“Midges very bad this year, William?” she asked, recognising the lotion.
“Tarrible bad, miss, tarrible,” he said, touching his hat. There hadn’t been such a drought since the Jubilee she understood him to say; but his accent, his singsong and Dorsetshire rhythm, made it difficult to catch what he said. Then he flicked his whip and they drove on; past the market cross; past the red brick town hall, with the arches under it; along a street of bow-windowed eighteenth-century houses, the residences of doctors and solicitors; past the pond with chains linking white posts together and a horse drinking; and so out into the country. The road was laid with soft white dust; the hedges, hung with wreaths of travellers’ joy, seemed also thick with dust. The old horse settled down into his mechanical jog-trot, and Eleanor lay back under her white umbrella.
Every summer she came to visit Morris at his mother-in-law’s house. Seven times, eight times she had come she counted; but this year it was different. This year everything was different. Her father was dead; her house was shut up; she had no attachment at the moment anywhere. As she jolted through the hot lanes she thought drowsily, What shall I do now? Live there? she asked herself, as she passed a very respectable Georgian villa in the middle of a street. No, not in a village she said to herself; and they jogged through the village. What about that house then, she said to herself, looking at a house with a verandah among some trees. But then she thought, I should turn into a grey-haired lady cutting flowers with a pair of scissors and tapping at cottage doors. She did not want to tap at cottage doors. And the clergyman — a clergyman was wheeling his bicycle up the hill — would come to tea with her. But she did not want the clergyman to come to tea with her. How spick and span it all is she thought; for they were passing through the village. The little gardens were bright with red and yellow flowers. Then they began to meet village people; a procession. Some of the women carried parcels; there was a gleaming silver object on the quilt of a perambulator; and one old man clasped a hairy-headed coco-nut to his breast. There had been a Fête she supposed; here it was, returning. They drew to the side of the road as the carriage trotted past, and cast steady curious looks at the lady sitting under her green and white umbrella. Now they came to a white gate; trotted briskly down a short avenue; and drew up with a flourish of the whip in front of two slender columns; door-scrapers like bristling hedgehogs; and a wide open hall door.
She waited for a moment in the hall. Her eyes were dimmed after the glare of the road. Everything seemed pale and frail and friendly. The rugs were faded; the pictures were faded. Even the Admiral in his cocked hat over the fireplace wore a curious look of faded urbanity. In Greece one was always going back two thousand years. Here it was always the eighteenth century. Like everything English, she thought, laying down her umbrella on the refectory table beside the china bowl, with dried rose leaves in it, the past seemed near, domestic, friendly.
The door opened. “Oh Eleanor!” her sister-in-law exclaimed, running into the hall in her fly-away summer clothes, “How nice to see you! How brown you look! Come into the cool!”
She led her into the drawing-room. The drawing-room piano was strewn with white baby-linen; pink and green fruit glimmered in glass bottles.
“We’re in such a mess,” said Celia, sinking onto the sofa. “Lady St. Austell has only just this minute gone, and the Bishop.”
She fanned herself with a sheet of paper.
“But it’s been a great success. We had the bazaar in the garden. They acted.” It was a programme with which she was fanning herself.
“A play?” said Eleanor.
“Yes, a scene from Shakespeare,” said Celia. “Midsummer-Night? As You Like It? I forget which. Miss Green got it up. Happily it was so fine. Last year it poured. But how my feet are aching!” The long window opened onto the lawn. Eleanor could see people dragging tables.
“What an undertaking!” she said.
“It was!” Celia panted. “We had Lady St. Austell and the Bishop, coco-nut shies and a pig; but I think it all went off very well. They enjoyed it.”
“For the Church?” Eleanor asked.
“Yes. The new steeple,” said Celia.
“What a business!” said Eleanor again. She looked out onto the lawn. The grass was already scorched and yellow; the laurel bushes looked shrivelled. Tables were standing against the laurel bushes. Morris passed, dragging a table.
“Was it nice in Spain?” Celia was asking. “Did you see wonderful things?”
