“I use to play the piano for hours and hours.”
“And after luncheon?”
“Then I went shopping with one of my aunts. Or we went to see someone, or we took a message; or we did something that had to be done—the taps might be leaking. They visit the poor a good deal—old char-women with bad legs, women who want tickets for hospitals. Or I used to walk in the park by myself. And after tea people sometimes called; or in summer we sat in the garden or played croquet; in winter I read aloud, while they worked; after dinner I played the piano and they wrote letters. If father was at home we had friends of his to dinner, and about once a month we went up to the play. Every now and then we dined out; sometimes I went to a dance in London, but that was difficult because of getting back. The people we saw were old family friends, and relations, but we didn’t see many people. There was the clergyman, Mr. Pepper, and the Hunts. Father generally wanted to be quiet when he came home, because he works very hard at Hull. Also my aunts aren’t very strong. A house takes up a lot of time if you do it properly. Our servants were always bad, and so Aunt Lucy used to do a good deal in the kitchen, and Aunt Clara, I think, spent most of the morning dusting the drawing-room and going through the linen and silver. Then there were the dogs. They had to be exercised, besides being washed and brushed. Now Sandy’s dead, but Aunt Clara has a very old cockatoo that came from India. Everything in our house,” she exclaimed, “comes from somewhere! It’s full of old furniture, not really old, Victorian, things mother’s family had or father’s family had, which they didn’t like to get rid of, I suppose, though we’ve really no room for them. It’s rather a nice house,” she continued, “except that it’s a little dingy—dull I should say.” She called up before her eyes a vision of the drawing-room at home; it was a large oblong room, with a square window opening on the garden. Green plush chairs stood against the wall; there was a heavy carved book-case, with glass doors, and a general impression of faded sofa covers, large spaces of pale green, and baskets with pieces of wool-work dropping out of them. Photographs from old Italian masterpieces hung on the walls, and views of Venetian bridges and Swedish waterfalls which members of the family had seen years ago. There were also one or two portraits of fathers and grandmothers, and an engraving of John Stuart Mill, after the picture by Watts. It was a room without definite character, being neither typically and openly hideous, nor strenuously artistic, nor really comfortable. Rachel roused herself from the contemplation of this familiar picture.
“But this isn’t very interesting for you,” she said, looking up.
“Good Lord!” Hewet exclaimed. “I’ve never been so much interested in my life.” She then realised that while she had been thinking of Richmond, his eyes had never left her face. The knowledge of this excited her.
“Go on, please go on,” he urged. “Let’s imagine it’s a Wednesday. You’re all at luncheon. You sit there, and Aunt Lucy there, and Aunt Clara here”; he arranged three pebbles on the grass between them.
“Aunt Clara carves the neck of lamb,” Rachel continued. She fixed her gaze upon the pebbles. “There’s a very ugly yellow china stand in front of me, called a dumb waiter, on which are three dishes, one for biscuits, one for butter, and one for cheese. There’s a pot of ferns. Then there’s Blanche the maid, who snuffles because of her nose. We talk—oh yes, it’s Aunt Lucy’s afternoon at Walworth, so we’re rather quick over luncheon. She goes off. She has a purple bag, and a black notebook. Aunt Clara has what they call a G.F.S. meeting in the drawing-room on Wednesday, so I take the dogs out. I go up Richmond Hill, along the terrace, into the park. It’s the 18th of April—the same day as it is here. It’s spring in England. The ground is rather damp. However, I cross the road and get on to the grass and we walk along, and I sing as I always do when I’m alone, until we come to the open place where you can see the whole of London beneath you on a clear day. Hampstead Church spire there, Westminster Cathedral over there, and factory chimneys about here. There’s generally a haze over the low parts of London; but it’s often blue over the park when London’s in a mist. It’s the open place that the balloons cross going over to Hurlingham. They’re pale yellow. Well, then, it smells very good, particularly if they happen to be burning wood in the keeper’s lodge which is there. I could tell you now how to get from place to place, and exactly what trees you’d pass, and where you’d cross the roads. You see, I played there when I was small. Spring is good, but it’s best in the autumn when the deer are barking; then it gets dusky, and I go back through the streets, and you can’t see people properly; they come past very quick, you just see their faces and then they’re gone—that’s what I like—and no one knows in the least what you’re doing—”
“But you have to be back for tea, I suppose?” Hewet checked her.
“Tea? Oh yes. Five o’clock. Then I say what I’ve done, and my aunts say what they’ve done, and perhaps someone comes in: Mrs. Hunt, let’s suppose. She’s an old lady with a lame leg. She has or she once had eight children; so we ask after them. They’re all over the world; so we ask where they are, and sometimes they’re ill, or they’re stationed in a cholera district, or in some place where it only rains once in five months. Mrs. Hunt,” she said with a smile, “had a son who was hugged to death by a bear.”
Here she stopped and looked at Hewet to see whether he was amused by the same things that amused her. She was reassured. But she thought it necessary to apologise again; she had been talking too much.
“You can’t conceive how it interests me,” he said. Indeed, his cigarette had gone out, and he had to light another.
