________________________________________________
_ Uncomfortable as the night, with its rocking movement,
and salt smells, may have been, and in one case undoubtedly was,
for Mr. Pepper had insufficient clothes upon his bed, the breakfast
next morning wore a kind of beauty. The voyage had begun,
and had begun happily with a soft blue sky, and a calm sea.
The sense of untapped resources, things to say as yet unsaid,
made the hour significant, so that in future years the entire journey
perhaps would be represented by this one scene, with the sound
of sirens hooting in the river the night before, somehow mixing in.
The table was cheerful with apples and bread and eggs. Helen handed
Willoughby the butter, and as she did so cast her eye on him
and reflected, "And she married you, and she was happy, I suppose."
She went off on a familiar train of thought, leading on to all
kinds of well-known reflections, from the old wonder, why Theresa
had married Willoughby?
"Of course, one sees all that," she thought, meaning that one sees
that he is big and burly, and has a great booming voice, and a fist
and a will of his own; "but--" here she slipped into a fine analysis
of him which is best represented by one word, "sentimental," by which
she meant that he was never simple and honest about his feelings.
For example, he seldom spoke of the dead, but kept anniversaries
with singular pomp. She suspected him of nameless atrocities
with regard to his daughter, as indeed she had always suspected
him of bullying his wife. Naturally she fell to comparing her
own fortunes with the fortunes of her friend, for Willoughby's
wife had been perhaps the one woman Helen called friend, and this
comparison often made the staple of their talk. Ridley was a scholar,
and Willoughby was a man of business. Ridley was bringing out the third
volume of Pindar when Willoughby was launching his first ship.
They built a new factory the very year the commentary on Aristotle--
was it?--appeared at the University Press. "And Rachel," she looked
at her, meaning, no doubt, to decide the argument, which was
otherwise too evenly balanced, by declaring that Rachel was not
comparable to her own children. "She really might be six years old,"
was all she said, however, this judgment referring to the smooth
unmarked outline of the girl's face, and not condemning her otherwise,
for if Rachel were ever to think, feel, laugh, or express herself,
instead of dropping milk from a height as though to see what kind of
drops it made, she might be interesting though never exactly pretty.
She was like her mother, as the image in a pool on a still summer's
day is like the vivid flushed face that hangs over it.
Meanwhile Helen herself was under examination, though not from either
of her victims. Mr. Pepper considered her; and his meditations,
carried on while he cut his toast into bars and neatly buttered them,
took him through a considerable stretch of autobiography. One of
his penetrating glances assured him that he was right last night
in judging that Helen was beautiful. Blandly he passed her the jam.
She was talking nonsense, but not worse nonsense than people usually
do talk at breakfast, the cerebral circulation, as he knew to his cost,
being apt to give trouble at that hour. He went on saying "No" to her,
on principle, for he never yielded to a woman on account of her sex.
And here, dropping his eyes to his plate, he became autobiographical.
He had not married himself for the sufficient reason that he had
never met a woman who commanded his respect. Condemned to pass
the susceptible years of youth in a railway station in Bombay,
he had seen only coloured women, military women, official women;
and his ideal was a woman who could read Greek, if not Persian,
was irreproachably fair in the face, and able to understand
the small things he let fall while undressing. As it was he
had contracted habits of which he was not in the least ashamed.
Certain odd minutes every day went to learning things by heart;
he never took a ticket without noting the number; he devoted
January to Petronius, February to Catullus, March to the Etruscan
vases perhaps; anyhow he had done good work in India, and there
was nothing to regret in his life except the fundamental defects
which no wise man regrets, when the present is still his.
So concluding he looked up suddenly and smiled. Rachel caught
his eye.
"And now you've chewed something thirty-seven times, I suppose?"
she thought, but said politely aloud, "Are your legs troubling you
to-day, Mr. Pepper?"
"My shoulder blades?" he asked, shifting them painfully.
"Beauty has no effect upon uric acid that I'm aware of," he sighed,
contemplating the round pane opposite, through which the sky and sea
showed blue. At the same time he took a little parchment volume
from his pocket and laid it on the table. As it was clear that he
invited comment, Helen asked him the name of it. She got the name;
but she got also a disquisition upon the proper method of making roads.
