The Voyage Out

“After the labours of legislation, I deserve sleep,” said Richard.

“You’re not to think about those guns,” said Clarissa, seeing that his eye, passing over the waves, still sought the land meditatively, “or about navies, or empires, or anything.” So saying she opened the book and began to read:

“‘Sir Walter Elliott, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage’—don’t you know Sir Walter?—‘There he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one.’ She does write well, doesn’t she? ‘There—’” She read on in a light humorous voice. She was determined that Sir Walter should take her husband’s mind off the guns of Britain, and divert him in an exquisite, quaint, sprightly, and slightly ridiculous world. After a time it appeared that the sun was sinking in that world, and the points becoming softer. Rachel looked up to see what caused the change. Richard’s eyelids were closing and opening; opening and closing. A loud nasal breath announced that he no longer considered appearances, that he was sound asleep.

“Triumph!” Clarissa whispered at the end of a sentence. Suddenly she raised her hand in protest. A sailor hesitated; she gave the book to Rachel, and stepped lightly to take the message—“Mr. Grice wished to know if it was convenient,” etc. She followed him. Ridley, who had prowled unheeded, started forward, stopped, and, with a gesture of disgust, strode off to his study. The sleeping politician was left in Rachel’s charge. She read a sentence, and took a look at him. In sleep he looked like a coat hanging at the end of a bed; there were all the wrinkles, and the sleeves and trousers kept their shape though no longer filled out by legs and arms. You can then best judge the age and state of the coat. She looked him all over until it seemed to her that he must protest.

He was a man of forty perhaps; and here there were lines round his eyes, and there curious clefts in his cheeks. Slightly battered he appeared, but dogged and in the prime of life.

“Sisters and a dormouse and some canaries,” Rachel murmured, never taking her eyes off him. “I wonder, I wonder” she ceased, her chin upon her hand, still looking at him. A bell chimed behind them, and Richard raised his head. Then he opened his eyes which wore for a second the queer look of a shortsighted person’s whose spectacles are lost. It took him a moment to recover from the impropriety of having snored, and possibly grunted, before a young lady. To wake and find oneself left alone with one was also slightly disconcerting.

“I suppose I’ve been dozing,” he said. “What’s happened to everyone? Clarissa?”

“Mrs. Dalloway has gone to look at Mr. Grice’s fish,” Rachel replied.

“I might have guessed,” said Richard. “It’s a common occurrence. And how have you improved the shining hour? Have you become a convert?”

“I don’t think I’ve read a line,” said Rachel.

“That’s what I always find. There are too many things to look at. I find nature very stimulating myself. My best ideas have come to me out of doors.”

“When you were walking?”

“Walking—riding—yachting—I suppose the most momentous conversations of my life took place while perambulating the great court at Trinity. I was at both universities. It was a fad of my father’s. He thought it broadening to the mind. I think I agree with him. I can remember—what an age ago it seems!—settling the basis of a future state with the present Secretary for India. We thought ourselves very wise. I’m not sure we weren’t. We were happy, Miss Vinrace, and we were young—gifts which make for wisdom.”

“Have you done what you said you’d do?” she asked.

“A searching question! I answer—Yes and No. If on the one hand I have not accomplished what I set out to accomplish—which of us does!—on the other I can fairly say this: I have not lowered my ideal.”

He looked resolutely at a sea-gull, as though his ideal flew on the wings of the bird.

“But,” said Rachel, “what is your ideal?”

“There you ask too much, Miss Vinrace,” said Richard playfully.

She could only say that she wanted to know, and Richard was sufficiently amused to answer.

“Well, how shall I reply? In one word—Unity. Unity of aim, of dominion, of progress. The dispersion of the best ideas over the greatest area.”

“The English?”

“I grant that the English seem, on the whole, whiter than most men, their records cleaner. But, good Lord, don’t run away with the idea that I don’t see the drawbacks—horrors—unmentionable things done in our very midst! I’m under no illusions. Few people, I suppose, have fewer illusions than I have. Have you ever been in a factory, Miss Vinrace!—No, I suppose not—I may say I hope not.”

As for Rachel, she had scarcely walked through a poor street, and always under the escort of father, maid, or aunts.

