Chapter 7


About this time a firm of merchants having dealings with the East put on the market little paper flowers which
opened on touching water. As it was the custom also to use finger−bowls at the end of dinner, the new
discovery was found of excellent service. In these sheltered lakes the little coloured flowers swam and slid;
surmounted smooth slippery waves, and sometimes foundered and lay like pebbles on the glass floor. Their
fortunes were watched by eyes intent and lovely. It is surely a great discovery that leads to the union of hearts
and foundation of homes. The paper flowers did no less.
It must not be thought, though, that they ousted the flowers of nature. Roses, lilies, carnations in particular,
looked over the rims of vases and surveyed the bright lives and swift dooms of their artificial relations. Mr.
Stuart Ormond made this very observation; and charming it was thought; and Kitty Craster married him on the
strength of it six months later. But real flowers can never be dispensed with. If they could, human life would
be a different affair altogether. For flowers fade; chrysanthemums are the worst; perfect over night; yellow
and jaded next morning−−not fit to be seen. On the whole, though the price is sinful, carnations pay
best;−−it's a question, however, whether it's wise to have them wired. Some shops advise it. Certainly it's the
only way to keep them at a dance; but whether it is necessary at dinner parties, unless the rooms are very hot,
remains in dispute. Old Mrs. Temple used to recommend an ivy leaf−−just one−−dropped into the bowl. She
said it kept the water pure for days and days. But there is some reason to think that old Mrs. Temple was
mistaken.
The little cards, however, with names engraved on them, are a more serious problem than the flowers. More
horses' legs have been worn out, more coachmen's lives consumed, more hours of sound afternoon time vainly
lavished than served to win us the battle of Waterloo, and pay for it into the bargain. The little demons are the
source of as many reprieves, calamities, and anxieties as the battle itself. Sometimes Mrs. Bonham has just
gone out; at others she is at home. But, even if the cards should be superseded, which seems unlikely, there
are unruly powers blowing life into storms, disordering sedulous mornings, and uprooting the stability of the
afternoon−−dressmakers, that is to say, and confectioners' shops. Six yards of silk will cover one body; but if
you have to devise six hundred shapes for it, and twice as many colours?−−in the middle of which there is the
urgent question of the pudding with tufts of green cream and battlements of almond paste. It has not arrived.
The flamingo hours fluttered softly through the sky. But regularly they dipped their wings in pitch black;
Notting Hill, for instance, or the purlieus of Clerkenwell. No wonder that Italian remained a hidden art, and
the piano always played the same sonata. In order to buy one pair of elastic stockings for Mrs. Page, widow,
aged sixty−three, in receipt of five shillings out−door relief, and help from her only son employed in Messrs.
Mackie's dye−works, suffering in winter with his chest, letters must be written, columns filled up in the same
round, simple hand that wrote in Mr. Letts's diary how the weather was fine, the children demons, and Jacob
Flanders unworldly. Clara Durrant procured the stockings, played the sonata, filled the vases, fetched the
CHAPTER SEVEN 41
pudding, left the cards, and when the great invention of paper flowers to swim in finger−bowls was
discovered, was one of those who most marvelled at their brief lives.
Nor were there wanting poets to celebrate the theme. Edwin Mallett, for example, wrote his verses ending:
And read their doom in Chloe's eyes,
which caused Clara to blush at the first reading, and to laugh at the second, saying that it was just like him to
call her Chloe when her name was Clara. Ridiculous young man! But when, between ten and eleven on a
rainy morning, Edwin Mallett laid his life at her feet she ran out of the room and hid herself in her bedroom,
and Timothy below could not get on with his work all that morning on account of her sobs.
"Which is the result of enjoying yourself," said Mrs. Durrant severely, surveying the dance programme all
scored with the same initials, or rather they were different ones this time−−R.B. instead of E.M.; Richard
Bonamy it was now, the young man with the Wellington nose.
"But I could never marry a man with a nose like that," said Clara.
"Nonsense," said Mrs. Durrant.
"But I am too severe," she thought to herself. For Clara, losing all vivacity, tore up her dance programme and
threw it in the fender.
Such were the very serious consequences of the invention of paper flowers to swim in bowls.
"Please," said Julia Eliot, taking up her position by the curtain almost opposite the door, "don't introduce me. I
like to look on. The amusing thing," she went on, addressing Mr. Salvin, who, owing to his lameness, was
accommodated with a chair, "the amusing thing about a party is to watch the people−−coming and going,
coming and going."
"Last time we met," said Mr. Salvin, "was at the Farquhars. Poor lady! She has much to put up with."
"Doesn't she look charming?" exclaimed Miss Eliot, as Clara Durrant passed them.
"And which of them ...?" asked Mr. Salvin, dropping his voice and speaking in quizzical tones.
"There are so many ..." Miss Eliot replied. Three young men stood at the doorway looking about for their
hostess.
"You don't remember Elizabeth as I do," said Mr. Salvin, "dancing Highland reels at Banchorie. Clara lacks
her mother's spirit. Clara is a little pale."
"What different people one sees here!" said Miss Eliot.
"Happily we are not governed by the evening papers," said Mr. Salvin.
"I never read them," said Miss Eliot. "I know nothing about politics," she added.
"The piano is in tune," said Clara, passing them, "but we may have to ask some one to move it for us."
"Are they going to dance?" asked Mr. Salvin.
CHAPTER SEVEN 42
"Nobody shall disturb you," said Mrs. Durrant peremptorily as she passed.
"Julia Eliot. It IS Julia Eliot!" said old Lady Hibbert, holding out both her hands. "And Mr. Salvin. What is
going to happen to us, Mr. Salvin? With all my experience of English politics−−My dear, I was thinking of
your father last night−−one of my oldest friends, Mr. Salvin. Never tell me that girls often are incapable of
love! I had all Shakespeare by heart before I was in my teens, Mr. Salvin!"
"You don't say so," said Mr. Salvin.
"But I do," said Lady Hibbert.
"Oh, Mr. Salvin, I'm so sorry. ..."
"I will remove myself if you'll kindly lend me a hand," said Mr. Salvin.
"You shall sit by my mother," said Clara. "Everybody seems to come in here. ... Mr. Calthorp, let me
introduce you to Miss Edwards."
"Are you going away for Christmas?" said Mr. Calthorp.
"If my brother gets his leave," said Miss Edwards.
"What regiment is he in?" said Mr. Calthorp.
"The Twentieth Hussars," said Miss Edwards.
"Perhaps he knows my brother?" said Mr. Calthorp.
"I am afraid I did not catch your name," said Miss Edwards.
"Calthorp," said Mr. Calthorp.
"But what proof was there that the marriage service was actually performed?" said Mr. Crosby.
"There is no reason to doubt that Charles James Fox ..." Mr. Burley began; but here Mrs. Stretton told him
that she knew his sister well; had stayed with her not six weeks ago; and thought the house charming, but
bleak in winter.
"Going about as girls do nowadays−−" said Mrs. Forster.
Mr. Bowley looked round him, and catching sight of Rose Shaw moved towards her, threw out his hands, and
exclaimed: "Well!"
"Nothing!" she replied. "Nothing at all−−though I left them alone the entire afternoon on purpose."
"Dear me, dear me," said Mr. Bowley. "I will ask Jimmy to breakfast."
"But who could resist her?" cried Rose Shaw. "Dearest Clara−−I know we mustn't try to stop you..."
"You and Mr. Bowley are talking dreadful gossip, I know," said Clara.
"Life is wicked−−life is detestable!" cried Rose Shaw.
CHAPTER SEVEN 43
"There's not much to be said for this sort of thing, is there?" said Timothy Durrant to Jacob.
"Women like it."
"Like what?" said Charlotte Wilding, coming up to them.
"Where have you come from?" said Timothy. "Dining somewhere, I suppose."
"I don't see why not," said Charlotte.
"People must go downstairs," said Clara, passing. "Take Charlotte, Timothy. How d'you do, Mr. Flanders."
"How d'you do, Mr. Flanders," said Julia Eliot, holding out her hand. "What's been happening to you?"
"Who is Silvia? what is she? That all our swains commend her?"
sang Elsbeth Siddons.
Every one stood where they were, or sat down if a chair was empty.
"Ah," sighed Clara, who stood beside Jacob, half−way through.
"Then to Silvia let us sing, That Silvia is excelling; She excels each mortal thing Upon the dull earth dwelling.
To her let us garlands bring,"
sang Elsbeth Siddons.
"Ah!" Clara exclaimed out loud, and clapped her gloved hands; and Jacob clapped his bare ones; and then she
moved forward and directed people to come in from the doorway.
"You are living in London?" asked Miss Julia Eliot.
"Yes," said Jacob.
"In rooms?"
'Yes."
"There is Mr. Clutterbuck. You always see Mr. Clutterbuck here. He is not very happy at home, I am afraid.
They say that Mrs. Clutterbuck ..." she dropped her voice. "That's why he stays with the Durrants. Were you
there when they acted Mr. Wortley's play? Oh, no, of course not−−at the last moment, did you hear−−you had
to go to join your mother, I remember, at Harrogate−−At the last moment, as I was saying, just as everything
was ready, the clothes finished and everything−−Now Elsbeth is going to sing again. Clara is playing her
accompaniment or turning over for Mr. Carter, I think. No, Mr. Carter is playing by himself−−This is BACH,"
she whispered, as Mr. Carter played the first bars.
"Are you fond of music?" said Mr. Durrant.
"Yes. I like hearing it," said Jacob. "I know nothing about it."
"Very few people do that," said Mrs. Durrant. "I daresay you were never taught. Why is that, Sir Jasper?−−Sir
Jasper Bigham−−Mr. Flanders. Why is nobody taught anything that they ought to know, Sir Jasper?" She left
CHAPTER SEVEN 44
them standing against the wall.
Neither of the gentlemen said anything for three minutes, though Jacob shifted perhaps five inches to the left,
and then as many to the right. Then Jacob grunted, and suddenly crossed the room.
"Will you come and have something to eat?" he said to Clara Durrant.
"Yes, an ice. Quickly. Now," she said.
Downstairs they went.
But half−way down they met Mr. and Mrs. Gresham, Herbert Turner, Sylvia Rashleigh, and a friend, whom
they had dared to bring, from America, "knowing that Mrs. Durrant−−wishing to show Mr. Pilcher.−−Mr.
Pilcher from New York−−This is Miss Durrant."
"Whom I have heard so much of," said Mr. Pilcher, bowing low.
So Clara left him.

Chapter 8


About half−past nine Jacob left the house, his door slamming, other doors slamming, buying his paper,
mounting his omnibus, or, weather permitting, walking his road as other people do. Head bent down, a desk, a
telephone, books bound in green leather, electric light.... "Fresh coals, sir?" ... "Your tea, sir."... Talk about
football, the Hotspurs, the Harlequins; six−thirty Star brought in by the office boy; the rooks of Gray's Inn
passing overhead; branches in the fog thin and brittle; and through the roar of traffic now and again a voice
shouting: "Verdict−−verdict−−winner−−winner," while letters accumulate in a basket, Jacob signs them, and
each evening finds him, as he takes his coat down, with some muscle of the brain new stretched.
Then, sometimes a game of chess; or pictures in Bond Street, or a long way home to take the air with Bonamy
on his arm, meditatively marching, head thrown back, the world a spectacle, the early moon above the
steeples coming in for praise, the sea−gulls flying high, Nelson on his column surveying the horizon, and the
world our ship.
Meanwhile, poor Betty Flanders's letter, having caught the second post, lay on the hall table−−poor Betty
Flanders writing her son's name, Jacob Alan Flanders, Esq., as mothers do, and the ink pale, profuse,
suggesting how mothers down at Scarborough scribble over the fire with their feet on the fender, when tea's
cleared away, and can never, never say, whatever it may be−−probably this−−Don't go with bad women, do
be a good boy; wear your thick shirts; and come back, come back, come back to me.
But she said nothing of the kind. "Do you remember old Miss Wargrave, who used to be so kind when you
had the whooping−cough?" she wrote; "she's dead at last, poor thing. They would like it if you wrote. Ellen
came over and we spent a nice day shopping. Old Mouse gets very stiff, and we have to walk him up the
smallest hill. Rebecca, at last, after I don't know how long, went into Mr. Adamson's. Three teeth, he says,
must come out. Such mild weather for the time of year, the little buds actually on the pear trees. And Mrs.
Jarvis tells me−−"Mrs. Flanders liked Mrs. Jarvis, always said of her that she was too good for such a quiet
place, and, though she never listened to her discontent and told her at the end of it (looking up, sucking her
thread, or taking off her spectacles) that a little peat wrapped round the iris roots keeps them from the frost,
and Parrot's great white sale is Tuesday next, "do remember,"−−Mrs. Flanders knew precisely how Mrs. Jarvis
felt; and how interesting her letters were, about Mrs. Jarvis, could one read them year in, year out−−the
unpublished works of women, written by the fireside in pale profusion, dried by the flame, for the
blotting−paper's worn to holes and the nib cleft and clotted. Then Captain Barfoot. Him she called "the
CHAPTER EIGHT 45
Captain," spoke of frankly, yet never without reserve. The Captain was enquiring for her about Garfit's acre;
advised chickens; could promise profit; or had the sciatica; or Mrs. Barfoot had been indoors for weeks; or the
Captain says things look bad, politics that is, for as Jacob knew, the Captain would sometimes talk, as the
evening waned, about Ireland or India; and then Mrs. Flanders would fall musing about Morty, her brother,
lost all these years−−had the natives got him, was his ship sunk−−would the Admiralty tell her?−−the Captain
knocking his pipe out, as Jacob knew, rising to go, stiffly stretching to pick up Mrs. Flanders's wool which
had rolled beneath the chair. Talk of the chicken farm came back and back, the women, even at fifty,
impulsive at heart, sketching on the cloudy future flocks of Leghorns, Cochin Chinas, Orpingtons; like Jacob
in the blur of her outline; but powerful as he was; fresh and vigorous, running about the house, scolding
Rebecca.
The letter lay upon the hall table; Florinda coming in that night took it up with her, put it on the table as she
kissed Jacob, and Jacob seeing the hand, left it there under the lamp, between the biscuit−tin and the
tobacco−box. They shut the bedroom door behind them.
The sitting−room neither knew nor cared. The door was shut; and to suppose that wood, when it creaks,
transmits anything save that rats are busy and wood dry is childish. These old houses are only brick and wood,
soaked in human sweat, grained with human dirt. But if the pale blue envelope lying by the biscuit−box had
the feelings of a mother, the heart was torn by the little creak, the sudden stir. Behind the door was the
obscene thing, the alarming presence, and terror would come over her as at death, or the birth of a child.
Better, perhaps, burst in and face it than sit in the antechamber listening to the little creak, the sudden stir, for
her heart was swollen, and pain threaded it. My son, my son−− such would be her cry, uttered to hide her
vision of him stretched with Florinda, inexcusable, irrational, in a woman with three children living at
Scarborough. And the fault lay with Florinda. Indeed, when the door opened and the couple came out, Mrs.
Flanders would have flounced upon her−−only it was Jacob who came first, in his dressing−gown, amiable,
authoritative, beautifully healthy, like a baby after an airing, with an eye clear as running water. Florinda
followed, lazily stretching; yawning a little; arranging her hair at the looking−glass−−while Jacob read his
mother's letter.
Let us consider letters−−how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green
stamps, immortalized by the postmark−−for to see one's own envelope on another's table is to realize how
soon deeds sever and become alien. Then at last the power of the mind to quit the body is manifest, and
perhaps we fear or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the table. Still, there are letters
that merely say how dinner's at seven; others ordering coal; making appointments. The hand in them is
scarcely perceptible, let alone the voice or the scowl. Ah, but when the post knocks and the letter comes
always the miracle seems repeated−−speech attempted. Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and
lost.
Life would split asunder without them. "Come to tea, come to dinner, what's the truth of the story? have you
heard the news? life in the capital is gay; the Russian dancers...." These are our stays and props. These lace
our days together and make of life a perfect globe. And yet, and yet ... when we go to dinner, when pressing
finger−tips we hope to meet somewhere soon, a doubt insinuates itself; is this the way to spend our days? the
rare, the limited, so soon dealt out to us−−drinking tea? dining out? And the notes accumulate. And the
telephones ring. And everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that try to penetrate
before the last card is dealt and the days are over. "Try to penetrate," for as we lift the cup, shake the hand,
express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be certain? Am I doomed all my
days to write letters, send voices, which fall upon the tea−table, fade upon the passage, making appointments,
while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a
lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps−−who knows?−−we
might talk by the way.
Well, people have tried. Byron wrote letters. So did Cowper. For centuries the writing−desk has contained
CHAPTER EIGHT 46
sheets fit precisely for the communications of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have turned
from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushing aside the tea−tray, drawing close to the fire (for
letters are written when the dark presses round a bright red cave), and addressed themselves to the task of
reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart. Were it possible! But words have been used too often;
touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We
come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.
Mrs. Flanders wrote letters; Mrs. Jarvis wrote them; Mrs. Durrant too; Mother Stuart actually scented her
pages, thereby adding a flavour which the English language fails to provide; Jacob had written in his day long
letters about art, morality, and politics to young men at college. Clara Durrant's letters were those of a child.
Florinda−−the impediment between Florinda and her pen was something impassable. Fancy a butterfly, gnat,
or other winged insect, attached to a twig which, clogged with mud, it rolls across a page. Her spelling was
abominable. Her sentiments infantile. And for some reason when she wrote she declared her belief in God.
Then there were crosses−−tear stains; and the hand itself rambling and redeemed only by the fact−−which
always did redeem Florinda−−by the fact that she cared. Yes, whether it was for chocolate creams, hot baths,
the shape of her face in the looking−glass, Florinda could no more pretend a feeling than swallow whisky.
Incontinent was her rejection. Great men are truthful, and these little prostitutes, staring in the fire, taking out
a powder−puff, decorating lips at an inch of looking−glass, have (so Jacob thought) an inviolable fidelity.
Then he saw her turning up Greek Street upon another man's arm.
The light from the arc lamp drenched him from head to toe. He stood for a minute motionless beneath it.
Shadows chequered the street. Other figures, single and together, poured out, wavered across, and obliterated
Florinda and the man.
The light drenched Jacob from head to toe. You could see the pattern on his trousers; the old thorns on his
stick; his shoe laces; bare hands; and face.
It was as if a stone were ground to dust; as if white sparks flew from a livid whetstone, which was his spine;
as if the switchback railway, having swooped to the depths, fell, fell, fell. This was in his face.
Whether we know what was in his mind is another question. Granted ten years' seniority and a difference of
sex, fear of him comes first; this is swallowed up by a desire to help−−overwhelming sense, reason, and the
time of night; anger would follow close on that−−with Florinda, with destiny; and then up would bubble an
irresponsible optimism. "Surely there's enough light in the street at this moment to drown all our cares in
gold!" Ah, what's the use of saying it? Even while you speak and look over your shoulder towards
Shaftesbury Avenue, destiny is chipping a dent in him. He has turned to go. As for following him back to his
rooms, no−−that we won't do.
Yet that, of course, is precisely what one does. He let himself in and shut the door, though it was only striking
ten on one of the city clocks. No one can go to bed at ten. Nobody was thinking of going to bed. It was
January and dismal, but Mrs. Wagg stood on her doorstep, as if expecting something to happen. A
barrel−organ played like an obscene nightingale beneath wet leaves. Children ran across the road. Here and
there one could see brown panelling inside the hall door.... The march that the mind keeps beneath the
windows of others is queer enough. Now distracted by brown panelling; now by a fern in a pot; here
improvising a few phrases to dance with the barrel−organ; again snatching a detached gaiety from a drunken
man; then altogether absorbed by words the poor shout across the street at each other (so outright, so
lusty)−−yet all the while having for centre, for magnet, a young man alone in his room.
"Life is wicked−−life is detestable," cried Rose Shaw.
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds
CHAPTER EIGHT 47
of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions
are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?
"Holborn straight ahead of you" says the policeman. Ah, but where are you going if instead of brushing past
the old man with the white beard, the silver medal, and the cheap violin, you let him go on with his story,
which ends in an invitation to step somewhere, to his room, presumably, off Queen's Square, and there he
shows you a collection of birds' eggs and a letter from the Prince of Wales's secretary, and this (skipping the
intermediate stages) brings you one winter's day to the Essex coast, where the little boat makes off to the ship,
and the ship sails and you behold on the skyline the Azores; and the flamingoes rise; and there you sit on the
verge of the marsh drinking rum−punch, an outcast from civilization, for you have committed a crime, are
infected with yellow fever as likely as not, and−−fill in the sketch as you like. As frequent as street corners in
Holborn are these chasms in the continuity of our ways. Yet we keep straight on.
Rose Shaw, talking in rather an emotional manner to Mr. Bowley at Mrs. Durrant's evening party a few nights
back, said that life was wicked because a man called Jimmy refused to marry a woman called (if memory
serves) Helen Aitken.
Both were beautiful. Both were inanimate. The oval tea−table invariably separated them, and the plate of
biscuits was all he ever gave her. He bowed; she inclined her head. They danced. He danced divinely. They
sat in the alcove; never a word was said. Her pillow was wet with tears. Kind Mr. Bowley and dear Rose
Shaw marvelled and deplored. Bowley had rooms in the Albany. Rose was re−born every evening precisely as
the clock struck eight. All four were civilization's triumphs, and if you persist that a command of the English
language is part of our inheritance, one can only reply that beauty is almost always dumb. Male beauty in
association with female beauty breeds in the onlooker a sense of fear. Often have I seen them−−Helen and
Jimmy−−and likened them to ships adrift, and feared for my own little craft. Or again, have you ever watched
fine collie dogs couchant at twenty yards' distance? As she passed him his cup there was that quiver in her
flanks. Bowley saw what was up−asked Jimmy to breakfast. Helen must have confided in Rose. For my own
part, I find it exceedingly difficult to interpret songs without words. And now Jimmy feeds crows in Flanders
and Helen visits hospitals. Oh, life is damnable, life is wicked, as Rose Shaw said.
The lamps of London uphold the dark as upon the points of burning bayonets. The yellow canopy sinks and
swells over the great four−poster. Passengers in the mail−coaches running into London in the eighteenth
century looked through leafless branches and saw it flaring beneath them. The light burns behind yellow
blinds and pink blinds, and above fanlights, and down in basement windows. The street market in Soho is
fierce with light. Raw meat, china mugs, and silk stockings blaze in it. Raw voices wrap themselves round the
flaring gas−jets. Arms akimbo, they stand on the pavement bawling−−Messrs. Kettle and Wilkinson; their
wives sit in the shop, furs wrapped round their necks, arms folded, eyes contemptuous. Such faces as one sees.
The little man fingering the meat must have squatted before the fire in innumerable lodging−houses, and
heard and seen and known so much that it seems to utter itself even volubly from dark eyes, loose lips, as he
fingers the meat silently, his face sad as a poet's, and never a song sung. Shawled women carry babies with
purple eyelids; boys stand at street corners; girls look across the road−−rude illustrations, pictures in a book
whose pages we turn over and over as if we should at last find what we look for. Every face, every shop,
bedroom window, public−house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned−−in search of what? It is the
same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages−− oh, here is
Jacob's room.
He sat at the table reading the Globe. The pinkish sheet was spread flat before him. He propped his face in his
hand, so that the skin of his cheek was wrinkled in deep folds. Terribly severe he looked, set, and defiant.
(What people go through in half an hour! But nothing could save him. These events are features of our
landscape. A foreigner coming to London could scarcely miss seeing St. Paul's.) He judged life. These pinkish
and greenish newspapers are thin sheets of gelatine pressed nightly over the brain and heart of the world. They
take the impression of the whole. Jacob cast his eye over it. A strike, a murder, football, bodies found;
CHAPTER EIGHT 48
vociferation from all parts of England simultaneously. How miserable it is that the Globe newspaper offers
nothing better to Jacob Flanders! When a child begins to read history one marvels, sorrowfully, to hear him
spell out in his new voice the ancient words.
The Prime Minister's speech was reported in something over five columns. Feeling in his pocket, Jacob took
out a pipe and proceeded to fill it. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed. Jacob took the paper
over to the fire. The Prime Minister proposed a measure for giving Home Rule to Ireland. Jacob knocked out
his pipe. He was certainly thinking about Home Rule in Ireland−−a very difficult matter. A very cold night.
The snow, which had been falling all night, lay at three o'clock in the afternoon over the fields and the hill.
Clumps of withered grass stood out upon the hill−top; the furze bushes were black, and now and then a black
shiver crossed the snow as the wind drove flurries of frozen particles before it. The sound was that of a broom
sweeping−−sweeping.
The stream crept along by the road unseen by any one. Sticks and leaves caught in the frozen grass. The sky
was sullen grey and the trees of black iron. Uncompromising was the severity of the country. At four o'clock
the snow was again falling. The day had gone out.
A window tinged yellow about two feet across alone combated the white fields and the black trees .... At six
o'clock a man's figure carrying a lantern crossed the field .... A raft of twig stayed upon a stone, suddenly
detached itself, and floated towards the culvert .... A load of snow slipped and fell from a fir branch .... Later
there was a mournful cry .... A motor car came along the road shoving the dark before it .... The dark shut
down behind it....
Spaces of complete immobility separated each of these movements. The land seemed to lie dead .... Then the
old shepherd returned stiffly across the field. Stiffly and painfully the frozen earth was trodden under and gave
beneath pressure like a treadmill. The worn voices of clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long.
Jacob, too, heard them, and raked out the fire. He rose. He stretched himself. He went to bed.

