“I couldn’t have stood it much longer,” Mrs. Elliot confided to Mrs. Thornbury, but the excitement of being at the top in another moment and seeing the view prevented any one from answering her. One after another they came out on the flat space at the top and stood overcome with wonder. Before them they beheld an immense space — grey sands running into forest, and forest merging in mountains, and mountains washed by air, the infinite distances of South America. A river ran across the plain, as flat as the land, and appearing quite as stationary. The effect of so much space was at first rather chilling. They felt themselves very small, and for some time no one said anything. Then Evelyn exclaimed, “Splendid!” She took hold of the hand that was next her; it chanced to be Miss Allan’s hand.
“North — South — East — West,” said Miss Allan, jerking her head slightly towards the points of the compass.
Hewet, who had gone a little in front, looked up at his guests as if to justify himself for having brought them. He observed how strangely the people standing in a row with their figures bent slightly forward and their clothes plastered by the wind to the shape of their bodies resembled naked statues. On their pedestal of earth they looked unfamiliar and noble, but in another moment they had broken their rank, and he had to see to the laying out of food. Hirst came to his help, and they handed packets of chicken and bread from one to another.
As St. John gave Helen her packet she looked him full in the face and said:
“Do you remember — two women?”
He looked at her sharply.
“I do,” he answered.
“So you’re the two women!” Hewet exclaimed, looking from Helen to Rachel.
“Your lights tempted us,” said Helen. “We watched you playing cards, but we never knew that we were being watched.”
“It was like a thing in a play,” Rachel added.
“And Hirst couldn’t describe you,” said Hewet.
It was certainly odd to have seen Helen and to find nothing to say about her.
Hughling Elliot put up his eyeglass and grasped the situation.
“I don’t know of anything more dreadful,” he said, pulling at the joint of a chicken’s leg, “than being seen when one isn’t conscious of it. One feels sure one has been caught doing something ridiculous — looking at one’s tongue in a hansom, for instance.”
Now the others ceased to look at the view, and drawing together sat down in a circle round the baskets.
“And yet those little looking-glasses in hansoms have a fascination of their own,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “One’s features look so different when one can only see a bit of them.”
“There will soon be very few hansom cabs left,” said Mrs. Elliot. “And four-wheeled cabs — I assure you even at Oxford it’s almost impossible to get a four-wheeled cab.”
“I wonder what happens to the horses,” said Susan.
“Veal pie,” said Arthur.
“It’s high time that horses should become extinct anyhow,” said Hirst. “They’re distressingly ugly, besides being vicious.”
But Susan, who had been brought up to understand that the horse is the noblest of God’s creatures, could not agree, and Venning thought Hirst an unspeakable ass, but was too polite not to continue the conversation.
“When they see us falling out of aeroplanes they get some of their own back, I expect,” he remarked.
“You fly?” said old Mr. Thornbury, putting on his spectacles to look at him.
“I hope to, some day,” said Arthur.
Here flying was discussed at length, and Mrs. Thornbury delivered an opinion which was almost a speech to the effect that it would be quite necessary in time of war, and in England we were terribly behind-hand. “If I were a young fellow,” she concluded, “I should certainly qualify.” It was odd to look at the little elderly lady, in her grey coat and skirt, with a sandwich in her hand, her eyes lighting up with zeal as she imagined herself a young man in an aeroplane. For some reason, however, the talk did not run easily after this, and all they said was about drink and salt and the view. Suddenly Miss Allan, who was seated with her back to the ruined wall, put down her sandwich, picked something off her neck, and remarked, “I’m covered with little creatures.” It was true, and the discovery was very welcome. The ants were pouring down a glacier of loose earth heaped between the stones of the ruin — large brown ants with polished bodies. She held out one on the back of her hand for Helen to look at.
“Suppose they sting?” said Helen.
