Classic Works from Women Writers

by Editors of Canterbury Classics

“You’d forgotten completely about me,” Terence reproached her, taking her arm and beginning to pace the deck, “and I never forget you.”

  “Oh, no,” she whispered, she had not forgotten, only the stars—the night—the dark—

  “You’re like a bird half asleep in its nest, Rachel. You’re asleep. You’re talking in your sleep.”

  Half asleep, and murmuring broken words, they stood in the angle made by the bow of the boat. It slipped on down the river. Now a bell struck on the bridge, and they heard the lapping of water as it rippled away on either side, and once a bird startled in its sleep creaked, flew on to the next tree, and was silent again. The darkness poured down profusely, and left them with scarcely any feeling of life, except that they were standing there together in the darkness.

  CHAPTER XXII

  The darkness fell, but rose again, and as each day spread widely over the earth and parted them from the strange day in the forest when they had been forced to tell each other what they wanted, this wish of theirs was revealed to other people, and in the process became slightly strange to themselves. Apparently it was not anything unusual that had happened; it was that they had become engaged to marry each other. The world, which consisted for the most part of the hotel and the villa, expressed itself glad on the whole that two people should marry, and allowed them to see that they were not expected to take part in the work which has to be done in order that the world shall go on, but might absent themselves for a time. They were accordingly left alone until they felt the silence as if, playing in a vast church, the door had been shut on them. They were driven to walk alone, and sit alone, to visit secret places where the flowers had never been picked and the trees were solitary. In solitude they could express those beautiful but too vast desires which were so oddly uncomfortable to the ears of other men and women—desires for a world, such as their own world which contained two people seemed to them to be, where people knew each other intimately and thus judged each other by what was good, and never quarrelled, because that was waste of time.

  They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun, or sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed. They were no longer embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning which could not express itself; they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers down a twisting river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner is turned; the unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable, and in many ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious, for it was refreshingly solid, and called out effort, and effort under such circumstances was not effort but delight.

  While Rachel played the piano, Terence sat near her, engaged, as far as the occasional writing of a word in pencil testified, in shaping the world as it appeared to him now that he and Rachel were going to be married. It was different certainly. The book called Silence would not now be the same book that it would have been. He would then put down his pencil and stare in front of him, and wonder in what respects the world was different—it had, perhaps, more solidity, more coherence, more importance, greater depth. Why, even the earth sometimes seemed to him very deep; not carved into hills and cities and fields, but heaped in great masses. He would look out of the window for ten minutes at a time; but no, he did not care for the earth swept of human beings. He liked human beings—he liked them, he suspected, better than Rachel did. There she was, swaying enthusiastically over her music, quite forgetful of him—but he liked that quality in her. He liked the impersonality which it produced in her. At last, having written down a series of little sentences, with notes of interrogation attached to them, he observed aloud, “‘Women—’under the heading Women I’ve written:

  “‘Not really vainer than men. Lack of self-confidence at the base of most serious faults. Dislike of own sex traditional, or founded on fact? Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an optimist, because they don’t think.’ What do you say, Rachel?” He paused with his pencil in his hand and a sheet of paper on his knee.

  Rachel said nothing. Up and up the steep spiral of a very late Beethoven sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined staircase, energetically at first, then more laboriously advancing her feet with effort until she could go no higher and returned with a run to begin at the very bottom again.

  “‘Again, it’s the fashion now to say that women are more practical and less idealistic than men, also that they have considerable organising ability but no sense of honour’—query, what is meant by masculine term, honour?—what corresponds to it in your sex? Eh?”

  Attacking her staircase once more, Rachel again neglected this opportunity of revealing the secrets of her sex. She had, indeed, advanced so far in the pursuit of wisdom that she allowed these secrets to rest undisturbed; it seemed to be reserved for a later generation to discuss them philosophically.

  Crashing down a final chord with her left hand, she exclaimed at last, swinging round upon him:

  “No, Terence, it’s no good; here am I, the best musician in South America, not to speak of Europe and Asia, and I can’t play a note because of you in the room interrupting me every other second.”

  “You don’t seem to realise that that’s what I’ve been aiming at for the last half-hour,” he remarked. “I’ve no objection to nice simple tunes—indeed, I find them very helpful to my literary composition, but that kind of thing is merely like an unfortunate old dog going round on its hind legs in the rain.”

  He began turning over the little sheets of note-paper which were scattered on the table, conveying the congratulations of their friends.

  “‘—all possible wishes for all possible happiness,’” he read; “correct, but not very vivid, are they?”

  “They’re sheer nonsense!” Rachel exclaimed. “Think of words compared with sounds!” she continued. “Think of novels and plays and histories—” Perched on the edge of the table, she stirred the red and yellow volumes contemptuously. She seemed to herself to be in a position where she could despise all human learning. Terence looked at them too.