“Oh yes!” Eleanor exclaimed. “I saw . . .” She stopped. She had seen wonderful things — buildings, mountains, a red city in a plain. But how could she describe it?
“You must tell me all about it afterwards,” said Celia getting up. “It’s time we got ready. But I’m afraid,” she said, toiling rather painfully up the broad staircase, “I must ask you to be careful, because we’re very short of water. The well. . . .” she stopped. The well, Eleanor remembered, always gave out in a hot summer. They walked together down the broad passage, past the old yellow globe which stood under the pleasant eighteenth-century picture of all the little Chinnerys in long drawers and nankeen trousers standing round their father and mother in the garden. Celia paused with her hand on the bedroom door. The sound of doves cooing came in through the open window.
“We’re putting you in the Blue room this time,” she said. Generally Eleanor had the Pink room. She glanced in. “I hope you’ve got everything—” she began.
“Yes, I’m sure I’ve got everything,” said Eleanor, and Celia left her.
The maid had already unpacked her things. There they were — laid on the bed. Eleanor took off her dress, and stood in her white petticoat washing herself, methodically but carefully, since they were short of water. The English sun still made her face prickle all over where the Spanish sun had burnt it. Her neck had been cut off from her chest as if it had been painted brown, she thought, as she slipped on her evening dress in front of the looking-glass. She twisted her thick hair, with the grey strand in it, rapidly into a coil; hung the jewel, a red blob like congealed raspberry jam with a gold seed in the centre, round her neck; and gave one glance at the woman who had been for fifty-five years so familiar that she no longer saw her — Eleanor Pargiter. That she was getting old was obvious; there were wrinkles across her forehead; hollows and creases where the flesh used to be firm.
And what was my good point? she asked herself, running the comb once more through her hair. My eyes? Her eyes laughed back at her as she looked at them. My eyes, yes, she thought. Somebody had once praised her eyes. She made herself open them instead of screwing them together. Round each eye were several little white strokes, where she had crinkled them up to avoid the glare on the Acropolis, at Naples, at Granada and Toledo. But that’s over, she thought, people praising my eyes, and finished her dressing.
She stood for a moment looking at the burnt, dry lawn. The grass was almost yellow; the elm trees were beginning to turn brown; red-and-white cows were munching on the far side of the sunk hedge. But England was disappointing, she thought; it was small; it was pretty; she felt no affection for her native land — none whatever. Then she went down, for she wanted if possible to see Morris alone.
But he was not alone. He got up as she came in and introduced her to a stoutish, white-haired old man in a dinner-jacket.
“You know each other, don’t you?” said Morris.
“Eleanor — Sir William Whatney.” He put a little stress humorously upon the “Sir” which for a moment confused Eleanor.
“We used to know each other,” said Sir William, coming forward and smiling as he took her hand.
She looked at him. Could it be William Whatney — old Dubbin — who used to come to Abercorn Terrace years ago? It was. She had not seen him since he went to India.
But are we all like that? she asked herself, looking from the grisled, crumpled red-and-yellow face of the boy she had known — he was almost hairless — at her own brother Morris. He looked bald and th
in; but surely he was in the prime of life, as she was herself? Or had they all suddenly become old fogies like Sir William? Then her nephew North and her niece Peggy came in with their mother and they went in to dinner. Old Mrs Chinnery dined upstairs.
How has Dubbin become Sir William Whatney? she wondered, glancing at him as they ate the fish that had been brought up in the damp parcel. She had last seen him — in a boat on the river. They had gone for a picnic; they had supped on an island in the middle of the river. Maidenhead, was it?
They were talking about the Fête. Craster had won the pig; Mrs Grice had won the silver-plated salver.
“That’s what I saw on the perambulator,” said Eleanor. “I met the Fête coming back,” she explained. She described the procession. And they talked about the Fête.
“Don’t you envy my sister-in-law?” said Celia, turning to Sir William. “She’s just back from a tour in Greece.”
