The Voyage Out (34 page)

The sun was beginning to go down, and a change had come over the mountains, as if they were robbed of their earthly substance, and composed merely of intense blue mist. Long thin clouds of flamingo red, with edges like the edges of curled ostrich feathers, lay up and down the sky at different altitudes. The roofs of the town seemed to have sunk lower than usual; the cypresses appeared very black between the roofs, and the roofs themselves were brown
and white. As usual in the evening, single cries and single bells became audible rising from beneath.

St. John stopped suddenly.

“Well, you must take the responsibility,” he said. “I’ve made up my mind; I shall go to the Bar.”

His words were very serious, almost emotional; they recalled Helen after a second’s hesitation from her dream.

“I’m sure you’re right,” she said warmly, and shook the hand he held out. “You’ll be a great man, I’m certain.”

Then, as if to make him look at the scene, she swept her hand round the immense circumference of the view. From the sea, over the roofs of the town, across the crests of the mountains, over the river and the plain, and again across the crests of the mountains it swept until it reached the villa, the garden, the magnolia-tree, and the figures of Hirst and herself standing together, when it dropped to her side.

Hewet and Rachel had long ago reached the particular place on the edge of the cliff where, looking down into the sea, you might chance on jelly-fish and dolphins. Looking the other way, the vast expanse of land gave them a sensation which is given by no view, however extended, in England; the villages and the hills there having names, and the farthest horizon of hills as often as not dipping and showing a line of mist which is the sea; here the view was one of infinite sun-dried earth, earth pointed in pinnacles, heaped in vast barriers, earth widening and spreading away and away like the immense floor of the sea, earth chequered by day and by night, and partitioned into different lands, where famous cities were founded, and the races of men changed from dark savages to white civilised men, and back to dark savages again. Perhaps their English blood made this prospect uncomfortably impersonal and hostile to them, for having once turned their faces that way they next turned them to the sea, and for the rest of the time sat looking at the sea. The sea, though it was a thin and sparkling water here, which seemed incapable of surge or anger, eventually narrowed itself, clouded its pure tint with grey, and swirled through narrow channels and dashed in a shiver of broken waters against massive granite rocks. It
was this sea that flowed up to the mouth of the Thames; and the Thames washed the roots of the city of London.

Hewet’s thoughts had followed some such course as this, for the first thing he said as they stood on the edge of the cliff was—

“I’d like to be in England!”

Rachel lay down on her elbow, and parted the tall grasses which grew on the edge, so that she might have a clear view. The water was very calm; rocking up and down at the base of the cliff, and so clear that one could see the red of the stones at the bottom of it. So it had been at the birth of the world, and so it had remained ever since. Probably no human being had ever broken that water with boat or with body. Obeying some impulse, she determined to mar that eternity of peace, and threw the largest pebble she could find. It struck the water, and the ripples spread out and out. Hewet looked down too.

“It’s wonderful,” he said, as they widened and ceased. The freshness and the newness seemed to him wonderful. He threw a pebble next. There was scarcely any sound.

“But England,” Rachel murmured in the absorbed tone of one whose eyes are concentrated upon some sight. “What d’you want with England?”

“My friends chiefly,” he said, “and all the things one does.”

He could look at Rachel without her noticing it. She was still absorbed in the water and the exquisitely pleasant sensations which a little depth of the sea washing over rocks suggests. He noticed that she was wearing a dress of deep blue colour, made of a soft thin cotton stuff, which clung to the shape of her body. It was a body with the angles and hollows of a young woman’s body not yet developed, but in no way distorted, and thus interesting and even lovable. Raising his eyes Hewet observed her head; she had taken her hat off, and the face rested on her hand. As she looked down into the sea, her lips were slightly parted. The expression was one of childlike intentness, as if she were watching for a fish to swim past over the clear red rocks. Nevertheless her twenty-four years of life had given her a look of reserve. Her hand, which lay on the ground, the fingers curling slightly in, was well shaped and competent; the
square-tipped and nervous fingers were the fingers of a musician. With something like anguish Hewet realised that, far from being unattractive, her body was very attractive to him. She looked up suddenly. Her eyes were full of eagerness and interest.

“You write novels?” she asked.

For the moment he could not think what he was saying. He was overcome with the desire to hold her in his arms.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “That is, I want to write them.”

