"Thank G.o.d!" he exclaimed. "That"s one mercy. You see," he continued with emotion, "I"d rather you liked me than any one I"ve ever met."
"What about the five philosophers?" said Helen, with a laugh, st.i.tching firmly and swiftly at her canvas. "I wish you"d describe them."
Hirst had no particular wish to describe them, but when he began to consider them he found himself soothed and strengthened. Far away on the other side of the world as they were, in smoky rooms, and grey medieval courts, they appeared remarkable figures, free-spoken men with whom one could be at ease; incomparably more subtle in emotion than the people here. They gave him, certainly, what no woman could give him, not Helen even. Warming at the thought of them, he went on to lay his own case before Mrs. Ambrose. Should he stay on at Cambridge or should he go to the Bar? One day he thought one thing, another day another. Helen listened attentively. At last, without any preface, she p.r.o.nounced her decision.
"Leave Cambridge and go to the Bar,"she said. He pressed her for her reasons.
"I think you"d enjoy London more," she said. It did not seem a very subtle reason, but she appeared to think it sufficient. She looked at him against the background of flowering magnolia. There was something curious in the sight. Perhaps it was that the heavy wax-like flowers were so smooth and inarticulate, and his face - he had thrown his hat away, his hair was rumpled, he held his eyegla.s.ses in his hand, so that a red mark appeared on either side of his nose - was so worried and garrulous. It was a beautiful bush, spreading very widely, and all the time she had sat there talking she had been noticing the patches of shade and the shape of the leaves, and the way the great white flowers sat in the midst of the green. She had noticed it half-consciously, nevertheless the pattern had become part of their talk. She laid down her sewing, and began to walk up and down the garden, and Hirst rose too and paced by her side. He was rather disturbed, uncomfortable, and full of thought. Neither of them spoke.
The sun was beginning to go down, and a change had come over the mountains, as if they were robbed of their earthy substance, and composed merely of intense blue mist. Long thin clouds of flamingo red, with edges like the edges of curled ostrich feathers, lay up and down the sky at different alt.i.tudes. The roofs of the town seemed to have sunk lower than usual; the cypresses appeared very black between the roofs, and the roofs themselves were brown and white. As usual in the evening, single cries and single bells became audible rising from beneath.
St. John stopped suddenly.
"Well, you must take the responsibility," he said. "I"ve made up my mind; I shall go to the Bar."
His words were very serious, almost emotional; they recalled Helen after a second"s hesitation.
"I"m sure you"re right," she said warmly, and shook the hand he held out. "You"ll be a great man, I"m certain."
Then, as if to make him look at the scene, she swept her hand round the immense circ.u.mference of the view. From the sea, over the roofs of the town, across the crests of the mountains, over the river and the plain, and again across the crests of the mountains it swept until it reached the villa, the garden, the magnolia-tree, and the figures of Hirst and herself standing together, when it dropped to her side.
CHAPTER XVI.
HEWET AND RACHEL HAD long ago reached the particular place on the edge of the cliff where, looking down into the sea, you might chance on jelly-fish and dolphins. Looking the other way, the vast expanse of land gave them a sensation which is given by no view, however extended, in England; the villages and the hills there having names, and the farthest horizon of hills as often as not dipping and showing a line of mist which is the sea; here the view was one of infinite sun-dried earth, earth pointed in pinnacles, heaped in vast barriers, earth widening and spreading away and away like the immense floor of the sea, earth chequered by day and by night, and part.i.tioned into different lands, where famous cities were founded, and the races of men changed from dark savages to white civilised men, and back to dark savages again. Perhaps their English blood made this prospect uncomfortably impersonal and hostile to them, for having once turned their faces that way they next turned them to the sea, and for the rest of the time sat looking at the sea. The sea, though it was a thin and sparkling water here, which seemed incapable of surge or anger, eventually narrowed itself, clouded its pure tint with grey, and swirled through narrow channels and dashed in a shiver of broken waters against ma.s.sive granite rocks. It was this sea that flowed up to the mouth of the Thames; and the Thames washed the roots of the city of London.
Hewet"s thoughts had followed some such course as this, for the first thing he said as they stood on the edge of the cliff was - "I"d like to be in England!"
Rachel lay down on her elbow, and parted the tall gra.s.ses which grew on the edge, so that she might have a clear view. The water was very calm; rocking up and down at the base of the cliff, and so clear that one could see the red of the stones at the bottom of it. So it had been at the birth of the world, and so it had remained ever since. Probably no human being had ever broken that water with boat or with body. Obeying some impulse, she determined to mar that eternity of peace, and threw the largest pebble she could find. It struck the water, and the ripples spread out and out. Hewet looked down too.
"It"s wonderful," he said, as they widened and ceased. The freshness and the newness seemed to him wonderful. He threw a pebble next. There was scarcely any sound.
