← catalogue

The Voyage Out

by Virginia Woolf · English · Gutenberg #144 · 783,409 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Voyage Out
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Voyage Out

Author: Virginia Woolf


        
Release date: January 12, 2006 [eBook #144]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/144

Credits: Judith Boss and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VOYAGE OUT ***

The Voyage Out

by Virginia Woolf


Contents

 CHAPTER I.
 CHAPTER II.
 CHAPTER III.
 CHAPTER IV.
 CHAPTER V.
 CHAPTER VI.
 CHAPTER VII.
 CHAPTER VIII.
 CHAPTER IX.
 CHAPTER X.
 CHAPTER XI.
 CHAPTER XII.
 CHAPTER XIII.
 CHAPTER XIV.
 CHAPTER XV.
 CHAPTER XVI.
 CHAPTER XVII.
 CHAPTER XVIII.
 CHAPTER XIX.
 CHAPTER XX.
 CHAPTER XXI.
 CHAPTER XXII.
 CHAPTER XXIII.
 CHAPTER XXIV.
 CHAPTER XXV.
 CHAPTER XXVI.
 CHAPTER XXVII.




CHAPTER I


As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very
narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist,
lawyers’ clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady
typists will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where
beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is
better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the
air with your left hand.

One afternoon in the beginning of October when the traffic was becoming
brisk a tall man strode along the edge of the pavement with a lady on
his arm. Angry glances struck upon their backs. The small, agitated
figures—for in comparison with this couple most people looked
small—decorated with fountain pens, and burdened with despatch-boxes,
had appointments to keep, and drew a weekly salary, so that there was
some reason for the unfriendly stare which was bestowed upon Mr.
Ambrose’s height and upon Mrs. Ambrose’s cloak. But some enchantment
had put both man and woman beyond the reach of malice and unpopularity.
In his case one might guess from the moving lips that it was thought;
and in hers from the eyes fixed stonily straight in front of her at a
level above the eyes of most that it was sorrow. It was only by
scorning all she met that she kept herself from tears, and the friction
of people brushing past her was evidently painful. After watching the
traffic on the Embankment for a minute or two with a stoical gaze she
twitched her husband’s sleeve, and they crossed between the swift
discharge of motor cars. When they were safe on the further side, she
gently withdrew her arm from his, allowing her mouth at the same time
to relax, to tremble; then tears rolled down, and leaning her elbows on
the balustrade, she shielded her face from the curious. Mr. Ambrose
attempted consolation; he patted her shoulder; but she showed no signs
of admitting him, and feeling it awkward to stand beside a grief that
was greater than his, he crossed his arms behind him, and took a turn
along the pavement.

The embankment juts out in angles here and there, like pulpits; instead
of preachers, however, small boys occupy them, dangling string,
dropping pebbles, or launching wads of paper for a cruise. With their
sharp eye for eccentricity, they were inclined to think Mr. Ambrose
awful; but the quickest witted cried “Bluebeard!” as he passed. In case
they should proceed to tease his wife, Mr. Ambrose flourished his stick
at them, upon which they decided that he was grotesque merely, and four
instead of one cried “Bluebeard!” in chorus.

Although Mrs. Ambrose stood quite still, much longer than is natural,
the little boys let her be. Some one is always looking into the river
near Waterloo Bridge; a couple will stand there talking for half an
hour on a fine afternoon; most people, walking for pleasure,
contemplate for three minutes; when, having compared the occasion with
other occasions, or made some sentence, they pass on. Sometimes the
flats and churches and hotels of Westminster are like the outlines of
Constantinople in a mist; sometimes the river is an opulent purple,
sometimes mud-coloured, sometimes sparkling blue like the sea. It is
always worth while to look down and see what is happening. But this
lady looked neither up nor down; the only thing she had seen, since she
stood there, was a circular iridescent patch slowly floating past with
a straw in the middle of it. The straw and the patch swam again and
again behind the tremulous medium of a great welling tear, and the tear
rose and fell and dropped into the river. Then there struck close upon
her ears—

Lars Porsena of Clusium
By the nine Gods he swore—


and then more faintly, as if the speaker had passed her on his walk—

That the Great House of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.


Yes, she knew she must go back to all that, but at present she must
weep. Screening her face she sobbed more steadily than she had yet
done, her shoulders rising and falling with great regularity. It was
this figure that her husband saw when, having reached the polished
Sphinx, having entangled himself with a man selling picture postcards,
he turned; the stanza instantly stopped. He came up to her, laid his
hand on her shoulder, and said, “Dearest.” His voice was supplicating.
But she shut her face away from him, as much as to say, “You can’t
possibly understand.”

As he did not leave her, however, she had to wipe her eyes, and to
raise them to the level of the factory chimneys on the other bank. She
saw also the arches of Waterloo Bridge and the carts moving across
them, like the line of animals in a shooting gallery. They were seen
blankly, but to see anything was of course to end her weeping and begin
to walk.

“I would rather walk,” she said, her husband having hailed a cab
already occupied by two city men.

The fixity of her mood was broken by the action of walking. The
shooting motor cars, more like spiders in the moon than terrestrial
objects, the thundering drays, the jingling hansoms, and little black
broughams, made her think of the world she lived in. Somewhere up there
above the pinnacles where the smoke rose in a pointed hill, her
children were now asking for her, and getting a soothing reply. As for
the mass of streets, squares, and public buildings which parted them,
she only felt at this moment how little London had done to make her
love it, although thirty of her forty years had been spent in a street.
She knew how to read the people who were passing her; there were the
rich who were running to and from each others’ houses at this hour;
there were the bigoted workers driving in a straight line to their
offices; there were the poor who were unhappy and rightly malignant.
Already, though there was sunlight in the haze, tattered old men and
women were nodding off to sleep upon the seats. When one gave up seeing
the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath.

A fine rain now made her still more dismal; vans with the odd names of
those engaged in odd industries—Sprules, Manufacturer of Saw-dust;
Grabb, to whom no piece of waste paper comes amiss—fell flat as a bad
joke; bold lovers, sheltered behind one cloak, seemed to her sordid,
past their passion; the flower women, a contented company, whose talk
is always worth hearing, were sodden hags; the red, yellow, and blue
flowers, whose heads were pressed together, would not blaze. Moreover,
her husband walking with a quick rhythmic stride, jerking his free hand
occasionally, was either a Viking or a stricken Nelson; the sea-gulls
had changed his note.

“Ridley, shall we drive? Shall we drive, Ridley?”

Mrs. Ambrose had to speak sharply; by this time he was far away.

The cab, by trotting steadily along the same road, soon withdrew them
from the West End, and plunged them into London. It appeared that this
was a great manufacturing place, where the people were engaged in
making things, as though the West End, with its electric lamps, its
vast plate-glass windows all shining yellow, its carefully-finished
houses, and tiny live figures trotting on the pavement, or bowled along
on wheels in the road, was the finished work. It appeared to her a very
small bit of work for such an enormous factory to have made. For some
reason it appeared to her as a small golden tassel on the edge of a
vast black cloak.

Observing that they passed no other hansom cab, but only vans and
waggons, and that not one of the thousand men and women she saw was
either a gentleman or a lady, Mrs. Ambrose understood that after all it
is the ordinary thing to be poor, and that London is the city of
innumerable poor people. Startled by this discovery and seeing herself
pacing a circle all the days of her life round Picadilly Circus she was
greatly relieved to pass a building put up by the London County Council
for Night Schools.

“Lord, how gloomy it is!” her husband groaned. “Poor creatures!”

What with the misery for her children, the poor, and the rain, her mind
was like a wound exposed to dry in the air.

At this point the cab stopped, for it was in danger of being crushed
like an egg-shell. The wide Embankment which had had room for
cannonballs and squadrons, had now shrunk to a cobbled lane steaming
with smells of malt and oil and blocked by waggons. While her husband
read the placards pasted on the brick announcing the hours at which
certain ships would sail for Scotland, Mrs. Ambrose did her best to
find information. From a world exclusively occupied in feeding waggons
with sacks, half obliterated too in a fine yellow fog, they got neither
help nor attention. It seemed a miracle when an old man approached,
guessed their condition, and proposed to row them out to their ship in
the little boat which he kept moored at the bottom of a flight of
steps. With some hesitation they trusted themselves to him, took their
places, and were soon waving up and down upon the water, London having
shrunk to two lines of buildings on either side of them, square
buildings and oblong buildings placed in rows like a child’s avenue of
bricks.

The river, which had a certain amount of troubled yellow light in it,
ran with great force; bulky barges floated down swiftly escorted by
tugs; police boats shot past everything; the wind went with the
current. The open rowing-boat in which they sat bobbed and curtseyed
across the line of traffic. In mid-stream the old man stayed his hands
upon the oars, and as the water rushed past them, remarked that once he
had taken many passengers across, where now he took scarcely any. He
seemed to recall an age when his boat, moored among rushes, carried
delicate feet across to lawns at Rotherhithe.

“They want bridges now,” he said, indicating the monstrous outline of
the Tower Bridge. Mournfully Helen regarded him, who was putting water
between her and her children. Mournfully she gazed at the ship they
were approaching; anchored in the middle of the stream they could dimly
read her name—_Euphrosyne_.

Very dimly in the falling dusk they could see the lines of the rigging,
the masts and the dark flag which the breeze blew out squarely behind.

As the little boat sidled up to the steamer, and the old man shipped
his oars, he remarked once more pointing above, that ships all the
world over flew that flag the day they sailed. In the minds of both the
passengers the blue flag appeared a sinister token, and this the moment
for presentiments, but nevertheless they rose, gathered their things
together, and climbed on deck.

Down in the saloon of her father’s ship, Miss Rachel Vinrace, aged
twenty-four, stood waiting her uncle and aunt nervously. To begin with,
though nearly related, she scarcely remembered them; to go on with,
they were elderly people, and finally, as her father’s daughter she
must be in some sort prepared to entertain them. She looked forward to
seeing them as civilised people generally look forward to the first
sight of civilised people, as though they were of the nature of an
approaching physical discomfort—a tight shoe or a draughty window. She
was already unnaturally braced to receive them. As she occupied herself
in laying forks severely straight by the side of knives, she heard a
man’s voice saying gloomily:

“On a dark night one would fall down these stairs head foremost,” to
which a woman’s voice added, “And be killed.”

As she spoke the last words the woman stood in the doorway. Tall,
large-eyed, draped in purple shawls, Mrs. Ambrose was romantic and
beautiful; not perhaps sympathetic, for her eyes looked straight and
considered what they saw. Her face was much warmer than a Greek face;
on the other hand it was much bolder than the face of the usual pretty
Englishwoman.

“Oh, Rachel, how d’you do,” she said, shaking hands.

“How are you, dear,” said Mr. Ambrose, inclining his forehead to be
kissed. His niece instinctively liked his thin angular body, and the
big head with its sweeping features, and the acute, innocent eyes.

“Tell Mr. Pepper,” Rachel bade the servant. Husband and wife then sat
down on one side of the table, with their niece opposite to them.

“My father told me to begin,” she explained. “He is very busy with the
men. . . . You know Mr. Pepper?”

A little man who was bent as some trees are by a gale on one side of
them had slipped in. Nodding to Mr. Ambrose, he shook hands with Helen.

“Draughts,” he said, erecting the collar of his coat.

“You are still rheumatic?” asked Helen. Her voice was low and
seductive, though she spoke absently enough, the sight of town and
river being still present to her mind.

“Once rheumatic, always rheumatic, I fear,” he replied. “To some extent
it depends on the weather, though not so much as people are apt to
think.”

“One does not die of it, at any rate,” said Helen.

“As a general rule—no,” said Mr. Pepper.

“Soup, Uncle Ridley?” asked Rachel.

“Thank you, dear,” he said, and, as he held his plate out, sighed
audibly, “Ah! she’s not like her mother.” Helen was just too late in
thumping her tumbler on the table to prevent Rachel from hearing, and
from blushing scarlet with embarrassment.

“The way servants treat flowers!” she said hastily. She drew a green
vase with a crinkled lip towards her, and began pulling out the tight
little chrysanthemums, which she laid on the table-cloth, arranging
them fastidiously side by side.

There was a pause.

“You knew Jenkinson, didn’t you, Ambrose?” asked Mr. Pepper across the
table.

“Jenkinson of Peterhouse?”

“He’s dead,” said Mr. Pepper.

“Ah, dear!—I knew him—ages ago,” said Ridley. “He was the hero of the
punt accident, you remember? A queer card. Married a young woman out of
a tobacconist’s, and lived in the Fens—never heard what became of him.”

“Drink—drugs,” said Mr. Pepper with sinister conciseness. “He left a
commentary. Hopeless muddle, I’m told.”

“The man had really great abilities,” said Ridley.

“His introduction to Jellaby holds its own still,” went on Mr. Pepper,
“which is surprising, seeing how text-books change.”

“There was a theory about the planets, wasn’t there?” asked Ridley.

“A screw loose somewhere, no doubt of it,” said Mr. Pepper, shaking his
head.

Now a tremor ran through the table, and a light outside swerved. At the
same time an electric bell rang sharply again and again.

“We’re off,” said Ridley.

A slight but perceptible wave seemed to roll beneath the floor; then it
sank; then another came, more perceptible. Lights slid right across the
uncurtained window. The ship gave a loud melancholy moan.

“We’re off!” said Mr. Pepper. Other ships, as sad as she, answered her
outside on the river. The chuckling and hissing of water could be
plainly heard, and the ship heaved so that the steward bringing plates
had to balance himself as he drew the curtain. There was a pause.

“Jenkinson of Cats—d’you still keep up with him?” asked Ambrose.

“As much as one ever does,” said Mr. Pepper. “We meet annually. This
year he has had the misfortune to lose his wife, which made it painful,
of course.”

“Very painful,” Ridley agreed.

“There’s an unmarried daughter who keeps house for him, I believe, but
it’s never the same, not at his age.”

Both gentlemen nodded sagely as they carved their apples.

“There was a book, wasn’t there?” Ridley enquired.

“There _was_ a book, but there never _will_ be a book,” said Mr. Pepper
with such fierceness that both ladies looked up at him.

“There never will be a book, because some one else has written it for
him,” said Mr. Pepper with considerable acidity. “That’s what comes of
putting things off, and collecting fossils, and sticking Norman arches
on one’s pigsties.”

“I confess I sympathise,” said Ridley with a melancholy sigh. “I have a
weakness for people who can’t begin.”

“. . . The accumulations of a lifetime wasted,” continued Mr. pepper.
“He had accumulations enough to fill a barn.”

“It’s a vice that some of us escape,” said Ridley. “Our friend Miles
has another work out to-day.”

Mr. Pepper gave an acid little laugh. “According to my calculations,”
he said, “he has produced two volumes and a half annually, which,
allowing for time spent in the cradle and so forth, shows a commendable
industry.”

“Yes, the old Master’s saying of him has been pretty well realised,”
said Ridley.

“A way they had,” said Mr. Pepper. “You know the Bruce collection?—not
for publication, of course.”

“I should suppose not,” said Ridley significantly. “For a Divine he
was—remarkably free.”

“The Pump in Neville’s Row, for example?” enquired Mr. Pepper.

“Precisely,” said Ambrose.

Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex, highly
trained in promoting men’s talk without listening to it, could
think—about the education of children, about the use of fog sirens in
an opera—without betraying herself. Only it struck Helen that Rachel
was perhaps too still for a hostess, and that she might have done
something with her hands.

“Perhaps—?” she said at length, upon which they rose and left, vaguely
to the surprise of the gentlemen, who had either thought them attentive
or had forgotten their presence.

“Ah, one could tell strange stories of the old days,” they heard Ridley
say, as he sank into his chair again. Glancing back, at the doorway,
they saw Mr. Pepper as though he had suddenly loosened his clothes, and
had become a vivacious and malicious old ape.

Winding veils round their heads, the women walked on deck. They were
now moving steadily down the river, passing the dark shapes of ships at
anchor, and London was a swarm of lights with a pale yellow canopy
drooping above it. There were the lights of the great theatres, the
lights of the long streets, lights that indicated huge squares of
domestic comfort, lights that hung high in air. No darkness would ever
settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for
hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for
ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to
adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound,
eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great
city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.

Leaning over the rail, side by side, Helen said, “Won’t you be cold?”
Rachel replied, “No. . . . How beautiful!” she added a moment later.
Very little was visible—a few masts, a shadow of land here, a line of
brilliant windows there. They tried to make head against the wind.

“It blows—it blows!” gasped Rachel, the words rammed down her throat.
Struggling by her side, Helen was suddenly overcome by the spirit of
movement, and pushed along with her skirts wrapping themselves round
her knees, and both arms to her hair. But slowly the intoxication of
movement died down, and the wind became rough and chilly. They looked
through a chink in the blind and saw that long cigars were being smoked
in the dining-room; they saw Mr. Ambrose throw himself violently
against the back of his chair, while Mr. Pepper crinkled his cheeks as
though they had been cut in wood. The ghost of a roar of laughter came
out to them, and was drowned at once in the wind. In the dry
yellow-lighted room Mr. Pepper and Mr. Ambrose were oblivious of all
tumult; they were in Cambridge, and it was probably about the year
1875.

“They’re old friends,” said Helen, smiling at the sight. “Now, is there
a room for us to sit in?”

Rachel opened a door.

“It’s more like a landing than a room,” she said. Indeed it had nothing
of the shut stationary character of a room on shore. A table was rooted
in the middle, and seats were stuck to the sides. Happily the tropical
suns had bleached the tapestries to a faded blue-green colour, and the
mirror with its frame of shells, the work of the steward’s love, when
the time hung heavy in the southern seas, was quaint rather than ugly.
Twisted shells with red lips like unicorn’s horns ornamented the
mantelpiece, which was draped by a pall of purple plush from which
depended a certain number of balls. Two windows opened on to the deck,
and the light beating through them when the ship was roasted on the
Amazons had turned the prints on the opposite wall to a faint yellow
colour, so that “The Coliseum” was scarcely to be distinguished from
Queen Alexandra playing with her Spaniels. A pair of wicker arm-chairs
by the fireside invited one to warm one’s hands at a grate full of gilt
shavings; a great lamp swung above the table—the kind of lamp which
makes the light of civilisation across dark fields to one walking in
the country.

“It’s odd that every one should be an old friend of Mr. Pepper’s,”
Rachel started nervously, for the situation was difficult, the room
cold, and Helen curiously silent.

“I suppose you take him for granted?” said her aunt.

“He’s like this,” said Rachel, lighting on a fossilised fish in a
basin, and displaying it.

“I expect you’re too severe,” Helen remarked.

Rachel immediately tried to qualify what she had said against her
belief.

“I don’t really know him,” she said, and took refuge in facts,
believing that elderly people really like them better than feelings.
She produced what she knew of William Pepper. She told Helen that he
always called on Sundays when they were at home; he knew about a great
many things—about mathematics, history, Greek, zoology, economics, and
the Icelandic Sagas. He had turned Persian poetry into English prose,
and English prose into Greek iambics; he was an authority upon coins;
and—one other thing—oh yes, she thought it was vehicular traffic.

He was here either to get things out of the sea, or to write upon the
probable course of Odysseus, for Greek after all was his hobby.

“I’ve got all his pamphlets,” she said. “Little pamphlets. Little
yellow books.” It did not appear that she had read them.

“Has he ever been in love?” asked Helen, who had chosen a seat.

This was unexpectedly to the point.

“His heart’s a piece of old shoe leather,” Rachel declared, dropping
the fish. But when questioned she had to own that she had never asked
him.

“I shall ask him,” said Helen.

“The last time I saw you, you were buying a piano,” she continued. “Do
you remember—the piano, the room in the attic, and the great plants
with the prickles?”

“Yes, and my aunts said the piano would come through the floor, but at
their age one wouldn’t mind being killed in the night?” she enquired.

“I heard from Aunt Bessie not long ago,” Helen stated. “She is afraid
that you will spoil your arms if you insist upon so much practising.”

“The muscles of the forearm—and then one won’t marry?”

“She didn’t put it quite like that,” replied Mrs. Ambrose.