Beginning with the Greeks, who had, he said, many difficulties
to contend with, he continued with the Romans, passed to England
and the right method, which speedily became the wrong method,
and wound up with such a fury of denunciation directed against
the road-makers of the present day in general, and the road-makers
of Richmond Park in particular, where Mr. Pepper had the habit
of cycling every morning before breakfast, that the spoons fairly
jingled against the coffee cups, and the insides of at least four
rolls mounted in a heap beside Mr. Pepper's plate.
"Pebbles!" he concluded, viciously dropping another bread pellet
upon the heap. "The roads of England are mended with pebbles!
'With the first heavy rainfall,' I've told 'em, 'your road
will be a swamp.' Again and again my words have proved true.
But d'you suppose they listen to me when I tell 'em so, when I
point out the consequences, the consequences to the public purse,
when I recommend 'em to read Coryphaeus? No, Mrs. Ambrose, you will
form no just opinion of the stupidity of mankind until you have sat
upon a Borough Council!" The little man fixed her with a glance
of ferocious energy.
"I have had servants," said Mrs. Ambrose, concentrating her gaze.
"At this moment I have a nurse. She's a good woman as they go,
but she's determined to make my children pray. So far, owing to
great care on my part, they think of God as a kind of walrus;
but now that my back's turned--Ridley," she demanded, swinging round
upon her husband, "what shall we do if we find them saying the Lord's
Prayer when we get home again?"
Ridley made the sound which is represented by "Tush." But Willoughby,
whose discomfort as he listened was manifested by a slight movement
rocking of his body, said awkwardly, "Oh, surely, Helen, a little
religion hurts nobody."
"I would rather my children told lies," she replied, and while
Willoughby was reflecting that his sister-in-law was even more eccentric
than he remembered, pushed her chair back and swept upstairs.
In a second they heard her calling back, "Oh, look! We're out at sea!"
They followed her on to the deck. All the smoke and the houses
had disappeared, and the ship was out in a wide space of sea very
fresh and clear though pale in the early light. They had left
London sitting on its mud. A very thin line of shadow tapered on
the horizon, scarcely thick enough to stand the burden of Paris,
which nevertheless rested upon it. They were free of roads,
free of mankind, and the same exhilaration at their freedom ran
through them all. The ship was making her way steadily through small
waves which slapped her and then fizzled like effervescing water,
leaving a little border of bubbles and foam on either side.
The colourless October sky above was thinly clouded as if by the trail
of wood-fire smoke, and the air was wonderfully salt and brisk.
Indeed it was too cold to stand still. Mrs. Ambrose drew her arm
within her husband's, and as they moved off it could be seen from
the way in which her sloping cheek turned up to his that she had
something private to communicate. They went a few paces and Rachel
saw them kiss.
Down she looked into the depth of the sea. While it was slightly
disturbed on the surface by the passage of the _Euphrosyne_,
beneath it was green and dim, and it grew dimmer and dimmer until
the sand at the bottom was only a pale blur. One could scarcely
see the black ribs of wrecked ships, or the spiral towers made
by the burrowings of great eels, or the smooth green-sided monsters
who came by flickering this way and that.
--"And, Rachel, if any one wants me, I'm busy till one," said her father,
enforcing his words as he often did, when he spoke to his daughter,
by a smart blow upon the shoulder.
"Until one," he repeated. "And you'll find yourself some employment,
eh? Scales, French, a little German, eh? There's Mr. Pepper who knows
more about separable verbs than any man in Europe, eh?" and he went
off laughing. Rachel laughed, too, as indeed she had laughed ever since she
could remember, without thinking it funny, but because she admired her father.
But just as she was turning with a view perhaps to finding
some employment, she was intercepted by a woman who was so broad
and so thick that to be intercepted by her was inevitable.
The discreet tentative way in which she moved, together with her
sober black dress, showed that she belonged to the lower orders;
nevertheless she took up a rock-like position, looking about her to see
that no gentry were near before she delivered her message, which had
reference to the state of the sheets, and was of the utmost gravity.
