The Voyage Out (33 page)

“My Aunt,” Hirst interrupted, “spends her life in East Lambeth among the degraded poor. I only quoted my Aunt because she is inclined to persecute people she calls ‘intellectual,’ which is what I suspect Miss Vinrace of doing. It’s all the fashion now. If you’re clever it’s always taken for granted that you’re completely without
sympathy, understanding, affection—all the things that really matter. Oh, you Christians! You’re the most conceited, patronising, hypocritical set of old humbugs in the kingdom! Of course,” he continued, “I’m the first to allow your country gentlemen great merits. For one thing, they’re probably quite frank about their passions, which we are not. My father, who is a clergyman in Norfolk, says that there is hardly a squire in the county who does not——”

“But about Gibbon?” Hewet interrupted. The look of nervous tension which had come over every face was relaxed by the interruption.

“You find him monotonous, I suppose. But you know——” He opened the book, and began searching for passages to read aloud, and in a little time he found a good one which he considered suitable. But there was nothing in the world that bored Ridley more than being read aloud to, and he was besides scrupulously fastidious as to the dress and behaviour of ladies. In the space of fifteen minutes he had decided against Mrs. Flushing on the ground that her orange plume did not suit her complexion, that she spoke too loud, that she crossed her legs, and finally, when he saw her accept a cigarette that Hewet offered her, he jumped up, exclaiming something about “bar parlours,” and left them. Mrs. Flushing was evidently relieved by his departure. She puffed her cigarette, stuck her legs out, and examined Helen closely as to the character and reputation of their common friend, Mrs. Raymond Parry. By a series of little stratagems she drove her to define Mrs. Parry as somewhat elderly, by no means beautiful, very much made up—an insolent old harridan, in short, whose parties were amusing because one met odd people; but Helen herself always pitied poor Mr. Parry, who was understood to be shut up downstairs with cases full of gems, while his wife enjoyed herself in the drawing-room. “Not that I believe what people say against her—although she hints, of course—” Upon which Mrs. Flushing cried out with delight:

“She’s my first cousin! Go on—go on!”

When Mrs. Flushing rose to go she was obviously delighted with her new acquaintances. She made three or four different plans for
meeting or going on an expedition, or showing Helen the things they had bought, on her way to the carriage. She included them all in a vague but magnificent invitation.

As Helen returned to the garden again, Ridley’s words of warning came into her head, and she hesitated a moment, and looked at Rachel sitting between Hirst and Hewet. But she could draw no conclusions, for Hewet was still reading Gibbon aloud, and Rachel, for all the expression she had, might have been a shell, and his words water rubbing against her ears, as water rubs a shell on the edge of a rock.

Hewet’s voice was very pleasant. When he reached the end of the period Hewet stopped, and no one volunteered any criticism.

“I do adore the aristocracy!” Hirst exclaimed after a moment’s pause. “They’re so amazingly unscrupulous. None of us would dare to behave as that woman behaves.”

“What I like about them,” said Helen as she sat down, “is that they’re so well put together. Naked, Mrs. Flushing would be superb. Dressed as she dresses, it’s absurd, of course.”

“Yes,” said Hirst. A shade of depression crossed his face. “I’ve never weighed more than ten stone in my life,” he said, “which is ridiculous, considering my height, and I’ve actually gone down in weight since we came here. I daresay that accounts for the rheumatism.” Again he jerked his wrist back sharply, so that Helen might hear the grinding of the chalk stones. She could not help smiling.

“It’s no laughing matter for me, I assure you,” he protested. “My mother’s a chronic invalid, and I’m always expecting to be told that I’ve got heart disease myself. Rheumatism always goes to the heart in the end.”

“For goodness’ sake, Hirst,” Hewet protested; “one might think you were an old cripple of eighty. If it comes to that, I had an aunt who died of cancer myself, but I put a bold face on it—” He rose and began tilting his chair backwards and forwards on its hind legs. “Is any one here inclined for a walk?” he said. “There’s a magnificent walk, up behind the house. You come out on to a cliff and look right down into the sea. The rocks are all red; you can see them
through the water. The other day I saw a sight that fairly took my breath away—about twenty jelly-fish, semi-transparent, pink, with long streamers, floating on the top of the waves.”

