But Hewet need not have increased his torments by imagining that Hirst
was still talking to Rachel. The party very soon broke up, the
Flushings going in one direction, Hirst in another, and Rachel
remaining in the hall, pulling the illustrated papers about, turning
from one to another, her movements expressing the unformed restless
desire in her mind. She did not know whether to go or to stay, though
Mrs. Flushing had commanded her to appear at tea. The hall was empty,
save for Miss Willett who was playing scales with her fingers upon a
sheet of sacred music, and the Carters, an opulent couple who disliked
the girl, because her shoe laces were untied, and she did not look
sufficiently cheery, which by some indirect process of thought led them
to think that she would not like them. Rachel certainly would not have
liked them, if she had seen them, for the excellent reason that Mr.
Carter waxed his moustache, and Mrs. Carter wore bracelets, and they
were evidently the kind of people who would not like her; but she was
too much absorbed by her own restlessness to think or to look.
She was turning over the slippery pages of an American magazine, when
the hall door swung, a wedge of light fell upon the floor, and a small
white figure upon whom the light seemed focussed, made straight across
the room to her.
“What! You here?” Evelyn exclaimed. “Just caught a glimpse of you at
lunch; but you wouldn’t condescend to look at _me_.”
It was part of Evelyn’s character that in spite of many snubs which she
received or imagined, she never gave up the pursuit of people she
wanted to know, and in the long run generally succeeded in knowing them
and even in making them like her.
She looked round her. “I hate this place. I hate these people,” she
said. “I wish you’d come up to my room with me. I do want to talk to
you.”
As Rachel had no wish to go or to stay, Evelyn took her by the wrist
and drew her out of the hall and up the stairs. As they went upstairs
two steps at a time, Evelyn, who still kept hold of Rachel’s hand,
ejaculated broken sentences about not caring a hang what people said.
“Why should one, if one knows one’s right? And let ’em all go to
blazes! Them’s my opinions!”
She was in a state of great excitement, and the muscles of her arms
were twitching nervously. It was evident that she was only waiting for
the door to shut to tell Rachel all about it. Indeed, directly they
were inside her room, she sat on the end of the bed and said, “I
suppose you think I’m mad?”
Rachel was not in the mood to think clearly about any one’s state of
mind. She was however in the mood to say straight out whatever occurred
to her without fear of the consequences.
“Somebody’s proposed to you,” she remarked.
“How on earth did you guess that?” Evelyn exclaimed, some pleasure
mingling with her surprise. “Do as I look as if I’d just had a
proposal?”
“You look as if you had them every day,” Rachel replied.
“But I don’t suppose I’ve had more than you’ve had,” Evelyn laughed
rather insincerely.
“I’ve never had one.”
“But you will—lots—it’s the easiest thing in the world—But that’s not
what’s happened this afternoon exactly. It’s—Oh, it’s a muddle, a
detestable, horrible, disgusting muddle!”
She went to the wash-stand and began sponging her cheeks with cold
water; for they were burning hot. Still sponging them and trembling
slightly she turned and explained in the high pitched voice of nervous
excitement: “Alfred Perrott says I’ve promised to marry him, and I say
I never did. Sinclair says he’ll shoot himself if I don’t marry him,
and I say, ‘Well, shoot yourself!’ But of course he doesn’t—they never
do. And Sinclair got hold of me this afternoon and began bothering me
to give an answer, and accusing me of flirting with Alfred Perrott, and
told me I’d no heart, and was merely a Siren, oh, and quantities of
pleasant things like that. So at last I said to him, ‘Well, Sinclair,
you’ve said enough now. You can just let me go.’ And then he caught me
and kissed me—the disgusting brute—I can still feel his nasty hairy
face just there—as if he’d any right to, after what he’d said!”
She sponged a spot on her left cheek energetically.
“I’ve never met a man that was fit to compare with a woman!” she cried;
“they’ve no dignity, they’ve no courage, they’ve nothing but their
beastly passions and their brute strength! Would any woman have behaved
like that—if a man had said he didn’t want her? We’ve too much
self-respect; we’re infinitely finer than they are.”
She walked about the room, dabbing her wet cheeks with a towel. Tears
were now running down with the drops of cold water.
“It makes me angry,” she explained, drying her eyes.
Rachel sat watching her. She did not think of Evelyn’s position; she
only thought that the world was full of people in torment.
“There’s only one man here I really like,” Evelyn continued; “Terence
Hewet. One feels as if one could trust him.”