"But England," Rachel murmured in the absorbed tone of one whose eyes are concentrated upon some sight. "What d"you want with England?"
"My friends chiefly," he said, "and all the things one does."
He could look at Rachel without her noticing it. She was still absorbed in the water and the exquisitely pleasant sensations which a little depth of the sea washing over rocks suggests. He noticed that she was wearing a dress of deep blue colour, made of a soft thin cotton stuff, which clung to the shape of her body. It was a body with the angles and hollows of a young woman"s body not yet developed, but in no way distorted, and thus interesting and even lovable. Raising his eyes Hewet observed her head; she had taken her hat off, and the face rested on her hand. As she looked down into the sea, her lips were slightly parted. The expression was one of childlike intentness, as if she were watching for a fish to swim past over the clear red rocks. Nevertheless her twenty-four years of life had given her a look of reserve. Her hand, which lay on the ground, the fingers curling slightly in, was well shaped and competent; the square-tipped and nervous fingers were the fingers of a musician. With something like anguish Hewet realised that, far from being unattractive, her body was very attractive to him. She looked up suddenly. Her eyes were full of eagerness and interest.
"You write novels?" she asked.
For the moment he could not think what he was saying. He was overcome with the desire to hold her in his arms.
"Oh yes," he said. "That is, I want to write them."
She would not take her large grey eyes off his face.
"Novels," she repeated. "Why do you write novels? You ought to write music. Music, you see" - she shifted her eyes, and became less desirable as her brain began to work, inflicting a certain change upon her face - "music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once. With writing it seems to me there"s so much" - she paused for an expression, and rubbed her fingers in the earth - "scratching on the match-box. Most of the time when I was reading Gibbon this afternoon I was horribly, oh infernally, d.a.m.nably bored!" She gave a shake of laughter, looking at Hewet, who laughed too.
"I shan"t lend you books," he remarked.
"Why is it," Rachel continued, "that I can laugh at Mr. Hirst to you, but not to his face? At tea I was completely overwhelmed, not by his ugliness - by his mind." She enclosed a circle in the air with her hands. She realised with a great sense of comfort how easily she could talk to Hewet, those thorns or ragged corners which tear the surface of some relationships being smoothed away "So I observed," said Hewet. "That"s a thing that never ceases to amaze me." He had recovered his composure to such an extent that he could light and smoke a cigarette, and feeling her ease, became happy and easy himself.
"The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women, have for men," he went on. "I believe we must have the sort of power over you that we"re said to have over horses. They see us three times as big as we are or they"d never obey us. For that very reason, I"m inclined to doubt that you"ll ever do anything even when you have the vote." He looked at her reflectively. She appeared very smooth and sensitive and young. "It"ll take at least six generations before you"re sufficiently thick-skinned to go into law courts and business offices. Consider what a bully the ordinary man is," he continued, "the ordinary hard-working, rather ambitious solicitor or man of business with a family to bring up and a certain position to maintain. And then, of course, the daughters have to give way to the sons; the sons have to be educated; they have to bully and shove for their wives and families, and so it all comes over again. And meanwhile there are the women in the background ... Do you really think that the vote will do you any good?"
"The vote?" Rachel repeated. She had to visualise it as a little bit of paper which she dropped into a box before she understood his question, and looking at each other they smiled at something absurd in the question.
"Not to me," she said. "But I play the piano ... Are men really like that?" she asked, returning to the question that interested her. "I"m not afraid of you." She looked at him easily.
"Oh, I"m different," Hewet replied. "I"ve got between six and seven hundred a year of my own. And then no one takes a novelist seriously, thank heavens. There"s no doubt it helps to make up for the drudgery of a profession if a man"s taken very, very seriously by every one - if he gets appointments, and has offices and a t.i.tle, and lots of letters after his name, and bits of ribbon and degrees. I don"t grudge it "em, though sometimes it comes over me - what an amazing concoction! What a miracle the masculine conception of life is - judges, civil servants, army, navy, Houses of Parliament, lord mayors - what a world we"ve made of it! Look at Hirst now. I a.s.sure you," he said, "not a day"s pa.s.sed since we came here without a discussion as to whether he"s to stay on at Cambridge or to go to the Bar. It"s his career - his sacred career. And if I"ve heard it twenty times, I"m sure his mother and sister have heard it five hundred times. Can"t you imagine the family conclaves, and the sister told to run out and feed the rabbits because St. John must have the school-room to himself - "St. John"s working," "St. John wants his tea brought to him." Don"t you know the kind of thing? No wonder that St. John thinks it a matter of considerable importance. It is too. He has to earn his living. But St. John"s sister - " Hewet puffed in silence. "No one takes her seriously, poor dear. She feeds the rabbits."
"Yes," said Rachel. "I"ve fed rabbits for twenty-four years; it seems odd now." She looked meditative, and Hewet, who had been talking much at random and instinctively adopting the feminine point of view, saw that she would now talk about herself, which was what he wanted, for so they might come to know each other.