“Why does it interest you?” she asked.
“Partly because you’re a woman,” he replied. When he said this, Rachel, who had become oblivious of anything, and had reverted to a childlike state of interest and pleasure, lost her freedom and became self-conscious. She felt herself at once singular and under observation, as she felt with St. John Hirst. She was about to launch into an argument which would have made them both feel bitterly against each other, and to define sensations which had no such importance as words were bound to give them when Hewet led her thoughts in a different direction.
“I’ve often walked along the streets where people live all in a row, and one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on earth the women were doing inside,” he said. “Just consider: it’s the beginning of the twentieth century, and until a few years ago no woman had ever come out by herself and said things at all. There it was going on in the background, for all those thousands of years, this curious silent unrepresented life. Of course we’re always writing about women—abusing them, or jeering at them, or worshipping them; but it’s never come from women themselves. I believe we still don’t know in the least how they live, or what they feel, or what they do precisely. If one’s a man, the only confidences one gets are from young women about their love affairs. But the lives of women of forty, of unmarried women, of working women, of women who keep shops and bring up children, of women like your aunts or Mrs. Thornbury or Miss Allan—one knows nothing whatever about them. They won’t tell you. Either they’re afraid, or they’ve got a way of treating men. It’s the man’s view that’s represented, you see. Think of a railway train: fifteen carriages for men who want to smoke. Doesn’t it make your blood boil? If I were a woman I’d blow someone’s brains out. Don’t you laugh at us a great deal? Don’t you think it all a great humbug? You, I mean—how does it all strike you?”
His determination to know, while it gave meaning to their talk, hampered her; he seemed to press further and further, and made it appear so important. She took some time to answer, and during that time she went over and over the course of her twenty-four years, lighting now on one point, now on another—on her aunts, her mother, her father, and at last her mind fixed upon her aunts and her father, and she tried to describe them as at this distance they appeared to her.
They were very much afraid of her father. He was a great dim force in the house, by
means of which they held on to the great world which is represented every morning in the Times. But the real life of the house was something quite different from this. It went on independently of Mr. Vinrace, and tended to hide itself from him. He was good-humoured towards them, but contemptuous. She had always taken it for granted that his point of view was just, and founded upon an ideal scale of things where the life of one person was absolutely more important than the life of another, and that in that scale they were much less importance than he was. But did she really believe that? Hewet’s words made her think. She always submitted to her father, just as they did, but it was her aunts who influenced her really; her aunts who built up the fine, closely woven substance of their life at home. They were less splendid but more natural than her father was. All her rages had been against them; it was their world with its four meals, its punctuality, and servants on the stairs at half-past ten, that she examined so closely and wanted so vehemently to smash to atoms. Following these thoughts she looked up and said:
“And there’s a sort of beauty in it—there they are at Richmond at this very moment building things up. They’re all wrong, perhaps, but there’s a sort of beauty in it,” she repeated. “It’s so unconscious, so modest. And yet they feel things. They do mind if people die. Old spinsters are always doing things. I don’t quite know what they do. Only that was what I felt when I lived with them. It was very real.”
She reviewed their little journeys to and fro, to Walworth, to charwomen with bad legs, to meetings for this and that, their minute acts of charity and unselfishness which flowered punctually from a definite view of what they ought to do, their friendships, their tastes and habits; she saw all these things like grains of sand falling, falling through innumerable days, making an atmosphere and building up a solid mass, a background. Hewet observed her as she considered this.
“Were you happy?” he demanded.
Again she had become absorbed in something else, and he called her back to an unusually vivid consciousness of herself.
“I was both,” she replied. “I was happy and I was miserable. You’ve no conception what it’s like—to be a young woman.” She looked straight at him. “There are terrors and agonies,” she said, keeping her eye on him as if to detect the slightest hint of laughter.
“I can believe it,” he said. He returned her look with perfect sincerity.
“Women one sees in the streets,” she said.
“Prostitutes?”
“Men kissing one.”
He nodded his head.
“You were never told?”
She shook her head.
“And then,” she began and stopped. Here came in the great space of life into which no one had ever penetrated. All that she had been saying about her father and her aunts and walks in Richmond Park, and what they did from hour to hour, was merely on the surface. Hewet was watching her. Did he demand that she should describe that also? Why did he sit so near and keep his eye on her? Why did they not have done with this searching and agony? Why did they not kiss each other simply? She wished to kiss him. But all the time she went on spinning out words.
“A girl is more lonely than a boy. No one cares in the least what she does. Nothing’s expected of her. Unless one’s very pretty people don’t listen to what you say … And that is what I like,” she added energetically, as if the memory were very happy. “I like walking in Richmond Park and singing to myself and knowing it doesn’t matter a damn to anybody. I like seeing things go on—as we saw you that night when you didn’t see us—I love the freedom of it—it’s like being the wind or the sea.” She turned with a curious fling of her hands and looked at the sea. It was still very blue, dancing away as far as the eye could reach, but the light on it was yellower, and the clouds were turning flamingo red.