Chapter 9


The Countess of Rocksbier sat at the head of the table alone with Jacob. Fed upon champagne and spices for
at least two centuries (four, if you count the female line), the Countess Lucy looked well fed. A discriminating
nose she had for scents, prolonged, as if in quest of them; her underlip protruded a narrow red shelf; her eyes
were small, with sandy tufts for eyebrows, and her jowl was heavy. Behind her (the window looked on
Grosvenor Square) stood Moll Pratt on the pavement, offering violets for sale; and Mrs. Hilda Thomas, lifting
her skirts, preparing to cross the road. One was from Walworth; the other from Putney. Both wore black
stockings, but Mrs. Thomas was coiled in furs. The comparison was much in Lady Rocksbier's favour. Moll
had more humour, but was violent; stupid too. Hilda Thomas was mealy−mouthed, all her silver frames
aslant; egg−cups in the drawing−room; and the windows shrouded. Lady Rocksbier, whatever the deficiencies
of her profile, had been a great rider to hounds. She used her knife with authority, tore her chicken bones,
asking Jacob's pardon, with her own hands.
"Who is that driving by?" she asked Boxall, the butler.
"Lady Firtlemere's carriage, my lady," which reminded her to send a card to ask after his lordship's health. A
rude old lady, Jacob thought. The wine was excellent. She called herself "an old woman"−−"so kind to lunch
with an old woman"−−which flattered him. She talked of Joseph Chamberlain, whom she had known. She
said that Jacob must come and meet−− one of our celebrities. And the Lady Alice came in with three dogs on
a leash, and Jackie, who ran to kiss his grandmother, while Boxall brought in a telegram, and Jacob was given
a good cigar.
CHAPTER NINE 49
A few moments before a horse jumps it slows, sidles, gathers itself together, goes up like a monster wave, and
pitches down on the further side. Hedges and sky swoop in a semicircle. Then as if your own body ran into the
horse's body and it was your own forelegs grown with his that sprang, rushing through the air you go, the
ground resilient, bodies a mass of muscles, yet you have command too, upright stillness, eyes accurately
judging. Then the curves cease, changing to downright hammer strokes, which jar; and you draw up with a
jolt; sitting back a little, sparkling, tingling, glazed with ice over pounding arteries, gasping: "Ah! ho! Hah!"
the steam going up from the horses as they jostle together at the cross−roads, where the signpost is, and the
woman in the apron stands and stares at the doorway. The man raises himself from the cabbages to stare too.
So Jacob galloped over the fields of Essex, flopped in the mud, lost the hunt, and rode by himself eating
sandwiches, looking over the hedges, noticing the colours as if new scraped, cursing his luck.
He had tea at the Inn; and there they all were, slapping, stamping, saying, "After you," clipped, curt, jocose,
red as the wattles of turkeys, using free speech until Mrs. Horsefield and her friend Miss Dudding appeared at
the doorway with their skirts hitched up, and hair looping down. Then Tom Dudding rapped at the window
with his whip. A motor car throbbed in the courtyard. Gentlemen, feeling for matches, moved out, and Jacob
went into the bar with Brandy Jones to smoke with the rustics. There was old Jevons with one eye gone, and
his clothes the colour of mud, his bag over his back, and his brains laid feet down in earth among the violet
roots and the nettle roots; Mary Sanders with her box of wood; and Tom sent for beer, the half−witted son of
the sexton−− all this within thirty miles of London.
Mrs. Papworth, of Endell Street, Covent Garden, did for Mr. Bonamy in New Square, Lincoln's Inn, and as
she washed up the dinner things in the scullery she heard the young gentlemen talking in the room next door.
Mr. Sanders was there again; Flanders she meant; and where an inquisitive old woman gets a name wrong,
what chance is there that she will faithfully report an argument? As she held the plates under water and then
dealt them on the pile beneath the hissing gas, she listened: heard Sanders speaking in a loud rather
overbearing tone of voice: "good," he said, and "absolute" and "justice" and "punishment," and "the will of the
majority." Then her gentleman piped up; she backed him for argument against Sanders. Yet Sanders was a
fine young fellow (here all the scraps went swirling round the sink, scoured after by her purple, almost nailless
hands). "Women"−−she thought, and wondered what Sanders and her gentleman did in THAT line, one eyelid
sinking perceptibly as she mused, for she was the mother of nine−−three still−born and one deaf and dumb
from birth. Putting the plates in the rack she heard once more Sanders at it again ("He don't give Bonamy a
chance," she thought). "Objective something," said Bonamy; and "common ground" and something else−−all
very long words, she noted. "Book learning does it," she thought to herself, and, as she thrust her arms into
her jacket, heard something−−might be the little table by the fire−−fall; and then stamp, stamp, stamp−−as if
they were having at each other−−round the room, making the plates dance.
"To−morrow's breakfast, sir," she said, opening the door; and there were Sanders and Bonamy like two bulls
of Bashan driving each other up and down, making such a racket, and all them chairs in the way. They never
noticed her. She felt motherly towards them. "Your breakfast, sir," she said, as they came near. And Bonamy,
all his hair touzled and his tie flying, broke off, and pushed Sanders into the arm−chair, and said Mr. Sanders
had smashed the coffee−pot and he was teaching Mr. Sanders−−
Sure enough, the coffee−pot lay broken on the hearthrug.
"Any day this week except Thursday," wrote Miss Perry, and this was not the first invitation by any means.
Were all Miss Perry's weeks blank with the exception of Thursday, and was her only desire to see her old
friend's son? Time is issued to spinster ladies of wealth in long white ribbons. These they wind round and
round, round and round, assisted by five female servants, a butler, a fine Mexican parrot, regular meals,
Mudie's library, and friends dropping in. A little hurt she was already that Jacob had not called.
"Your mother," she said, "is one of my oldest friends."
CHAPTER NINE 50
Miss Rosseter, who was sitting by the fire, holding the Spectator between her cheek and the blaze, refused to
have a fire screen, but finally accepted one. The weather was then discussed, for in deference to Parkes, who
was opening little tables, graver matters were postponed. Miss Rosseter drew Jacob's attention to the beauty of
the cabinet.
"So wonderfully clever in picking things up," she said. Miss Perry had found it in Yorkshire. The North of
England was discussed. When Jacob spoke they both listened. Miss Perry was bethinking her of something
suitable and manly to say when the door opened and Mr. Benson was announced. Now there were four people
sitting in that room. Miss Perry aged 66; Miss Rosseter 42; Mr. Benson 38; and Jacob 25.
"My old friend looks as well as ever," said Mr. Benson, tapping the bars of the parrot's cage; Miss Rosseter
simultaneously praised the tea; Jacob handed the wrong plates; and Miss Perry signified her desire to
approach more closely. "Your brothers," she began vaguely.
"Archer and John," Jacob supplied her. Then to her pleasure she recovered Rebecca's name; and how one day
"when you were all little boys, playing in the drawing−room−−"
"But Miss Perry has the kettle−holder," said Miss Rosseter, and indeed Miss Perry was clasping it to her
breast. (Had she, then, loved Jacob's father?)
"So clever"−−"not so good as usual"−−"I thought it most unfair," said Mr. Benson and Miss Rosseter,
discussing the Saturday Westminster. Did they not compete regularly for prizes? Had not Mr. Benson three
times won a guinea, and Miss Rosseter once ten and sixpence? Of course Everard Benson had a weak heart,
but still, to win prizes, remember parrots, toady Miss Perry, despise Miss Rosseter, give tea−parties in his
rooms (which were in the style of Whistler, with pretty books on tables), all this, so Jacob felt without
knowing him, made him a contemptible ass. As for Miss Rosseter, she had nursed cancer, and now painted
water−colours.
"Running away so soon?" said Miss Perry vaguely. "At home every afternoon, if you've nothing better to
do−−except Thursdays."
"I've never known you desert your old ladies once," Miss Rosseter was saying, and Mr. Benson was stooping
over the parrot's cage, and Miss Perry was moving towards the bell....
The fire burnt clear between two pillars of greenish marble, and on the mantelpiece there was a green clock
guarded by Britannia leaning on her spear. As for pictures−−a maiden in a large hat offered roses over the
garden gate to a gentleman in eighteenth−century costume. A mastiff lay extended against a battered door.
The lower panes of the windows were of ground glass, and the curtains, accurately looped, were of plush and
green too.
Laurette and Jacob sat with their toes in the fender side by side, in two large chairs covered in green plush.
Laurette's skirts were short, her legs long, thin, and transparently covered. Her fingers stroked her ankles.
"It's not exactly that I don't understand them," she was saying thoughtfully. "I must go and try again."
"What time will you be there?" said Jacob.
She shrugged her shoulders.
"To−morrow?"
No, not to−morrow.
CHAPTER NINE 51
"This weather makes me long for the country," she said, looking over her shoulder at the back view of tall
houses through the window.
"I wish you'd been with me on Saturday," said Jacob.
"I used to ride," she said. She got up gracefully, calmly. Jacob got up. She smiled at him. As she shut the door
he put so many shillings on the mantelpiece.
Altogether a most reasonable conversation; a most respectable room; an intelligent girl. Only Madame herself
seeing Jacob out had about her that leer, that lewdness, that quake of the surface (visible in the eyes chiefly),
which threatens to spill the whole bag of ordure, with difficulty held together, over the pavement. In short,
something was wrong.
Not so very long ago the workmen had gilt the final "y" in Lord Macaulay's name, and the names stretched in
unbroken file round the dome of the British Museum. At a considerable depth beneath, many hundreds of the
living sat at the spokes of a cart−wheel copying from printed books into manuscript books; now and then
rising to consult the catalogue; regaining their places stealthily, while from time to time a silent man
replenished their compartments.
There was a little catastrophe. Miss Marchmont's pile overbalanced and fell into Jacob's compartment. Such
things happened to Miss Marchmont. What was she seeking through millions of pages, in her old plush dress,
and her wig of claret−coloured hair, with her gems and her chilblains? Sometimes one thing, sometimes
another, to confirm her philosophy that colour is sound−−or, perhaps, it has something to do with music. She
could never quite say, though it was not for lack of trying. And she could not ask you back to her room, for it
was "not very clean, I'm afraid," so she must catch you in the passage, or take a chair in Hyde Park to explain
her philosophy. The rhythm of the soul depends on it−− ("how rude the little boys are!" she would say), and
Mr. Asquith's Irish policy, and Shakespeare comes in, "and Queen Alexandra most graciously once
acknowledged a copy of my pamphlet," she would say, waving the little boys magnificently away. But she
needs funds to publish her book, for "publishers are capitalists−−publishers are cowards." And so, digging her
elbow into her pile of books it fell over.
Jacob remained quite unmoved.
But Fraser, the atheist, on the other side, detesting plush, more than once accosted with leaflets, shifted
irritably. He abhorred vagueness−− the Christian religion, for example, and old Dean Parker's
pronouncements. Dean Parker wrote books and Fraser utterly destroyed them by force of logic and left his
children unbaptized−−his wife did it secretly in the washing basin−−but Fraser ignored her, and went on
supporting blasphemers, distributing leaflets, getting up his facts in the British Museum, always in the same
check suit and fiery tie, but pale, spotted, irritable. Indeed, what a work−−to destroy religion!
Jacob transcribed a whole passage from Marlowe.
Miss Julia Hedge, the feminist, waited for her books. They did not come. She wetted her pen. She looked
about her. Her eye was caught by the final letters in Lord Macaulay's name. And she read them all round the
dome−−the names of great men which remind us−−"Oh damn," said Julia Hedge, "why didn't they leave room
for an Eliot or a Bronte?"
Unfortunate Julia! wetting her pen in bitterness, and leaving her shoe laces untied. When her books came she
applied herself to her gigantic labours, but perceived through one of the nerves of her exasperated sensibility
how composedly, unconcernedly, and with every consideration the male readers applied themselves to theirs.
That young man for example. What had he got to do except copy out poetry? And she must study statistics.
There are more women than men. Yes; but if you let women work as men work, they'll die off much quicker.
CHAPTER NINE 52
They'll become extinct. That was her argument. Death and gall and bitter dust were on her pen−tip; and as the
afternoon wore on, red had worked into her cheek−bones and a light was in her eyes.
But what brought Jacob Flanders to read Marlowe in the British Museum? Youth, youth−−something
savage−−something pedantic. For example, there is Mr. Masefield, there is Mr. Bennett. Stuff them into the
flame of Marlowe and burn them to cinders. Let not a shred remain. Don't palter with the second rate. Detest
your own age. Build a better one. And to set that on foot read incredibly dull essays upon Marlowe to your
friends. For which purpose one most collate editions in the British Museum. One must do the thing oneself.
Useless to trust to the Victorians, who disembowel, or to the living, who are mere publicists. The flesh and
blood of the future depends entirely upon six young men. And as Jacob was one of them, no doubt he looked a
little regal and pompous as he turned his page, and Julia Hedge disliked him naturally enough.
But then a pudding−faced man pushed a note towards Jacob, and Jacob, leaning back in his chair, began an
uneasy murmured conversation, and they went off together (Julia Hedge watched them), and laughed aloud
(she thought) directly they were in the hall.
Nobody laughed in the reading−room. There were shirtings, murmurings, apologetic sneezes, and sudden
unashamed devastating coughs. The lesson hour was almost over. Ushers were collecting exercises. Lazy
children wanted to stretch. Good ones scribbled assiduously−−ah, another day over and so little done! And
now and then was to be heard from the whole collection of human beings a heavy sigh, after which the
humiliating old man would cough shamelessly, and Miss Marchmont hinnied like a horse.
Jacob came back only in time to return his books.
The books were now replaced. A few letters of the alphabet were sprinkled round the dome. Closely stood
together in a ring round the dome were Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Shakespeare; the literature of Rome,
Greece, China, India, Persia. One leaf of poetry was pressed flat against another leaf, one burnished letter laid
smooth against another in a density of meaning, a conglomeration of loveliness.
"One does want one's tea," said Miss Marchmont, reclaiming her shabby umbrella.
Miss Marchmont wanted her tea, but could never resist a last look at the Elgin Marbles. She looked at them
sideways, waving her hand and muttering a word or two of salutation which made Jacob and the other man
turn round. She smiled at them amiably. It all came into her philosophy−− that colour is sound, or perhaps it
has something to do with music. And having done her service, she hobbled off to tea. It was closing time. The
public collected in the hall to receive their umbrellas.
For the most part the students wait their turn very patiently. To stand and wait while some one examines white
discs is soothing. The umbrella will certainly be found. But the fact leads you on all day through Macaulay,
Hobbes, Gibbon; through octavos, quartos, folios; sinks deeper and deeper through ivory pages and morocco
bindings into this density of thought, this conglomeration of knowledge.
Jacob's walking−stick was like all the others; they had muddled the pigeon−holes perhaps.
There is in the British Museum an enormous mind. Consider that Plato is there cheek by jowl with Aristotle;
and Shakespeare with Marlowe. This great mind is hoarded beyond the power of any single mind to possess it.
Nevertheless (as they take so long finding one's walking−stick) one can't help thinking how one might come
with a notebook, sit at a desk, and read it all through. A learned man is the most venerable of all−−a man like
Huxtable of Trinity, who writes all his letters in Greek, they say, and could have kept his end up with Bentley.
And then there is science, pictures, architecture,−−an enormous mind.
They pushed the walking−stick across the counter. Jacob stood beneath the porch of the British Museum. It
CHAPTER NINE 53
was raining. Great Russell Street was glazed and shining−−here yellow, here, outside the chemist's, red and
pale blue. People scuttled quickly close to the wall; carriages rattled rather helter−skelter down the streets.
Well, but a little rain hurts nobody. Jacob walked off much as if he had been in the country; and late that night
there he was sitting at his table with his pipe and his book.
The rain poured down. The British Museum stood in one solid immense mound, very pale, very sleek in the
rain, not a quarter of a mile from him. The vast mind was sheeted with stone; and each compartment in the
depths of it was safe and dry. The night−watchmen, flashing their lanterns over the backs of Plato and
Shakespeare, saw that on the twenty−second of February neither flame, rat, nor burglar was going to violate
these treasures−−poor, highly respectable men, with wives and families at Kentish Town, do their best for
twenty years to protect Plato and Shakespeare, and then are buried at Highgate.
Stone lies solid over the British Museum, as bone lies cool over the visions and heat of the brain. Only here
the brain is Plato's brain and Shakespeare's; the brain has made pots and statues, great bulls and little jewels,
and crossed the river of death this way and that incessantly, seeking some landing, now wrapping the body
well for its long sleep; now laying a penny piece on the eyes; now turning the toes scrupulously to the East.
Meanwhile, Plato continues his dialogue; in spite of the rain; in spite of the cab whistles; in spite of the
woman in the mews behind Great Ormond Street who has come home drunk and cries all night long, "Let me
in! Let me in!"
In the street below Jacob's room voices were raised.
But he read on. For after all Plato continues imperturbably. And Hamlet utters his soliloquy. And there the
Elgin Marbles lie, all night long, old Jones's lantern sometimes recalling Ulysses, or a horse's head; or
sometimes a flash of gold, or a mummy's sunk yellow cheek. Plato and Shakespeare continue; and Jacob, who
was reading the Phaedrus, heard people vociferating round the lamp−post, and the woman battering at the
door and crying, "Let me in!" as if a coal had dropped from the fire, or a fly, falling from the ceiling, had lain
on its back, too weak to turn over.
The Phaedrus is very difficult. And so, when at length one reads straight ahead, falling into step, marching on,
becoming (so it seems) momentarily part of this rolling, imperturbable energy, which has driven darkness
before it since Plato walked the Acropolis, it is impossible to see to the fire.
The dialogue draws to its close. Plato's argument is done. Plato's argument is stowed away in Jacob's mind,
and for five minutes Jacob's mind continues alone, onwards, into the darkness. Then, getting up, he parted the
curtains, and saw, with astonishing clearness, how the Springetts opposite had gone to bed; how it rained; how
the Jews and the foreign woman, at the end of the street, stood by the pillar−box, arguing.
Every time the door opened and fresh people came in, those already in the room shifted slightly; those who
were standing looked over their shoulders; those who were sitting stopped in the middle of sentences. What
with the light, the wine, the strumming of a guitar, something exciting happened each time the door opened.
Who was coming in?
"That's Gibson."
"The painter?"
"But go on with what you were saying."
They were saying something that was far, far too intimate to be said outright. But the noise of the voices
served like a clapper in little Mrs. Withers's mind, scaring into the air blocks of small birds, and then they'd
settle, and then she'd feel afraid, put one hand to her hair, bind both round her knees, and look up at Oliver
CHAPTER NINE 54
Skelton nervously, and say:
"Promise, PROMISE, you'll tell no one." ... so considerate he was, so tender. It was her husband's character
that she discussed. He was cold, she said.
Down upon them came the splendid Magdalen, brown, warm, voluminous, scarcely brushing the grass with
her sandalled feet. Her hair flew; pins seemed scarcely to attach the flying silks. An actress of course, a line of
light perpetually beneath her. It was only "My dear" that she said, but her voice went jodelling between
Alpine passes. And down she tumbled on the floor, and sang, since there was nothing to be said, round ah's
and oh's. Mangin, the poet, coming up to her, stood looking down at her, drawing at his pipe. The dancing
began.
Grey−haired Mrs. Keymer asked Dick Graves to tell her who Mangin was, and said that she had seen too
much of this sort of thing in Paris (Magdalen had got upon his knees; now his pipe was in her mouth) to be
shocked. "Who is that?" she said, staying her glasses when they came to Jacob, for indeed he looked quiet, not
indifferent, but like some one on a beach, watching.
"Oh, my dear, let me lean on you," gasped Helen Askew, hopping on one foot, for the silver cord round her
ankle had worked loose. Mrs. Keymer turned and looked at the picture on the wall.
"Look at Jacob," said Helen (they were binding his eyes for some game).
And Dick Graves, being a little drunk, very faithful, and very simple− minded, told her that he thought Jacob
the greatest man he had ever known. And down they sat cross−legged upon cushions and talked about Jacob,
and Helen's voice trembled, for they both seemed heroes to her, and the friendship between them so much
more beautiful than women's friendships. Anthony Pollett now asked her to dance, and as she danced she
looked at them, over her shoulder, standing at the table, drinking together.
The magnificent world−−the live, sane, vigorous world .... These words refer to the stretch of wood pavement
between Hammersmith and Holborn in January between two and three in the morning. That was the ground
beneath Jacob's feet. It was healthy and magnificent because one room, above a mews, somewhere near the
river, contained fifty excited, talkative, friendly people. And then to stride over the pavement (there was
scarcely a cab or policeman in sight) is of itself exhilarating. The long loop of Piccadilly, diamond−stitched,
shows to best advantage when it is empty. A young man has nothing to fear. On the contrary, though he may
not have said anything brilliant, he feels pretty confident he can hold his own. He was pleased to have met
Mangin; he admired the young woman on the floor; he liked them all; he liked that sort of thing. In short, all
the drums and trumpets were sounding. The street scavengers were the only people about at the moment. It is
scarcely necessary to say how well−disposed Jacob felt towards them; how it pleased him to let himself in
with his latch−key at his own door; how he seemed to bring back with him into the empty room ten or eleven
people whom he had not known when he set out; how he looked about for something to read, and found it,
and never read it, and fell asleep.
Indeed, drums and trumpets is no phrase. Indeed, Piccadilly and Holborn, and the empty sitting−room and the
sitting−room with fifty people in it are liable at any moment to blow music into the air. Women perhaps are
more excitable than men. It is seldom that any one says anything about it, and to see the hordes crossing
Waterloo Bridge to catch the non−stop to Surbiton one might think that reason impelled them. No, no. It is the
drums and trumpets. Only, should you turn aside into one of those little bays on Waterloo Bridge to think the
matter over, it will probably seem to you all a muddle−−all a mystery.
They cross the Bridge incessantly. Sometimes in the midst of carts and omnibuses a lorry will appear with
great forest trees chained to it. Then, perhaps, a mason's van with newly lettered tombstones recording how
some one loved some one who is buried at Putney. Then the motor car in front jerks forward, and the
CHAPTER NINE 55
tombstones pass too quick for you to read more. All the time the stream of people never ceases passing from
the Surrey side to the Strand; from the Strand to the Surrey side. It seems as if the poor had gone raiding the
town, and now trapesed back to their own quarters, like beetles scurrying to their holes, for that old woman
fairly hobbles towards Waterloo, grasping a shiny bag, as if she had been out into the light and now made off
with some scraped chicken bones to her hovel underground. On the other hand, though the wind is rough and
blowing in their faces, those girls there, striding hand in hand, shouting out a song, seem to feel neither cold
nor shame. They are hatless. They triumph.
The wind has blown up the waves. The river races beneath us, and the men standing on the barges have to
lean all their weight on the tiller. A black tarpaulin is tied down over a swelling load of gold. Avalanches of
coal glitter blackly. As usual, painters are slung on planks across the great riverside hotels, and the hotel
windows have already points of light in them. On the other side the city is white as if with age; St. Paul's
swells white above the fretted, pointed, or oblong buildings beside it. The cross alone shines rosy−gilt. But
what century have we reached? Has this procession from the Surrey side to the Strand gone on for ever? That
old man has been crossing the Bridge these six hundred years, with the rabble of little boys at his heels, for he
is drunk, or blind with misery, and tied round with old clouts of clothing such as pilgrims might have worn.
He shuffles on. No one stands still. It seems as if we marched to the sound of music; perhaps the wind and the
river; perhaps these same drums and trumpets−−the ecstasy and hubbub of the soul. Why, even the unhappy
laugh, and the policeman, far from judging the drunk man, surveys him humorously, and the little boys
scamper back again, and the clerk from Somerset House has nothing but tolerance for him, and the man who
is reading half a page of Lothair at the bookstall muses charitably, with his eyes off the print, and the girl
hesitates at the crossing and turns on him the bright yet vague glance of the young.
Bright yet vague. She is perhaps twenty−two. She is shabby. She crosses the road and looks at the daffodils
and the red tulips in the florist's window. She hesitates, and makes off in the direction of Temple Bar. She
walks fast, and yet anything distracts her. Now she seems to see, and now to notice nothing.

