The Voyage Out (24 page)

“I’m not a young lady,” Evelyn flashed; she bit her underlip. “Just because I like splendid things you laugh at me. Why are there no men like Garibaldi now?” she demanded.

“Look here,” said Mr. Perrott, “you don’t give me a chance. You think we ought to begin things fresh. Good. But I don’t see precisely—conquer a territory? They’re all conquered already, aren’t they?”

“It’s not any territory in particular,” Evelyn explained. “It’s the idea, don’t you see? We lead such tame lives. And I feel sure you’ve got splendid things in you.”

Hewet saw the scars and hollows in Mr. Perrott’s sagacious face relax pathetically. He could imagine the calculations which even then went on within his mind, as to whether he would be justified in asking a woman to marry him, considering that he made no more than five hundred a year at the Bar, owned no private means, and had an invalid sister to support. Mr. Perrott again knew that he was not “quite,” as Susan stated in her diary; not quite a gentleman she meant, for he was the son of a grocer in Leeds, had started life with a basket on his back, and now, though practically indistinguishable from a born gentleman, showed his origin to keen eyes in an impeccable neatness of dress, lack of freedom in manner, extreme cleanliness of person, and a certain indescribable timidity and precision with his knife and fork which might be the relic of days when meat was rare, and the way of handling it by no means gingerly.

The two parties who were strolling about and losing their unity now came together, and joined each other in a long stare over the yellow and green patches of the heated landscape below. The hot air danced across it, making it impossible to see the roofs of a village on the plain distinctly. Even on the top of the mountain where a breeze played lightly, it was very hot, and the heat, the food, the immense space, and perhaps some less well-defined cause produced a comfortable drowsiness and a sense of happy relaxation in them. They did not say much, but felt no constraint in being silent.

“Suppose we go and see what’s to be seen over there?” said Arthur to Susan, and the pair walked off together, their departure certainly sending some thrill of emotion through the rest.

“An odd lot, aren’t they?” said Arthur. “I thought we should never get ’em all to the top. But I’m glad we came, by Jove! I wouldn’t have missed this for something.”

“I don’t
like
Mr. Hirst,” said Susan inconsequently. “I suppose he’s very clever, but why should clever people be so—I expect he’s awfully nice, really,” she added, instinctively qualifying what might have seemed an unkind remark.

“Hirst? Oh, he’s one of these learned chaps,” said Arthur indifferently. “He don’t look as if he enjoyed it. You should hear him talking to Elliot. It’s as much as I can do to follow ’em at all.… I was never good at my books.”

With these sentences and the pauses that came between them they reached a little hillock, on the top of which grew several slim trees.

“D’you mind if we sit down here?” said Arthur, looking about him. “It’s jolly in the shade—and the view—” They sat down, and looked straight ahead of them in silence for some time.

“But I do envy those clever chaps sometimes,” Arthur remarked. “I don’t suppose they ever …” He did not finish his sentence.

“I can’t see why you should envy them,” said Susan, with great sincerity.

“Odd things happen to one,” said Arthur. “One goes along smoothly enough, one thing following another, and it’s all very jolly and plain sailing, and you think you know all about it, and suddenly one doesn’t know where one is a bit, and everything seems different from what it used to seem. Now to-day, coming up that path, riding behind you, I seemed to see everything as if—” he paused and plucked a piece of grass up by the roots. He scattered the little lumps of earth which were sticking to the roots—“As if it had a kind of meaning. You’ve made the difference to me,” he jerked out, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you. I’ve felt it ever since I knew you.… It’s because I love you.”

Even while they had been saying commonplace things Susan
had been conscious of the excitement of intimacy, which seemed not only to lay bare something in her, but in the trees and the sky, and the progress of his speech which seemed inevitable was positively painful to her, for no human being had ever come so close to her before.

She was struck motionless as his speech went on, and her heart gave great separate leaps at the last words. She sat with her fingers curled round a stone, looking straight in front of her down the mountain over the plain. So then, it had actually happened to her, a proposal of marriage.

Arthur looked round at her; his face was oddly twisted. She was drawing her breath with such difficulty that she could hardly answer.

