The Voyage Out
little men and women, tiny men and women. Oh, it was absurd, when one
thought of it, to sit here in a little room suffering and caring. What
did anything matter? Rachel, a tiny creature, lay ill beneath him, and
here in his little room he suffered on her account. The nearness of
their bodies in this vast universe, and the minuteness of their bodies,
seemed to him absurd and laughable. Nothing mattered, he repeated; they
had no power, no hope. He leant on the window-sill, thinking, until he
almost forgot the time and the place. Nevertheless, although he was
convinced that it was absurd and laughable, and that they were small
and hopeless, he never lost the sense that these thoughts somehow
formed part of a life which he and Rachel would live together.
Owing perhaps to the change of doctor, Rachel appeared to be rather
better next day. Terribly pale and worn though Helen looked, there was
a slight lifting of the cloud which had hung all these days in her
eyes.
“She talked to me,” she said voluntarily. “She asked me what day of the
week it was, like herself.”
Then suddenly, without any warning or any apparent reason, the tears
formed in her eyes and rolled steadily down her cheeks. She cried with
scarcely any attempt at movement of her features, and without any
attempt to stop herself, as if she did not know that she was crying. In
spite of the relief which her words gave him, Terence was dismayed by
the sight; had everything given way? Were there no limits to the power
of this illness? Would everything go down before it? Helen had always
seemed to him strong and determined, and now she was like a child. He
took her in his arms, and she clung to him like a child, crying softly
and quietly upon his shoulder. Then she roused herself and wiped her
tears away; it was silly to behave like that, she said; very silly, she
repeated, when there could be no doubt that Rachel was better. She
asked Terence to forgive her for her folly. She stopped at the door and
came back and kissed him without saying anything.
On this day indeed Rachel was conscious of what went on round her. She
had come to the surface of the dark, sticky pool, and a wave seemed to
bear her up and down with it; she had ceased to have any will of her
own; she lay on the top of the wave conscious of some pain, but chiefly
of weakness. The wave was replaced by the side of a mountain. Her body
became a drift of melting snow, above which her knees rose in huge
peaked mountains of bare bone. It was true that she saw Helen and saw
her room, but everything had become very pale and semi-transparent.
Sometimes she could see through the wall in front of her. Sometimes
when Helen went away she seemed to go so far that Rachel’s eyes could
hardly follow her. The room also had an odd power of expanding, and
though she pushed her voice out as far as possible until sometimes it
became a bird and flew away, she thought it doubtful whether it ever
reached the person she was talking to. There were immense intervals or
chasms, for things still had the power to appear visibly before her,
between one moment and the next; it sometimes took an hour for Helen to
raise her arm, pausing long between each jerky movement, and pour out
medicine. Helen’s form stooping to raise her in bed appeared of
gigantic size, and came down upon her like the ceiling falling. But for
long spaces of time she would merely lie conscious of her body floating
on the top of the bed and her mind driven to some remote corner of her
body, or escaped and gone flitting round the room. All sights were
something of an effort, but the sight of Terence was the greatest
effort, because he forced her to join mind to body in the desire to
remember something. She did not wish to remember; it troubled her when
people tried to disturb her loneliness; she wished to be alone. She
wished for nothing else in the world.
Although she had cried, Terence observed Helen’s greater hopefulness
with something like triumph; in the argument between them she had made
the first sign of admitting herself in the wrong. He waited for Dr.
Lesage to come down that afternoon with considerable anxiety, but with
the same certainty at the back of his mind that he would in time force
them all to admit that they were in the wrong.
As usual, Dr. Lesage was sulky in his manner and very short in his
answers. To Terence’s demand, “She seems to be better?” he replied,
looking at him in an odd way, “She has a chance of life.”
The door shut and Terence walked across to the window. He leant his
forehead against the pane.
“Rachel,” he repeated to himself. “She has a chance of life. Rachel.”
How could they say these things of Rachel? Had any one yesterday
seriously believed that Rachel was dying? They had been engaged for
four weeks. A fortnight ago she had been perfectly well. What could
fourteen days have done to bring her from that state to this? To
realise what they meant by saying that she had a chance of life was
beyond him, knowing as he did that they were engaged. He turned, still
enveloped in the same dreary mist, and walked towards the door.
Suddenly he saw it all. He saw the room and the garden, and the trees
moving in the air, they could go on without her; she could die. For the
first time since she fell ill he remembered exactly what she looked
like and the way in which they cared for each other. The immense
happiness of feeling her close to him mingled with a more intense
anxiety than he had felt yet. He could not let her die; he could not
live without her. But after a momentary struggle, the curtain fell
again, and he saw nothing and felt nothing clearly. It was all going
on—going on still, in the same way as before. Save for a physical pain
when his heart beat, and the fact that his fingers were icy cold, he
did not realise that he was anxious about anything. Within his mind he
seemed to feel nothing about Rachel or about any one or anything in the
world. He went on giving orders, arranging with Mrs. Chailey, writing
out lists, and every now and then he went upstairs and put something
quietly on the table outside Rachel’s door. That night Dr. Lesage
seemed to be less sulky than usual. He stayed voluntarily for a few
moments, and, addressing St. John and Terence equally, as if he did not
remember which of them was engaged to the young lady, said, “I consider
that her condition to-night is very grave.”