  “God, Rachel, you do read trash!” he exclaimed. “And you’re behind the times too, my dear. No one dreams of reading this kind of thing now—antiquated problem plays, harrowing descriptions of life in the east end—oh, no, we’ve exploded all that. Read poetry, Rachel, poetry, poetry, poetry!”

  Picking up one of the books, he began to read aloud, his intention being to satirise the short sharp bark of the writer’s English; but she paid no attention, and after an interval of meditation exclaimed:

  “Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed entirely of vast blocks of matter, and that we’re nothing but patches of light—” she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering over the carpet and up the wall—“like that?”

  “No,” said Terence, “I feel solid; immensely solid; the legs of my chair might be rooted in the bowels of the earth. But at Cambridge, I can remember, there were times when one fell into ridiculous states of semi-coma about five o’clock in the morning. Hirst does now, I expect—oh, no, Hirst wouldn’t.”

  Rachel continued, “The day your note came, asking us to go on the picnic, I was sitting where you’re sitting now, thinking that; I wonder if I could think that again? I wonder if the world’s changed? and if so, when it’ll stop changing, and which is the real world?”

  “When I first saw you,” he began, “I thought you were like a creature who’d lived all its life among pearls and old bones. Your hands were wet, d’you remember, and you never said a word until I gave you a bit of bread, and then you said, ‘Human Beings!’”

  “And I thought you—a prig,” she recollected. “No; that’s not quite it. There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I thought you and St. John were like those ants—very big, very ugly, very energetic, with all your virtues on your backs. However, when I talked to you I liked you—”

  “You fell in love with me,” he corrected her. “You were in love with me all the time, only you didn’t know it.”

  “No, I never fell in love wit
h you,” she asserted.

  “Rachel—what a lie—didn’t you sit here looking at my window—didn’t you wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun—?”

  “No,” she repeated, “I never fell in love, if falling in love is what people say it is, and it’s the world that tells the lies and I tell the truth. Oh, what lies—what lies!”

  She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from Mr. Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington. It was strange, considering how very different these people were, that they used almost the same sentences when they wrote to congratulate her upon her engagement.

  That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church service had done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done; and if they didn’t feel a thing why did they go and pretend to? The simplicity and arrogance and hardness of her youth, now concentrated into a single spark as it was by her love of him, puzzled Terence; being engaged had not that effect on him; the world was different, but not in that way; he still wanted the things he had always wanted, and in particular he wanted the companionship of other people more than ever perhaps. He took the letters out of her hand, and protested:

  “Of course they’re absurd, Rachel; of course they say things just because other people say them, but even so, what a nice woman Miss Allan is; you can’t deny that; and Mrs. Thornbury too; she’s got too many children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone to the bad instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees—hasn’t she a kind of beauty—of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say? Isn’t she rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river going on and on and on? By the way, Ralph’s been made governor of the Carroway Islands—the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn’t it?”

  But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast majority of the affairs of the world went on unconnected by a single thread with her own destiny.

  “I won’t have eleven children,” she asserted; “I won’t have the eyes of an old woman. She looks at one up and down, up and down, as if one were a horse.”

  “We must have a son and we must have a daughter,” said Terence, putting down the letters, “because, let alone the inestimable advantage of being our children, they’d be so well brought up.” They went on to sketch an outline of the ideal education—how their daughter should be required from infancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard painted blue, to suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too practical; and their son—he should be taught to laugh at great men, that is, at distinguished successful men, at men who wore ribands and rose to the tops of their trees. He should in no way resemble (Rachel added) St. John Hirst.

  At this Terence professed the greatest admiration for St. John Hirst. Dwelling upon his good qualities he became seriously convinced of them; he had a mind like a torpedo, he declared, aimed at falsehood. Where should we all be without him and his like? Choked in weeds; Christians, bigots—why, Rachel herself, would be a slave with a fan to sing songs to men when they felt drowsy.

  “But you’ll never see it!” he exclaimed; “because with all your virtues you don’t, and you never will, care with every fibre of your being for the pursuit of truth! You’ve no respect for facts, Rachel; you’re essentially feminine.”

  She did not trouble to deny it, nor did she think good to produce the one unanswerable argument against the merits which Terence admired. St. John Hirst said that she was in love with him; she would never forgive that; but the argument was not one to appeal to a man.

  “But I like him,” she said, and she thought to herself that she also pitied him, as one pities those unfortunate people who are outside the warm mysterious globe full of changes and miracles in which we ourselves move about; she thought that it must be very dull to be St. John Hirst.

  She summed up what she felt about him by saying that she would not kiss him supposing he wished it, which was not likely.

  As if some apology were due to Hirst for the kiss which she then bestowed upon him, Terence protested:

  “And compared with Hirst I’m a perfect Zany.”

  The clock here struck twelve instead of eleven.

  “We’re wasting the morning—I ought to be writing my book, and you ought to be answering these.”

  “We’ve only got twenty-one whole mornings left,” said Rachel. “And my father’ll be here in a day or two.”

