The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf [best ereader under 100 txt] 📗

a skull, or a crucifix to remind him of the frailty of the body.

“Is it true, Terence,” she demanded, “that women die with bugs crawling across their faces?”

“I think it’s very probable,” he said. “But you must admit, Rachel, that we so seldom think of anything but ourselves that an occasional twinge is really rather pleasant.”

Accusing him of an affection of cynicism which was just as bad as sentimentality itself, she left her position by his side and knelt upon the window sill, twisting the curtain tassels between her fingers. A vague sense of dissatisfaction filled her.

“What’s so detestable in this country,” she exclaimed, “is the blue⁠—always blue sky and blue sea. It’s like a curtain⁠—all the things one wants are on the other side of that. I want to know what’s going on behind it. I hate these divisions, don’t you, Terence? One person all in the dark about another person. Now I liked the Dalloways,” she continued, “and they’re gone. I shall never see them again. Just by going on a ship we cut ourselves off entirely from the rest of the world. I want to see England there⁠—London there⁠—all sorts of people⁠—why shouldn’t one? why should one be shut up all by oneself in a room?”

While she spoke thus half to herself and with increasing vagueness, because her eye was caught by a ship that had just come into the bay, she did not see that Terence had ceased to stare contentedly in front of him, and was looking at her keenly and with dissatisfaction. She seemed to be able to cut herself adrift from him, and to pass away to unknown places where she had no need of him. The thought roused his jealousy.

“I sometimes think you’re not in love with me and never will be,” he said energetically. She started and turned round at his words.

“I don’t satisfy you in the way you satisfy me,” he continued. “There’s something I can’t get hold of in you. You don’t want me as I want you⁠—you’re always wanting something else.”

He began pacing up and down the room.

“Perhaps I ask too much,” he went on. “Perhaps it isn’t really possible to have what I want. Men and women are too different. You can’t understand⁠—you don’t understand⁠—”

He came up to where she stood looking at him in silence.

It seemed to her now that what he was saying was perfectly true, and that she wanted many more things than the love of one human being⁠—the sea, the sky. She turned again the looked at the distant blue, which was so smooth and serene where the sky met the sea; she could not possibly want only one human being.

“Or is it only this damnable engagement?” he continued. “Let’s be married here, before we go back⁠—or is it too great a risk? Are we sure we want to marry each other?”

They began pacing up and down the room, but although they came very near each other in their pacing, they took care not to touch each other. The hopelessness of their position overcame them both. They were impotent; they could never love each other sufficiently to overcome all these barriers, and they could never be satisfied with less. Realising this with intolerable keenness she stopped in front of him and exclaimed:

“Let’s break it off, then.”

The words did more to unite them than any amount of argument. As if they stood on the edge of a precipice they clung together. They knew that they could not separate; painful and terrible it might be, but they were joined forever. They lapsed into silence, and after a time crept together in silence. Merely to be so close soothed them, and sitting side by side the divisions disappeared, and it seemed as if the world were once more solid and entire, and as if, in some strange way, they had grown larger and stronger.

It was long before they moved, and when they moved it was with great reluctance. They stood together in front of the looking-glass, and with a brush tried to make themselves look as if they had been feeling nothing all the morning, neither pain nor happiness. But it chilled them to see themselves in the glass, for instead of being vast and indivisible they were really very small and separate, the size of the glass leaving a large space for the reflection of other things.

XXIII

But no brush was able to efface completely the expression of happiness, so that Mrs. Ambrose could not treat them when they came downstairs as if they had spent the morning in a way that could be discussed naturally. This being so, she joined in the world’s conspiracy to consider them for the time incapacitated from the business of life, struck by their intensity of feeling into enmity against life, and almost succeeded in dismissing them from her thoughts.

She reflected that she had done all that it was necessary to do in practical matters. She had written a great many letters, and had obtained Willoughby’s consent. She had dwelt so often upon Mr. Hewet’s prospects, his profession, his birth, appearance, and temperament, that she had almost forgotten what he was really like. When she refreshed herself by a look at him, she used to wonder again what he was like, and then, concluding that they were happy at any rate, thought no more about it.

She might more profitably consider what would happen in three years’ time, or what might have happened if Rachel had been left to explore the world under her father’s guidance. The result, she was honest enough to own, might have been better⁠—who knows? She did not disguise from herself that Terence had faults. She was inclined to think him too easy and tolerant, just as he was inclined to think her perhaps a trifle hard⁠—no, it was rather that she was uncompromising. In some ways she found St. John preferable; but then, of course, he would never have suited Rachel. Her friendship