“I was going to say that if you’d ever seen the kind of thing that’s going on round you, you’d understand what it is that makes me and men like me politicians. You asked me a moment ago whether I’d done what I set out to do. Well, when I consider my life, there is one fact I admit that I’m proud of; owing to me some thousands of girls in Lancashire—and many thousands to come after them—can spend an hour every day in the open air which their mothers had to spend over their looms. I’m prouder of that, I own, than I should be of writing Keats and Shelley into the bargain!”

It became painful to Rachel to be one of those who write Keats and Shelley. She liked Richard Dalloway, and warmed as he warmed. He seemed to mean what he said.

“I know nothing!” she exclaimed.

“It’s far better that you should know nothing,” he said paternally, “and you wrong yourself, I’m sure. You play very nicely, I’m told, and I’ve no doubt you’ve read heaps of learned books.”

Elderly banter would no longer check her.

“You talk of unity,” she said. “You ought to make me understand.”

“I never allow my wife to talk politics,” he said seriously. “For this reason. It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals. If I have preserved mine, as I am thankful to say that in great measure I have, it is due to the fact that I have been able to come home to my wife in the evening and to find that she has spent her day in calling, music, play with the children, domestic duties—what you will; her illusions have not been destroyed. She gives me courage to go on. The strain of public life is very great,” he added.

This made him appear a battered martyr, parting every day with some of the finest gold, in the service of mankind.

“I can’t think,” Rachel exclaimed, “how any one does it!”

“Explain, Miss Vinrace,” said Richard. “This is a matter I want to clear up.”

His kindness was genuine, and she determined to take the chance he gave her, although to talk to a man of such worth and authority made her heart beat.

“It seems to me like this,” she began, doing her best first to recollect and then to expose her shivering private visions.

“There’s an old widow in her room, somewhere, let us suppose in the suburbs of Leeds.”

Richard bent his head to show that he accepted the widow.

“In London you’re spending your life, talking, writing things, getting bills through, missing what seems natural. The result of it all is that she goes to her cupboard and finds a little more tea, a few lumps of sugar, or a little less tea and a newspaper. Widows all over the country I admit do this. Still, there’s the mind of the widow—the affections; those you leave untouched. But you waste you own.”

“If the widow goes to her cupboard and finds it bare,” Richard answered, “her spiritual outlook we may admit will be affected. If I may pick holes in your philosophy, Miss Vinrace, which has its merits, I would point out that a human being is not a set of compartments, but an organism. Imagination, Miss Vinrace; use your imagination; that’s where you young Liberals fail. Conceive the world as a whole. Now for your second point; when you assert that in trying to set the house in order for the benefit of the young generation I am wasting my higher capabilities, I totally disagree with you. I can conceive no more exalted aim—to be the citizen of the Empire. Look at it in this way, Miss Vinrace; conceive the state as a complicated machine; we citizens are parts of that machine; some fulfil more important duties; others (perhaps I am one of them) serve only to connect some obscure parts of the mechanism, concealed from the public eye. Yet if the meanest screw fails in its task, the proper working of the whole is imperilled.”

It was impossible to combine the image of a lean black widow, gazing out of her window, and longing for some one to talk to, with the image of a vast machine, such as one sees at South Kensington, thumping, thumping, thumping. The attempt at communication had been a failure.

“We don’t seem to understand each other,” she said.

“Shall I say something that will make you very angry?” he replied.

“It won’t,” said Rachel.

“Well, then; no woman has what I may call the political instinct. You have very great virtues; I am the first, I hope, to admit that; but I have never met a woman who even saw what is meant by statesmanship. I am going to make you still more angry. I hope that I never shall meet such a woman. Now, Miss Vinrace, are we enemies for life?”

Vanity, irritation, and a thrusting desire to be understood, urged her to make another attempt.

“Under the streets, in the sewers, in the wires, in the telephones, there is something alive; is that what you mean? In things like dust-carts, and men mending roads? You feel that all the time when you walk about London, and when you turn on a tap and the water comes?”

“Certainly,” said Richard. “I understand you to mean that the whole of modern society is based upon cooperative effort. If only more people would realise that, Miss Vinrace, there would be fewer of your old widows in solitary lodgings!”