"How ever we're to get through this voyage, Miss Rachel, I really
can't tell," she began with a shake of her head. "There's only
just sheets enough to go round, and the master's has a rotten place
you could put your fingers through. And the counterpanes. Did you
notice the counterpanes? I thought to myself a poor person would
have been ashamed of them. The one I gave Mr. Pepper was hardly fit
to cover a dog. . . . No, Miss Rachel, they could _not_ be mended;
they're only fit for dust sheets. Why, if one sewed one's finger
to the bone, one would have one's work undone the next time they
went to the laundry."
Her voice in its indignation wavered as if tears were near.
There was nothing for it but to descend and inspect a large pile
of linen heaped upon a table. Mrs. Chailey handled the sheets
as if she knew each by name, character, and constitution. Some had
yellow stains, others had places where the threads made long ladders;
but to the ordinary eye they looked much as sheets usually do look,
very chill, white, cold, and irreproachably clean.
Suddenly Mrs. Chailey, turning from the subject of sheets,
dismissing them entirely, clenched her fists on the top of them,
and proclaimed, "And you couldn't ask a living creature to sit
where I sit!"
Mrs. Chailey was expected to sit in a cabin which was large enough,
but too near the boilers, so that after five minutes she could
hear her heart "go," she complained, putting her hand above it,
which was a state of things that Mrs. Vinrace, Rachel's mother,
would never have dreamt of inflicting--Mrs. Vinrace, who knew every
sheet in her house, and expected of every one the best they could do,
but no more.
It was the easiest thing in the world to grant another room,
and the problem of sheets simultaneously and miraculously solved itself,
the spots and ladders not being past cure after all, but--
"Lies! Lies! Lies!" exclaimed the mistress indignantly, as she
ran up on to the deck. "What's the use of telling me lies?"
In her anger that a woman of fifty should behave like a child
and come cringing to a girl because she wanted to sit where she
had not leave to sit, she did not think of the particular case, and,
unpacking her music, soon forgot all about the old woman and her sheets.
Mrs. Chailey folded her sheets, but her expression testified to
flatness within. The world no longer cared about her, and a ship
was not a home. When the lamps were lit yesterday, and the sailors
went tumbling above her head, she had cried; she would cry
this evening; she would cry to-morrow. It was not home. Meanwhile she
arranged her ornaments in the room which she had won too easily.
They were strange ornaments to bring on a sea voyage--china pugs,
tea-sets in miniature, cups stamped floridly with the arms of the city
of Bristol, hair-pin boxes crusted with shamrock, antelopes' heads in
coloured plaster, together with a multitude of tiny photographs,
representing downright workmen in their Sunday best, and women
holding white babies. But there was one portrait in a gilt frame,
for which a nail was needed, and before she sought it Mrs. Chailey
put on her spectacles and read what was written on a slip of paper
at the back:
"This picture of her mistress is given to Emma Chailey by Willoughby
Vinrace in gratitude for thirty years of devoted service."
Tears obliterated the words and the head of the nail.
"So long as I can do something for your family," she was saying,
as she hammered at it, when a voice called melodiously in the passage:
"Mrs. Chailey! Mrs. Chailey!"
Chailey instantly tidied her dress, composed her face, and opened
the door.
"I'm in a fix," said Mrs. Ambrose, who was flushed and out of breath.
"You know what gentlemen are. The chairs too high--the tables
too low--there's six inches between the floor and the door.
What I want's a hammer, an old quilt, and have you such a thing
as a kitchen table? Anyhow, between us"--she now flung open the door
of her husband's sitting room, and revealed Ridley pacing up and down,
his forehead all wrinkled, and the collar of his coat turned up.
"It's as though they'd taken pains to torment me!" he cried,
stopping dead. "Did I come on this voyage in order to catch
rheumatism and pneumonia? Really one might have credited Vinrace
with more sense. My dear," Helen was on her knees under a table,
"you are only making yourself untidy, and we had much better recognise
the fact that we are condemned to six weeks of unspeakable misery.
To come at all was the height of folly, but now that we are here I
suppose that I can face it like a man. My diseases of course will
be increased--I feel already worse than I did yesterday, but we've
only ourselves to thank, and the children happily--"
"Move! Move! Move!" cried Helen, chasing him from corner
to corner with a chair as though he were an errant hen.
"Out of the way, Ridley, and in half an hour you'll find it ready."
She turned him out of the room, and they could hear him groaning
and swearing as he went along the passage.