“Oh, no—of course she wouldn’t,” said Rachel with a sigh.

Helen looked at her. Her face was weak rather than decided, saved from
insipidity by the large enquiring eyes; denied beauty, now that she was
sheltered indoors, by the lack of colour and definite outline.
Moreover, a hesitation in speaking, or rather a tendency to use the
wrong words, made her seem more than normally incompetent for her
years. Mrs. Ambrose, who had been speaking much at random, now
reflected that she certainly did not look forward to the intimacy of
three or four weeks on board ship which was threatened. Women of her
own age usually boring her, she supposed that girls would be worse. She
glanced at Rachel again. Yes! how clear it was that she would be
vacillating, emotional, and when you said something to her it would
make no more lasting impression than the stroke of a stick upon water.
There was nothing to take hold of in girls—nothing hard, permanent,
satisfactory. Did Willoughby say three weeks, or did he say four? She
tried to remember.

At this point, however, the door opened and a tall burly man entered
the room, came forward and shook Helen’s hand with an emotional kind of
heartiness, Willoughby himself, Rachel’s father, Helen’s
brother-in-law. As a great deal of flesh would have been needed to make
a fat man of him, his frame being so large, he was not fat; his face
was a large framework too, looking, by the smallness of the features
and the glow in the hollow of the cheek, more fitted to withstand
assaults of the weather than to express sentiments and emotions, or to
respond to them in others.

“It is a great pleasure that you have come,” he said, “for both of us.”

Rachel murmured in obedience to her father’s glance.

“We’ll do our best to make you comfortable. And Ridley. We think it an
honour to have charge of him. Pepper’ll have some one to contradict
him—which I daren’t do. You find this child grown, don’t you? A young
woman, eh?”

Still holding Helen’s hand he drew his arm round Rachel’s shoulder,
thus making them come uncomfortably close, but Helen forbore to look.

“You think she does us credit?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” said Helen.

“Because we expect great things of her,” he continued, squeezing his
daughter’s arm and releasing her. “But about you now.” They sat down
side by side on the little sofa. “Did you leave the children well?
They’ll be ready for school, I suppose. Do they take after you or
Ambrose? They’ve got good heads on their shoulders, I’ll be bound?”

At this Helen immediately brightened more than she had yet done, and
explained that her son was six and her daughter ten. Everybody said
that her boy was like her and her girl like Ridley. As for brains, they
were quick brats, she thought, and modestly she ventured on a little
story about her son,—how left alone for a minute he had taken the pat
of butter in his fingers, run across the room with it, and put it on
the fire—merely for the fun of the thing, a feeling which she could
understand.

“And you had to show the young rascal that these tricks wouldn’t do,
eh?”

“A child of six? I don’t think they matter.”

“I’m an old-fashioned father.”

“Nonsense, Willoughby; Rachel knows better.”

Much as Willoughby would doubtless have liked his daughter to praise
him she did not; her eyes were unreflecting as water, her fingers still
toying with the fossilised fish, her mind absent. The elder people went
on to speak of arrangements that could be made for Ridley’s comfort—a
table placed where he couldn’t help looking at the sea, far from
boilers, at the same time sheltered from the view of people passing.
Unless he made this a holiday, when his books were all packed, he would
have no holiday whatever; for out at Santa Marina Helen knew, by
experience, that he would work all day; his boxes, she said, were
packed with books.

“Leave it to me—leave it to me!” said Willoughby, obviously intending
to do much more than she asked of him. But Ridley and Mr. Pepper were
heard fumbling at the door.

“How are you, Vinrace?” said Ridley, extending a limp hand as he came
in, as though the meeting were melancholy to both, but on the whole
more so to him.

Willoughby preserved his heartiness, tempered by respect. For the
moment nothing was said.

“We looked in and saw you laughing,” Helen remarked. “Mr. Pepper had
just told a very good story.”

“Pish. None of the stories were good,” said her husband peevishly.

“Still a severe judge, Ridley?” enquired Mr. Vinrace.

“We bored you so that you left,” said Ridley, speaking directly to his
wife.

As this was quite true Helen did not attempt to deny it, and her next
remark, “But didn’t they improve after we’d gone?” was unfortunate, for
her husband answered with a droop of his shoulders, “If possible they
got worse.”

The situation was now one of considerable discomfort for every one
concerned, as was proved by a long interval of constraint and silence.
Mr. Pepper, indeed, created a diversion of a kind by leaping on to his
seat, both feet tucked under him, with the action of a spinster who
detects a mouse, as the draught struck at his ankles. Drawn up there,
sucking at his cigar, with his arms encircling his knees, he looked
like the image of Buddha, and from this elevation began a discourse,
addressed to nobody, for nobody had called for it, upon the unplumbed
depths of ocean. He professed himself surprised to learn that although
Mr. Vinrace possessed ten ships, regularly plying between London and
Buenos Aires, not one of them was bidden to investigate the great white
monsters of the lower waters.

“No, no,” laughed Willoughby, “the monsters of the earth are too many
for me!”

Rachel was heard to sigh, “Poor little goats!”

“If it weren’t for the goats there’d be no music, my dear; music
depends upon goats,” said her father rather sharply, and Mr. Pepper
went on to describe the white, hairless, blind monsters lying curled on
the ridges of sand at the bottom of the sea, which would explode if you
brought them to the surface, their sides bursting asunder and
scattering entrails to the winds when released from pressure, with
considerable detail and with such show of knowledge, that Ridley was
disgusted, and begged him to stop.

From all this Helen drew her own conclusions, which were gloomy enough.
Pepper was a bore; Rachel was an unlicked girl, no doubt prolific of
confidences, the very first of which would be: “You see, I don’t get on
with my father.” Willoughby, as usual, loved his business and built his
Empire, and between them all she would be considerably bored. Being a
woman of action, however, she rose, and said that for her part she was
going to bed. At the door she glanced back instinctively at Rachel,
expecting that as two of the same sex they would leave the room
together. Rachel rose, looked vaguely into Helen’s face, and remarked
with her slight stammer, “I’m going out to t-t-triumph in the wind.”

Mrs. Ambrose’s worst suspicions were confirmed; she went down the
passage lurching from side to side, and fending off the wall now with
her right arm, now with her left; at each lurch she exclaimed
emphatically, “Damn!”




CHAPTER II


Uncomfortable as the night, with its rocking movement, and salt smells,
may have been, and in one case undoubtedly was, for Mr. Pepper had
insufficient clothes upon his bed, the breakfast next morning wore a
kind of beauty. The voyage had begun, and had begun happily with a soft
blue sky, and a calm sea. The sense of untapped resources, things to
say as yet unsaid, made the hour significant, so that in future years
the entire journey perhaps would be represented by this one scene, with
the sound of sirens hooting in the river the night before, somehow
mixing in.

The table was cheerful with apples and bread and eggs. Helen handed
Willoughby the butter, and as she did so cast her eye on him and
reflected, “And she married you, and she was happy, I suppose.”

She went off on a familiar train of thought, leading on to all kinds of
well-known reflections, from the old wonder, why Theresa had married
Willoughby?

“Of course, one sees all that,” she thought, meaning that one sees that
he is big and burly, and has a great booming voice, and a fist and a
will of his own; “but—” here she slipped into a fine analysis of him
which is best represented by one word, “sentimental,” by which she
meant that he was never simple and honest about his feelings. For
example, he seldom spoke of the dead, but kept anniversaries with
singular pomp. She suspected him of nameless atrocities with regard to
his daughter, as indeed she had always suspected him of bullying his
wife. Naturally she fell to comparing her own fortunes with the
fortunes of her friend, for Willoughby’s wife had been perhaps the one
woman Helen called friend, and this comparison often made the staple of
their talk. Ridley was a scholar, and Willoughby was a man of business.
Ridley was bringing out the third volume of Pindar when Willoughby was
launching his first ship. They built a new factory the very year the
commentary on Aristotle—was it?—appeared at the University Press. “And
Rachel,” she looked at her, meaning, no doubt, to decide the argument,
which was otherwise too evenly balanced, by declaring that Rachel was
not comparable to her own children. “She really might be six years
old,” was all she said, however, this judgment referring to the smooth
unmarked outline of the girl’s face, and not condemning her otherwise,
for if Rachel were ever to think, feel, laugh, or express herself,
instead of dropping milk from a height as though to see what kind of
drops it made, she might be interesting though never exactly pretty.
She was like her mother, as the image in a pool on a still summer’s day
is like the vivid flushed face that hangs over it.

Meanwhile Helen herself was under examination, though not from either
of her victims. Mr. Pepper considered her; and his meditations, carried
on while he cut his toast into bars and neatly buttered them, took him
through a considerable stretch of autobiography. One of his penetrating
glances assured him that he was right last night in judging that Helen
was beautiful. Blandly he passed her the jam. She was talking nonsense,
but not worse nonsense than people usually do talk at breakfast, the
cerebral circulation, as he knew to his cost, being apt to give trouble
at that hour. He went on saying “No” to her, on principle, for he never
yielded to a woman on account of her sex. And here, dropping his eyes
to his plate, he became autobiographical. He had not married himself
for the sufficient reason that he had never met a woman who commanded
his respect. Condemned to pass the susceptible years of youth in a
railway station in Bombay, he had seen only coloured women, military
women, official women; and his ideal was a woman who could read Greek,
if not Persian, was irreproachably fair in the face, and able to
understand the small things he let fall while undressing. As it was he
had contracted habits of which he was not in the least ashamed. Certain
odd minutes every day went to learning things by heart; he never took a
ticket without noting the number; he devoted January to Petronius,
February to Catullus, March to the Etruscan vases perhaps; anyhow he
had done good work in India, and there was nothing to regret in his
life except the fundamental defects which no wise man regrets, when the
present is still his. So concluding he looked up suddenly and smiled.
Rachel caught his eye.

“And now you’ve chewed something thirty-seven times, I suppose?” she
thought, but said politely aloud, “Are your legs troubling you to-day,
Mr. Pepper?”

“My shoulder blades?” he asked, shifting them painfully. “Beauty has no
effect upon uric acid that I’m aware of,” he sighed, contemplating the
round pane opposite, through which the sky and sea showed blue. At the
same time he took a little parchment volume from his pocket and laid it
on the table. As it was clear that he invited comment, Helen asked him
the name of it. She got the name; but she got also a disquisition upon
the proper method of making roads. Beginning with the Greeks, who had,
he said, many difficulties to contend with, he continued with the
Romans, passed to England and the right method, which speedily became
the wrong method, and wound up with such a fury of denunciation
directed against the road-makers of the present day in general, and the
road-makers of Richmond Park in particular, where Mr. Pepper had the
habit of cycling every morning before breakfast, that the spoons fairly
jingled against the coffee cups, and the insides of at least four rolls
mounted in a heap beside Mr. Pepper’s plate.

“Pebbles!” he concluded, viciously dropping another bread pellet upon
the heap. “The roads of England are mended with pebbles! ‘With the
first heavy rainfall,’ I’ve told ’em, ‘your road will be a swamp.’
Again and again my words have proved true. But d’you suppose they
listen to me when I tell ’em so, when I point out the consequences, the
consequences to the public purse, when I recommend ’em to read
Coryphaeus? No, Mrs. Ambrose, you will form no just opinion of the
stupidity of mankind until you have sat upon a Borough Council!” The
little man fixed her with a glance of ferocious energy.

“I have had servants,” said Mrs. Ambrose, concentrating her gaze. “At
this moment I have a nurse. She’s a good woman as they go, but she’s
determined to make my children pray. So far, owing to great care on my
part, they think of God as a kind of walrus; but now that my back’s
turned—Ridley,” she demanded, swinging round upon her husband, “what
shall we do if we find them saying the Lord’s Prayer when we get home
again?”

Ridley made the sound which is represented by “Tush.” But Willoughby,
whose discomfort as he listened was manifested by a slight movement
rocking of his body, said awkwardly, “Oh, surely, Helen, a little
religion hurts nobody.”

“I would rather my children told lies,” she replied, and while
Willoughby was reflecting that his sister-in-law was even more
eccentric than he remembered, pushed her chair back and swept upstairs.
In a second they heard her calling back, “Oh, look! We’re out at sea!”

They followed her on to the deck. All the smoke and the houses had
disappeared, and the ship was out in a wide space of sea very fresh and
clear though pale in the early light. They had left London sitting on
its mud. A very thin line of shadow tapered on the horizon, scarcely
thick enough to stand the burden of Paris, which nevertheless rested
upon it. They were free of roads, free of mankind, and the same
exhilaration at their freedom ran through them all. The ship was making
her way steadily through small waves which slapped her and then fizzled
like effervescing water, leaving a little border of bubbles and foam on
either side. The colourless October sky above was thinly clouded as if
by the trail of wood-fire smoke, and the air was wonderfully salt and
brisk. Indeed it was too cold to stand still. Mrs. Ambrose drew her arm
within her husband’s, and as they moved off it could be seen from the
way in which her sloping cheek turned up to his that she had something
private to communicate. They went a few paces and Rachel saw them kiss.

Down she looked into the depth of the sea. While it was slightly
disturbed on the surface by the passage of the _Euphrosyne_, beneath it
was green and dim, and it grew dimmer and dimmer until the sand at the
bottom was only a pale blur. One could scarcely see the black ribs of
wrecked ships, or the spiral towers made by the burrowings of great
eels, or the smooth green-sided monsters who came by flickering this
way and that.

—“And, Rachel, if any one wants me, I’m busy till one,” said her
father, enforcing his words as he often did, when he spoke to his
daughter, by a smart blow upon the shoulder.

“Until one,” he repeated. “And you’ll find yourself some employment,
eh? Scales, French, a little German, eh? There’s Mr. Pepper who knows
more about separable verbs than any man in Europe, eh?” and he went off
laughing. Rachel laughed, too, as indeed she had laughed ever since she
could remember, without thinking it funny, but because she admired her
father.

But just as she was turning with a view perhaps to finding some
employment, she was intercepted by a woman who was so broad and so
thick that to be intercepted by her was inevitable. The discreet
tentative way in which she moved, together with her sober black dress,
showed that she belonged to the lower orders; nevertheless she took up
a rock-like position, looking about her to see that no gentry were near
before she delivered her message, which had reference to the state of
the sheets, and was of the utmost gravity.

“How ever we’re to get through this voyage, Miss Rachel, I really can’t
tell,” she began with a shake of her head. “There’s only just sheets
enough to go round, and the master’s has a rotten place you could put
your fingers through. And the counterpanes. Did you notice the
counterpanes? I thought to myself a poor person would have been ashamed
of them. The one I gave Mr. Pepper was hardly fit to cover a dog. . . .
No, Miss Rachel, they could _not_ be mended; they’re only fit for dust
sheets. Why, if one sewed one’s finger to the bone, one would have
one’s work undone the next time they went to the laundry.”

Her voice in its indignation wavered as if tears were near.

There was nothing for it but to descend and inspect a large pile of
linen heaped upon a table. Mrs. Chailey handled the sheets as if she
knew each by name, character, and constitution. Some had yellow stains,
others had places where the threads made long ladders; but to the
ordinary eye they looked much as sheets usually do look, very chill,
white, cold, and irreproachably clean.

Suddenly Mrs. Chailey, turning from the subject of sheets, dismissing
them entirely, clenched her fists on the top of them, and proclaimed,
“And you couldn’t ask a living creature to sit where I sit!”

Mrs. Chailey was expected to sit in a cabin which was large enough, but
too near the boilers, so that after five minutes she could hear her
heart “go,” she complained, putting her hand above it, which was a
state of things that Mrs. Vinrace, Rachel’s mother, would never have
dreamt of inflicting—Mrs. Vinrace, who knew every sheet in her house,
and expected of every one the best they could do, but no more.

It was the easiest thing in the world to grant another room, and the
problem of sheets simultaneously and miraculously solved itself, the
spots and ladders not being past cure after all, but—

“Lies! Lies! Lies!” exclaimed the mistress indignantly, as she ran up
on to the deck. “What’s the use of telling me lies?”

In her anger that a woman of fifty should behave like a child and come
cringing to a girl because she wanted to sit where she had not leave to
sit, she did not think of the particular case, and, unpacking her
music, soon forgot all about the old woman and her sheets.

Mrs. Chailey folded her sheets, but her expression testified to
flatness within. The world no longer cared about her, and a ship was
not a home. When the lamps were lit yesterday, and the sailors went
tumbling above her head, she had cried; she would cry this evening; she
would cry to-morrow. It was not home. Meanwhile she arranged her
ornaments in the room which she had won too easily. They were strange
ornaments to bring on a sea voyage—china pugs, tea-sets in miniature,
cups stamped floridly with the arms of the city of Bristol, hair-pin
boxes crusted with shamrock, antelopes’ heads in coloured plaster,
together with a multitude of tiny photographs, representing downright
workmen in their Sunday best, and women holding white babies. But there
was one portrait in a gilt frame, for which a nail was needed, and
before she sought it Mrs. Chailey put on her spectacles and read what
was written on a slip of paper at the back:

“This picture of her mistress is given to Emma Chailey by Willoughby
Vinrace in gratitude for thirty years of devoted service.”

Tears obliterated the words and the head of the nail.

“So long as I can do something for your family,” she was saying, as she
hammered at it, when a voice called melodiously in the passage:

“Mrs. Chailey! Mrs. Chailey!”

Chailey instantly tidied her dress, composed her face, and opened the
door.

“I’m in a fix,” said Mrs. Ambrose, who was flushed and out of breath.
“You know what gentlemen are. The chairs too high—the tables too
low—there’s six inches between the floor and the door. What I want’s a
hammer, an old quilt, and have you such a thing as a kitchen table?
Anyhow, between us”—she now flung open the door of her husband’s
sitting room, and revealed Ridley pacing up and down, his forehead all
wrinkled, and the collar of his coat turned up.

“It’s as though they’d taken pains to torment me!” he cried, stopping
dead. “Did I come on this voyage in order to catch rheumatism and
pneumonia? Really one might have credited Vinrace with more sense. My
dear,” Helen was on her knees under a table, “you are only making
yourself untidy, and we had much better recognise the fact that we are
condemned to six weeks of unspeakable misery. To come at all was the
height of folly, but now that we are here I suppose that I can face it
like a man. My diseases of course will be increased—I feel already
worse than I did yesterday, but we’ve only ourselves to thank, and the
children happily—”

“Move! Move! Move!” cried Helen, chasing him from corner to corner with
a chair as though he were an errant hen. “Out of the way, Ridley, and
in half an hour you’ll find it ready.”

She turned him out of the room, and they could hear him groaning and
swearing as he went along the passage.

“I daresay he isn’t very strong,” said Mrs. Chailey, looking at Mrs.
Ambrose compassionately, as she helped to shift and carry.

“It’s books,” sighed Helen, lifting an armful of sad volumes from the
floor to the shelf. “Greek from morning to night. If ever Miss Rachel
marries, Chailey, pray that she may marry a man who doesn’t know his
ABC.”

The preliminary discomforts and harshnesses, which generally make the
first days of a sea voyage so cheerless and trying to the temper, being
somehow lived through, the succeeding days passed pleasantly enough.
October was well advanced, but steadily burning with a warmth that made
the early months of the summer appear very young and capricious. Great
tracts of the earth lay now beneath the autumn sun, and the whole of
England, from the bald moors to the Cornish rocks, was lit up from dawn
to sunset, and showed in stretches of yellow, green, and purple. Under
that illumination even the roofs of the great towns glittered. In
thousands of small gardens, millions of dark-red flowers were blooming,
until the old ladies who had tended them so carefully came down the
paths with their scissors, snipped through their juicy stalks, and laid
them upon cold stone ledges in the village church. Innumerable parties
of picnickers coming home at sunset cried, “Was there ever such a day
as this?” “It’s you,” the young men whispered; “Oh, it’s you,” the
young women replied. All old people and many sick people were drawn,
were it only for a foot or two, into the open air, and prognosticated
pleasant things about the course of the world. As for the confidences
and expressions of love that were heard not only in cornfields but in
lamplit rooms, where the windows opened on the garden, and men with
cigars kissed women with grey hairs, they were not to be counted. Some
said that the sky was an emblem of the life to come. Long-tailed birds
clattered and screamed, and crossed from wood to wood, with golden eyes
in their plumage.

