“That’s where I saw my first aeroplane — there between those chimneys,” she said. There were high chimneys, factory chimneys, in the distance; and a great building — Westminster Cathedral was it? — over there riding above the roofs.
“I was standing here, looking out,” Eleanor went on. “It must have been just after I’d got into the flat, a summer’s day, and I saw a black spot in the sky, and I said to whoever it was — Miriam Parrish, I think, yes, for she came to help me to get into the flat — I hope Delia, by the way, remembered to ask her—” . . . that’s old age, Peggy noted, bringing in one thing after another.
“You said to Miriam—” she prompted her.
“I said to Miriam, ‘Is it a bird? No, I don’t think it can be a bird. It’s too big. Yet it moves.’ And suddenly it came over me, that’s an aeroplane! And it was! You know they’d flown the Channel not so very long before. I was staying with you in Dorset at the time: and I remember reading it out in the paper, and someone — your father, I think — said: ‘The world will never be the same again!”
“Oh, well—” Peggy laughed. She was about to say that aeroplanes hadn’t made all that difference, for it was her line to disabuse her elders of their belief in science, partly because their credulity amused her, partly because she was daily impressed by the ignorance of doctors — when Eleanor sighed.
“Oh dear,” she murmured.
She turned away from the window.
Old age again, Peggy thought. Some gust blew open a door: one of the many millions in Eleanor’s seventy-odd years; out came a painful thought; which she at once concealed — she had gone to her writing-table and was fidgeting with papers — with the humble generosity, the painful humility of the old.
“What, Nell — ?” Peggy began.
“Nothing, nothing,” said Eleanor. She had seen the sky; and that sky was laid with pictures — she had seen it so often; any one of which might come uppermost when she looked at it. Now, because she had been talking to North, it brought back the war; how she had stood there one night, watching the searchlights. She had come home, after a raid; she had been dining in Westminster with Renny and Maggie. They had sat in a cellar; and Nicholas — it was the first time she had met him — had said that the war was of no importance. “We are children playing with fireworks in the back garden” . . . she remembered his phrase; and how, sitting round a wooden packing-case, they had drunk to a new world. “A new world — a new world!” Sally had cried, drumming with her spoon on top of the packing-case. She turned to her writing-table, tore up a letter and threw it away.
“Yes,” she said, fumbling among her papers, looking for something. “Yes — I don’t know about aeroplanes, I’ve never been up in one; but motor cars — I could do without motor cars. I was almost knocked down by one, did I tell you? In the Brompton Road. All my own fault — I wasn’t looking. . . . And wireless — that’s a nuisance — the people downstairs turn it on after breakfast; but on the other hand — hot water; electric light; and those new—” She paused. “Ah, there it is!” she exclaimed. She pounced upon some paper that she had been hunting for. “If Edward’s there tonight, do remind me — I’ll tie a knot in my handkerchief. . . .”
She opened her bag, took out a silk handkerchief, and proceeded solemnly to tie it into a knot . . . “to ask him about Runcorn’s boy.”
The bell rang.
“The taxi,” she said.
She glanced about to make sure that she had forgotten nothing. She stopped suddenly. Her eye had been caught by the evening paper, which lay on the floor with its broad bar of print and its blurred photograph. She picked it up.
“What a face!” she exclaimed, flattening it out on the table.
As far as Peggy could see, but she was short-sighted, it was the usual evening paper’s blurred picture of a fat man gesticulating.
“Damned—” Eleanor shot out suddenly, “bully!” She tore the paper across with one sweep of her hand and flung it on the floor. Peggy was shocked. A little shiver ran over her skin as the paper tore. The word “damned” on her aunt’s lips had shocked her.
Next moment she was amused; but still she had been shocked. For when Eleanor, who used English so reticently, said “damned” and then “bully,” it meant much more than the words she and her friends used. And her gesture, tearing the paper . . . What a queer set they are, she thought, as she followed Eleanor down the stairs. Her red-gold cloak trailed from step to step. So she had seen her father crumple The Times and sit trembling with rage because somebody had said something in a newspaper. How odd!
And the way she tore it! she thought, half laughing, and she flung out her hand as Eleanor had flung hers. Eleanor’s figure still seemed erect with indignation. It would be simple, she thought, it would be satisfactory, she thought, following her down flight after flight of stone steps, to be like that. The little knob on her cloak tapped on the stairs. They descended rather slowly.
“Take my aunt,” she said to herself, beginning to arrange the scene into an argument she had been having with a man at the hospital, “take my aunt, living alone in a sort of workman’s flat at the top of six flights of stairs . . .” Eleanor stopped.
“Don’t tell me,” she said, “that I left the letter upstairs — Runcorn’s letter that I want to show Edward, about the boy?” She opened her bag. “No: here it is.” There it was in her bag. They went on downstairs.
Eleanor gave the address to the cabman and sat down with a jerk in her corner. Peggy glanced at her out of the corner of her eye.
It was the force that she had put into the words that impressed her, not the words. It was as if she still believed with passion — she, old Eleanor — in the things that man had destroyed. A wonderful generation, she thought, as they drove off. Believers . . .
