The darkness fell, but rose again, and as each day spread widely over
the earth and parted them from the strange day in the forest when they
had been forced to tell each other what they wanted, this wish of
theirs was revealed to other people, and in the process became slightly
strange to themselves. Apparently it was not anything unusual that had
happened; it was that they had become engaged to marry each other. The
world, which consisted for the most part of the hotel and the villa,
expressed itself glad on the whole that two people should marry, and
allowed them to see that they were not expected to take part in the
work which has to be done in order that the world shall go on, but
might absent themselves for a time. They were accordingly left alone
until they felt the silence as if, playing in a vast church, the door
had been shut on them. They were driven to walk alone, and sit alone,
to visit secret places where the flowers had never been picked and the
trees were solitary. In solitude they could express those beautiful but
too vast desires which were so oddly uncomfortable to the ears of other
men and women—desires for a world, such as their own world which
contained two people seemed to them to be, where people knew each other
intimately and thus judged each other by what was good, and never
quarrelled, because that was waste of time.
They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun, or
sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed. They were no longer
embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning which could not express
itself; they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers down a
twisting river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner is turned;
the unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable, and in many
ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious, for it was refreshingly
solid, and called out effort, and effort under such circumstances was
not effort but delight.
While Rachel played the piano, Terence sat near her, engaged, as far as
the occasional writing of a word in pencil testified, in shaping the
world as it appeared to him now that he and Rachel were going to be
married. It was different certainly. The book called _Silence_ would
not now be the same book that it would have been. He would then put
down his pencil and stare in front of him, and wonder in what respects
the world was different—it had, perhaps, more solidity, more coherence,
more importance, greater depth. Why, even the earth sometimes seemed to
him very deep; not carved into hills and cities and fields, but heaped
in great masses. He would look out of the window for ten minutes at a
time; but no, he did not care for the earth swept of human beings. He
liked human beings—he liked them, he suspected, better than Rachel did.
There she was, swaying enthusiastically over her music, quite forgetful
of him,—but he liked that quality in her. He liked the impersonality
which it produced in her. At last, having written down a series of
little sentences, with notes of interrogation attached to them, he
observed aloud, “‘Women—under the heading Women I’ve written:
“‘Not really vainer than men. Lack of self-confidence at the base of
most serious faults. Dislike of own sex traditional, or founded on
fact? Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an optimist, because
they don’t think.’ What do you say, Rachel?” He paused with his pencil
in his hand and a sheet of paper on his knee.
Rachel said nothing. Up and up the steep spiral of a very late
Beethoven sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined
staircase, energetically at first, then more laboriously advancing her
feet with effort until she could go no higher and returned with a run
to begin at the very bottom again.
“‘Again, it’s the fashion now to say that women are more practical and
less idealistic than men, also that they have considerable organising
ability but no sense of honour’—query, what is meant by masculine term,
honour?—what corresponds to it in your sex? Eh?”
Attacking her staircase once more, Rachel again neglected this
opportunity of revealing the secrets of her sex. She had, indeed,
advanced so far in the pursuit of wisdom that she allowed these secrets
to rest undisturbed; it seemed to be reserved for a later generation to
discuss them philosophically.
Crashing down a final chord with her left hand, she exclaimed at last,
swinging round upon him:
“No, Terence, it’s no good; here am I, the best musician in South
America, not to speak of Europe and Asia, and I can’t play a note
because of you in the room interrupting me every other second.”
“You don’t seem to realise that that’s what I’ve been aiming at for the
last half-hour,” he remarked. “I’ve no objection to nice simple
tunes—indeed, I find them very helpful to my literary composition, but
that kind of thing is merely like an unfortunate old dog going round on
its hind legs in the rain.”
He began turning over the little sheets of note-paper which were
scattered on the table, conveying the congratulations of their friends.
“‘—all possible wishes for all possible happiness,’” he read; “correct,
but not very vivid, are they?”
