The Voyage Out (32 page)

Whether too slight or too vague the ties that bind people casually meeting in a hotel at midnight, they possess one advantage at least over the bonds which unite the elderly, who have lived together once and so must live for ever. Slight they may be, but vivid and genuine, merely because the power to break them is within the grasp of each, and there is no reason for continuance except a true desire that continue they shall. When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other’s bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness. The joint lives of Ridley and Helen had arrived at this stage of community, and it was often necessary for one or the other to recall with an effort whether a thing had been said or only thought, shared or dreamt in private. At four o’clock in the afternoon two or three days later Mrs. Ambrose was standing brushing her hair, while her husband was in the dressing-room which opened out of her room, and occasionally, through the cascade of water—he was washing his face—she caught exclamations, “So it goes on year after year; I
wish, I wish, I wish I could make an end of it,” to which she paid no attention.

“It’s white? Or only brown?” Thus she herself murmured, examining a hair which gleamed suspiciously among the brown. She pulled it out and laid it on the dressing-table. She was criticising her own appearance, or rather approving of it, standing a little way back from the glass and looking at her own face with superb pride and melancholy, when her husband appeared in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, his face half obscured by a towel.

“You often tell me I don’t notice things,” he remarked.

“Tell me if this is a white hair, then?” she replied. She laid the hair on his hand.

“There’s not a white hair on your head,” he exclaimed.

“Ah, Ridley, I begin to doubt,” she sighed; and bowed her head under his eyes so that he might judge, but the inspection produced only a kiss where the line of parting ran, and husband and wife then proceeded to move about the room, casually murmuring.

“What was that you were saying?” Helen remarked, after an interval of conversation which no third person could have understood.

“Rachel—you ought to keep an eye upon Rachel,” he observed significantly, and Helen, though she went on brushing her hair, looked at him. His observations were apt to be true.

“Young gentlemen don’t interest themselves in young women’s education without a motive,” he remarked.

“Oh, Hirst,” said Helen.

“Hirst and Hewet, they’re all the same to me—all covered with spots,” he replied. “He advises her to read Gibbon. Did you know that?”

Helen did not know that, but she would not allow herself inferior to her husband in powers of observation. She merely said:

“Nothing would surprise me. Even that dreadful flying man we met at the dance—even Mr. Dalloway—even——”

“I advise you to be circumspect,” said Ridley. “There’s Willoughby, remember—Willoughby”; he pointed at a letter.

Helen looked with a sigh at an envelope which lay upon her dressing-table. Yes, there lay Willoughby, curt, inexpressive, perpetually jocular, robbing a whole continent of mystery, enquiring after his daughter’s manners and morals—hoping she wasn’t a bore, and bidding them pack her off to him on board the very next ship if she were—and then grateful and affectionate with suppressed emotion, and then half a page about his own triumphs over wretched little natives who went on strike and refused to load his ships, until he roared English oaths at them, “popping my head out of the window just as I was, in my shirt sleeves. The beggars had the sense to scatter.”

“If Theresa married Willoughby,” she remarked, turning the page with a hairpin, “one doesn’t see what’s to prevent Rachel——”

But Ridley was now off on grievances of his own connected with the washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits of Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man, and yet Ridley couldn’t simply point at the door and tell him to go. The truth of it was, they saw too many people. And so on and so on, more conjugal talk pattering softly and unintelligibly, until they were both ready to go down to tea.

The first thing that caught Helen’s eye as she came downstairs was a carriage at the door, filled with skirts and feathers nodding on the tops of hats. She had only time to gain the drawing-room before two names were oddly mispronounced by the Spanish maid, and Mrs. Thornbury came in slightly in advance of Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing.

“Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing,” said Mrs. Thornbury, with a wave of her hand. “A friend of our common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry.”

Mrs. Flushing shook hands energetically. She was a woman of forty perhaps, very well set up and erect, splendidly robust, though not as tall as the upright carriage of her body made her appear.

She looked Helen straight in the face and said, “You have a charmin’ house.”

She had a strongly marked face, her eyes looked straight at you, and though naturally she was imperious in her manner she was nervous at the same time. Mrs. Thornbury acted as interpreter, making
things smooth all round by a series of charming commonplace remarks.