  However, she drew a pen and paper towards her and began to write laboriously,

  “My dear Evelyn—”

  Terence, meanwhile, read a novel which someone else had written, a process which he found essential to the composition of his own. For a considerable time nothing was to be heard but the ticking of the clock and the fitful scratch of Rachel’s pen, as she produced phrases which bore a considerable likeness to those which she had condemned. She was struck by it herself, for she stopped writing and looked up; looked at Terence deep in the armchair, looked at the different pieces of furniture, at her bed in the corner, at the window-pane which showed the branches of a tree filled in with sky, heard the clock ticking, and was amazed at the gulf which lay between all that and her sheet of paper. Would there ever be a time when the world was one and indivisible? Even with Terence himself—how far apart they could be, how little she knew what was passing in his brain now! She then finished her sentence, which was awkward and ugly, and stated that they were “both very happy, and going to be married in the autumn probably and hope to live in London, where we hope you will come and see us when we get back.” Choosing “affectionately,” after some further speculation, rather than sincerely, she signed the letter and was doggedly beginning on another when Terence remarked, quoting from his book:

  “Listen to this, Rachel. ‘It is probable that Hugh’ (he’s the hero, a literary man), ‘had not realised at the time of his marriage, any more than the young man of parts and imagination usually does realise, the nature of the gulf which separates the needs and desires of the male from the needs and desires of the female … At first they had been very happy. The walking tour in Switzerland had been a time of jolly companionship and stimulating revelations for both of them. Betty had proved herself the ideal comrade … They had shouted Love in the Valley to each other across the snowy slopes of the Riffelhorn’ (and so on, and so on—I’ll skip the descriptions) … ‘But in London, after the boy’s birth, all was changed. Betty was an admirable mother; but it did not take her long to find out that motherhood, as that function is understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did not absorb the whole of her energies. She was young and strong, with healthy limbs and a body and brain that called urgently for exercise …’ (In short she began to give tea-parties.) … ‘Coming in late from this singular talk with old Bob Murphy in his smoky, book-lined room, where the two men had each unloosened his soul to the other, with the sound of the traffic humming in his ears, and the foggy London sky slung tragically across his mind … he found women’s hats dotted about among his papers. Women’s wraps and absurd little feminine shoes and umbrellas were in the hall … Then the bills began to come in … He tried to speak frankly to her. He found her lying on the great polar-bear skin in their bedroom, half-undressed, for they were dining with the Greens in Wilton Crescent, the ruddy firelight making the diamonds wink and twinkle on her bare arms and in the delicious curve of her breast—a vision of adorable femininity. He forgave her all.’ (Well, this goes from bad to worse, and finally about fifty pages later, Hugh takes a weekend ticket to Swanage and ‘has it out with himself on the downs above Corfe’ … Here there’s fifteen pages or so which we’ll skip. The conclusion is …) ‘They were different. Perhaps, in the far future, when generations of men had struggled and failed as he must now struggle and fail, woman would be, indeed, what she now made a pretence of being—the friend and companion—not the enemy and parasite
of man.’

  “The end of it is, you see, Hugh went back to his wife, poor fellow. It was his duty, as a married man. Lord, Rachel,” he concluded, “will it be like that when we’re married?”

  Instead of answering him she asked,

  “Why don’t people write about the things they do feel?”

  “Ah, that’s the difficulty!” he sighed, tossing the book away.

  “Well, then, what will it be like when we’re married? What are the things people do feel?”

  She seemed doubtful.

  “Sit on the floor and let me look at you,” he commanded. Resting her chin on his knee, she looked straight at him.

  He examined her curiously.

  “You’re not beautiful,” he began, “but I like your face. I like the way your hair grows down in a point, and your eyes too—they never see anything. Your mouth’s too big, and your cheeks would be better if they had more colour in them. But what I like about your face is that it makes one wonder what the devil you’re thinking about—it makes me want to do that—” He clenched his fist and shook it so near her that she started back, “because now you look as if you’d blow my brains out. There are moments,” he continued, “when, if we stood on a rock together, you’d throw me into the sea.”

  Hypnotised by the force of his eyes in hers, she repeated, “If we stood on a rock together—”

  To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven about the roots of the world—the idea was incoherently delightful. She sprang up, and began moving about the room, bending and thrusting aside the chairs and tables as if she were indeed striking through the waters. He watched her with pleasure; she seemed to be cleaving a passage for herself, and dealing triumphantly with the obstacles which would hinder their passage through life.

  “It does seem possible!” he exclaimed, “though I’ve always thought it the most unlikely thing in the world—I shall be in love with you all my life, and our marriage will be the most exciting thing that’s ever been done! We’ll never have a moment’s peace—” He caught her in his arms as she passed him, and they fought for mastery, imagining a rock, and the sea heaving beneath them. At last she was thrown to the floor, where she lay gasping, and crying for mercy.