The Voyage Out
The two women looked at each other with a quiet significant gaze, and
then, feeling oddly dazed, and seeking she did not know exactly what,
Mrs. Thornbury went slowly upstairs and walked quietly along the
passages, touching the wall with her fingers as if to guide herself.
Housemaids were passing briskly from room to room, but Mrs. Thornbury
avoided them; she hardly saw them; they seemed to her to be in another
world. She did not even look up directly when Evelyn stopped her. It
was evident that Evelyn had been lately in tears, and when she looked
at Mrs. Thornbury she began to cry again. Together they drew into the
hollow of a window, and stood there in silence. Broken words formed
themselves at last among Evelyn’s sobs. “It was wicked,” she sobbed,
“it was cruel—they were so happy.”
Mrs. Thornbury patted her on the shoulder.
“It seems hard—very hard,” she said. She paused and looked out over the
slope of the hill at the Ambroses’ villa; the windows were blazing in
the sun, and she thought how the soul of the dead had passed from those
windows. Something had passed from the world. It seemed to her
strangely empty.
“And yet the older one grows,” she continued, her eyes regaining more
than their usual brightness, “the more certain one becomes that there
is a reason. How could one go on if there were no reason?” she asked.
She asked the question of some one, but she did not ask it of Evelyn.
Evelyn’s sobs were becoming quieter. “There must be a reason,” she
said. “It can’t only be an accident. For it was an accident—it need
never have happened.”
Mrs. Thornbury sighed deeply.
“But we must not let ourselves think of that,” she added, “and let us
hope that they don’t either. Whatever they had done it might have been
the same. These terrible illnesses—”
“There’s no reason—I don’t believe there’s any reason at all!” Evelyn
broke out, pulling the blind down and letting it fly back with a little
snap.
“Why should these things happen? Why should people suffer? I honestly
believe,” she went on, lowering her voice slightly, “that Rachel’s in
Heaven, but Terence. . . .”
“What’s the good of it all?” she demanded.
Mrs. Thornbury shook her head slightly but made no reply, and pressing
Evelyn’s hand she went on down the passage. Impelled by a strong desire
to hear something, although she did not know exactly what there was to
hear, she was making her way to the Flushings’ room. As she opened
their door she felt that she had interrupted some argument between
husband and wife. Mrs. Flushing was sitting with her back to the light,
and Mr. Flushing was standing near her, arguing and trying to persuade
her of something.
“Ah, here is Mrs. Thornbury,” he began with some relief in his voice.
“You have heard, of course. My wife feels that she was in some way
responsible. She urged poor Miss Vinrace to come on the expedition. I’m
sure you will agree with me that it is most unreasonable to feel that.
We don’t even know—in fact I think it most unlikely—that she caught her
illness there. These diseases—Besides, she was set on going. She would
have gone whether you asked her or not, Alice.”
“Don’t, Wilfrid,” said Mrs. Flushing, neither moving nor taking her
eyes off the spot on the floor upon which they rested. “What’s the use
of talking? What’s the use—?” She ceased.
“I was coming to ask you,” said Mrs. Thornbury, addressing Wilfrid, for
it was useless to speak to his wife. “Is there anything you think that
one could do? Has the father arrived? Could one go and see?”
The strongest wish in her being at this moment was to be able to do
something for the unhappy people—to see them—to assure them—to help
them. It was dreadful to be so far away from them. But Mr. Flushing
shook his head; he did not think that now—later perhaps one might be
able to help. Here Mrs. Flushing rose stiffly, turned her back to them,
and walked to the dressing-room opposite. As she walked, they could see
her breast slowly rise and slowly fall. But her grief was silent. She
shut the door behind her.
When she was alone by herself she clenched her fists together, and
began beating the back of a chair with them. She was like a wounded
animal. She hated death; she was furious, outraged, indignant with
death, as if it were a living creature. She refused to relinquish her
friends to death. She would not submit to dark and nothingness. She
began to pace up and down, clenching her hands, and making no attempt
to stop the quick tears which raced down her cheeks. She sat still at
last, but she did not submit. She looked stubborn and strong when she
had ceased to cry.
In the next room, meanwhile, Wilfrid was talking to Mrs. Thornbury with
greater freedom now that his wife was not sitting there.
“That’s the worst of these places,” he said. “People will behave as
though they were in England, and they’re not. I’ve no doubt myself that
Miss Vinrace caught the infection up at the villa itself. She probably
ran risks a dozen times a day that might have given her the illness.
It’s absurd to say she caught it with us.”
If he had not been sincerely sorry for them he would have been annoyed.
“Pepper tells me,” he continued, “that he left the house because he
thought them so careless. He says they never washed their vegetables
properly. Poor people! It’s a fearful price to pay. But it’s only what
I’ve seen over and over again—people seem to forget that these things
happen, and then they do happen, and they’re surprised.”