Rachel considered.

“Are you a Liberal or are you a Conservative?” she asked.

“I call myself a Conservative for convenience sake,” said Richard, smiling. “But there is more in common between the two parties than people generally allow.”

There was a pause, which did not come on Rachel’s side from any lack of things to say; as usual she could not say them, and was further confused by the fact that the time for talking probably ran short. She was haunted by absurd jumbled ideas—how, if one went back far enough, everything perhaps was intelligible; everything was in common; for the mammoths who pastured in the fields of Richmond High Street had turned into paving stones and boxes full of ribbon, and her aunts.

“Did you say you lived in the country when you were a child?” she asked.

Crude as her manners seemed to him, Richard was flattered. There could be no doubt that her interest was genuine.

“I did,” he smiled.

“And what happened?” she asked. “Or do I ask too many questions?”

“I’m flattered, I assure you. But—let me see—what happened? Well, riding, lessons, sisters. There was an enchanted rubbish heap, I remember, where all kinds of queer things happened. Odd, what things impress children! I can remember the look of the place to this day. It’s a fallacy to think that children are happy. They’re not; they’re unhappy. I’ve never suffered so much as I did when I was a child.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I didn’t get on well with my father,” said Richard shortly. “He was a very able man, but hard. Well—it makes one determined not to sin in that way oneself. Children never forget injustice. They forgive heaps of things grown-up people mind; but that sin is the unpardonable sin. Mind you—I daresay I was a difficult child to manage; but when I think what I was ready to give! No, I was more sinned against than sinning. And then I went to school, where I did very fairly well; and and then, as I say, my father sent me to both universities… D’you know, Miss Vinrace, you’ve made me think? How little, after all, one can tell anybody about one’s life! Here I sit; there you sit; both, I doubt not, chock-full of the most interesting experiences, ideas, emotions; yet how communicate? I’ve told you what every second person you meet might tell you.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s the way of saying things, isn’t it, not the things?”

“True,” said Richard. “Perfectly true.” He paused. “When I look back over my life—I’m forty-two—what are the great facts that stand out? What were the revelations, if I may call them so? The misery of the poor and—” (he hesitated and pitched over) “love!”

Upon that word he lowered his voice; it was a word that seemed to unveil the skies for Rachel.

“It’s an odd thing to say to a young lady,” he continued. “But have you any idea what—what I mean by that? No, of course not. I don’t use the word in a conventional sense. I use it as young men use it. Girls are kept very ignorant, aren’t they? Perhaps it’s wise—perhaps—You don’t know?”

He spoke as if he had lost consciousness of what he was saying.

“No; I don’t,” she said, scarcely speaking above her breath.

“Warships, Dick! Over there! Look!” Clarissa, released from Mr. Grice, appreciative of all his seaweeds, skimmed towards them, gesticulating.

She had sighted two sinister grey vessels, low in the water, and bald as bone, one closely following the other with the look of eyeless beasts seeking their prey. Consciousness returned to Richard instantly.

“By George!” he exclaimed, and stood shielding his eyes.

“Ours, Dick?” said Clarissa.

“The Mediterranean Fleet,” he answered.

The Euphrosyne was slowly dipping her flag. Richard raised his hat. Convulsively Clarissa squeezed Rachel’s hand.

“Aren’t you glad to be English!” she said.

The warships drew past, casting a curious effect of discipline and sadness upon the waters, and it was not until they were again invisible that people spoke to each other naturally. At lunch the talk was all of valour and death, and the magnificent qualities of British admirals. Clarissa quoted one poet, Willoughby quoted another. Life on board a man-of-war was splendid, so they agreed, and sailors, whenever one met them, were quite especially nice and simple.

This being so, no one liked it when Helen remarked that it seemed to her as wrong to keep sailors as to keep a Zoo, and that as for dying on a battle-field, surely it was time we ceased to praise courage—“or to write bad poetry about it,” snarled Pepper.

But Helen was really wondering why Rachel, sitting silent, looked so queer and flushed.

CHAPTER 5

She was not able to follow up her observations, however, or to come to any conclusion, for by one of those accidents which are liable to happen at sea, the whole course of their lives was now put out of order.

