The Voyage Out
beauty of her attitude struck Terence in the way things struck him
now—as something to be put away in his mind and to be thought about
afterwards. They scarcely spoke, the argument between them seeming to
be suspended or forgotten.
Now that the afternoon sun had left the front of the house, Ridley
paced up and down the terrace repeating stanzas of a long poem, in a
subdued but suddenly sonorous voice. Fragments of the poem were wafted
in at the open window as he passed and repassed.
Peor and Baalim
Forsake their Temples dim,
With that twice batter’d God of Palestine
And mooned Astaroth—
The sound of these words were strangely discomforting to both the young
men, but they had to be borne. As the evening drew on and the red light
of the sunset glittered far away on the sea, the same sense of
desperation attacked both Terence and St. John at the thought that the
day was nearly over, and that another night was at hand. The appearance
of one light after another in the town beneath them produced in Hirst a
repetition of his terrible and disgusting desire to break down and sob.
Then the lamps were brought in by Chailey. She explained that Maria, in
opening a bottle, had been so foolish as to cut her arm badly, but she
had bound it up; it was unfortunate when there was so much work to be
done. Chailey herself limped because of the rheumatism in her feet, but
it appeared to her mere waste of time to take any notice of the unruly
flesh of servants. The evening went on. Dr. Lesage arrived
unexpectedly, and stayed upstairs a very long time. He came down once
and drank a cup of coffee.
“She is very ill,” he said in answer to Ridley’s question. All the
annoyance had by this time left his manner, he was grave and formal,
but at the same time it was full of consideration, which had not marked
it before. He went upstairs again. The three men sat together in the
drawing-room. Ridley was quite quiet now, and his attention seemed to
be thoroughly awakened. Save for little half-voluntary movements and
exclamations that were stifled at once, they waited in complete
silence. It seemed as if they were at last brought together face to
face with something definite.
It was nearly eleven o’clock when Dr. Lesage again appeared in the
room. He approached them very slowly, and did not speak at once. He
looked first at St. John and then at Terence, and said to Terence, “Mr.
Hewet, I think you should go upstairs now.”
Terence rose immediately, leaving the others seated with Dr. Lesage
standing motionless between them.
Chailey was in the passage outside, repeating over and over again,
“It’s wicked—it’s wicked.”
Terence paid her no attention; he heard what she was saying, but it
conveyed no meaning to his mind. All the way upstairs he kept saying to
himself, “This has not happened to me. It is not possible that this has
happened to me.”
He looked curiously at his own hand on the banisters. The stairs were
very steep, and it seemed to take him a long time to surmount them.
Instead of feeling keenly, as he knew that he ought to feel, he felt
nothing at all. When he opened the door he saw Helen sitting by the
bedside. There were shaded lights on the table, and the room, though it
seemed to be full of a great many things, was very tidy. There was a
faint and not unpleasant smell of disinfectants. Helen rose and gave up
her chair to him in silence. As they passed each other their eyes met
in a peculiar level glance, he wondered at the extraordinary clearness
of his eyes, and at the deep calm and sadness that dwelt in them. He
sat down by the bedside, and a moment afterwards heard the door shut
gently behind her. He was alone with Rachel, and a faint reflection of
the sense of relief that they used to feel when they were left alone
possessed him. He looked at her. He expected to find some terrible
change in her, but there was none. She looked indeed very thin, and, as
far as he could see, very tired, but she was the same as she had always
been. Moreover, she saw him and knew him. She smiled at him and said,
“Hullo, Terence.”
The curtain which had been drawn between them for so long vanished
immediately.
“Well, Rachel,” he replied in his usual voice, upon which she opened
her eyes quite widely and smiled with her familiar smile. He kissed her
and took her hand.
“It’s been wretched without you,” he said.
She still looked at him and smiled, but soon a slight look of fatigue
or perplexity came into her eyes and she shut them again.
“But when we’re together we’re perfectly happy,” he said. He continued
to hold her hand.
The light being dim, it was impossible to see any change in her face.
An immense feeling of peace came over Terence, so that he had no wish
to move or to speak. The terrible torture and unreality of the last
days were over, and he had come out now into perfect certainty and
peace. His mind began to work naturally again and with great ease. The
longer he sat there the more profoundly was he conscious of the peace
invading every corner of his soul. Once he held his breath and listened
acutely; she was still breathing; he went on thinking for some time;
they seemed to be thinking together; he seemed to be Rachel as well as
himself; and then he listened again; no, she had ceased to breathe. So
much the better—this was death. It was nothing; it was to cease to
breathe. It was happiness, it was perfect happiness. They had now what
they had always wanted to have, the union which had been impossible
while they lived. Unconscious whether he thought the words or spoke
them aloud, he said, “No two people have ever been so happy as we have
been. No one has ever loved as we have loved.”
