It was now the height of the season, and every ship that came fromEngland left a few people on the shores of Santa Marina who droveup to the hotel. The fact that the Ambroses had a house where onecould escape momentarily from the slightly inhuman atmosphere of anhotel was a source of genuine pleasure not only to Hirst and Hewet,but to the Elliots, the Thornburys, the Flushings, Miss Allan,Evelyn M., together with other people whose identity was so littledeveloped that the Ambroses did not discover that they possessed names.
By degrees there was established a kind of correspondence betweenthe two houses, the big and the small, so that at most hoursof the day one house could guess what was going on in the other,and the words "the villa" and "the hotel" called up the idea of twoseparate systems of life. Acquaintances showed signs of developinginto friends, for that one tie to Mrs. Parry's drawing-room hadinevitably split into many other ties attached to different partsof England, and sometimes these alliances seemed cynically fragile,and sometimes painfully acute, lacking as they did the supportingbackground of organised English life. One night when the moon wasround between the trees, Evelyn M. told Helen the story of her life,and claimed her everlasting friendship; or another occasion,merely because of a sigh, or a pause, or a word thoughtlessly dropped,poor Mrs. Elliot left the villa half in tears, vowing never againto meet the cold and scornful woman who had insulted her, and in truth,meet again they never did. It did not seem worth while to piecetogether so slight a friendship.
Hewet, indeed, might have found excellent material at this time upat the villa for some chapters in the novel which was to be called"Silence, or the Things People don't say." Helen and Rachel hadbecome very silent. Having detected, as she thought, a secret,and judging that Rachel meant to keep it from her, Mrs. Ambroserespected it carefully, but from that cause, though unintentionally,a curious atmosphere of reserve grew up between them. Instead ofsharing their views upon all subjects, and plunging after an ideawherever it might lead, they spoke chiefly in comment uponthe people they saw, and the secret between them made itself feltin what they said even of Thornburys and Elliots. Always calmand unemotional in her judgments, Mrs. Ambrose was now inclinedto be definitely pessimistic. She was not severe upon individualsso much as incredulous of the kindness of destiny, fate, what happensin the long run, and apt to insist that this was generally adverseto people in proportion as they deserved well. Even this theory shewas ready to discard in favour of one which made chaos triumphant,things happening for no reason at all, and every one groping aboutin illusion and ignorance. With a certain pleasure she developedthese views to her niece, taking a letter from home as her test:
which gave good news, but might just as well have given bad.
How did she know that at this very moment both her children werenot lying dead, crushed by motor omnibuses? "It's happeningto somebody: why shouldn't it happen to me?" she would argue,her face taking on the stoical expression of anticipated sorrow.
however sincere these views may have been, they were undoubtedlycalled forth by the irrational state of her niece's mind.
It was so fluctuating, and went so quickly from joy to despair,that it seemed necessary to confront it with some stable opinionwhich naturally became dark as well as stable. Perhaps Mrs. Ambrosehad some idea that in leading the talk into these quarters she mightdiscover what was in Rachel's mind, but it was difficult to judge,for sometimes she would agree with the gloomiest thing that was said,at other times she refused to listen, and rammed Helen's theoriesdown her throat with laughter, chatter, ridicule of the wildest,and fierce bursts of anger even at what she called the "croaking of araven in the mud.""It's hard enough without that," she asserted.
"What's hard?" Helen demanded.
"Life," she replied, and then they both became silent.
Helen might draw her own conclusions as to why life was hard, as to whyan hour later, perhaps, life was something so wonderful and vividthat the eyes of Rachel beholding it were positively exhilaratingto a spectator. True to her creed, she did not attempt to interfere,although there were enough of those weak moments of depressionto make it perfectly easy for a less scrupulous person to pressthrough and know all, and perhaps Rachel was sorry that she didnot choose. All these moods ran themselves into one general effect,which Helen compared to the sliding of a river, quick, quicker,quicker still, as it races to a waterfall. Her instinct was to cryout Stop! but even had there been any use in crying Stop! she wouldhave refrained, thinking it best that things should take their way,the water racing because the earth was shaped to make it race.
It seemed that Rachel herself had no suspicion that she was watched,or that there was anything in her manner likely to draw attention to her.
What had happened to her she did not know. Her mind was very muchin the condition of the racing water to which Helen compared it.
She wanted to see Terence; she was perpetually wishing to seehim when he was not there; it was an agony to miss seeing him;agonies were strewn all about her day on account of him, but she neverasked herself what this force driving through her life arose from.