Chapter 10


Through the disused graveyard in the parish of St. Pancras, Fanny Elmer strayed between the white tombs
which lean against the wall, crossing the grass to read a name, hurrying on when the grave−keeper
approached, hurrying into the street, pausing now by a window with blue china, now quickly making up for
lost time, abruptly entering a baker's shop, buying rolls, adding cakes, going on again so that any one wishing
to follow must fairly trot. She was not drably shabby, though. She wore silk stockings, and silver−buckled
shoes, only the red feather in her hat drooped, and the clasp of her bag was weak, for out fell a copy of
Madame Tussaud's programme as she walked. She had the ankles of a stag. Her face was hidden. Of course,
in this dusk, rapid movements, quick glances, and soaring hopes come naturally enough. She passed right
beneath Jacob's window.
The house was flat, dark, and silent. Jacob was at home engaged upon a chess problem, the board being on a
stool between his knees. One hand was fingering the hair at the back of his head. He slowly brought it forward
and raised the white queen from her square; then put her down again on the same spot. He filled his pipe;
ruminated; moved two pawns; advanced the white knight; then ruminated with one finger upon the bishop.
Now Fanny Elmer passed beneath the window.
She was on her way to sit to Nick Bramham the painter.
She sat in a flowered Spanish shawl, holding in her hand a yellow novel.
"A little lower, a little looser, so−−better, that's right," Bramham mumbled, who was drawing her, and
smoking at the same time, and was naturally speechless. His head might have been the work of a sculptor,
who had squared the forehead, stretched the mouth, and left marks of his thumbs and streaks from his fingers
CHAPTER TEN 56
in the clay. But the eyes had never been shut. They were rather prominent, and rather bloodshot, as if from
staring and staring, and when he spoke they looked for a second disturbed, but went on staring. An unshaded
electric light hung above her head.
As for the beauty of women, it is like the light on the sea, never constant to a single wave. They all have it;
they all lose it. Now she is dull and thick as bacon; now transparent as a hanging glass. The fixed faces are the
dull ones. Here comes Lady Venice displayed like a monument for admiration, but carved in alabaster, to be
set on the mantelpiece and never dusted. A dapper brunette complete from head to foot serves only as an
illustration to lie upon the drawing−room table. The women in the streets have the faces of playing cards; the
outlines accurately filled in with pink or yellow, and the line drawn tightly round them. Then, at a top−floor
window, leaning out, looking down, you see beauty itself; or in the corner of an omnibus; or squatted in a
ditch−−beauty glowing, suddenly expressive, withdrawn the moment after. No one can count on it or seize it
or have it wrapped in paper. Nothing is to be won from the shops, and Heaven knows it would be better to sit
at home than haunt the plate−glass windows in the hope of lifting the shining green, the glowing ruby, out of
them alive. Sea glass in a saucer loses its lustre no sooner than silks do. Thus if you talk of a beautiful woman
you mean only something flying fast which for a second uses the eyes, lips, or cheeks of Fanny Elmer, for
example, to glow through.
She was not beautiful, as she sat stiffly; her underlip too prominent; her nose too large; her eyes too near
together. She was a thin girl, with brilliant cheeks and dark hair, sulky just now, or stiff with sitting. When
Bramham snapped his stick of charcoal she started. Bramham was out of temper. He squatted before the gas
fire warming his hands. Meanwhile she looked at his drawing. He grunted. Fanny threw on a dressing−gown
and boiled a kettle.
"By God, it's bad," said Bramham.
Fanny dropped on to the floor, clasped her hands round her knees, and looked at him, her beautiful eyes−−yes,
beauty, flying through the room, shone there for a second. Fanny's eyes seemed to question, to commiserate,
to be, for a second, love itself. But she exaggerated. Bramham noticed nothing. And when the kettle boiled, up
she scrambled, more like a colt or a puppy than a loving woman.
Now Jacob walked over to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. Mr. Springett opposite came
out, looked at his shop window, and went in again. The children drifted past, eyeing the pink sticks of
sweetstuff. Pickford's van swung down the street. A small boy twirled from a rope. Jacob turned away. Two
minutes later he opened the front door, and walked off in the direction of Holborn.
Fanny Elmer took down her cloak from the hook. Nick Bramham unpinned his drawing and rolled it under his
arm. They turned out the lights and set off down the street, holding on their way through all the people, motor
cars, omnibuses, carts, until they reached Leicester Square, five minutes before Jacob reached it, for his way
was slightly longer, and he had been stopped by a block in Holborn waiting to see the King drive by, so that
Nick and Fanny were already leaning over the barrier in the promenade at the Empire when Jacob pushed
through the swing doors and took his place beside them.
"Hullo, never noticed you," said Nick, five minutes later.
"Bloody rot," said Jacob.
"Miss Elmer," said Nick.
Jacob took his pipe out of his mouth very awkwardly.
Very awkward he was. And when they sat upon a plush sofa and let the smoke go up between them and the
CHAPTER TEN 57
stage, and heard far off the high− pitched voices and the jolly orchestra breaking in opportunely he was still
awkward, only Fanny thought: "What a beautiful voice!" She thought how little he said yet how firm it was.
She thought how young men are dignified and aloof, and how unconscious they are, and how quietly one
might sit beside Jacob and look at him. And how childlike he would be, come in tired of an evening, she
thought, and how majestic; a little overbearing perhaps; "But I wouldn't give way," she thought. He got up and
leant over the barrier. The smoke hung about him.
And for ever the beauty of young men seems to be set in smoke, however lustily they chase footballs, or drive
cricket balls, dance, run, or stride along roads. Possibly they are soon to lose it. Possibly they look into the
eyes of faraway heroes, and take their station among us half contemptuously, she thought (vibrating like a
fiddle−string, to be played on and snapped). Anyhow, they love silence, and speak beautifully, each word
falling like a disc new cut, not a hubble−bubble of small smooth coins such as girls use; and they move
decidedly, as if they knew how long to stay and when to go−−oh, but Mr. Flanders was only gone to get a
programme.
"The dancers come right at the end," he said, coming back to them.
And isn't it pleasant, Fanny went on thinking, how young men bring out lots of silver coins from their trouser
pockets, and look at them, instead of having just so many in a purse?
Then there she was herself, whirling across the stage in white flounces, and the music was the dance and fling
of her own soul, and the whole machinery, rock and gear of the world was spun smoothly into those swift
eddies and falls, she felt, as she stood rigid leaning over the barrier two feet from Jacob Flanders.
Her screwed−up black glove dropped to the floor. When Jacob gave it her, she started angrily. For never was
there a more irrational passion. And Jacob was afraid of her for a moment−−so violent, so dangerous is it
when young women stand rigid; grasp the barrier; fall in love.
It was the middle of February. The roofs of Hampstead Garden Suburb lay in a tremulous haze. It was too hot
to walk. A dog barked, barked, barked down in the hollow. The liquid shadows went over the plain.
The body after long illness is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness, but too weak to contain it. The tears
well and fall as the dog barks in the hollow, the children skim after hoops, the country darkens and brightens.
Beyond a veil it seems. Ah, but draw the veil thicker lest I faint with sweetness, Fanny Elmer sighed, as she
sat on a bench in Judges Walk looking at Hampstead Garden Suburb. But the dog went on barking. The motor
cars hooted on the road. She heard a far−away rush and humming. Agitation was at her heart. Up she got and
walked. The grass was freshly green; the sun hot. All round the pond children were stooping to launch little
boats; or were drawn back screaming by their nurses.
At mid−day young women walk out into the air. All the men are busy in the town. They stand by the edge of
the blue pond. The fresh wind scatters the children's voices all about. My children, thought Fanny Elmer. The
women stand round the pond, beating off great prancing shaggy dogs. Gently the baby is rocked in the
perambulator. The eyes of all the nurses, mothers, and wandering women are a little glazed, absorbed. They
gently nod instead of answering when the little boys tug at their skirts, begging them to move on.
And Fanny moved, hearing some cry−−a workman's whistle perhaps−−high in mid−air. Now, among the
trees, it was the thrush trilling out into the warm air a flutter of jubilation, but fear seemed to spur him, Fanny
thought; as if he too were anxious with such joy at his heart−−as if he were watched as he sang, and pressed
by tumult to sing. There! Restless, he flew to the next tree. She heard his song more faintly. Beyond it was the
humming of the wheels and the wind rushing.
She spent tenpence on lunch.
CHAPTER TEN 58
"Dear, miss, she's left her umbrella," grumbled the mottled woman in the glass box near the door at the
Express Dairy Company's shop.
"Perhaps I'll catch her," answered Milly Edwards, the waitress with the pale plaits of hair; and she dashed
through the door.
"No good," she said, coming back a moment later with Fanny's cheap umbrella. She put her hand to her plaits.
"Oh, that door!" grumbled the cashier.
Her hands were cased in black mittens, and the finger−tips that drew in the paper slips were swollen as
sausages.
"Pie and greens for one. Large coffee and crumpets. Eggs on toast. Two fruit cakes."
Thus the sharp voices of the waitresses snapped. The lunchers heard their orders repeated with approval; saw
the next table served with anticipation. Their own eggs on toast were at last delivered. Their eyes strayed no
more.
Damp cubes of pastry fell into mouths opened like triangular bags.
Nelly Jenkinson, the typist, crumbled her cake indifferently enough. Every time the door opened she looked
up. What did she expect to see?
The coal merchant read the Telegraph without stopping, missed the saucer, and, feeling abstractedly, put the
cup down on the table−cloth.
"Did you ever hear the like of that for impertinence?" Mrs. Parsons wound up, brushing the crumbs from her
furs.
"Hot milk and scone for one. Pot of tea. Roll and butter," cried the waitresses.
The door opened and shut.
Such is the life of the elderly.
It is curious, lying in a boat, to watch the waves. Here are three coming regularly one after another, all much
of a size. Then, hurrying after them comes a fourth, very large and menacing; it lifts the boat; on it goes;
somehow merges without accomplishing anything; flattens itself out with the rest.
What can be more violent than the fling of boughs in a gale, the tree yielding itself all up the trunk, to the very
tip of the branch, streaming and shuddering the way the wind blows, yet never flying in dishevelment away?
The corn squirms and abases itself as if preparing to tug itself free from the roots, and yet is tied down.
Why, from the very windows, even in the dusk, you see a swelling run through the street, an aspiration, as
with arms outstretched, eyes desiring, mouths agape. And then we peaceably subside. For if the exaltation
lasted we should be blown like foam into the air. The stars would shine through us. We should go down the
gale in salt drops−−as sometimes happens. For the impetuous spirits will have none of this cradling. Never
any swaying or aimlessly lolling for them. Never any making believe, or lying cosily, or genially supposing
that one is much like another, fire warm, wine pleasant, extravagance a sin.
"People are so nice, once you know them."
CHAPTER TEN 59
"I couldn't think ill of her. One must remember−−" But Nick perhaps, or Fanny Elmer, believing implicitly in
the truth of the moment, fling off, sting the cheek, are gone like sharp hail.
"Oh," said Fanny, bursting into the studio three−quarters of an hour late because she had been hanging about
the neighbourhood of the Foundling Hospital merely for the chance of seeing Jacob walk down the street, take
out his latch−key, and open the door, "I'm afraid I'm late"; upon which Nick said nothing and Fanny grew
defiant.
"I'll never come again!" she cried at length.
"Don't, then," Nick replied, and off she ran without so much as good− night.
How exquisite it was−−that dress in Evelina's shop off Shaftesbury Avenue! It was four o'clock on a fine day
early in April, and was Fanny the one to spend four o'clock on a fine day indoors? Other girls in that very
street sat over ledgers, or drew long threads wearily between silk and gauze; or, festooned with ribbons in
Swan and Edgars, rapidly added up pence and farthings on the back of the bill and twisted the yard and
three−quarters in tissue paper and asked "Your pleasure?" of the next comer.
In Evelina's shop off Shaftesbury Avenue the parts of a woman were shown separate. In the left hand was her
skirt. Twining round a pole in the middle was a feather boa. Ranged like the heads of malefactors on Temple
Bar were hats−−emerald and white, lightly wreathed or drooping beneath deep−dyed feathers. And on the
carpet were her feet−−pointed gold, or patent leather slashed with scarlet.
Feasted upon by the eyes of women, the clothes by four o'clock were flyblown like sugar cakes in a baker's
window. Fanny eyed them too. But coming along Gerrard Street was a tall man in a shabby coat. A shadow
fell across Evelina's window−−Jacob's shadow, though it was not Jacob. And Fanny turned and walked along
Gerrard Street and wished that she had read books. Nick never read books, never talked of Ireland, or the
House of Lords; and as for his finger−nails! She would learn Latin and read Virgil. She had been a great
reader. She had read Scott; she had read Dumas. At the Slade no one read. But no one knew Fanny at the
Slade, or guessed how empty it seemed to her; the passion for ear−rings, for dances, for Tonks and
Steer−−when it was only the French who could paint, Jacob said. For the moderns were futile; painting the
least respectable of the arts; and why read anything but Marlowe and Shakespeare, Jacob said, and Fielding if
you must read novels?
"Fielding," said Fanny, when the man in Charing Cross Road asked her what book she wanted.
She bought Tom Jones.
At ten o'clock in the morning, in a room which she shared with a school teacher, Fanny Elmer read Tom
Jones−−that mystic book. For this dull stuff (Fanny thought) about people with odd names is what Jacob likes.
Good people like it. Dowdy women who don't mind how they cross their legs read Tom Jones−−a mystic
book; for there is something, Fanny thought, about books which if I had been educated I could have liked−−
much better than ear−rings and flowers, she sighed, thinking of the corridors at the Slade and the fancy−dress
dance next week. She had nothing to wear.
They are real, thought Fanny Elmer, setting her feet on the mantelpiece. Some people are. Nick perhaps, only
he was so stupid. And women never−− except Miss Sargent, but she went off at lunch−time and gave herself
airs. There they sat quietly of a night reading, she thought. Not going to music−halls; not looking in at shop
windows; not wearing each other's clothes, like Robertson who had worn her shawl, and she had worn his
waistcoat, which Jacob could only do very awkwardly; for he liked Tom Jones.
There it lay on her lap, in double columns, price three and sixpence; the mystic book in which Henry Fielding
CHAPTER TEN 60
ever so many years ago rebuked Fanny Elmer for feasting on scarlet, in perfect prose, Jacob said. For he never
read modern novels. He liked Tom Jones.
"I do like Tom Jones," said Fanny, at five−thirty that same day early in April when Jacob took out his pipe in
the arm−chair opposite.
Alas, women lie! But not Clara Durrant. A flawless mind; a candid nature; a virgin chained to a rock
(somewhere off Lowndes Square) eternally pouring out tea for old men in white waistcoats, blue−eyed,
looking you straight in the face, playing Bach. Of all women, Jacob honoured her most. But to sit at a table
with bread and butter, with dowagers in velvet, and never say more to Clara Durrant than Benson said to the
parrot when old Miss Perry poured out tea, was an insufferable outrage upon the liberties and decencies of
human nature−−or words to that effect. For Jacob said nothing. Only he glared at the fire. Fanny laid down
Tom Jones.
She stitched or knitted.
"What's that?" asked Jacob.
"For the dance at the Slade."
And she fetched her head−dress; her trousers; her shoes with red tassels. What should she wear?
"I shall be in Paris," said Jacob.
And what is the point of fancy−dress dances? thought Fanny. You meet the same people; you wear the same
clothes; Mangin gets drunk; Florinda sits on his knee. She flirts outrageously−−with Nick Bramham just now.
"In Paris?" said Fanny.
"On my way to Greece," he replied.
For, he said, there is nothing so detestable as London in May.
He would forget her.
A sparrow flew past the window trailing a straw−−a straw from a stack stood by a barn in a farmyard. The old
brown spaniel snuffs at the base for a rat. Already the upper branches of the elm trees are blotted with nests.
The chestnuts have flirted their fans. And the butterflies are flaunting across the rides in the Forest. Perhaps
the Purple Emperor is feasting, as Morris says, upon a mass of putrid carrion at the base of an oak tree.
Fanny thought it all came from Tom Jones. He could go alone with a book in his pocket and watch the
badgers. He would take a train at eight− thirty and walk all night. He saw fire−flies, and brought back glow−
worms in pill−boxes. He would hunt with the New Forest Staghounds. It all came from Tom Jones; and he
would go to Greece with a book in his pocket and forget her.
She fetched her hand−glass. There was her face. And suppose one wreathed Jacob in a turban? There was his
face. She lit the lamp. But as the daylight came through the window only half was lit up by the lamp. And
though he looked terrible and magnificent and would chuck the Forest, he said, and come to the Slade, and be
a Turkish knight or a Roman emperor (and he let her blacken his lips and clenched his teeth and scowled in
the glass), still−−there lay Tom Jones.