“I’ve taken it upon myself, Mr. Ambrose,” she said, “to promise that you will be so kind as to give Mrs. Flushing the benefit of your experience. I’m sure no one here knows the country as well as you do. No one takes such wonderful long walks. No one, I’m sure, has your encyclopaedic knowledge upon every subject. Mr. Wilfrid Flushing is a collector. He had discovered really beautiful things already. I had no notion that the peasants were so artistic—though of course in the past——”

“Not old things—new things,” interrupted Mrs. Flushing curtly. “That is, if he takes my advice.”

The Ambroses had not lived for many years in London without knowing something of a good many people, by name at least, and Helen remembered hearing of the Flushings. Mr. Flushing was a man who kept an old furniture shop; he had always said he would not marry because most women have red cheeks, and would not take a house because most houses have narrow staircases, and would not eat meat because most animals bleed when they are killed; and then he had married an eccentric aristocratic lady, who certainly was not pale, who looked as if she ate meat, who had forced him to do all the things he most disliked—and here then was the lady. Helen looked at her with interest. They had moved out into the garden, where the tea was laid under a tree, and Mrs. Flushing was helping herself to cherry jam. She had a peculiar jerking movement of the body when she spoke, which caused the canary-coloured plume on her hat to jerk too. Her small but finely cut and vigorous features, together with the deep red of lips and cheeks, pointed to many generations of well-trained and well-nourished ancestors behind her.

“Nothin’ that’s more than twenty years old interests me,” she continued. “Mouldy old pictures, dirty old books, they stick ’em in museums when they’re only fit for burnin’.”

“I quite agree,” Helen laughed. “But my husband spends his life in digging up manuscripts which nobody wants.” She was amused by Ridley’s expression of startled disapproval.

“There’s a clever man in London called John who paints ever so much better than the old masters,” Mrs. Flushing continued. “His pictures excite me—nothin’ that’s old excites me.”

“But even his pictures will become old,” Mrs. Thornbury intervened.

“Then I’ll have ’em burnt, or I’ll put it in my will,” said Mrs. Flushing.

“And Mrs. Flushing lived in one of the most beautiful old houses in England—Chillingley,” Mrs. Thornbury explained to the rest of them.

“If I’d my way I’d burn that to-morrow,” Mrs. Flushing laughed. She had a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless.

“What does any sane person want with those great big houses?” she demanded. “If you go downstairs after dark you’re covered with black beetles, and the electric lights always goin’ out. What would you do if spiders came out of the tap when you turned on the hot water?” she demanded, fixing her eye on Helen.

Mrs. Ambrose shrugged her shoulders with a smile.

“This is what I like,” said Mrs. Flushing. She jerked her head at the villa. “A little house in a garden. I had one once in Ireland. One could lie in bed in the mornin’ and pick the roses outside the window with one’s toes.”

“And the gardeners, weren’t they surprised?” Mrs. Thornbury enquired.

“There were no gardeners,” Mrs. Flushing chuckled. “Nobody but me and an old woman without any teeth. You know the poor in Ireland lose their teeth after they’re twenty. But you wouldn’t expect a politician to understand that—Arthur Balfour wouldn’t understand that.”

Ridley sighed that he never expected any one to understand anything, least of all politicians.

“However,” he concluded, “there’s one advantage I find in extreme old age—nothing matters a hang except one’s food and one’s digestion. All I ask is to be left alone to moulder away in solitude. It’s obvious that the world’s going as fast as it can to—the Nethermost
Pit, and all I can do is to sit still and consume as much of my own smoke as possible.” He groaned, and with a melancholy glance laid the jam on his bread, for he felt the atmosphere of this abrupt lady distinctly unsympathetic.

“I always contradict my husband when he says that,” said Mrs. Thornbury sweetly. “You men! Where would you be if it weren’t for the women!”

“Read the
Symposium,”
said Ridley grimly.

“Symposium?”
cried Mrs. Flushing. “That’s Latin or Greek? Tell me, is there a good translation?”

“No,” said Ridley. “You will have to learn Greek.”

Mrs. Flushing cried, “Ah, ah, ah! I’d rather break stones in the road. I always envy the men who break stones and sit on those nice little heaps all day wearin’ spectacles. I’d infinitely rather break stones than clean out poultry runs, or feed the cows, or——”

Here Rachel came up from the lower garden with a book in her hand.