“Sure they weren’t mermaids?” said Hirst. “It’s much too hot to climb uphill.” He looked at Helen, who showed no signs of moving.

“Yes, it’s too hot,” Helen decided.

There was a short silence.

“I’d like to come,” said Rachel.

“But she might have said that anyhow,” Helen thought to herself as Hewet and Rachel went away together, and Helen was left alone with St. John, to St. John’s obvious satisfaction.

He may have been satisfied, but his usual difficulty in deciding that one subject was more deserving of notice than another prevented him from speaking for some time. He sat staring intently at the head of a dead match, while Helen considered—so it seemed from the expression of her eyes—something not closely connected with the present moment.

At last St. John exclaimed, “Damn! Damn everything! Damn everybody!” he added. “At Cambridge there are people to talk to.”

“At Cambridge there are people to talk to,” Helen echoed him, rhythmically and absent-mindedly. Then she woke up.

“By the way, have you settled what you’re going to do—is it to be Cambridge or the Bar?”

He pursed his lips, but made no immediate answer, for Helen was still slightly inattentive. She had been thinking about Rachel and which of the two young men she was likely to fall in love with, and now sitting opposite to Hirst she thought, “He’s ugly. It’s a pity they’re so ugly.”

She did not include Hewet in this criticism; she was thinking of the clever, honest, interesting young men she knew, of whom Hirst was a good example, and wondering whether it was necessary that thought and scholarship should thus maltreat their bodies, and should thus elevate their minds to a very high tower from which the human race appeared to them like rats and mice squirming on the flat.

“And the future?” she reflected, vaguely envisaging a race of
men becoming more and more like Hirst, and a race of women becoming more and more like Rachel. “Oh no,” she concluded, glancing at him, “one wouldn’t marry you. Well, then, the future of the race is in the hands of Susan and Arthur; no—that’s dreadful. Of farm labourers; no—not of the English at all, but of Russians and Chinese.” This train of thought did not satisfy her, and was interrupted by St. John, who began again:

“I wish you knew Bennett. He’s the greatest man in the world.”

“Bennett?” she enquired. Becoming more at his ease, St. John dropped the concentrated abruptness of his manner, and explained that Bennett was a man who lived in an old windmill six miles out of Cambridge. He lived the perfect life, according to St. John, very lonely, very simple, caring only for the truth of things, always ready to talk, and extraordinarily modest, though his mind was of the greatest.

“Don’t you think,” said St. John, when he had done describing him, “that kind of thing makes this kind of thing rather flimsy? Did you notice at tea how poor old Hewet had to change the conversation? How they were all ready to pounce upon me because they thought I was going to say something improper? It wasn’t anything, really. If Bennett had been there he’d have said exactly what he meant to say, or he’d have got up and gone. But there’s something rather bad for the character in that—I mean if one hasn’t got Bennett’s character. It’s inclined to make one bitter. Should you say that I was bitter?”

Helen did not answer, and he continued:

“Of course I am, disgustingly bitter, and it’s a beastly thing to be. But the worst of me is that I’m so envious. I envy every one. I can’t endure people who do things better than I do—perfectly absurd things too—waiters balancing piles of plates—even Arthur, because Susan’s in love with him. I want people to like me, and they don’t. It’s partly my appearance, I expect,” he continued, “though it’s an absolute lie to say I’ve Jewish blood in me—as a matter of fact we’ve been in Norfolk, Hirst of Hirstbourne Hall, for three centuries at least. It must be awfully soothing to be like you—every one liking one at once.”

“I assure you they don’t,” Helen laughed.

“They do,” said Hirst with conviction. “In the first place, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen; in the second, you have an exceptionally nice nature.”

If Hirst had looked at her instead of looking intently at his teacup he would have seen Helen blush, partly with pleasure, partly with an impulse of affection towards the young man who had seemed, and would seem again, so ugly and so limited. She pitied him, for she suspected that he suffered, and she was interested in him, for many of the things he said seemed to her true; she admired the morality of youth, and yet she felt imprisoned. As if her instinct were to escape to something brightly coloured and impersonal, which she could hold in her hands, she went into the house and returned with her embroidery. But he was not interested in her embroidery; he did not even look at it.