At these words Rachel suffered an indescribable chill; her heart seemed
to be pressed together by cold hands.
“Why?” she asked. “Why can you trust him?”
“I don’t know,” said Evelyn. “Don’t you have feelings about people?
Feelings you’re absolutely certain are right? I had a long talk with
Terence the other night. I felt we were really friends after that.
There’s something of a woman in him—” She paused as though she were
thinking of very intimate things that Terence had told her, so at least
Rachel interpreted her gaze.
She tried to force herself to say, “Has he proposed to you?” but the
question was too tremendous, and in another moment Evelyn was saying
that the finest men were like women, and women were nobler than men—for
example, one couldn’t imagine a woman like Lillah Harrison thinking a
mean thing or having anything base about her.
“How I’d like you to know her!” she exclaimed.
She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now quite dry. Her
eyes had regained their usual expression of keen vitality, and she
seemed to have forgotten Alfred and Sinclair and her emotion. “Lillah
runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford Road,” she continued.
“She started it, managed it, did everything off her own bat, and it’s
now the biggest of its kind in England. You can’t think what those
women are like—and their homes. But she goes among them at all hours of
the day and night. I’ve often been with her. . . . That’s what’s the
matter with us. . . . We don’t _do_ things. What do you _do_?” she
demanded, looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical smile. Rachel had
scarcely listened to any of this, and her expression was vacant and
unhappy. She had conceived an equal dislike for Lillah Harrison and her
work in the Deptford Road, and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love
affairs.
“I play,” she said with an affection of stolid composure.
“That’s about it!” Evelyn laughed. “We none of us do anything but play.
And that’s why women like Lillah Harrison, who’s worth twenty of you
and me, have to work themselves to the bone. But I’m tired of playing,”
she went on, lying flat on the bed, and raising her arms above her
head. Thus stretched out, she looked more diminutive than ever.
“I’m going to do something. I’ve got a splendid idea. Look here, you
must join. I’m sure you’ve got any amount of stuff in you, though you
look—well, as if you’d lived all your life in a garden.” She sat up,
and began to explain with animation. “I belong to a club in London. It
meets every Saturday, so it’s called the Saturday Club. We’re supposed
to talk about art, but I’m sick of talking about art—what’s the good of
it? With all kinds of real things going on round one? It isn’t as if
they’d got anything to say about art, either. So what I’m going to tell
’em is that we’ve talked enough about art, and we’d better talk about
life for a change. Questions that really matter to people’s lives, the
White Slave Traffic, Women Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on. And
when we’ve made up our mind what we want to do we could form ourselves
into a society for doing it. . . . I’m certain that if people like
ourselves were to take things in hand instead of leaving it to
policemen and magistrates, we could put a stop to—prostitution”—she
lowered her voice at the ugly word—“in six months. My idea is that men
and women ought to join in these matters. We ought to go into
Piccadilly and stop one of these poor wretches and say: ‘Now, look
here, I’m no better than you are, and I don’t pretend to be any better,
but you’re doing what you know to be beastly, and I won’t have you
doing beastly things, because we’re all the same under our skins, and
if you do a beastly thing it does matter to me.’ That’s what Mr. Bax
was saying this morning, and it’s true, though you clever people—you’re
clever too, aren’t you?—don’t believe it.”
When Evelyn began talking—it was a fact she often regretted—her
thoughts came so quickly that she never had any time to listen to other
people’s thoughts. She continued without more pause than was needed for
taking breath.
“I don’t see why the Saturday club people shouldn’t do a really great
work in that way,” she went on. “Of course it would want organisation,
some one to give their life to it, but I’m ready to do that. My
notion’s to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas
take care of themselves. What’s wrong with Lillah—if there is anything
wrong—is that she thinks of Temperance first and the women afterwards.
Now there’s one thing I’ll say to my credit,” she continued; “I’m not
intellectual or artistic or anything of that sort, but I’m jolly
human.” She slipped off the bed and sat on the floor, looking up at
Rachel. She searched up into her face as if she were trying to read
what kind of character was concealed behind the face. She put her hand
on Rachel’s knee.
“It _is_ being human that counts, isn’t it?” she continued. “Being
real, whatever Mr. Hirst may say. Are you real?”
Rachel felt much as Terence had felt that Evelyn was too close to her,
and that there was something exciting in this closeness, although it
was also disagreeable. She was spared the need of finding an answer to
the question, for Evelyn proceeded, “Do you _believe_ in anything?”