But while all this went on by land, very few people thought about the
sea. They took it for granted that the sea was calm; and there was no
need, as there is in many houses when the creeper taps on the bedroom
windows, for the couples to murmur before they kiss, “Think of the
ships to-night,” or “Thank Heaven, I’m not the man in the lighthouse!”
For all they imagined, the ships when they vanished on the sky-line
dissolved, like snow in water. The grown-up view, indeed, was not much
clearer than the view of the little creatures in bathing drawers who
were trotting in to the foam all along the coasts of England, and
scooping up buckets full of water. They saw white sails or tufts of
smoke pass across the horizon, and if you had said that these were
waterspouts, or the petals of white sea flowers, they would have
agreed.

The people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England.
Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a very small
island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned.
One figured them first swarming about like aimless ants, and almost
pressing each other over the edge; and then, as the ship withdrew, one
figured them making a vain clamour, which, being unheard, either
ceased, or rose into a brawl. Finally, when the ship was out of sight
of land, it became plain that the people of England were completely
mute. The disease attacked other parts of the earth; Europe shrank,
Asia shrank, Africa and America shrank, until it seemed doubtful
whether the ship would ever run against any of those wrinkled little
rocks again. But, on the other hand, an immense dignity had descended
upon her; she was an inhabitant of the great world, which has so few
inhabitants, travelling all day across an empty universe, with veils
drawn before her and behind. She was more lonely than the caravan
crossing the desert; she was infinitely more mysterious, moving by her
own power and sustained by her own resources. The sea might give her
death or some unexampled joy, and none would know of it. She was a
bride going forth to her husband, a virgin unknown of men; in her vigor
and purity she might be likened to all beautiful things, for as a ship
she had a life of her own.

Indeed if they had not been blessed in their weather, one blue day
being bowled up after another, smooth, round, and flawless, Mrs.
Ambrose would have found it very dull. As it was, she had her
embroidery frame set up on deck, with a little table by her side on
which lay open a black volume of philosophy. She chose a thread from
the vari-coloured tangle that lay in her lap, and sewed red into the
bark of a tree, or yellow into the river torrent. She was working at a
great design of a tropical river running through a tropical forest,
where spotted deer would eventually browse upon masses of fruit,
bananas, oranges, and giant pomegranates, while a troop of naked
natives whirled darts into the air. Between the stitches she looked to
one side and read a sentence about the Reality of Matter, or the Nature
of Good. Round her men in blue jerseys knelt and scrubbed the boards,
or leant over the rails and whistled, and not far off Mr. Pepper sat
cutting up roots with a penknife. The rest were occupied in other parts
of the ship: Ridley at his Greek—he had never found quarters more to
his liking; Willoughby at his documents, for he used a voyage to work
off arrears of business; and Rachel—Helen, between her sentences of
philosophy, wondered sometimes what Rachel _did_ do with herself? She
meant vaguely to go and see. They had scarcely spoken two words to each
other since that first evening; they were polite when they met, but
there had been no confidence of any kind. Rachel seemed to get on very
well with her father—much better, Helen thought, than she ought to—and
was as ready to let Helen alone as Helen was to let her alone.

At that moment Rachel was sitting in her room doing absolutely nothing.
When the ship was full this apartment bore some magnificent title and
was the resort of elderly sea-sick ladies who left the deck to their
youngsters. By virtue of the piano, and a mess of books on the floor,
Rachel considered it her room, and there she would sit for hours
playing very difficult music, reading a little German, or a little
English when the mood took her, and doing—as at this moment—absolutely
nothing.

The way she had been educated, joined to a fine natural indolence, was
of course partly the reason of it, for she had been educated as the
majority of well-to-do girls in the last part of the nineteenth century
were educated. Kindly doctors and gentle old professors had taught her
the rudiments of about ten different branches of knowledge, but they
would as soon have forced her to go through one piece of drudgery
thoroughly as they would have told her that her hands were dirty. The
one hour or the two hours weekly passed very pleasantly, partly owing
to the other pupils, partly to the fact that the window looked upon the
back of a shop, where figures appeared against the red windows in
winter, partly to the accidents that are bound to happen when more than
two people are in the same room together. But there was no subject in
the world which she knew accurately. Her mind was in the state of an
intelligent man’s in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; she
would believe practically anything she was told, invent reasons for
anything she said. The shape of the earth, the history of the world,
how trains worked, or money was invested, what laws were in force,
which people wanted what, and why they wanted it, the most elementary
idea of a system in modern life—none of this had been imparted to her
by any of her professors or mistresses. But this system of education
had one great advantage. It did not teach anything, but it put no
obstacle in the way of any real talent that the pupil might chance to
have. Rachel, being musical, was allowed to learn nothing but music;
she became a fanatic about music. All the energies that might have gone
into languages, science, or literature, that might have made her
friends, or shown her the world, poured straight into music. Finding
her teachers inadequate, she had practically taught herself. At the age
of twenty-four she knew as much about music as most people do when they
are thirty; and could play as well as nature allowed her to, which, as
became daily more obvious, was a really generous allowance. If this one
definite gift was surrounded by dreams and ideas of the most
extravagant and foolish description, no one was any the wiser.

Her education being thus ordinary, her circumstances were no more out
of the common. She was an only child and had never been bullied and
laughed at by brothers and sisters. Her mother having died when she was
eleven, two aunts, the sisters of her father, brought her up, and they
lived for the sake of the air in a comfortable house in Richmond. She
was of course brought up with excessive care, which as a child was for
her health; as a girl and a young woman was for what it seems almost
crude to call her morals. Until quite lately she had been completely
ignorant that for women such things existed. She groped for knowledge
in old books, and found it in repulsive chunks, but she did not
naturally care for books and thus never troubled her head about the
censorship which was exercised first by her aunts, later by her father.
Friends might have told her things, but she had few of her own
age,—Richmond being an awkward place to reach,—and, as it happened, the
only girl she knew well was a religious zealot, who in the fervour of
intimacy talked about God, and the best ways of taking up one’s cross,
a topic only fitfully interesting to one whose mind reached other
stages at other times.

But lying in her chair, with one hand behind her head, the other
grasping the knob on the arm, she was clearly following her thoughts
intently. Her education left her abundant time for thinking. Her eyes
were fixed so steadily upon a ball on the rail of the ship that she
would have been startled and annoyed if anything had chanced to obscure
it for a second. She had begun her meditations with a shout of
laughter, caused by the following translation from _Tristan_:

In shrinking trepidation
His shame he seems to hide
While to the king his relation
He brings the corpse-like Bride.
Seems it so senseless what I say?


She cried that it did, and threw down the book. Next she had picked up
_Cowper’s Letters_, the classic prescribed by her father which had
bored her, so that one sentence chancing to say something about the
smell of broom in his garden, she had thereupon seen the little hall at
Richmond laden with flowers on the day of her mother’s funeral,
smelling so strong that now any flower-scent brought back the sickly
horrible sensation; and so from one scene she passed, half-hearing,
half-seeing, to another. She saw her Aunt Lucy arranging flowers in the
drawing-room.

“Aunt Lucy,” she volunteered, “I don’t like the smell of broom; it
reminds me of funerals.”

“Nonsense, Rachel,” Aunt Lucy replied; “don’t say such foolish things,
dear. I always think it a particularly cheerful plant.”

Lying in the hot sun her mind was fixed upon the characters of her
aunts, their views, and the way they lived. Indeed this was a subject
that lasted her hundreds of morning walks round Richmond Park, and
blotted out the trees and the people and the deer. Why did they do the
things they did, and what did they feel, and what was it all about?
Again she heard Aunt Lucy talking to Aunt Eleanor. She had been that
morning to take up the character of a servant, “And, of course, at
half-past ten in the morning one expects to find the housemaid brushing
the stairs.” How odd! How unspeakably odd! But she could not explain to
herself why suddenly as her aunt spoke the whole system in which they
lived had appeared before her eyes as something quite unfamiliar and
inexplicable, and themselves as chairs or umbrellas dropped about here
and there without any reason. She could only say with her slight
stammer, “Are you f-f-fond of Aunt Eleanor, Aunt Lucy?” to which her
aunt replied, with her nervous hen-like twitter of a laugh, “My dear
child, what questions you do ask!”

“How fond? Very fond!” Rachel pursued.

“I can’t say I’ve ever thought ‘how,’” said Miss Vinrace. “If one cares
one doesn’t think ‘how,’ Rachel,” which was aimed at the niece who had
never yet “come” to her aunts as cordially as they wished.

“But you know I care for you, don’t you, dear, because you’re your
mother’s daughter, if for no other reason, and there _are_ plenty of
other reasons”—and she leant over and kissed her with some emotion, and
the argument was spilt irretrievably about the place like a bucket of
milk.

By these means Rachel reached that stage in thinking, if thinking it
can be called, when the eyes are intent upon a ball or a knob and the
lips cease to move. Her efforts to come to an understanding had only
hurt her aunt’s feelings, and the conclusion must be that it is better
not to try. To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between
oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently. It was
far better to play the piano and forget all the rest. The conclusion
was very welcome. Let these odd men and women—her aunts, the Hunts,
Ridley, Helen, Mr. Pepper, and the rest—be symbols,—featureless but
dignified, symbols of age, of youth, of motherhood, of learning, and
beautiful often as people upon the stage are beautiful. It appeared
that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling
they felt, but that was what music was for. Reality dwelling in what
one saw and felt, but did not talk about, one could accept a system in
which things went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people,
without often troubling to think about it, except as something
superficially strange. Absorbed by her music she accepted her lot very
complacently, blazing into indignation perhaps once a fortnight, and
subsiding as she subsided now. Inextricably mixed in dreamy confusion,
her mind seemed to enter into communion, to be delightfully expanded
and combined with the spirit of the whitish boards on deck, with the
spirit of the sea, with the spirit of Beethoven Op. 112, even with the
spirit of poor William Cowper there at Olney. Like a ball of
thistledown it kissed the sea, rose, kissed it again, and thus rising
and kissing passed finally out of sight. The rising and falling of the
ball of thistledown was represented by the sudden droop forward of her
own head, and when it passed out of sight she was asleep.

Ten minutes later Mrs. Ambrose opened the door and looked at her. It
did not surprise her to find that this was the way in which Rachel
passed her mornings. She glanced round the room at the piano, at the
books, at the general mess. In the first place she considered Rachel
aesthetically; lying unprotected she looked somehow like a victim
dropped from the claws of a bird of prey, but considered as a woman, a
young woman of twenty-four, the sight gave rise to reflections. Mrs.
Ambrose stood thinking for at least two minutes. She then smiled,
turned noiselessly away and went, lest the sleeper should waken, and
there should be the awkwardness of speech between them.




CHAPTER III


Early next morning there was a sound as of chains being drawn roughly
overhead; the steady heart of the _Euphrosyne_ slowly ceased to beat;
and Helen, poking her nose above deck, saw a stationary castle upon a
stationary hill. They had dropped anchor in the mouth of the Tagus, and
instead of cleaving new waves perpetually, the same waves kept
returning and washing against the sides of the ship.

As soon as breakfast was done, Willoughby disappeared over the vessel’s
side, carrying a brown leather case, shouting over his shoulder that
every one was to mind and behave themselves, for he would be kept in
Lisbon doing business until five o’clock that afternoon.

At about that hour he reappeared, carrying his case, professing himself
tired, bothered, hungry, thirsty, cold, and in immediate need of his
tea. Rubbing his hands, he told them the adventures of the day: how he
had come upon poor old Jackson combing his moustache before the glass
in the office, little expecting his descent, had put him through such a
morning’s work as seldom came his way; then treated him to a lunch of
champagne and ortolans; paid a call upon Mrs. Jackson, who was fatter
than ever, poor woman, but asked kindly after Rachel—and O Lord, little
Jackson had confessed to a confounded piece of weakness—well, well, no
harm was done, he supposed, but what was the use of his giving orders
if they were promptly disobeyed? He had said distinctly that he would
take no passengers on this trip. Here he began searching in his pockets
and eventually discovered a card, which he planked down on the table
before Rachel. On it she read, “Mr. and Mrs. Richard Dalloway, 23
Browne Street, Mayfair.”

“Mr. Richard Dalloway,” continued Vinrace, “seems to be a gentleman who
thinks that because he was once a member of Parliament, and his wife’s
the daughter of a peer, they can have what they like for the asking.
They got round poor little Jackson anyhow. Said they must have
passages—produced a letter from Lord Glenaway, asking me as a personal
favour—overruled any objections Jackson made (I don’t believe they came
to much), and so there’s nothing for it but to submit, I suppose.”

But it was evident that for some reason or other Willoughby was quite
pleased to submit, although he made a show of growling.

The truth was that Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway had found themselves stranded
in Lisbon. They had been travelling on the Continent for some weeks,
chiefly with a view to broadening Mr. Dalloway’s mind. Unable for a
season, by one of the accidents of political life, to serve his country
in Parliament, Mr. Dalloway was doing the best he could to serve it out
of Parliament. For that purpose the Latin countries did very well,
although the East, of course, would have done better.

“Expect to hear of me next in Petersburg or Teheran,” he had said,
turning to wave farewell from the steps of the Travellers’. But a
disease had broken out in the East, there was cholera in Russia, and he
was heard of, not so romantically, in Lisbon. They had been through
France; he had stopped at manufacturing centres where, producing
letters of introduction, he had been shown over works, and noted facts
in a pocket-book. In Spain he and Mrs. Dalloway had mounted mules, for
they wished to understand how the peasants live. Are they ripe for
rebellion, for example? Mrs. Dalloway had then insisted upon a day or
two at Madrid with the pictures. Finally they arrived in Lisbon and
spent six days which, in a journal privately issued afterwards, they
described as of “unique interest.” Richard had audiences with
ministers, and foretold a crisis at no distant date, “the foundations
of government being incurably corrupt. Yet how blame, etc.”; while
Clarissa inspected the royal stables, and took several snapshots
showing men now exiled and windows now broken. Among other things she
photographed Fielding’s grave, and let loose a small bird which some
ruffian had trapped, “because one hates to think of anything in a cage
where English people lie buried,” the diary stated. Their tour was
thoroughly unconventional, and followed no meditated plan. The foreign
correspondents of the _Times_ decided their route as much as anything
else. Mr. Dalloway wished to look at certain guns, and was of opinion
that the African coast is far more unsettled than people at home were
inclined to believe. For these reasons they wanted a slow inquisitive
kind of ship, comfortable, for they were bad sailors, but not
extravagant, which would stop for a day or two at this port and at
that, taking in coal while the Dalloways saw things for themselves.
Meanwhile they found themselves stranded in Lisbon, unable for the
moment to lay hands upon the precise vessel they wanted. They heard of
the _Euphrosyne_, but heard also that she was primarily a cargo boat,
and only took passengers by special arrangement, her business being to
carry dry goods to the Amazons, and rubber home again. “By special
arrangement,” however, were words of high encouragement to them, for
they came of a class where almost everything was specially arranged, or
could be if necessary. On this occasion all that Richard did was to
write a note to Lord Glenaway, the head of the line which bears his
title; to call on poor old Jackson; to represent to him how Mrs.
Dalloway was so-and-so, and he had been something or other else, and
what they wanted was such and such a thing. It was done. They parted
with compliments and pleasure on both sides, and here, a week later,
came the boat rowing up to the ship in the dusk with the Dalloways on
board of it; in three minutes they were standing together on the deck
of the _Euphrosyne_. Their arrival, of course, created some stir, and
it was seen by several pairs of eyes that Mrs. Dalloway was a tall
slight woman, her body wrapped in furs, her head in veils, while Mr.
Dalloway appeared to be a middle-sized man of sturdy build, dressed
like a sportsman on an autumnal moor. Many solid leather bags of a rich
brown hue soon surrounded them, in addition to which Mr. Dalloway
carried a despatch box, and his wife a dressing-case suggestive of a
diamond necklace and bottles with silver tops.

“It’s so like Whistler!” she exclaimed, with a wave towards the shore,
as she shook Rachel by the hand, and Rachel had only time to look at
the grey hills on one side of her before Willoughby introduced Mrs.
Chailey, who took the lady to her cabin.

Momentary though it seemed, nevertheless the interruption was
upsetting; every one was more or less put out by it, from Mr. Grice,
the steward, to Ridley himself. A few minutes later Rachel passed the
smoking-room, and found Helen moving arm-chairs. She was absorbed in
her arrangements, and on seeing Rachel remarked confidentially:

“If one can give men a room to themselves where they will sit, it’s all
to the good. Arm-chairs are _the_ important things—” She began wheeling
them about. “Now, does it still look like a bar at a railway station?”

She whipped a plush cover off a table. The appearance of the place was
marvellously improved.

Again, the arrival of the strangers made it obvious to Rachel, as the
hour of dinner approached, that she must change her dress; and the
ringing of the great bell found her sitting on the edge of her berth in
such a position that the little glass above the washstand reflected her
head and shoulders. In the glass she wore an expression of tense
melancholy, for she had come to the depressing conclusion, since the
arrival of the Dalloways, that her face was not the face she wanted,
and in all probability never would be.

However, punctuality had been impressed on her, and whatever face she
had, she must go in to dinner.

These few minutes had been used by Willoughby in sketching to the
Dalloways the people they were to meet, and checking them upon his
fingers.

“There’s my brother-in-law, Ambrose, the scholar (I daresay you’ve
heard his name), his wife, my old friend Pepper, a very quiet fellow,
but knows everything, I’m told. And that’s all. We’re a very small
party. I’m dropping them on the coast.”

Mrs. Dalloway, with her head a little on one side, did her best to
recollect Ambrose—was it a surname?—but failed. She was made slightly
uneasy by what she had heard. She knew that scholars married any
one—girls they met in farms on reading parties; or little suburban
women who said disagreeably, “Of course I know it’s my husband you
want; not _me_.”

But Helen came in at that point, and Mrs. Dalloway saw with relief that
though slightly eccentric in appearance, she was not untidy, held
herself well, and her voice had restraint in it, which she held to be
the sign of a lady. Mr. Pepper had not troubled to change his neat ugly
suit.

“But after all,” Clarissa thought to herself as she followed Vinrace in
to dinner, “_every one’s_ interesting really.”

When seated at the table she had some need of that assurance, chiefly
because of Ridley, who came in late, looked decidedly unkempt, and took
to his soup in profound gloom.

An imperceptible signal passed between husband and wife, meaning that
they grasped the situation and would stand by each other loyally. With
scarcely a pause Mrs. Dalloway turned to Willoughby and began:

“What I find so tiresome about the sea is that there are no flowers in
it. Imagine fields of hollyhocks and violets in mid-ocean! How divine!”

“But somewhat dangerous to navigation,” boomed Richard, in the bass,
like the bassoon to the flourish of his wife’s violin. “Why, weeds can
be bad enough, can’t they, Vinrace? I remember crossing in the
_Mauretania_ once, and saying to the Captain—Richards—did you know
him?—‘Now tell me what perils you really dread most for your ship,
Captain Richards?’ expecting him to say icebergs, or derelicts, or fog,
or something of that sort. Not a bit of it. I’ve always remembered his
answer. ‘_Sedgius aquatici_,’ he said, which I take to be a kind of
duck-weed.”

Mr. Pepper looked up sharply, and was about to put a question when
Willoughby continued:

“They’ve an awful time of it—those captains! Three thousand souls on
board!”

“Yes, indeed,” said Clarissa. She turned to Helen with an air of
profundity. “I’m convinced people are wrong when they say it’s work
that wears one; it’s responsibility. That’s why one pays one’s cook
more than one’s housemaid, I suppose.”

“According to that, one ought to pay one’s nurse double; but one
doesn’t,” said Helen.

“No; but think what a joy to have to do with babies, instead of
saucepans!” said Mrs. Dalloway, looking with more interest at Helen, a
probable mother.

“I’d much rather be a cook than a nurse,” said Helen. “Nothing would
induce me to take charge of children.”