She thought of no result any more than a tree perpetually presseddownwards by the wind considers the result of being pressed downwardsby the wind.
During the two or three weeks which had passed since their walk,half a dozen notes from him had accumulated in her drawer. She wouldread them, and spend the whole morning in a daze of happiness;the sunny land outside the window being no less capable of analysingits own colour and heat than she was of analysing hers. In these moodsshe found it impossible to read or play the piano, even to move beingbeyond her inclination. The time passed without her noticing it.
When it was dark she was drawn to the window by the lights of the hotel.
A light that went in and out was the light in Terence's window:
there he sat, reading perhaps, or now he was walking up and downpulling out one book after another; and now he was seated in hischair again, and she tried to imagine what he was thinking about.
The steady lights marked the rooms where Terence sat with peoplemoving round him. Every one who stayed in the hotel had a peculiarromance and interest about them. They were not ordinary people.
She would attribute wisdom to Mrs. Elliot, beauty to Susan Warrington,a splendid vitality to Evelyn M., because Terence spoke to them.
As unreflecting and pervasive were the moods of depression.
Her mind was as the landscape outside when dark beneath cloudsand straitly lashed by wind and hail. Again she would sit passivein her chair exposed to pain, and Helen's fantastical or gloomywords were like so many darts goading her to cry out against thehardness of life. Best of all were the moods when for no reasonagain this stress of feeling slackened, and life went on as usual,only with a joy and colour in its events that was unknown before;they had a significance like that which she had seen in the tree:
the nights were black bars separating her from the days;she would have liked to run all the days into one long continuityof sensation. Although these moods were directly or indirectlycaused by the presence of Terence or the thought of him, she neversaid to herself that she was in love with him, or consideredwhat was to happen if she continued to feel such things, so thatHelen's image of the river sliding on to the waterfall had a greatlikeness to the facts, and the alarm which Helen sometimes feltwas justified.
In her curious condition of unanalysed sensations she was incapableof making a plan which should have any effect upon her state of mind.
She abandoned herself to the mercy of accidents, missing Terence one day,meeting him the next, receiving his letters always with a startof surprise. Any woman experienced in the progress of courtshipwould have come by certain opinions from all this which would havegiven her at least a theory to go upon; but no one had ever beenin love with Rachel, and she had never been in love with any one.
Moreover, none of the books she read, from _Wuthering_ _Heights_to _Man_ _and_ _Superman_, and the plays of Ibsen, suggested fromtheir analysis of love that what their heroines felt was what shewas feeling now. It seemed to her that her sensations had no name.
She met Terence frequently. When they did not meet, he was aptto send a note with a book or about a book, for he had not beenable after all to neglect that approach to intimacy. But sometimeshe did not come or did not write for several days at a time.
Again when they met their meeting might be one of inspiriting joyor of harassing despair. Over all their partings hung the senseof interruption, leaving them both unsatisfied, though ignorantthat the other shared the feeling.
If Rachel was ignorant of her own feelings, she was even morecompletely ignorant of his. At first he moved as a god;as she came to know him better he was still the centre of light,but combined with this beauty a wonderful power of making her daringand confident of herself. She was conscious of emotions and powerswhich she had never suspected in herself, and of a depth in the worldhitherto unknown. When she thought of their relationship she sawrather than reasoned, representing her view of what Terence feltby a picture of him drawn across the room to stand by her side.
This passage across the room amounted to a physical sensation,but what it meant she did not know.
Thus the time went on, wearing a calm, bright look upon its surface.
Letters came from England, letters came from Willoughby,and the days accumulated their small events which shaped the year.
Superficially, three odes of Pindar were mended, Helen covered aboutfive inches of her embroidery, and St. John completed the firsttwo acts of a play. He and Rachel being now very good friends,he read them aloud to her, and she was so genuinely impressedby the skill of his rhythms and the variety of his adjectives,as well as by the fact that he was Terence's friend, that he beganto wonder whether he was not intended for literature rather thanfor law. It was a time of profound thought and sudden revelationsfor more than one couple, and several single people.
A Sunday came, which no one in the villa with the exception ofRachel and the Spanish maid proposed to recognise. Rachel stillwent to church, because she had never, according to Helen,taken the trouble to think about it. Since they had celebratedthe service at the hotel she went there expecting to get somepleasure from her passage across the garden and through the hallof the hotel, although it was very doubtful whether she wouldsee Terence, or at any rate have the chance of speaking to him.
