_ The next few months passed away, as many years can pass away,
without definite events, and yet, if suddenly disturbed, it would
be seen that such months or years had a character unlike others.
The three months which had passed had brought them to the beginning
of March. The climate had kept its promise, and the change
of season from winter to spring had made very little difference,
so that Helen, who was sitting in the drawing-room with a pen in
her hand, could keep the windows open though a great fire of logs
burnt on one side of her. Below, the sea was still blue and the
roofs still brown and white, though the day was fading rapidly.
It was dusk in the room, which, large and empty at all times,
now appeared larger and emptier than usual. Her own figure, as she
sat writing with a pad on her knee, shared the general effect of size
and lack of detail, for the flames which ran along the branches,
suddenly devouring little green tufts, burnt intermittently and sent
irregular illuminations across her face and the plaster walls.
There were no pictures on the walls but here and there boughs
laden with heavy-petalled flowers spread widely against them.
Of the books fallen on the bare floor and heaped upon the large table,
it was only possible in this light to trace the outline.
Mrs. Ambrose was writing a very long letter. Beginning "Dear Bernard,"
it went on to describe what had been happening in the Villa San
Gervasio during the past three months, as, for instance, that they
had had the British Consul to dinner, and had been taken over a Spanish
man-of-war, and had seen a great many processions and religious festivals,
which were so beautiful that Mrs. Ambrose couldn't conceive why,
if people must have a religion, they didn't all become Roman Catholics.
They had made several expeditions though none of any length. It was
worth coming if only for the sake of the flowering trees which grew
wild quite near the house, and the amazing colours of sea and earth.
The earth, instead of being brown, was red, purple, green. "You won't
believe me," she added, "there is no colour like it in England."
She adopted, indeed, a condescending tone towards that poor island,
which was now advancing chilly crocuses and nipped violets in nooks,
in copses, in cosy corners, tended by rosy old gardeners in mufflers,
who were always touching their hats and bobbing obsequiously.
She went on to deride the islanders themselves. Rumours of London all
in a ferment over a General Election had reached them even out here.
"It seems incredible," she went on, "that people should care whether
Asquith is in or Austen Chamberlin out, and while you scream yourselves
hoarse about politics you let the only people who are trying for
something good starve or simply laugh at them. When have you ever
encouraged a living artist? Or bought his best work? Why are you
all so ugly and so servile? Here the servants are human beings.
They talk to one as if they were equals. As far as I can tell there
are no aristocrats."
Perhaps it was the mention of aristocrats that reminded her of
Richard Dalloway and Rachel, for she ran on with the same penful
to describe her niece.
"It's an odd fate that has put me in charge of a girl," she wrote,
"considering that I have never got on well with women, or had much
to do with them. However, I must retract some of the things that I
have said against them. If they were properly educated I don't see
why they shouldn't be much the same as men--as satisfactory I mean;
though, of course, very different. The question is, how should
one educate them. The present method seems to me abominable.
This girl, though twenty-four, had never heard that men desired women,
and, until I explained it, did not know how children were born.
Her ignorance upon other matters as important" (here Mrs. Ambrose's
letter may not be quoted) . . ."was complete. It seems to me not
merely foolish but criminal to bring people up like that. Let alone
the suffering to them, it explains why women are what they are--
the wonder is they're no worse. I have taken it upon myself
to enlighten her, and now, though still a good deal prejudiced and
liable to exaggerate, she is more or less a reasonable human being.
Keeping them ignorant, of course, defeats its own object, and when
they begin to understand they take it all much too seriously.
My brother-in-law really deserved a catastrophe--which he won't get.
I now pray for a young man to come to my help; some one, I mean,
who would talk to her openly, and prove how absurd most of her ideas
about life are. Unluckily such men seem almost as rare as the women.
The English colony certainly doesn't provide one; artists, merchants,
cultivated people--they are stupid, conventional, and flirtatious.
. . ." She ceased, and with her pen in her hand sat looking into
the fire, making the logs into caves and mountains, for it had grown
too dark to go on writing. Moreover, the house began to stir as
the hour of dinner approached; she could hear the plates being chinked
in the dining-room next door, and Chailey instructing the Spanish
girl where to put things down in vigorous English. The bell rang;
she rose, met Ridley and Rachel outside, and they all went in
to dinner.
Three months had made but little difference in the appearance either
of Ridley or Rachel; yet a keen observer might have thought that the girl
was more definite and self-confident in her manner than before.
Her skin was brown, her eyes certainly brighter, and she attended
to what was said as though she might be going to contradict it.
The meal began with the comfortable silence of people who are quite
at their ease together. Then Ridley, leaning on his elbow and looking
out of the window, observed that it was a lovely night.