"I daresay he isn't very strong," said Mrs. Chailey, looking at
Mrs. Ambrose compassionately, as she helped to shift and carry.
"It's books," sighed Helen, lifting an armful of sad volumes
from the floor to the shelf. "Greek from morning to night.
If ever Miss Rachel marries, Chailey, pray that she may marry a man
who doesn't know his ABC."
The preliminary discomforts and harshnesses, which generally make
the first days of a sea voyage so cheerless and trying to the temper,
being somehow lived through, the succeeding days passed pleasantly enough.
October was well advanced, but steadily burning with a warmth that made
the early months of the summer appear very young and capricious.
Great tracts of the earth lay now beneath the autumn sun, and the whole
of England, from the bald moors to the Cornish rocks, was lit up from
dawn to sunset, and showed in stretches of yellow, green, and purple.
Under that illumination even the roofs of the great towns glittered.
In thousands of small gardens, millions of dark-red flowers were blooming,
until the old ladies who had tended them so carefully came down
the paths with their scissors, snipped through their juicy stalks,
and laid them upon cold stone ledges in the village church.
Innumerable parties of picnickers coming home at sunset cried,
"Was there ever such a day as this?" "It's you," the young men whispered;
"Oh, it's you," the young women replied. All old people and many sick
people were drawn, were it only for a foot or two, into the open air,
and prognosticated pleasant things about the course of the world.
As for the confidences and expressions of love that were heard not
only in cornfields but in lamplit rooms, where the windows opened
on the garden, and men with cigars kissed women with grey hairs,
they were not to be counted. Some said that the sky was an emblem
of the life to come. Long-tailed birds clattered and screamed,
and crossed from wood to wood, with golden eyes in their plumage.
But while all this went on by land, very few people thought
about the sea. They took it for granted that the sea was calm;
and there was no need, as there is in many houses when the creeper
taps on the bedroom windows, for the couples to murmur before
they kiss, "Think of the ships to-night," or "Thank Heaven,
I'm not the man in the lighthouse!" For all they imagined, the ships
when they vanished on the sky-line dissolved, like snow in water.
The grown-up view, indeed, was not much clearer than the view
of the little creatures in bathing drawers who were trotting in to
the foam all along the coasts of England, and scooping up buckets
full of water. They saw white sails or tufts of smoke pass across
the horizon, and if you had said that these were waterspouts,
or the petals of white sea flowers, they would have agreed.
The people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England.
Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a very small island,
but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned.
One figured them first swarming about like aimless ants, and almost
pressing each other over the edge; and then, as the ship withdrew,
one figured them making a vain clamour, which, being unheard,
either ceased, or rose into a brawl. Finally, when the ship was
out of sight of land, it became plain that the people of England
were completely mute. The disease attacked other parts of the earth;
Europe shrank, Asia shrank, Africa and America shrank, until it seemed
doubtful whether the ship would ever run against any of those wrinkled
little rocks again. But, on the other hand, an immense dignity had
descended upon her; she was an inhabitant of the great world, which has
so few inhabitants, travelling all day across an empty universe,
with veils drawn before her and behind. She was more lonely than
the caravan crossing the desert; she was infinitely more mysterious,
moving by her own power and sustained by her own resources. The sea
might give her death or some unexampled joy, and none would know of it.
She was a bride going forth to her husband, a virgin unknown of men;
in her vigor and purity she might be likened to all beautiful things,
for as a ship she had a life of her own.
Indeed if they had not been blessed in their weather, one blue
day being bowled up after another, smooth, round, and flawless.
Mrs. Ambrose would have found it very dull. As it was, she had her
embroidery frame set up on deck, with a little table by her side
on which lay open a black volume of philosophy. She chose a thread
from the vari-coloured tangle that lay in her lap, and sewed
red into the bark of a tree, or yellow into the river torrent.
She was working at a great design of a tropical river running
through a tropical forest, where spotted deer would eventually browse
upon masses of fruit, bananas, oranges, and giant pomegranates,
while a troop of naked natives whirled darts into the air.