She would not take her large grey eyes off his face.

“Novels,” she repeated. “Why do you write novels? You ought to write music. Music, you see”—she shifted her eyes, and became less desirable as her brain began to work, inflicting a certain change upon her face—“music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once. With writing it seems to me there’s so much”—she paused for an expression, and rubbed her fingers in the earth—“scratching on the matchbox. Most of the time when I was reading Gibbon this afternoon I was horribly, oh infernally, damnably bored!” She gave a shake of laughter, looking at Hewet, who laughed too.

“
I
shan’t lend you books,” he remarked.

“Why is it,” Rachel continued, “that I can laugh at Mr. Hirst to you, but not to his face? At tea I was completely overwhelmed, not by his ugliness—by his mind.” She enclosed a circle in the air with her hands. She realised with a great sense of comfort how easily she could talk to Hewet, those thorns or ragged corners which tear the surface of some relationships being smoothed away.

“So I observed,” said Hewet. “That’s a thing that never ceases to amaze me.” He had recovered his composure to such an extent that he could light and smoke a cigarette, and feeling her ease, became happy and easy himself.

“The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women, have for men” he went on. “I believe we must have the sort of power over you that we’re said to have over horses. They see us three times as big as we are or they’d never obey us. For that very reason, I’m inclined to doubt that you’ll ever do anything even
when you have the vote.” He looked at her reflectively. She appeared very smooth and sensitive and young. “It’ll take at least six generations before you’re sufficiently thick-skinned to go into law courts and business offices. Consider what a bully the ordinary man is,” he continued, “the ordinary hard-working, rather ambitious solicitor or man of business with a family to bring up and a certain position to maintain. And then, of course, the daughters have to give way to the sons; the sons have to be educated; they have to bully and shove for their wives and families, and so it all comes over again. And meanwhile there are the women in the background.… Do you really think that the vote will do you any good?”

“The vote?” Rachel repeated. She had to visualise it as a little bit of paper which she dropped into a box before she understood his question, and looking at each other they smiled at something absurd in the question.

“Not to me,” she said. “But I play the piano.… Are men really like that?” she asked, returning to the question that interested her. “I’m not afraid of you.” She looked at him easily.

“Oh, I’m different,” Hewet replied. “I’ve got between six and seven hundred a year of my own. And then no one takes a novelist seriously, thank heavens. There’s no doubt it helps to make up for the drudgery of a profession if a man’s taken very, very seriously by every one—if he gets appointments, and has offices and a title, and lots of letters after his name, and bits of ribbon and degrees. I don’t grudge it ’em, though sometimes it comes over me—what an amazing concoction! What a miracle the masculine conception of life is—judges, civil servants, army, navy, Houses of Parliament, lord mayors—what a world we’ve made of it! Look at Hirst now. I assure you,” he said, “not a day’s passed since we came here without a discussion as to whether he’s to stay on at Cambridge or to go to the Bar. It’s his career—his sacred career. And if I’ve heard it twenty times, I’m sure his mother and sister have heard it five hundred times. Can’t you imagine the family conclaves, and the sister told to run out and feed the rabbits because St. John must have the schoolroom to himself—‘St. John’s working,’ ‘St. John wants his tea
brought to him.’ Don’t you know the kind of thing? No wonder that St. John thinks it a matter of considerable importance. It is too. He has to earn his living. But St. John’s sister—” Hewet puffed in silence. “No one takes her seriously, poor dear. She feeds the rabbits.”

“Yes,” said Rachel. “I’ve fed rabbits for twenty-four years; it seems odd now.” She looked meditative, and Hewet, who had been talking much at random and instinctively adopting the feminine point of view, saw that she would now talk about herself, which was what he wanted, for so they might come to know each other.

She looked back meditatively upon her past life.

“How do you spend your day?” he asked.

She meditated still. When she thought of their day it seemed to her that it was cut into four pieces by their meals. These divisions were absolutely rigid, the contents of the day having to accommodate themselves within the four rigid bars. Looking back at her life, that was what she saw.

“Breakfast nine; luncheon one; tea five; dinner eight,” she said.

“Well,” said Hewet, “what d’you do in the morning?”

“I used to play the piano for hours and hours.”