Chapter 11


"Archer," said Mrs. Flanders with that tenderness which mothers so often display towards their eldest sons,
"will be at Gibraltar to−morrow."
The post for which she was waiting (strolling up Dods Hill while the random church bells swung a hymn tune
about her head, the clock striking four straight through the circling notes; the glass purpling under a
storm−cloud; and the two dozen houses of the village cowering, infinitely humble, in company under a leaf of
shadow), the post, with all its variety of messages, envelopes addressed in bold hands, in slanting hands,
stamped now with English stamps, again with Colonial stamps, or sometimes hastily dabbed with a yellow
bar, the post was about to scatter a myriad messages over the world. Whether we gain or not by this habit of
profuse communication it is not for us to say. But that letter−writing is practised mendaciously nowadays,
particularly by young men travelling in foreign parts, seems likely enough.
For example, take this scene.
Here was Jacob Flanders gone abroad and staying to break his journey in Paris. (Old Miss Birkbeck, his
mother's cousin, had died last June and left him a hundred pounds.)
"You needn't repeat the whole damned thing over again, Cruttendon," said Mallinson, the little bald painter
who was sitting at a marble table, splashed with coffee and ringed with wine, talking very fast, and
undoubtedly more than a little drunk.
"Well, Flanders, finished writing to your lady?" said Cruttendon, as Jacob came and took his seat beside them,
holding in his hand an envelope addressed to Mrs. Flanders, near Scarborough, England.
"Do you uphold Velasquez?" said Cruttendon.
"By God, he does," said Mallinson.
"He always gets like this," said Cruttendon irritably.
Jacob looked at Mallinson with excessive composure.
"I'll tell you the three greatest things that were ever written in the whole of literature," Cruttendon burst out.
"'Hang there like fruit my soul.'" he began. ...
"Don't listen to a man who don't like Velasquez," said Mallinson.
"Adolphe, don't give Mr. Mallinson any more wine," said Cruttendon.
"Fair play, fair play," said Jacob judicially. "Let a man get drunk if he likes. That's Shakespeare, Cruttendon.
I'm with you there. Shakespeare had more guts than all these damned frogs put together. 'Hang there like fruit
my soul,'" he began quoting, in a musical rhetorical voice, flourishing his wine−glass. "The devil damn you
black, you cream−faced loon!" he exclaimed as the wine washed over the rim.
"'Hang there like fruit my soul,'" Cruttendon and Jacob both began again at the same moment, and both burst
out laughing.
"Curse these flies," said Mallinson, flicking at his bald head. "What do they take me for?"
"Something sweet−smelling," said Cruttendon.
CHAPTER ELEVEN 62
"Shut up, Cruttendon," said Jacob. "The fellow has no manners," he explained to Mallinson very politely.
"Wants to cut people off their drink. Look here. I want grilled bone. What's the French for grilled bone?
Grilled bone, Adolphe. Now you juggins, don't you understand?"
"And I'll tell you, Flanders, the second most beautiful thing in the whole of literature," said Cruttendon,
bringing his feet down on to the floor, and leaning right across the table, so that his face almost touched
Jacob's face.
"'Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,'" Mallinson interrupted, strumming his fingers on the table. "The
most ex−qui−sitely beautiful thing in the whole of literature. ... Cruttendon is a very good fellow," he
remarked confidentially. "But he's a bit of a fool." And he jerked his head forward.
Well, not a word of this was ever told to Mrs. Flanders; nor what happened when they paid the bill and left the
restaurant, and walked along the Boulevard Raspaille.
Then here is another scrap of conversation; the time about eleven in the morning; the scene a studio; and the
day Sunday.
"I tell you, Flanders," said Cruttendon, "I'd as soon have one of Mallinson's little pictures as a Chardin. And
when I say that ..." he squeezed the tail of an emaciated tube ... "Chardin was a great swell. ... He sells 'em to
pay his dinner now. But wait till the dealers get hold of him. A great swell−−oh, a very great swell."
"It's an awfully pleasant life," said Jacob, "messing away up here. Still, it's a stupid art, Cruttendon." He
wandered off across the room. "There's this man, Pierre Louys now." He took up a book.
"Now my good sir, are you going to settle down?" said Cruttendon.
"That's a solid piece of work," said Jacob, standing a canvas on a chair.
"Oh, that I did ages ago," said Cruttendon, looking over his shoulder.
"You're a pretty competent painter in my opinion," said Jacob after a time.
"Now if you'd like to see what I'm after at the present moment," said Cruttendon, putting a canvas before
Jacob. "There. That's it. That's more like it. That's ..." he squirmed his thumb in a circle round a lamp globe
painted white.
"A pretty solid piece of work," said Jacob, straddling his legs in front of it. "But what I wish you'd explain ..."
Miss Jinny Carslake, pale, freckled, morbid, came into the room.
"Oh Jinny, here's a friend. Flanders. An Englishman. Wealthy. Highly connected. Go on, Flanders. ..."
Jacob said nothing.
"It's THAT−−that's not right," said Jinny Carslake.
"No," said Cruttendon decidedly. "Can't be done."
He took the canvas off the chair and stood it on the floor with its back to them.
"Sit down, ladies and gentlemen. Miss Carslake comes from your part of the world, Flanders. From
CHAPTER ELEVEN 63
Devonshire. Oh, I thought you said Devonshire. Very well. She's a daughter of the church too. The black
sheep of the family. Her mother writes her such letters. I say−−have you one about you? It's generally
Sundays they come. Sort of church−bell effect, you know."
"Have you met all the painter men?" said Jinny. "Was Mallinson drunk? If you go to his studio he'll give you
one of his pictures. I say, Teddy ..."
"Half a jiff," said Cruttendon. "What's the season of the year?" He looked out of the window.
"We take a day off on Sundays, Flanders."
"Will he ..." said Jinny, looking at Jacob. "You ..."
"Yes, he'll come with us," said Cruttendon.
And then, here is Versailles. Jinny stood on the stone rim and leant over the pond, clasped by Cruttendon's
arms or she would have fallen in. "There! There!" she cried. "Right up to the top!" Some sluggish,
sloping−shouldered fish had floated up from the depths to nip her crumbs. "You look," she said, jumping
down. And then the dazzling white water, rough and throttled, shot up into the air. The fountain spread itself.
Through it came the sound of military music far away. All the water was puckered with drops. A blue air−ball
gently bumped the surface. How all the nurses and children and old men and young crowded to the edge, leant
over and waved their sticks! The little girl ran stretching her arms towards her air−ball, but it sank beneath the
fountain.
Edward Cruttendon, Jinny Carslake, and Jacob Flanders walked in a row along the yellow gravel path; got on
to the grass; so passed under the trees; and came out at the summer−house where Marie Antoinette used to
drink chocolate. In went Edward and Jinny, but Jacob waited outside, sitting on the handle of his
walking−stick. Out they came again.
"Well?" said Cruttendon, smiling at Jacob.
Jinny waited; Edward waited; and both looked at Jacob.
"Well?" said Jacob, smiling and pressing both hands on his stick.
"Come along," he decided; and started off. The others followed him, smiling.
And then they went to the little cafe in the by−street where people sit drinking coffee, watching the soldiers,
meditatively knocking ashes into trays.
"But he's quite different," said Jinny, folding her hands over the top of her glass. "I don't suppose you know
what Ted means when he says a thing like that," she said, looking at Jacob. "But I do. Sometimes I could kill
myself. Sometimes he lies in bed all day long−−just lies there. ... I don't want you right on the table"; she
waved her hands. Swollen iridescent pigeons were waddling round their feet.
"Look at that woman's hat," said Cruttendon. "How do they come to think of it? ... No, Flanders, I don't think I
could live like you. When one walks down that street opposite the British Museum−−what's it called?−− that's
what I mean. It's all like that. Those fat women−−and the man standing in the middle of the road as if he were
going to have a fit ..."
"Everybody feeds them," said Jinny, waving the pigeons away. "They're stupid old things."
CHAPTER ELEVEN 64
"Well, I don't know," said Jacob, smoking his cigarette. "There's St. Paul's."
"I mean going to an office," said Cruttendon.
"Hang it all," Jacob expostulated.
"But you don't count," said Jinny, looking at Cruttendon. "You're mad. I mean, you just think of painting."
"Yes, I know. I can't help it. I say, will King George give way about the peers?"
"He'll jolly well have to," said Jacob.
"There!" said Jinny. "He really knows."
"You see, I would if I could," said Cruttendon, "but I simply can't."
"I THINK I could," said Jinny. "Only, it's all the people one dislikes who do it. At home, I mean. They talk of
nothing else. Even people like my mother."
"Now if I came and lived here−−−" said Jacob. "What's my share, Cruttendon? Oh, very well. Have it your
own way. Those silly birds, directly one wants them−−they've flown away."
And finally under the arc lamps in the Gare des Invalides, with one of those queer movements which are so
slight yet so definite, which may wound or pass unnoticed but generally inflict a good deal of discomfort,
Jinny and Cruttendon drew together; Jacob stood apart. They had to separate. Something must be said.
Nothing was said. A man wheeled a trolley past Jacob's legs so near that he almost grazed them. When Jacob
recovered his balance the other two were turning away, though Jinny looked over her shoulder, and
Cruttendon, waving his hand, disappeared like the very great genius that he was.
No−−Mrs. Flanders was told none of this, though Jacob felt, it is safe to say, that nothing in the world was of
greater importance; and as for Cruttendon and Jinny, he thought them the most remarkable people he had ever
met−−being of course unable to foresee how it fell out in the course of time that Cruttendon took to painting
orchards; had therefore to live in Kent; and must, one would think, see through apple blossom by this time,
since his wife, for whose sake he did it, eloped with a novelist; but no; Cruttendon still paints orchards,
savagely, in solitude. Then Jinny Carslake, after her affair with Lefanu the American painter, frequented
Indian philosophers, and now you find her in pensions in Italy cherishing a little jeweller's box containing
ordinary pebbles picked off the road. But if you look at them steadily, she says, multiplicity becomes unity,
which is somehow the secret of life, though it does not prevent her from following the macaroni as it goes
round the table, and sometimes, on spring nights, she makes the strangest confidences to shy young
Englishmen.
Jacob had nothing to hide from his mother. It was only that he could make no sense himself of his
extraordinary excitement, and as for writing it down−−−
"Jacob's letters are so like him," said Mrs. Jarvis, folding the sheet.
"Indeed he seems to be having ..." said Mrs. Flanders, and paused, for she was cutting out a dress and had to
straighten the pattern, "... a very gay time."
Mrs. Jarvis thought of Paris. At her back the window was open, for it was a mild night; a calm night; when the
moon seemed muffled and the apple trees stood perfectly still.
CHAPTER ELEVEN 65
"I never pity the dead," said Mrs. Jarvis, shifting the cushion at her back, and clasping her hands behind her
head. Betty Flanders did not hear, for her scissors made so much noise on the table.
"They are at rest," said Mrs. Jarvis. "And we spend our days doing foolish unnecessary things without
knowing why."
Mrs. Jarvis was not liked in the village.
"You never walk at this time of night?" she asked Mrs. Flanders.
"It is certainly wonderfully mild," said Mrs. Flanders.
Yet it was years since she had opened the orchard gate and gone out on Dods Hill after dinner.
"It is perfectly dry," said Mrs. Jarvis, as they shut the orchard door and stepped on to the turf.
"I shan't go far," said Betty Flanders. "Yes, Jacob will leave Paris on Wednesday."
"Jacob was always my friend of the three," said Mrs. Jarvis.
"Now, my dear, I am going no further," said Mrs. Flanders. They had climbed the dark hill and reached the
Roman camp.
The rampart rose at their feet−−the smooth circle surrounding the camp or the grave. How many needles Betty
Flanders had lost there; and her garnet brooch.
"It is much clearer than this sometimes," said Mrs. Jarvis, standing upon the ridge. There were no clouds, and
yet there was a haze over the sea, and over the moors. The lights of Scarborough flashed, as if a woman
wearing a diamond necklace turned her head this way and that.
"How quiet it is!" said Mrs. Jarvis.
Mrs. Flanders rubbed the turf with her toe, thinking of her garnet brooch.
Mrs. Jarvis found it difficult to think of herself to−night. It was so calm. There was no wind; nothing racing,
flying, escaping. Black shadows stood still over the silver moors. The furze bushes stood perfectly still.
Neither did Mrs. Jarvis think of God. There was a church behind them, of course. The church clock struck ten.
Did the strokes reach the furze bush, or did the thorn tree hear them?
Mrs. Flanders was stooping down to pick up a pebble. Sometimes people do find things, Mrs. Jarvis thought,
and yet in this hazy moonlight it was impossible to see anything, except bones, and little pieces of chalk.
"Jacob bought it with his own money, and then I brought Mr. Parker up to see the view, and it must have
dropped−−" Mrs. Flanders murmured.
Did the bones stir, or the rusty swords? Was Mrs. Flanders's twopenny− halfpenny brooch for ever part of the
rich accumulation? and if all the ghosts flocked thick and rubbed shoulders with Mrs. Flanders in the circle,
would she not have seemed perfectly in her place, a live English matron, growing stout?
The clock struck the quarter.
The frail waves of sound broke among the stiff gorse and the hawthorn twigs as the church clock divided time
CHAPTER ELEVEN 66
into quarters.
Motionless and broad−backed the moors received the statement "It is fifteen minutes past the hour," but made
no answer, unless a bramble stirred.
Yet even in this light the legends on the tombstones could be read, brief voices saying, "I am Bertha Ruck," "I
am Tom Gage." And they say which day of the year they died, and the New Testament says something for
them, very proud, very emphatic, or consoling.
The moors accept all that too.
The moonlight falls like a pale page upon the church wall, and illumines the kneeling family in the niche, and
the tablet set up in 1780 to the Squire of the parish who relieved the poor, and believed in God−−so the
measured voice goes on down the marble scroll, as though it could impose itself upon time and the open air.
Now a fox steals out from behind the gorse bushes.
Often, even at night, the church seems full of people. The pews are worn and greasy, and the cassocks in
place, and the hymn−books on the ledges. It is a ship with all its crew aboard. The timbers strain to hold the
dead and the living, the ploughmen, the carpenters, the fox−hunting gentlemen and the farmers smelling of
mud and brandy. Their tongues join together in syllabling the sharp−cut words, which for ever slice asunder
time and the broad−backed moors. Plaint and belief and elegy, despair and triumph, but for the most part good
sense and jolly indifference, go trampling out of the windows any time these five hundred years.
Still, as Mrs. Jarvis said, stepping out on to the moors, "How quiet it is!" Quiet at midday, except when the
hunt scatters across it; quiet in the afternoon, save for the drifting sheep; at night the moor is perfectly quiet.
A garnet brooch has dropped into its grass. A fox pads stealthily. A leaf turns on its edge. Mrs. Jarvis, who is
fifty years of age, reposes in the camp in the hazy moonlight.
"... and," said Mrs. Flanders, straightening her back, "I never cared for Mr. Parker."
"Neither did I," said Mrs. Jarvis. They began to walk home.
But their voices floated for a little above the camp. The moonlight destroyed nothing. The moor accepted
everything. Tom Gage cries aloud so long as his tombstone endures. The Roman skeletons are in safe keeping.
Betty Flanders's darning needles are safe too and her garnet brooch. And sometimes at midday, in the
sunshine, the moor seems to hoard these little treasures, like a nurse. But at midnight when no one speaks or
gallops, and the thorn tree is perfectly still, it would be foolish to vex the moor with questions−−what? and
why?
The church clock, however, strikes twelve.