Between the stitches she looked to one side and read a sentence
about the Reality of Matter, or the Nature of Good. Round her men
in blue jerseys knelt and scrubbed the boards, or leant over the rails
and whistled, and not far off Mr. Pepper sat cutting up roots with
a penknife. The rest were occupied in other parts of the ship:
Ridley at his Greek--he had never found quarters more to his liking;
Willoughby at his documents, for he used a voyage to work of arrears
of business; and Rachel--Helen, between her sentences of philosophy,
wondered sometimes what Rachel _did_ do with herself? She meant
vaguely to go and see. They had scarcely spoken two words to each
other since that first evening; they were polite when they met,
but there had been no confidence of any kind. Rachel seemed to get
on very well with her father--much better, Helen thought, than she
ought to--and was as ready to let Helen alone as Helen was to let
her alone.
At that moment Rachel was sitting in her room doing absolutely nothing.
When the ship was full this apartment bore some magnificent title
and was the resort of elderly sea-sick ladies who left the deck
to their youngsters. By virtue of the piano, and a mess of books
on the floor, Rachel considered it her room, and there she would sit
for hours playing very difficult music, reading a little German,
or a little English when the mood took her, and doing--as at this moment--
absolutely nothing.
The way she had been educated, joined to a fine natural indolence,
was of course partly the reason of it, for she had been educated
as the majority of well-to-do girls in the last part of the nineteenth
century were educated. Kindly doctors and gentle old professors had
taught her the rudiments of about ten different branches of knowledge,
but they would as soon have forced her to go through one piece of drudgery
thoroughly as they would have told her that her hands were dirty.
The one hour or the two hours weekly passed very pleasantly,
partly owing to the other pupils, partly to the fact that the window
looked upon the back of a shop, where figures appeared against
the red windows in winter, partly to the accidents that are bound
to happen when more than two people are in the same room together.
But there was no subject in the world which she knew accurately.
Her mind was in the state of an intelligent man's in the beginning
of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; she would believe practically
anything she was told, invent reasons for anything she said.
The shape of the earth, the history of the world, how trains worked,
or money was invested, what laws were in force, which people wanted what,
and why they wanted it, the most elementary idea of a system in
modern life--none of this had been imparted to her by any of her
professors or mistresses. But this system of education had one
great advantage. It did not teach anything, but it put no obstacle
in the way of any real talent that the pupil might chance to have.
Rachel, being musical, was allowed to learn nothing but music;
she became a fanatic about music. All the energies that might have
gone into languages, science, or literature, that might have made
her friends, or shown her the world, poured straight into music.
Finding her teachers inadequate, she had practically taught herself.
At the age of twenty-four she knew as much about music as most
people do when they are thirty; and could play as well as nature
allowed her to, which, as became daily more obvious, was a really
generous allowance. If this one definite gift was surrounded by
dreams and ideas of the most extravagant and foolish description,
no one was any the wiser.
Her education being thus ordinary, her circumstances were no more out
of the common. She was an only child and had never been bullied and
laughed at by brothers and sisters. Her mother having died when she
was eleven, two aunts, the sisters of her father, brought her up,
and they lived for the sake of the air in a comfortable house
in Richmond. She was of course brought up with excessive care,
which as a child was for her health; as a girl and a young
woman was for what it seems almost crude to call her morals.
Until quite lately she had been completely ignorant that for women
such things existed. She groped for knowledge in old books,
and found it in repulsive chunks, but she did not naturally care
for books and thus never troubled her head about the censorship
which was exercised first by her aunts, later by her father.
Friends might have told her things, but she had few of her own age,--
Richmond being an awkward place to reach,--and, as it happened,
the only girl she knew well was a religious zealot, who in the fervour
of intimacy talked about God, and the best ways of taking up
one's cross, a topic only fitfully interesting to one whose mind
reached other stages at other times.
But lying in her chair, with one hand behind her head, the other
grasping the knob on the arm, she was clearly following her
thoughts intently. Her education left her abundant time for thinking.
Her eyes were fixed so steadily upon a ball on the rail of the ship
that she would have been startled and annoyed if anything had chanced
to obscure it for a second. She had begun her meditations with
a shout of laughter, caused by the following translation from _Tristan_:
In shrinking trepidation
His shame he seems to hide
While to the king his relation
He brings the corpse-like Bride.
Seems it so senseless what I say?