“They’re sheer nonsense!” Rachel exclaimed. “Think of words compared
with sounds!” she continued. “Think of novels and plays and histories—”
Perched on the edge of the table, she stirred the red and yellow
volumes contemptuously. She seemed to herself to be in a position where
she could despise all human learning. Terence looked at them too.
“God, Rachel, you do read trash!” he exclaimed. “And you’re behind the
times too, my dear. No one dreams of reading this kind of thing
now—antiquated problem plays, harrowing descriptions of life in the
east end—oh, no, we’ve exploded all that. Read poetry, Rachel, poetry,
poetry, poetry!”
Picking up one of the books, he began to read aloud, his intention
being to satirise the short sharp bark of the writer’s English; but she
paid no attention, and after an interval of meditation exclaimed:
“Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed entirely
of vast blocks of matter, and that we’re nothing but patches of light—”
she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering over the carpet and up the
wall—“like that?”
“No,” said Terence, “I feel solid; immensely solid; the legs of my
chair might be rooted in the bowels of the earth. But at Cambridge, I
can remember, there were times when one fell into ridiculous states of
semi-coma about five o’clock in the morning. Hirst does now, I
expect—oh, no, Hirst wouldn’t.”
Rachel continued, “The day your note came, asking us to go on the
picnic, I was sitting where you’re sitting now, thinking that; I wonder
if I could think that again? I wonder if the world’s changed? and if
so, when it’ll stop changing, and which is the real world?”
“When I first saw you,” he began, “I thought you were like a creature
who’d lived all its life among pearls and old bones. Your hands were
wet, d’you remember, and you never said a word until I gave you a bit
of bread, and then you said, ‘Human Beings!’”
“And I thought you—a prig,” she recollected. “No; that’s not quite it.
There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I thought you and St.
John were like those ants—very big, very ugly, very energetic, with all
your virtues on your backs. However, when I talked to you I liked you—”
“You fell in love with me,” he corrected her. “You were in love with me
all the time, only you didn’t know it.”
“No, I never fell in love with you,” she asserted.
“Rachel—what a lie—didn’t you sit here looking at my window—didn’t you
wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun—?”
“No,” she repeated, “I never fell in love, if falling in love is what
people say it is, and it’s the world that tells the lies and I tell the
truth. Oh, what lies—what lies!”
She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from Mr.
Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington. It
was strange, considering how very different these people were, that
they used almost the same sentences when they wrote to congratulate her
upon her engagement.
That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever
feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they
were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church service had
done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done; and if they
didn’t feel a thing why did they go and pretend to? The simplicity and
arrogance and hardness of her youth, now concentrated into a single
spark as it was by her love of him, puzzled Terence; being engaged had
not that effect on him; the world was different, but not in that way;
he still wanted the things he had always wanted, and in particular he
wanted the companionship of other people more than ever perhaps. He
took the letters out of her hand, and protested:
“Of course they’re absurd, Rachel; of course they say things just
because other people say them, but even so, what a nice woman Miss
Allan is; you can’t deny that; and Mrs. Thornbury too; she’s got too
many children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone to the
bad instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees—hasn’t she
a kind of beauty—of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say? Isn’t
she rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river
going on and on and on? By the way, Ralph’s been made governor of the
Carroway Islands—the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn’t
it?”
But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast majority of
the affairs of the world went on unconnected by a single thread with
her own destiny.
“I won’t have eleven children,” she asserted; “I won’t have the eyes of
an old woman. She looks at one up and down, up and down, as if one were
a horse.”
“We must have a son and we must have a daughter,” said Terence, putting
down the letters, “because, let alone the inestimable advantage of
being our children, they’d be so well brought up.” They went on to
sketch an outline of the ideal education—how their daughter should be
required from infancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard painted
blue, to suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too
practical; and their son—he should be taught to laugh at great men,
that is, at distinguished successful men, at men who wore ribands and
rose to the tops of their trees. He should in no way resemble (Rachel
added) St. John Hirst.