“Indeed!” said Sir William. “Which part of Greece?”
“We went to Athens, then to Olympia, then to Delphi,” Eleanor began, reciting the usual formula. They were on purely formal terms evidently — she and Dubbin.
“My brother-in-law, Edward,” Celia explained, “takes these delightful tours.”
“You remember Edward?” said Morris. “Weren’t you up with him?”
“No, he was junior to me,” said Sir William. “But I’ve heard of him, of course. He’s — let me think — what is he — a great swell, isn’t he?”
“Oh, he’s at the top of his tree,” said Morris.
He was not jealous of Edward, Eleanor thought; but there was a certain note in his voice which told her that he was comparing his career with Edward’s.
“They loved him,” she said. She smiled; she saw Edward lecturing troops of devout school mistresses on the Acropolis. Out came their notebooks and down they scribbled every word he said. But he had been very generous; very kind; he had looked after her all the time.
“Did you meet anyone at the Embassy?” Sir William asked her. Then he corrected himself. “Not an Embassy though, is it?”
“No. Athens is not an Embassy,” said Morris. Here there was a diversion; what was the difference between an Embassy and a Legation? Then they began to discuss the situation in the Balkans.
“There’s going to be trouble there in the near future,” Sir William was saying. He turned to Morris; they discussed the situation in the Balkans.
Eleanor’s attention wandered. What’s he done? she wondered. Certain words and gestures brought him back to her as he had been thirty years ago. There were relics of the old Dubbin if one half-shut one’s eyes. She half-shut her eyes. Suddenly she remembered — it was he who had praised her eyes. “Your sister has the brightest eyes I ever saw,” he had said. Morris had told her. And she had hidden her face behind a newspaper in the train going home to conceal her pleasure. She looked at him again. He was talking. She listened. He seemed too big for the quiet, English dining-room; his voice boomed out. He wanted an audience.
He was telling a story. He spoke in clipped, nervous sentences as if there were a ring round them — a style she admired, but she had missed the beginning. His glass was empty.
“Give Sir William some more wine,” Celia whispered to the nervous parlour-maid. There was some juggling with decanters on the sideboard. Celia frowned nervously. A girl from the village who doesn’t know her job, Eleanor reflected. The story was reaching its climax; but she had missed several links.
“. . . and I found myself in an old pair of riding-breeches standing under a peacock umbrella; and all the good people were crouching with their heads to the ground. ‘Good Lord,’ I said to myself, ‘if they only knew what a bally ass I feel!’” He held out his glass to be filled. “That’s how we were taught our job in those days,” he added.
He was boasting, of course; that was natural. He came back to England after ruling a district “about the size of Ireland,” as they always said; and nobody had ever heard of him. She had a feeling that she would hear a great many more stories that sailed serenely to his own advantage, during the week-end. But he talked very well. He had done a great many interesting things. She wished that Morris would tell stories too. She wished that he would assert himself instead of leaning back and passing his hand — the hand with the cut on it — over his forehead.
Ought I to have urged him to go to the Bar? she thought. Her father had been against it. But once it’s done there it is; he married; the children came; he had to go on, whether he wanted to or not. How irrevocable things are, she thought. We make our experiments, then they make theirs. She looked at her nephew North and at her niece Peggy. They sat opposite her with the sun on their faces. Their perfectly healthy egg-shell faces looked extraordinarily young. Peggy’s blue dress stuck out like a child’s muslin frock; North was still a brown-eyed cricketing boy. He was listening intently; Peggy was looking down at her plate. She had the non-committal look which well brought up children have when they listen to the talk of their elders. She might be amused; or bored? Eleanor could not be sure which it was.
“There he goes,” Peggy said, suddenly looking up. “The owl . . .” she said, catching Eleanor’s eye. Eleanor turned to look out of the window behind her. She missed the owl; she saw the heavy trees, gold in the setting sun; and the cows slowly moving as they munched their way across the meadow.
“You can time him,” said Peggy, “he’s so regular.” Then Celia made a move.