In order to put an end to the scrutiny of these bright blue eyes, and
to relieve her own physical restlessness, Rachel pushed back her chair
and exclaimed, “In everything!” and began to finger different objects,
the books on the table, the photographs, the freshly leaved plant with
the stiff bristles, which stood in a large earthenware pot in the
window.
“I believe in the bed, in the photographs, in the pot, in the balcony,
in the sun, in Mrs. Flushing,” she remarked, still speaking recklessly,
with something at the back of her mind forcing her to say the things
that one usually does not say. “But I don’t believe in God, I don’t
believe in Mr. Bax, I don’t believe in the hospital nurse. I don’t
believe—” She took up a photograph and, looking at it, did not finish
her sentence.
“That’s my mother,” said Evelyn, who remained sitting on the floor
binding her knees together with her arms, and watching Rachel
curiously.
Rachel considered the portrait. “Well, I don’t much believe in her,”
she remarked after a time in a low tone of voice.
Mrs. Murgatroyd looked indeed as if the life had been crushed out of
her; she knelt on a chair, gazing piteously from behind the body of a
Pomeranian dog which she clasped to her cheek, as if for protection.
“And that’s my dad,” said Evelyn, for there were two photographs in one
frame. The second photograph represented a handsome soldier with high
regular features and a heavy black moustache; his hand rested on the
hilt of his sword; there was a decided likeness between him and Evelyn.
“And it’s because of them,” said Evelyn, “that I’m going to help the
other women. You’ve heard about me, I suppose? They weren’t married,
you see; I’m not anybody in particular. I’m not a bit ashamed of it.
They loved each other anyhow, and that’s more than most people can say
of their parents.”
Rachel sat down on the bed, with the two pictures in her hands, and
compared them—the man and the woman who had, so Evelyn said, loved each
other. That fact interested her more than the campaign on behalf of
unfortunate women which Evelyn was once more beginning to describe. She
looked again from one to the other.
“What d’you think it’s like,” she asked, as Evelyn paused for a minute,
“being in love?”
“Have you never been in love?” Evelyn asked. “Oh no—one’s only got to
look at you to see that,” she added. She considered. “I really was in
love once,” she said. She fell into reflection, her eyes losing their
bright vitality and approaching something like an expression of
tenderness. “It was heavenly!—while it lasted. The worst of it is it
don’t last, not with me. That’s the bother.”
She went on to consider the difficulty with Alfred and Sinclair about
which she had pretended to ask Rachel’s advice. But she did not want
advice; she wanted intimacy. When she looked at Rachel, who was still
looking at the photographs on the bed, she could not help seeing that
Rachel was not thinking about her. What was she thinking about, then?
Evelyn was tormented by the little spark of life in her which was
always trying to work through to other people, and was always being
rebuffed. Falling silent she looked at her visitor, her shoes, her
stockings, the combs in her hair, all the details of her dress in
short, as though by seizing every detail she might get closer to the
life within.
Rachel at last put down the photographs, walked to the window and
remarked, “It’s odd. People talk as much about love as they do about
religion.”
“I wish you’d sit down and talk,” said Evelyn impatiently.
Instead Rachel opened the window, which was made in two long panes, and
looked down into the garden below.
“That’s where we got lost the first night,” she said. “It must have
been in those bushes.”
“They kill hens down there,” said Evelyn. “They cut their heads off
with a knife—disgusting! But tell me—what—”
“I’d like to explore the hotel,” Rachel interrupted. She drew her head
in and looked at Evelyn, who still sat on the floor.
“It’s just like other hotels,” said Evelyn.
That might be, although every room and passage and chair in the place
had a character of its own in Rachel’s eyes; but she could not bring
herself to stay in one place any longer. She moved slowly towards the
door.
“What is it you want?” said Evelyn. “You make me feel as if you were
always thinking of something you don’t say. . . . Do say it!”
But Rachel made no response to this invitation either. She stopped with
her fingers on the handle of the door, as if she remembered that some
sort of pronouncement was due from her.
“I suppose you’ll marry one of them,” she said, and then turned the
handle and shut the door behind her. She walked slowly down the
passage, running her hand along the wall beside her. She did not think
which way she was going, and therefore walked down a passage which only
led to a window and a balcony. She looked down at the kitchen premises,
the wrong side of the hotel life, which was cut off from the right side
by a maze of small bushes. The ground was bare, old tins were scattered
about, and the bushes wore towels and aprons upon their heads to dry.