At this Terence professed the greatest admiration for St. John Hirst.
Dwelling upon his good qualities he became seriously convinced of them;
he had a mind like a torpedo, he declared, aimed at falsehood. Where
should we all be without him and his like? Choked in weeds; Christians,
bigots,—why, Rachel herself, would be a slave with a fan to sing songs
to men when they felt drowsy.
“But you’ll never see it!” he exclaimed; “because with all your virtues
you don’t, and you never will, care with every fibre of your being for
the pursuit of truth! You’ve no respect for facts, Rachel; you’re
essentially feminine.” She did not trouble to deny it, nor did she
think good to produce the one unanswerable argument against the merits
which Terence admired. St. John Hirst said that she was in love with
him; she would never forgive that; but the argument was not one to
appeal to a man.
“But I like him,” she said, and she thought to herself that she also
pitied him, as one pities those unfortunate people who are outside the
warm mysterious globe full of changes and miracles in which we
ourselves move about; she thought that it must be very dull to be St.
John Hirst.
She summed up what she felt about him by saying that she would not kiss
him supposing he wished it, which was not likely.
As if some apology were due to Hirst for the kiss which she then
bestowed upon him, Terence protested:
“And compared with Hirst I’m a perfect Zany.”
The clock here struck twelve instead of eleven.
“We’re wasting the morning—I ought to be writing my book, and you ought
to be answering these.”
“We’ve only got twenty-one whole mornings left,” said Rachel. “And my
father’ll be here in a day or two.”
However, she drew a pen and paper towards her and began to write
laboriously,
“My dear Evelyn—”
Terence, meanwhile, read a novel which some one else had written, a
process which he found essential to the composition of his own. For a
considerable time nothing was to be heard but the ticking of the clock
and the fitful scratch of Rachel’s pen, as she produced phrases which
bore a considerable likeness to those which she had condemned. She was
struck by it herself, for she stopped writing and looked up; looked at
Terence deep in the arm-chair, looked at the different pieces of
furniture, at her bed in the corner, at the window-pane which showed
the branches of a tree filled in with sky, heard the clock ticking, and
was amazed at the gulf which lay between all that and her sheet of
paper. Would there ever be a time when the world was one and
indivisible? Even with Terence himself—how far apart they could be, how
little she knew what was passing in his brain now! She then finished
her sentence, which was awkward and ugly, and stated that they were
“both very happy, and going to be married in the autumn probably and
hope to live in London, where we hope you will come and see us when we
get back.” Choosing “affectionately,” after some further speculation,
rather than sincerely, she signed the letter and was doggedly beginning
on another when Terence remarked, quoting from his book:
“Listen to this, Rachel. ‘It is probable that Hugh’ (he’s the hero, a
literary man), ‘had not realised at the time of his marriage, any more
than the young man of parts and imagination usually does realise, the
nature of the gulf which separates the needs and desires of the male
from the needs and desires of the female. . . . At first they had been
very happy. The walking tour in Switzerland had been a time of jolly
companionship and stimulating revelations for both of them. Betty had
proved herself the ideal comrade. . . . They had shouted _Love in the
Valley_ to each other across the snowy slopes of the Riffelhorn’ (and
so on, and so on—I’ll skip the descriptions). . . . ‘But in London,
after the boy’s birth, all was changed. Betty was an admirable mother;
but it did not take her long to find out that motherhood, as that
function is understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did
not absorb the whole of her energies. She was young and strong, with
healthy limbs and a body and brain that called urgently for exercise. .
. .’ (In short she began to give tea-parties.) . . . ‘Coming in late
from this singular talk with old Bob Murphy in his smoky, book-lined
room, where the two men had each unloosened his soul to the other, with
the sound of the traffic humming in his ears, and the foggy London sky
slung tragically across his mind . . . he found women’s hats dotted
about among his papers. Women’s wraps and absurd little feminine shoes
and umbrellas were in the hall. . . . Then the bills began to come in.
