Classic Works from Women Writers

by Editors of Canterbury Classics

  “And the future?” she reflected, vaguely envisaging a race of men becoming more and more like Hirst, and a race of women becoming more and more like Rachel. “Oh no,” she concluded, glancing at him, “one wouldn’t marry you. Well, then, the future of the race is in the hands of Susan and Arthur; no—that’s dreadful. Of farm labourers; no—not of the English at all, but of Russians and Chinese.” This train of thought did not satisfy her, and was interrupted by St. John, who began again:

  “I wish you knew Bennett. He’s the greatest man in the world.”

  “Bennett?” she enquired. Becoming more at ease, St. John dropped the concentrated abruptness of his manner, and explained that Bennett was a man who lived in an old windmill six miles out of Cambridge. He lived the perfect life, according to St. John, very lonely, very simple, caring only for the truth of things, always ready to talk, and extraordinarily modest, though his mind was of the greatest.

  “Don’t you think,” said St. John, when he had done describing him, “that kind of thing makes this kind of thing rather flimsy? Did you notice at tea how poor old Hewet had to change the conversation? How they were all ready to pounce upon me because they thought I was going to say something improper? It wasn’t anything, really. If Bennett had been there he’d have said exactly what he meant to say, or he’d have got up and gone. But there’s something rather bad for the character in that—I mean if one hasn’t got Bennett’s character. It’s inclined to make one bitter. Should you say that I was bitter?”

  Helen did not answer, and he continued:

  “Of course I am, disgustingly bitter, and it’s a beastly thing to be. But the worst of me is that I’m so envious. I envy every one. I can’t endure people who do things better than I do—perfectly absurd things too—waiters balancing piles of plates—even Arthur, because Susan’s in love with him. I want people to like me, and they don’t. It’s partly my appearance, I expect,” he continued, “though it’s an absolute lie to say I’ve Jewish blood in me—as a matter of fact we’ve been in Norfolk, Hirst of Hirstbourne Hall, for three centuries at least. It must be awfully soothing to be like you—every one liking one at once.”

  “I assure you they don’t,” Helen laughed.

  “They do,” said Hirst with conviction. “In the first place, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen; in the second, you have an exceptionally nice nature.”

  If Hirst had looked at her instead of looking intently at his teacup he would have seen Helen blush, partly with pleasure, partly with an impulse of affection towards the young man who had seemed, and would seem again, so ugly and so limited. She pitied him, for she suspected that he suffered, and she was interested in him, for many of the things he said seemed to her true; she admired the morality of youth, and yet she felt imprisoned. As if her instinct were to escape to something brightly coloured and impersonal, which she could hold in her hands, she went into the house and returned with her embroidery. But he was not interested in her embroidery; he did not even look at it.

  “About Miss Vinrace,” he began—“oh, look here, do let’s be St. John and Helen, and Rachel and Terence—what’s she like? Does she reason, does she feel, or is she merely a kind of footstool?”

  “Oh no,” said Helen, with great decision. From her observations at tea she was inclined to doubt whether Hirst was the person to educate Rachel. She had gradually come to be interested in her niece, and fond of her; she disliked some things about her very much, she was amused by others; but she felt her, on the whole, a live if unformed human being, experimental, and not always fortunate in her experiments, but with powers of some kind, and a capacity for feeling. Somewhere in the depths of her, too, she was bound to Rachel by the indestructible if inexplicable ties of sex. “She seems vague, but she’s a will of her own,” she said, as if in the interval she had run through her qualities.

  The embroidery, which was a matter for thought, the design being difficult and the colours wanting consideration, brought lapses into the dialogue when she seemed to be engrossed in her skeins of silk, or, with head a little drawn back and eyes narrowed, considered the effect of the whole. Thus she merely said, “Um-m-m” to St. John’s next remark, “I shall ask her to go for a walk with me.”

  Perhaps he resented this division of attention. He sat silent watching Helen closely.

  “You’re absolutely happy,” he proclaimed at last.

  “Yes?” Helen enquired, sticking in her needle.

  “Marriage, I suppose,” said St. John.

  “Yes,” said Helen, gently drawing her needle out.

  “Children?” St. John enquired.

  “Yes,” said Helen, sticking her needle in again. “I don’t know why I’m happy,” she suddenly laughed, looking him full in the face. There was a considerable pause.

  “There’s an abyss between us,” said St. John. His voice sounded as if it issued from the depths of a cavern in the rocks. “You’re infinitely simpler than I am. Women always are, of course. That’s the difficulty. One never knows how a woman gets there. Supposing all the time you’re thinking, ‘Oh, what a morbid young man!’”

  Helen sat and looked at him with her needle in her hand. From her position she saw his head in front of the dark pyramid of a magnolia-tree. With one foot raised on the rung of a chair, and her elbow out in the attitude for sewing, her own figure possessed the sublimity of a woman’s of the early world, spinning the thread of fate—the sublimity possessed by many women of the present day who fall into the attitude required by scrubbing or sewing. St. John looked at her.

  “I suppose you’ve never paid any a compliment in the course of your life,” he said irrelevantly.

  “I spoil Ridley rather,” Helen considered.

  “I’m going to ask you point blank—do you like me?”

  After a certain pause, she replied, “Yes, certainly.”

  “Thank God!” he exclaimed. “That’s one mercy. You see,” he continued with emotion, “I’d rather you liked me than anyone I’ve ever met.”

  “What about the five philosophers?” said Helen, with a laugh, stitching 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 to 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 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 pronounced 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 eyeglasses 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 earthly substance, and composed merely of intense blue mist. Lon
g thin clouds of flamingo red, with edges like the edges of curled ostrich feathers, lay up and down the sky at different altitudes. 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 circumference 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 partitioned 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 massive 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 grasses 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 matchbox. Most of the time when I was reading Gibbon this afternoon I was horribly, oh infernally, damnably 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 title, 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! Wh
at 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 assure you,” he said, “not a day’s passed 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 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?”