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.