Every now and then a waiter came out in a white apron and threw rubbish
on to a heap. Two large women in cotton dresses were sitting on a bench
with blood-smeared tin trays in front of them and yellow bodies across
their knees. They were plucking the birds, and talking as they plucked.
Suddenly a chicken came floundering, half flying, half running into the
space, pursued by a third woman whose age could hardly be under eighty.
Although wizened and unsteady on her legs she kept up the chase, egged
on by the laughter of the others; her face was expressive of furious
rage, and as she ran she swore in Spanish. Frightened by hand-clapping
here, a napkin there, the bird ran this way and that in sharp angles,
and finally fluttered straight at the old woman, who opened her scanty
grey skirts to enclose it, dropped upon it in a bundle, and then
holding it out cut its head off with an expression of vindictive energy
and triumph combined. The blood and the ugly wriggling fascinated
Rachel, so that although she knew that some one had come up behind and
was standing beside her, she did not turn round until the old woman had
settled down on the bench beside the others. Then she looked up
sharply, because of the ugliness of what she had seen. It was Miss
Allan who stood beside her.
“Not a pretty sight,” said Miss Allan, “although I daresay it’s really
more humane than our method. . . . I don’t believe you’ve ever been in
my room,” she added, and turned away as if she meant Rachel to follow
her. Rachel followed, for it seemed possible that each new person might
remove the mystery which burdened her.
The bedrooms at the hotel were all on the same pattern, save that some
were larger and some smaller; they had a floor of dark red tiles; they
had a high bed, draped in mosquito curtains; they had each a
writing-table and a dressing-table, and a couple of arm-chairs. But
directly a box was unpacked the rooms became very different, so that
Miss Allan’s room was very unlike Evelyn’s room. There were no
variously coloured hatpins on her dressing-table; no scent-bottles; no
narrow curved pairs of scissors; no great variety of shoes and boots;
no silk petticoats lying on the chairs. The room was extremely neat.
There seemed to be two pairs of everything. The writing-table, however,
was piled with manuscript, and a table was drawn out to stand by the
arm-chair on which were two separate heaps of dark library books, in
which there were many slips of paper sticking out at different degrees
of thickness. Miss Allan had asked Rachel to come in out of kindness,
thinking that she was waiting about with nothing to do. Moreover, she
liked young women, for she had taught many of them, and having received
so much hospitality from the Ambroses she was glad to be able to repay
a minute part of it. She looked about accordingly for something to show
her. The room did not provide much entertainment. She touched her
manuscript. “Age of Chaucer; Age of Elizabeth; Age of Dryden,” she
reflected; “I’m glad there aren’t many more ages. I’m still in the
middle of the eighteenth century. Won’t you sit down, Miss Vinrace? The
chair, though small, is firm. . . . Euphues. The germ of the English
novel,” she continued, glancing at another page. “Is that the kind of
thing that interests you?”
She looked at Rachel with great kindness and simplicity, as though she
would do her utmost to provide anything she wished to have. This
expression had a remarkable charm in a face otherwise much lined with
care and thought.
“Oh no, it’s music with you, isn’t it?” she continued, recollecting,
“and I generally find that they don’t go together. Sometimes of course
we have prodigies—” She was looking about her for something and now saw
a jar on the mantelpiece which she reached down and gave to Rachel. “If
you put your finger into this jar you may be able to extract a piece of
preserved ginger. Are you a prodigy?”
But the ginger was deep and could not be reached.
“Don’t bother,” she said, as Miss Allan looked about for some other
implement. “I daresay I shouldn’t like preserved ginger.”
“You’ve never tried?” enquired Miss Allan. “Then I consider that it is
your duty to try now. Why, you may add a new pleasure to life, and as
you are still young—” She wondered whether a button-hook would do. “I
make it a rule to try everything,” she said. “Don’t you think it would
be very annoying if you tasted ginger for the first time on your
death-bed, and found you never liked anything so much? I should be so
exceedingly annoyed that I think I should get well on that account
alone.”
She was now successful, and a lump of ginger emerged on the end of the
button-hook. While she went to wipe the button-hook, Rachel bit the
ginger and at once cried, “I must spit it out!”
“Are you sure you have really tasted it?” Miss Allan demanded.
For answer Rachel threw it out of the window.
“An experience anyhow,” said Miss Allan calmly. “Let me see—I have
nothing else to offer you, unless you would like to taste this.” A
small cupboard hung above her bed, and she took out of it a slim
elegant jar filled with a bright green fluid.