“They will not sting, but they may infest the victuals,” said Miss Allan, and measures were taken at once to divert the ants from their course. At Hewet’s suggestion it was decided to adopt the methods of modern warfare against an invading army. The table-cloth represented the invaded country, and round it they built barricades of baskets, set up the wine bottles in a rampart, made fortifications of bread and dug fosses of salt. When an ant got through it was exposed to a fire of bread-crumbs, until Susan pronounced that that was cruel, and rewarded those brave spirits with spoil in the shape of tongue. Playing this game they lost their stiffness, and even became unusually daring, for Mr. Perrott, who was very shy, said, “Permit me,” and removed an ant from Evelyn’s neck.
“It would be no laughing matter really,” said Mrs. Elliot confidentially to Mrs. Thornbury, “if an ant did get between the vest and the skin.”
The noise grew suddenly more clamorous, for it was discovered that a long line of ants had found their way on to the table-cloth by a back entrance, and if success could be gauged by noise, Hewet had every reason to think his party a success. Nevertheless he became, for no reason at all, profoundly depressed.
“They are not satisfactory; they are ignoble,” he thought, surveying his guests from a little distance, where he was gathering together the plates. He glanced at them all, stooping and swaying and gesticulating round the table-cloth. Amiable and modest, respectable in many ways, lovable even in their contentment and desire to be kind, how mediocre they all were, and capable of what insipid cruelty to one another! There was Mrs. Thornbury, sweet but trivial in her maternal egoism; Mrs. Elliot, perpetually complaining of her lot; her husband a mere pea in a pod; and Susan — she had no self, and counted neither one way nor the other; Venning was as honest and as brutal as a schoolboy; poor old Thornbury merely trod his round like a horse in a mill; and the less one examined into Evelyn’s character the better, he suspected. Yet these were the people with money, and to them rather than to others was given the management of the world. Put among them some one more vital, who cared for life or for beauty, and what an agony, what a waste would they inflict on him if he tried to share with them and not to scourge!
“There’s Hirst,” he concluded, coming to the figure of his friend; with his usual little frown of concentration upon his forehead he was peeling the skin off a banana. “And he’s as ugly as sin.” For the ugliness of St. John Hirst, and the limitations that went with it, he made the rest in some way responsible. It was their fault that he had to live alone. Then he came to Helen, attracted to her by the sound of her laugh. She was laughing at Miss Allan. “You wear combinations in this heat?” she said in a voice which was meant to be private. He liked the look of her immensely, not so much her beauty, but her largeness and simplicity, which made her stand out from the rest like a great stone woman, and he passed on in a gentler mood. His eye fell upon Rachel. She was lying back rather behind the others resting on one elbow; she might have been thinking precisely the same thoughts as Hewet himself. Her eyes were fixed rather sadly but not intently upon the row of people opposite her. Hewet crawled up to her on his knees, with a piece of bread in his hand.
“What are you looking at?” he asked.
She was a little startled, but answered directly, “Human beings.”
Chapter XI
One after another they rose and stretched themselves, and in a few minutes divided more or less into two separate parties. One of these parties was dominated by Hughling
Elliot and Mrs. Thornbury, who, having both read the same books and considered the same questions, were now anxious to name the places beneath them and to hang upon them stores of information about navies and armies, political parties, natives and mineral products — all of which combined, they said, to prove that South America was the country of the future.
Evelyn M. listened with her bright blue eyes fixed upon the oracles.
“How it makes one long to be a man!” she exclaimed.
Mr. Perrott answered, surveying the plain, that a country with a future was a very fine thing.
“If I were you,” said Evelyn, turning to him and drawing her glove vehemently through her fingers, “I’d raise a troop and conquer some great territory and make it splendid. You’d want women for that. I’d love to start life from the very beginning as it ought to be — nothing squalid — but great halls and gardens and splendid men and women. But you — you only like Law Courts!”
“And would you really be content without pretty frocks and sweets and all the things young ladies like?” asked Mr. Perrott, concealing a certain amount of pain beneath his ironical manner.