She looked back meditatively upon her past life.
"How do you spend your day?" he asked.
She meditated still. When she thought of their day it seemed to her that it was cut into four pieces by their meals. These divisions were absolutely rigid, the contents of the day having to accommodate themselves within the four rigid bars. Looking back at her life, that was what she saw.
"Breakfast nine; luncheon one; tea five; dinner eight," she said.
"Well," said Hewet, "what d"you do in the morning?"
"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 some one, 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 charwomen with bad legs, women who want tickets for hospitals.bg 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 c.o.c.katoo 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 gla.s.s doors, and a general impression of faded sofa covers, large s.p.a.ces 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. 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 c.o.c.katoo 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 gla.s.s doors, and a general impression of faded sofa covers, large s.p.a.ces 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.bh 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. 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 gra.s.s 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 b.u.t.ter, 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.bi 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.s, 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 - " 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.s, 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 some one 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 rea.s.sured. 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 some one"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?"18 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. 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 of 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: 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 of 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 ma.s.s, 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.
"Prost.i.tutes?"
"Men kissing one."
He nodded his head.
"Things one guesses at."
"You were never told?"
She shook her head.
"And then," she began and stopped. Here came in the great s.p.a.ce 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 d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.sion 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 "n.o.body 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, made 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 any one; 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,bj I should say." 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 any one 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 managesto 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 circ.u.mstances. Lady Theo Bingham Bingley, whose bay mare he had the good fortune to stop, is the daughter 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 that 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 than 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 any one 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."
As he said this he was leaning on his elbow arranging and rearranging in the gra.s.s the stones which had represented Rachel and her aunts at luncheon. He was speaking as much to himself as to Rachel. He was reasoning against the desire, which had returned with intensity, to take her in his arms; to have done with indirectness ; to explain exactly what he felt. What he said was against his belief; all the things that were important about her he knew; he felt them in the air around them; but he said nothing; he went on arranging the stones.
"I like you; d"you like me?" Rachel suddenly observed.
"I like you immensely," Hewet replied, speaking with the relief of a person who is unexpectedly given an opportunity of saying what he wants to say. He stopped moving the pebbles.
"Mightn"t we call each other Rachel and Terence?" he asked.
"Terence," Rachel repeated. "Terence - that"s like the cry of an owl."
She looked up with a sudden rush of delight, and in looking at Terence with eyes widened by pleasure she was struck by the change that had come over the sky behind them. The substantial blue day had faded to a paler and more ethereal blue; the clouds were pink, far away and closely packed together; and the peace of evening had replaced the heat of the southern afternoon, in which they had started on their walk.
"It must be late!" she exclaimed.
It was nearly eight o"clock.
"But eight o"clock doesn"t count here, does it?" Terence asked, as they got up and turned inland again. They began to walk rather quickly down the hill on a little path between the olive trees.
They felt more intimate because they shared the knowledge of what eight o"clock in Richmond meant. Terence walked in front, for there was not room for them side by side.
"What I want to do in writing novels is very much what you want to do when you play the piano, I expect," he began, turning and speaking over his shoulder. "We want to find out what"s behind things, don"t we? - Look at the lights down there," he continued, "scattered about anyhow. Things I feel come to me like lights ... I want to combine them ... Have you ever seen fireworks that make figures? ... I want to make figures ... Is that what you want to do?"
Now they were out on the road and could walk side by side.
"When I play the piano? Music is different ... But I see what you mean." They tried to invent theories and to make their theories agree. As Hewet had no knowledge of music, Rachel took his stick and drew figures in the thin white dust to explain how Bach wrote his fugues.
"My musical gift was ruined," he explained, as they walked on after one of these demonstrations, "by the village organist at home, who had invented a system of notation which he tried to teach me, with the result that I never got to the tune-playing at all. My mother thought music wasn"t manly for boys; she wanted me to kill rats and birds - that"s the worst of living in the country. We live in Devonshire. It"s the loveliest place in the world. Only - it"s always difficult at home when one"s grown up. I"d like you to know one of my sisters ... Oh, here"s your gate - " He pushed it open. They paused for a moment. She could not ask him to come in. She could not say that she hoped they would meet again; there was nothing to be said, and so without a word she went through the gate, and was soon invisible. Directly Hewet lost sight of her, he felt the old discomfort return, even more strongly than before. Their talk had been interrupted in the middle, just as he was beginning to say the things he wanted to say. After all, what had they been able to say? He ran his mind over the things they had said, the random, unnecessary things which had eddied round and round and used up all the time, and drawn them so close together and flung them so far apart, and left him in the end unsatisfied, ignorant still of what she felt and of what she was like. What was the use of talking, talking, merely talking?
CHAPTER XVII.