“Crême de Menthe,” she said. “Liqueur, you know. It looks as if I
drank, doesn’t it? As a matter of fact it goes to prove what an
exceptionally abstemious person I am. I’ve had that jar for
six-and-twenty years,” she added, looking at it with pride, as she
tipped it over, and from the height of the liquid it could be seen that
the bottle was still untouched.
“Twenty-six years?” Rachel exclaimed.
Miss Allan was gratified, for she had meant Rachel to be surprised.
“When I went to Dresden six-and-twenty years ago,” she said, “a certain
friend of mine announced her intention of making me a present. She
thought that in the event of shipwreck or accident a stimulant might be
useful. However, as I had no occasion for it, I gave it back on my
return. On the eve of any foreign journey the same bottle always makes
its appearance, with the same note; on my return in safety it is always
handed back. I consider it a kind of charm against accidents. Though I
was once detained twenty-four hours by an accident to the train in
front of me, I have never met with any accident myself. Yes,” she
continued, now addressing the bottle, “we have seen many climes and
cupboards together, have we not? I intend one of these days to have a
silver label made with an inscription. It is a gentleman, as you may
observe, and his name is Oliver. . . . I do not think I could forgive
you, Miss Vinrace, if you broke my Oliver,” she said, firmly taking the
bottle out of Rachel’s hands and replacing it in the cupboard.
Rachel was swinging the bottle by the neck. She was interested by Miss
Allan to the point of forgetting the bottle.
“Well,” she exclaimed, “I do think that odd; to have had a friend for
twenty-six years, and a bottle, and—to have made all those journeys.”
“Not at all; I call it the reverse of odd,” Miss Allan replied. “I
always consider myself the most ordinary person I know. It’s rather
distinguished to be as ordinary as I am. I forget—are you a prodigy, or
did you say you were not a prodigy?”
She smiled at Rachel very kindly. She seemed to have known and
experienced so much, as she moved cumbrously about the room, that
surely there must be balm for all anguish in her words, could one
induce her to have recourse to them. But Miss Allan, who was now
locking the cupboard door, showed no signs of breaking the reticence
which had snowed her under for years. An uncomfortable sensation kept
Rachel silent; on the one hand, she wished to whirl high and strike a
spark out of the cool pink flesh; on the other she perceived there was
nothing to be done but to drift past each other in silence.
“I’m not a prodigy. I find it very difficult to say what I mean—” she
observed at length.
“It’s a matter of temperament, I believe,” Miss Allan helped her.
“There are some people who have no difficulty; for myself I find there
are a great many things I simply cannot say. But then I consider myself
very slow. One of my colleagues now, knows whether she likes you or
not—let me see, how does she do it?—by the way you say good-morning at
breakfast. It is sometimes a matter of years before I can make up my
mind. But most young people seem to find it easy?”
“Oh no,” said Rachel. “It’s hard!”
Miss Allan looked at Rachel quietly, saying nothing; she suspected that
there were difficulties of some kind. Then she put her hand to the back
of her head, and discovered that one of the grey coils of hair had come
loose.
“I must ask you to be so kind as to excuse me,” she said, rising, “if I
do my hair. I have never yet found a satisfactory type of hairpin. I
must change my dress, too, for the matter of that; and I should be
particularly glad of your assistance, because there is a tiresome set
of hooks which I _can_ fasten for myself, but it takes from ten to
fifteen minutes; whereas with your help—”
She slipped off her coat and skirt and blouse, and stood doing her hair
before the glass, a massive homely figure, her petticoat being so short
that she stood on a pair of thick slate-grey legs.
“People say youth is pleasant; I myself find middle age far
pleasanter,” she remarked, removing hair pins and combs, and taking up
her brush. When it fell loose her hair only came down to her neck.
“When one was young,” she continued, “things could seem so very serious
if one was made that way. . . . And now my dress.”
In a wonderfully short space of time her hair had been reformed in its
usual loops. The upper half of her body now became dark green with
black stripes on it; the skirt, however, needed hooking at various
angles, and Rachel had to kneel on the floor, fitting the eyes to the
hooks.
“Our Miss Johnson used to find life very unsatisfactory, I remember,”
Miss Allan continued. She turned her back to the light. “And then she
took to breeding guinea-pigs for their spots, and became absorbed in
that. I have just heard that the yellow guinea-pig has had a black
baby. We had a bet of sixpence on about it. She will be very
triumphant.”
The skirt was fastened. She looked at herself in the glass with the
curious stiffening of her face generally caused by looking in the
glass.
