The Voyage Out

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THE VOYAGE OUT (1915)


by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)



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 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 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.

"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 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.

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.

"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 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?"