“Mothers always exaggerate,” said Ridley. “A well-bred child is no
responsibility. I’ve travelled all over Europe with mine. You just wrap
’em up warm and put ’em in the rack.”

Helen laughed at that. Mrs. Dalloway exclaimed, looking at Ridley:

“How like a father! My husband’s just the same. And then one talks of
the equality of the sexes!”

“Does one?” said Mr. Pepper.

“Oh, some do!” cried Clarissa. “My husband had to pass an irate lady
every afternoon last session who said nothing else, I imagine.”

“She sat outside the house; it was very awkward,” said Dalloway. “At
last I plucked up courage and said to her, ‘My good creature, you’re
only in the way where you are. You’re hindering me, and you’re doing no
good to yourself.’”

“And then she caught him by the coat, and would have scratched his eyes
out—” Mrs. Dalloway put in.

“Pooh—that’s been exaggerated,” said Richard. “No, I pity them, I
confess. The discomfort of sitting on those steps must be awful.”

“Serve them right,” said Willoughby curtly.

“Oh, I’m entirely with you there,” said Dalloway. “Nobody can condemn
the utter folly and futility of such behaviour more than I do; and as
for the whole agitation, well! may I be in my grave before a woman has
the right to vote in England! That’s all I say.”

The solemnity of her husband’s assertion made Clarissa grave.

“It’s unthinkable,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re a suffragist?” she
turned to Ridley.

“I don’t care a fig one way or t’other,” said Ambrose. “If any creature
is so deluded as to think that a vote does him or her any good, let him
have it. He’ll soon learn better.”

“You’re not a politician, I see,” she smiled.

“Goodness, no,” said Ridley.

“I’m afraid your husband won’t approve of me,” said Dalloway aside, to
Mrs. Ambrose. She suddenly recollected that he had been in Parliament.

“Don’t you ever find it rather dull?” she asked, not knowing exactly
what to say.

Richard spread his hands before him, as if inscriptions were to be read
in the palms of them.

“If you ask me whether I ever find it rather dull,” he said, “I am
bound to say yes; on the other hand, if you ask me what career do you
consider on the whole, taking the good with the bad, the most enjoyable
and enviable, not to speak of its more serious side, of all careers,
for a man, I am bound to say, ‘The Politician’s.’”

“The Bar or politics, I agree,” said Willoughby. “You get more run for
your money.”

“All one’s faculties have their play,” said Richard. “I may be treading
on dangerous ground; but what I feel about poets and artists in general
is this: on your own lines, you can’t be beaten—granted; but off your
own lines—puff—one has to make allowances. Now, I shouldn’t like to
think that any one had to make allowances for me.”

“I don’t quite agree, Richard,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Think of Shelley.
I feel that there’s almost everything one wants in ‘Adonais.’”

“Read ‘Adonais’ by all means,” Richard conceded. “But whenever I hear
of Shelley I repeat to myself the words of Matthew Arnold, ‘What a set!
What a set!’”

This roused Ridley’s attention. “Matthew Arnold? A detestable prig!” he
snapped.

“A prig—granted,” said Richard; “but, I think a man of the world.
That’s where my point comes in. We politicians doubtless seem to you”
(he grasped somehow that Helen was the representative of the arts) “a
gross commonplace set of people; but we see both sides; we may be
clumsy, but we do our best to get a grasp of things. Now your artists
_find_ things in a mess, shrug their shoulders, turn aside to their
visions—which I grant may be very beautiful—and _leave_ things in a
mess. Now that seems to me evading one’s responsibilities. Besides, we
aren’t all born with the artistic faculty.”

“It’s dreadful,” said Mrs. Dalloway, who, while her husband spoke, had
been thinking. “When I’m with artists I feel so intensely the delights
of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures
and music and everything beautiful, and then I go out into the streets
and the first child I meet with its poor, hungry, dirty little face
makes me turn round and say, ‘No, I _can’t_ shut myself up—I _won’t_
live in a world of my own. I should like to stop all the painting and
writing and music until this kind of thing exists no longer.’ Don’t you
feel,” she wound up, addressing Helen, “that life’s a perpetual
conflict?” Helen considered for a moment. “No,” she said. “I don’t
think I do.”

There was a pause, which was decidedly uncomfortable. Mrs. Dalloway
then gave a little shiver, and asked whether she might have her fur
cloak brought to her. As she adjusted the soft brown fur about her neck
a fresh topic struck her.

“I own,” she said, “that I shall never forget the _Antigone_. I saw it
at Cambridge years ago, and it’s haunted me ever since. Don’t you think
it’s quite the most modern thing you ever saw?” she asked Ridley. “It
seemed to me I’d known twenty Clytemnestras. Old Lady Ditchling for
one. I don’t know a word of Greek, but I could listen to it for ever—”

Here Mr. Pepper struck up:

πολλὰ τὰ δεινά, κοὐδὲν ἀν-
θρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.
τοῦτο καὶ πολιοῦ πέραν
πόντου χειμερίῳ νότῳ
χωρεῖ, περιβρυχίοισι
περῶν ὑπ᾽ οἴδμασι.


Mrs. Dalloway looked at him with compressed lips.

“I’d give ten years of my life to know Greek,” she said, when he had
done.

“I could teach you the alphabet in half an hour,” said Ridley, “and
you’d read Homer in a month. I should think it an honour to instruct
you.”

Helen, engaged with Mr. Dalloway and the habit, now fallen into
decline, of quoting Greek in the House of Commons, noted, in the great
commonplace book that lies open beside us as we talk, the fact that all
men, even men like Ridley, really prefer women to be fashionable.

Clarissa exclaimed that she could think of nothing more delightful. For
an instant she saw herself in her drawing-room in Browne Street with a
Plato open on her knees—Plato in the original Greek. She could not help
believing that a real scholar, if specially interested, could slip
Greek into her head with scarcely any trouble.

Ridley engaged her to come to-morrow.

“If only your ship is going to treat us kindly!” she exclaimed, drawing
Willoughby into play. For the sake of guests, and these were
distinguished, Willoughby was ready with a bow of his head to vouch for
the good behaviour even of the waves.

“I’m dreadfully bad; and my husband’s not very good,” sighed Clarissa.

“I am never sick,” Richard explained. “At least, I have only been
actually sick once,” he corrected himself. “That was crossing the
Channel. But a choppy sea, I confess, or still worse, a swell, makes me
distinctly uncomfortable. The great thing is never to miss a meal. You
look at the food, and you say, ‘I can’t’; you take a mouthful, and Lord
knows how you’re going to swallow it; but persevere, and you often
settle the attack for good. My wife’s a coward.”

They were pushing back their chairs. The ladies were hesitating at the
doorway.

“I’d better show the way,” said Helen, advancing.

Rachel followed. She had taken no part in the talk; no one had spoken
to her; but she had listened to every word that was said. She had
looked from Mrs. Dalloway to Mr. Dalloway, and from Mr. Dalloway back
again. Clarissa, indeed, was a fascinating spectacle. She wore a white
dress and a long glittering necklace. What with her clothes, and her
arch delicate face, which showed exquisitely pink beneath hair turning
grey, she was astonishingly like an eighteenth-century masterpiece—a
Reynolds or a Romney. She made Helen and the others look coarse and
slovenly beside her. Sitting lightly upright she seemed to be dealing
with the world as she chose; the enormous solid globe spun round this
way and that beneath her fingers. And her husband! Mr. Dalloway rolling
that rich deliberate voice was even more impressive. He seemed to come
from the humming oily centre of the machine where the polished rods are
sliding, and the pistons thumping; he grasped things so firmly but so
loosely; he made the others appear like old maids cheapening remnants.
Rachel followed in the wake of the matrons, as if in a trance; a
curious scent of violets came back from Mrs. Dalloway, mingling with
the soft rustling of her skirts, and the tinkling of her chains. As she
followed, Rachel thought with supreme self-abasement, taking in the
whole course of her life and the lives of all her friends, “She said we
lived in a world of our own. It’s true. We’re perfectly absurd.”

“We sit in here,” said Helen, opening the door of the saloon.

“You play?” said Mrs. Dalloway to Mrs. Ambrose, taking up the score of
_Tristan_ which lay on the table.

“My niece does,” said Helen, laying her hand on Rachel’s shoulder.

“Oh, how I envy you!” Clarissa addressed Rachel for the first time.
“D’you remember this? Isn’t it divine?” She played a bar or two with
ringed fingers upon the page.

“And then Tristan goes like this, and Isolde—oh!—it’s all too
thrilling! Have you been to Bayreuth?”

“No, I haven’t,” said Rachel.

“Then that’s still to come. I shall never forget my first _Parsifal_—a
grilling August day, and those fat old German women, come in their
stuffy high frocks, and then the dark theatre, and the music beginning,
and one couldn’t help sobbing. A kind man went and fetched me water, I
remember; and I could only cry on his shoulder! It caught me here” (she
touched her throat). “It’s like nothing else in the world! But where’s
your piano?”

“It’s in another room,” Rachel explained.

“But you will play to us?” Clarissa entreated. “I can’t imagine
anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to
music—only that sounds too like a schoolgirl! You know,” she said,
turning to Helen, “I don’t think music’s altogether good for people—I’m
afraid not.”

“Too great a strain?” asked Helen.

“Too emotional, somehow,” said Clarissa. “One notices it at once when a
boy or girl takes up music as a profession. Sir William Broadley told
me just the same thing. Don’t you hate the kind of attitudes people go
into over Wagner—like this—” She cast her eyes to the ceiling, clasped
her hands, and assumed a look of intensity. “It really doesn’t mean
that they appreciate him; in fact, I always think it’s the other way
round. The people who really care about an art are always the least
affected. D’you know Henry Philips, the painter?” she asked.

“I have seen him,” said Helen.

“To look at, one might think he was a successful stockbroker, and not
one of the greatest painters of the age. That’s what I like.”

“There are a great many successful stockbrokers, if you like looking at
them,” said Helen.

Rachel wished vehemently that her aunt would not be so perverse.

“When you see a musician with long hair, don’t you know instinctively
that he’s bad?” Clarissa asked, turning to Rachel. “Watts and
Joachim—they looked just like you and me.”

“And how much nicer they’d have looked with curls!” said Helen. “The
question is, are you going to aim at beauty or are you not?”

“Cleanliness!” said Clarissa, “I do want a man to look clean!”

“By cleanliness you really mean well-cut clothes,” said Helen.

“There’s something one knows a gentleman by,” said Clarissa, “but one
can’t say what it is.”

“Take my husband now, does he look like a gentleman?”

The question seemed to Clarissa in extraordinarily bad taste. “One of
the things that can’t be said,” she would have put it. She could find
no answer, but a laugh.

“Well, anyhow,” she said, turning to Rachel, “I shall insist upon your
playing to me to-morrow.”

There was that in her manner that made Rachel love her.

Mrs. Dalloway hid a tiny yawn, a mere dilation of the nostrils.

“D’you know,” she said, “I’m extraordinarily sleepy. It’s the sea air.
I think I shall escape.”

A man’s voice, which she took to be that of Mr. Pepper, strident in
discussion, and advancing upon the saloon, gave her the alarm.

“Good-night—good-night!” she said. “Oh, I know my way—do pray for calm!
Good-night!”

Her yawn must have been the image of a yawn. Instead of letting her
mouth droop, dropping all her clothes in a bunch as though they
depended on one string, and stretching her limbs to the utmost end of
her berth, she merely changed her dress for a dressing-gown, with
innumerable frills, and wrapping her feet in a rug, sat down with a
writing-pad on her knee. Already this cramped little cabin was the
dressing room of a lady of quality. There were bottles containing
liquids; there were trays, boxes, brushes, pins. Evidently not an inch
of her person lacked its proper instrument. The scent which had
intoxicated Rachel pervaded the air. Thus established, Mrs. Dalloway
began to write. A pen in her hands became a thing one caressed paper
with, and she might have been stroking and tickling a kitten as she
wrote:

Picture us, my dear, afloat in the very oddest ship you can imagine.
It’s not the ship, so much as the people. One does come across queer
sorts as one travels. I must say I find it hugely amusing. There’s the
manager of the line—called Vinrace—a nice big Englishman, doesn’t say
much—you know the sort. As for the rest—they might have come trailing
out of an old number of _Punch_. They’re like people playing croquet in
the ’sixties. How long they’ve all been shut up in this ship I don’t
know—years and years I should say—but one feels as though one had
boarded a little separate world, and they’d never been on shore, or
done ordinary things in their lives. It’s what I’ve always said about
literary people—they’re far the hardest of any to get on with. The
worst of it is, these people—a man and his wife and a niece—might have
been, one feels, just like everybody else, if they hadn’t got swallowed
up by Oxford or Cambridge or some such place, and been made cranks of.
The man’s really delightful (if he’d cut his nails), and the woman has
quite a fine face, only she dresses, of course, in a potato sack, and
wears her hair like a Liberty shopgirl’s. They talk about art, and
think us such poops for dressing in the evening. However, I can’t help
that; I’d rather die than come in to dinner without changing—wouldn’t
you? It matters ever so much more than the soup. (It’s odd how things
like that _do_ matter so much more than what’s generally supposed to
matter. I’d rather have my head cut off than wear flannel next the
skin.) Then there’s a nice shy girl—poor thing—I wish one could rake
her out before it’s too late. She has quite nice eyes and hair, only,
of course, she’ll get funny too. We ought to start a society for
broadening the minds of the young—much more useful than missionaries,
Hester! Oh, I’d forgotten there’s a dreadful little thing called
Pepper. He’s just like his name. He’s indescribably insignificant, and
rather queer in his temper, poor dear. It’s like sitting down to dinner
with an ill-conditioned fox-terrier, only one can’t comb him out, and
sprinkle him with powder, as one would one’s dog. It’s a pity,
sometimes, one can’t treat people like dogs! The great comfort is that
we’re away from newspapers, so that Richard will have a real holiday
this time. Spain wasn’t a holiday. . . .

“You coward!” said Richard, almost filling the room with his sturdy
figure.

“I did my duty at dinner!” cried Clarissa.

“You’ve let yourself in for the Greek alphabet, anyhow.”

“Oh, my dear! Who _is_ Ambrose?”

“I gather that he was a Cambridge don; lives in London now, and edits
classics.”

“Did you ever see such a set of cranks? The woman asked me if I thought
her husband looked like a gentleman!”

“It was hard to keep the ball rolling at dinner, certainly,” said
Richard. “Why is it that the women, in that class, are so much queerer
than the men?”

“They’re not half bad-looking, really—only—they’re so odd!”

They both laughed, thinking of the same things, so that there was no
need to compare their impressions.

“I see I shall have quite a lot to say to Vinrace,” said Richard. “He
knows Sutton and all that set. He can tell me a good deal about the
conditions of ship-building in the North.”

“Oh, I’m glad. The men always _are_ so much better than the women.”

“One always has something to say to a man certainly,” said Richard.
“But I’ve no doubt you’ll chatter away fast enough about the babies,
Clarice.”

“Has she got children? She doesn’t look like it somehow.”

“Two. A boy and girl.”

A pang of envy shot through Mrs. Dalloway’s heart.

“We _must_ have a son, Dick,” she said.

“Good Lord, what opportunities there are now for young men!” said
Dalloway, for his talk had set him thinking. “I don’t suppose there’s
been so good an opening since the days of Pitt.”

“And it’s yours!” said Clarissa.

“To be a leader of men,” Richard soliloquised. “It’s a fine career. My
God—what a career!”

The chest slowly curved beneath his waistcoat.

“D’you know, Dick, I can’t help thinking of England,” said his wife
meditatively, leaning her head against his chest. “Being on this ship
seems to make it so much more vivid—what it really means to be English.
One thinks of all we’ve done, and our navies, and the people in India
and Africa, and how we’ve gone on century after century, sending out
boys from little country villages—and of men like you, Dick, and it
makes one feel as if one couldn’t bear _not_ to be English! Think of
the light burning over the House, Dick! When I stood on deck just now I
seemed to see it. It’s what one means by London.”

“It’s the continuity,” said Richard sententiously. A vision of English
history, King following King, Prime Minister Prime Minister, and Law
Law had come over him while his wife spoke. He ran his mind along the
line of conservative policy, which went steadily from Lord Salisbury to
Alfred, and gradually enclosed, as though it were a lasso that opened
and caught things, enormous chunks of the habitable globe.

“It’s taken a long time, but we’ve pretty nearly done it,” he said; “it
remains to consolidate.”

“And these people don’t see it!” Clarissa exclaimed.

“It takes all sorts to make a world,” said her husband. “There would
never be a government if there weren’t an opposition.”

“Dick, you’re better than I am,” said Clarissa. “You see round, where I
only see _there_.” She pressed a point on the back of his hand.

“That’s my business, as I tried to explain at dinner.”

“What I like about you, Dick,” she continued, “is that you’re always
the same, and I’m a creature of moods.”

“You’re a pretty creature, anyhow,” he said, gazing at her with deeper
eyes.

“You think so, do you? Then kiss me.”

He kissed her passionately, so that her half-written letter slid to the
ground. Picking it up, he read it without asking leave.

“Where’s your pen?” he said; and added in his little masculine hand:

R.D. _loquitur_: Clarice has omitted to tell you that she looked
exceedingly pretty at dinner, and made a conquest by which she has
bound herself to learn the Greek alphabet. I will take this occasion of
adding that we are both enjoying ourselves in these outlandish parts,
and only wish for the presence of our friends (yourself and John, to
wit) to make the trip perfectly enjoyable as it promises to be
instructive. . . .


Voices were heard at the end of the corridor. Mrs. Ambrose was speaking
low; William Pepper was remarking in his definite and rather acid
voice, “That is the type of lady with whom I find myself distinctly out
of sympathy. She—”

But neither Richard nor Clarissa profited by the verdict, for directly
it seemed likely that they would overhear, Richard crackled a sheet of
paper.

“I often wonder,” Clarissa mused in bed, over the little white volume
of Pascal which went with her everywhere, “whether it is really good
for a woman to live with a man who is morally her superior, as Richard
is mine. It makes one so dependent. I suppose I feel for him what my
mother and women of her generation felt for Christ. It just shows that
one can’t do without _something_.” She then fell into a sleep, which
was as usual extremely sound and refreshing, but visited by fantastic
dreams of great Greek letters stalking round the room, when she woke up
and laughed to herself, remembering where she was and that the Greek
letters were real people, lying asleep not many yards away. Then,
thinking of the black sea outside tossing beneath the moon, she
shuddered, and thought of her husband and the others as companions on
the voyage. The dreams were not confined to her indeed, but went from
one brain to another. They all dreamt of each other that night, as was
natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how
strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in
mid-ocean, and see every detail of each other’s faces, and hear
whatever they chanced to say.




CHAPTER IV


Next morning Clarissa was up before anyone else. She dressed, and was
out on deck, breathing the fresh air of a calm morning, and, making the
circuit of the ship for the second time, she ran straight into the lean
person of Mr. Grice, the steward. She apologised, and at the same time
asked him to enlighten her: what were those shiny brass stands for,
half glass on the top? She had been wondering, and could not guess.
When he had done explaining, she cried enthusiastically:

“I do think that to be a sailor must be the finest thing in the world!”

“And what d’you know about it?” said Mr. Grice, kindling in a strange
manner. “Pardon me. What does any man or woman brought up in England
know about the sea? They profess to know; but they don’t.”

The bitterness with which he spoke was ominous of what was to come. He
led her off to his own quarters, and, sitting on the edge of a
brass-bound table, looking uncommonly like a sea-gull, with her white
tapering body and thin alert face, Mrs. Dalloway had to listen to the
tirade of a fanatical man. Did she realise, to begin with, what a very
small part of the world the land was? How peaceful, how beautiful, how
benignant in comparison the sea? The deep waters could sustain Europe
unaided if every earthly animal died of the plague to-morrow. Mr. Grice
recalled dreadful sights which he had seen in the richest city of the
world—men and women standing in line hour after hour to receive a mug
of greasy soup. “And I thought of the good flesh down here waiting and
asking to be caught. I’m not exactly a Protestant, and I’m not a
Catholic, but I could almost pray for the days of popery to come
again—because of the fasts.”