Mrs. Thornbury agreed with him that they had been very careless, and
that there was no reason whatever to think that she had caught the
fever on the expedition; and after talking about other things for a
short time, she left him and went sadly along the passage to her own
room. There must be some reason why such things happen, she thought to
herself, as she shut the door. Only at first it was not easy to
understand what it was. It seemed so strange—so unbelievable. Why, only
three weeks ago—only a fortnight ago, she had seen Rachel; when she
shut her eyes she could almost see her now, the quiet, shy girl who was
going to be married. She thought of all that she would have missed had
she died at Rachel’s age, the children, the married life, the
unimaginable depths and miracles that seemed to her, as she looked
back, to have lain about her, day after day, and year after year. The
stunned feeling, which had been making it difficult for her to think,
gradually gave way to a feeling of the opposite nature; she thought
very quickly and very clearly, and, looking back over all her
experiences, tried to fit them into a kind of order. There was
undoubtedly much suffering, much struggling, but, on the whole, surely
there was a balance of happiness—surely order did prevail. Nor were the
deaths of young people really the saddest things in life—they were
saved so much; they kept so much. The dead—she called to mind those who
had died early, accidentally—were beautiful; she often dreamt of the
dead. And in time Terence himself would come to feel—She got up and
began to wander restlessly about the room.
For an old woman of her age she was very restless, and for one of her
clear, quick mind she was unusually perplexed. She could not settle to
anything, so that she was relieved when the door opened. She went up to
her husband, took him in her arms, and kissed him with unusual
intensity, and then as they sat down together she began to pat him and
question him as if he were a baby, an old, tired, querulous baby. She
did not tell him about Miss Vinrace’s death, for that would only
disturb him, and he was put out already. She tried to discover why he
was uneasy. Politics again? What were those horrid people doing? She
spent the whole morning in discussing politics with her husband, and by
degrees she became deeply interested in what they were saying. But
every now and then what she was saying seemed to her oddly empty of
meaning.
At luncheon it was remarked by several people that the visitors at the
hotel were beginning to leave; there were fewer every day. There were
only forty people at luncheon, instead of the sixty that there had
been. So old Mrs. Paley computed, gazing about her with her faded eyes,
as she took her seat at her own table in the window. Her party
generally consisted of Mr. Perrott as well as Arthur and Susan, and
to-day Evelyn was lunching with them also.
She was unusually subdued. Having noticed that her eyes were red, and
guessing the reason, the others took pains to keep up an elaborate
conversation between themselves. She suffered it to go on for a few
minutes, leaning both elbows on the table, and leaving her soup
untouched, when she exclaimed suddenly, “I don’t know how you feel, but
I can simply think of nothing else!”
The gentlemen murmured sympathetically, and looked grave.
Susan replied, “Yes—isn’t it perfectly awful? When you think what a
nice girl she was—only just engaged, and this need never have
happened—it seems too tragic.” She looked at Arthur as though he might
be able to help her with something more suitable.
“Hard lines,” said Arthur briefly. “But it was a foolish thing to do—to
go up that river.” He shook his head. “They should have known better.
You can’t expect Englishwomen to stand roughing it as the natives do
who’ve been acclimatised. I’d half a mind to warn them at tea that day
when it was being discussed. But it’s no good saying these sort of
things—it only puts people’s backs up—it never makes any difference.”
Old Mrs. Paley, hitherto contented with her soup, here intimated, by
raising one hand to her ear, that she wished to know what was being
said.
“You heard, Aunt Emma, that poor Miss Vinrace has died of the fever,”
Susan informed her gently. She could not speak of death loudly or even
in her usual voice, so that Mrs. Paley did not catch a word. Arthur
came to the rescue.
“Miss Vinrace is dead,” he said very distinctly.
Mrs. Paley merely bent a little towards him and asked, “Eh?”
“Miss Vinrace is dead,” he repeated. It was only by stiffening all the
muscles round his mouth that he could prevent himself from bursting
into laughter, and forced himself to repeat for the third time, “Miss
Vinrace. . . . She’s dead.”
Let alone the difficulty of hearing the exact words, facts that were
outside her daily experience took some time to reach Mrs. Paley’s
consciousness. A weight seemed to rest upon her brain, impeding, though
not damaging its action. She sat vague-eyed for at least a minute
before she realised what Arthur meant.
“Dead?” she said vaguely. “Miss Vinrace dead? Dear me . . . that’s very
sad. But I don’t at the moment remember which she was. We seem to have
made so many new acquaintances here.” She looked at Susan for help. “A
tall dark girl, who just missed being handsome, with a high colour?”
“No,” Susan interposed. “She was—” then she gave it up in despair.
There was no use in explaining that Mrs. Paley was thinking of the
wrong person.
“She ought not to have died,” Mrs. Paley continued. “She looked so
strong. But people will drink the water. I can never make out why. It
seems such a simple thing to tell them to put a bottle of Seltzer water
in your bedroom. That’s all the precaution I’ve ever taken, and I’ve
been in every part of the world, I may say—Italy a dozen times over. .
. . But young people always think they know better, and then they pay
the penalty. Poor thing—I am very sorry for her.” But the difficulty of
peering into a dish of potatoes and helping herself engrossed her
attention.
Arthur and Susan both secretly hoped that the subject was now disposed
of, for there seemed to them something unpleasant in this discussion.
But Evelyn was not ready to let it drop. Why would people never talk
about the things that mattered?