. . . He tried to speak frankly to her. He found her lying on the great
polar-bear skin in their bedroom, half-undressed, for they were dining
with the Greens in Wilton Crescent, the ruddy firelight making the
diamonds wink and twinkle on her bare arms and in the delicious curve
of her breast—a vision of adorable femininity. He forgave her all.’
(Well, this goes from bad to worse, and finally about fifty pages
later, Hugh takes a week-end ticket to Swanage and ‘has it out with
himself on the downs above Corfe.’ . . . Here there’s fifteen pages or
so which we’ll skip. The conclusion is . . .) ‘They were different.
Perhaps, in the far future, when generations of men had struggled and
failed as he must now struggle and fail, woman would be, indeed, what
she now made a pretence of being—the friend and companion—not the enemy
and parasite of man.’
“The end of it is, you see, Hugh went back to his wife, poor fellow. It
was his duty, as a married man. Lord, Rachel,” he concluded, “will it
be like that when we’re married?”
Instead of answering him she asked,
“Why don’t people write about the things they do feel?”
“Ah, that’s the difficulty!” he sighed, tossing the book away.
“Well, then, what will it be like when we’re married? What are the
things people do feel?”
She seemed doubtful.
“Sit on the floor and let me look at you,” he commanded. Resting her
chin on his knee, she looked straight at him.
He examined her curiously.
“You’re not beautiful,” he began, “but I like your face. I like the way
your hair grows down in a point, and your eyes too—they never see
anything. Your mouth’s too big, and your cheeks would be better if they
had more colour in them. But what I like about your face is that it
makes one wonder what the devil you’re thinking about—it makes me want
to do that—” He clenched his fist and shook it so near her that she
started back, “because now you look as if you’d blow my brains out.
There are moments,” he continued, “when, if we stood on a rock
together, you’d throw me into the sea.”
Hypnotised by the force of his eyes in hers, she repeated, “If we stood
on a rock together—”
To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven
about the roots of the world—the idea was incoherently delightful. She
sprang up, and began moving about the room, bending and thrusting aside
the chairs and tables as if she were indeed striking through the
waters. He watched her with pleasure; she seemed to be cleaving a
passage for herself, and dealing triumphantly with the obstacles which
would hinder their passage through life.
“It does seem possible!” he exclaimed, “though I’ve always thought it
the most unlikely thing in the world—I shall be in love with you all my
life, and our marriage will be the most exciting thing that’s ever been
done! We’ll never have a moment’s peace—” He caught her in his arms as
she passed him, and they fought for mastery, imagining a rock, and the
sea heaving beneath them. At last she was thrown to the floor, where
she lay gasping, and crying for mercy.
“I’m a mermaid! I can swim,” she cried, “so the game’s up.” Her dress
was torn across, and peace being established, she fetched a needle and
thread and began to mend the tear.
“And now,” she said, “be quiet and tell me about the world; tell me
about everything that’s ever happened, and I’ll tell you—let me see,
what can I tell you?—I’ll tell you about Miss Montgomerie and the river
party. She was left, you see, with one foot in the boat, and the other
on shore.”
They had spent much time already in thus filling out for the other the
course of their past lives, and the characters of their friends and
relations, so that very soon Terence knew not only what Rachel’s aunts
might be expected to say upon every occasion, but also how their
bedrooms were furnished, and what kind of bonnets they wore. He could
sustain a conversation between Mrs. Hunt and Rachel, and carry on a
tea-party including the Rev. William Johnson and Miss Macquoid, the
Christian Scientists, with remarkable likeness to the truth. But he had
known many more people, and was far more highly skilled in the art of
narrative than Rachel was, whose experiences were, for the most part,
of a curiously childlike and humorous kind, so that it generally fell
to her lot to listen and ask questions.