“You might have known.” He seized her in his arms; again and again and again they clasped each other, murmuring inarticulately.

“Well,” sighed Arthur, sinking back on the ground, “that’s the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me.” He looked as if he were trying to put things seen in a dream beside real things.

There was a long silence.

“It’s the most perfect thing in the world,” Susan stated, very gently and with great conviction. It was no longer merely a proposal of marriage, but of marriage with Arthur, with whom she was in love.

In the silence that followed, holding his hand tightly in hers, she prayed to God that she might make him a good wife.

“And what will Mr. Perrott say?” she asked at the end of it.

“Dear old fellow,” said Arthur who, now that the first shock was over, was relaxing into an enormous sense of pleasure and contentment. “We must be very nice to him, Susan.”

He told her how hard Perrott’s life had been, and how absurdly devoted he was to Arthur himself. He went on to tell her about his mother, a widow lady, of strong character. In return Susan sketched the portraits of her own family—Edith in particular, her youngest sister, whom she loved better than any one else, “except you, Arthur.… Arthur,” she continued, “what was it that you first liked me for?”

“It was a buckle you wore one night at sea,” said Arthur, after due consideration. “I remember noticing—it’s an absurd thing to notice!—that you didn’t take peas, because I don’t either.”

From this they went on to compare their more serious tastes, or rather Susan ascertained what Arthur cared about, and professed herself very fond of the same thing. They would live in London, perhaps have a cottage in the country near Susan’s family, for they would find it strange without her at first. Her mind, stunned to begin with, now flew to the various changes that her engagement would make—how delightful it would be to join the ranks of the married women—no longer to hang on to groups of girls much younger than herself—to escape the long solitude of an old maid’s life. Now and then her amazing good fortune overcame her, and she turned to Arthur with an exclamation of love.

They lay in each other’s arms and had no notion that they were observed. Yet two figures suddenly appeared among the trees above them.

“Here’s shade,” began Hewet, when Rachel suddenly stopped dead. They saw a man and woman lying on the ground beneath them, rolling slightly this way and that as the embrace tightened and slackened. The man then sat upright and the woman, who now appeared to be Susan Warrington, lay back upon the ground, with her eyes shut and an absorbed look upon her face, as though she were not altogether conscious. Nor could you tell from her expression whether she was happy, or had suffered something. When Arthur again turned to her, butting her as a lamb butts a ewe, Hewet and Rachel retreated without a word. Hewet felt uncomfortably shy.

“I don’t like that,” said Rachel after a moment.

“I can remember not liking it either,” said Hewet. “I can remember—” but he changed his mind and continued in an ordinary tone of voice, “Well, we may take it for granted that they’re engaged. D’you think he’ll ever fly, or will she put a stop to that?”

But Rachel was still agitated; she could not get away from the sight they had just seen. Instead of answering Hewet she persisted:

“Love’s an odd thing, isn’t it, making one’s heart beat.”

“It’s so enormously important, you see,” Hewet replied. “Their lives are now changed for ever.”

“And it makes one sorry for them too,” Rachel continued, as though she were tracing the course of her feelings. “I don’t know either of them, but I could almost burst into tears. That’s silly, isn’t it?”

“Just because they’re in love,” said Hewet. “Yes,” he added after a moment’s consideration, “there’s something horribly pathetic about it, I agree.”

And now, as they had walked some way from the grove of trees, and had come to a rounded hollow very tempting to the back, they proceeded to sit down, and the impression of the lovers lost some of its force, though a certain intensity of vision, which was probably the result of the sight, remained with them. As a day upon which any emotion has been repressed is different from other days, so this day was now different, merely because they had seen other people at a crisis of their lives.

“A great encampment of tents they might be,” said Hewet, looking in front of him at the mountains. “Isn’t it like a water-colour too—you know the way water-colours dry in ridges all across the paper—I’ve been wondering what they looked like.”