“You see,” Eleanor interrupted, as if she wanted to explain her words, “it means the end of everything we cared for.”
“Freedom?” said Peggy perfunctorily.
“Yes,” said Eleanor. “Freedom and justice.”
The cab drove off down the mild respectable little streets where every house had its bow window, its strip of garden, its private name. As they drove on, into the big main street, the scene in the flat composed itself in Peggy’s mind as she would tell it to the man in the hospital. “Suddenly she lost her temper,” she said, “took the paper and tore it across — my aunt, who’s over seventy.” She glanced at Eleanor to verify the details. Her aunt interrupted her.
“That’s where we used to live,” she said. She waved her hand towards a long lamp-starred street on the left. Peggy, looking out, could just see the imposing unbroken avenue with its succession of pale pillars and steps. The repeated columns, the orderly architecture, had even a pale pompous beauty as one stucco column repeated another stucco column all down the street.
“Abercorn Terrace,” said Eleanor; “. . . the pillar-box,” she murmured as they drove past. Why the pillar-box? Peggy asked herself. Another door had been opened. Old age must have endless avenues, stretching away and away down its darkness, she supposed, and now one door opened and then another.
“Aren’t people—” Eleanor began. Then she stopped. As usual, she had begun in the wrong place.
“Yes?” said Peggy. She was irritated by this inconsequence.
“I was going to say — the pillar-box made me think,” Eleanor began; then she laughed. She gave up the attempt to account for the order in which her thoughts came to her. There was an order, doubtless; but it took so long to find it, and this rambling, she knew, annoyed Peggy, for young people’s minds worked so quickly.
“That’s where we used to dine,” she broke off, nodding at a big house at the corner of a square. “Your father and I. The man he used to read with. What was his name? He became a Judge. . . . We used to dine there, the three of us. Morris, my father and I. . . . They had very large parties in those days. Always legal people. And he collected old oak. Mostly shams,” she added with a little chuckle.
“You used to dine . . .” Peggy began. She wished to get her back to her past. It was so interesting; so safe; so unreal — that past of the ‘eighties; and to her, so beautiful in its unreality.
“Tell me about your youth . . .” she began.
“But your lives are much more interesting than ours were,” said Eleanor. Peggy was silent.
They were driving along a bright crowded street; here stained ruby with the light from picture palaces; here yellow from shop windows gay with summer dresses, for the shops, though shut, were still lit up, and people were still looking at dresses, at flights of hats on little rods, at jewels.
When my Aunt Delia comes to town, Peggy continued the story of Eleanor that she was telling her friend at the hospital, she says, We must have a party. Then they all flock together. They love it. As for herself, she hated it. She would far rather have stayed at home or gone to the pictures. It’s the sense of the family, she added, glancing at Eleanor as if to collect another little fact about her to add to her portrait of a Victorian spinster. Eleanor was looking out of the window. Then she turned.
“And the experiment with the guinea-pig — how did that go off?” she asked. Peggy was puzzled.
Then she remembered and told her.
“I see. So it proved nothing. So you’ve got to begin all over again. That’s very interesting. Now I wish you’d explain to me . . .” There was another problem that puzzled her.
The things she wants explained, Peggy said to her friend at the Hospital, are either as simple as two and two make four, or so difficult that nobody in the world knows the answer. And if you say to her, “What’s eight times eight?” — she smiled at the profile of her aunt against the window — she taps her forehead and says . . . but again Eleanor interrupted her.
“It’s so good of you to come,” she said, giving her a little pat on the knee. (But did I show her, Peggy thought, that I hate coming?)
“It’s a way of seeing people,” Eleanor continued. “And now that we’re all getting on — not you, us — one doesn’t like to miss chances.”
They drove on. And how does one get that right? Peggy thought, trying to add another touch to the portrait. “Sentimental” was it? Or, on the contrary, was it good to feel like that . . . natural . . . right? She shook her head. I’m no use at describing people, she said to her friend at the Hospital. They’re too difficult. . . . She’s not like that — not like that at all, she said, making a little dash with her hand as if to rub out an outline that she had drawn wrongly. As she did so, her friend at the Hospital vanished.
She was alone with Eleanor in the cab. And they were passing houses. Where does she begin, and where do I end? she thought. . . . On they drove. They were two living people, driving across London; two sparks of life enclosed in two separate bodies; and those sparks of life enclosed in two separate bodies are at this moment, she thought, driving past a picture palace. But what is this moment; and what are we? The puzzle was too difficult for her to solve it. She sighed.
“You’re too young to feel that,” said Eleanor.
“What?” Peggy asked with a little start.
“About meeting people. About not missing chances of seeing them.”
“Young?” said Peggy. “I shall never be as young as you are!” She patted her Aunt’s knee in her turn. “Gallivanting off to India . . .” she laughed.
“Oh, India. India’s nothing nowadays,” said Eleanor. “Travel’s so easy. You just take a ticket; just get on board ship. . . . But what I want to see before I die,” she continued, “is something different. . . .” She waved her hand out of the window. They were passing public buildings; offices of some sort. “. . . another kind of civilisation. Tibet, for instance. I was reading a book by a man called — now what was he called?”