Chapter 12


The water fell off a ledge like lead−−like a chain with thick white links. The train ran out into a steep green
meadow, and Jacob saw striped tulips growing and heard a bird singing, in Italy.
A motor car full of Italian officers ran along the flat road and kept up with the train, raising dust behind it.
There were trees laced together with vines−−as Virgil said. Here was a station; and a tremendous leave−
taking going on, with women in high yellow boots and odd pale boys in ringed socks. Virgil's bees had gone
about the plains of Lombardy. It was the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms. Then at Milan
CHAPTER TWELVE 67
there were sharp−winged hawks, of a bright brown, cutting figures over the roofs.
These Italian carriages get damnably hot with the afternoon sun on them, and the chances are that before the
engine has pulled to the top of the gorge the clanking chain will have broken. Up, up, up, it goes, like a train
on a scenic railway. Every peak is covered with sharp trees, and amazing white villages are crowded on
ledges. There is always a white tower on the very summit, flat red−frilled roofs, and a sheer drop beneath. It is
not a country in which one walks after tea. For one thing there is no grass. A whole hillside will be ruled with
olive trees. Already in April the earth is clotted into dry dust between them. And there are neither stiles nor
footpaths, nor lanes chequered with the shadows of leaves nor eighteenth−century inns with bow−windows,
where one eats ham and eggs. Oh no, Italy is all fierceness, bareness, exposure, and black priests shuffling
along the roads. It is strange, too, how you never get away from villas.
Still, to be travelling on one's own with a hundred pounds to spend is a fine affair. And if his money gave out,
as it probably would, he would go on foot. He could live on bread and wine−−the wine in straw bottles−− for
after doing Greece he was going to knock off Rome. The Roman civilization was a very inferior affair, no
doubt. But Bonamy talked a lot of rot, all the same. "You ought to have been in Athens," he would say to
Bonamy when he got back. "Standing on the Parthenon," he would say, or "The ruins of the Coliseum suggest
some fairly sublime reflections," which he would write out at length in letters. It might turn to an essay upon
civilization. A comparison between the ancients and moderns, with some pretty sharp hits at Mr.
Asquith−−something in the style of Gibbon.
A stout gentleman laboriously hauled himself in, dusty, baggy, slung with gold chains, and Jacob, regretting
that he did not come of the Latin race, looked out of the window.
It is a strange reflection that by travelling two days and nights you are in the heart of Italy. Accidental villas
among olive trees appear; and men−servants watering the cactuses. Black victorias drive in between pompous
pillars with plaster shields stuck to them. It is at once momentary and astonishingly intimate−−to be displayed
before the eyes of a foreigner. And there is a lonely hill−top where no one ever comes, and yet it is seen by
me who was lately driving down Piccadilly on an omnibus. And what I should like would be to get out among
the fields, sit down and hear the grasshoppers, and take up a handful of earth−− Italian earth, as this is Italian
dust upon my shoes.
Jacob heard them crying strange names at railway stations through the night. The train stopped and he heard
frogs croaking close by, and he wrinkled back the blind cautiously and saw a vast strange marsh all white in
the moonlight. The carriage was thick with cigar smoke, which floated round the globe with the green shade
on it. The Italian gentleman lay snoring with his boots off and his waistcoat unbuttoned. ... And all this
business of going to Greece seemed to Jacob an intolerable weariness−−sitting in hotels by oneself and
looking at monuments−−he'd have done better to go to Cornwall with Timmy Durrant. ... "O−−h," Jacob
protested, as the darkness began breaking in front of him and the light showed through, but the man was
reaching across him to get something−−the fat Italian man in his dicky, unshaven, crumpled, obese, was
opening the door and going off to have a wash.
So Jacob sat up, and saw a lean Italian sportsman with a gun walking down the road in the early morning
light, and the whole idea of the Parthenon came upon him in a clap.
"By Jove!" he thought, "we must be nearly there!" and he stuck his head out of the window and got the air full
in his face.
It is highly exasperating that twenty−five people of your acquaintance should be able to say straight off
something very much to the point about being in Greece, while for yourself there is a stopper upon all
emotions whatsoever. For after washing at the hotel at Patras, Jacob had followed the tram lines a mile or so
out; and followed them a mile or so back; he had met several droves of turkeys; several strings of donkeys;
CHAPTER TWELVE 68
had got lost in back streets; had read advertisements of corsets and of Maggi's consomme; children had
trodden on his toes; the place smelt of bad cheese; and he was glad to find himself suddenly come out
opposite his hotel. There was an old copy of the Daily Mail lying among coffee− cups; which he read. But
what could he do after dinner?
No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion. At
the age of twelve or so, having given up dolls and broken our steam engines, France, but much more probably
Italy, and India almost for a certainty, draws the superfluous imagination. One's aunts have been to Rome; and
every one has an uncle who was last heard of−−poor man−−in Rangoon. He will never come back any more.
But it is the governesses who start the Greek myth. Look at that for a head (they say)−−nose, you see, straight
as a dart, curls, eyebrows−−everything appropriate to manly beauty; while his legs and arms have lines on
them which indicate a perfect degree of development−− the Greeks caring for the body as much as for the
face. And the Greeks could paint fruit so that birds pecked at it. First you read Xenophon; then Euripides. One
day−−that was an occasion, by God−−what people have said appears to have sense in it; "the Greek spirit";
the Greek this, that, and the other; though it is absurd, by the way, to say that any Greek comes near
Shakespeare. The point is, however, that we have been brought up in an illusion.
Jacob, no doubt, thought something in this fashion, the Daily Mail crumpled in his hand; his legs extended;
the very picture of boredom.
"But it's the way we're brought up," he went on.
And it all seemed to him very distasteful. Something ought to be done about it. And from being moderately
depressed he became like a man about to be executed. Clara Durrant had left him at a party to talk to an
American called Pilchard. And he had come all the way to Greece and left her. They wore evening−dresses,
and talked nonsense−−what damned nonsense−−and he put out his hand for the Globe Trotter, an international
magazine which is supplied free of charge to the proprietors of hotels.
In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in the electric tramway system, so that
while Jacob sat in the hotel sitting−room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to get the
donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge, beneath the windows. The whole of
civilization was being condemned.
The waiter was quite indifferent to that too. Aristotle, a dirty man, carnivorously interested in the body of the
only guest now occupying the only arm−chair, came into the room ostentatiously, put something down, put
something straight, and saw that Jacob was still there.
"I shall want to be called early to−morrow," said Jacob, over his shoulder. "I am going to Olympia."
This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention. Perhaps, as
Cruttendon said, we do not believe enough. Our fathers at any rate had something to demolish. So have we for
the matter of that, thought Jacob, crumpling the Daily Mail in his hand. He would go into Parliament and
make fine speeches−−but what use are fine speeches and Parliament, once you surrender an inch to the black
waters? Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins−−of happiness and
unhappiness. That respectability and evening parties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back
of Gray's Inn−−something solid, immovable, and grotesque−−is at the back of it, Jacob thought probable. But
then there was the British Empire which was beginning to puzzle him; nor was he altogether in favour of
giving Home Rule to Ireland. What did the Daily Mail say about that?
For he had grown to be a man, and was about to be immersed in things−−as indeed the chambermaid,
emptying his basin upstairs, fingering keys, studs, pencils, and bottles of tabloids strewn on the
dressing−table, was aware.
CHAPTER TWELVE 69
That he had grown to be a man was a fact that Florinda knew, as she knew everything, by instinct.
And Betty Flanders even now suspected it, as she read his letter, posted at Milan, "Telling me," she
complained to Mrs. Jarvis, "really nothing that I want to know"; but she brooded over it.
Fanny Elmer felt it to desperation. For he would take his stick and his hat and would walk to the window, and
look perfectly absent−minded and very stern too, she thought.
"I am going," he would say, "to cadge a meal of Bonamy."
"Anyhow, I can drown myself in the Thames," Fanny cried, as she hurried past the Foundling Hospital.
"But the Daily Mail isn't to be trusted," Jacob said to himself, looking about for something else to read. And
he sighed again, being indeed so profoundly gloomy that gloom must have been lodged in him to cloud him at
any moment, which was odd in a man who enjoyed things so, was not much given to analysis, but was
horribly romantic, of course, Bonamy thought, in his rooms in Lincoln's Inn.
"He will fall in love," thought Bonamy. "Some Greek woman with a straight nose."
It was to Bonamy that Jacob wrote from Patras−−to Bonamy who couldn't love a woman and never read a
foolish book.
There are very few good books after all, for we can't count profuse histories, travels in mule carts to discover
the sources of the Nile, or the volubility of fiction.
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though
armies cross them. I like words to be hard−−such were Bonamy's views, and they won him the hostility of
those whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up the window, and find the poppies
spread in the sun, and can't forbear a shout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature. That
was not Bonamy's way at all. That his taste in literature affected his friendships, and made him silent,
secretive, fastidious, and only quite at his ease with one or two young men of his own way of thinking, was
the charge against him.
But then Jacob Flanders was not at all of his own way of thinking−−far from it, Bonamy sighed, laying the
thin sheets of notepaper on the table and falling into thought about Jacob's character, not for the first time.
The trouble was this romantic vein in him. "But mixed with the stupidity which leads him into these absurd
predicaments," thought Bonamy, "there is something−−something"−−he sighed, for he was fonder of Jacob
than of any one in the world.
Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. There he saw three Greeks in kilts; the
masts of ships; idle or busy people of the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into groups
and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for him was not the cause of his gloom; but some
more profound conviction−−it was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are.
Yet next day, as the train slowly rounded a hill on the way to Olympia, the Greek peasant women were out
among the vines; the old Greek men were sitting at the stations, sipping sweet wine. And though Jacob
remained gloomy he had never suspected how tremendously pleasant it is to be alone; out of England; on
one's own; cut off from the whole thing. There are very sharp bare hills on the way to Olympia; and between
them blue sea in triangular spaces. A little like the Cornish coast. Well now, to go walking by oneself all
day−−to get on to that track and follow it up between the bushes−−or are they small trees?−−to the top of that
mountain from which one can see half the nations of antiquity−−
CHAPTER TWELVE 70
"Yes," said Jacob, for his carriage was empty, "let's look at the map." Blame it or praise it, there is no denying
the wild horse in us. To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to
have−−positively−−a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and
women, let them go hang−− there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty often.
The evening air slightly moved the dirty curtains in the hotel window at Olympia.
"I am full of love for every one," thought Mrs. Wentworth Williams, "−− for the poor most of all−−for the
peasants coming back in the evening with their burdens. And everything is soft and vague and very sad. It is
sad, it is sad. But everything has meaning," thought Sandra Wentworth Williams, raising her head a little and
looking very beautiful, tragic, and exalted. "One must love everything."
She held in her hand a little book convenient for travelling−−stories by Tchekov−−as she stood, veiled, in
white, in the window of the hotel at Olympia. How beautiful the evening was! and her beauty was its beauty.
The tragedy of Greece was the tragedy of all high souls. The inevitable compromise. She seemed to have
grasped something. She would write it down. And moving to the table where her husband sat reading she leant
her chin in her hands and thought of the peasants, of suffering, of her own beauty, of the inevitable
compromise, and of how she would write it down. Nor did Evan Williams say anything brutal, banal, or
foolish when he shut his book and put it away to make room for the plates of soup which were now being
placed before them. Only his drooping bloodhound eyes and his heavy sallow cheeks expressed his
melancholy tolerance, his conviction that though forced to live with circumspection and deliberation he could
never possibly achieve any of those objects which, as he knew, are the only ones worth pursuing. His
consideration was flawless; his silence unbroken.
"Everything seems to mean so much," said Sandra. But with the sound of her own voice the spell was broken.
She forgot the peasants. Only there remained with her a sense of her own beauty, and in front, luckily, there
was a looking−glass.
"I am very beautiful," she thought.
She shifted her hat slightly. Her husband saw her looking in the glass; and agreed that beauty is important; it
is an inheritance; one cannot ignore it. But it is a barrier; it is in fact rather a bore. So he drank his soup; and
kept his eyes fixed upon the window.
"Quails," said Mrs. Wentworth Williams languidly. "And then goat, I suppose; and then..."
"Caramel custard presumably," said her husband in the same cadence, with his toothpick out already.
She laid her spoon upon her plate, and her soup was taken away half finished. Never did she do anything
without dignity; for hers was the English type which is so Greek, save that villagers have touched their hats to
it, the vicarage reveres it; and upper−gardeners and under− gardeners respectfully straighten their backs as she
comes down the broad terrace on Sunday morning, dallying at the stone urns with the Prime Minister to pick a
rose−−which, perhaps, she was trying to forget, as her eye wandered round the dining−room of the inn at
Olympia, seeking the window where her book lay, where a few minutes ago she had discovered
something−−something very profound it had been, about love and sadness and the peasants.
But it was Evan who sighed; not in despair nor indeed in rebellion. But, being the most ambitious of men and
temperamentally the most sluggish, he had accomplished nothing; had the political history of England at his
finger−ends, and living much in company with Chatham, Pitt, Burke, and Charles James Fox could not help
contrasting himself and his age with them and theirs. "Yet there never was a time when great men are more
needed," he was in the habit of saying to himself, with a sigh. Here he was picking his teeth in an inn at
Olympia. He had done. But Sandra's eyes wandered.
CHAPTER TWELVE 71
"Those pink melons are sure to be dangerous," he said gloomily. And as he spoke the door opened and in
came a young man in a grey check suit.
"Beautiful but dangerous," said Sandra, immediately talking to her husband in the presence of a third person.
("Ah, an English boy on tour," she thought to herself.)
And Evan knew all that too.
Yes, he knew all that; and he admired her. Very pleasant, he thought, to have affairs. But for himself, what
with his height (Napoleon was five feet four, he remembered), his bulk, his inability to impose his own
personality (and yet great men are needed more than ever now, he sighed), it was useless. He threw away his
cigar, went up to Jacob and asked him, with a simple sort of sincerity which Jacob liked, whether he had come
straight out from England.
"How very English!" Sandra laughed when the waiter told them next morning that the young gentleman had
left at five to climb the mountain. "I am sure he asked you for a bath?" at which the waiter shook his head, and
said that he would ask the manager.
"You do not understand," laughed Sandra. "Never mind."
Stretched on the top of the mountain, quite alone, Jacob enjoyed himself immensely. Probably he had never
been so happy in the whole of his life.
But at dinner that night Mr. Williams asked him whether he would like to see the paper; then Mrs. Williams
asked him (as they strolled on the terrace smoking−−and how could he refuse that man's cigar?) whether he'd
seen the theatre by moonlight; whether he knew Everard Sherborn; whether he read Greek and whether (Evan
rose silently and went in) if he had to sacrifice one it would be the French literature or the Russian?
"And now," wrote Jacob in his letter to Bonamy, "I shall have to read her cursed book"−−her Tchekov, he
meant, for she had lent it him.
Though the opinion is unpopular it seems likely enough that bare places, fields too thick with stones to be
ploughed, tossing sea−meadows half− way between England and America, suit us better than cities.
There is something absolute in us which despises qualification. It is this which is teased and twisted in
society. People come together in a room. "So delighted," says somebody, "to meet you," and that is a lie. And
then: "I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older." For women are
always, always, always talking about what one feels, and if they say "as one gets older," they mean you to
reply with something quite off the point.
Jacob sat himself down in the quarry where the Greeks had cut marble for the theatre. It is hot work walking
up Greek hills at midday. The wild red cyclamen was out; he had seen the little tortoises hobbling from clump
to clump; the air smelt strong and suddenly sweet, and the sun, striking on jagged splinters of marble, was
very dazzling to the eyes. Composed, commanding, contemptuous, a little melancholy, and bored with an
august kind of boredom, there he sat smoking his pipe.
Bonamy would have said that this was the sort of thing that made him uneasy−−when Jacob got into the
doldrums, looked like a Margate fisherman out of a job, or a British Admiral. You couldn't make him
understand a thing when he was in a mood like that. One had better leave him alone. He was dull. He was apt
to be grumpy.
He was up very early, looking at the statues with his Baedeker.
CHAPTER TWELVE 72
Sandra Wentworth Williams, ranging the world before breakfast in quest of adventure or a point of view, all
in white, not so very tall perhaps, but uncommonly upright−−Sandra Williams got Jacob's head exactly on a
level with the head of the Hermes of Praxiteles. The comparison was all in his favour. But before she could
say a single word he had gone out of the Museum and left her.
Still, a lady of fashion travels with more than one dress, and if white suits the morning hour, perhaps sandy
yellow with purple spots on it, a black hat, and a volume of Balzac, suit the evening. Thus she was arranged
on the terrace when Jacob came in. Very beautiful she looked. With her hands folded she mused, seemed to
listen to her husband, seemed to watch the peasants coming down with brushwood on their backs, seemed to
notice how the hill changed from blue to black, seemed to discriminate between truth and falsehood, Jacob
thought, and crossed his legs suddenly, observing the extreme shabbiness of his trousers.
"But he is very distinguished looking," Sandra decided.
And Evan Williams, lying back in his chair with the paper on his knees, envied them. The best thing he could
do would be to publish, with Macmillans, his monograph upon the foreign policy of Chatham. But confound
this tumid, queasy feeling−−this restlessness, swelling, and heat−−it was jealousy! jealousy! jealousy! which
he had sworn never to feel again.
"Come with us to Corinth, Flanders," he said with more than his usual energy, stopping by Jacob's chair. He
was relieved by Jacob's reply, or rather by the solid, direct, if shy manner in which he said that he would like
very much to come with them to Corinth.
"Here is a fellow," thought Evan Williams, "who might do very well in politics."
"I intend to come to Greece every year so long as I live," Jacob wrote to Bonamy. "It is the only chance I can
see of protecting oneself from civilization."
"Goodness knows what he means by that," Bonamy sighed. For as he never said a clumsy thing himself, these
dark sayings of Jacob's made him feel apprehensive, yet somehow impressed, his own turn being all for the
definite, the concrete, and the rational.
Nothing could be much simpler than what Sandra said as she descended the Acro−Corinth, keeping to the
little path, while Jacob strode over rougher ground by her side. She had been left motherless at the age of four;
and the Park was vast.
"One never seemed able to get out of it," she laughed. Of course there was the library, and dear Mr. Jones, and
notions about things. "I used to stray into the kitchen and sit upon the butler's knees," she laughed, sadly
though.
Jacob thought that if he had been there he would have saved her; for she had been exposed to great dangers,
he felt, and, he thought to himself, "People wouldn't understand a woman talking as she talks."
She made little of the roughness of the hill; and wore breeches, he saw, under her short skirts.
"Women like Fanny Elmer don't," he thought. "What's−her−name Carslake didn't; yet they pretend..."
Mrs. Williams said things straight out. He was surprised by his own knowledge of the rules of behaviour; how
much more can be said than one thought; how open one can be with a woman; and how little he had known
himself before.
Evan joined them on the road; and as they drove along up hill and down hill (for Greece is in a state of
CHAPTER TWELVE 73
effervescence, yet astonishingly clean−cut, a treeless land, where you see the ground between the blades, each
hill cut and shaped and outlined as often as not against sparkling deep blue waters, islands white as sand
floating on the horizon, occasional groves of palm trees standing in the valleys, which are scattered with black
goats, spotted with little olive trees and sometimes have white hollows, rayed and criss−crossed, in their
flanks), as they drove up hill and down he scowled in the corner of the carriage, with his paw so tightly closed
that the skin was stretched between the knuckles and the little hairs stood upright. Sandra rode opposite,
dominant, like a Victory prepared to fling into the air.
"Heartless!" thought Evan (which was untrue).
"Brainless!" he suspected (and that was not true either). "Still...!" He envied her.
When bedtime came the difficulty was to write to Bonamy, Jacob found. Yet he had seen Salamis, and
Marathon in the distance. Poor old Bonamy! No; there was something queer about it. He could not write to
Bonamy.
"I shall go to Athens all the same," he resolved, looking very set, with this hook dragging in his side.
The Williamses had already been to Athens.
Athens is still quite capable of striking a young man as the oddest combination, the most incongruous
assortment. Now it is suburban; now immortal. Now cheap continental jewellery is laid upon plush trays. Now
the stately woman stands naked, save for a wave of drapery above the knee. No form can he set on his
sensations as he strolls, one blazing afternoon, along the Parisian boulevard and skips out of the way of the
royal landau which, looking indescribably ramshackle, rattles along the pitted roadway, saluted by citizens of
both sexes cheaply dressed in bowler hats and continental costumes; though a shepherd in kilt, cap, and
gaiters very nearly drives his herd of goats between the royal wheels; and all the time the Acropolis surges
into the air, raises itself above the town, like a large immobile wave with the yellow columns of the Parthenon
firmly planted upon it.
The yellow columns of the Parthenon are to be seen at all hours of the day firmly planted upon the Acropolis;
though at sunset, when the ships in the Piraeus fire their guns, a bell rings, a man in uniform (the waistcoat
unbuttoned) appears; and the women roll up the black stockings which they are knitting in the shadow of the
columns, call to the children, and troop off down the hill back to their houses.
There they are again, the pillars, the pediment, the Temple of Victory and the Erechtheum, set on a tawny
rock cleft with shadows, directly you unlatch your shutters in the morning and, leaning out, hear the clatter,
the clamour, the whip cracking in the street below. There they are.
The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white, again yellow, and in some lights red,
imposes ideas of durability, of the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere dissipated
in elegant trifles. But this durability exists quite independently of our admiration. Although the beauty is
sufficiently humane to weaken us, to stir the deep deposit of mud−−memories, abandonments, regrets,
sentimental devotions−−the Parthenon is separate from all that; and if you consider how it has stood out all
night, for centuries, you begin to connect the blaze (at midday the glare is dazzling and the frieze almost
invisible) with the idea that perhaps it is beauty alone that is immortal.
Added to this, compared with the blistered stucco, the new love songs rasped out to the strum of guitar and
gramophone, and the mobile yet insignificant faces of the street, the Parthenon is really astonishing in its
silent composure; which is so vigorous that, far from being decayed, the Parthenon appears, on the contrary,
likely to outlast the entire world.
CHAPTER TWELVE 74
"And the Greeks, like sensible men, never bothered to finish the backs of their statues," said Jacob, shading
his eyes and observing that the side of the figure which is turned away from view is left in the rough.
He noted the slight irregularity in the line of the steps which "the artistic sense of the Greeks preferred to
mathematical accuracy," he read in his guide−book.
He stood on the exact spot where the great statue of Athena used to stand, and identified the more famous
landmarks of the scene beneath.
In short he was accurate and diligent; but profoundly morose. Moreover he was pestered by guides. This was
on Monday.
But on Wednesday he wrote a telegram to Bonamy, telling him to come at once. And then he crumpled it in
his hand and threw it in the gutter.
"For one thing he wouldn't come," he thought. "And then I daresay this sort of thing wears off." "This sort of
thing" being that uneasy, painful feeling, something like selfishness−−one wishes almost that the thing would
stop−−it is getting more and more beyond what is possible−− "If it goes on much longer I shan't be able to
cope with it−−but if some one else were seeing it at the same time−−Bonamy is stuffed in his room in
Lincoln's Inn−−oh, I say, damn it all, I say,"−−the sight of Hymettus, Pentelicus, Lycabettus on one side, and
the sea on the other, as one stands in the Parthenon at sunset, the sky pink feathered, the plain all colours, the
marble tawny in one's eyes, is thus oppressive. Luckily Jacob had little sense of personal association; he
seldom thought of Plato or Socrates in the flesh; on the other hand his feeling for architecture was very strong;
he preferred statues to pictures; and he was beginning to think a great deal about the problems of civilization,
which were solved, of course, so very remarkably by the ancient Greeks, though their solution is no help to us.
Then the hook gave a great tug in his side as he lay in bed on Wednesday night; and he turned over with a
desperate sort of tumble, remembering Sandra Wentworth Williams with whom he was in love.
Next day he climbed Pentelicus.
The day after he went up to the Acropolis. The hour was early; the place almost deserted; and possibly there
was thunder in the air. But the sun struck full upon the Acropolis.
Jacob's intention was to sit down and read, and, finding a drum of marble conveniently placed, from which
Marathon could be seen, and yet it was in the shade, while the Erechtheum blazed white in front of him, there
he sat. And after reading a page he put his thumb in his book. Why not rule countries in the way they should
be ruled? And he read again.
No doubt his position there overlooking Marathon somehow raised his spirits. Or it may have been that a slow
capacious brain has these moments of flowering. Or he had, insensibly, while he was abroad, got into the way
of thinking about politics.
And then looking up and seeing the sharp outline, his meditations were given an extraordinary edge; Greece
was over; the Parthenon in ruins; yet there he was.
(Ladies with green and white umbrellas passed through the courtyard−− French ladies on their way to join
their husbands in Constantinople.)
Jacob read on again. And laying the book on the ground he began, as if inspired by what he had read, to write
a note upon the importance of history−−upon democracy−−one of those scribbles upon which the work of a
lifetime may be based; or again, it falls out of a book twenty years later, and one can't remember a word of it.
It is a little painful. It had better be burnt.
CHAPTER TWELVE 75
Jacob wrote; began to draw a straight nose; when all the French ladies opening and shutting their umbrellas
just beneath him exclaimed, looking at the sky, that one did not know what to expect−−rain or fine weather?
Jacob got up and strolled across to the Erechtheum. There are still several women standing there holding the
roof on their heads. Jacob straightened himself slightly; for stability and balance affect the body first. These
statues annulled things so! He stared at them, then turned, and there was Madame Lucien Grave perched on a
block of marble with her kodak pointed at his head. Of course she jumped down, in spite of her age, her
figure, and her tight boots−−having, now that her daughter was married, lapsed with a luxurious
abandonment, grand enough in its way, into the fleshy grotesque; she jumped down, but not before Jacob had
seen her.
"Damn these women−−damn these women!" he thought. And he went to fetch his book which he had left
lying on the ground in the Parthenon.
"How they spoil things," he murmured, leaning against one of the pillars, pressing his book tight between his
arm and his side. (As for the weather, no doubt the storm would break soon; Athens was under cloud.)
"It is those damned women," said Jacob, without any trace of bitterness, but rather with sadness and
disappointment that what might have been should never be.
(This violent disillusionment is generally to be expected in young men in the prime of life, sound of wind and
limb, who will soon become fathers of families and directors of banks.)
Then, making sure that the Frenchwomen had gone, and looking cautiously round him, Jacob strolled over to
the Erechtheum and looked rather furtively at the goddess on the left−hand side holding the roof on her head.
She reminded him of Sandra Wentworth Williams. He looked at her, then looked away. He looked at her, then
looked away. He was extraordinarily moved, and with the battered Greek nose in his head, with Sandra in his
head, with all sorts of things in his head, off he started to walk right up to the top of Mount Hymettus, alone,
in the heat.
That very afternoon Bonamy went expressly to talk about Jacob to tea with Clara Durrant in the square behind
Sloane Street where, on hot spring days, there are striped blinds over the front windows, single horses pawing
the macadam outside the doors, and elderly gentlemen in yellow waistcoats ringing bells and stepping in very
politely when the maid demurely replies that Mrs. Durrant is at home.
Bonamy sat with Clara in the sunny front room with the barrel organ piping sweetly outside; the water−cart
going slowly along spraying the pavement; the carriages jingling, and all the silver and chintz, brown and blue
rugs and vases filled with green boughs, striped with trembling yellow bars.
The insipidity of what was said needs no illustration−−Bonamy kept on gently returning quiet answers and
accumulating amazement at an existence squeezed and emasculated within a white satin shoe (Mrs. Durrant
meanwhile enunciating strident politics with Sir Somebody in the back room) until the virginity of Clara's
soul appeared to him candid; the depths unknown; and he would have brought out Jacob's name had he not
begun to feel positively certain that Clara loved him−−and could do nothing whatever.
"Nothing whatever!" he exclaimed, as the door shut, and, for a man of his temperament, got a very queer
feeling, as he walked through the park, of carriages irresistibly driven; of flower beds uncompromisingly
geometrical; of force rushing round geometrical patterns in the most senseless way in the world. "Was Clara,"
he thought, pausing to watch the boys bathing in the Serpentine, "the silent woman?−−would Jacob marry
her?"
But in Athens in the sunshine, in Athens, where it is almost impossible to get afternoon tea, and elderly
CHAPTER TWELVE 76
gentlemen who talk politics talk them all the other way round, in Athens sat Sandra Wentworth Williams,
veiled, in white, her legs stretched in front of her, one elbow on the arm of the bamboo chair, blue clouds
wavering and drifting from her cigarette.
The orange trees which flourish in the Square of the Constitution, the band, the dragging of feet, the sky, the
houses, lemon and rose coloured−−all this became so significant to Mrs. Wentworth Williams after her second
cup of coffee that she began dramatizing the story of the noble and impulsive Englishwoman who had offered
a seat in her carriage to the old American lady at Mycenae (Mrs. Duggan)−−not altogether a false story,
though it said nothing of Evan, standing first on one foot, then on the other, waiting for the women to stop
chattering.
"I am putting the life of Father Damien into verse," Mrs. Duggan had said, for she had lost
everything−−everything in the world, husband and child and everything, but faith remained.
Sandra, floating from the particular to the universal, lay back in a trance.
The flight of time which hurries us so tragically along; the eternal drudge and drone, now bursting into fiery
flame like those brief balls of yellow among green leaves (she was looking at orange trees); kisses on lips that
are to die; the world turning, turning in mazes of heat and sound−−though to be sure there is the quiet evening
with its lovely pallor, "For I am sensitive to every side of it," Sandra thought, "and Mrs. Duggan will write to
me for ever, and I shall answer her letters." Now the royal band marching by with the national flag stirred
wider rings of emotion, and life became something that the courageous mount and ride out to sea on−−the hair
blown back (so she envisaged it, and the breeze stirred slightly among the orange trees) and she herself was
emerging from silver spray−−when she saw Jacob. He was standing in the Square with a book under his arm
looking vacantly about him. That he was heavily built and might become stout in time was a fact.
But she suspected him of being a mere bumpkin.
"There is that young man," she said, peevishly, throwing away her cigarette, "that Mr. Flanders."
"Where?" said Evan. "I don't see him."
"Oh, walking away−−behind the trees now. No, you can't see him. But we are sure to run into him," which, of
course, they did.
But how far was he a mere bumpkin? How far was Jacob Flanders at the age of twenty−six a stupid fellow? It
is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is
done. Some, it is true, take ineffaceable impressions of character at once. Others dally, loiter, and get blown
this way and that. Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always
go to a good man, they say; but then, Mrs. Whitehorn, Jacob's landlady, loathed cats.
There is also the highly respectable opinion that character−mongering is much overdone nowadays. After all,
what does it matter−−that Fanny Elmer was all sentiment and sensation, and Mrs. Durrant hard as iron? that
Clara, owing (so the character−mongers said) largely to her mother's influence, never yet had the chance to do
anything off her own bat, and only to very observant eyes displayed deeps of feeling which were positively
alarming; and would certainly throw herself away upon some one unworthy of her one of these days unless, so
the character−mongers said, she had a spark of her mother's spirit in her−−was somehow heroic. But what a
term to apply to Clara Durrant! Simple to a degree, others thought her. And that is the very reason, so they
said, why she attracts Dick Bonamy−−the young man with the Wellington nose. Now HE'S a dark horse if
you like. And there these gossips would suddenly pause. Obviously they meant to hint at his peculiar
disposition−−long rumoured among them.
CHAPTER TWELVE 77
"But sometimes it is precisely a woman like Clara that men of that temperament need..." Miss Julia Eliot
would hint.
"Well," Mr. Bowley would reply, "it may be so."
For however long these gossips sit, and however they stuff out their victims' characters till they are swollen
and tender as the livers of geese exposed to a hot fire, they never come to a decision.
"That young man, Jacob Flanders," they would say, "so distinguished looking−−and yet so awkward." Then
they would apply themselves to Jacob and vacillate eternally between the two extremes. He rode to hounds−−
after a fashion, for he hadn't a penny.
"Did you ever hear who his father was?" asked Julia Eliot.
"His mother, they say, is somehow connected with the Rocksbiers," replied Mr. Bowley.
"He doesn't overwork himself anyhow."
"His friends are very fond of him."
"Dick Bonamy, you mean?"
"No, I didn't mean that. It's evidently the other way with Jacob. He is precisely the young man to fall headlong
in love and repent it for the rest of his life."
"Oh, Mr. Bowley," said Mrs. Durrant, sweeping down upon them in her imperious manner, "you remember
Mrs. Adams? Well, that is her niece." And Mr. Bowley, getting up, bowed politely and fetched strawberries.
So we are driven back to see what the other side means−−the men in clubs and Cabinets−−when they say that
character−drawing is a frivolous fireside art, a matter of pins and needles, exquisite outlines enclosing
vacancy, flourishes, and mere scrawls.
The battleships ray out over the North Sea, keeping their stations accurately apart. At a given signal all the
guns are trained on a target which (the master gunner counts the seconds, watch in hand−−at the sixth he
looks up) flames into splinters. With equal nonchalance a dozen young men in the prime of life descend with
composed faces into the depths of the sea; and there impassively (though with perfect mastery of machinery)
suffocate uncomplainingly together. Like blocks of tin soldiers the army covers the cornfield, moves up the
hillside, stops, reels slightly this way and that, and falls flat, save that, through field glasses, it can be seen that
one or two pieces still agitate up and down like fragments of broken match−stick.
These actions, together with the incessant commerce of banks, laboratories, chancellories, and houses of
business, are the strokes which oar the world forward, they say. And they are dealt by men as smoothly
sculptured as the impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus. But you will observe that far from being padded to
rotundity his face is stiff from force of will, and lean from the efforts of keeping it so. When his right arm
rises, all the force in his veins flows straight from shoulder to finger−tips; not an ounce is diverted into sudden
impulses, sentimental regrets, wire−drawn distinctions. The buses punctually stop.
It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They say that the novelists never catch it; that it
goes hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what we live by−−this
unseizable force.
"Where are the men?" said old General Gibbons, looking round the drawing−room, full as usual on Sunday
CHAPTER TWELVE 78
afternoons of well−dressed people. "Where are the guns?"
Mrs. Durrant looked too.
Clara, thinking that her mother wanted her, came in; then went out again.
They were talking about Germany at the Durrants, and Jacob (driven by this unseizable force) walked rapidly
down Hermes Street and ran straight into the Williamses.
"Oh!" cried Sandra, with a cordiality which she suddenly felt. And Evan added, "What luck!"
The dinner which they gave him in the hotel which looks on to the Square of the Constitution was excellent.
Plated baskets contained fresh rolls. There was real butter. And the meat scarcely needed the disguise of
innumerable little red and green vegetables glazed in sauce.
It was strange, though. There were the little tables set out at intervals on the scarlet floor with the Greek
King's monogram wrought in yellow. Sandra dined in her hat, veiled as usual. Evan looked this way and that
over his shoulder; imperturbable yet supple; and sometimes sighed. It was strange. For they were English
people come together in Athens on a May evening. Jacob, helping himself to this and that, answered
intelligently, yet with a ring in his voice.
The Williamses were going to Constantinople early next morning, they said.
"Before you are up," said Sandra.
They would leave Jacob alone, then. Turning very slightly, Evan ordered something−−a bottle of wine−−from
which he helped Jacob, with a kind of solicitude, with a kind of paternal solicitude, if that were possible. To
be left alone−−that was good for a young fellow. Never was there a time when the country had more need of
men. He sighed.
"And you have been to the Acropolis?" asked Sandra.
"Yes," said Jacob. And they moved off to the window together, while Evan spoke to the head waiter about
calling them early.
"It is astonishing," said Jacob, in a gruff voice.
Sandra opened her eyes very slightly. Possibly her nostrils expanded a little too.
"At half−past six then," said Evan, coming towards them, looking as if he faced something in facing his wife
and Jacob standing with their backs to the window.
Sandra smiled at him.
And, as he went to the window and had nothing to say she added, in broken half−sentences:
"Well, but how lovely−−wouldn't it be? The Acropolis, Evan−−or are you too tired?"
At that Evan looked at them, or, since Jacob was staring ahead of him, at his wife, surlily, sullenly, yet with a
kind of distress−−not that she would pity him. Nor would the implacable spirit of love, for anything he could
do, cease its tortures.
CHAPTER TWELVE 79
They left him and he sat in the smoking−room, which looks out on to the Square of the Constitution.
"Evan is happier alone," said Sandra. "We have been separated from the newspapers. Well, it is better that
people should have what they want.... You have seen all these wonderful things since we met.... What
impression ... I think that you are changed."
"You want to go to the Acropolis," said Jacob. "Up here then."
"One will remember it all one's life," said Sandra.
"Yes," said Jacob. "I wish you could have come in the day−time."
"This is more wonderful," said Sandra, waving her hand.
Jacob looked vaguely.
"But you should see the Parthenon in the day−time," he said. "You couldn't come to−morrow−−it would be
too early?"
"You have sat there for hours and hours by yourself?"
"There were some awful women this morning," said Jacob.
"Awful women?" Sandra echoed.
"Frenchwomen."
"But something very wonderful has happened," said Sandra. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour−−that
was all the time before her.
"Yes," he said.
"When one is your age−−when one is young. What will you do? You will fall in love−−oh yes! But don't be in
too great a hurry. I am so much older."
She was brushed off the pavement by parading men.
"Shall we go on?" Jacob asked.
"Let us go on," she insisted.
For she could not stop until she had told him−−or heard him say−−or was it some action on his part that she
required? Far away on the horizon she discerned it and could not rest.
"You'd never get English people to sit out like this," he said.
"Never−−no. When you get back to England you won't forget this−−or come with us to Constantinople!" she
cried suddenly.
"But then..."
Sandra sighed.
CHAPTER TWELVE 80
"You must go to Delphi, of course," she said. "But," she asked herself, "what do I want from him? Perhaps it
is something that I have missed...."
"You will get there about six in the evening," she said. "You will see the eagles."
Jacob looked set and even desperate by the light at the street corner and yet composed. He was suffering,
perhaps. He was credulous. Yet there was something caustic about him. He had in him the seeds of extreme
disillusionment, which would come to him from women in middle life. Perhaps if one strove hard enough to
reach the top of the hill it need not come to him−−this disillusionment from women in middle life.
"The hotel is awful," she said. "The last visitors had left their basins full of dirty water. There is always that,"
she laughed.
"The people one meets ARE beastly," Jacob said.
His excitement was clear enough.
"Write and tell me about it," she said. "And tell me what you feel and what you think. Tell me everything."
The night was dark. The Acropolis was a jagged mound.
"I should like to, awfully," he said.
"When we get back to London, we shall meet..."
"Yes."
"I suppose they leave the gates open?" he asked.
"We could climb them!" she answered wildly.
Obscuring the moon and altogether darkening the Acropolis the clouds passed from east to west. The clouds
solidified; the vapours thickened; the trailing veils stayed and accumulated.
It was dark now over Athens, except for gauzy red streaks where the streets ran; and the front of the Palace
was cadaverous from electric light. At sea the piers stood out, marked by separate dots; the waves being
invisible, and promontories and islands were dark humps with a few lights.
"I'd love to bring my brother, if I may," Jacob murmured.
"And then when your mother comes to London−−," said Sandra.
The mainland of Greece was dark; and somewhere off Euboea a cloud must have touched the waves and
spattered them−−the dolphins circling deeper and deeper into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down
the Sea of Marmara between Greece and the plains of Troy.
In Greece and the uplands of Albania and Turkey, the wind scours the sand and the dust, and sows itself thick
with dry particles. And then it pelts the smooth domes of the mosques, and makes the cypresses, standing stiff
by the turbaned tombstones of Mohammedans, creak and bristle.
Sandra's veils were swirled about her.
CHAPTER TWELVE 81
"I will give you my copy," said Jacob. "Here. Will you keep it?"
(The book was the poems of Donne.)
Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star. Now it was dark. Now one after another lights were
extinguished. Now great towns−−Paris−− Constantinople−−London−−were black as strewn rocks. Waterways
might be distinguished. In England the trees were heavy in leaf. Here perhaps in some southern wood an old
man lit dry ferns and the birds were startled. The sheep coughed; one flower bent slightly towards another.
The English sky is softer, milkier than the Eastern. Something gentle has passed into it from the
grass−rounded hills, something damp. The salt gale blew in at Betty Flanders's bedroom window, and the
widow lady, raising herself slightly on her elbow, sighed like one who realizes, but would fain ward off a little
longer−−oh, a little longer!−−the oppression of eternity.
But to return to Jacob and Sandra.
They had vanished. There was the Acropolis; but had they reached it? The columns and the Temple remain;
the emotion of the living breaks fresh on them year after year; and of that what remains?
As for reaching the Acropolis who shall say that we ever do it, or that when Jacob woke next morning he
found anything hard and durable to keep for ever? Still, he went with them to Constantinople.
Sandra Wentworth Williams certainly woke to find a copy of Donne's poems upon her dressing−table. And
the book would be stood on the shelf in the English country house where Sally Duggan's Life of Father
Damien in verse would join it one of these days. There were ten or twelve little volumes already. Strolling in
at dusk, Sandra would open the books and her eyes would brighten (but not at the print), and subsiding into
the arm−chair she would suck back again the soul of the moment; or, for sometimes she was restless, would
pull out book after book and swing across the whole space of her life like an acrobat from bar to bar. She had
had her moments. Meanwhile, the great clock on the landing ticked and Sandra would hear time
accumulating, and ask herself, "What for? What for?"
"What for? What for?" Sandra would say, putting the book back, and strolling to the looking−glass and
pressing her hair. And Miss Edwards would be startled at dinner, as she opened her mouth to admit roast
mutton, by Sandra's sudden solicitude: "Are you happy, Miss Edwards?"−−a thing Cissy Edwards hadn't
thought of for years.
"What for? What for?" Jacob never asked himself any such questions, to judge by the way he laced his boots;
shaved himself; to judge by the depth of his sleep that night, with the wind fidgeting at the shutters, and
half−a−dozen mosquitoes singing in his ears. He was young−−a man. And then Sandra was right when she
judged him to be credulous as yet. At forty it might be a different matter. Already he had marked the things he
liked in Donne, and they were savage enough. However, you might place beside them passages of the purest
poetry in Shakespeare.
But the wind was rolling the darkness through the streets of Athens, rolling it, one might suppose, with a sort
of trampling energy of mood which forbids too close an analysis of the feelings of any single person, or
inspection of features. All faces−−Greek, Levantine, Turkish, English−−would have looked much the same in
that darkness. At length the columns and the Temples whiten, yellow, turn rose; and the Pyramids and St.
Peter's arise, and at last sluggish St. Paul's looms up.
The Christians have the right to rouse most cities with their interpretation of the day's meaning. Then, less
melodiously, dissenters of different sects issue a cantankerous emendation. The steamers, resounding like
gigantic tuning−forks, state the old old fact−−how there is a sea coldly, greenly, swaying outside. But
nowadays it is the thin voice of duty, piping in a white thread from the top of a funnel, that collects the largest
CHAPTER TWELVE 82
multitudes, and night is nothing but a long−drawn sigh between hammer−strokes, a deep breath−−you can
hear it from an open window even in the heart of London.
But who, save the nerve−worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with hands to the eyes on some crag above
the multitude, see things thus in skeleton outline, bare of flesh? In Surbiton the skeleton is wrapped in flesh.
"The kettle never boils so well on a sunny morning," says Mrs. Grandage, glancing at the clock on the
mantelpiece. Then the grey Persian cat stretches itself on the window−seat, and buffets a moth with soft round
paws. And before breakfast is half over (they were late today), a baby is deposited in her lap, and she must
guard the sugar basin while Tom Grandage reads the golfing article in the "Times," sips his coffee, wipes his
moustaches, and is off to the office, where he is the greatest authority upon the foreign exchanges and marked
for promotion. The skeleton is well wrapped in flesh. Even this dark night when the wind rolls the darkness
through Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square it stirs (since it is summer−time and the height
of the season), plane trees spangled with electric light, and curtains still preserving the room from the dawn.
People still murmur over the last word said on the staircase, or strain, all through their dreams, for the voice of
the alarum clock. So when the wind roams through a forest innumerable twigs stir; hives are brushed; insects
sway on grass blades; the spider runs rapidly up a crease in the bark; and the whole air is tremulous with
breathing; elastic with filaments.
Only here−−in Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square−−each insect carries a globe of the world
in his head, and the webs of the forest are schemes evolved for the smooth conduct of business; and honey is
treasure of one sort and another; and the stir in the air is the indescribable agitation of life.
But colour returns; runs up the stalks of the grass; blows out into tulips and crocuses; solidly stripes the tree
trunks; and fills the gauze of the air and the grasses and pools.
The Bank of England emerges; and the Monument with its bristling head of golden hair; the dray horses
crossing London Bridge show grey and strawberry and iron−coloured. There is a whir of wings as the
suburban trains rush into the terminus. And the light mounts over the faces of all the tall blind houses, slides
through a chink and paints the lustrous bellying crimson curtains; the green wine−glasses; the coffee− cups;
and the chairs standing askew.
Sunlight strikes in upon shaving−glasses; and gleaming brass cans; upon all the jolly trappings of the day; the
bright, inquisitive, armoured, resplendent, summer's day, which has long since vanquished chaos; which has
dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stood glass and stone upon it; and equipped our
brains and bodies with such an armoury of weapons that merely to see the flash and thrust of limbs engaged in
the conduct of daily life is better than the old pageant of armies drawn out in battle array upon the plain.