"Yes," said Helen. She added, "The season's begun," looking at
the lights beneath them. She asked Maria in Spanish whether the hotel
was not filling up with visitors. Maria informed her with pride
that there would come a time when it was positively difficult
to buy eggs--the shopkeepers would not mind what prices they asked;
they would get them, at any rate, from the English.
"That's an English steamer in the bay," said Rachel, looking at
a triangle of lights below. "She came in early this morning."
"Then we may hope for some letters and send ours back," said Helen.
For some reason the mention of letters always made Ridley groan,
and the rest of the meal passed in a brisk argument between husband
and wife as to whether he was or was not wholly ignored by the entire
civilised world.
"Considering the last batch," said Helen, "you deserve beating.
You were asked to lecture, you were offered a degree, and some silly
woman praised not only your books but your beauty--she said he was what
Shelley would have been if Shelley had lived to fifty-five and grown
a beard. Really, Ridley, I think you're the vainest man I know,"
she ended, rising from the table, "which I may tell you is saying
a good deal."
Finding her letter lying before the fire she added a few lines to it,
and then announced that she was going to take the letters now--
Ridley must bring his--and Rachel?
"I hope you've written to your Aunts? It's high time."
The women put on cloaks and hats, and after inviting Ridley to come
with them, which he emphatically refused to do, exclaiming that
Rachel he expected to be a fool, but Helen surely knew better,
they turned to go. He stood over the fire gazing into the depths
of the looking-glass, and compressing his face into the likeness
of a commander surveying a field of battle, or a martyr watching
the flames lick his toes, rather than that of a secluded Professor.
Helen laid hold of his beard.
"Am I a fool?" she said.
"Let me go, Helen."
"Am I a fool?" she repeated.
"Vile woman!" he exclaimed, and kissed her.
"We'll leave you to your vanities," she called back as they went
out of the door.
It was a beautiful evening, still light enough to see a long way
down the road, though the stars were coming out. The pillar-box
was let into a high yellow wall where the lane met the road,
and having dropped the letters into it, Helen was for turning back.
"No, no," said Rachel, taking her by the wrist. "We're going
to see life. You promised."
"Seeing life" was the phrase they used for their habit of strolling
through the town after dark. The social life of Santa Marina
was carried on almost entirely by lamp-light, which the warmth of
the nights and the scents culled from flowers made pleasant enough.
The young women, with their hair magnificently swept in coils,
a red flower behind the ear, sat on the doorsteps, or issued out
on to balconies, while the young men ranged up and down beneath,
shouting up a greeting from time to time and stopping here and there
to enter into amorous talk. At the open windows merchants could
be seen making up the day's account, and older women lifting jars
from shelf to shelf. The streets were full of people, men for the
most part, who interchanged their views of the world as they walked,
or gathered round the wine-tables at the street corner, where an old
cripple was twanging his guitar strings, while a poor girl cried
her passionate song in the gutter. The two Englishwomen excited
some friendly curiosity, but no one molested them.
Helen sauntered on, observing the different people in their shabby
clothes, who seemed so careless and so natural, with satisfaction.
"Just think of the Mall to-night!" she exclaimed at length.
"It's the fifteenth of March. Perhaps there's a Court."
She thought of the crowd waiting in the cold spring air to see
the grand carriages go by. "It's very cold, if it's not raining,"
she said. "First there are men selling picture postcards; then there
are wretched little shop-girls with round bandboxes; then there
are bank clerks in tail coats; and then--any number of dressmakers.
People from South Kensington drive up in a hired fly; officials have
a pair of bays; earls, on the other hand, are allowed one footman
to stand up behind; dukes have two, royal dukes--so I was told--
have three; the king, I suppose, can have as many as he likes.
And the people believe in it!"
Out here it seemed as though the people of England must be
shaped in the body like the kings and queens, knights and pawns
of the chessboard, so strange were their differences, so marked
and so implicitly believed in.
They had to part in order to circumvent a crowd.
"They believe in God," said Rachel as they regained each other.
She meant that the people in the crowd believed in Him; for she
remembered the crosses with bleeding plaster figures that stood
where foot-paths joined, and the inexplicable mystery of a service
in a Roman Catholic church.
"We shall never understand!" she sighed.
They had walked some way and it was now night, but they could see
a large iron gate a little way farther down the road on their left.
"Do you mean to go right up to the hotel?" Helen asked.
Rachel gave the gate a push; it swung open, and, seeing no one
about and judging that nothing was private in this country,
they walked straight on. An avenue of trees ran along the road,
which was completely straight. The trees suddenly came to an end;
the road turned a corner, and they found themselves confronted by
a large square building. They had come out upon the broad terrace
which ran round the hotel and were only a few feet distant from
the windows. A row of long windows opened almost to the ground.
