvexed space of air, on a little
island by himself; he was free and immune from pain. It did not matter
whether Rachel was well or ill; it did not matter whether they were
apart or together; nothing mattered—nothing mattered. The waves beat on
the shore far away, and the soft wind passed through the branches of
the trees, seeming to encircle him with peace and security, with dark
and nothingness. Surely the world of strife and fret and anxiety was
not the real world, but this was the real world, the world that lay
beneath the superficial world, so that, whatever happened, one was
secure. The quiet and peace seemed to lap his body in a fine cool
sheet, soothing every nerve; his mind seemed once more to expand, and
become natural.
But when he had stood thus for a time a noise in the house roused him;
he turned instinctively and went into the drawing-room. The sight of
the lamp-lit room brought back so abruptly all that he had forgotten
that he stood for a moment unable to move. He remembered everything,
the hour, the minute even, what point they had reached, and what was to
come. He cursed himself for making believe for a minute that things
were different from what they are. The night was now harder to face
than ever.
Unable to stay in the empty drawing-room, he wandered out and sat on
the stairs half-way up to Rachel’s room. He longed for some one to talk
to, but Hirst was asleep, and Ridley was asleep; there was no sound in
Rachel’s room. The only sound in the house was the sound of Chailey
moving in the kitchen. At last there was a rustling on the stairs
overhead, and Nurse McInnis came down fastening the links in her cuffs,
in preparation for the night’s watch. Terence rose and stopped her. He
had scarcely spoken to her, but it was possible that she might confirm
him in the belief which still persisted in his own mind that Rachel was
not seriously ill. He told her in a whisper that Dr. Lesage had been
and what he had said.
“Now, Nurse,” he whispered, “please tell me your opinion. Do you
consider that she is very seriously ill? Is she in any danger?”
“The doctor has said—” she began.
“Yes, but I want your opinion. You have had experience of many cases
like this?”
“I could not tell you more than Dr. Lesage, Mr. Hewet,” she replied
cautiously, as though her words might be used against her. “The case is
serious, but you may feel quite certain that we are doing all we can
for Miss Vinrace.” She spoke with some professional self-approbation.
But she realised perhaps that she did not satisfy the young man, who
still blocked her way, for she shifted her feet slightly upon the stair
and looked out of the window where they could see the moon over the
sea.
“If you ask me,” she began in a curiously stealthy tone, “I never like
May for my patients.”
“May?” Terence repeated.
“It may be a fancy, but I don’t like to see anybody fall ill in May,”
she continued. “Things seem to go wrong in May. Perhaps it’s the moon.
They say the moon affects the brain, don’t they, Sir?”
He looked at her but he could not answer her; like all the others, when
one looked at her she seemed to shrivel beneath one’s eyes and become
worthless, malicious, and untrustworthy.
She slipped past him and disappeared.
Though he went to his room he was unable even to take his clothes off.
For a long time he paced up and down, and then leaning out of the
window gazed at the earth which lay so dark against the paler blue of
the sky. With a mixture of fear and loathing he looked at the slim
black cypress trees which were still visible in the garden, and heard
the unfamiliar creaking and grating sounds which show that the earth is
still hot. All these sights and sounds appeared sinister and full of
hostility and foreboding; together with the natives and the nurse and
the doctor and the terrible force of the illness itself they seemed to
be in conspiracy against him. They seemed to join together in their
effort to extract the greatest possible amount of suffering from him.
He could not get used to his pain, it was a revelation to him. He had
never realised before that underneath every action, underneath the life
of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to
be able to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the
edges of all action, eating away the lives of men and women. He thought
for the first time with understanding of words which had before seemed
to him empty: the struggle of life; the hardness of life. Now he knew
for himself that life is hard and full of suffering. He looked at the
scattered lights in the town beneath, and thought of Arthur and Susan,
or Evelyn and Perrott venturing out unwittingly, and by their happiness
laying themselves open to suffering such as this. How did they dare to
love each other, he wondered; how had he himself dared to live as he
had lived, rapidly and carelessly, passing from one thing to another,
loving Rachel as he had loved her? Never again would he feel secure; he
would never believe in the stability of life, or forget what depths of
pain lie beneath small happiness and feelings of content and safety. It
seemed to him as he looked back that their happiness had never been so
great as his pain was now. There had always been something imperfect in
their happiness, something they had wanted and had not been able to
get. It had been fragmentary and incomplete, because they were so young
and had not known what they were doing.
The light of his candle flickered over the boughs of a tree outside the
window, and as the branch swayed in the darkness there came before his
mind a picture of all the world that lay outside his window; he thought
of the immense river and the immense forest, the vast stretches of dry
earth and the plains of the sea that encircled the earth; from the sea
the sky rose steep and enormous, and the air washed profoundly between
the sky and the sea. How vast and dark it must be tonight, lying
exposed to the wind; and in all this great space it was curious to
think how few the towns were, and how small little rings of light, or
single glow-worms he figured them, scattered here and there, among the
swelling uncultivated folds of the world. And in those towns were