“Shall we leave the gentlemen to their politics,” she said, “and have our coffee on the terrace?” and they shut the door upon the gentlemen and their politics.
“I’ll fetch my glasses,” said Eleanor, and she went upstairs.
She wanted to see the owl before it got too dark. She was becoming more and more interested in birds. It was a sign of old age, she supposed, as she went into her bedroom. An old maid who washes and watches birds, she said to herself as she looked in the glass. There were her eyes — they still seemed to her rather bright, in spite of the lines round them — the eyes she had shaded in the railway carriage because Dubbin praised them. But now I’m labelled, she thought — an old maid who washes and watches birds. That’s what they think I am. But I’m not — I’m not in the least like that, she said. She shook her head, and turned away from the glass. It was a nice room; shady, civilised, cool after the bedrooms in foreign inns, with marks on the wall where someone had squashed bugs and men brawling under the window. But where were her glasses? Put away in some drawer? She turned to look for them.
“Did father say Sir William was in love with her?” Peggy asked as they waited on the terrace.
“Oh I don’t know about that,” said Celia. “But I wish they could have married. I wish she had children of her own. And then they could have settled here,” she added. “He’s such a delightful man.”
Peggy was silent. There was a pause.
Celia resumed:
“I hope you were polite to the Robinsons this afternoon, dreadful as they are. . . .”
“They give ripping parties anyhow,” said Peggy.
“‘Ripping, ripping,’” her mother complained half laughing. “I wish you wouldn’t pick up all North’s slang, my dear. . . . Oh, here’s Eleanor,” she broke off.
Eleanor came out onto the terrace with her glasses, and sat down beside Celia. It was still very warm; it was still light enough to see the hills in the distance.
“He’ll be back in a minute,” said Peggy, drawing up a chair. “He’ll come along that hedge.”
She pointed to the dark line of hedge that went across the meadow. Eleanor focussed her glasses and waited.
“Now,” said Celia, pouring out the coffee. “There are so many things I want to ask you.” She paused. She always had a hoard of questions to ask; she had not seen Eleanor since April. In four months questions accumulated. Out they came drop by drop.
“In the first place,” she began. “No. . . .” She rejected that question in favour of another.
“What’s all this about Rose?” she asked.
“What?” said Eleanor absentmindedly, altering the focus of her glasses. “It’s getting too dark,” she said; the field was blurred.
“Morris says she’s been had up in a police-court,” said Celia. She dropped her voice slightly though they were alone.
“She threw a brick—” said Eleanor. She focused her glasses on the hedge again. She held them poised in case the owl should come that way again.
“Will she be put in prison?” Peggy asked quickly.
“Not this time,” said Eleanor. “Next time — Ah, here he comes!” she broke off. The blunt-headed bird came swinging along the hedge. He looked almost white in the dusk. Eleanor got him within the circle of her lens. He held a little black spot in front of him.
“He’s got a mouse in his claws!” she exclaimed. “He’s got a nest in the steeple,” said Peggy. The owl swooped out of the field of vision.
“Now I can’t see him any more,” said Eleanor. She lowered her glasses. They were silent for a moment, sipping their coffee. Celia was thinking of her next question; Eleanor anticipated her.
“Tell me about William Whatney,” she said. “When I last saw him he was a slim young man in a boat.” Peggy burst out laughing.
“That must have been ages ago!” she said.
“Not so very long,” said Eleanor. She felt rather nettled. “Well—” she reflected, “twenty years — twenty-five years perhaps.”
It seemed a very short time to her; but then, she thought, it was before Peggy was born. She could only be sixteen or seventeen.
“Isn’t he a delightful man?” Celia exclaimed. “He was in India, you know. Now he’s retired, and we do hope he’ll take a house here; but Morris thinks he’d find it too dull.”
They sat silent for a moment, looking out over the meadow. The cows coughed now and then as they munched and moved a step further through the grass. A sweet scent of cows and grass was wafted up to them.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 221