“What’s that book?” said Ridley, when she had shaken hands.

“It’s Gibbon,” said Rachel as she sat down.

“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?”
said Mrs. Thornbury. “A very wonderful book, I know. My dear father was always quoting it at us, with the result that we resolved never to read a line.”

“Gibbon the historian?” enquired Mrs. Flushing. “I connect him with some of the happiest hours of my life. We used to lie in bed and read Gibbon—about the massacres of the Christians, I remember—when we were supposed to be asleep. It’s no joke, I can tell you, readin’ a great big book, in double columns, by a night-light, and the light that comes through a chink in the door. Then there were the moths—tiger moths, yellow moths, and horrid cockchafers. Louisa, my sister, would have the window open. I wanted it shut. We fought every night of our lives over that window. Have you ever seen a moth dyin’ in a night-light?” she enquired.

Again there was an interruption. Hewet and Hirst appeared at the drawing-room window and came up to the tea-table.

Rachel’s heart beat hard. She was conscious of an extraordinary
intensity in everything, as though their presence stripped some cover off the surface of things; but the greetings were remarkably commonplace.

“Excuse me,” said Hirst, rising from his chair directly he had sat down. He went into the drawing-room, and returned with a cushion which he placed carefully upon his seat.

“Rheumatism,” he remarked, as he sat down for the second time.

“The result of the dance?” Helen enquired.

“Whenever I get at all run down I tend to be rheumatic,” Hirst stated. He bent his wrist back sharply. “I hear little pieces of chalk grinding together!”

Rachel looked at him. She was amused, and yet she was respectful; if such a thing could be, the upper part of her face seemed to laugh, and the lower part to check its laughter.

Hewet picked up the book that lay on the ground.

“You like this?” he asked in an undertone.

“No, I don’t like it,” she replied. She had indeed been trying all the afternoon to read it, and for some reason the glory which she had perceived at first had faded, and, read as she would, she could not grasp the meaning with her mind.

“It goes round, round, round, like a roll of oil-cloth,” she hazarded. Evidently she meant Hewet alone to hear her words, but Hirst demanded, “What d’you mean?”

She was instantly ashamed of her figure of speech, for she could not explain it in words of sober criticism.

“Surely it’s the most perfect style, so far as style goes, that’s ever been invented,” he continued. “Every sentence is practically perfect, and the wit——”

“Ugly in body, repulsive in mind,” she thought, instead of thinking about Gibbon’s style. “Yes, but strong, searching, unyielding in mind,” she was forced to add. She looked at his big head, a disproportionate part of which was occupied by the forehead, and at the direct, severe eyes.

“I give you up in despair,” he said. He meant it lightly, but she took it seriously, and believed that her value as a human being was lessened because she did not happen to admire the style of Gibbon.
The others were talking now in a group about the native villages which Mrs. Flushing ought to visit.

“I despair too,” she said impetuously. “How are you going to judge people merely by their minds?”

“You agree with my spinster Aunt, I expect,” said St. John in his jaunty manner, which was always irritating because it made the person he talked to appear unduly clumsy and in earnest. “ ‘Be good, sweet maid’—I thought Mr. Kingsley and my Aunt were now obsolete.”

“One can be very nice without having read a book,” she asserted. Very silly and simple her words sounded, and laid her open to derision.

“Did I ever deny it?” Hirst enquired, raising his eyebrows.

Most unexpectedly Mrs. Thornbury here intervened, either because it was her mission to keep things smooth or because she had long wished to speak to Mr. Hirst, feeling as she did that all young men were her sons.

“I have lived all my life with people like your Aunt, Mr. Hirst,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. Her brown squirrel-like eyes became even brighter than usual. “They have never heard of Gibbon. They only care for their pheasants and their peasants. They are great big men who look so fine on horseback, as people must have done, I think, in the days of the great wars. Say what you like against them—they are animal, they are unintellectual; they don’t read themselves, and they don’t want others to read, but they are some of the finest and the kindest human beings on the face of the earth! You would be surprised at some of the stories I could tell. You have never guessed, perhaps, at all the romances that go on in the heart of the country. Those are the people, I feel, among whom Shakespeare will be born if he is ever born again. In those old houses, up among the Downs——”