His eyes became dreamy, as though he were matching things, and reminded Rachel in their colour of the green flesh of a snail. She sat beside him looking at the mountains too. When it became painful to look any longer, the great size of the view seeming to enlarge her eyes beyond their natural limit, she looked at the ground; it pleased her to scrutinise this inch of the soil of South America so minutely that she noticed every grain of earth and made it into a world where she was endowed with the supreme power. She bent a blade of grass, and set an insect on the utmost tassel of it, and wondered if the insect realised his strange adventure, and thought how strange it was that she should have bent that tassel rather than any other of the million tassels.

“You’ve never told me your name,” said Hewet suddenly. “Miss Somebody Vinrace.… I like to know people’s Christian names.”

“Rachel,” she replied.

“Rachel,” he repeated. “I have an aunt called Rachel, who put the life of Father Damien into verse. She is a religious fanatic—the result of the way she was brought up, down in Northamptonshire, never seeing a soul. Have you any aunts?”

“I live with them,” said Rachel.

“And I wonder what they’re doing now?” Hewet enquired.

“They are probably buying wool,” Rachel determined. She tried to describe them. “They are small, rather pale women,” she began, “very clean. We live in Richmond. They have an old dog, too, who will only eat the marrow out of bones.… They are always going to church. They tidy their drawers a good deal.” But here she was overcome by the difficulty of describing people.

“It’s impossible to believe that it’s all going on still!” she exclaimed.

The sun was behind them and two long shadows suddenly lay upon the ground in front of them, one waving because it was made by a skirt, and the other stationary, because thrown by a pair of legs in trousers.

“You look very comfortable!” said Helen’s voice above them.

“Hirst,” said Hewet, pointing at the scissor-like shadow; he then rolled round to look up at them.

“There’s room for us all here,” he said.

When Hirst had seated himself comfortably, he said:

“Did you congratulate the young couple?”

It appeared that, coming to the same spot a few minutes after Hewet and Rachel, Helen and Hirst had seen precisely the same thing.

“No, we didn’t congratulate them,” said Hewet. “They seemed very happy.”

“Well,” said Hirst, pursing up his lips, “so long as I needn’t marry either of them——”

“We were very much moved,” said Hewet.

“I thought you would be,” said Hirst. “Which was it, Monk? The thought of the immortal passions, or the thought of new-born males to keep the Roman Catholics out? I assure you,” he said to Helen, “he’s capable of being moved by either.”

Rachel was a good deal stung by his banter, which she felt to be directed equally against them both, but she could think of no repartee.

“Nothing moves Hirst,” Hewet laughed; he did not seem to be stung at all. “Unless it were a transfinite number falling in love with a finite one—I suppose such things do happen, even in mathematics.”

“On the contrary,” said Hirst with a touch of annoyance, “I consider myself a person of very strong passions.” It was clear from the way he spoke that he meant it seriously; he spoke of course for the benefit of the ladies.

“By the way, Hirst,” said Hewet, after a pause, “I have a terrible confession to make. Your book—the poems of Wordsworth, which if you remember I took off your table just as we were starting, and certainly put in my pocket here——”

“Is lost,” Hirst finished for him.

“I consider that there is still a chance,” Hewet urged, slapping himself to right and left, “that I never did take it after all.”

“No,” said Hirst. “It is here.” He pointed to his breast.

“Thank God,” Hewet exclaimed. “I need no longer feel as though I’d murdered a child!”

“I should think you were always losing things,” Helen remarked, looking at him meditatively.

“I don’t lose things,” said Hewet. “I mislay them. That was the reason why Hirst refused to share a cabin with me on the voyage out.”

“You came out together?” Helen enquired.

“I propose that each member of this party now gives a short biographical sketch of himself or herself,” said Hirst, sitting upright. “Miss Vinrace, you come first; begin.”

Rachel stated that she was twenty-four years of age, the daughter of a ship-owner, that she had never been properly educated; played the piano, had no brothers or sisters, and lived at Richmond with aunts, her mother being dead.

“Next,” said Hirst, having taken in these facts; he pointed at Hewet.

“I am the son of an English gentleman. I am twenty-seven,” Hewet began. “My father was a fox-hunting squire. He died when I was ten in the hunting field. I can remember his body coming home, on a shutter I suppose, just as I was going down to tea, and noticing that there was jam for tea, and wondering whether I should be allowed——”