Chapter 13


"The Height of the season," said Bonamy.
The sun had already blistered the paint on the backs of the green chairs in Hyde Park; peeled the bark off the
plane trees; and turned the earth to powder and to smooth yellow pebbles. Hyde Park was circled, incessantly,
by turning wheels.
"The height of the season," said Bonamy sarcastically.
He was sarcastic because of Clara Durrant; because Jacob had come back from Greece very brown and lean,
with his pockets full of Greek notes, which he pulled out when the chair man came for pence; because Jacob
was silent.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 83
"He has not said a word to show that he is glad to see me," thought Bonamy bitterly.
The motor cars passed incessantly over the bridge of the Serpentine; the upper classes walked upright, or bent
themselves gracefully over the palings; the lower classes lay with their knees cocked up, flat on their backs;
the sheep grazed on pointed wooden legs; small children ran down the sloping grass, stretched their arms, and
fell.
"Very urbane," Jacob brought out.
"Urbane" on the lips of Jacob had mysteriously all the shapeliness of a character which Bonamy thought daily
more sublime, devastating, terrific than ever, though he was still, and perhaps would be for ever, barbaric,
obscure.
What superlatives! What adjectives! How acquit Bonamy of sentimentality of the grossest sort; of being
tossed like a cork on the waves; of having no steady insight into character; of being unsupported by reason,
and of drawing no comfort whatever from the works of the classics?
"The height of civilization," said Jacob.
He was fond of using Latin words.
Magnanimity, virtue−−such words when Jacob used them in talk with Bonamy meant that he took control of
the situation; that Bonamy would play round him like an affectionate spaniel; and that (as likely as not) they
would end by rolling on the floor.
"And Greece?" said Bonamy. "The Parthenon and all that?"
"There's none of this European mysticism," said Jacob.
"It's the atmosphere. I suppose," said Bonamy. "And you went to Constantinople?"
"Yes," said Jacob.
Bonamy paused, moved a pebble; then darted in with the rapidity and certainty of a lizard's tongue.
"You are in love!" he exclaimed.
Jacob blushed.
The sharpest of knives never cut so deep.
As for responding, or taking the least account of it, Jacob stared straight ahead of him, fixed, monolithic−−oh,
very beautiful!−−like a British Admiral, exclaimed Bonamy in a rage, rising from his seat and walking off;
waiting for some sound; none came; too proud to look back; walking quicker and quicker until he found
himself gazing into motor cars and cursing women. Where was the pretty woman's face? Clara's−−
Fanny's−−Florinda's? Who was the pretty little creature?
Not Clara Durrant.
The Aberdeen terrier must be exercised, and as Mr. Bowley was going that very moment−−would like nothing
better than a walk−−they went together, Clara and kind little Bowley−−Bowley who had rooms in the Albany,
Bowley who wrote letters to the "Times" in a jocular vein about foreign hotels and the Aurora
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 84
Borealis−−Bowley who liked young people and walked down Piccadilly with his right arm resting on the boss
of his back.
"Little demon!" cried Clara, and attached Troy to his chain.
Bowley anticipated−−hoped for−−a confidence. Devoted to her mother, Clara sometimes felt her a little, well,
her mother was so sure of herself that she could not understand other people being−−being−−"as ludicrous as
I am," Clara jerked out (the dog tugging her forwards). And Bowley thought she looked like a huntress and
turned over in his mind which it should be−−some pale virgin with a slip of the moon in her hair, which was a
flight for Bowley.
The colour was in her cheeks. To have spoken outright about her mother−− still, it was only to Mr. Bowley,
who loved her, as everybody must; but to speak was unnatural to her, yet it was awful to feel, as she had done
all day, that she MUST tell some one.
"Wait till we cross the road," she said to the dog, bending down.
Happily she had recovered by that time.
"She thinks so much about England," she said. "She is so anxious−−−"
Bowley was defrauded as usual. Clara never confided in any one.
"Why don't the young people settle it, eh?" he wanted to ask. "What's all this about England?"−−a question
poor Clara could not have answered, since, as Mrs. Durrant discussed with Sir Edgar the policy of Sir Edward
Grey, Clara only wondered why the cabinet looked dusty, and Jacob had never come. Oh, here was Mrs.
Cowley Johnson...
And Clara would hand the pretty china teacups, and smile at the compliment−−that no one in London made
tea so well as she did.
"We get it at Brocklebank's," she said, "in Cursitor Street."
Ought she not to be grateful? Ought she not to be happy?
Especially since her mother looked so well and enjoyed so much talking to Sir Edgar about Morocco,
Venezuela, or some such place.
"Jacob! Jacob!" thought Clara; and kind Mr. Bowley, who was ever so good with old ladies, looked; stopped;
wondered whether Elizabeth wasn't too harsh with her daughter; wondered about Bonamy, Jacob−−which
young fellow was it?−−and jumped up directly Clara said she must exercise Troy.
They had reached the site of the old Exhibition. They looked at the tulips. Stiff and curled, the little rods of
waxy smoothness rose from the earth, nourished yet contained, suffused with scarlet and coral pink. Each had
its shadow; each grew trimly in the diamond−shaped wedge as the gardener had planned it.
"Barnes never gets them to grow like that," Clara mused; she sighed.
"You are neglecting your friends," said Bowley, as some one, going the other way, lifted his hat. She started;
acknowledged Mr. Lionel Parry's bow; wasted on him what had sprung for Jacob.
("Jacob! Jacob!" she thought.)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 85
"But you'll get run over if I let you go," she said to the dog.
"England seems all right," said Mr. Bowley.
The loop of the railing beneath the statue of Achilles was full of parasols and waistcoats; chains and bangles;
of ladies and gentlemen, lounging elegantly, lightly observant.
"'This statue was erected by the women of England...'" Clara read out with a foolish little laugh. "Oh, Mr.
Bowley! Oh!" Gallop−−gallop−− gallop−−a horse galloped past without a rider. The stirrups swung; the
pebbles spurted.
"Oh, stop! Stop it, Mr. Bowley!" she cried, white, trembling, gripping his arm, utterly unconscious, the tears
coming.
"Tut−tut!" said Mr. Bowley in his dressing−room an hour later. "Tut− tut!"−−a comment that was profound
enough, though inarticulately expressed, since his valet was handing his shirt studs.
Julia Eliot, too, had seen the horse run away, and had risen from her seat to watch the end of the incident,
which, since she came of a sporting family, seemed to her slightly ridiculous. Sure enough the little man came
pounding behind with his breeches dusty; looked thoroughly annoyed; and was being helped to mount by a
policeman when Julia Eliot, with a sardonic smile, turned towards the Marble Arch on her errand of mercy. It
was only to visit a sick old lady who had known her mother and perhaps the Duke of Wellington; for Julia
shared the love of her sex for the distressed; liked to visit death−beds; threw slippers at weddings; received
confidences by the dozen; knew more pedigrees than a scholar knows dates, and was one of the kindliest,
most generous, least continent of women.
Yet five minutes after she had passed the statue of Achilles she had the rapt look of one brushing through
crowds on a summer's afternoon, when the trees are rustling, the wheels churning yellow, and the tumult of
the present seems like an elegy for past youth and past summers, and there rose in her mind a curious sadness,
as if time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoasts, and she saw people passing tragically to
destruction. Yet, Heaven knows, Julia was no fool. A sharper woman at a bargain did not exist. She was
always punctual. The watch on her wrist gave her twelve minutes and a half in which to reach Bruton Street.
Lady Congreve expected her at five.
The gilt clock at Verrey's was striking five.
Florinda looked at it with a dull expression, like an animal. She looked at the clock; looked at the door; looked
at the long glass opposite; disposed her cloak; drew closer to the table, for she was pregnant−−no doubt about
it, Mother Stuart said, recommending remedies, consulting friends; sunk, caught by the heel, as she tripped so
lightly over the surface.
Her tumbler of pinkish sweet stuff was set down by the waiter; and she sucked, through a straw, her eyes on
the looking−glass, on the door, now soothed by the sweet taste. When Nick Bramham came in it was plain,
even to the young Swiss waiter, that there was a bargain between them. Nick hitched his clothes together
clumsily; ran his fingers through his hair; sat down, to an ordeal, nervously. She looked at him; and set off
laughing; laughed−−laughed−−laughed. The young Swiss waiter, standing with crossed legs by the pillar,
laughed too.
The door opened; in came the roar of Regent Street, the roar of traffic, impersonal, unpitying; and sunshine
grained with dirt. The Swiss waiter must see to the newcomers. Bramham lifted his glass.
"He's like Jacob," said Florinda, looking at the newcomer.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 86
"The way he stares." She stopped laughing.
Jacob, leaning forward, drew a plan of the Parthenon in the dust in Hyde Park, a network of strokes at least,
which may have been the Parthenon, or again a mathematical diagram. And why was the pebble so
emphatically ground in at the corner? It was not to count his notes that he took out a wad of papers and read a
long flowing letter which Sandra had written two days ago at Milton Dower House with his book before her
and in her mind the memory of something said or attempted, some moment in the dark on the road to the
Acropolis which (such was her creed) mattered for ever.
"He is," she mused, "like that man in Moliere."
She meant Alceste. She meant that he was severe. She meant that she could deceive him.
"Or could I not?" she thought, putting the poems of Donne back in the bookcase. "Jacob," she went on, going
to the window and looking over the spotted flower−beds across the grass where the piebald cows grazed under
beech trees, "Jacob would be shocked."
The perambulator was going through the little gate in the railing. She kissed her hand; directed by the nurse,
Jimmy waved his.
"HE'S a small boy," she said, thinking of Jacob.
And yet−−Alceste?
"What a nuisance you are!" Jacob grumbled, stretching out first one leg and then the other and feeling in each
trouser−pocket for his chair ticket.
"I expect the sheep have eaten it," he said. "Why do you keep sheep?"
"Sorry to disturb you, sir," said the ticket−collector, his hand deep in the enormous pouch of pence.
"Well, I hope they pay you for it," said Jacob. "There you are. No. You can stick to it. Go and get drunk."
He had parted with half−a−crown, tolerantly, compassionately, with considerable contempt for his species.
Even now poor Fanny Elmer was dealing, as she walked along the Strand, in her incompetent way with this
very careless, indifferent, sublime manner he had of talking to railway guards or porters; or Mrs. Whitehorn,
when she consulted him about her little boy who was beaten by the schoolmaster.
Sustained entirely upon picture post cards for the past two months, Fanny's idea of Jacob was more
statuesque, noble, and eyeless than ever. To reinforce her vision she had taken to visiting the British Museum,
where, keeping her eyes downcast until she was alongside of the battered Ulysses, she opened them and got a
fresh shock of Jacob's presence, enough to last her half a day. But this was wearing thin. And she wrote
now−−poems, letters that were never posted, saw his face in advertisements on hoardings, and would cross the
road to let the barrel− organ turn her musings to rhapsody. But at breakfast (she shared rooms with a teacher),
when the butter was smeared about the plate, and the prongs of the forks were clotted with old egg yolk, she
revised these visions violently; was, in truth, very cross; was losing her complexion, as Margery Jackson told
her, bringing the whole thing down (as she laced her stout boots) to a level of mother−wit, vulgarity, and
sentiment, for she had loved too; and been a fool.
"One's godmothers ought to have told one," said Fanny, looking in at the window of Bacon, the mapseller, in
the Strand−−told one that it is no use making a fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it now,
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 87
looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines.
"This is life. This is life," said Fanny.
"A very hard face," thought Miss Barrett, on the other side of the glass, buying maps of the Syrian desert and
waiting impatiently to be served. "Girls look old so soon nowadays."
The equator swam behind tears.
"Piccadilly?" Fanny asked the conductor of the omnibus, and climbed to the top. After all, he would, he must,
come back to her.
But Jacob might have been thinking of Rome; of architecture; of jurisprudence; as he sat under the plane tree
in Hyde Park.
The omnibus stopped outside Charing Cross; and behind it were clogged omnibuses, vans, motor−cars, for a
procession with banners was passing down Whitehall, and elderly people were stiffly descending from
between the paws of the slippery lions, where they had been testifying to their faith, singing lustily, raising
their eyes from their music to look into the sky, and still their eyes were on the sky as they marched behind
the gold letters of their creed.
The traffic stopped, and the sun, no longer sprayed out by the breeze, became almost too hot. But the
procession passed; the banners glittered −−far away down Whitehall; the traffic was released; lurched on;
spun to a smooth continuous uproar; swerving round the curve of Cockspur Street; and sweeping past
Government offices and equestrian statues down Whitehall to the prickly spires, the tethered grey fleet of
masonry, and the large white clock of Westminster.
Five strokes Big Ben intoned; Nelson received the salute. The wires of the Admiralty shivered with some
far−away communication. A voice kept remarking that Prime Ministers and Viceroys spoke in the Reichstag;
entered Lahore; said that the Emperor travelled; in Milan they rioted; said there were rumours in Vienna; said
that the Ambassador at Constantinople had audience with the Sultan; the fleet was at Gibraltar. The voice
continued, imprinting on the faces of the clerks in Whitehall (Timothy Durrant was one of them) something of
its own inexorable gravity, as they listened, deciphered, wrote down. Papers accumulated, inscribed with the
utterances of Kaisers, the statistics of ricefields, the growling of hundreds of work−people, plotting sedition in
back streets, or gathering in the Calcutta bazaars, or mustering their forces in the uplands of Albania, where
the hills are sand−coloured, and bones lie unburied.
The voice spoke plainly in the square quiet room with heavy tables, where one elderly man made notes on the
margin of typewritten sheets, his silver−topped umbrella leaning against the bookcase.
His head−−bald, red−veined, hollow−looking−−represented all the heads in the building. His head, with the
amiable pale eyes, carried the burden of knowledge across the street; laid it before his colleagues, who came
equally burdened; and then the sixteen gentlemen, lifting their pens or turning perhaps rather wearily in their
chairs, decreed that the course of history should shape itself this way or that way, being manfully determined,
as their faces showed, to impose some coherency upon Rajahs and Kaisers and the muttering in bazaars, the
secret gatherings, plainly visible in Whitehall, of kilted peasants in Albanian uplands; to control the course of
events.
Pitt and Chatham, Burke and Gladstone looked from side to side with fixed marble eyes and an air of
immortal quiescence which perhaps the living may have envied, the air being full of whistling and
concussions, as the procession with its banners passed down Whitehall. Moreover, some were troubled with
dyspepsia; one had at that very moment cracked the glass of his spectacles; another spoke in Glasgow
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 88
to−morrow; altogether they looked too red, fat, pale or lean, to be dealing, as the marble heads had dealt, with
the course of history.
Timmy Durrant in his little room in the Admiralty, going to consult a Blue book, stopped for a moment by the
window and observed the placard tied round the lamp−post.
Miss Thomas, one of the typists, said to her friend that if the Cabinet was going to sit much longer she should
miss her boy outside the Gaiety.
Timmy Durrant, returning with his Blue book under his arm, noticed a little knot of people at the street corner;
conglomerated as though one of them knew something; and the others, pressing round him, looked up, looked
down, looked along the street. What was it that he knew?
Timothy, placing the Blue book before him, studied a paper sent round by the Treasury for information. Mr.
Crawley, his fellow−clerk, impaled a letter on a skewer.
Jacob rose from his chair in Hyde Park, tore his ticket to pieces, and walked away.
"Such a sunset," wrote Mrs. Flanders in her letter to Archer at Singapore. "One couldn't make up one's mind
to come indoors," she wrote. "It seemed wicked to waste even a moment."
The long windows of Kensington Palace flushed fiery rose as Jacob walked away; a flock of wild duck flew
over the Serpentine; and the trees were stood against the sky, blackly, magnificently.
"Jacob," wrote Mrs. Flanders, with the red light on her page, "is hard at work after his delightful journey..."
"The Kaiser," the far−away voice remarked in Whitehall, "received me in audience."
"Now I know that face−−" said the Reverend Andrew Floyd, coming out of Carter's shop in Piccadilly, "but
who the dickens−−?" and he watched Jacob, turned round to look at him, but could not be sure−−
"Oh, Jacob Flanders!" he remembered in a flash.
But he was so tall; so unconscious; such a fine young fellow.
"I gave him Byron's works," Andrew Floyd mused, and started forward, as Jacob crossed the road; but
hesitated, and let the moment pass, and lost the opportunity.
Another procession, without banners, was blocking Long Acre. Carriages, with dowagers in amethyst and
gentlemen spotted with carnations, intercepted cabs and motor−cars turned in the opposite direction, in which
jaded men in white waistcoats lolled, on their way home to shrubberies and billiard−rooms in Putney and
Wimbledon.
Two barrel−organs played by the kerb, and horses coming out of Aldridge's with white labels on their
buttocks straddled across the road and were smartly jerked back.
Mrs. Durrant, sitting with Mr. Wortley in a motor−car, was impatient lest they should miss the overture.
But Mr. Wortley, always urbane, always in time for the overture, buttoned his gloves, and admired Miss
Clara.
"A shame to spend such a night in the theatre!" said Mrs. Durrant, seeing all the windows of the coachmakers
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 89
in Long Acre ablaze.
"Think of your moors!" said Mr. Wortley to Clara.
"Ah! but Clara likes this better," Mrs. Durrant laughed.
"I don't know−−really," said Clara, looking at the blazing windows. She started.
She saw Jacob.
"Who?" asked Mrs. Durrant sharply, leaning forward.
But she saw no one.
Under the arch of the Opera House large faces and lean ones, the powdered and the hairy, all alike were red in
the sunset; and, quickened by the great hanging lamps with their repressed primrose lights, by the tramp, and
the scarlet, and the pompous ceremony, some ladies looked for a moment into steaming bedrooms near by,
where women with loose hair leaned out of windows, where girls−−where children−−(the long mirrors held
the ladies suspended) but one must follow; one must not block the way.
Clara's moors were fine enough. The Phoenicians slept under their piled grey rocks; the chimneys of the old
mines pointed starkly; early moths blurred the heather−bells; cartwheels could be heard grinding on the road
far beneath; and the suck and sighing of the waves sounded gently, persistently, for ever.
Shading her eyes with her hand Mrs. Pascoe stood in her cabbage−garden looking out to sea. Two steamers
and a sailing−ship crossed each other; passed each other; and in the bay the gulls kept alighting on a log,
rising high, returning again to the log, while some rode in upon the waves and stood on the rim of the water
until the moon blanched all to whiteness.
Mrs. Pascoe had gone indoors long ago.
But the red light was on the columns of the Parthenon, and the Greek women who were knitting their
stockings and sometimes crying to a child to come and have the insects picked from its head were as jolly as
sand− martins in the heat, quarrelling, scolding, suckling their babies, until the ships in the Piraeus fired their
guns.
The sound spread itself flat, and then went tunnelling its way with fitful explosions among the channels of the
islands.
Darkness drops like a knife over Greece.
"The guns?" said Betty Flanders, half asleep, getting out of bed and going to the window, which was
decorated with a fringe of dark leaves.
"Not at this distance," she thought. "It is the sea."
Again, far away, she heard the dull sound, as if nocturnal women were beating great carpets. There was Morty
lost, and Seabrook dead; her sons fighting for their country. But were the chickens safe? Was that some one
moving downstairs? Rebecca with the toothache? No. The nocturnal women were beating great carpets. Her
hens shifted slightly on their perches.

Chapter 14


"He left everything just as it was," Bonamy marvelled. "Nothing arranged. All his letters strewn about for any
one to read. What did he expect? Did he think he would come back?" he mused, standing in the middle of
Jacob's room.
The eighteenth century has its distinction. These houses were built, say, a hundred and fifty years ago. The
rooms are shapely, the ceilings high; over the doorways a rose or a ram's skull is carved in the wood. Even the
panels, painted in raspberry−coloured paint, have their distinction.
Bonamy took up a bill for a hunting−crop.
"That seems to be paid," he said.
There were Sandra's letters.
Mrs. Durrant was taking a party to Greenwich.
Lady Rocksbier hoped for the pleasure....
Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the
wicker arm−chair creaks, though no one sits there.
Bonamy crossed to the window. Pickford's van swung down the street. The omnibuses were locked together at
Mudie's corner. Engines throbbed, and carters, jamming the brakes down, pulled their horses sharp up. A
harsh and unhappy voice cried something unintelligible. And then suddenly all the leaves seemed to raise
themselves.
"Jacob! Jacob!" cried Bonamy, standing by the window. The leaves sank down again.
"Such confusion everywhere!" exclaimed Betty Flanders, bursting open the bedroom door.
Bonamy turned away from the window.
"What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?"
She held out a pair of Jacob's old shoes.