As he talked he kept opening drawers and moving little glass jars. Here
were the treasures which the great ocean had bestowed upon him—pale
fish in greenish liquids, blobs of jelly with streaming tresses, fish
with lights in their heads, they lived so deep.

“They have swum about among bones,” Clarissa sighed.

“You’re thinking of Shakespeare,” said Mr. Grice, and taking down a
copy from a shelf well lined with books, recited in an emphatic nasal
voice:

“Full fathom five thy father lies,


“A grand fellow, Shakespeare,” he said, replacing the volume.

Clarissa was so glad to hear him say so.

“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
match on the sole of his boot; while Willoughby expounded something,
which seemed to be of great interest to them both.

“There’s nothing like it,” she concluded. “Do tell me about the
Ambroses. Or am I asking too many questions?”

“I find you easy to talk to,” said Rachel.

The short sketch of the Ambroses was, however, somewhat perfunctory,
and contained little but the fact that Mr. Ambrose was her uncle.

“Your mother’s brother?”

When a name has dropped out of use, the lightest touch upon it tells.
Mrs. Dalloway went on:

“Are you like your mother?”

“No; she was different,” said Rachel.

She was overcome by an intense desire to tell Mrs. Dalloway things she
had never told any one—things she had not realised herself until this
moment.

“I am lonely,” she began. “I want—” She did not know what she wanted,
so that she could not finish the sentence; but her lip quivered.

But it seemed that Mrs. Dalloway was able to understand without words.

“I know,” she said, actually putting one arm round Rachel’s shoulder.
“When I was your age I wanted too. No one understood until I met
Richard. He gave me all I wanted. He’s man and woman as well.” Her eyes
rested upon Mr. Dalloway, leaning upon the rail, still talking. “Don’t
think I say that because I’m his wife—I see his faults more clearly
than I see any one else’s. What one wants in the person one lives with
is that they should keep one at one’s best. I often wonder what I’ve
done to be so happy!” she exclaimed, and a tear slid down her cheek.
She wiped it away, squeezed Rachel’s hand, and exclaimed:

“How good life is!” At that moment, standing out in the fresh breeze,
with the sun upon the waves, and Mrs. Dalloway’s hand upon her arm, it
seemed indeed as if life which had been unnamed before was infinitely
wonderful, and too good to be true.

Here Helen passed them, and seeing Rachel arm-in-arm with a comparative
stranger, looking excited, was amused, but at the same time slightly
irritated. But they were immediately joined by Richard, who had enjoyed
a very interesting talk with Willoughby and was in a sociable mood.

“Observe my Panama,” he said, touching the brim of his hat. “Are you
aware, Miss Vinrace, how much can be done to induce fine weather by
appropriate headdress? I have determined that it is a hot summer day; I
warn you that nothing you can say will shake me. Therefore I am going
to sit down. I advise you to follow my example.” Three chairs in a row
invited them to be seated.

Leaning back, Richard surveyed the waves.

“That’s a very pretty blue,” he said. “But there’s a little too much of
it. Variety is essential to a view. Thus, if you have hills you ought
to have a river; if a river, hills. The best view in the world in my
opinion is that from Boars Hill on a fine day—it must be a fine day,
mark you—A rug?—Oh, thank you, my dear . . . in that case you have also
the advantage of associations—the Past.”

“D’you want to talk, Dick, or shall I read aloud?”

Clarissa had fetched a book with the rugs.

“_Persuasion_,” announced Richard, examining the volume.

“That’s for Miss Vinrace,” said Clarissa. “She can’t bear our beloved
Jane.”

“That—if I may say so—is because you have not read her,” said Richard.
“She is incomparably the greatest female writer we possess.”

“She is the greatest,” he continued, “and for this reason: she does not
attempt to write like a man. Every other woman does; on that account, I
don’t read ’em.”

“Produce your instances, Miss Vinrace,” he went on, joining his
finger-tips. “I’m ready to be converted.”

He waited, while Rachel vainly tried to vindicate her sex from the
slight he put upon it.

“I’m afraid he’s right,” said Clarissa. “He generally is—the wretch!”

“I brought _Persuasion_,” she went on, “because I thought it was a
little less threadbare than the others—though, Dick, it’s no good
_your_ pretending to know Jane by heart, considering that she always
sends you to sleep!”

“After the labours of legislation, I deserve sleep,” said Richard.

“You’re not to think about those guns,” said Clarissa, seeing that his
eye, passing over the waves, still sought the land meditatively, “or
about navies, or empires, or anything.” So saying she opened the book
and began to read:

“‘Sir Walter Elliott, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man
who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the
_Baronetage_’—don’t you know Sir Walter?—‘There he found occupation for
an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one.’ She does write
well, doesn’t she? ‘There—’” She read on in a light humorous voice. She
was determined that Sir Walter should take her husband’s mind off the
guns of Britain, and divert him in an exquisite, quaint, sprightly, and
slightly ridiculous world. After a time it appeared that the sun was
sinking in that world, and the points becoming softer. Rachel looked up
to see what caused the change. Richard’s eyelids were closing and
opening; opening and closing. A loud nasal breath announced that he no
longer considered appearances, that he was sound asleep.

“Triumph!” Clarissa whispered at the end of a sentence. Suddenly she
raised her hand in protest. A sailor hesitated; she gave the book to
Rachel, and stepped lightly to take the message—“Mr. Grice wished to
know if it was convenient,” etc. She followed him. Ridley, who had
prowled unheeded, started forward, stopped, and, with a gesture of
disgust, strode off to his study. The sleeping politician was left in
Rachel’s charge. She read a sentence, and took a look at him. In sleep
he looked like a coat hanging at the end of a bed; there were all the
wrinkles, and the sleeves and trousers kept their shape though no
longer filled out by legs and arms. You can then best judge the age and
state of the coat. She looked him all over until it seemed to her that
he must protest.

He was a man of forty perhaps; and here there were lines round his
eyes, and there curious clefts in his cheeks. Slightly battered he
appeared, but dogged and in the prime of life.

“Sisters and a dormouse and some canaries,” Rachel murmured, never
taking her eyes off him. “I wonder, I wonder.” She ceased, her chin
upon her hand, still looking at him. A bell chimed behind them, and
Richard raised his head. Then he opened his eyes which wore for a
second the queer look of a shortsighted person’s whose spectacles are
lost. It took him a moment to recover from the impropriety of having
snored, and possibly grunted, before a young lady. To wake and find
oneself left alone with one was also slightly disconcerting.

“I suppose I’ve been dozing,” he said. “What’s happened to everyone?
Clarissa?”

“Mrs. Dalloway has gone to look at Mr. Grice’s fish,” Rachel replied.

“I might have guessed,” said Richard. “It’s a common occurrence. And
how have you improved the shining hour? Have you become a convert?”

“I don’t think I’ve read a line,” said Rachel.

“That’s what I always find. There are too many things to look at. I
find nature very stimulating myself. My best ideas have come to me out
of doors.”

“When you were walking?”

“Walking—riding—yachting—I suppose the most momentous conversations of
my life took place while perambulating the great court at Trinity. I
was at both universities. It was a fad of my father’s. He thought it
broadening to the mind. I think I agree with him. I can remember—what
an age ago it seems!—settling the basis of a future state with the
present Secretary for India. We thought ourselves very wise. I’m not
sure we weren’t. We were happy, Miss Vinrace, and we were young—gifts
which make for wisdom.”

“Have you done what you said you’d do?” she asked.

“A searching question! I answer—Yes and No. If on the one hand I have
not accomplished what I set out to accomplish—which of us does!—on the
other I can fairly say this: I have not lowered my ideal.”

He looked resolutely at a sea-gull, as though his ideal flew on the
wings of the bird.

“But,” said Rachel, “what _is_ your ideal?”

“There you ask too much, Miss Vinrace,” said Richard playfully.

She could only say that she wanted to know, and Richard was
sufficiently amused to answer.

“Well, how shall I reply? In one word—Unity. Unity of aim, of dominion,
of progress. The dispersion of the best ideas over the greatest area.”

“The English?”

“I grant that the English seem, on the whole, whiter than most men,
their records cleaner. But, good Lord, don’t run away with the idea
that I don’t see the drawbacks—horrors—unmentionable things done in our
very midst! I’m under no illusions. Few people, I suppose, have fewer
illusions than I have. Have you ever been in a factory, Miss
Vinrace!—No, I suppose not—I may say I hope not.”

As for Rachel, she had scarcely walked through a poor street, and
always under the escort of father, maid, or aunts.

“I was going to say that if you’d ever seen the kind of thing that’s
going on round you, you’d understand what it is that makes me and men
like me politicians. You asked me a moment ago whether I’d done what I
set out to do. Well, when I consider my life, there is one fact I admit
that I’m proud of; owing to me some thousands of girls in
Lancashire—and many thousands to come after them—can spend an hour
every day in the open air which their mothers had to spend over their
looms. I’m prouder of that, I own, than I should be of writing Keats
and Shelley into the bargain!”

It became painful to Rachel to be one of those who write Keats and
Shelley. She liked Richard Dalloway, and warmed as he warmed. He seemed
to mean what he said.

“I know nothing!” she exclaimed.

“It’s far better that you should know nothing,” he said paternally,
“and you wrong yourself, I’m sure. You play very nicely, I’m told, and
I’ve no doubt you’ve read heaps of learned books.”

Elderly banter would no longer check her.

“You talk of unity,” she said. “You ought to make me understand.”

“I never allow my wife to talk politics,” he said seriously. “For this
reason. It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are,
both to fight and to have ideals. If I have preserved mine, as I am
thankful to say that in great measure I have, it is due to the fact
that I have been able to come home to my wife in the evening and to
find that she has spent her day in calling, music, play with the
children, domestic duties—what you will; her illusions have not been
destroyed. She gives me courage to go on. The strain of public life is
very great,” he added.

This made him appear a battered martyr, parting every day with some of
the finest gold, in the service of mankind.

“I can’t think,” Rachel exclaimed, “how any one does it!”

“Explain, Miss Vinrace,” said Richard. “This is a matter I want to
clear up.”

His kindness was genuine, and she determined to take the chance he gave
her, although to talk to a man of such worth and authority made her
heart beat.

“It seems to me like this,” she began, doing her best first to
recollect and then to expose her shivering private visions.

“There’s an old widow in her room, somewhere, let us suppose in the
suburbs of Leeds.”

Richard bent his head to show that he accepted the widow.

“In London you’re spending your life, talking, writing things, getting
bills through, missing what seems natural. The result of it all is that
she goes to her cupboard and finds a little more tea, a few lumps of
sugar, or a little less tea and a newspaper. Widows all over the
country I admit do this. Still, there’s the mind of the widow—the
affections; those you leave untouched. But you waste you own.”

“If the widow goes to her cupboard and finds it bare,” Richard
answered, “her spiritual outlook we may admit will be affected. If I
may pick holes in your philosophy, Miss Vinrace, which has its merits,
I would point out that a human being is not a set of compartments, but
an organism. Imagination, Miss Vinrace; use your imagination; that’s
where you young Liberals fail. Conceive the world as a whole. Now for
your second point; when you assert that in trying to set the house in
order for the benefit of the young generation I am wasting my higher
capabilities, I totally disagree with you. I can conceive no more
exalted aim—to be the citizen of the Empire. Look at it in this way,
Miss Vinrace; conceive the state as a complicated machine; we citizens
are parts of that machine; some fulfil more important duties; others
(perhaps I am one of them) serve only to connect some obscure parts of
the mechanism, concealed from the public eye. Yet if the meanest screw
fails in its task, the proper working of the whole is imperilled.”

It was impossible to combine the image of a lean black widow, gazing
out of her window, and longing for some one to talk to, with the image
of a vast machine, such as one sees at South Kensington, thumping,
thumping, thumping. The attempt at communication had been a failure.

“We don’t seem to understand each other,” she said.

“Shall I say something that will make you very angry?” he replied.

“It won’t,” said Rachel.

“Well, then; no woman has what I may call the political instinct. You
have very great virtues; I am the first, I hope, to admit that; but I
have never met a woman who even saw what is meant by statesmanship. I
am going to make you still more angry. I hope that I never shall meet
such a woman. Now, Miss Vinrace, are we enemies for life?”

Vanity, irritation, and a thrusting desire to be understood, urged her
to make another attempt.

“Under the streets, in the sewers, in the wires, in the telephones,
there is something alive; is that what you mean? In things like
dust-carts, and men mending roads? You feel that all the time when you
walk about London, and when you turn on a tap and the water comes?”

“Certainly,” said Richard. “I understand you to mean that the whole of
modern society is based upon cooperative effort. If only more people
would realise that, Miss Vinrace, there would be fewer of your old
widows in solitary lodgings!”

Rachel considered.

“Are you a Liberal or are you a Conservative?” she asked.

“I call myself a Conservative for convenience sake,” said Richard,
smiling. “But there is more in common between the two parties than
people generally allow.”

There was a pause, which did not come on Rachel’s side from any lack of
things to say; as usual she could not say them, and was further
confused by the fact that the time for talking probably ran short. She
was haunted by absurd jumbled ideas—how, if one went back far enough,
everything perhaps was intelligible; everything was in common; for the
mammoths who pastured in the fields of Richmond High Street had turned
into paving stones and boxes full of ribbon, and her aunts.

“Did you say you lived in the country when you were a child?” she
asked.

Crude as her manners seemed to him, Richard was flattered. There could
be no doubt that her interest was genuine.

“I did,” he smiled.

“And what happened?” she asked. “Or do I ask too many questions?”

“I’m flattered, I assure you. But—let me see—what happened? Well,
riding, lessons, sisters. There was an enchanted rubbish heap, I
remember, where all kinds of queer things happened. Odd, what things
impress children! I can remember the look of the place to this day.
It’s a fallacy to think that children are happy. They’re not; they’re
unhappy. I’ve never suffered so much as I did when I was a child.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I didn’t get on well with my father,” said Richard shortly. “He was a
very able man, but hard. Well—it makes one determined not to sin in
that way oneself. Children never forget injustice. They forgive heaps
of things grown-up people mind; but that sin is the unpardonable sin.
Mind you—I daresay I was a difficult child to manage; but when I think
what I was ready to give! No, I was more sinned against than sinning.
And then I went to school, where I did very fairly well; and and then,
as I say, my father sent me to both universities. . . . D’you know,
Miss Vinrace, you’ve made me think? How little, after all, one can tell
anybody about one’s life! Here I sit; there you sit; both, I doubt not,
chock-full of the most interesting experiences, ideas, emotions; yet
how communicate? I’ve told you what every second person you meet might
tell you.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s the way of saying things, isn’t it,
not the things?”

“True,” said Richard. “Perfectly true.” He paused. “When I look back
over my life—I’m forty-two—what are the great facts that stand out?
What were the revelations, if I may call them so? The misery of the
poor and—” (he hesitated and pitched over) “love!”

Upon that word he lowered his voice; it was a word that seemed to
unveil the skies for Rachel.

“It’s an odd thing to say to a young lady,” he continued. “But have you
any idea what—what I mean by that? No, of course not. I don’t use the
word in a conventional sense. I use it as young men use it. Girls are
kept very ignorant, aren’t they? Perhaps it’s wise—perhaps—You _don’t_
know?”

He spoke as if he had lost consciousness of what he was saying.

“No; I don’t,” she said, scarcely speaking above her breath.

“Warships, Dick! Over there! Look!” Clarissa, released from Mr. Grice,
appreciative of all his seaweeds, skimmed towards them, gesticulating.

She had sighted two sinister grey vessels, low in the water, and bald
as bone, one closely following the other with the look of eyeless
beasts seeking their prey. Consciousness returned to Richard instantly.

“By George!” he exclaimed, and stood shielding his eyes.

“Ours, Dick?” said Clarissa.

“The Mediterranean Fleet,” he answered.

The _Euphrosyne_ was slowly dipping her flag. Richard raised his hat.
Convulsively Clarissa squeezed Rachel’s hand.

“Aren’t you glad to be English!” she said.

The warships drew past, casting a curious effect of discipline and
sadness upon the waters, and it was not until they were again invisible
that people spoke to each other naturally. At lunch the talk was all of
valour and death, and the magnificent qualities of British admirals.
Clarissa quoted one poet, Willoughby quoted another. Life on board a
man-of-war was splendid, so they agreed, and sailors, whenever one met
them, were quite especially nice and simple.

This being so, no one liked it when Helen remarked that it seemed to
her as wrong to keep sailors as to keep a Zoo, and that as for dying on
a battle-field, surely it was time we ceased to praise courage—“or to
write bad poetry about it,” snarled Pepper.

But Helen was really wondering why Rachel, sitting silent, looked so
queer and flushed.




CHAPTER V


She was not able to follow up her observations, however, or to come to
any conclusion, for by one of those accidents which are liable to
happen at sea, the whole course of their lives was now put out of
order.

Even at tea the floor rose beneath their feet and pitched too low
again, and at dinner the ship seemed to groan and strain as though a
lash were descending. She who had been a broad-backed dray-horse, upon
whose hind-quarters pierrots might waltz, became a colt in a field. The
plates slanted away from the knives, and Mrs. Dalloway’s face blanched
for a second as she helped herself and saw the potatoes roll this way
and that. Willoughby, of course, extolled the virtues of his ship, and
quoted what had been said of her by experts and distinguished
passengers, for he loved his own possessions. Still, dinner was uneasy,
and directly the ladies were alone Clarissa owned that she would be
better off in bed, and went, smiling bravely.

Next morning the storm was on them, and no politeness could ignore it.
Mrs. Dalloway stayed in her room. Richard faced three meals, eating
valiantly at each; but at the third, certain glazed asparagus swimming
in oil finally conquered him.

“That beats me,” he said, and withdrew.

“Now we are alone once more,” remarked William Pepper, looking round
the table; but no one was ready to engage him in talk, and the meal
ended in silence.

On the following day they met—but as flying leaves meet in the air.
Sick they were not; but the wind propelled them hastily into rooms,
violently downstairs. They passed each other gasping on deck; they
shouted across tables. They wore fur coats; and Helen was never seen
without a bandanna on her head. For comfort they retreated to their
cabins, where with tightly wedged feet they let the ship bounce and
tumble. Their sensations were the sensations of potatoes in a sack on a
galloping horse. The world outside was merely a violent grey tumult.
For two days they had a perfect rest from their old emotions. Rachel
had just enough consciousness to suppose herself a donkey on the summit
of a moor in a hail-storm, with its coat blown into furrows; then she
became a wizened tree, perpetually driven back by the salt Atlantic
gale.

Helen, on the other hand, staggered to Mrs. Dalloway’s door, knocked,
could not be heard for the slamming of doors and the battering of wind,
and entered.

There were basins, of course. Mrs. Dalloway lay half-raised on a
pillow, and did not open her eyes. Then she murmured, “Oh, Dick, is
that you?”

Helen shouted—for she was thrown against the washstand—“How are you?”

Clarissa opened one eye. It gave her an incredibly dissipated
appearance. “Awful!” she gasped. Her lips were white inside.

Planting her feet wide, Helen contrived to pour champagne into a
tumbler with a tooth-brush in it.

“Champagne,” she said.

“There’s a tooth-brush in it,” murmured Clarissa, and smiled; it might
have been the contortion of one weeping. She drank.

“Disgusting,” she whispered, indicating the basins. Relics of humour
still played over her face like moonshine.

“Want more?” Helen shouted. Speech was again beyond Clarissa’s reach.
The wind laid the ship shivering on her side. Pale agonies crossed Mrs.
Dalloway in waves. When the curtains flapped, grey lights puffed across
her. Between the spasms of the storm, Helen made the curtain fast,
shook the pillows, stretched the bed-clothes, and smoothed the hot
nostrils and forehead with cold scent.

“You _are_ good!” Clarissa gasped. “Horrid mess!”

She was trying to apologise for white underclothes fallen and scattered
on the floor. For one second she opened a single eye, and saw that the
room was tidy.

“That’s nice,” she gasped.