“I’m not a young lady,” Evelyn flashed; she bit her underlip. “Just because I like splendid things you laugh at me. Why are there no men like Garibaldi now?” she demanded.
“Look here,” said Mr. Perrott, “you don’t give me a chance. You think we ought to begin things fresh. Good. But I don’t see precisely — conquer a territory? They’re all conquered already, aren’t they?”
“It’s not any territory in particular,” Evelyn explained. “It’s the idea, don’t you see? We lead such tame lives. And I feel sure you’ve got splendid things in you.”
Hewet saw the scars and hollows in Mr. Perrott’s sagacious face relax pathetically. He could imagine the calculations which even then went on within his mind, as to whether he would be justified in asking a woman to marry him, considering that he made no more than five hundred a year at the Bar, owned no private means, and had an invalid sister to support. Mr. Perrott again knew that he was not “quite,” as Susan stated in her diary; not quite a gentleman she meant, for he was the son of a grocer in Leeds, had started life with a basket on his back, and now, though practically indistinguishable from a born gentleman, showed his origin to keen eyes in an impeccable neatness of dress, lack of freedom in manner, extreme cleanliness of person, and a certain indescribable timidity and precision with his knife and fork which might be the relic of days when meat was rare, and the way of handling it by no means gingerly.
The two parties who were strolling about and losing their unity now came together, and joined each other in a long stare over the yellow and green patches of the heated landscape below. The hot air danced across it, making it impossible to see the roofs of a village on the plain distinctly. Even on the top of the mountain where a breeze played lightly, it was very hot, and the heat, the food, the immense space, and perhaps some less well-defined cause produced a comfortable drowsiness and a sense of happy relaxation in them. They did not say much, but felt no constraint in being silent.
“Suppose we go and see what’s to be seen over there?” said Arthur to Susan, and the pair walked off together, their departure certainly sending some thrill of emotion through the rest.
“An odd lot, aren’t they?” said Arthur. “I thought we should never get ’em all to the top. But I’m glad we came, by Jove! I wouldn’t have missed this for something.”
“I don’t like Mr. Hirst,” said Susan inconsequently. “I suppose he’s very clever, but why should clever people be so — I expect he’s awfully nice, really,” she added, instinctively qualifying what might have seemed an unkind remark.
“Hirst? Oh, he’s one of these learned chaps,” said Arthur indifferently. “He don’t look as if he enjoyed it. You should hear him talking to Elliot. It’s as much as I can do to follow ’em at all. . . . I was never good at my books.”
With these sentences and the pauses that came between them they reached a little hillock, on the top of which grew several slim trees.
“D’you mind if we sit down here?” said Arthur, looking about him. “It’s jolly in the shade — and the view—” They sat down, and looked straight ahead of them in silence for some time.
“But I do envy those clever chaps sometimes,” Arthur remarked. “I don’t suppose they ever . . .” He did not finish his sentence.
“I can’t see why you should envy them,” said Susan, with great sincerity.
“Odd things happen to one,” said Arthur. “One goes along smoothly enough, one thing following another, and it’s all very jolly and plain sailing, and you think you know all about it, and suddenly one doesn’t know where one is a bit, and everything seems different from what it used to seem. Now to-day, coming up that path, riding behind you, I seemed to see everything as if—” he paused and plucked a piece of grass up by the roots. He scattered the little lumps of earth which were sticking to the roots— “As if it had a kind of meaning. You’ve made the difference to me,” he jerked out, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you. I’ve felt it ever since I knew you. . . . It’s because I love you.”
Even while they had been saying commonplace things Susan had been conscious of the excitement of intimacy, which seemed not only to lay bare something in her, but in the trees and the sky, and the progress of his speech which seemed inevitable was positively painful to her, for no human being had ever come so close to her before.
