The Voyage Out (23 page)

“These little donkeys stand anything,
n’est-ce pas?”
Mrs. Elliot addressed the guide, who obligingly bowed his head.

“Flowers,” said Helen, stooping to pick the lovely little bright flowers which grew separately here and there. “You pinch their leaves and then they smell,” she said, laying one on Miss Allan’s knee.

“Haven’t we met before?” asked Miss Allan, looking at her.

“I was taking it for granted,” Helen laughed, for in the confusion of meeting they had not been introduced.

“How sensible!” chirped Mrs. Elliot. “That’s just what one would always like—only unfortunately it’s not possible.”

“Not possible?” said Helen. “Everything’s possible. Who knows what mayn’t happen before nightfall?” she continued, mocking the poor lady’s timidity, who depended so implicitly upon one thing following another that the mere glimpse of a world where dinner could be disregarded, or the table moved one inch from its accustomed place, filled her with fears for her own stability.

Higher and higher they went, becoming separated from the world. The world, when they turned to look back, flattened itself out, and was marked with squares of thin green and grey.

“Towns are very small,” Rachel remarked, obscuring the whole of Santa Marina and its suburbs with one hand. The sea filled in all the angles of the coast smoothly, breaking in a white frill, and here and there ships were set firmly in the blue. The sea was stained with purple and green blots, and there was a glittering line upon the rim where it met the sky. The air was very clear and silent save for the sharp noise of grasshoppers and the hum of bees, which sounded loud in the ear as they shot past and vanished. The party halted and sat for a time in a quarry on the hillside.

“Amazingly clear,” exclaimed St. John, identifying one cleft in the land after another.

Evelyn M. sat beside him, propping her chin on her hand. She surveyed the view with a certain look of triumph.

“D’you think Garibaldi
⁵
was ever up here?” she asked Mr. Hirst. Oh, if she had been his bride! If, instead of a picnic party, this was a
party of patriots, and she, red-shirted like the rest, had lain among grim men, flat on the turf, aiming her gun at the white turrets beneath them, screening her eyes to pierce through the smoke! So thinking, her foot stirred restlessly, and she exclaimed:

“I don’t call this
life
, do you?”

“What do you call life?” said St. John.

“Fighting—revolution,” she said, still gazing at the doomed city. “You only care for books, I know.”

“You’re quite wrong,” said St. John.

“Explain,” she urged, for there were no guns to be aimed at bodies, and she turned to another kind of warfare.

“What do I care for? People,” he said.

“Well, I
am
surprised!” she exclaimed. “You look so awfully serious. Do let’s be friends and tell each other what we’re like. I hate being cautious, don’t you?”

But St. John was decidedly cautious, as she could see by the sudden constriction of his lips, and had no intention of revealing his soul to a young lady.

“The ass is eating my hat,” he remarked, and stretched out for it instead of answering her. Evelyn blushed very slightly and then turned with some impetuosity upon Mr. Perrott, and when they mounted again it was Mr. Perrott who lifted her to her seat.

“When one has laid the eggs one eats the omelette,” said Hughling Elliot, exquisitely in French, a hint to the rest of them that it was time to ride on again.

The midday sun which Hirst had foretold was beginning to beat down hotly. The higher they got the more of the sky appeared, until the mountain was only a small tent of earth against an enormous blue background. The English fell silent; the natives who walked beside the donkeys broke into queer wavering songs and tossed jokes from one to the other. The way grew very steep, and each rider kept his eyes fixed on the hobbling curved form of the rider and donkey directly in front of him. Rather more strain was being put upon their bodies than is quite legitimate in a party of pleasure, and Hewet overheard one or two slightly grumbling remarks.

“Expeditions in such heat are perhaps a little unwise,” Mrs. Elliot murmured to Miss Allan.

But Miss Allan returned, “I always like to get to the top”; and it was true, although she was a big woman, stiff in the joints, and unused to donkey-riding, but as her holidays were few she made the most of them.

The vivacious white figure rode well in front; she had somehow possessed herself of a leafy branch and wore it round her hat like a garland. They went on for a few minutes in silence.

“The view will be wonderful,” Hewet assured them, turning round in his saddle and smiling encouragement. Rachel caught his eye and smiled too. They struggled on for some time longer, nothing being heard but the clatter of hooves striving on the loose stones. Then they saw that Evelyn was off her ass, and that Mr. Perrott was standing in the attitude of a statesman in Parliament Square, stretching an arm of stone towards the view. A little to the left of them was a low ruined wall, the stump of an Elizabethan watch-tower.

“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 on 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 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 behindhand. “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.”

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.