She cried that it did, and threw down the book. Next she had
picked up _Cowper's_ _Letters_, the classic prescribed by her
father which had bored her, so that one sentence chancing to
say something about the smell of broom in his garden, she had
thereupon seen the little hall at Richmond laden with flowers
on the day of her mother's funeral, smelling so strong that now
any flower-scent brought back the sickly horrible sensation;
and so from one scene she passed, half-hearing, half-seeing,
to another. She saw her Aunt Lucy arranging flowers in the drawing-room.
"Aunt Lucy," she volunteered, "I don't like the smell of broom;
it reminds me of funerals."
"Nonsense, Rachel," Aunt Lucy replied; "don't say such foolish
things, dear. I always think it a particularly cheerful plant."
Lying in the hot sun her mind was fixed upon the characters of her aunts,
their views, and the way they lived. Indeed this was a subject
that lasted her hundreds of morning walks round Richmond Park,
and blotted out the trees and the people and the deer. Why did
they do the things they did, and what did they feel, and what was
it all about? Again she heard Aunt Lucy talking to Aunt Eleanor.
She had been that morning to take up the character of a servant,
"And, of course, at half-past ten in the morning one expects to find
the housemaid brushing the stairs." How odd! How unspeakably odd!
But she could not explain to herself why suddenly as her aunt spoke
the whole system in which they lived had appeared before her eyes
as something quite unfamiliar and inexplicable, and themselves as
chairs or umbrellas dropped about here and there without any reason.
She could only say with her slight stammer, "Are you f-f-fond of
Aunt Eleanor, Aunt Lucy?" to which her aunt replied, with her nervous
hen-like twitter of a laugh, "My dear child, what questions you
do ask!"
"How fond? Very fond!" Rachel pursued.
"I can't say I've ever thought 'how,'" said Miss Vinrace.
"If one cares one doesn't think 'how,' Rachel," which was aimed
at the niece who had never yet "come" to her aunts as cordially
as they wished.
"But you know I care for you, don't you, dear, because you're
your mother's daughter, if for no other reason, and there
_are_ plenty of other reasons"--and she leant over and kissed
her with some emotion, and the argument was spilt irretrievably
about the place like a bucket of milk.
By these means Rachel reached that stage in thinking, if thinking
it can be called, when the eyes are intent upon a ball or a knob
and the lips cease to move. Her efforts to come to an understanding
had only hurt her aunt's feelings, and the conclusion must be that it
is better not to try. To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss
between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently.
It was far better to play the piano and forget all the rest.
The conclusion was very welcome. Let these odd men and women--
her aunts, the Hunts, Ridley, Helen, Mr. Pepper, and the rest--
be symbols,--featureless but dignified, symbols of age, of youth,
of motherhood, of learning, and beautiful often as people upon the stage
are beautiful. It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant,
or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.
Reality dwelling in what one saw and felt, but did not talk about,
one could accept a system in which things went round and round
quite satisfactorily to other people, without often troubling
to think about it, except as something superficially strange.
Absorbed by her music she accepted her lot very complacently,
blazing into indignation perhaps once a fortnight, and subsiding
as she subsided now. Inextricably mixed in dreamy confusion,
her mind seemed to enter into communion, to be delightfully expanded
and combined with the spirit of the whitish boards on deck,
with the spirit of the sea, with the spirit of Beethoven Op.
112, even with the spirit of poor William Cowper there at Olney.
Like a ball of thistledown it kissed the sea, rose, kissed it again,
and thus rising and kissing passed finally out of sight. The rising
and falling of the ball of thistledown was represented by the sudden
droop forward of her own head, and when it passed out of sight she
was asleep.
Ten minutes later Mrs. Ambrose opened the door and looked at her.
It did not surprise her to find that this was the way in which Rachel
passed her mornings. She glanced round the room at the piano,
at the books, at the general mess. In the first place she considered
Rachel aesthetically; lying unprotected she looked somehow like a victim
dropped from the claws of a bird of prey, but considered as a woman,
a young woman of twenty-four, the sight gave rise to reflections.
Mrs. Ambrose stood thinking for at least two minutes. She then smiled,
turned noiselessly away and went, lest the sleeper should waken,
and there should be the awkwardness of speech between them. _
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