Helen left her; far, far away she knew that she felt a kind of liking
for Mrs. Dalloway. She could not help respecting her spirit and her
desire, even in the throes of sickness, for a tidy bedroom. Her
petticoats, however, rose above her knees.

Quite suddenly the storm relaxed its grasp. It happened at tea; the
expected paroxysm of the blast gave out just as it reached its climax
and dwindled away, and the ship instead of taking the usual plunge went
steadily. The monotonous order of plunging and rising, roaring and
relaxing, was interfered with, and every one at table looked up and
felt something loosen within them. The strain was slackened and human
feelings began to peep again, as they do when daylight shows at the end
of a tunnel.

“Try a turn with me,” Ridley called across to Rachel.

“Foolish!” cried Helen, but they went stumbling up the ladder. Choked
by the wind their spirits rose with a rush, for on the skirts of all
the grey tumult was a misty spot of gold. Instantly the world dropped
into shape; they were no longer atoms flying in the void, but people
riding a triumphant ship on the back of the sea. Wind and space were
banished; the world floated like an apple in a tub, and the mind of
man, which had been unmoored also, once more attached itself to the old
beliefs.

Having scrambled twice round the ship and received many sound cuffs
from the wind, they saw a sailor’s face positively shine golden. They
looked, and beheld a complete yellow circle of sun; next minute it was
traversed by sailing stands of cloud, and then completely hidden. By
breakfast the next morning, however, the sky was swept clean, the
waves, although steep, were blue, and after their view of the strange
under-world, inhabited by phantoms, people began to live among tea-pots
and loaves of bread with greater zest than ever.

Richard and Clarissa, however, still remained on the borderland. She
did not attempt to sit up; her husband stood on his feet, contemplated
his waistcoat and trousers, shook his head, and then lay down again.
The inside of his brain was still rising and falling like the sea on
the stage. At four o’clock he woke from sleep and saw the sunlight make
a vivid angle across the red plush curtains and the grey tweed
trousers. The ordinary world outside slid into his mind, and by the
time he was dressed he was an English gentleman again.

He stood beside his wife. She pulled him down to her by the lapel of
his coat, kissed him, and held him fast for a minute.

“Go and get a breath of air, Dick,” she said. “You look quite washed
out. . . . How nice you smell! . . . And be polite to that woman. She
was so kind to me.”

Thereupon Mrs. Dalloway turned to the cool side of her pillow, terribly
flattened but still invincible.

Richard found Helen talking to her brother-in-law, over two dishes of
yellow cake and smooth bread and butter.

“You look very ill!” she exclaimed on seeing him. “Come and have some
tea.”

He remarked that the hands that moved about the cups were beautiful.

“I hear you’ve been very good to my wife,” he said. “She’s had an awful
time of it. You came in and fed her with champagne. Were you among the
saved yourself?”

“I? Oh, I haven’t been sick for twenty years—sea-sick, I mean.”

“There are three stages of convalescence, I always say,” broke in the
hearty voice of Willoughby. “The milk stage, the bread-and-butter
stage, and the roast-beef stage. I should say you were at the
bread-and-butter stage.” He handed him the plate.

“Now, I should advise a hearty tea, then a brisk walk on deck; and by
dinner-time you’ll be clamouring for beef, eh?” He went off laughing,
excusing himself on the score of business.

“What a splendid fellow he is!” said Richard. “Always keen on
something.”

“Yes,” said Helen, “he’s always been like that.”

“This is a great undertaking of his,” Richard continued. “It’s a
business that won’t stop with ships, I should say. We shall see him in
Parliament, or I’m much mistaken. He’s the kind of man we want in
Parliament—the man who has done things.”

But Helen was not much interested in her brother-in-law.

“I expect your head’s aching, isn’t it?” she asked, pouring a fresh
cup.

“Well, it is,” said Richard. “It’s humiliating to find what a slave one
is to one’s body in this world. D’you know, I can never work without a
kettle on the hob. As often as not I don’t drink tea, but I must feel
that I can if I want to.”

“That’s very bad for you,” said Helen.

“It shortens one’s life; but I’m afraid, Mrs. Ambrose, we politicians
must make up our minds to that at the outset. We’ve got to burn the
candle at both ends, or—”

“You’ve cooked your goose!” said Helen brightly.

“We can’t make you take us seriously, Mrs. Ambrose,” he protested. “May
I ask how you’ve spent your time? Reading—philosophy?” (He saw the
black book.) “Metaphysics and fishing!” he exclaimed. “If I had to live
again I believe I should devote myself to one or the other.” He began
turning the pages.

“‘Good, then, is indefinable,’” he read out. “How jolly to think that’s
going on still! ‘So far as I know there is only one ethical writer,
Professor Henry Sidgwick, who has clearly recognised and stated this
fact.’ That’s just the kind of thing we used to talk about when we were
boys. I can remember arguing until five in the morning with Duffy—now
Secretary for India—pacing round and round those cloisters until we
decided it was too late to go to bed, and we went for a ride instead.
Whether we ever came to any conclusion—that’s another matter. Still,
it’s the arguing that counts. It’s things like that that stand out in
life. Nothing’s been quite so vivid since. It’s the philosophers, it’s
the scholars,” he continued, “they’re the people who pass the torch,
who keep the light burning by which we live. Being a politician doesn’t
necessarily blind one to that, Mrs. Ambrose.”

“No. Why should it?” said Helen. “But can you remember if your wife
takes sugar?”

She lifted the tray and went off with it to Mrs. Dalloway.

Richard twisted a muffler twice round his throat and struggled up on
deck. His body, which had grown white and tender in a dark room,
tingled all over in the fresh air. He felt himself a man undoubtedly in
the prime of life. Pride glowed in his eye as he let the wind buffet
him and stood firm. With his head slightly lowered he sheered round
corners, strode uphill, and met the blast. There was a collision. For a
second he could not see what the body was he had run into. “Sorry.”
“Sorry.” It was Rachel who apologised. They both laughed, too much
blown about to speak. She drove open the door of her room and stepped
into its calm. In order to speak to her, it was necessary that Richard
should follow. They stood in a whirlpool of wind; papers began flying
round in circles, the door crashed to, and they tumbled, laughing, into
chairs. Richard sat upon Bach.

“My word! What a tempest!” he exclaimed.

“Fine, isn’t it?” said Rachel. Certainly the struggle and wind had
given her a decision she lacked; red was in her cheeks, and her hair
was down.

“Oh, what fun!” he cried. “What am I sitting on? Is this your room? How
jolly!” “There—sit there,” she commanded. Cowper slid once more.

“How jolly to meet again,” said Richard. “It seems an age. _Cowper’s
Letters_? . . . Bach? . . . _Wuthering Heights_? . . . Is this where
you meditate on the world, and then come out and pose poor politicians
with questions? In the intervals of sea-sickness I’ve thought a lot of
our talk. I assure you, you made me think.”

“I made you think! But why?”

“What solitary icebergs we are, Miss Vinrace! How little we can
communicate! There are lots of things I should like to tell you
about—to hear your opinion of. Have you ever read Burke?”

“Burke?” she repeated. “Who was Burke?”

“No? Well, then I shall make a point of sending you a copy. _The Speech
on the French Revolution_—_The American Rebellion_? Which shall it be,
I wonder?” He noted something in his pocket-book. “And then you must
write and tell me what you think of it. This reticence—this
isolation—that’s what’s the matter with modern life! Now, tell me about
yourself. What are your interests and occupations? I should imagine
that you were a person with very strong interests. Of course you are!
Good God! When I think of the age we live in, with its opportunities
and possibilities, the mass of things to be done and enjoyed—why
haven’t we ten lives instead of one? But about yourself?”

“You see, I’m a woman,” said Rachel.

“I know—I know,” said Richard, throwing his head back, and drawing his
fingers across his eyes.

“How strange to be a woman! A young and beautiful woman,” he continued
sententiously, “has the whole world at her feet. That’s true, Miss
Vinrace. You have an inestimable power—for good or for evil. What
couldn’t you do—” he broke off.

“What?” asked Rachel.

“You have beauty,” he said. The ship lurched. Rachel fell slightly
forward. Richard took her in his arms and kissed her. Holding her
tight, he kissed her passionately, so that she felt the hardness of his
body and the roughness of his cheek printed upon hers. She fell back in
her chair, with tremendous beats of the heart, each of which sent black
waves across her eyes. He clasped his forehead in his hands.

“You tempt me,” he said. The tone of his voice was terrifying. He
seemed choked in fright. They were both trembling. Rachel stood up and
went. Her head was cold, her knees shaking, and the physical pain of
the emotion was so great that she could only keep herself moving above
the great leaps of her heart. She leant upon the rail of the ship, and
gradually ceased to feel, for a chill of body and mind crept over her.
Far out between the waves little black and white sea-birds were riding.
Rising and falling with smooth and graceful movements in the hollows of
the waves they seemed singularly detached and unconcerned.

“You’re peaceful,” she said. She became peaceful too, at the same time
possessed with a strange exultation. Life seemed to hold infinite
possibilities she had never guessed at. She leant upon the rail and
looked over the troubled grey waters, where the sunlight was fitfully
scattered upon the crests of the waves, until she was cold and
absolutely calm again. Nevertheless something wonderful had happened.

At dinner, however, she did not feel exalted, but merely uncomfortable,
as if she and Richard had seen something together which is hidden in
ordinary life, so that they did not like to look at each other. Richard
slid his eyes over her uneasily once, and never looked at her again.
Formal platitudes were manufactured with effort, but Willoughby was
kindled.

“Beef for Mr. Dalloway!” he shouted. “Come now—after that walk you’re
at the beef stage, Dalloway!”

Wonderful masculine stories followed about Bright and Disraeli and
coalition governments, wonderful stories which made the people at the
dinner-table seem featureless and small. After dinner, sitting alone
with Rachel under the great swinging lamp, Helen was struck by her
pallor. It once more occurred to her that there was something strange
in the girl’s behaviour.

“You look tired. Are you tired?” she asked.

“Not tired,” said Rachel. “Oh, yes, I suppose I am tired.”

Helen advised bed, and she went, not seeing Richard again. She must
have been very tired for she fell asleep at once, but after an hour or
two of dreamless sleep, she dreamt. She dreamt that she was walking
down a long tunnel, which grew so narrow by degrees that she could
touch the damp bricks on either side. At length the tunnel opened and
became a vault; she found herself trapped in it, bricks meeting her
wherever she turned, alone with a little deformed man who squatted on
the floor gibbering, with long nails. His face was pitted and like the
face of an animal. The wall behind him oozed with damp, which collected
into drops and slid down. Still and cold as death she lay, not daring
to move, until she broke the agony by tossing herself across the bed,
and woke crying “Oh!”

Light showed her the familiar things: her clothes, fallen off the
chair; the water jug gleaming white; but the horror did not go at once.
She felt herself pursued, so that she got up and actually locked her
door. A voice moaned for her; eyes desired her. All night long
barbarian men harassed the ship; they came scuffling down the passages,
and stopped to snuffle at her door. She could not sleep again.




CHAPTER VI


“That’s the tragedy of life—as I always say!” said Mrs. Dalloway.
“Beginning things and having to end them. Still, I’m not going to let
_this_ end, if you’re willing.” It was the morning, the sea was calm,
and the ship once again was anchored not far from another shore.

She was dressed in her long fur cloak, with the veils wound around her
head, and once more the rich boxes stood on top of each other so that
the scene of a few days back seemed to be repeated.

“D’you suppose we shall ever meet in London?” said Ridley ironically.
“You’ll have forgotten all about me by the time you step out there.”

He pointed to the shore of the little bay, where they could now see the
separate trees with moving branches.

“How horrid you are!” she laughed. “Rachel’s coming to see me
anyhow—the instant you get back,” she said, pressing Rachel’s arm.
“Now—you’ve no excuse!”

With a silver pencil she wrote her name and address on the flyleaf of
_Persuasion_, and gave the book to Rachel. Sailors were shouldering the
luggage, and people were beginning to congregate. There were Captain
Cobbold, Mr. Grice, Willoughby, Helen, and an obscure grateful man in a
blue jersey.

“Oh, it’s time,” said Clarissa. “Well, good-bye. I _do_ like you,” she
murmured as she kissed Rachel. People in the way made it unnecessary
for Richard to shake Rachel by the hand; he managed to look at her very
stiffly for a second before he followed his wife down the ship’s side.

The boat separating from the vessel made off towards the land, and for
some minutes Helen, Ridley, and Rachel leant over the rail, watching.
Once Mrs. Dalloway turned and waved; but the boat steadily grew smaller
and smaller until it ceased to rise and fall, and nothing could be seen
save two resolute backs.

“Well, that’s over,” said Ridley after a long silence. “We shall never
see _them_ again,” he added, turning to go to his books. A feeling of
emptiness and melancholy came over them; they knew in their hearts that
it was over, and that they had parted for ever, and the knowledge
filled them with far greater depression than the length of their
acquaintance seemed to justify. Even as the boat pulled away they could
feel other sights and sounds beginning to take the place of the
Dalloways, and the feeling was so unpleasant that they tried to resist
it. For so, too, would they be forgotten.

In much the same way as Mrs. Chailey downstairs was sweeping the
withered rose-leaves off the dressing-table, so Helen was anxious to
make things straight again after the visitors had gone. Rachel’s
obvious languor and listlessness made her an easy prey, and indeed
Helen had devised a kind of trap. That something had happened she now
felt pretty certain; moreover, she had come to think that they had been
strangers long enough; she wished to know what the girl was like,
partly of course because Rachel showed no disposition to be known. So,
as they turned from the rail, she said:

“Come and talk to me instead of practising,” and led the way to the
sheltered side where the deck-chairs were stretched in the sun. Rachel
followed her indifferently. Her mind was absorbed by Richard; by the
extreme strangeness of what had happened, and by a thousand feelings of
which she had not been conscious before. She made scarcely any attempt
to listen to what Helen was saying, as Helen indulged in commonplaces
to begin with. While Mrs. Ambrose arranged her embroidery, sucked her
silk, and threaded her needle, she lay back gazing at the horizon.

“Did you like those people?” Helen asked her casually.

“Yes,” she replied blankly.

“You talked to him, didn’t you?”

She said nothing for a minute.

“He kissed me,” she said without any change of tone.

Helen started, looked at her, but could not make out what she felt.

“M-m-m’yes,” she said, after a pause. “I thought he was that kind of
man.”

“What kind of man?” said Rachel.

“Pompous and sentimental.”

“I like him,” said Rachel.

“So you really didn’t mind?”

For the first time since Helen had known her Rachel’s eyes lit up
brightly.

“I did mind,” she said vehemently. “I dreamt. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Tell me what happened,” said Helen. She had to keep her lips from
twitching as she listened to Rachel’s story. It was poured out abruptly
with great seriousness and no sense of humour.

“We talked about politics. He told me what he had done for the poor
somewhere. I asked him all sorts of questions. He told me about his own
life. The day before yesterday, after the storm, he came in to see me.
It happened then, quite suddenly. He kissed me. I don’t know why.” As
she spoke she grew flushed. “I was a good deal excited,” she continued.
“But I didn’t mind till afterwards; when—” she paused, and saw the
figure of the bloated little man again—“I became terrified.”

From the look in her eyes it was evident she was again terrified. Helen
was really at a loss what to say. From the little she knew of Rachel’s
upbringing she supposed that she had been kept entirely ignorant as to
the relations of men with women. With a shyness which she felt with
women and not with men she did not like to explain simply what these
are. Therefore she took the other course and belittled the whole
affair.

“Oh, well,” she said, “He was a silly creature, and if I were you, I’d
think no more about it.”

“No,” said Rachel, sitting bolt upright, “I shan’t do that. I shall
think about it all day and all night until I find out exactly what it
does mean.”

“Don’t you ever read?” Helen asked tentatively.

“_Cowper’s Letters_—that kind of thing. Father gets them for me or my
Aunts.”

Helen could hardly restrain herself from saying out loud what she
thought of a man who brought up his daughter so that at the age of
twenty-four she scarcely knew that men desired women and was terrified
by a kiss. She had good reason to fear that Rachel had made herself
incredibly ridiculous.

“You don’t know many men?” she asked.

“Mr. Pepper,” said Rachel ironically.

“So no one’s ever wanted to marry you?”

“No,” she answered ingenuously.

Helen reflected that as, from what she had said, Rachel certainly would
think these things out, it might be as well to help her.

“You oughtn’t to be frightened,” she said. “It’s the most natural thing
in the world. Men will want to kiss you, just as they’ll want to marry
you. The pity is to get things out of proportion. It’s like noticing
the noises people make when they eat, or men spitting; or, in short,
any small thing that gets on one’s nerves.”

Rachel seemed to be inattentive to these remarks.

“Tell me,” she said suddenly, “what are those women in Piccadilly?”

“In Picadilly? They are prostituted,” said Helen.

“It _is_ terrifying—it _is_ disgusting,” Rachel asserted, as if she
included Helen in the hatred.

“It is,” said Helen. “But—”

“I did like him,” Rachel mused, as if speaking to herself. “I wanted to
talk to him; I wanted to know what he’d done. The women in Lancashire—”

It seemed to her as she recalled their talk that there was something
lovable about Richard, good in their attempted friendship, and
strangely piteous in the way they had parted.

The softening of her mood was apparent to Helen.

“You see,” she said, “you must take things as they are; and if you want
friendship with men you must run risks. Personally,” she continued,
breaking into a smile, “I think it’s worth it; I don’t mind being
kissed; I’m rather jealous, I believe, that Mr. Dalloway kissed you and
didn’t kiss me. Though,” she added, “he bored me considerably.”

But Rachel did not return the smile or dismiss the whole affair, as
Helen meant her to. Her mind was working very quickly, inconsistently
and painfully. Helen’s words hewed down great blocks which had stood
there always, and the light which came in was cold. After sitting for a
time with fixed eyes, she burst out:

“So that’s why I can’t walk alone!”

By this new light she saw her life for the first time a creeping
hedged-in thing, driven cautiously between high walls, here turned
aside, there plunged in darkness, made dull and crippled for ever—her
life that was the only chance she had—a thousand words and actions
became plain to her.

“Because men are brutes! I hate men!” she exclaimed.

“I thought you said you liked him?” said Helen.

“I liked him, and I liked being kissed,” she answered, as if that only
added more difficulties to her problem.

Helen was surprised to see how genuine both shock and problem were, but
she could think of no way of easing the difficulty except by going on
talking. She wanted to make her niece talk, and so to understand why
this rather dull, kindly, plausible politician had made so deep an
impression on her, for surely at the age of twenty-four this was not
natural.

“And did you like Mrs. Dalloway too?” she asked.

As she spoke she saw Rachel redden; for she remembered silly things she
had said, and also, it occurred to her that she treated this exquisite
woman rather badly, for Mrs. Dalloway had said that she loved her
husband.

“She was quite nice, but a thimble-pated creature,” Helen continued. “I
never heard such nonsense! Chitter-chatter-chitter-chatter—fish and the
Greek alphabet—never listened to a word any one said—chock-full of
idiotic theories about the way to bring up children—I’d far rather talk
to him any day. He was pompous, but he did at least understand what was
said to him.”

The glamour insensibly faded a little both from Richard and Clarissa.
They had not been so wonderful after all, then, in the eyes of a mature
person.

“It’s very difficult to know what people are like,” Rachel remarked,
and Helen saw with pleasure that she spoke more naturally. “I suppose I
was taken in.”

There was little doubt about that according to Helen, but she
restrained herself and said aloud:

“One has to make experiments.”

“And they _were_ nice,” said Rachel. “They were extraordinarily
interesting.” She tried to recall the image of the world as a live
thing that Richard had given her, with drains like nerves, and bad
houses like patches of diseased skin. She recalled his
watch-words—Unity—Imagination, and saw again the bubbles meeting in her
tea-cup as he spoke of sisters and canaries, boyhood and his father,
her small world becoming wonderfully enlarged.

“But all people don’t seem to you equally interesting, do they?” asked
Mrs. Ambrose.

Rachel explained that most people had hitherto been symbols; but that
when they talked to one they ceased to be symbols, and became—“I could
listen to them for ever!” she exclaimed. She then jumped up,
disappeared downstairs for a minute, and came back with a fat red book.