He told her not only what had happened, but what he had thought and
felt, and sketched for her portraits which fascinated her of what other
men and women might be supposed to be thinking and feeling, so that she
became very anxious to go back to England, which was full of people,
where she could merely stand in the streets and look at them. According
to him, too, there was an order, a pattern which made life reasonable,
or if that word was foolish, made it of deep interest anyhow, for
sometimes it seemed possible to understand why things happened as they
did. Nor were people so solitary and uncommunicative as she believed.
She should look for vanity—for vanity was a common quality—first in
herself, and then in Helen, in Ridley, in St. John, they all had their
share of it—and she would find it in ten people out of every twelve she
met; and once linked together by one such tie she would find them not
separate and formidable, but practically indistinguishable, and she
would come to love them when she found that they were like herself.
If she denied this, she must defend her belief that human beings were
as various as the beasts at the Zoo, which had stripes and manes, and
horns and humps; and so, wrestling over the entire list of their
acquaintances, and diverging into anecdote and theory and speculation,
they came to know each other. The hours passed quickly, and seemed to
them full to leaking-point. After a night’s solitude they were always
ready to begin again.
The virtues which Mrs. Ambrose had once believed to exist in free talk
between men and women did in truth exist for both of them, although not
quite in the measure she prescribed. Far more than upon the nature of
sex they dwelt upon the nature of poetry, but it was true that talk
which had no boundaries deepened and enlarged the strangely small
bright view of a girl. In return for what he could tell her she brought
him such curiosity and sensitiveness of perception, that he was led to
doubt whether any gift bestowed by much reading and living was quite
the equal of that for pleasure and pain. What would experience give her
after all, except a kind of ridiculous formal balance, like that of a
drilled dog in the street? He looked at her face and wondered how it
would look in twenty years’ time, when the eyes had dulled, and the
forehead wore those little persistent wrinkles which seem to show that
the middle-aged are facing something hard which the young do not see?
What would the hard thing be for them, he wondered? Then his thoughts
turned to their life in England.
The thought of England was delightful, for together they would see the
old things freshly; it would be England in June, and there would be
June nights in the country; and the nightingales singing in the lanes,
into which they could steal when the room grew hot; and there would be
English meadows gleaming with water and set with stolid cows, and
clouds dipping low and trailing across the green hills. As he sat in
the room with her, he wished very often to be back again in the thick
of life, doing things with Rachel.
He crossed to the window and exclaimed, “Lord, how good it is to think
of lanes, muddy lanes, with brambles and nettles, you know, and real
grass fields, and farmyards with pigs and cows, and men walking beside
carts with pitchforks—there’s nothing to compare with that here—look at
the stony red earth, and the bright blue sea, and the glaring white
houses—how tired one gets of it! And the air, without a stain or a
wrinkle. I’d give anything for a sea mist.”
Rachel, too, had been thinking of the English country: the flat land
rolling away to the sea, and the woods and the long straight roads,
where one can walk for miles without seeing any one, and the great
church towers and the curious houses clustered in the valleys, and the
birds, and the dusk, and the rain falling against the windows.
“But London, London’s the place,” Terence continued. They looked
together at the carpet, as though London itself were to be seen there
lying on the floor, with all its spires and pinnacles pricking through
the smoke.
“On the whole, what I should like best at this moment,” Terence
pondered, “would be to find myself walking down Kingsway, by those big
placards, you know, and turning into the Strand. Perhaps I might go and
look over Waterloo Bridge for a moment. Then I’d go along the Strand
past the shops with all the new books in them, and through the little
archway into the Temple. I always like the quiet after the uproar. You
hear your own footsteps suddenly quite loud. The Temple’s very
pleasant. I think I should go and see if I could find dear old
Hodgkin—the man who writes books about Van Eyck, you know. When I left
England he was very sad about his tame magpie. He suspected that a man
had poisoned it. And then Russell lives on the next staircase. I think
you’d like him. He’s a passion for Handel. Well, Rachel,” he concluded,
dismissing the vision of London, “we shall be doing that together in
six weeks’ time, and it’ll be the middle of June then—and June in
London—my God! how pleasant it all is!”
