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.