Here lies the duck that Samuel Johnson sat on, eh? I was big for my age.”
“Then we had canaries,” he continued, “a pair of ring-doves, a lemur, and at one time a martin.”
“Did you live in the country?” Rachel asked him.
“We lived in the country for six months of the year. When I say ‘we’ I mean four sisters, a brother, and myself. There’s nothing like coming of a large family. Sisters particularly are delightful.”
“Dick, you were horribly spoilt!” cried Clarissa across the table.
“No, no. Appreciated,” said Richard.
Rachel had other questions on the tip of her tongue; or rather one enormous question, which she did not in the least know how to put into words. The talk appeared too airy to admit of it.
“Please tell me—everything.” That was what she wanted to say. He had drawn apart one little chink and showed astonishing treasures. It seemed to her incredible that a man like that should be willing to talk to her. He had sisters and pets, and once lived in the country. She stirred her tea round and round; the bubbles which swam and clustered in the cup seemed to her like the union of their minds.
The talk meanwhile raced past her, and when Richard suddenly stated in a jocular tone of voice, “I’m sure Miss Vinrace, now, has secret leanings towards Catholicism,” she had no idea what to answer, and Helen could not help laughing at the start she gave.
However, breakfast was over and Mrs. Dalloway was rising. “I always think religion’s like collecting beetles,” she said, summing up the discussion as she went up the stairs with Helen. “One person has a passion for black beetles; another hasn’t; it’s no good arguing about it. What’s your black beetle now?”
“I suppose it’s my children,” said Helen.
“Ah—that’s different,” Clarissa breathed. “Do tell me. You have a boy, haven’t you? Isn’t it detestable, leaving them?”
It was as though a blue shadow had fallen across a pool. Their eyes became deeper, and their voices more cordial. Instead of joining them as they began to pace the deck, Rachel was indignant with the prosperous matrons, who made her feel outside their world and motherless, and turning back, she left them abruptly. She slammed the door of her room, and pulled out her music. It was all old music—Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Purcell—the pages yellow, the engraving rough to the finger. In three minutes she was deep in a very difficult, very classical fugue in A, and over her face came a queer remote impersonal expression of complete absorption and anxious satisfaction. Now she stumbled; now she faltered and had to play the same bar twice over; but an invisible line seemed to string the notes together, from which rose a shape, a building. She was so far absorbed in this work, for it was really difficult to find how all these sounds should stand together, and drew upon the whole of her faculties, that she never heard a knock at the door. It was burst impulsively open, and Mrs. Dalloway stood in the room leaving the door open, so that a strip of the white deck and of the blue sea appeared through the opening. The shape of the Bach fugue crashed to the ground.
“Don’t let me interrupt,” Clarissa implored. “I heard you playing, and I couldn’t resist. I adore Bach!”
Rachel flushed and fumbled her fingers in her lap. She stood up awkwardly.
“It’s too difficult,” she said.
“But you were playing quite splendidly! I ought to have stayed outside.”
“No,” said Rachel.
She slid Cowper’s Letters and Wuthering Heights out of the arm-chair, so that Clarissa was invited to sit there.
“What a dear little room!” she said, looking round. “Oh, Cowper’s Letters>!” I’ve never read them. Are they nice?”
“Rather dull,” said Rachel.
“He wrote awfully well, didn’t he?” said Clarissa; “—if one likes that kind of thing—finished his sentences and all that. Wuthering Heights! Ah—that’s more in my line. I really couldn’t exist without the Brontes! Don’t you love them? Still, on the whole, I’d rather live without them than without Jane Austen.”
Lightly and at random though she spoke, her manner conveyed an extraordinary degree of sympathy and desire to befriend.
“Jane Austen? I don’t like Jane Austen,” said Rachel.
“You monster!” Clarissa exclaimed. “I can only just forgive you. Tell me why?”
“She’s so—so—well, so like a tight plait,” Rachel floundered. “Ah—I see what you mean. But I don’t agree. And you won’t when you’re older. At your age I only liked Shelley. I can remember sobbing over him in the garden.
He has outsoared the shadow of our night,
Envy and calumny and hate and pain—you remember?
Can touch him not and torture not again
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain.
How divine!—and yet what nonsense!” She looked lightly round the room. “I always think it’s living, not dying, that counts. I really respect some snuffy old stockbroker who’s gone on adding up column after column all his days, and trotting back to his villa at Brixton with some old pug dog he worships, and a dreary little wife sitting at the end of the table, and going off to Margate for a fortnight—I assure you I know heaps like that—well, they seem to me really nobler than poets whom every one worships, just because they’re geniuses and die young. But I don’t expect you to agree with me!”
She pressed Rachel’s shoulder.
“Um-m-m—” she went on quoting—
Unrest which men miscall delight—
“when you’re my age you’ll see that the world is crammed with delightful things. I think young people make such a mistake about that—not letting themselves be happy. I sometimes think that happiness is the only thing that counts. I don’t know you well enough to say, but I should guess you might be a little inclined to—when one’s young and attractive—I’m going to say it!—every_thing’s at one’s feet.” She glanced round as much as to say, “not only a few stuffy books and Bach.”
“I long to ask questions,” she continued. “You interest me so much. If I’m impertinent, you must just box my ears.”
“And I—I want to ask questions,” said Rachel with such earnestness that Mrs. Dalloway had to check her smile.
“D’you mind if we walk?” she said. “The air’s so delicious.”
She snuffed it like a racehorse as they shut the door and stood on deck.
“Isn’t it good to be alive?” she exclaimed, and drew Rachel’s arm within hers.
“Look, look! How exquisite!”
The shores of Portugal were beginning to lose their substance; but the land was still the land, though at a great distance. They could