As the greater number of visitors at the hotel were English,there was almost as much difference between Sunday and Wednesdayas there is in England, and Sunday appeared here as there, the muteblack ghost or penitent spirit of the busy weekday. The Englishcould not pale the sunshine, but they could in some miraculous wayslow down the hours, dull the incidents, lengthen the meals, and makeeven the servants and page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety.
The best clothes which every one put on helped the general effect;it seemed that no lady could sit down without bending a clean starchedpetticoat, and no gentleman could breathe without a sudden cracklefrom a stiff shirt-front. As the hands of the clock neared eleven,on this particular Sunday, various people tended to draw togetherin the hall, clasping little redleaved books in their hands.
The clock marked a few minutes to the hour when a stout black figurepassed through the hall with a preoccupied expression, as thoughhe would rather not recognise salutations, although aware of them,and disappeared down the corridor which led from it.
"Mr. Bax," Mrs. Thornbury whispered.
The little group of people then began to move off in the samedirection as the stout black figure. Looked at in an oddway by people who made no effort to join them, they movedwith one exception slowly and consciously towards the stairs.
Mrs. Flushing was the exception. She came running downstairs,strode across the hall, joined the procession much out of breath,demanding of Mrs. Thornbury in an agitated whisper, "Where, where?""We are all going," said Mrs. Thornbury gently, and soon theywere descending the stairs two by two. Rachel was amongthe first to descend. She did not see that Terence and Hirstcame in at the rear possessed of no black volume, but of onethin book bound in light-blue cloth, which St. John carried under his arm.
The chapel was the old chapel of the monks. It was a profound coolplace where they had said Mass for hundreds of years, and done penancein the cold moonlight, and worshipped old brown pictures and carvedsaints which stood with upraised hands of blessing in the hollowsin the walls. The transition from Catholic to Protestant worshiphad been bridged by a time of disuse, when there were no services,and the place was used for storing jars of oil, liqueur, and deck-chairs;the hotel flourishing, some religious body had taken the place in hand,and it was now fitted out with a number of glazed yellow benches,claret-coloured footstools; it had a small pulpit, and a brass eaglecarrying the Bible on its back, while the piety of different womenhad supplied ugly squares of carpet, and long strips of embroideryheavily wrought with monograms in gold.
As the congregation entered they were met by mild sweet chordsissuing from a harmonium, where Miss Willett, concealed from viewby a baize curtain, struck emphatic chords with uncertain fingers.
The sound spread through the chapel as the rings of water spreadfrom a fallen stone. The twenty or twenty-five people who composedthe congregation first bowed their heads and then sat up and lookedabout them. It was very quiet, and the light down here seemed palerthan the light above. The usual bows and smiles were dispensed with,but they recognised each other. The Lord's Prayer was read over them.
As the childlike battle of voices rose, the congregation,many of whom had only met on the staircase, felt themselvespathetically united and well-disposed towards each other.
As if the prayer were a torch applied to fuel, a smoke seemed to riseautomatically and fill the place with the ghosts of innumerableservices on innumerable Sunday mornings at home. Susan Warringtonin particular was conscious of the sweetest sense of sisterhood,as she covered her face with her hands and saw slips of bent backsthrough the chinks between her fingers. Her emotions rose calmlyand evenly, approving of herself and of life at the same time.
It was all so quiet and so good. But having created this peacefulatmosphere Mr. Bax suddenly turned the page and read a psalm.
Though he read it with no change of voice the mood was broken.
"Be merciful unto me, O God," he read, "for man goeth about to devour me:
he is daily fighting and troubling me. . . . They daily mistakemy words: all that they imagine is to do me evil. They holdall together and keep themselves close. . . . Break their teeth,O God, in their mouths; smite the jaw-bones of the lions, O Lord:
let them fall away like water that runneth apace; and when they shoottheir arrows let them be rooted out."Nothing in Susan's experience at all corresponded with this,and as she had no love of language she had long ceased to attendto such remarks, although she followed them with the same kindof mechanical respect with which she heard many of Lear's speechesread aloud. Her mind was still serene and really occupied withpraise of her own nature and praise of God, that is of the solemnand satisfactory order of the world.
But it could be seen from a glance at their faces that most of the others,the men in particular, felt the inconvenience of the sudden intrusionof this old savage. They looked more secular and critical as thenlistened to the ravings of the old black man with a cloth round hisloins cursing with vehement gesture by a camp-fire in the desert.