“_Who’s Who_,” she said, laying it upon Helen’s knee and turning the
pages. “It gives short lives of people—for instance: ‘Sir Roland Beal;
born 1852; parents from Moffatt; educated at Rugby; passed first into
R.E.; married 1878 the daughter of T. Fishwick; served in the
Bechuanaland Expedition 1884-85 (honourably mentioned). Clubs: United
Service, Naval and Military. Recreations: an enthusiastic curler.’”

Sitting on the deck at Helen’s feet she went on turning the pages and
reading biographies of bankers, writers, clergymen, sailors, surgeons,
judges, professors, statesmen, editors, philanthropists, merchants, and
actresses; what clubs they belonged to, where they lived, what games
they played, and how many acres they owned.

She became absorbed in the book.

Helen meanwhile stitched at her embroidery and thought over the things
they had said. Her conclusion was that she would very much like to show
her niece, if it were possible, how to live, or as she put it, how to
be a reasonable person. She thought that there must be something wrong
in this confusion between politics and kissing politicians, and that an
elder person ought to be able to help.

“I quite agree,” she said, “that people are very interesting; only—”
Rachel, putting her finger between the pages, looked up enquiringly.

“Only I think you ought to discriminate,” she ended. “It’s a pity to be
intimate with people who are—well, rather second-rate, like the
Dalloways, and to find it out later.”

“But how does one know?” Rachel asked.

“I really can’t tell you,” replied Helen candidly, after a moment’s
thought. “You’ll have to find out for yourself. But try and—Why don’t
you call me Helen?” she added. “‘Aunt’s’ a horrid name. I never liked
my Aunts.”

“I should like to call you Helen,” Rachel answered.

“D’you think me very unsympathetic?”

Rachel reviewed the points which Helen had certainly failed to
understand; they arose chiefly from the difference of nearly twenty
years in age between them, which made Mrs. Ambrose appear too humorous
and cool in a matter of such moment.

“No,” she said. “Some things you don’t understand, of course.”

“Of course,” Helen agreed. “So now you can go ahead and be a person on
your own account,” she added.

The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting
thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the
wind, flashed into Rachel’s mind, and she became profoundly excited at
the thought of living.

“I can by m-m-myself,” she stammered, “in spite of you, in spite of the
Dalloways, and Mr. Pepper, and Father, and my Aunts, in spite of
these?” She swept her hand across a whole page of statesmen and
soldiers.

“In spite of them all,” said Helen gravely. She then put down her
needle, and explained a plan which had come into her head as they
talked. Instead of wandering on down the Amazons until she reached some
sulphurous tropical port, where one had to lie within doors all day
beating off insects with a fan, the sensible thing to do surely was to
spend the season with them in their villa by the seaside, where among
other advantages Mrs. Ambrose herself would be at hand to—“After all,
Rachel,” she broke off, “it’s silly to pretend that because there’s
twenty years’ difference between us we therefore can’t talk to each
other like human beings.”

“No; because we like each other,” said Rachel.

“Yes,” Mrs. Ambrose agreed.

That fact, together with other facts, had been made clear by their
twenty minutes’ talk, although how they had come to these conclusions
they could not have said.

However they were come by, they were sufficiently serious to send Mrs.
Ambrose a day or two later in search of her brother-in-law. She found
him sitting in his room working, applying a stout blue pencil
authoritatively to bundles of filmy paper. Papers lay to left and to
right of him, there were great envelopes so gorged with papers that
they spilt papers on to the table. Above him hung a photograph of a
woman’s head. The need of sitting absolutely still before a Cockney
photographer had given her lips a queer little pucker, and her eyes for
the same reason looked as though she thought the whole situation
ridiculous. Nevertheless it was the head of an individual and
interesting woman, who would no doubt have turned and laughed at
Willoughby if she could have caught his eye; but when he looked up at
her he sighed profoundly. In his mind this work of his, the great
factories at Hull which showed like mountains at night, the ships that
crossed the ocean punctually, the schemes for combining this and that
and building up a solid mass of industry, was all an offering to her;
he laid his success at her feet; and was always thinking how to educate
his daughter so that Theresa might be glad. He was a very ambitious
man; and although he had not been particularly kind to her while she
lived, as Helen thought, he now believed that she watched him from
Heaven, and inspired what was good in him.

Mrs. Ambrose apologised for the interruption, and asked whether she
might speak to him about a plan of hers. Would he consent to leave his
daughter with them when they landed, instead of taking her on up the
Amazons?

“We would take great care of her,” she added, “and we should really
like it.”

Willoughby looked very grave and carefully laid aside his papers.

“She’s a good girl,” he said at length. “There is a likeness?”—he
nodded his head at the photograph of Theresa and sighed. Helen looked
at Theresa pursing up her lips before the Cockney photographer. It
suggested her in an absurd human way, and she felt an intense desire to
share some joke.

“She’s the only thing that’s left to me,” sighed Willoughby. “We go on
year after year without talking about these things—” He broke off. “But
it’s better so. Only life’s very hard.”

Helen was sorry for him, and patted him on the shoulder, but she felt
uncomfortable when her brother-in-law expressed his feelings, and took
refuge in praising Rachel, and explaining why she thought her plan
might be a good one.

“True,” said Willoughby when she had done. “The social conditions are
bound to be primitive. I should be out a good deal. I agreed because
she wished it. And of course I have complete confidence in you. . . .
You see, Helen,” he continued, becoming confidential, “I want to bring
her up as her mother would have wished. I don’t hold with these modern
views—any more than you do, eh? She’s a nice quiet girl, devoted to her
music—a little less of _that_ would do no harm. Still, it’s kept her
happy, and we lead a very quiet life at Richmond. I should like her to
begin to see more people. I want to take her about with me when I get
home. I’ve half a mind to rent a house in London, leaving my sisters at
Richmond, and take her to see one or two people who’d be kind to her
for my sake. I’m beginning to realise,” he continued, stretching
himself out, “that all this is tending to Parliament, Helen. It’s the
only way to get things done as one wants them done. I talked to
Dalloway about it. In that case, of course, I should want Rachel to be
able to take more part in things. A certain amount of entertaining
would be necessary—dinners, an occasional evening party. One’s
constituents like to be fed, I believe. In all these ways Rachel could
be of great help to me. So,” he wound up, “I should be very glad, if we
arrange this visit (which must be upon a business footing, mind), if
you could see your way to helping my girl, bringing her out—she’s a
little shy now,—making a woman of her, the kind of woman her mother
would have liked her to be,” he ended, jerking his head at the
photograph.

Willoughby’s selfishness, though consistent as Helen saw with real
affection for his daughter, made her determined to have the girl to
stay with her, even if she had to promise a complete course of
instruction in the feminine graces. She could not help laughing at the
notion of it—Rachel a Tory hostess!—and marvelling as she left him at
the astonishing ignorance of a father.

Rachel, when consulted, showed less enthusiasm than Helen could have
wished. One moment she was eager, the next doubtful. Visions of a great
river, now blue, now yellow in the tropical sun and crossed by bright
birds, now white in the moon, now deep in shade with moving trees and
canoes sliding out from the tangled banks, beset her. Helen promised a
river. Then she did not want to leave her father. That feeling seemed
genuine too, but in the end Helen prevailed, although when she had won
her case she was beset by doubts, and more than once regretted the
impulse which had entangled her with the fortunes of another human
being.




CHAPTER VII


From a distance the _Euphrosyne_ looked very small. Glasses were turned
upon her from the decks of great liners, and she was pronounced a
tramp, a cargo-boat, or one of those wretched little passenger steamers
where people rolled about among the cattle on deck. The insect-like
figures of Dalloways, Ambroses, and Vinraces were also derided, both
from the extreme smallness of their persons and the doubt which only
strong glasses could dispel as to whether they were really live
creatures or only lumps on the rigging. Mr. Pepper with all his
learning had been mistaken for a cormorant, and then, as unjustly,
transformed into a cow. At night, indeed, when the waltzes were
swinging in the saloon, and gifted passengers reciting, the little
ship—shrunk to a few beads of light out among the dark waves, and one
high in air upon the mast-head—seemed something mysterious and
impressive to heated partners resting from the dance. She became a ship
passing in the night—an emblem of the loneliness of human life, an
occasion for queer confidences and sudden appeals for sympathy.

On and on she went, by day and by night, following her path, until one
morning broke and showed the land. Losing its shadow-like appearance it
became first cleft and mountainous, next coloured grey and purple, next
scattered with white blocks which gradually separated themselves, and
then, as the progress of the ship acted upon the view like a
field-glass of increasing power, became streets of houses. By nine
o’clock the _Euphrosyne_ had taken up her position in the middle of a
great bay; she dropped her anchor; immediately, as if she were a
recumbent giant requiring examination, small boats came swarming about
her. She rang with cries; men jumped on to her; her deck was thumped by
feet. The lonely little island was invaded from all quarters at once,
and after four weeks of silence it was bewildering to hear human
speech. Mrs. Ambrose alone heeded none of this stir. She was pale with
suspense while the boat with mail bags was making towards them.
Absorbed in her letters she did not notice that she had left the
_Euphrosyne_, and felt no sadness when the ship lifted up her voice and
bellowed thrice like a cow separated from its calf.

“The children are well!” she exclaimed. Mr. Pepper, who sat opposite
with a great mound of bag and rug upon his knees, said, “Gratifying.”
Rachel, to whom the end of the voyage meant a complete change of
perspective, was too much bewildered by the approach of the shore to
realise what children were well or why it was gratifying. Helen went on
reading.

Moving very slowly, and rearing absurdly high over each wave, the
little boat was now approaching a white crescent of sand. Behind this
was a deep green valley, with distinct hills on either side. On the
slope of the right-hand hill white houses with brown roofs were
settled, like nesting sea-birds, and at intervals cypresses striped the
hill with black bars. Mountains whose sides were flushed with red, but
whose crowns were bald, rose as a pinnacle, half-concealing another
pinnacle behind it. The hour being still early, the whole view was
exquisitely light and airy; the blues and greens of sky and tree were
intense but not sultry. As they drew nearer and could distinguish
details, the effect of the earth with its minute objects and colours
and different forms of life was overwhelming after four weeks of the
sea, and kept them silent.

“Three hundred years odd,” said Mr. Pepper meditatively at length.

As nobody said, “What?” he merely extracted a bottle and swallowed a
pill. The piece of information that died within him was to the effect
that three hundred years ago five Elizabethan barques had anchored
where the _Euphrosyne_ now floated. Half-drawn up upon the beach lay an
equal number of Spanish galleons, unmanned, for the country was still a
virgin land behind a veil. Slipping across the water, the English
sailors bore away bars of silver, bales of linen, timbers of cedar
wood, golden crucifixes knobbed with emeralds. When the Spaniards came
down from their drinking, a fight ensued, the two parties churning up
the sand, and driving each other into the surf. The Spaniards, bloated
with fine living upon the fruits of the miraculous land, fell in heaps;
but the hardy Englishmen, tawny with sea-voyaging, hairy for lack of
razors, with muscles like wire, fangs greedy for flesh, and fingers
itching for gold, despatched the wounded, drove the dying into the sea,
and soon reduced the natives to a state of superstitious wonderment.
Here a settlement was made; women were imported; children grew. All
seemed to favour the expansion of the British Empire, and had there
been men like Richard Dalloway in the time of Charles the First, the
map would undoubtedly be red where it is now an odious green. But it
must be supposed that the political mind of that age lacked
imagination, and, merely for want of a few thousand pounds and a few
thousand men, the spark died that should have been a conflagration.
From the interior came Indians with subtle poisons, naked bodies, and
painted idols; from the sea came vengeful Spaniards and rapacious
Portuguese; exposed to all these enemies (though the climate proved
wonderfully kind and the earth abundant) the English dwindled away and
all but disappeared. Somewhere about the middle of the seventeenth
century a single sloop watched its season and slipped out by night,
bearing within it all that was left of the great British colony, a few
men, a few women, and perhaps a dozen dusky children. English history
then denies all knowledge of the place. Owing to one cause and another
civilisation shifted its centre to a spot some four or five hundred
miles to the south, and to-day Santa Marina is not much larger than it
was three hundred years ago. In population it is a happy compromise,
for Portuguese fathers wed Indian mothers, and their children
intermarry with the Spanish. Although they get their ploughs from
Manchester, they make their coats from their own sheep, their silk from
their own worms, and their furniture from their own cedar trees, so
that in arts and industries the place is still much where it was in
Elizabethan days.

The reasons which had drawn the English across the sea to found a small
colony within the last ten years are not so easily described, and will
never perhaps be recorded in history books. Granted facility of travel,
peace, good trade, and so on, there was besides a kind of
dissatisfaction among the English with the older countries and the
enormous accumulations of carved stone, stained glass, and rich brown
painting which they offered to the tourist. The movement in search of
something new was of course infinitely small, affecting only a handful
of well-to-do people. It began by a few schoolmasters serving their
passage out to South America as the pursers of tramp steamers. They
returned in time for the summer term, when their stories of the
splendours and hardships of life at sea, the humours of sea-captains,
the wonders of night and dawn, and the marvels of the place delighted
outsiders, and sometimes found their way into print. The country itself
taxed all their powers of description, for they said it was much bigger
than Italy, and really nobler than Greece. Again, they declared that
the natives were strangely beautiful, very big in stature, dark,
passionate, and quick to seize the knife. The place seemed new and full
of new forms of beauty, in proof of which they showed handkerchiefs
which the women had worn round their heads, and primitive carvings
coloured bright greens and blues. Somehow or other, as fashions do, the
fashion spread; an old monastery was quickly turned into a hotel, while
a famous line of steamships altered its route for the convenience of
passengers.

Oddly enough it happened that the least satisfactory of Helen Ambrose’s
brothers had been sent out years before to make his fortune, at any
rate to keep clear of race-horses, in the very spot which had now
become so popular. Often, leaning upon the column in the verandah, he
had watched the English ships with English schoolmasters for pursers
steaming into the bay. Having at length earned enough to take a
holiday, and being sick of the place, he proposed to put his villa, on
the slope of the mountain, at his sister’s disposal. She, too, had been
a little stirred by the talk of a new world, where there was always sun
and never a fog, which went on around her, and the chance, when they
were planning where to spend the winter out of England, seemed too good
to be missed. For these reasons she determined to accept Willoughby’s
offer of free passages on his ship, to place the children with their
grand-parents, and to do the thing thoroughly while she was about it.

Taking seats in a carriage drawn by long-tailed horses with pheasants’
feathers erect between their ears, the Ambroses, Mr. Pepper, and Rachel
rattled out of the harbour. The day increased in heat as they drove up
the hill. The road passed through the town, where men seemed to be
beating brass and crying “Water,” where the passage was blocked by
mules and cleared by whips and curses, where the women walked barefoot,
their heads balancing baskets, and cripples hastily displayed mutilated
members; it issued among steep green fields, not so green but that the
earth showed through. Great trees now shaded all but the centre of the
road, and a mountain stream, so shallow and so swift that it plaited
itself into strands as it ran, raced along the edge. Higher they went,
until Ridley and Rachel walked behind; next they turned along a lane
scattered with stones, where Mr. Pepper raised his stick and silently
indicated a shrub, bearing among sparse leaves a voluminous purple
blossom; and at a rickety canter the last stage of the way was
accomplished.

The villa was a roomy white house, which, as is the case with most
continental houses, looked to an English eye frail, ramshackle, and
absurdly frivolous, more like a pagoda in a tea-garden than a place
where one slept. The garden called urgently for the services of
gardener. Bushes waved their branches across the paths, and the blades
of grass, with spaces of earth between them, could be counted. In the
circular piece of ground in front of the verandah were two cracked
vases, from which red flowers drooped, with a stone fountain between
them, now parched in the sun. The circular garden led to a long garden,
where the gardener’s shears had scarcely been, unless now and then,
when he cut a bough of blossom for his beloved. A few tall trees shaded
it, and round bushes with wax-like flowers mobbed their heads together
in a row. A garden smoothly laid with turf, divided by thick hedges,
with raised beds of bright flowers, such as we keep within walls in
England, would have been out of place upon the side of this bare hill.
There was no ugliness to shut out, and the villa looked straight across
the shoulder of a slope, ribbed with olive trees, to the sea.

The indecency of the whole place struck Mrs. Chailey forcibly. There
were no blinds to shut out the sun, nor was there any furniture to
speak of for the sun to spoil. Standing in the bare stone hall, and
surveying a staircase of superb breadth, but cracked and carpetless,
she further ventured the opinion that there were rats, as large as
terriers at home, and that if one put one’s foot down with any force
one would come through the floor. As for hot water—at this point her
investigations left her speechless.

“Poor creature!” she murmured to the sallow Spanish servant-girl who
came out with the pigs and hens to receive them, “no wonder you hardly
look like a human being!” Maria accepted the compliment with an
exquisite Spanish grace. In Chailey’s opinion they would have done
better to stay on board an English ship, but none knew better than she
that her duty commanded her to stay.

When they were settled in, and in train to find daily occupation, there
was some speculation as to the reasons which induced Mr. Pepper to
stay, taking up his lodging in the Ambroses’ house. Efforts had been
made for some days before landing to impress upon him the advantages of
the Amazons.

“That great stream!” Helen would begin, gazing as if she saw a
visionary cascade, “I’ve a good mind to go with you myself,
Willoughby—only I can’t. Think of the sunsets and the moonrises—I
believe the colours are unimaginable.”

“There are wild peacocks,” Rachel hazarded.

“And marvellous creatures in the water,” Helen asserted.

“One might discover a new reptile,” Rachel continued.

“There’s certain to be a revolution, I’m told,” Helen urged.

The effect of these subterfuges was a little dashed by Ridley, who,
after regarding Pepper for some moments, sighed aloud, “Poor fellow!”
and inwardly speculated upon the unkindness of women.

He stayed, however, in apparent contentment for six days, playing with
a microscope and a notebook in one of the many sparsely furnished
sitting-rooms, but on the evening of the seventh day, as they sat at
dinner, he appeared more restless than usual. The dinner-table was set
between two long windows which were left uncurtained by Helen’s orders.
Darkness fell as sharply as a knife in this climate, and the town then
sprang out in circles and lines of bright dots beneath them. Buildings
which never showed by day showed by night, and the sea flowed right
over the land judging by the moving lights of the steamers. The sight
fulfilled the same purpose as an orchestra in a London restaurant, and
silence had its setting. William Pepper observed it for some time; he
put on his spectacles to contemplate the scene.

“I’ve identified the big block to the left,” he observed, and pointed
with his fork at a square formed by several rows of lights.

“One should infer that they can cook vegetables,” he added.

“An hotel?” said Helen.

“Once a monastery,” said Mr. Pepper.

Nothing more was said then, but, the day after, Mr. Pepper returned
from a midday walk, and stood silently before Helen who was reading in
the verandah.

“I’ve taken a room over there,” he said.

“You’re not going?” she exclaimed.

“On the whole—yes,” he remarked. “No private cook _can_ cook
vegetables.”

Knowing his dislike of questions, which she to some extent shared,
Helen asked no more. Still, an uneasy suspicion lurked in her mind that
William was hiding a wound. She flushed to think that her words, or her
husband’s, or Rachel’s had penetrated and stung. She was half-moved to
cry, “Stop, William; explain!” and would have returned to the subject
at luncheon if William had not shown himself inscrutable and chill,
lifting fragments of salad on the point of his fork, with the gesture
of a man pronging seaweed, detecting gravel, suspecting germs.

“If you all die of typhoid I won’t be responsible!” he snapped.

“If you die of dulness, neither will I,” Helen echoed in her heart.

She reflected that she had never yet asked him whether he had been in
love. They had got further and further from that subject instead of
drawing nearer to it, and she could not help feeling it a relief when
William Pepper, with all his knowledge, his microscope, his note-books,
his genuine kindliness and good sense, but a certain dryness of soul,
took his departure. Also she could not help feeling it sad that
friendships should end thus, although in this case to have the room
empty was something of a comfort, and she tried to console herself with
the reflection that one never knows how far other people feel the
things they might be supposed to feel.