She was struck motionless as his speech went on, and her heart gave great separate leaps at the last words. She sat with her fingers curled round a stone, looking straight in front of her down the mountain over the plain. So then, it had actually happened to her, a proposal of marriage.
Arthur looked round at her; his face was oddly twisted. She was drawing her breath with such difficulty that she could hardly answer.
“You might have known.” He seized her in his arms; again and again and again they clasped each other, murmuring inarticulately.
“Well,” sighed Arthur, sinking back on the ground, “that’s the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me.” He looked as if he were trying to put things seen in a dream beside real things.
There was a long silence.
“It’s the most perfect thing in the world,” Susan stated, very gently and with great conviction. It was no longer merely a proposal of marriage, but of marriage with Arthur, with whom she was in love.
In the silence that followed, holding his hand tightly in hers, she prayed to God that she might make him a good wife.
“And what will Mr. Perrott say?” she asked at the end of it.
“Dear old fellow,” said Arthur who, now that the first shock was over, was relaxing into an enormous sense of pleasure and contentment. “We must be very nice to him, Susan.”
He told her how hard Perrott’s life had been, and how absurdly devoted he was to Arthur himself. He went on to tell her about his mother, a widow lady, of strong character. In return Susan sketched the portraits of her own family — Edith in particular, her youngest sister, whom she loved better than any one else, “except you, Arthur. . . . Arthur,” she continued, “what was it that you first liked me for?”
“It was a buckle you wore one night at sea,” said Arthur, after due consideration. “I remember noticing — it’s an absurd thing to notice! — that you didn’t take peas, because I don’t either.”
From this they went on to compare their more serious tastes, or rather Susan ascertained what Arthur cared about, and professed herself very fond of the same thing. They would live in London, perhaps have a cottage in the country near Susan’s family, for they would find it strange without her at first. Her mind, stunned to begin with, now flew to the various changes that her engagement would make — how delightful it would be to join the ranks of the married women — no longer to hang on to groups of girls much younger than herself — to escape the long solitude of an old maid’s life. Now and then her amazing good fort
une overcame her, and she turned to Arthur with an exclamation of love.
They lay in each other’s arms and had no notion that they were observed. Yet two figures suddenly appeared among the trees above them. “Here’s shade,” began Hewet, when Rachel suddenly stopped dead. They saw a man and woman lying on the ground beneath them, rolling slightly this way and that as the embrace tightened and slackened. The man then sat upright and the woman, who now appeared to be Susan Warrington, lay back upon the ground, with her eyes shut and an absorbed look upon her face, as though she were not altogether conscious. Nor could you tell from her expression whether she was happy, or had suffered something. When Arthur again turned to her, butting her as a lamb butts a ewe, Hewet and Rachel retreated without a word. Hewet felt uncomfortably shy.
“I don’t like that,” said Rachel after a moment.
“I can remember not liking it either,” said Hewet. “I can remember—” but he changed his mind and continued in an ordinary tone of voice, “Well, we may take it for granted that they’re engaged. D’you think he’ll ever fly, or will she put a stop to that?”
But Rachel was still agitated; she could not get away from the sight they had just seen. Instead of answering Hewet she persisted.
“Love’s an odd thing, isn’t it, making one’s heart beat.”
“It’s so enormously important, you see,” Hewet replied. “Their lives are now changed for ever.”
“And it makes one sorry for them too,” Rachel continued, as though she were tracing the course of her feelings. “I don’t know either of them, but I could almost burst into tears. That’s silly, isn’t it?”
“Just because they’re in love,” said Hewet. “Yes,” he added after a moment’s consideration, “there’s something horribly pathetic about it, I agree.”
And now, as they had walked some way from the grove of trees, and had come to a rounded hollow very tempting to the back, they proceeded to sit down, and the impression of the lovers lost some of its force, though a certain intensity of vision, which was probably the result of the sight, remained with them. As a day upon which any emotion has been repressed is different from other days, so this day was now different, merely because they had seen other people at a crisis of their lives.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 15