“Am I in a fit state to encounter my fellow-beings?” she asked. “I
forget which way it is—but they find black animals very rarely have
coloured babies—it may be the other way round. I have had it so often
explained to me that it is very stupid of me to have forgotten again.”
She moved about the room acquiring small objects with quiet force, and
fixing them about her—a locket, a watch and chain, a heavy gold
bracelet, and the parti-coloured button of a suffrage society. Finally,
completely equipped for Sunday tea, she stood before Rachel, and smiled
at her kindly. She was not an impulsive woman, and her life had
schooled her to restrain her tongue. At the same time, she was
possessed of an amount of good-will towards others, and in particular
towards the young, which often made her regret that speech was so
difficult.
“Shall we descend?” she said.
She put one hand upon Rachel’s shoulder, and stooping, picked up a pair
of walking-shoes with the other, and placed them neatly side by side
outside her door. As they walked down the passage they passed many
pairs of boots and shoes, some black and some brown, all side by side,
and all different, even to the way in which they lay together.
“I always think that people are so like their boots,” said Miss Allan.
“That is Mrs. Paley’s—” but as she spoke the door opened, and Mrs.
Paley rolled out in her chair, equipped also for tea.
She greeted Miss Allan and Rachel.
“I was just saying that people are so like their boots,” said Miss
Allan. Mrs. Paley did not hear. She repeated it more loudly still. Mrs.
Paley did not hear. She repeated it a third time. Mrs. Paley heard, but
she did not understand. She was apparently about to repeat it for the
fourth time, when Rachel suddenly said something inarticulate, and
disappeared down the corridor. This misunderstanding, which involved a
complete block in the passage, seemed to her unbearable. She walked
quickly and blindly in the opposite direction, and found herself at the
end of a _cul de sac_. There was a window, and a table and a chair in
the window, and upon the table stood a rusty inkstand, an ashtray, an
old copy of a French newspaper, and a pen with a broken nib. Rachel sat
down, as if to study the French newspaper, but a tear fell on the
blurred French print, raising a soft blot. She lifted her head sharply,
exclaiming aloud, “It’s intolerable!” Looking out of the window with
eyes that would have seen nothing even had they not been dazed by
tears, she indulged herself at last in violent abuse of the entire day.
It had been miserable from start to finish; first, the service in the
chapel; then luncheon; then Evelyn; then Miss Allan; then old Mrs.
Paley blocking up the passage. All day long she had been tantalized and
put off. She had now reached one of those eminences, the result of some
crisis, from which the world is finally displayed in its true
proportions. She disliked the look of it immensely—churches,
politicians, misfits, and huge impostures—men like Mr. Dalloway, men
like Mr. Bax, Evelyn and her chatter, Mrs. Paley blocking up the
passage. Meanwhile the steady beat of her own pulse represented the hot
current of feeling that ran down beneath; beating, struggling,
fretting. For the time, her own body was the source of all the life in
the world, which tried to burst forth here—there—and was repressed now
by Mr. Bax, now by Evelyn, now by the imposition of ponderous
stupidity, the weight of the entire world. Thus tormented, she would
twist her hands together, for all things were wrong, all people stupid.
Vaguely seeing that there were people down in the garden beneath she
represented them as aimless masses of matter, floating hither and
thither, without aim except to impede her. What were they doing, those
other people in the world?
“Nobody knows,” she said. The force of her rage was beginning to spend
itself, and the vision of the world which had been so vivid became dim.
“It’s a dream,” she murmured. She considered the rusty inkstand, the
pen, the ash-tray, and the old French newspaper. These small and
worthless objects seemed to her to represent human lives.
“We’re asleep and dreaming,” she repeated. But the possibility which
now suggested itself that one of the shapes might be the shape of
Terence roused her from her melancholy lethargy. She became as restless
as she had been before she sat down. She was no longer able to see the
world as a town laid out beneath her. It was covered instead by a haze
of feverish red mist. She had returned to the state in which she had
been all day. Thinking was no escape. Physical movement was the only
refuge, in and out of rooms, in and out of people’s minds, seeking she
knew not what. Therefore she rose, pushed back the table, and went
downstairs. She went out of the hall door, and, turning the corner of
the hotel, found herself among the people whom she had seen from the
window. But owing to the broad sunshine after shaded passages, and to
the substance of living people after dreams, the group appeared with
startling intensity, as though the dusty surface had been peeled off
everything, leaving only the reality and the instant. It had the look
of a vision printed on the dark at night. White and grey and purple
figures were scattered on the green, round wicker tables, in the middle
the flame of the tea-urn made the air waver like a faulty sheet of
glass, a massive green tree stood over them as if it were a moving
force held at rest. As she approached, she could hear Evelyn’s voice
repeating monotonously, “Here then—here—good doggie, come here”; for a
moment nothing seemed to happen; it all stood still, and then she
realised that one of the figures was Helen Ambrose; and the dust again
began to settle.