Neither of them went to bed or suggested that the other should go to
bed. They sat in the drawing-room playing picquet with the door open.
St. John made up a bed upon the sofa, and when it was ready insisted
that Terence should lie upon it. They began to quarrel as to who should
lie on the sofa and who should lie upon a couple of chairs covered with
rugs. St. John forced Terence at last to lie down upon the sofa.
“Don’t be a fool, Terence,” he said. “You’ll only get ill if you don’t
sleep.”
“Old fellow,” he began, as Terence still refused, and stopped abruptly,
fearing sentimentality; he found that he was on the verge of tears.
He began to say what he had long been wanting to say, that he was sorry
for Terence, that he cared for him, that he cared for Rachel. Did she
know how much he cared for her—had she said anything, asked perhaps? He
was very anxious to say this, but he refrained, thinking that it was a
selfish question after all, and what was the use of bothering Terence
to talk about such things? He was already half asleep. But St. John
could not sleep at once. If only, he thought to himself, as he lay in
the darkness, something would happen—if only this strain would come to
an end. He did not mind what happened, so long as the succession of
these hard and dreary days was broken; he did not mind if she died. He
felt himself disloyal in not minding it, but it seemed to him that he
had no feelings left.
All night long there was no call or movement, except the opening and
shutting of the bedroom door once. By degrees the light returned into
the untidy room. At six the servants began to move; at seven they crept
downstairs into the kitchen; and half an hour later the day began
again.
Nevertheless it was not the same as the days that had gone before,
although it would have been hard to say in what the difference
consisted. Perhaps it was that they seemed to be waiting for something.
There were certainly fewer things to be done than usual. People drifted
through the drawing-room—Mr. Flushing, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury. They
spoke very apologetically in low tones, refusing to sit down, but
remaining for a considerable time standing up, although the only thing
they had to say was, “Is there anything we can do?” and there was
nothing they could do.
Feeling oddly detached from it all, Terence remembered how Helen had
said that whenever anything happened to you this was how people
behaved. Was she right, or was she wrong? He was too little interested
to frame an opinion of his own. He put things away in his mind, as if
one of these days he would think about them, but not now. The mist of
unreality had deepened and deepened until it had produced a feeling of
numbness all over his body. Was it his body? Were those really his own
hands?
This morning also for the first time Ridley found it impossible to sit
alone in his room. He was very uncomfortable downstairs, and, as he did
not know what was going on, constantly in the way; but he would not
leave the drawing-room. Too restless to read, and having nothing to do,
he began to pace up and down reciting poetry in an undertone. Occupied
in various ways—now in undoing parcels, now in uncorking bottles, now
in writing directions, the sound of Ridley’s song and the beat of his
pacing worked into the minds of Terence and St. John all the morning as
a half comprehended refrain.
They wrestled up, they wrestled down,
They wrestled sore and still:
The fiend who blinds the eyes of men,
That night he had his will.
Like stags full spent, among the bent
They dropped awhile to rest—
“Oh, it’s intolerable!” Hirst exclaimed, and then checked himself, as
if it were a breach of their agreement. Again and again Terence would
creep half-way up the stairs in case he might be able to glean news of
Rachel. But the only news now was of a very fragmentary kind; she had
drunk something; she had slept a little; she seemed quieter. In the
same way, Dr. Lesage confined himself to talking about details, save
once when he volunteered the information that he had just been called
in to ascertain, by severing a vein in the wrist, that an old lady of
eighty-five was really dead. She had a horror of being buried alive.
“It is a horror,” he remarked, “that we generally find in the very old,
and seldom in the young.” They both expressed their interest in what he
told them; it seemed to them very strange. Another strange thing about
the day was that the luncheon was forgotten by all of them until it was
late in the afternoon, and then Mrs. Chailey waited on them, and looked
strange too, because she wore a stiff print dress, and her sleeves were
rolled up above her elbows. She seemed as oblivious of her appearance,
however, as if she had been called out of her bed by a midnight alarm
of fire, and she had forgotten, too, her reserve and her composure; she
talked to them quite familiarly as if she had nursed them and held them
naked on her knee. She assured them over and over again that it was
their duty to eat.
The afternoon, being thus shortened, passed more quickly than they
expected. Once Mrs. Flushing opened the door, but on seeing them shut
it again quickly; once Helen came down to fetch something, but she
stopped as she left the room to look at a letter addressed to her. She
stood for a moment turning it over, and the extraordinary and mournful