Even at tea the floor rose beneath their feet and pitched too low again, and at dinner the ship seemed to groan and strain as though a lash were descending. She who had been a broad-backed dray-horse, upon whose hind-quarters pierrots might waltz, became a colt in a field. The plates slanted away from the knives, and Mrs. Dalloway’s face blanched for a second as she helped herself and saw the potatoes roll this way and that. Willoughby, of course, extolled the virtues of his ship, and quoted what had been said of her by experts and distinguished passengers, for he loved his own possessions. Still, dinner was uneasy, and directly the ladies were alone Clarissa owned that she would be better off in bed, and went, smiling bravely.

Next morning the storm was on them, and no politeness could ignore it. Mrs. Dalloway stayed in her room. Richard faced three meals, eating valiantly at each; but at the

third, certain glazed asparagus swimming in oil finally conquered him.

“That beats me,” he said, and withdrew.

“Now we are alone once more,” remarked William Pepper, looking round the table; but no one was ready to engage him in talk, and the meal ended in silence.

On the following day they met—but as flying leaves meet in the air. Sick they were not; but the wind propelled them hastily into rooms, violently downstairs. They passed each other gasping on deck; they shouted across tables. They wore fur coats; and Helen was never seen without a bandanna on her head. For comfort they retreated to their cabins, where with tightly wedged feet they let the ship bounce and tumble. Their sensations were the sensations of potatoes in a sack on a galloping horse. The world outside was merely a violent grey tumult. For two days they had a perfect rest from their old emotions. Rachel had just enough consciousness to suppose herself a donkey on the summit of a moor in a hail-storm, with its coat blown into furrows; then she became a wizened tree, perpetually driven back by the salt Atlantic gale.

Helen, on the other hand, staggered to Mrs. Dalloway’s door, knocked, could not be heard for the slamming of doors and the battering of wind, and entered.

There were basins, of course. Mrs. Dalloway lay half-raised on a pillow, and did not open her eyes. Then she murmured, “Oh, Dick, is that you?”

Helen shouted—for she was thrown against the washstand—“How are you?”

Clarissa opened one eye. It gave her an incredibly dissipated appearance. “Awful!” she gasped. Her lips were white inside.

Planting her feet wide, Helen contrived to pour champagne into a tumbler with a tooth-brush in it.

“Champagne,” she said.

“There’s a tooth-brush in it,” murmured Clarissa, and smiled; it might have been the contortion of one weeping. She drank.

“Disgusting,” she whispered, indicating the basins. Relics of humour still played over her face like moonshine.

“Want more?” Helen shouted. Speech was again beyond Clarissa’s reach. The wind laid the ship shivering on her side. Pale agonies crossed Mrs. Dalloway in waves. When the curtains flapped, grey lights puffed across her. Between the spasms of the storm, Helen made the curtain fast, shook the pillows, stretched the bed-clothes, and smoothed the hot nostrils and forehead with cold scent.

“You are good!” Clarissa gasped. “Horrid mess!”

She was trying to apologise for white underclothes fallen and scattered on the floor. For one second she opened a single eye, and saw that the room was tidy.

“That’s nice,” she gasped.

Helen left her; far, far away she knew that she felt a kind of liking for Mrs. Dalloway. She could not help respecting her spirit and her desire, even in the throes of sickness, for a tidy bedroom. Her petticoats, however, rose above her knees.

Quite suddenly the storm relaxed its grasp. It happened at tea; the expected paroxysm of the blast gave out just as it reached its climax and dwindled away, and the ship instead of taking the usual plunge went steadily. The monotonous order of plunging and rising, roaring and relaxing, was interfered with, and every one at table looked up and felt something loosen within them. The strain was slackened and human feelings began to peep again, as they do when daylight shows at the end of a tunnel.

“Try a turn with me,” Ridley called across to Rachel.

“Foolish!” cried Helen, but they went stumbling up the ladder. Choked by the wind their spirits rose with a rush, for on the skirts of all the grey tumult was a misty spot of gold. Instantly the world dropped into shape; they were no longer atoms flying in the void, but people riding a triumphant ship on the back of the sea. Wind and space were banished; the world floated like an apple in a tub, and the mind of man, which had been unmoored also, once more attached itself to the old beliefs.