“And after luncheon?”

“Then I went shopping with one of my aunts. Or we went to see some one, or we took a message; or we did something that had to be done—the taps might be leaking. They visit the poor a good deal—old charwomen with bad legs, women who want tickets for hospitals. Or I used to walk in the park by myself. And after tea people sometimes called; or in summer we sat in the garden or played croquet; in winter I read aloud, while they worked; after dinner I played the piano and they wrote letters. If father was at home we had friends of his to dinner, and about once a month we went up to the play. Every now and then we dined out; sometimes I went to a dance in London, but that was difficult because of getting back. The people we saw were old family friends, and relations, but we didn’t see many people. There was the clergyman, Mr. Pepper, and the Hunts. Father generally wanted to be quiet when he came home, because he works very hard at Hull. Also my aunts aren’t
very strong. A house takes up a lot of time if you do it properly. Our servants were always bad, and so Aunt Lucy used to do a good deal in the kitchen, and Aunt Clara, I think, spent most of the morning dusting the drawing-room and going through the linen and silver. Then there were the dogs. They had to be exercised, besides being washed and brushed. Now Sandy’s dead, but Aunt Clara has a very old cockatoo that came from India. Everything in our house,” she exclaimed, “comes from somewhere! It’s full of old furniture, not really old, Victorian, things mother’s family had or father’s family had, which they didn’t like to get rid of, I suppose, though we’ve really no room for them. It’s rather a nice house,” she continued, “except that it’s a little dingy—dull I should say.” She called up before her eyes a vision of the drawing-room at home; it was a large oblong room, with a square window opening on the garden. Green plush chairs stood against the wall; there was a heavy carved book-case, with glass doors, and a general impression of faded sofa covers, large spaces of pale green, and baskets with pieces of wool-work dropping out of them. Photographs from old Italian masterpieces hung on the walls, and views of Venetian bridges and Swedish waterfalls which members of the family had seen years ago. There were also one or two portraits of fathers and grandmothers, and an engraving of John Stuart Mill,
¹
after the picture by Watts. It was a room without definite character, being neither typically and openly hideous, nor strenuously artistic, nor really comfortable. Rachel roused herself from the contemplation of this familiar picture.

“But this isn’t very interesting for you.”

“Good Lord!” Hewet exclaimed, “I’ve never been so much interested in my life.” She then realised that while she had been thinking of Richmond, his eyes had never left her face. The knowledge of this excited her.

“Go on, please go on,” he urged. “Let’s imagine it’s a Wednesday. You’re all at luncheon. You sit there, and Aunt Lucy there, and Aunt Clara here;” he arranged three pebbles on the grass between them.

“Aunt Clara carves the neck of lamb,” Rachel continued. She fixed her gaze upon the pebbles. “There’s a very ugly yellow china
stand in front of me, called a dumb waiter, on which are three dishes, one for biscuits, one for butter, and one for cheese. There’s a pot of ferns. Then there’s Blanche the maid, who snuffles because of her nose. We talk—oh yes, it’s Aunt Lucy’s afternoon at Walworth, so we’re rather quick over luncheon. She goes off. She has a purple bag, and a black notebook. Aunt Clara has what they call a G.F.S. meeting in the drawing-room on Wednesday, so I take the dogs out. I go up Richmond Hill, along the terrace, into the park. It’s the 18th of April—the same day as it is here. It’s spring in England. The ground is rather damp. However, I cross the road and get on to the grass and we walk along, and I sing as I always do when I’m alone, until we come to the open place where you can see the whole of London beneath you on a clear day. Hampstead Church spire there, Westminster Cathedral over there, and factory chimneys about here. There’s generally a haze over the low parts of London; but it’s often blue over the park when London’s in a mist. It’s the open place that the balloons cross going over to Hurlingham. They’re pale yellow. Well, then, it smells very good, particularly if they happen to be burning wood in the keeper’s lodge which is there. I could tell you now how to get from place to place, and exactly what trees you’d pass, and where you’d cross the roads. You see, I played there when I was small. Spring is good, but it’s best in the autumn when the deer are barking; then it gets dusky, and I go back through the streets, and you can’t see people properly; they come past very quick, you just see their faces and then they’re gone—that’s what I like—and no one knows in the least what you’re doing——”