Chapter I


As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them
arm−in−arm. If you persist, lawyers' clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady typists
will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay
the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand.
One afternoon in the beginning of October when the traffic was becoming brisk a tall man strode along the
edge of the pavement with a lady on his arm. Angry glances struck upon their backs. The small, agitated
figures−−for in comparison with this couple most people looked small−−decorated with fountain pens, and
burdened with despatch−boxes, had appointments to keep, and drew a weekly salary, so that there was some
reason for the unfriendly stare which was bestowed upon Mr. Ambrose's height and upon Mrs. Ambrose's
cloak. But some enchantment had put both man and woman beyond the reach of malice and unpopularity. In
his guess one might guess from the moving lips that it was thought; and in hers from the eyes fixed stonily
straight in front of her at a level above the eyes of most that it was sorrow. It was only by scorning all she met
that she kept herself from tears, and the friction of people brushing past her was evidently painful. After
watching the traffic on the Embankment for a minute or two with a stoical gaze she twitched her husband's
sleeve, and they crossed between the swift discharge of motor cars. When they were safe on the further side,
she gently withdrew her arm from his, allowing her mouth at the same time to relax, to tremble; then tears
rolled down, and leaning her elbows on the balustrade, she shielded her face from the curious. Mr. Ambrose
attempted consolation; he patted her shoulder; but she showed no signs of admitting him, and feeling it
awkward to stand beside a grief that was greater than his, he crossed his arms behind him, and took a turn
along the pavement.
The embankment juts out in angles here and there, like pulpits; instead of preachers, however, small boys
occupy them, dangling string, dropping pebbles, or launching wads of paper for a cruise. With their sharp eye
for eccentricity, they were inclined to think Mr. Ambrose awful; but the quickest witted cried "Bluebeard!" as
he passed. In case they should proceed to tease his wife, Mr. Ambrose flourished his stick at them, upon
which they decided that he was grotesque merely, and four instead of one cried "Bluebeard!" in chorus.
Although Mrs. Ambrose stood quite still, much longer than is natural, the little boys let her be. Some one is
always looking into the river near Waterloo Bridge; a couple will stand there talking for half an hour on a fine
afternoon; most people, walking for pleasure, contemplate for three minutes; when, having compared the
occasion with other occasions, or made some sentence, they pass on. Sometimes the flats and churches and
hotels of Westminster are like the outlines of Constantinople in a mist; sometimes the river is an opulent
purple, sometimes mud−coloured, sometimes sparkling blue like the sea. It is always worth while to look
down and see what is happening. But this lady looked neither up nor down; the only thing she had seen, since
she stood there, was a circular iridescent patch slowly floating past with a straw in the middle of it. The straw
and the patch swam again and again behind the tremulous medium of a great welling tear, and the tear rose
and fell and dropped into the river. Then there struck close upon her ears−−
Lars Porsena of Clusium By the nine Gods he swore−−
and then more faintly, as if the speaker had passed her on his walk−−
That the Great House of Tarquin Should suffer wrong no more.
Yes, she knew she must go back to all that, but at present she must weep. Screening her face she sobbed more
steadily than she had yet done, her shoulders rising and falling with great regularity. It was this figure that her
husband saw when, having reached the polished Sphinx, having entangled himself with a man selling picture
postcards, he turned; the stanza instantly stopped. He came up to her, laid his hand on her shoulder, and said,
"Dearest." His voice was supplicating. But she shut her face away from him, as much as to say, "You can't
Chapter I 2
possibly understand."
As he did not leave her, however, she had to wipe her eyes, and to raise them to the level of the factory
chimneys on the other bank. She saw also the arches of Waterloo Bridge and the carts moving across them,
like the line of animals in a shooting gallery. They were seen blankly, but to see anything was of course to end
her weeping and begin to walk.
"I would rather walk," she said, her husband having hailed a cab already occupied by two city men.
The fixity of her mood was broken by the action of walking. The shooting motor cars, more like spiders in the
moon than terrestrial objects, the thundering drays, the jingling hansoms, and little black broughams, made
her think of the world she lived in. Somewhere up there above the pinnacles where the smoke rose in a
pointed hill, her children were now asking for her, and getting a soothing reply. As for the mass of streets,
squares, and public buildings which parted them, she only felt at this moment how little London had done to
make her love it, although thirty of her forty years had been spent in a street. She knew how to read the people
who were passing her; there were the rich who were running to and from each others' houses at this hour;
there were the bigoted workers driving in a straight line to their offices; there were the poor who were
unhappy and rightly malignant. Already, though there was sunlight in the haze, tattered old men and women
were nodding off to sleep upon the seats. When one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed things, this was the
skeleton beneath.
A fine rain now made her still more dismal; vans with the odd names of those engaged in odd
industries−−Sprules, Manufacturer of Saw−dust; Grabb, to whom no piece of waste paper comes amiss−−fell
flat as a bad joke; bold lovers, sheltered behind one cloak, seemed to her sordid, past their passion; the flower
women, a contented company, whose talk is always worth hearing, were sodden hags; the red, yellow, and
blue flowers, whose heads were pressed together, would not blaze. Moreover, her husband walking with a
quick rhythmic stride, jerking his free hand occasionally, was either a Viking or a stricken Nelson; the
sea−gulls had changed his note.
"Ridley, shall we drive? Shall we drive, Ridley?"
Mrs. Ambrose had to speak sharply; by this time he was far away.
The cab, by trotting steadily along the same road, soon withdrew them from the West End, and plunged them
into London. It appeared that this was a great manufacturing place, where the people were engaged in making
things, as though the West End, with its electric lamps, its vast plate−glass windows all shining yellow, its
carefully−finished houses, and tiny live figures trotting on the pavement, or bowled along on wheels in the
road, was the finished work. It appeared to her a very small bit of work for such an enormous factory to have
made. For some reason it appeared to her as a small golden tassel on the edge of a vast black cloak.
Observing that they passed no other hansom cab, but only vans and waggons, and that not one of the thousand
men and women she saw was either a gentleman or a lady, Mrs. Ambrose understood that after all it is the
ordinary thing to be poor, and that London is the city of innumerable poor people. Startled by this discovery
and seeing herself pacing a circle all the days of her life round Picadilly Circus she was greatly relieved to
pass a building put up by the London County Council for Night Schools.
"Lord, how gloomy it is!" her husband groaned. "Poor creatures!"
What with the misery for her children, the poor, and the rain, her mind was like a wound exposed to dry in the
air.
At this point the cab stopped, for it was in danger of being crushed like an egg−shell. The wide Embankment
Chapter I 3
which had had room for cannonballs and squadrons, had now shrunk to a cobbled lane steaming with smells
of malt and oil and blocked by waggons. While her husband read the placards pasted on the brick announcing
the hours at which certain ships would sail for Scotland, Mrs. Ambrose did her best to find information. From
a world exclusively occupied in feeding waggons with sacks, half obliterated too in a fine yellow fog, they got
neither help nor attention. It seemed a miracle when an old man approached, guessed their condition, and
proposed to row them out to their ship in the little boat which he kept moored at the bottom of a flight of
steps. With some hesitation they trusted themselves to him, took their places, and were soon waving up and
down upon the water, London having shrunk to two lines of buildings on either side of them, square buildings
and oblong buildings placed in rows like a child's avenue of bricks.
The river, which had a certain amount of troubled yellow light in it, ran with great force; bulky barges floated
down swiftly escorted by tugs; police boats shot past everything; the wind went with the current. The open
rowing−boat in which they sat bobbed and curtseyed across the line of traffic. In mid−stream the old man
stayed his hands upon the oars, and as the water rushed past them, remarked that once he had taken many
passengers across, where now he took scarcely any. He seemed to recall an age when his boat, moored among
rushes, carried delicate feet across to lawns at Rotherhithe.
"They want bridges now," he said, indicating the monstrous outline of the Tower Bridge. Mournfully Helen
regarded him, who was putting water between her and her children. Mournfully she gazed at the ship they
were approaching; anchored in the middle of the stream they could dimly read her name−−Euphrosyne.
Very dimly in the falling dusk they could see the lines of the rigging, the masts and the dark flag which the
breeze blew out squarely behind.
As the little boat sidled up to the steamer, and the old man shipped his oars, he remarked once more pointing
above, that ships all the world over flew that flag the day they sailed. In the minds of both the passengers the
blue flag appeared a sinister token, and this the moment for presentiments, but nevertheless they rose,
gathered their things together, and climbed on deck.
Down in the saloon of her father's ship, Miss Rachel Vinrace, aged twenty−four, stood waiting her uncle and
aunt nervously. To begin with, though nearly related, she scarcely remembered them; to go on with, they were
elderly people, and finally, as her father's daughter she must be in some sort prepared to entertain them. She
looked forward to seeing them as civilised people generally look forward to the first sight of civilised people,
as though they were of the nature of an approaching physical discomfort−−a tight shoe or a draughty window.
She was already unnaturally braced to receive them. As she occupied herself in laying forks severely straight
by the side of knives, she heard a man's voice saying gloomily:
"On a dark night one would fall down these stairs head foremost," to which a woman's voice added, "And be
killed."
As she spoke the last words the woman stood in the doorway. Tall, large−eyed, draped in purple shawls, Mrs.
Ambrose was romantic and beautiful; not perhaps sympathetic, for her eyes looked straight and considered
what they saw. Her face was much warmer than a Greek face; on the other hand it was much bolder than the
face of the usual pretty Englishwoman.
"Oh, Rachel, how d'you do," she said, shaking hands.
"How are you, dear," said Mr. Ambrose, inclining his forehead to be kissed. His niece instinctively liked his
thin angular body, and the big head with its sweeping features, and the acute, innocent eyes.
"Tell Mr. Pepper," Rachel bade the servant. Husband and wife then sat down on one side of the table, with
their niece opposite to them.
Chapter I 4
"My father told me to begin," she explained. "He is very busy with the men. . . . You know Mr. Pepper?"
A little man who was bent as some trees are by a gale on one side of them had slipped in. Nodding to Mr.
Ambrose, he shook hands with Helen.
"Draughts," he said, erecting the collar of his coat.
"You are still rheumatic?" asked Helen. Her voice was low and seductive, though she spoke absently enough,
the sight of town and river being still present to her mind.
"Once rheumatic, always rheumatic, I fear," he replied. "To some extent it depends on the weather, though not
so much as people are apt to think."
"One does not die of it, at any rate," said Helen.
"As a general rule−−no," said Mr. Pepper.
"Soup, Uncle Ridley?" asked Rachel.
"Thank you, dear," he said, and, as he held his plate out, sighed audibly, "Ah! she's not like her mother."
Helen was just too late in thumping her tumbler on the table to prevent Rachel from hearing, and from
blushing scarlet with embarrassment.
"The way servants treat flowers!" she said hastily. She drew a green vase with a crinkled lip towards her, and
began pulling out the tight little chrysanthemums, which she laid on the table−cloth, arranging them
fastidiously side by side.
There was a pause.
"You knew Jenkinson, didn't you, Ambrose?" asked Mr. Pepper across the table.
"Jenkinson of Peterhouse?"
"He's dead," said Mr. Pepper.
"Ah, dear!−−I knew him−−ages ago," said Ridley. "He was the hero of the punt accident, you remember? A
queer card. Married a young woman out of a tobacconist's, and lived in the Fens−−never heard what became
of him."
"Drink−−drugs," said Mr. Pepper with sinister conciseness. "He left a commentary. Hopeless muddle, I'm
told."
"The man had really great abilities," said Ridley.
"His introduction to Jellaby holds its own still," went on Mr. Pepper, "which is surprising, seeing how
text−books change."
"There was a theory about the planets, wasn't there?" asked Ridley.
"A screw loose somewhere, no doubt of it," said Mr. Pepper, shaking his head.
Now a tremor ran through the table, and a light outside swerved. At the same time an electric bell rang sharply
Chapter I 5
again and again.
"We're off," said Ridley.
A slight but perceptible wave seemed to roll beneath the floor; then it sank; then another came, more
perceptible. Lights slid right across the uncurtained window. The ship gave a loud melancholy moan.
"We're off!" said Mr. Pepper. Other ships, as sad as she, answered her outside on the river. The chuckling and
hissing of water could be plainly heard, and the ship heaved so that the steward bringing plates had to balance
himself as he drew the curtain. There was a pause.
"Jenkinson of Cats−−d'you still keep up with him?" asked Ambrose.
"As much as one ever does," said Mr. Pepper. "We meet annually. This year he has had the misfortune to lose
his wife, which made it painful, of course."
"Very painful," Ridley agreed.
"There's an unmarried daughter who keeps house for him, I believe, but it's never the same, not at his age."
Both gentlemen nodded sagely as they carved their apples.
"There was a book, wasn't there?" Ridley enquired.
"There was a book, but there never will be a book," said Mr. Pepper with such fierceness that both ladies
looked up at him.
"There never will be a book, because some one else has written it for him," said Mr. Pepper with considerable
acidity. "That's what comes of putting things off, and collecting fossils, and sticking Norman arches on one's
pigsties."
"I confess I sympathise," said Ridley with a melancholy sigh. "I have a weakness for people who can't begin."
". . . The accumulations of a lifetime wasted," continued Mr. pepper. "He had accumulations enough to fill a
barn."
"It's a vice that some of us escape," said Ridley. "Our friend Miles has another work out to−day."
Mr. Pepper gave an acid little laugh. "According to my calculations," he said, "he has produced two volumes
and a half annually, which, allowing for time spent in the cradle and so forth, shows a commendable
industry."
"Yes, the old Master's saying of him has been pretty well realised," said Ridley.
"A way they had," said Mr. Pepper. "You know the Bruce collection?−−not for publication, of course."
"I should suppose not," said Ridley significantly. "For a Divine he was−−remarkably free."
"The Pump in Neville's Row, for example?" enquired Mr. Pepper.
"Precisely," said Ambrose.
Chapter I 6
Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex, highly trained in promoting men's talk without listening
to it, could think−−about the education of children, about the use of fog sirens in an opera−−without betraying
herself. Only it struck Helen that Rachel was perhaps too still for a hostess, and that she might have done
something with her hands.
"Perhaps−−?" she said at length, upon which they rose and left, vaguely to the surprise of the gentlemen, who
had either thought them attentive or had forgotten their presence.
"Ah, one could tell strange stories of the old days," they heard Ridley say, as he sank into his chair again.
Glancing back, at the doorway, they saw Mr. Pepper as though he had suddenly loosened his clothes, and had
become a vivacious and malicious old ape.
Winding veils round their heads, the women walked on deck. They were now moving steadily down the river,
passing the dark shapes of ships at anchor, and London was a swarm of lights with a pale yellow canopy
drooping above it. There were the lights of the great theatres, the lights of the long streets, lights that indicated
huge squares of domestic comfort, lights that hung high in air. No darkness would ever settle upon those
lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should
blaze for ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and
beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great
city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.
Leaning over the rail, side by side, Helen said, "Won't you be cold?" Rachel replied, "No. . . . How beautiful!"
she added a moment later. Very little was visible−−a few masts, a shadow of land here, a line of brilliant
windows there. They tried to make head against the wind.
"It blows−−it blows!" gasped Rachel, the words rammed down her throat. Struggling by her side, Helen was
suddenly overcome by the spirit of movement, and pushed along with her skirts wrapping themselves round
her knees, and both arms to her hair. But slowly the intoxication of movement died down, and the wind
became rough and chilly. They looked through a chink in the blind and saw that long cigars were being
smoked in the dining−room; they saw Mr. Ambrose throw himself violently against the back of his chair,
while Mr. Pepper crinkled his cheeks as though they had been cut in wood. The ghost of a roar of laughter
came out to them, and was drowned at once in the wind. In the dry yellow−lighted room Mr. Pepper and Mr.
Ambrose were oblivious of all tumult; they were in Cambridge, and it was probably about the year 1875.
"They're old friends," said Helen, smiling at the sight. "Now, is there a room for us to sit in?"
Rachel opened a door.
"It's more like a landing than a room," she said. Indeed it had nothing of the shut stationary character of a
room on shore. A table was rooted in the middle, and seats were stuck to the sides. Happily the tropical suns
had bleached the tapestries to a faded blue−green colour, and the mirror with its frame of shells, the work of
the steward's love, when the time hung heavy in the southern seas, was quaint rather than ugly. Twisted shells
with red lips like unicorn's horns ornamented the mantelpiece, which was draped by a pall of purple plush
from which depended a certain number of balls. Two windows opened on to the deck, and the light beating
through them when the ship was roasted on the Amazons had turned the prints on the opposite wall to a faint
yellow colour, so that "The Coliseum" was scarcely to be distinguished from Queen Alexandra playing with
her Spaniels. A pair of wicker arm−chairs by the fireside invited one to warm one's hands at a grate full of gilt
shavings; a great lamp swung above the table−−the kind of lamp which makes the light of civilisation across
dark fields to one walking in the country.
"It's odd that every one should be an old friend of Mr. Pepper's," Rachel started nervously, for the situation
was difficult, the room cold, and Helen curiously silent.
Chapter I 7
"I suppose you take him for granted?" said her aunt.
"He's like this," said Rachel, lighting on a fossilised fish in a basin, and displaying it.
"I expect you're too severe," Helen remarked.
Rachel immediately tried to qualify what she had said against her belief.
"I don't really know him," she said, and took refuge in facts, believing that elderly people really like them
better than feelings. She produced what she knew of William Pepper. She told Helen that he always called on
Sundays when they were at home; he knew about a great many things−−about mathematics, history, Greek,
zoology, economics, and the Icelandic Sagas. He had turned Persian poetry into English prose, and English
prose into Greek iambics; he was an authority upon coins; and−−one other thing−−oh yes, she thought it was
vehicular traffic.
He was here either to get things out of the sea, or to write upon the probable course of Odysseus, for Greek
after all was his hobby.
"I've got all his pamphlets," she said. "Little pamphlets. Little yellow books." It did not appear that she had
read them.
"Has he ever been in love?" asked Helen, who had chosen a seat.
This was unexpectedly to the point.
"His heart's a piece of old shoe leather," Rachel declared, dropping the fish. But when questioned she had to
own that she had never asked him.
"I shall ask him," said Helen.
"The last time I saw you, you were buying a piano," she continued. "Do you remember−−the piano, the room
in the attic, and the great plants with the prickles?"
"Yes, and my aunts said the piano would come through the floor, but at their age one wouldn't mind being
killed in the night?" she enquired.
"I heard from Aunt Bessie not long ago," Helen stated. "She is afraid that you will spoil your arms if you
insist upon so much practising."
"The muscles of the forearm−−and then one won't marry?"
"She didn't put it quite like that," replied Mrs. Ambrose.
"Oh, no−−of course she wouldn't," said Rachel with a sigh.
Helen looked at her. Her face was weak rather than decided, saved from insipidity by the large enquiring eyes;
denied beauty, now that she was sheltered indoors, by the lack of colour and definite outline. Moreover, a
hesitation in speaking, or rather a tendency to use the wrong words, made her seem more than normally
incompetent for her years. Mrs. Ambrose, who had been speaking much at random, now reflected that she
certainly did not look forward to the intimacy of three or four weeks on board ship which was threatened.
Women of her own age usually boring her, she supposed that girls would be worse. She glanced at Rachel
again. Yes! how clear it was that she would be vacillating, emotional, and when you said something to her it
Chapter I 8
would make no more lasting impression than the stroke of a stick upon water. There was nothing to take hold
of in girls−−nothing hard, permanent, satisfactory. Did Willoughby say three weeks, or did he say four? She
tried to remember.
At this point, however, the door opened and a tall burly man entered the room, came forward and shook
Helen's hand with an emotional kind of heartiness, Willoughby himself, Rachel's father, Helen's
brother−in−law. As a great deal of flesh would have been needed to make a fat man of him, his frame being so
large, he was not fat; his face was a large framework too, looking, by the smallness of the features and the
glow in the hollow of the cheek, more fitted to withstand assaults of the weather than to express sentiments
and emotions, or to respond to them in others.
"It is a great pleasure that you have come," he said, "for both of us."
Rachel murmured in obedience to her father's glance.
"We'll do our best to make you comfortable. And Ridley. We think it an honour to have charge of him.
Pepper'll have some one to contradict him−−which I daren't do. You find this child grown, don't you? A
young woman, eh?"
Still holding Helen's hand he drew his arm round Rachel's shoulder, thus making them come uncomfortably
close, but Helen forbore to look.
"You think she does us credit?" he asked.
"Oh yes," said Helen.
"Because we expect great things of her," he continued, squeezing his daughter's arm and releasing her. "But
about you now." They sat down side by side on the little sofa. "Did you leave the children well? They'll be
ready for school, I suppose. Do they take after you or Ambrose? They've got good heads on their shoulders,
I'll be bound?"
At this Helen immediately brightened more than she had yet done, and explained that her son was six and her
daughter ten. Everybody said that her boy was like her and her girl like Ridley. As for brains, they were quick
brats, she thought, and modestly she ventured on a little story about her son,−−how left alone for a minute he
had taken the pat of butter in his fingers, run across the room with it, and put it on the fire−−merely for the fun
of the thing, a feeling which she could understand.
"And you had to show the young rascal that these tricks wouldn't do, eh?"
"A child of six? I don't think they matter."
"I'm an old−fashioned father."
"Nonsense, Willoughby; Rachel knows better."
Much as Willoughby would doubtless have liked his daughter to praise him she did not; her eyes were
unreflecting as water, her fingers still toying with the fossilised fish, her mind absent. The elder people went
on to speak of arrangements that could be made for Ridley's comfort−−a table placed where he couldn't help
looking at the sea, far from boilers, at the same time sheltered from the view of people passing. Unless he
made this a holiday, when his books were all packed, he would have no holiday whatever; for out at Santa
Marina Helen knew, by experience, that he would work all day; his boxes, she said, were packed with books.
Chapter I 9
"Leave it to me−−leave it to me!" said Willoughby, obviously intending to do much more than she asked of
him. But Ridley and Mr. Pepper were heard fumbling at the door.
"How are you, Vinrace?" said Ridley, extending a limp hand as he came in, as though the meeting were
melancholy to both, but on the whole more so to him.
Willoughby preserved his heartiness, tempered by respect. For the moment nothing was said.
"We looked in and saw you laughing," Helen remarked. "Mr. Pepper had just told a very good story."
"Pish. None of the stories were good," said her husband peevishly.
"Still a severe judge, Ridley?" enquired Mr. Vinrace.
"We bored you so that you left," said Ridley, speaking directly to his wife.
As this was quite true Helen did not attempt to deny it, and her next remark, "But didn't they improve after
we'd gone?" was unfortunate, for her husband answered with a droop of his shoulders, "If possible they got
worse."
The situation was now one of considerable discomfort for every one concerned, as was proved by a long
interval of constraint and silence. Mr. Pepper, indeed, created a diversion of a kind by leaping on to his seat,
both feet tucked under him, with the action of a spinster who detects a mouse, as the draught struck at his
ankles. Drawn up there, sucking at his cigar, with his arms encircling his knees, he looked like the image of
Buddha, and from this elevation began a discourse, addressed to nobody, for nobody had called for it, upon
the unplumbed depths of ocean. He professed himself surprised to learn that although Mr. Vinrace possessed
ten ships, regularly plying between London and Buenos Aires, not one of them was bidden to investigate the
great white monsters of the lower waters.
"No, no," laughed Willoughby, "the monsters of the earth are too many for me!"
Rachel was heard to sigh, "Poor little goats!"
"If it weren't for the goats there'd be no music, my dear; music depends upon goats," said her father rather
sharply, and Mr. Pepper went on to describe the white, hairless, blind monsters lying curled on the ridges of
sand at the bottom of the sea, which would explode if you brought them to the surface, their sides bursting
asunder and scattering entrails to the winds when released from pressure, with considerable detail and with
such show of knowledge, that Ridley was disgusted, and begged him to stop.
From all this Helen drew her own conclusions, which were gloomy enough. Pepper was a bore; Rachel was an
unlicked girl, no doubt prolific of confidences, the very first of which would be: "You see, I don't get on with
my father." Willoughby, as usual, loved his business and built his Empire, and between them all she would be
considerably bored. Being a woman of action, however, she rose, and said that for her part she was going to
bed. At the door she glanced back instinctively at Rachel, expecting that as two of the same sex they would
leave the room together. Rachel rose, looked vaguely into Helen's face, and remarked with her slight stammer,
"I'm going out to t−t−triumph in the wind."
Mrs. Ambrose's worst suspicions were confirmed; she went down the passage lurching from side to side, and
fending off the wall now with her right arm, now with her left; at each lurch she exclaimed emphatically,
"Damn!"