Having scrambled twice round the ship and received many sound cuffs from the wind, they saw a sailor’s face positively shine golden. They looked, and beheld a complete yellow circle of sun; next minute it was traversed by sailing stands of cloud, and then completely hidden. By breakfast the next morning, however, the sky was swept clean, the waves, although steep, were blue, and after their view of the strange under-world, inhabited by phantoms, people began to live among tea-pots and loaves of bread with greater zest than ever.

Richard and Clarissa, however, still remained on the borderland. She did not attempt to sit up; her husband stood on his feet, contemplated his waistcoat and trousers, shook his head, and then lay down again. The inside of his brain was still rising and falling like the sea on the stage. At four o’clock he woke from sleep and saw the sunlight make a vivid angle across the red plush curtains and the grey tweed trousers. The ordinary world outside slid into his mind, and by the time he was dressed he was an English gentleman again.

He stood beside his wife. She pulled him down to her by the lapel of his coat, kissed him, and held him fast for a minute.

“Go and get a breath of air, Dick,” she said. “You look quite washed out… How nice you smell! … And be polite to that woman. She was so kind to me.”

Thereupon Mrs. Dalloway turned to the cool side of her pillow, terribly flattened but still invincible.

Richard found Helen talking to her brother-in-law, over two dishes of yellow cake and smooth bread and butter.

“You look very ill!” she exclaimed on seeing him. “Come and have some tea.”

He remarked that the hands that moved about the cups were beautiful.

“I hear you’ve been very good to my wife,” he said. “She’s had an awful time of it. You came in and fed her with champagne. Were you among the saved yourself?”

“I? Oh, I haven’t been sick for twenty years—sea-sick, I mean.”

“There are three stages of convalescence, I always say,” broke in the hearty voice of Willoughby. “The milk stage, the bread-and-butter stage, and the roast-beef stage. I should say you were at the bread-and-butter stage.” He handed him the plate.

“Now, I should advise a hearty tea, then a brisk walk on deck; and by dinner-time you’ll be clamouring for beef, eh?” He went off laughing, excusing himself on the score of business.

“What a splendid fellow he is!” said Richard. “Always keen on something.”

“Yes,” said Helen, “he’s always been like that.”

“This is a great undertaking of his,” Richard continued. “It’s a business that won’t stop with ships, I should say. We shall see him in Parliament, or I’m much mistaken. He’s the kind of man we want in Parliament—the man who has done things.”

But Helen was not much interested in her brother-in-law.

“I expect your head’s aching, isn’t it?” she asked, pouring a fresh cup.

“Well, it is,” said Richard. “It’s humiliating to find what a slave one is to one’s body in this world. D’you know, I can never work without a kettle on the hob. As often as not I don’t drink tea, but I must feel that I can if I

want to.”

“That’s very bad for you,” said Helen.

“It shortens one’s life; but I’m afraid, Mrs. Ambrose, we politicians must make up our minds to that at the outset. We’ve got to burn the candle at both ends, or—”

“You’ve cooked your goose!” said Helen brightly.

“We can’t make you take us seriously, Mrs. Ambrose,” he protested. “May I ask how you’ve spent your time? Reading—philosophy?” (He saw the black book.) “Metaphysics and fishing!” he exclaimed. “If I had to live again I believe I should devote myself to one or the other.” He began turning the pages.

“‘Good, then, is indefinable,’” he read out. “How jolly to think that’s going on still! ‘So far as I know there is only one ethical writer, Professor Henry Sidgwick, who has clearly recognised and stated this fact.’ That’s just the kind of thing we used to talk about when we were boys. I can remember arguing until five in the morning with Duffy—now Secretary for India—pacing round and round those cloisters until we decided it was too late to go to bed, and we went for a ride instead. Whether we ever came to any conclusion—that’s another matter. Still, it’s the arguing that counts. It’s things like that that stand out in life. Nothing’s been quite so vivid since. It’s the philosophers, it’s the scholars,” he continued, “they’re the people who pass the torch, who keep the light burning by which we live. Being a politician doesn’t necessarily blind one to that, Mrs. Ambrose.”