CHAPTER VIII


The next few months passed away, as many years can pass away, without
definite events, and yet, if suddenly disturbed, it would be seen that
such months or years had a character unlike others. The three months
which had passed had brought them to the beginning of March. The
climate had kept its promise, and the change of season from winter to
spring had made very little difference, so that Helen, who was sitting
in the drawing-room with a pen in her hand, could keep the windows open
though a great fire of logs burnt on one side of her. Below, the sea
was still blue and the roofs still brown and white, though the day was
fading rapidly. It was dusk in the room, which, large and empty at all
times, now appeared larger and emptier than usual. Her own figure, as
she sat writing with a pad on her knee, shared the general effect of
size and lack of detail, for the flames which ran along the branches,
suddenly devouring little green tufts, burnt intermittently and sent
irregular illuminations across her face and the plaster walls. There
were no pictures on the walls but here and there boughs laden with
heavy-petalled flowers spread widely against them. Of the books fallen
on the bare floor and heaped upon the large table, it was only possible
in this light to trace the outline.

Mrs. Ambrose was writing a very long letter. Beginning “Dear Bernard,”
it went on to describe what had been happening in the Villa San
Gervasio during the past three months, as, for instance, that they had
had the British Consul to dinner, and had been taken over a Spanish
man-of-war, and had seen a great many processions and religious
festivals, which were so beautiful that Mrs. Ambrose couldn’t conceive
why, if people must have a religion, they didn’t all become Roman
Catholics. They had made several expeditions though none of any length.
It was worth coming if only for the sake of the flowering trees which
grew wild quite near the house, and the amazing colours of sea and
earth. The earth, instead of being brown, was red, purple, green. “You
won’t believe me,” she added, “there is no colour like it in England.”
She adopted, indeed, a condescending tone towards that poor island,
which was now advancing chilly crocuses and nipped violets in nooks, in
copses, in cosy corners, tended by rosy old gardeners in mufflers, who
were always touching their hats and bobbing obsequiously. She went on
to deride the islanders themselves. Rumours of London all in a ferment
over a General Election had reached them even out here. “It seems
incredible,” she went on, “that people should care whether Asquith is
in or Austen Chamberlain out, and while you scream yourselves hoarse
about politics you let the only people who are trying for something
good starve or simply laugh at them. When have you ever encouraged a
living artist? Or bought his best work? Why are you all so ugly and so
servile? Here the servants are human beings. They talk to one as if
they were equals. As far as I can tell there are no aristocrats.”

Perhaps it was the mention of aristocrats that reminded her of Richard
Dalloway and Rachel, for she ran on with the same penful to describe
her niece.

“It’s an odd fate that has put me in charge of a girl,” she wrote,
“considering that I have never got on well with women, or had much to
do with them. However, I must retract some of the things that I have
said against them. If they were properly educated I don’t see why they
shouldn’t be much the same as men—as satisfactory I mean; though, of
course, very different. The question is, how should one educate them.
The present method seems to me abominable. This girl, though
twenty-four, had never heard that men desired women, and, until I
explained it, did not know how children were born. Her ignorance upon
other matters as important” (here Mrs. Ambrose’s letter may not be
quoted) . . . “was complete. It seems to me not merely foolish but
criminal to bring people up like that. Let alone the suffering to them,
it explains why women are what they are—the wonder is they’re no worse.
I have taken it upon myself to enlighten her, and now, though still a
good deal prejudiced and liable to exaggerate, she is more or less a
reasonable human being. Keeping them ignorant, of course, defeats its
own object, and when they begin to understand they take it all much too
seriously. My brother-in-law really deserved a catastrophe—which he
won’t get. I now pray for a young man to come to my help; some one, I
mean, who would talk to her openly, and prove how absurd most of her
ideas about life are. Unluckily such men seem almost as rare as the
women. The English colony certainly doesn’t provide one; artists,
merchants, cultivated people—they are stupid, conventional, and
flirtatious. . . .” She ceased, and with her pen in her hand sat
looking into the fire, making the logs into caves and mountains, for it
had grown too dark to go on writing. Moreover, the house began to stir
as the hour of dinner approached; she could hear the plates being
chinked in the dining-room next door, and Chailey instructing the
Spanish girl where to put things down in vigorous English. The bell
rang; she rose, met Ridley and Rachel outside, and they all went in to
dinner.

Three months had made but little difference in the appearance either of
Ridley or Rachel; yet a keen observer might have thought that the girl
was more definite and self-confident in her manner than before. Her
skin was brown, her eyes certainly brighter, and she attended to what
was said as though she might be going to contradict it. The meal began
with the comfortable silence of people who are quite at their ease
together. Then Ridley, leaning on his elbow and looking out of the
window, observed that it was a lovely night.

“Yes,” said Helen. She added, “The season’s begun,” looking at the
lights beneath them. She asked Maria in Spanish whether the hotel was
not filling up with visitors. Maria informed her with pride that there
would come a time when it was positively difficult to buy eggs—the
shopkeepers would not mind what prices they asked; they would get them,
at any rate, from the English.

“That’s an English steamer in the bay,” said Rachel, looking at a
triangle of lights below. “She came in early this morning.”

“Then we may hope for some letters and send ours back,” said Helen.

For some reason the mention of letters always made Ridley groan, and
the rest of the meal passed in a brisk argument between husband and
wife as to whether he was or was not wholly ignored by the entire
civilised world.

“Considering the last batch,” said Helen, “you deserve beating. You
were asked to lecture, you were offered a degree, and some silly woman
praised not only your books but your beauty—she said he was what
Shelley would have been if Shelley had lived to fifty-five and grown a
beard. Really, Ridley, I think you’re the vainest man I know,” she
ended, rising from the table, “which I may tell you is saying a good
deal.”

Finding her letter lying before the fire she added a few lines to it,
and then announced that she was going to take the letters now—Ridley
must bring his—and Rachel?

“I hope you’ve written to your Aunts? It’s high time.”

The women put on cloaks and hats, and after inviting Ridley to come
with them, which he emphatically refused to do, exclaiming that Rachel
he expected to be a fool, but Helen surely knew better, they turned to
go. He stood over the fire gazing into the depths of the looking-glass,
and compressing his face into the likeness of a commander surveying a
field of battle, or a martyr watching the flames lick his toes, rather
than that of a secluded Professor.

Helen laid hold of his beard.

“Am I a fool?” she said.

“Let me go, Helen.”

“Am I a fool?” she repeated.

“Vile woman!” he exclaimed, and kissed her.

“We’ll leave you to your vanities,” she called back as they went out of
the door.

It was a beautiful evening, still light enough to see a long way down
the road, though the stars were coming out. The pillar-box was let into
a high yellow wall where the lane met the road, and having dropped the
letters into it, Helen was for turning back.

“No, no,” said Rachel, taking her by the wrist. “We’re going to see
life. You promised.”

“Seeing life” was the phrase they used for their habit of strolling
through the town after dark. The social life of Santa Marina was
carried on almost entirely by lamp-light, which the warmth of the
nights and the scents culled from flowers made pleasant enough. The
young women, with their hair magnificently swept in coils, a red flower
behind the ear, sat on the doorsteps, or issued out on to balconies,
while the young men ranged up and down beneath, shouting up a greeting
from time to time and stopping here and there to enter into amorous
talk. At the open windows merchants could be seen making up the day’s
account, and older women lifting jars from shelf to shelf. The streets
were full of people, men for the most part, who interchanged their
views of the world as they walked, or gathered round the wine-tables at
the street corner, where an old cripple was twanging his guitar
strings, while a poor girl cried her passionate song in the gutter. The
two Englishwomen excited some friendly curiosity, but no one molested
them.

Helen sauntered on, observing the different people in their shabby
clothes, who seemed so careless and so natural, with satisfaction.

“Just think of the Mall to-night!” she exclaimed at length. “It’s the
fifteenth of March. Perhaps there’s a Court.” She thought of the crowd
waiting in the cold spring air to see the grand carriages go by. “It’s
very cold, if it’s not raining,” she said. “First there are men selling
picture postcards; then there are wretched little shop-girls with round
bandboxes; then there are bank clerks in tail coats; and then—any
number of dressmakers. People from South Kensington drive up in a hired
fly; officials have a pair of bays; earls, on the other hand, are
allowed one footman to stand up behind; dukes have two, royal dukes—so
I was told—have three; the king, I suppose, can have as many as he
likes. And the people believe in it!”

Out here it seemed as though the people of England must be shaped in
the body like the kings and queens, knights and pawns of the
chessboard, so strange were their differences, so marked and so
implicitly believed in.

They had to part in order to circumvent a crowd.

“They believe in God,” said Rachel as they regained each other. She
meant that the people in the crowd believed in Him; for she remembered
the crosses with bleeding plaster figures that stood where foot-paths
joined, and the inexplicable mystery of a service in a Roman Catholic
church.

“We shall never understand!” she sighed.

They had walked some way and it was now night, but they could see a
large iron gate a little way farther down the road on their left.

“Do you mean to go right up to the hotel?” Helen asked.

Rachel gave the gate a push; it swung open, and, seeing no one about
and judging that nothing was private in this country, they walked
straight on. An avenue of trees ran along the road, which was
completely straight. The trees suddenly came to an end; the road turned
a corner, and they found themselves confronted by a large square
building. They had come out upon the broad terrace which ran round the
hotel and were only a few feet distant from the windows. A row of long
windows opened almost to the ground. They were all of them uncurtained,
and all brilliantly lighted, so that they could see everything inside.
Each window revealed a different section of the life of the hotel. They
drew into one of the broad columns of shadow which separated the
windows and gazed in. They found themselves just outside the
dining-room. It was being swept; a waiter was eating a bunch of grapes
with his leg across the corner of a table. Next door was the kitchen,
where they were washing up; white cooks were dipping their arms into
cauldrons, while the waiters made their meal voraciously off broken
meats, sopping up the gravy with bits of crumb. Moving on, they became
lost in a plantation of bushes, and then suddenly found themselves
outside the drawing-room, where the ladies and gentlemen, having dined
well, lay back in deep arm-chairs, occasionally speaking or turning
over the pages of magazines. A thin woman was flourishing up and down
the piano.

“What is a dahabeeyah, Charles?” the distinct voice of a widow, seated
in an arm-chair by the window, asked her son.

It was the end of the piece, and his answer was lost in the general
clearing of throats and tapping of knees.

“They’re all old in this room,” Rachel whispered.

Creeping on, they found that the next window revealed two men in
shirt-sleeves playing billiards with two young ladies.

“He pinched my arm!” the plump young woman cried, as she missed her
stroke.

“Now you two—no ragging,” the young man with the red face reproved
them, who was marking.

“Take care or we shall be seen,” whispered Helen, plucking Rachel by
the arm. Incautiously her head had risen to the middle of the window.

Turning the corner they came to the largest room in the hotel, which
was supplied with four windows, and was called the Lounge, although it
was really a hall. Hung with armour and native embroideries, furnished
with divans and screens, which shut off convenient corners, the room
was less formal than the others, and was evidently the haunt of youth.
Signor Rodriguez, whom they knew to be the manager of the hotel, stood
quite near them in the doorway surveying the scene—the gentlemen
lounging in chairs, the couples leaning over coffee-cups, the game of
cards in the centre under profuse clusters of electric light. He was
congratulating himself upon the enterprise which had turned the
refectory, a cold stone room with pots on trestles, into the most
comfortable room in the house. The hotel was very full, and proved his
wisdom in decreeing that no hotel can flourish without a lounge.

The people were scattered about in couples or parties of four, and
either they were actually better acquainted, or the informal room made
their manners easier. Through the open window came an uneven humming
sound like that which rises from a flock of sheep pent within hurdles
at dusk. The card-party occupied the centre of the foreground.

Helen and Rachel watched them play for some minutes without being able
to distinguish a word. Helen was observing one of the men intently. He
was a lean, somewhat cadaverous man of about her own age, whose profile
was turned to them, and he was the partner of a highly-coloured girl,
obviously English by birth.

Suddenly, in the strange way in which some words detach themselves from
the rest, they heard him say quite distinctly:—

“All you want is practice, Miss Warrington; courage and practice—one’s
no good without the other.”

“Hughling Elliot! Of course!” Helen exclaimed. She ducked her head
immediately, for at the sound of his name he looked up. The game went
on for a few minutes, and was then broken up by the approach of a
wheeled chair, containing a voluminous old lady who paused by the table
and said:—

“Better luck to-night, Susan?”

“All the luck’s on our side,” said a young man who until now had kept
his back turned to the window. He appeared to be rather stout, and had
a thick crop of hair.

“Luck, Mr. Hewet?” said his partner, a middle-aged lady with
spectacles. “I assure you, Mrs. Paley, our success is due solely to our
brilliant play.”

“Unless I go to bed early I get practically no sleep at all,” Mrs.
Paley was heard to explain, as if to justify her seizure of Susan, who
got up and proceeded to wheel the chair to the door.

“They’ll get some one else to take my place,” she said cheerfully. But
she was wrong. No attempt was made to find another player, and after
the young man had built three stories of a card-house, which fell down,
the players strolled off in different directions.

Mr. Hewet turned his full face towards the window. They could see that
he had large eyes obscured by glasses; his complexion was rosy, his
lips clean-shaven; and, seen among ordinary people, it appeared to be
an interesting face. He came straight towards them, but his eyes were
fixed not upon the eavesdroppers but upon a spot where the curtain hung
in folds.

“Asleep?” he said.

Helen and Rachel started to think that some one had been sitting near
to them unobserved all the time. There were legs in the shadow. A
melancholy voice issued from above them.

“Two women,” it said.

A scuffling was heard on the gravel. The women had fled. They did not
stop running until they felt certain that no eye could penetrate the
darkness and the hotel was only a square shadow in the distance, with
red holes regularly cut in it.




CHAPTER IX


An hour passed, and the downstairs rooms at the hotel grew dim and were
almost deserted, while the little box-like squares above them were
brilliantly irradiated. Some forty or fifty people were going to bed.
The thump of jugs set down on the floor above could be heard and the
clink of china, for there was not as thick a partition between the
rooms as one might wish, so Miss Allan, the elderly lady who had been
playing bridge, determined, giving the wall a smart rap with her
knuckles. It was only matchboard, she decided, run up to make many
little rooms of one large one. Her grey petticoats slipped to the
ground, and, stooping, she folded her clothes with neat, if not loving
fingers, screwed her hair into a plait, wound her father’s great gold
watch, and opened the complete works of Wordsworth. She was reading the
“Prelude,” partly because she always read the “Prelude” abroad, and
partly because she was engaged in writing a short _Primer of English
Literature_—_Beowulf to Swinburne_—which would have a paragraph on
Wordsworth. She was deep in the fifth book, stopping indeed to pencil a
note, when a pair of boots dropped, one after another, on the floor
above her. She looked up and speculated. Whose boots were they, she
wondered. She then became aware of a swishing sound next door—a woman,
clearly, putting away her dress. It was succeeded by a gentle tapping
sound, such as that which accompanies hair-dressing. It was very
difficult to keep her attention fixed upon the “Prelude.” Was it Susan
Warrington tapping? She forced herself, however, to read to the end of
the book, when she placed a mark between the pages, sighed contentedly,
and then turned out the light.

Very different was the room through the wall, though as like in shape
as one egg-box is like another. As Miss Allan read her book, Susan
Warrington was brushing her hair. Ages have consecrated this hour, and
the most majestic of all domestic actions, to talk of love between
women; but Miss Warrington being alone could not talk; she could only
look with extreme solicitude at her own face in the glass. She turned
her head from side to side, tossing heavy locks now this way now that;
and then withdrew a pace or two, and considered herself seriously.

“I’m nice-looking,” she determined. “Not pretty—possibly,” she drew
herself up a little. “Yes—most people would say I was handsome.”

She was really wondering what Arthur Venning would say she was. Her
feeling about him was decidedly queer. She would not admit to herself
that she was in love with him or that she wanted to marry him, yet she
spent every minute when she was alone in wondering what he thought of
her, and in comparing what they had done to-day with what they had done
the day before.

“He didn’t ask me to play, but he certainly followed me into the hall,”
she meditated, summing up the evening. She was thirty years of age, and
owing to the number of her sisters and the seclusion of life in a
country parsonage had as yet had no proposal of marriage. The hour of
confidences was often a sad one, and she had been known to jump into
bed, treating her hair unkindly, feeling herself overlooked by life in
comparison with others. She was a big, well-made woman, the red lying
upon her cheeks in patches that were too well defined, but her serious
anxiety gave her a kind of beauty.

She was just about to pull back the bed-clothes when she exclaimed,
“Oh, but I’m forgetting,” and went to her writing-table. A brown volume
lay there stamped with the figure of the year. She proceeded to write
in the square ugly hand of a mature child, as she wrote daily year
after year, keeping the diaries, though she seldom looked at them.

“A.M.—Talked to Mrs. H. Elliot about country neighbours. She knows the
Manns; also the Selby-Carroways. How small the world is! Like her. Read
a chapter of _Miss Appleby’s Adventure_ to Aunt E. P.M.—Played
lawn-tennis with Mr. Perrott and Evelyn M. Don’t _like_ Mr. P. Have a
feeling that he is not ‘quite,’ though clever certainly. Beat them. Day
splendid, view wonderful. One gets used to no trees, though much too
bare at first. Cards after dinner. Aunt E. cheerful, though twingy, she
says. Mem.: _ask about damp sheets_.”

She knelt in prayer, and then lay down in bed, tucking the blankets
comfortably about her, and in a few minutes her breathing showed that
she was asleep. With its profoundly peaceful sighs and hesitations it
resembled that of a cow standing up to its knees all night through in
the long grass.

A glance into the next room revealed little more than a nose, prominent
above the sheets. Growing accustomed to the darkness, for the windows
were open and showed grey squares with splinters of starlight, one
could distinguish a lean form, terribly like the body of a dead person,
the body indeed of William Pepper, asleep too. Thirty-six,
thirty-seven, thirty-eight—here were three Portuguese men of business,
asleep presumably, since a snore came with the regularity of a great
ticking clock. Thirty-nine was a corner room, at the end of the
passage, but late though it was—“One” struck gently downstairs—a line
of light under the door showed that some one was still awake.

“How late you are, Hugh!” a woman, lying in bed, said in a peevish but
solicitous voice. Her husband was brushing his teeth, and for some
moments did not answer.

“You should have gone to sleep,” he replied. “I was talking to
Thornbury.”

“But you know that I never can sleep when I’m waiting for you,” she
said.

To that he made no answer, but only remarked, “Well then, we’ll turn
out the light.” They were silent.

The faint but penetrating pulse of an electric bell could now be heard
in the corridor. Old Mrs. Paley, having woken hungry but without her
spectacles, was summoning her maid to find the biscuit-box. The maid
having answered the bell, drearily respectful even at this hour though
muffled in a mackintosh, the passage was left in silence. Downstairs
all was empty and dark; but on the upper floor a light still burnt in
the room where the boots had dropped so heavily above Miss Allan’s
head. Here was the gentleman who, a few hours previously, in the shade
of the curtain, had seemed to consist entirely of legs. Deep in an
arm-chair he was reading the third volume of Gibbon’s _History of the
Decline and Fall of Rome_ by candle-light. As he read he knocked the
ash automatically, now and again, from his cigarette and turned the
page, while a whole procession of splendid sentences entered his
capacious brow and went marching through his brain in order. It seemed
likely that this process might continue for an hour or more, until the
entire regiment had shifted its quarters, had not the door opened, and
the young man, who was inclined to be stout, come in with large naked
feet.

“Oh, Hirst, what I forgot to say was—”

“Two minutes,” said Hirst, raising his finger.

He safely stowed away the last words of the paragraph.

“What was it you forgot to say?” he asked.

“D’you think you _do_ make enough allowance for feelings?” asked Mr.
Hewet. He had again forgotten what he had meant to say.

After intense contemplation of the immaculate Gibbon Mr. Hirst smiled
at the question of his friend. He laid aside his book and considered.

“I should call yours a singularly untidy mind,” he 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/144