The Voyage Out
“Which is your favourite play? I wonder if it’s the same as mine?”
“_Henry the Fifth_,” said Mr. Grice.
“Joy!” cried Clarissa. “It is!”
_Hamlet_ was what you might call too introspective for Mr. Grice, the
sonnets too passionate; Henry the Fifth was to him the model of an
English gentleman. But his favourite reading was Huxley, Herbert
Spencer, and Henry George; while Emerson and Thomas Hardy he read for
relaxation. He was giving Mrs. Dalloway his views upon the present
state of England when the breakfast bell rung so imperiously that she
had to tear herself away, promising to come back and be shown his
sea-weeds.
The party, which had seemed so odd to her the night before, was already
gathered round the table, still under the influence of sleep, and
therefore uncommunicative, but her entrance sent a little flutter like
a breath of air through them all.
“I’ve had the most interesting talk of my life!” she exclaimed, taking
her seat beside Willoughby. “D’you realise that one of your men is a
philosopher and a poet?”
“A very interesting fellow—that’s what I always say,” said Willoughby,
distinguishing Mr. Grice. “Though Rachel finds him a bore.”
“He’s a bore when he talks about currents,” said Rachel. Her eyes were
full of sleep, but Mrs. Dalloway still seemed to her wonderful.
“I’ve never met a bore yet!” said Clarissa.
“And I should say the world was full of them!” exclaimed Helen. But her
beauty, which was radiant in the morning light, took the contrariness
from her words.
“I agree that it’s the worst one can possibly say of any one,” said
Clarissa. “How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!” she
added, with her usual air of saying something profound. “One can fancy
liking a murderer. It’s the same with dogs. Some dogs are awful bores,
poor dears.”
It happened that Richard was sitting next to Rachel. She was curiously
conscious of his presence and appearance—his well-cut clothes, his
crackling shirt-front, his cuffs with blue rings round them, and the
square-tipped, very clean fingers with the red stone on the little
finger of the left hand.
“We had a dog who was a bore and knew it,” he said, addressing her in
cool, easy tones. “He was a Skye terrier, one of those long chaps, with
little feet poking out from their hair like—like caterpillars—no, like
sofas I should say. Well, we had another dog at the same time, a black
brisk animal—a Schipperke, I think, you call them. You can’t imagine a
greater contrast. The Skye so slow and deliberate, looking up at you
like some old gentleman in the club, as much as to say, ‘You don’t
really mean it, do you?’ and the Schipperke as quick as a knife. I
liked the Skye best, I must confess. There was something pathetic about
him.”
The story seemed to have no climax.
“What happened to him?” Rachel asked.
“That’s a very sad story,” said Richard, lowering his voice and peeling
an apple. “He followed my wife in the car one day and got run over by a
brute of a cyclist.”
“Was he killed?” asked Rachel.
But Clarissa at her end of the table had overheard.
“Don’t talk of it!” she cried. “It’s a thing I can’t bear to think of
to this day.”
Surely the tears stood in her eyes?
“That’s the painful thing about pets,” said Mr. Dalloway; “they die.
The first sorrow I can remember was for the death of a dormouse. I
regret to say that I sat upon it. Still, that didn’t make one any the
less sorry. Here lies the duck that Samuel Johnson sat on, eh? I was
big for my age.”
“Then we had canaries,” he continued, “a pair of ring-doves, a lemur,
and at one time a martin.”
“Did you live in the country?” Rachel asked him.
“We lived in the country for six months of the year. When I say ‘we’ I
mean four sisters, a brother, and myself. There’s nothing like coming
of a large family. Sisters particularly are delightful.”
“Dick, you were horribly spoilt!” cried Clarissa across the table.
“No, no. Appreciated,” said Richard.
Rachel had other questions on the tip of her tongue; or rather one
enormous question, which she did not in the least know how to put into
words. The talk appeared too airy to admit of it.
“Please tell me—everything.” That was what she wanted to say. He had
drawn apart one little chink and showed astonishing treasures. It
seemed to her incredible that a man like that should be willing to talk
to her. He had sisters and pets, and once lived in the country. She
stirred her tea round and round; the bubbles which swam and clustered
in the cup seemed to her like the union of their minds.
The talk meanwhile raced past her, and when Richard suddenly stated in
a jocular tone of voice, “I’m sure Miss Vinrace, now, has secret
leanings towards Catholicism,” she had no idea what to answer, and
Helen could not help laughing at the start she gave.
However, breakfast was over and Mrs. Dalloway was rising. “I always
think religion’s like collecting beetles,” she said, summing up the
discussion as she went up the stairs with Helen. “One person has a
passion for black beetles; another hasn’t; it’s no good arguing about
it. What’s _your_ black beetle now?”
“I suppose it’s my children,” said Helen.
“Ah—that’s different,” Clarissa breathed. “Do tell me. You have a boy,
haven’t you? Isn’t it detestable, leaving them?”
It was as though a blue shadow had fallen across a pool. Their eyes
became deeper, and their voices more cordial. Instead of joining them
as they began to pace the deck, Rachel was indignant with the
prosperous matrons, who made her feel outside their world and
motherless, and turning back, she left them abruptly. She slammed the
door of her room, and pulled out her music. It was all old music—Bach
and Beethoven, Mozart and Purcell—the pages yellow, the engraving rough
to the finger. In three minutes she was deep in a very difficult, very
classical fugue in A, and over her face came a queer remote impersonal
expression of complete absorption and anxious satisfaction. Now she
stumbled; now she faltered and had to play the same bar twice over; but
an invisible line seemed to string the notes together, from which rose
a shape, a building. She was so far absorbed in this work, for it was
really difficult to find how all these sounds should stand together,
and drew upon the whole of her faculties, that she never heard a knock
at the door. It was burst impulsively open, and Mrs. Dalloway stood in
the room leaving the door open, so that a strip of the white deck and
of the blue sea appeared through the opening. The shape of the Bach
fugue crashed to the ground.