Chapter II


Uncomfortable as the night, with its rocking movement, and salt smells, may have been, and in one case
undoubtedly was, for Mr. Pepper had insufficient clothes upon his bed, the breakfast next morning wore a
kind of beauty. The voyage had begun, and had begun happily with a soft blue sky, and a calm sea. The sense
of untapped resources, things to say as yet unsaid, made the hour significant, so that in future years the entire
journey perhaps would be represented by this one scene, with the sound of sirens hooting in the river the night
before, somehow mixing in.
The table was cheerful with apples and bread and eggs. Helen handed Willoughby the butter, and as she did so
cast her eye on him and reflected, "And she married you, and she was happy, I suppose."
She went off on a familiar train of thought, leading on to all kinds of well−known reflections, from the old
wonder, why Theresa had married Willoughby?
"Of course, one sees all that," she thought, meaning that one sees that he is big and burly, and has a great
booming voice, and a fist and a will of his own; "but−−" here she slipped into a fine analysis of him which is
best represented by one word, "sentimental," by which she meant that he was never simple and honest about
his feelings. For example, he seldom spoke of the dead, but kept anniversaries with singular pomp. She
suspected him of nameless atrocities with regard to his daughter, as indeed she had always suspected him of
bullying his wife. Naturally she fell to comparing her own fortunes with the fortunes of her friend, for
Willoughby's wife had been perhaps the one woman Helen called friend, and this comparison often made the
staple of their talk. Ridley was a scholar, and Willoughby was a man of business. Ridley was bringing out the
third volume of Pindar when Willoughby was launching his first ship. They built a new factory the very year
the commentary on Aristotle−−was it?−−appeared at the University Press. "And Rachel," she looked at her,
meaning, no doubt, to decide the argument, which was otherwise too evenly balanced, by declaring that
Rachel was not comparable to her own children. "She really might be six years old," was all she said,
however, this judgment referring to the smooth unmarked outline of the girl's face, and not condemning her
otherwise, for if Rachel were ever to think, feel, laugh, or express herself, instead of dropping milk from a
height as though to see what kind of drops it made, she might be interesting though never exactly pretty. She
was like her mother, as the image in a pool on a still summer's day is like the vivid flushed face that hangs
over it.
Meanwhile Helen herself was under examination, though not from either of her victims. Mr. Pepper
considered her; and his meditations, carried on while he cut his toast into bars and neatly buttered them, took
him through a considerable stretch of autobiography. One of his penetrating glances assured him that he was
right last night in judging that Helen was beautiful. Blandly he passed her the jam. She was talking nonsense,
but not worse nonsense than people usually do talk at breakfast, the cerebral circulation, as he knew to his
cost, being apt to give trouble at that hour. He went on saying "No" to her, on principle, for he never yielded
to a woman on account of her sex. And here, dropping his eyes to his plate, he became autobiographical. He
had not married himself for the sufficient reason that he had never met a woman who commanded his respect.
Condemned to pass the susceptible years of youth in a railway station in Bombay, he had seen only coloured
women, military women, official women; and his ideal was a woman who could read Greek, if not Persian,
was irreproachably fair in the face, and able to understand the small things he let fall while undressing. As it
was he had contracted habits of which he was not in the least ashamed. Certain odd minutes every day went to
learning things by heart; he never took a ticket without noting the number; he devoted January to Petronius,
February to Catullus, March to the Etruscan vases perhaps; anyhow he had done good work in India, and there
was nothing to regret in his life except the fundamental defects which no wise man regrets, when the present
is still his. So concluding he looked up suddenly and smiled. Rachel caught his eye.
"And now you've chewed something thirty−seven times, I suppose?" she thought, but said politely aloud, "Are
your legs troubling you to−day, Mr. Pepper?"
Chapter II 11
"My shoulder blades?" he asked, shifting them painfully. "Beauty has no effect upon uric acid that I'm aware
of," he sighed, contemplating the round pane opposite, through which the sky and sea showed blue. At the
same time he took a little parchment volume from his pocket and laid it on the table. As it was clear that he
invited comment, Helen asked him the name of it. She got the name; but she got also a disquisition upon the
proper method of making roads. Beginning with the Greeks, who had, he said, many difficulties to contend
with, he continued with the Romans, passed to England and the right method, which speedily became the
wrong method, and wound up with such a fury of denunciation directed against the road−makers of the
present day in general, and the road−makers of Richmond Park in particular, where Mr. Pepper had the habit
of cycling every morning before breakfast, that the spoons fairly jingled against the coffee cups, and the
insides of at least four rolls mounted in a heap beside Mr. Pepper's plate.
"Pebbles!" he concluded, viciously dropping another bread pellet upon the heap. "The roads of England are
mended with pebbles! 'With the first heavy rainfall,' I've told 'em, 'your road will be a swamp.' Again and
again my words have proved true. But d'you suppose they listen to me when I tell 'em so, when I point out the
consequences, the consequences to the public purse, when I recommend 'em to read Coryphaeus? No, Mrs.
Ambrose, you will form no just opinion of the stupidity of mankind until you have sat upon a Borough
Council!" The little man fixed her with a glance of ferocious energy.
"I have had servants," said Mrs. Ambrose, concentrating her gaze. "At this moment I have a nurse. She's a
good woman as they go, but she's determined to make my children pray. So far, owing to great care on my
part, they think of God as a kind of walrus; but now that my back's turned−−Ridley," she demanded, swinging
round upon her husband, "what shall we do if we find them saying the Lord's Prayer when we get home
again?"
Ridley made the sound which is represented by "Tush." But Willoughby, whose discomfort as he listened was
manifested by a slight movement rocking of his body, said awkwardly, "Oh, surely, Helen, a little religion
hurts nobody."
"I would rather my children told lies," she replied, and while Willoughby was reflecting that his sister−in−law
was even more eccentric than he remembered, pushed her chair back and swept upstairs. In a second they
heard her calling back, "Oh, look! We're out at sea!"
They followed her on to the deck. All the smoke and the houses had disappeared, and the ship was out in a
wide space of sea very fresh and clear though pale in the early light. They had left London sitting on its mud.
A very thin line of shadow tapered on the horizon, scarcely thick enough to stand the burden of Paris, which
nevertheless rested upon it. They were free of roads, free of mankind, and the same exhilaration at their
freedom ran through them all. The ship was making her way steadily through small waves which slapped her
and then fizzled like effervescing water, leaving a little border of bubbles and foam on either side. The
colourless October sky above was thinly clouded as if by the trail of wood−fire smoke, and the air was
wonderfully salt and brisk. Indeed it was too cold to stand still. Mrs. Ambrose drew her arm within her
husband's, and as they moved off it could be seen from the way in which her sloping cheek turned up to his
that she had something private to communicate. They went a few paces and Rachel saw them kiss.
Down she looked into the depth of the sea. While it was slightly disturbed on the surface by the passage of the
Euphrosyne, beneath it was green and dim, and it grew dimmer and dimmer until the sand at the bottom was
only a pale blur. One could scarcely see the black ribs of wrecked ships, or the spiral towers made by the
burrowings of great eels, or the smooth green−sided monsters who came by flickering this way and that.
−−"And, Rachel, if any one wants me, I'm busy till one," said her father, enforcing his words as he often did,
when he spoke to his daughter, by a smart blow upon the shoulder.
"Until one," he repeated. "And you'll find yourself some employment, eh? Scales, French, a little German, eh?
Chapter II 12
There's Mr. Pepper who knows more about separable verbs than any man in Europe, eh?" and he went off
laughing. Rachel laughed, too, as indeed she had laughed ever since she could remember, without thinking it
funny, but because she admired her father.
But just as she was turning with a view perhaps to finding some employment, she was intercepted by a
woman who was so broad and so thick that to be intercepted by her was inevitable. The discreet tentative way
in which she moved, together with her sober black dress, showed that she belonged to the lower orders;
nevertheless she took up a rock−like position, looking about her to see that no gentry were near before she
delivered her message, which had reference to the state of the sheets, and was of the utmost gravity.
"How ever we're to get through this voyage, Miss Rachel, I really can't tell," she began with a shake of her
head. "There's only just sheets enough to go round, and the master's has a rotten place you could put your
fingers through. And the counterpanes. Did you notice the counterpanes? I thought to myself a poor person
would have been ashamed of them. The one I gave Mr. Pepper was hardly fit to cover a dog. . . . No, Miss
Rachel, they could not be mended; they're only fit for dust sheets. Why, if one sewed one's finger to the bone,
one would have one's work undone the next time they went to the laundry."
Her voice in its indignation wavered as if tears were near.
There was nothing for it but to descend and inspect a large pile of linen heaped upon a table. Mrs. Chailey
handled the sheets as if she knew each by name, character, and constitution. Some had yellow stains, others
had places where the threads made long ladders; but to the ordinary eye they looked much as sheets usually do
look, very chill, white, cold, and irreproachably clean.
Suddenly Mrs. Chailey, turning from the subject of sheets, dismissing them entirely, clenched her fists on the
top of them, and proclaimed, "And you couldn't ask a living creature to sit where I sit!"
Mrs. Chailey was expected to sit in a cabin which was large enough, but too near the boilers, so that after five
minutes she could hear her heart "go," she complained, putting her hand above it, which was a state of things
that Mrs. Vinrace, Rachel's mother, would never have dreamt of inflicting−−Mrs. Vinrace, who knew every
sheet in her house, and expected of every one the best they could do, but no more.
It was the easiest thing in the world to grant another room, and the problem of sheets simultaneously and
miraculously solved itself, the spots and ladders not being past cure after all, but−−
"Lies! Lies! Lies!" exclaimed the mistress indignantly, as she ran up on to the deck. "What's the use of telling
me lies?"
In her anger that a woman of fifty should behave like a child and come cringing to a girl because she wanted
to sit where she had not leave to sit, she did not think of the particular case, and, unpacking her music, soon
forgot all about the old woman and her sheets.
Mrs. Chailey folded her sheets, but her expression testified to flatness within. The world no longer cared about
her, and a ship was not a home. When the lamps were lit yesterday, and the sailors went tumbling above her
head, she had cried; she would cry this evening; she would cry to−morrow. It was not home. Meanwhile she
arranged her ornaments in the room which she had won too easily. They were strange ornaments to bring on a
sea voyage−−china pugs, tea−sets in miniature, cups stamped floridly with the arms of the city of Bristol,
hair−pin boxes crusted with shamrock, antelopes' heads in coloured plaster, together with a multitude of tiny
photographs, representing downright workmen in their Sunday best, and women holding white babies. But
there was one portrait in a gilt frame, for which a nail was needed, and before she sought it Mrs. Chailey put
on her spectacles and read what was written on a slip of paper at the back:
Chapter II 13
"This picture of her mistress is given to Emma Chailey by Willoughby Vinrace in gratitude for thirty years of
devoted service."
Tears obliterated the words and the head of the nail.
"So long as I can do something for your family," she was saying, as she hammered at it, when a voice called
melodiously in the passage:
"Mrs. Chailey! Mrs. Chailey!"
Chailey instantly tidied her dress, composed her face, and opened the door.
"I'm in a fix," said Mrs. Ambrose, who was flushed and out of breath. "You know what gentlemen are. The
chairs too high−−the tables too low−−there's six inches between the floor and the door. What I want's a
hammer, an old quilt, and have you such a thing as a kitchen table? Anyhow, between us"−−she now flung
open the door of her husband's sitting room, and revealed Ridley pacing up and down, his forehead all
wrinkled, and the collar of his coat turned up.
"It's as though they'd taken pains to torment me!" he cried, stopping dead. "Did I come on this voyage in order
to catch rheumatism and pneumonia? Really one might have credited Vinrace with more sense. My dear,"
Helen was on her knees under a table, "you are only making yourself untidy, and we had much better
recognise the fact that we are condemned to six weeks of unspeakable misery. To come at all was the height
of folly, but now that we are here I suppose that I can face it like a man. My diseases of course will be
increased−−I feel already worse than I did yesterday, but we've only ourselves to thank, and the children
happily−−"
"Move! Move! Move!" cried Helen, chasing him from corner to corner with a chair as though he were an
errant hen. "Out of the way, Ridley, and in half an hour you'll find it ready."
She turned him out of the room, and they could hear him groaning and swearing as he went along the passage.
"I daresay he isn't very strong," said Mrs. Chailey, looking at Mrs. Ambrose compassionately, as she helped to
shift and carry.
"It's books," sighed Helen, lifting an armful of sad volumes from the floor to the shelf. "Greek from morning
to night. If ever Miss Rachel marries, Chailey, pray that she may marry a man who doesn't know his ABC."
The preliminary discomforts and harshnesses, which generally make the first days of a sea voyage so
cheerless and trying to the temper, being somehow lived through, the succeeding days passed pleasantly
enough. October was well advanced, but steadily burning with a warmth that made the early months of the
summer appear very young and capricious. Great tracts of the earth lay now beneath the autumn sun, and the
whole of England, from the bald moors to the Cornish rocks, was lit up from dawn to sunset, and showed in
stretches of yellow, green, and purple. Under that illumination even the roofs of the great towns glittered. In
thousands of small gardens, millions of dark−red flowers were blooming, until the old ladies who had tended
them so carefully came down the paths with their scissors, snipped through their juicy stalks, and laid them
upon cold stone ledges in the village church. Innumerable parties of picnickers coming home at sunset cried,
"Was there ever such a day as this?" "It's you," the young men whispered; "Oh, it's you," the young women
replied. All old people and many sick people were drawn, were it only for a foot or two, into the open air, and
prognosticated pleasant things about the course of the world. As for the confidences and expressions of love
that were heard not only in cornfields but in lamplit rooms, where the windows opened on the garden, and
men with cigars kissed women with grey hairs, they were not to be counted. Some said that the sky was an
emblem of the life to come. Long−tailed birds clattered and screamed, and crossed from wood to wood, with
Chapter II 14
golden eyes in their plumage.
But while all this went on by land, very few people thought about the sea. They took it for granted that the sea
was calm; and there was no need, as there is in many houses when the creeper taps on the bedroom windows,
for the couples to murmur before they kiss, "Think of the ships to−night," or "Thank Heaven, I'm not the man
in the lighthouse!" For all they imagined, the ships when they vanished on the sky−line dissolved, like snow
in water. The grown−up view, indeed, was not much clearer than the view of the little creatures in bathing
drawers who were trotting in to the foam all along the coasts of England, and scooping up buckets full of
water. They saw white sails or tufts of smoke pass across the horizon, and if you had said that these were
waterspouts, or the petals of white sea flowers, they would have agreed.
The people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England. Not only did it appear to them to be
an island, and a very small island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned. One figured
them first swarming about like aimless ants, and almost pressing each other over the edge; and then, as the
ship withdrew, one figured them making a vain clamour, which, being unheard, either ceased, or rose into a
brawl. Finally, when the ship was out of sight of land, it became plain that the people of England were
completely mute. The disease attacked other parts of the earth; Europe shrank, Asia shrank, Africa and
America shrank, until it seemed doubtful whether the ship would ever run against any of those wrinkled little
rocks again. But, on the other hand, an immense dignity had descended upon her; she was an inhabitant of the
great world, which has so few inhabitants, travelling all day across an empty universe, with veils drawn before
her and behind. She was more lonely than the caravan crossing the desert; she was infinitely more mysterious,
moving by her own power and sustained by her own resources. The sea might give her death or some
unexampled joy, and none would know of it. She was a bride going forth to her husband, a virgin unknown of
men; in her vigor and purity she might be likened to all beautiful things, for as a ship she had a life of her
own.
Indeed if they had not been blessed in their weather, one blue day being bowled up after another, smooth,
round, and flawless. Mrs. Ambrose would have found it very dull. As it was, she had her embroidery frame set
up on deck, with a little table by her side on which lay open a black volume of philosophy. She chose a thread
from the vari−coloured tangle that lay in her lap, and sewed red into the bark of a tree, or yellow into the river
torrent. She was working at a great design of a tropical river running through a tropical forest, where spotted
deer would eventually browse upon masses of fruit, bananas, oranges, and giant pomegranates, while a troop
of naked natives whirled darts into the air. Between the stitches she looked to one side and read a sentence
about the Reality of Matter, or the Nature of Good. Round her men in blue jerseys knelt and scrubbed the
boards, or leant over the rails and whistled, and not far off Mr. Pepper sat cutting up roots with a penknife.
The rest were occupied in other parts of the ship: Ridley at his Greek−−he had never found quarters more to
his liking; Willoughby at his documents, for he used a voyage to work of arrears of business; and
Rachel−−Helen, between her sentences of philosophy, wondered sometimes what Rachel did do with herself?
She meant vaguely to go and see. They had scarcely spoken two words to each other since that first evening;
they were polite when they met, but there had been no confidence of any kind. Rachel seemed to get on very
well with her father−−much better, Helen thought, than she ought to−−and was as ready to let Helen alone as
Helen was to let her alone.
At that moment Rachel was sitting in her room doing absolutely nothing. When the ship was full this
apartment bore some magnificent title and was the resort of elderly sea−sick ladies who left the deck to their
youngsters. By virtue of the piano, and a mess of books on the floor, Rachel considered it her room, and there
she would sit for hours playing very difficult music, reading a little German, or a little English when the mood
took her, and doing−−as at this moment−−absolutely nothing.
The way she had been educated, joined to a fine natural indolence, was of course partly the reason of it, for
she had been educated as the majority of well−to−do girls in the last part of the nineteenth century were
educated. Kindly doctors and gentle old professors had taught her the rudiments of about ten different
Chapter II 15
branches of knowledge, but they would as soon have forced her to go through one piece of drudgery
thoroughly as they would have told her that her hands were dirty. The one hour or the two hours weekly
passed very pleasantly, partly owing to the other pupils, partly to the fact that the window looked upon the
back of a shop, where figures appeared against the red windows in winter, partly to the accidents that are
bound to happen when more than two people are in the same room together. But there was no subject in the
world which she knew accurately. Her mind was in the state of an intelligent man's in the beginning of the
reign of Queen Elizabeth; she would believe practically anything she was told, invent reasons for anything she
said. The shape of the earth, the history of the world, how trains worked, or money was invested, what laws
were in force, which people wanted what, and why they wanted it, the most elementary idea of a system in
modern life−−none of this had been imparted to her by any of her professors or mistresses. But this system of
education had one great advantage. It did not teach anything, but it put no obstacle in the way of any real
talent that the pupil might chance to have. Rachel, being musical, was allowed to learn nothing but music; she
became a fanatic about music. All the energies that might have gone into languages, science, or literature, that
might have made her friends, or shown her the world, poured straight into music. Finding her teachers
inadequate, she had practically taught herself. At the age of twenty−four she knew as much about music as
most people do when they are thirty; and could play as well as nature allowed her to, which, as became daily
more obvious, was a really generous allowance. If this one definite gift was surrounded by dreams and ideas
of the most extravagant and foolish description, no one was any the wiser.
Her education being thus ordinary, her circumstances were no more out of the common. She was an only child
and had never been bullied and laughed at by brothers and sisters. Her mother having died when she was
eleven, two aunts, the sisters of her father, brought her up, and they lived for the sake of the air in a
comfortable house in Richmond. She was of course brought up with excessive care, which as a child was for
her health; as a girl and a young woman was for what it seems almost crude to call her morals. Until quite
lately she had been completely ignorant that for women such things existed. She groped for knowledge in old
books, and found it in repulsive chunks, but she did not naturally care for books and thus never troubled her
head about the censorship which was exercised first by her aunts, later by her father. Friends might have told
her things, but she had few of her own age,−−Richmond being an awkward place to reach,−−and, as it
happened, the only girl she knew well was a religious zealot, who in the fervour of intimacy talked about God,
and the best ways of taking up one's cross, a topic only fitfully interesting to one whose mind reached other
stages at other times.
But lying in her chair, with one hand behind her head, the other grasping the knob on the arm, she was clearly
following her thoughts intently. Her education left her abundant time for thinking. Her eyes were fixed so
steadily upon a ball on the rail of the ship that she would have been startled and annoyed if anything had
chanced to obscure it for a second. She had begun her meditations with a shout of laughter, caused by the
following translation from Tristan:
In shrinking trepidation His shame he seems to hide While to the king his relation He brings the corpse−like
Bride. Seems it so senseless what I say?
She cried that it did, and threw down the book. Next she had picked up Cowper's Letters, the classic
prescribed by her father which had bored her, so that one sentence chancing to say something about the smell
of broom in his garden, she had thereupon seen the little hall at Richmond laden with flowers on the day of
her mother's funeral, smelling so strong that now any flower−scent brought back the sickly horrible sensation;
and so from one scene she passed, half−hearing, half−seeing, to another. She saw her Aunt Lucy arranging
flowers in the drawing−room.
"Aunt Lucy," she volunteered, "I don't like the smell of broom; it reminds me of funerals."
"Nonsense, Rachel," Aunt Lucy replied; "don't say such foolish things, dear. I always think it a particularly
cheerful plant."
Chapter II 16
Lying in the hot sun her mind was fixed upon the characters of her aunts, their views, and the way they lived.
Indeed this was a subject that lasted her hundreds of morning walks round Richmond Park, and blotted out the
trees and the people and the deer. Why did they do the things they did, and what did they feel, and what was it
all about? Again she heard Aunt Lucy talking to Aunt Eleanor. She had been that morning to take up the
character of a servant, "And, of course, at half−past ten in the morning one expects to find the housemaid
brushing the stairs." How odd! How unspeakably odd! But she could not explain to herself why suddenly as
her aunt spoke the whole system in which they lived had appeared before her eyes as something quite
unfamiliar and inexplicable, and themselves as chairs or umbrellas dropped about here and there without any
reason. She could only say with her slight stammer, "Are you f−f−fond of Aunt Eleanor, Aunt Lucy?" to
which her aunt replied, with her nervous hen−like twitter of a laugh, "My dear child, what questions you do
ask!"
"How fond? Very fond!" Rachel pursued.
"I can't say I've ever thought 'how,'" said Miss Vinrace. "If one cares one doesn't think 'how,' Rachel," which
was aimed at the niece who had never yet "come" to her aunts as cordially as they wished.
"But you know I care for you, don't you, dear, because you're your mother's daughter, if for no other reason,
and there are plenty of other reasons"−−and she leant over and kissed her with some emotion, and the
argument was spilt irretrievably about the place like a bucket of milk.
By these means Rachel reached that stage in thinking, if thinking it can be called, when the eyes are intent
upon a ball or a knob and the lips cease to move. Her efforts to come to an understanding had only hurt her
aunt's feelings, and the conclusion must be that it is better not to try. To feel anything strongly was to create
an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently. It was far better to play the
piano and forget all the rest. The conclusion was very welcome. Let these odd men and women−−her aunts,
the Hunts, Ridley, Helen, Mr. Pepper, and the rest−−be symbols,−−featureless but dignified, symbols of age,
of youth, of motherhood, of learning, and beautiful often as people upon the stage are beautiful. It appeared
that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.
Reality dwelling in what one saw and felt, but did not talk about, one could accept a system in which things
went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people, without often troubling to think about it, except as
something superficially strange. Absorbed by her music she accepted her lot very complacently, blazing into
indignation perhaps once a fortnight, and subsiding as she subsided now. Inextricably mixed in dreamy
confusion, her mind seemed to enter into communion, to be delightfully expanded and combined with the
spirit of the whitish boards on deck, with the spirit of the sea, with the spirit of Beethoven Op. 112, even with
the spirit of poor William Cowper there at Olney. Like a ball of thistledown it kissed the sea, rose, kissed it
again, and thus rising and kissing passed finally out of sight. The rising and falling of the ball of thistledown
was represented by the sudden droop forward of her own head, and when it passed out of sight she was asleep.
Ten minutes later Mrs. Ambrose opened the door and looked at her. It did not surprise her to find that this was
the way in which Rachel passed her mornings. She glanced round the room at the piano, at the books, at the
general mess. In the first place she considered Rachel aesthetically; lying unprotected she looked somehow
like a victim dropped from the claws of a bird of prey, but considered as a woman, a young woman of
twenty−four, the sight gave rise to reflections. Mrs. Ambrose stood thinking for at least two minutes. She then
smiled, turned noiselessly away and went, lest the sleeper should waken, and there should be the awkwardness
of speech between them.