The group indeed had come together in a miscellaneous way; one
tea-table joining to another tea-table, and deck-chairs serving to
connect two groups. But even at a distance it could be seen that Mrs.
Flushing, upright and imperious, dominated the party. She was talking
vehemently to Helen across the table.
“Ten days under canvas,” she was saying. “No comforts. If you want
comforts, don’t come. But I may tell you, if you don’t come you’ll
regret it all your life. You say yes?”
At this moment Mrs. Flushing caught sight of Rachel.
“Ah, there’s your niece. She’s promised. You’re coming, aren’t you?”
Having adopted the plan, she pursued it with the energy of a child.
Rachel took her part with eagerness.
“Of course I’m coming. So are you, Helen. And Mr. Pepper too.” As she
sat she realised that she was surrounded by people she knew, but that
Terence was not among them. From various angles people began saying
what they thought of the proposed expedition. According to some it
would be hot, but the nights would be cold; according to others, the
difficulties would lie rather in getting a boat, and in speaking the
language. Mrs. Flushing disposed of all objections, whether due to man
or due to nature, by announcing that her husband would settle all that.
Meanwhile Mr. Flushing quietly explained to Helen that the expedition
was really a simple matter; it took five days at the outside; and the
place—a native village—was certainly well worth seeing before she
returned to England. Helen murmured ambiguously, and did not commit
herself to one answer rather than to another.
The tea-party, however, included too many different kinds of people for
general conversation to flourish; and from Rachel’s point of view
possessed the great advantage that it was quite unnecessary for her to
talk. Over there Susan and Arthur were explaining to Mrs. Paley that an
expedition had been proposed; and Mrs. Paley having grasped the fact,
gave the advice of an old traveller that they should take nice canned
vegetables, fur cloaks, and insect powder. She leant over to Mrs.
Flushing and whispered something which from the twinkle in her eyes
probably had reference to bugs. Then Helen was reciting “Toll for the
Brave” to St. John Hirst, in order apparently to win a sixpence which
lay upon the table; while Mr. Hughling Elliot imposed silence upon his
section of the audience by his fascinating anecdote of Lord Curzon and
the undergraduate’s bicycle. Mrs. Thornbury was trying to remember the
name of a man who might have been another Garibaldi, and had written a
book which they ought to read; and Mr. Thornbury recollected that he
had a pair of binoculars at anybody’s service. Miss Allan meanwhile
murmured with the curious intimacy which a spinster often achieves with
dogs, to the fox-terrier which Evelyn had at last induced to come over
to them. Little particles of dust or blossom fell on the plates now and
then when the branches sighed above. Rachel seemed to see and hear a
little of everything, much as a river feels the twigs that fall into it
and sees the sky above, but her eyes were too vague for Evelyn’s
liking. She came across, and sat on the ground at Rachel’s feet.
“Well?” she asked suddenly. “What are you thinking about?”
“Miss Warrington,” Rachel replied rashly, because she had to say
something. She did indeed see Susan murmuring to Mrs. Elliot, while
Arthur stared at her with complete confidence in his own love. Both
Rachel and Evelyn then began to listen to what Susan was saying.
“There’s the ordering and the dogs and the garden, and the children
coming to be taught,” her voice proceeded rhythmically as if checking
the list, “and my tennis, and the village, and letters to write for
father, and a thousand little things that don’t sound much; but I never
have a moment to myself, and when I go to bed, I’m so sleepy I’m off
before my head touches the pillow. Besides I like to be a great deal
with my Aunts—I’m a great bore, aren’t I, Aunt Emma?” (she smiled at
old Mrs. Paley, who with head slightly drooped was regarding the cake
with speculative affection), “and father has to be very careful about
chills in winter which means a great deal of running about, because he
won’t look after himself, any more than you will, Arthur! So it all
mounts up!”
Her voice mounted too, in a mild ecstasy of satisfaction with her life
and her own nature. Rachel suddenly took a violent dislike to Susan,
ignoring all that was kindly, modest, and even pathetic about her. She
appeared insincere and cruel; she saw her grown stout and prolific, the
kind blue eyes now shallow and watery, the bloom of the cheeks
congealed to a network of dry red canals.