A feeling of intense depression crossed Hewet’s mind as she spoke. It seemed plain that she would never care for one person rather than another; she was evidently quite indifferent to him; they seemed to come very near, and then they were as far apart as ever again; and her gesture as she turned away had been oddly beautiful.
“Nonsense,” he said abruptly. “You like people. You like admiration. Your real grudge against Hirst is that he doesn’t admire you.”
She made no answer for some time. Then she said:
“That’s probably true. Of course I like people—I like almost every one I’ve ever met.”
She turned her back on the sea and regarded Hewet with friendly if critical eyes. He was good-looking in the sense that he had always had a sufficiency of beef to eat and fresh air to breathe. His head was big; the eyes were also large; though generally vague they could be forcible; and the lips were sensitive. One might account him a man of considerable passion and fitful energy, likely to be at the mercy of moods which had little relation to facts; at once tolerant and fastidious. The breadth of his forehead showed capacity for thought. The interest with which Rachel looked at him was heard in her voice.
“What novels do you write?” she asked.
“I want to write a novel about Silence,” he said; “the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.” He sighed. “However, you don’t care,” he continued. He looked at her almost severely. “Nobody cares. All you read a novel for is to see what sort of person the writer is, and, if you know him, which of his friends he’s put in. As for the novel itself, the whole conception, the way one’s seen the thing, felt about it, make it stand in relation to other things, not one in a million cares for that. And yet I sometimes wonder whether there’s anything else in the whole world worth doing. These other people,” he indicated the hotel, “are always wanting something they can’t get. But there’s an extraordinary satisfaction in writing, even in the attempt to write. What you said just now is true: one doesn’t want to be things; one wants merely to be allowed to see them.”
Some of the satisfaction of which he spoke came into his face as he gazed out to sea.
It was Rachel’s turn now to feel depressed. As he talked of writing he had become suddenly impersonal. He might never care for anyone; all that desire to know her and get at her, which she had felt pressing on her almost painfully, had completely vanished.
“Are you a good writer?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m not first-rate, of course; I’m good second-rate; about as good as Thackeray, I should say.”
Rachel was amazed. For one thing it amazed her to hear Thackeray called second-rate; and then she could not widen her point of view to believe that there could be great writers in existence at the present day, or if there were, that anyone she knew could be a great writer, and his self-confidence astounded her, and he became more and more remote.
“My other novel,” Hewet continued, “is about a young man who is obsessed by an idea—the idea of being a gentleman. He manages to exist at Cambridge on a hundred pounds a year. He has a coat; it was once a very good coat. But the trousers—they’re not so good. Well, he goes up to London, gets into good society, owing to an early-morning adventure on the banks of the Serpentine. He is led into telling lies—my idea, you see, is to show the gradual corruption of the soul—calls himself the son of some great landed proprietor in Devonshire. Meanwhile the coat becomes older and older, and he hardly dares to wear the trousers. Can’t you imagine the wretched man, after some splendid evening of debauchery, contemplating these garments—hanging them over the end of the bed, arranging them now in full light, now in shade, and wondering whether they will survive him, or he will survive them? Thoughts of suicide cross his mind. He has a friend, too, a man who somehow subsists upon selling small birds, for which he sets traps in the fields near Uxbridge. They’re scholars, both of them. I know one or two wretched starving creatures like that who quote Aristotle at you over a fried herring and a pint of porter. Fashionable life, too, I have to represent at some length, in order to show my hero under all circumstances. Lady Theo Bingham Bingley, whose bay mare he had the good fortune to stop, is the daughte
r of a very fine old Tory peer. I’m going to describe the kind of parties I once went to—the fashionable intellectuals, you know, who like to have the latest book on their tables. They give parties, river parties, parties where you play games. There’s no difficulty in conceiving incidents; the difficulty is to put them into shape—not to get run away with, as Lady Theo was. It ended disastrously for her, poor woman, for the book, as I planned it, was going to end in profound and sordid respectability. Disowned by her father, she marries my hero, and they live in a snug little villa outside Croydon, in which town he is set up as a house agent. He never succeeds in becoming a real gentleman after all. That’s the interesting part of it. Does it seem to you the kind of book you’d like to read?” he enquired; “or perhaps you’d like my Stuart tragedy better,” he continued, without waiting for her to answer him. “My idea is that there’s a certain quality of beauty in the past, which the ordinary historical novelist completely ruins by his absurd conventions. The moon becomes the Regent of the Skies. People clap spurs to their horses, and so on. I’m going to treat people as though they were exactly the same as we are. The advantage is that, detached from modern conditions, one can make them more intense and more abstract then people who live as we do.”
Rachel had listened to all this with attention, but with a certain amount of bewilderment. They both sat thinking their own thoughts.
“I’m not like Hirst,” said Hewet, after a pause; he spoke meditatively; “I don’t see circles of chalk between people’s feet. I sometimes wish I did. It seems to me so tremendously complicated and confused. One can’t come to any decision at all; one’s less and less capable of making judgments. D’you find that? And then one never knows what anyone feels. We’re all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person’s opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn’t know.”
Classic Works from Women Writers Page 89