She paused, distracted by the sights in the street. “Don’t people wear pretty clothes nowadays?” she said, pointing to a girl with fair hair and a young man in evening dress.
“Yes,” said Peggy perfunctorily, looking at the painted face and the bright shawl; at the white waistcoat and the smoothed back hair. Anything distracts Eleanor, everything interests her, she thought.
“Was it that you were suppressed when you were young?” she said aloud, recalling vaguely some childish memory; her grandfather with the shiny stumps instead of fingers; and a long dark drawing-room. Eleanor turned. She was surprised.
“Suppressed?” she repeated. She so seldom thought about herself now that she was surprised.
“Oh, I see what you mean,” she added after a moment. A picture — another picture — had swum to the surface. There was Delia standing in the middle of the room; Oh my God! Oh my God! she was saying; a hansom cab had stopped at the house next door; and she herself was watching Morris — was it Morris? — going down the street to post a letter. . . . She was silent. I do not want to go back into my past, she was thinking. I want the present.
“Where’s he taking us?” she said, looking out. They had reached the public part of London; the illuminated. The light fell on broad pavements; on white brilliantly lit-up public offices; on a pallid, hoary-looking church. Advertisements popped in and out. Here was a bottle of beer: it poured: then stopped: then poured again. They had reached the theatre quarter. There was the usual garish confusion. Men and women in evening dress were walking in the middle of the road. Cabs were wheeling and stopping. Their own taxi was held up. It stopped dead under a statue: the lights shone on its cadaverous pallor.
“Always reminds me of an advertisement of sanitary towels,” said Peggy, glancing at the figure of a woman in nurse’s uniform holding out her hand.
Eleanor was shocked for a moment. A knife seemed to slice her skin, leaving a ripple of unpleasant sensation; but what was solid in her body it did not touch, she realised after a moment. That she said because of Charles, she thought, feeling the bitterness in her tone — her brother, a nice dull boy who had been killed.
“The only fine thing that was said in the war,” she said aloud, reading the words cut on the pedestal.
“It didn’t come to much,” said Peggy sharply.
The cab remained fixed in the block.
The pause seemed to hold them in the light of some thought that they both wished to put away.
“Don’t people wear pretty clothes nowadays?” said Eleanor, pointing to another girl with fair hair in a long bright cloak and another young man in evening dress.
“Yes,” said Peggy briefly.
But why don’t you enjoy yourself more? Eleanor said to herself. Her brother’s death had been very sad, but she had always found North much the more interesting of the two. The cab threaded its way through the traffic and passed into a back street. He was stopped now by a red light. “It’s nice, having North back again,” Eleanor said.
“Yes,” said Peggy. “He says we talk of nothing but money and politics,” she added. She finds fault with him because he was not the one to be killed; but that’s wrong, Eleanor thought.
“Does he?” she said. “But then . . .” A newspaper placard, with large black letters, seemed to finish her sentence for her. They were approaching the square in which Delia lived. She began to fumble with her purse. She looked at the metre which had mounted rather high. The man was going the long way round.
“He’ll find his way in time,” she said. They were gliding slowly round the square. She waited patiently, holding her purse in her hand. She saw a breadth of dark sky over the roofs. The sun had sunk. For a moment the sky had the quiet look of the sky that lies above fields and woods in the country.
“He’ll have to turn, that’s all,” she said. “I’m not despondent,” she added, as the taxi turned. “Travelling, you see: when one has to mix up with all sorts of other people on board ship, or in one of those little places where one has to stay — off the beaten track—” The taxi was sliding tentatively past house after house— “You ought to go there, Peggy,” she broke off; “you ought to travel: the natives are so beautiful you know; ha
lf naked: going down to the river in the moonlight; — that’s the house over there—” She tapped on the window — the taxi slowed down. “What was I saying? I’m not despondent, no, because people are so kind, so good at heart. . . . So that if only ordinary people, ordinary people like ourselves . . .”
The cab drew up at a house whose windows were lit up. Peggy leant forward and opened the door. She jumped out and paid the driver. Eleanor bundled out after her. “No, no, no, Peggy,” she began.
“It’s my cab. It’s my cab,” Peggy protested.
“But I insist on paying my share,” said Eleanor, opening her purse.
“That’s Eleanor,” said North. He left the telephone and turned to Sara. She was still swinging her foot up and down.
“She told me to tell you to come to Delia’s party,” he said.
“To Delia’s party? Why to Delia’s party?” she asked.
“Because they’re old and want you to come,” he said, standing over her.
“Old Eleanor; wandering Eleanor; Eleanor with the wild eyes . . .” she mused. “Shall I, shan’t I, shall I, shan’t I?” she hummed, looking up at him. “No,” she said, putting her feet to the ground, “I shan’t.”
“You must,” he said. For her manner irritated him — Eleanor’s voice was still in his ears.
“I must, must I?” she said, making the coffee.
“Then,” she said, giving him his cup and picking up the book at the same time, “read until we must go.”
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 233