“And we’re certain to have it too,” she said. “It isn’t as if we were
expecting a great deal—only to walk about and look at things.”
“Only a thousand a year and perfect freedom,” he replied. “How many
people in London d’you think have that?”
“And now you’ve spoilt it,” she complained. “Now we’ve got to think of
the horrors.” She looked grudgingly at the novel which had once caused
her perhaps an hour’s discomfort, so that she had never opened it
again, but kept it on her table, and looked at it occasionally, as some
medieval monk kept a skull, or a crucifix to remind him of the frailty
of the body.
“Is it true, Terence,” she demanded, “that women die with bugs crawling
across their faces?”
“I think it’s very probable,” he said. “But you must admit, Rachel,
that we so seldom think of anything but ourselves that an occasional
twinge is really rather pleasant.”
Accusing him of an affection of cynicism which was just as bad as
sentimentality itself, she left her position by his side and knelt upon
the window sill, twisting the curtain tassels between her fingers. A
vague sense of dissatisfaction filled her.
“What’s so detestable in this country,” she exclaimed, “is the
blue—always blue sky and blue sea. It’s like a curtain—all the things
one wants are on the other side of that. I want to know what’s going on
behind it. I hate these divisions, don’t you, Terence? One person all
in the dark about another person. Now I liked the Dalloways,” she
continued, “and they’re gone. I shall never see them again. Just by
going on a ship we cut ourselves off entirely from the rest of the
world. I want to see England there—London there—all sorts of people—why
shouldn’t one? why should one be shut up all by oneself in a room?”
While she spoke thus half to herself and with increasing vagueness,
because her eye was caught by a ship that had just come into the bay,
she did not see that Terence had ceased to stare contentedly in front
of him, and was looking at her keenly and with dissatisfaction. She
seemed to be able to cut herself adrift from him, and to pass away to
unknown places where she had no need of him. The thought roused his
jealousy.
“I sometimes think you’re not in love with me and never will be,” he
said energetically. She started and turned round at his words.
“I don’t satisfy you in the way you satisfy me,” he continued. “There’s
something I can’t get hold of in you. You don’t want me as I want
you—you’re always wanting something else.”
He began pacing up and down the room.
“Perhaps I ask too much,” he went on. “Perhaps it isn’t really possible
to have what I want. Men and women are too different. You can’t
understand—you don’t understand—”
He came up to where she stood looking at him in silence.
It seemed to her now that what he was saying was perfectly true, and
that she wanted many more things than the love of one human being—the
sea, the sky. She turned again and looked at the distant blue, which
was so smooth and serene where the sky met the sea; she could not
possibly want only one human being.
“Or is it only this damnable engagement?” he continued. “Let’s be
married here, before we go back—or is it too great a risk? Are we sure
we want to marry each other?”
They began pacing up and down the room, but although they came very
near each other in their pacing, they took care not to touch each
other. The hopelessness of their position overcame them both. They were
impotent; they could never love each other sufficiently to overcome all
these barriers, and they could never be satisfied with less. Realising
this with intolerable keenness she stopped in front of him and
exclaimed:
“Let’s break it off, then.”
The words did more to unite them than any amount of argument. As if
they stood on the edge of a precipice they clung together. They knew
that they could not separate; painful and terrible it might be, but
they were joined for ever. They lapsed into silence, and after a time
crept together in silence. Merely to be so close soothed them, and
sitting side by side the divisions disappeared, and it seemed as if the
world were once more solid and entire, and as if, in some strange way,
they had grown larger and stronger.
It was long before they moved, and when they moved it was with great
reluctance. They stood together in front of the looking-glass, and with
a brush tried to make themselves look as if they had been feeling
nothing all the morning, neither pain nor happiness. But it chilled
them to see themselves in the glass, for instead of being vast and
indivisible they were really very small and separate, the size of the
glass leaving a large space for the reflection of other things.