They were all of them uncurtained, and all brilliantly lighted,
so that they could see everything inside. Each window revealed
a different section of the life of the hotel. They drew into one
of the broad columns of shadow which separated the windows and
gazed in. They found themselves just outside the dining-room. It
was being swept; a waiter was eating a bunch of grapes with his leg
across the corner of a table. Next door was the kitchen, where they
were washing up; white cooks were dipping their arms into cauldrons,
while the waiters made their meal voraciously off broken meats,
sopping up the gravy with bits of crumb. Moving on, they became lost
in a plantation of bushes, and then suddenly found themselves outside
the drawing-room, where the ladies and gentlemen, having dined well,
lay back in deep arm-chairs, occasionally speaking or turning over
the pages of magazines. A thin woman was flourishing up and down
the piano.
"What is a dahabeeyah, Charles?" the distinct voice of a widow,
seated in an arm-chair by the window, asked her son.
It was the end of the piece, and his answer was lost in the general
clearing of throats and tapping of knees.
"They're all old in this room," Rachel whispered.
Creeping on, they found that the next window revealed two men
in shirt-sleeves playing billiards with two young ladies.
"He pinched my arm!" the plump young woman cried, as she missed
her stroke.
"Now you two--no ragging," the young man with the red face
reproved them, who was marking.
"Take care or we shall be seen," whispered Helen, plucking Rachel
by the arm. Incautiously her head had risen to the middle of the window.
Turning the corner they came to the largest room in the hotel,
which was supplied with four windows, and was called the Lounge,
although it was really a hall. Hung with armour and native embroideries,
furnished with divans and screens, which shut off convenient corners,
the room was less formal than the others, and was evidently the haunt
of youth. Signor Rodriguez, whom they knew to be the manager
of the hotel, stood quite near them in the doorway surveying
the scene--the gentlemen lounging in chairs, the couples leaning
over coffee-cups, the game of cards in the centre under profuse
clusters of electric light. He was congratulating himself upon
the enterprise which had turned the refectory, a cold stone room
with pots on trestles, into the most comfortable room in the house.
The hotel was very full, and proved his wisdom in decreeing
that no hotel can flourish without a lounge.
The people were scattered about in couples or parties of four,
and either they were actually better acquainted, or the informal
room made their manners easier. Through the open window came
an uneven humming sound like that which rises from a flock of sheep
pent within hurdles at dusk. The card-party occupied the centre
of the foreground.
Helen and Rachel watched them play for some minutes without being able
to distinguish a word. Helen was observing one of the men intently.
He was a lean, somewhat cadaverous man of about her own age,
whose profile was turned to them, and he was the partner
of a highly-coloured girl, obviously English by birth.
Suddenly, in the strange way in which some words detach themselves
from the rest, they heard him say quite distinctly:--
"All you want is practice, Miss Warrington; courage and practice--
one's no good without the other."
"Hughling Elliot! Of course!" Helen exclaimed. She ducked
her head immediately, for at the sound of his name he looked up.
The game went on for a few minutes, and was then broken up by
the approach of a wheeled chair, containing a voluminous old lady
who paused by the table and said:--
"Better luck to-night, Susan?"
"All the luck's on our side," said a young man who until now had kept
his back turned to the window. He appeared to be rather stout,
and had a thick crop of hair.
"Luck, Mr. Hewet?" said his partner, a middle-aged lady with spectacles.
"I assure you, Mrs. Paley, our success is due solely to our brilliant play."
"Unless I go to bed early I get practically no sleep at all,"
Mrs. Paley was heard to explain, as if to justify her seizure of Susan,
who got up and proceeded to wheel the chair to the door.
"They'll get some one else to take my place," she said cheerfully.
But she was wrong. No attempt was made to find another player,
and after the young man had built three stories of a card-house,
which fell down, the players strolled off in different directions.
Mr. Hewet turned his full face towards the window. They could
see that he had large eyes obscured by glasses; his complexion
was rosy, his lips clean-shaven; and, seen among ordinary people,
it appeared to be an interesting face. He came straight towards them,
but his eyes were fixed not upon the eavesdroppers but upon a spot
where the curtain hung in folds.
"Asleep?" he said.
Helen and Rachel started to think that some one had been sitting near
to them unobserved all the time. There were legs in the shadow.
A melancholy voice issued from above them.
"Two women," it said.
A scuffling was heard on the gravel. The women had fled. They did
not stop running until they felt certain that no eye could penetrate
the darkness and the hotel was only a square shadow in the distance,
with red holes regularly cut in it. _