“Don’t let me interrupt,” Clarissa implored. “I heard you playing, and
I couldn’t resist. I adore Bach!”
Rachel flushed and fumbled her fingers in her lap. She stood up
awkwardly.
“It’s too difficult,” she said.
“But you were playing quite splendidly! I ought to have stayed
outside.”
“No,” said Rachel.
She slid _Cowper’s Letters_ and _Wuthering Heights_ out of the
arm-chair, so that Clarissa was invited to sit there.
“What a dear little room!” she said, looking round. “Oh, _Cowper’s
Letters_! I’ve never read them. Are they nice?”
“Rather dull,” said Rachel.
“He wrote awfully well, didn’t he?” said Clarissa; “—if one likes that
kind of thing—finished his sentences and all that. _Wuthering Heights_!
Ah—that’s more in my line. I really couldn’t exist without the Brontes!
Don’t you love them? Still, on the whole, I’d rather live without them
than without Jane Austen.”
Lightly and at random though she spoke, her manner conveyed an
extraordinary degree of sympathy and desire to befriend.
“Jane Austen? I don’t like Jane Austen,” said Rachel.
“You monster!” Clarissa exclaimed. “I can only just forgive you. Tell
me why?”
“She’s so—so—well, so like a tight plait,” Rachel floundered.
“Ah—I see what you mean. But I don’t agree. And you won’t when you’re
older. At your age I only liked Shelley. I can remember sobbing over
him in the garden.
He has outsoared the shadow of our night,
Envy and calumny and hate and pain—
you remember?
Can touch him not and torture not again
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain.
How divine!—and yet what nonsense!” She looked lightly round the room.
“I always think it’s _living_, not dying, that counts. I really respect
some snuffy old stockbroker who’s gone on adding up column after column
all his days, and trotting back to his villa at Brixton with some old
pug dog he worships, and a dreary little wife sitting at the end of the
table, and going off to Margate for a fortnight—I assure you I know
heaps like that—well, they seem to me _really_ nobler than poets whom
every one worships, just because they’re geniuses and die young. But I
don’t expect _you_ to agree with me!”
She pressed Rachel’s shoulder.
“Um-m-m—” she went on quoting—
Unrest which men miscall delight—
“when you’re my age you’ll see that the world is _crammed_ with
delightful things. I think young people make such a mistake about
that—not letting themselves be happy. I sometimes think that happiness
is the only thing that counts. I don’t know you well enough to say, but
I should guess you might be a little inclined to—when one’s young and
attractive—I’m going to say it!—_every_thing’s at one’s feet.” She
glanced round as much as to say, “not only a few stuffy books and
Bach.”
“I long to ask questions,” she continued. “You interest me so much. If
I’m impertinent, you must just box my ears.”
“And I—I want to ask questions,” said Rachel with such earnestness that
Mrs. Dalloway had to check her smile.
“D’you mind if we walk?” she said. “The air’s so delicious.”
She snuffed it like a racehorse as they shut the door and stood on
deck.
“Isn’t it good to be alive?” she exclaimed, and drew Rachel’s arm
within hers.
“Look, look! How exquisite!”
The shores of Portugal were beginning to lose their substance; but the
land was still the land, though at a great distance. They could
distinguish the little towns that were sprinkled in the folds of the
hills, and the smoke rising faintly. The towns appeared to be very
small in comparison with the great purple mountains behind them.
“Honestly, though,” said Clarissa, having looked, “I don’t like views.
They’re too inhuman.” They walked on.
“How odd it is!” she continued impulsively. “This time yesterday we’d
never met. I was packing in a stuffy little room in the hotel. We know
absolutely nothing about each other—and yet—I feel as if I _did_ know
you!”
“You have children—your husband was in Parliament?”
“You’ve never been to school, and you live—?”
“With my aunts at Richmond.”
“Richmond?”
“You see, my aunts like the Park. They like the quiet.”
“And you don’t! I understand!” Clarissa laughed.
“I like walking in the Park alone; but not—with the dogs,” she
finished.
“No; and some people _are_ dogs; aren’t they?” said Clarissa, as if she
had guessed a secret. “But not every one—oh no, not every one.”
“Not every one,” said Rachel, and stopped.
“I can quite imagine you walking alone,” said Clarissa: “and
thinking—in a little world of your own. But how you will enjoy it—some
day!”
“I shall enjoy walking with a man—is that what you mean?” said Rachel,
regarding Mrs. Dalloway with her large enquiring eyes.
“I wasn’t thinking of a man particularly,” said Clarissa. “But you
will.”
“No. I shall never marry,” Rachel determined.
“I shouldn’t be so sure of that,” said Clarissa. Her sidelong glance
told Rachel that she found her attractive although she was inexplicably
amused.
“Why do people marry?” Rachel asked.
“That’s what you’re going to find out,” Clarissa laughed.
Rachel followed her eyes and found that they rested for a second, on
the robust figure of Richard Dalloway, who was engaged in striking a