After that there was a general sound of pages being turned as ifthey were in class, and then they read a little bit of the OldTestament about making a well, very much as school boys translatean easy passage from the _Anabasis_ when they have shut up theirFrench grammar. Then they returned to the New Testament and the sadand beautiful figure of Christ. While Christ spoke they madeanother effort to fit his interpretation of life upon the livesthey lived, but as they were all very different, some practical,some ambitious, some stupid, some wild and experimental, some in love,and others long past any feeling except a feeling of comfort,they did very different things with the words of Christ.
From their faces it seemed that for the most part they madeno effort at all, and, recumbent as it were, accepted the ideasthe words gave as representing goodness, in the same way, no doubt,as one of those industrious needlewomen had accepted the brightugly pattern on her mat as beauty.
Whatever the reason might be, for the first time in her life,instead of slipping at once into some curious pleasant cloudof emotion, too familiar to be considered, Rachel listened criticallyto what was being said. By the time they had swung in an irregularway from prayer to psalm, from psalm to history, from historyto poetry, and Mr. Bax was giving out his text, she was in a stateof acute discomfort. Such was the discomfort she felt when forcedto sit through an unsatisfactory piece of music badly played.
Tantalised, enraged by the clumsy insensitiveness of the conductor,who put the stress on the wrong places, and annoyed by the vastflock of the audience tamely praising and acquiescing withoutknowing or caring, so she was not tantalized and enraged, only here,with eyes half-shut and lips pursed together, the atmosphere offorced solemnity increased her anger. All round her were peoplepretending to feel what they did not feel, while somewhere aboveher floated the idea which they could none of them grasp, which theypretended to grasp, always escaping out of reach, a beautiful idea,an idea like a butterfly. One after another, vast and hard and cold,appeared to her the churches all over the world where this blunderingeffort and misunderstanding were perpetually going on, great buildings,filled with innumerable men and women, not seeing clearly,who finally gave up the effort to see, and relapsed tamely into praiseand acquiescence, half-shutting their eyes and pursing up their lips.
The thought had the same sort of physical discomfort as is causedby a film of mist always coming between the eyes and the printed page.
She did her best to brush away the film and to conceive somethingto be worshipped as the service went on, but failed, always misledby the voice of Mr. Bax saying things which misrepresented the idea,and by the patter of baaing inexpressive human voices falling roundher like damp leaves. The effort was tiring and dispiriting.
She ceased to listen, and fixed her eyes on the face of a womannear her, a hospital nurse, whose expression of devout attentionseemed to prove that she was at any rate receiving satisfaction.
But looking at her carefully she came to the conclusion that thehospital nurse was only slavishly acquiescent, and that the look ofsatisfaction was produced by no splendid conception of God within her.
How indeed, could she conceive anything far outside her own experience,a woman with a commonplace face like hers, a little round red face,upon which trivial duties and trivial spites had drawn lines, whose weakblue eyes saw without intensity or individuality, whose featureswere blurred, insensitive, and callous? She was adoring somethingshallow and smug, clinging to it, so the obstinate mouth witnessed,with the assiduity of a limpet; nothing would tear her from herdemure belief in her own virtue and the virtues of her religion.
She was a limpet, with the sensitive side of her stuck to a rock,for ever dead to the rush of fresh and beautiful things past her.
The face of this single worshipper became printed on Rachel's mindwith an impression of keen horror, and she had it suddenly revealedto her what Helen meant and St. John meant when they proclaimed theirhatred of Christianity. With the violence that now marked her feelings,she rejected all that she had implicitly believed.
Meanwhile Mr. Bax was half-way through the second lesson.
She looked at him. He was a man of the world with supple lipsand an agreeable manner, he was indeed a man of much kindlinessand simplicity, though by no means clever, but she was not inthe mood to give any one credit for such qualities, and examinedhim as though he were an epitome of all the vices of his service.
Right at the back of the chapel Mrs. Flushing, Hirst, and Hewetsat in a row in a very different frame of mind. Hewet was staringat the roof with his legs stuck out in front of him, for as hehad never tried to make the service fit any feeling or idea of his,he was able to enjoy the beauty of the language without hindrance.
His mind was occupied first with accidental things, such as thewomen's hair in front of him, the light on the faces, then withthe words which seemed to him magnificent, and then more vaguelywith the characters of the other worshippers. But when he suddenlyperceived Rachel, all these thoughts were driven out of his head,and he thought only of her. The psalms, the prayers, the Litany,and the sermon were all reduced to one chanting sound which paused,and then renewed itself, a little higher or a little lower.
He stared alternately at Rachel and at the ceiling, but his expressionwas now produced not by what he saw but by something in his mind.
He was almost as painfull............