It seemed to him that their complete union and happiness filled the
room with rings eddying more and more widely. He had no wish in the
world left unfulfilled. They possessed what could never be taken from
them.
He was not conscious that any one had come into the room, but later,
moments later, or hours later perhaps, he felt an arm behind him. The
arms were round him. He did not want to have arms round him, and the
mysterious whispering voices annoyed him. He laid Rachel’s hand, which
was now cold, upon the counterpane, and rose from his chair, and walked
across to the window. The windows were uncurtained, and showed the
moon, and a long silver pathway upon the surface of the waves.
“Why,” he said, in his ordinary tone of voice, “look at the moon.
There’s a halo round the moon. We shall have rain to-morrow.”
The arms, whether they were the arms of man or of woman, were round him
again; they were pushing him gently towards the door. He turned of his
own accord and walked steadily in advance of the arms, conscious of a
little amusement at the strange way in which people behaved merely
because some one was dead. He would go if they wished it, but nothing
they could do would disturb his happiness.
As he saw the passage outside the room, and the table with the cups and
the plates, it suddenly came over him that here was a world in which he
would never see Rachel again.
“Rachel! Rachel!” he shrieked, trying to rush back to her. But they
prevented him, and pushed him down the passage and into a bedroom far
from her room. Downstairs they could hear the thud of his feet on the
floor, as he struggled to break free; and twice they heard him shout,
“Rachel, Rachel!”
CHAPTER XXVI
For two or three hours longer the moon poured its light through the
empty air. Unbroken by clouds it fell straightly, and lay almost like a
chill white frost over the sea and the earth. During these hours the
silence was not broken, and the only movement was caused by the
movement of trees and branches which stirred slightly, and then the
shadows that lay across the white spaces of the land moved too. In this
profound silence one sound only was audible, the sound of a slight but
continuous breathing which never ceased, although it never rose and
never fell. It continued after the birds had begun to flutter from
branch to branch, and could be heard behind the first thin notes of
their voices. It continued all through the hours when the east
whitened, and grew red, and a faint blue tinged the sky, but when the
sun rose it ceased, and gave place to other sounds.
The first sounds that were heard were little inarticulate cries, the
cries, it seemed, of children or of the very poor, of people who were
very weak or in pain. But when the sun was above the horizon, the air
which had been thin and pale grew every moment richer and warmer, and
the sounds of life became bolder and more full of courage and
authority. By degrees the smoke began to ascend in wavering breaths
over the houses, and these slowly thickened, until they were as round
and straight as columns, and instead of striking upon pale white
blinds, the sun shone upon dark windows, beyond which there was depth
and space.
The sun had been up for many hours, and the great dome of air was
warmed through and glittering with thin gold threads of sunlight,
before any one moved in the hotel. White and massive it stood in the
early light, half asleep with its blinds down.
At about half-past nine Miss Allan came very slowly into the hall, and
walked very slowly to the table where the morning papers were laid, but
she did not put out her hand to take one; she stood still, thinking,
with her head a little sunk upon her shoulders. She looked curiously
old, and from the way in which she stood, a little hunched together and
very massive, you could see what she would be like when she was really
old, how she would sit day after day in her chair looking placidly in
front of her. Other people began to come into the room, and to pass
her, but she did not speak to any of them or even look at them, and at
last, as if it were necessary to do something, she sat down in a chair,
and looked quietly and fixedly in front of her. She felt very old this
morning, and useless too, as if her life had been a failure, as if it
had been hard and laborious to no purpose. She did not want to go on
living, and yet she knew that she would. She was so strong that she
would live to be a very old woman. She would probably live to be
eighty, and as she was now fifty, that left thirty years more for her
to live. She turned her hands over and over in her lap and looked at
them curiously; her old hands, that had done so much work for her.
There did not seem to be much point in it all; one went on, of course
one went on. . . . She looked up to see Mrs. Thornbury standing beside
her, with lines drawn upon her forehead, and her lips parted as if she
were about to ask a question.
Miss Allan anticipated her.
“Yes,” she said. “She died this morning, very early, about three
o’clock.”
Mrs. Thornbury made a little exclamation, drew her lips together, and
the tears rose in her eyes. Through them she looked at the hall which
was now laid with great breadths of sunlight, and at the careless,
casual groups of people who were standing beside the solid arm-chairs
and tables. They looked to her unreal, or as people look who remain
unconscious that some great explosion is about to take place beside
them. But there was no explosion, and they went on standing by the
chairs and the tables. Mrs. Thornbury no longer saw them, but,
penetrating through them as though they were without substance, she saw
the house, the people in the house, the room, the bed in the room, and
the figure of the dead lying still in the dark beneath the sheets. She
could almost see the dead. She could almost hear the voices of the
mourners.
“They expected it?” she asked at length.
Miss Allan could only shake her head.
“I know nothing,” she replied, “except what Mrs. Flushing’s maid told
me. She died early this morning.”