Helen turned to her. “Did you go to church?” she asked. She had won her
sixpence and seemed making ready to go.
“Yes,” said Rachel. “For the last time,” she added.
In preparing to put on her gloves, Helen dropped one.
“You’re not going?” Evelyn asked, taking hold of one glove as if to
keep them.
“It’s high time we went,” said Helen. “Don’t you see how silent every
one’s getting—?”
A silence had fallen upon them all, caused partly by one of the
accidents of talk, and partly because they saw some one approaching.
Helen could not see who it was, but keeping her eyes fixed upon Rachel
observed something which made her say to herself, “So it’s Hewet.” She
drew on her gloves with a curious sense of the significance of the
moment. Then she rose, for Mrs. Flushing had seen Hewet too, and was
demanding information about rivers and boats which showed that the
whole conversation would now come over again.
Rachel followed her, and they walked in silence down the avenue. In
spite of what Helen had seen and understood, the feeling that was
uppermost in her mind was now curiously perverse; if she went on this
expedition, she would not be able to have a bath, the effort appeared
to her to be great and disagreeable.
“It’s so unpleasant, being cooped up with people one hardly knows,” she
remarked. “People who mind being seen naked.”
“You don’t mean to go?” Rachel asked.
The intensity with which this was spoken irritated Mrs. Ambrose.
“I don’t mean to go, and I don’t mean not to go,” she replied. She
became more and more casual and indifferent.
“After all, I daresay we’ve seen all there is to be seen; and there’s
the bother of getting there, and whatever they may say it’s bound to be
vilely uncomfortable.”
For some time Rachel made no reply; but every sentence Helen spoke
increased her bitterness. At last she broke out—
“Thank God, Helen, I’m not like you! I sometimes think you don’t think
or feel or care to do anything but exist! You’re like Mr. Hirst. You
see that things are bad, and you pride yourself on saying so. It’s what
you call being honest; as a matter of fact it’s being lazy, being dull,
being nothing. You don’t help; you put an end to things.”
Helen smiled as if she rather enjoyed the attack.
“Well?” she enquired.
“It seems to me bad—that’s all,” Rachel replied.
“Quite likely,” said Helen.
At any other time Rachel would probably have been silenced by her
Aunt’s candour; but this afternoon she was not in the mood to be
silenced by any one. A quarrel would be welcome.
“You’re only half alive,” she continued.
“Is that because I didn’t accept Mr. Flushing’s invitation?” Helen
asked, “or do you always think that?”
At the moment it appeared to Rachel that she had always seen the same
faults in Helen, from the very first night on board the _Euphrosyne_,
in spite of her beauty, in spite of her magnanimity and their love.
“Oh, it’s only what’s the matter with every one!” she exclaimed. “No
one feels—no one does anything but hurt. I tell you, Helen, the world’s
bad. It’s an agony, living, wanting—”
Here she tore a handful of leaves from a bush and crushed them to
control herself.
“The lives of these people,” she tried to explain, “the aimlessness,
the way they live. One goes from one to another, and it’s all the same.
One never gets what one wants out of any of them.”
Her emotional state and her confusion would have made her an easy prey
if Helen had wished to argue or had wished to draw confidences. But
instead of talking she fell into a profound silence as they walked on.
Aimless, trivial, meaningless, oh no—what she had seen at tea made it
impossible for her to believe that. The little jokes, the chatter, the
inanities of the afternoon had shrivelled up before her eyes.
Underneath the likings and spites, the comings together and partings,
great things were happening—terrible things, because they were so
great. Her sense of safety was shaken, as if beneath twigs and dead
leaves she had seen the movement of a snake. It seemed to her that a
moment’s respite was allowed, a moment’s make-believe, and then again
the profound and reasonless law asserted itself, moulding them all to
its liking, making and destroying.
She looked at Rachel walking beside her, still crushing the leaves in
her fingers and absorbed in her own thoughts. She was in love, and she
pitied her profoundly. But she roused herself from these thoughts and
apologised. “I’m very sorry,” she said, “but if I’m dull, it’s my
nature, and it can’t be helped.” If it was a natural defect, however,
she found an easy remedy, for she went on to say that she thought Mr.
Flushing’s scheme a very good one, only needing a little consideration,
which it appeared she had given it by the time they reached home. By
that time they had settled that if anything more was said, they would
accept the invitation.