“About Miss Vinrace,” he began,—“oh, look here, do let’s be St. John and Helen, and Rachel and Terence—what’s she like? Does she reason, does she feel, or is she merely a kind of footstool?”

“Oh, no,” said Helen, with great decision. From her observations at tea she was inclined to doubt whether Hirst was the person to educate Rachel. She had gradually come to be interested in her niece, and fond of her; she disliked some things about her very much, she was amused by others; but she felt her, on the whole, a live if unformed human being, experimental, and not always fortunate in her experiments, but with powers of some kind, and a capacity for feeling. Somewhere in the depths of her, too, she was bound to Rachel by the indestructible if inexplicable ties of sex. “She seems vague, but she’s a will of her own,” she said, as if in the interval she had run through her qualities.

The embroidery, which was a matter for thought, the design being difficult and the colours wanting consideration, brought lapses into the dialogue when she seemed to be engrossed in her skeins of silk, or, with head a little drawn back and eyes narrowed, considered the effect of the whole. Thus she merely said, “Um—m—m,” to St. John’s next remark, “I shall ask her to go for a walk with me.”

Perhaps he resented this division of attention. He sat silent watching Helen closely.

“You’re absolutely happy,” he proclaimed at last.

“Yes?” Helen enquired, sticking in her needle.

“Marriage, I suppose,” said St. John.

“Yes,” said Helen, gently drawing her needle out.

“Children?” St. John enquired.

“Yes,” said Helen, sticking her needle in again. “I don’t know why I’m happy,” she suddenly laughed, looking him full in the face. There was a considerable pause.

“There’s an abyss between us,” said St. John. His voice sounded as if it issued from the depths of a cavern in the rocks. “You’re infinitely simpler than I am. Women always are, of course. That’s the difficulty. One never knows how a woman gets there. Supposing all the time you’re thinking, ‘Oh, what a morbid young man!’ ”

Helen sat and looked at him with her needle in her hand. From her position she saw his head in front of the dark pyramid of a magnolia-tree. With one foot raised on the rung of a chair, and her elbow out in the attitude for sewing, her own figure possessed the sublimity of a woman’s of the early world, spinning the thread of fate—the sublimity possessed by many women of the present day who fall into the attitude required by scrubbing or sewing. St. John looked at her.

“I suppose you’ve never paid any one a compliment in the course of your life,” he said irrelevantly.

“I spoil Ridley rather,” Helen considered.

“I’m going to ask you point blank—do you like me?”

After a certain pause, she replied, “Yes, certainly.”

“Thank God!” he exclaimed. “That’s one mercy. You see,” he continued with emotion, “I’d rather you liked me than any one I’ve ever met.”

“What about the five philosophers?” said Helen, with a laugh, stitching firmly and swiftly at her canvas. “I wish you’d describe them.”

Hirst had no particular wish to describe them, but when he
began to consider them he found himself soothed and strengthened. Far away on the other side of the world as they were, in smoky rooms, and grey medieval courts, they appeared remarkable figures, free-spoken men with whom one could be at ease; incomparably more subtle in emotion than the people here. They gave him, certainly, what no woman would give him, not Helen even. Warming at the thought of them, he went on to lay his own case before Mrs. Ambrose. Should he stay on at Cambridge or should he go to the Bar? One day he thought one thing, another day another. Helen listened attentively. At last, without any preface, she pronounced her decision.

“Leave Cambridge and go to the Bar,” she said. He pressed her for her reasons.

“I think you’d enjoy London more,” she said. It did not seem a very subtle reason, but she appeared to think it sufficient. She looked at him against the background of flowering magnolia. There was something curious in the sight. Perhaps it was that the heavy wax-like flowers were so smooth and inarticulate, and his face—he had thrown his hat away, his hair was rumpled, he held his eyeglasses in his hand, so that a red mark appeared on either side of his nose—was so worried and garrulous. It was a beautiful bush, spreading very widely, and all the time she had sat there talking she had been noticing the patches of shade and the shape of the leaves, and the way the great white flowers sat in the midst of the green. She had noticed it half-consciously, but nevertheless the pattern had become part of their talk. She laid down her sewing, and began to walk up and down the garden, and Hirst rose too and paced by her side. He was rather disturbed, uncomfortable, and full of thought. Neither of them spoke.