The Voyage Out quotes

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.

“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 someone 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 seemed dreadful that the town should blaze forever 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.

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.

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.

“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 A.B.C.”

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.

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;

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.

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 …

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.

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.

“To look at, one might think he was a successful stockbroker, and not one of the greatest painters of the age. That’s what I like.”

“There are a great many successful stockbrokers, if you like looking at them,” said Helen.

Rachel wished vehemently that her aunt would not be so perverse.

“And how much nicer they’d have looked with curls!” said Helen.

“The question is, are you going to aim at beauty or are you not?”

“Cleanliness!” said Clarissa, “I do want a man to look clean!”

“I agree that it’s the worst one can possibly say of anyone,” said Clarissa. “How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!” she added, with her usual air of saying something profound.

“One can fancy liking a murderer. It’s the same with dogs. Some dogs are awful bores, poor dears.”

It happened that Richard was sitting next to Rachel.

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?”

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, …

“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!—everything’s at one’s feet.”

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.

She followed him. Ridley, who had prowled unheeded, started forward, stopped, and, with a gesture of disgust, strode off to his study. The sleeping politician was left in Rachel’s charge. She read a sentence, and took a look at him.

In sleep he looked like a coat hanging at the end of a bed; there were all the wrinkles, and the sleeves and trousers kept their shape though no longer filled out by legs and arms.

You can then best judge the age and state of the coat. She looked him all over until it seemed to her that he must protest.

some fulfil more important duties; others (perhaps I am one of them) serve only to connect some obscure parts of the mechanism, concealed from the public eye. Yet if the meanest screw fails in its task, the proper working of the whole is imperilled.”

It was impossible to combine the image of a lean black widow, gazing out of her window, and longing for someone to talk to, with the image of a vast machine, such as one sees at South Kensington, thumping, thumping, thumping.

The attempt at communication had been a failure.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“It’s the way of saying things, isn’t it, not the things?”

“True,” said Richard. “Perfectly true.” He paused. “When I look back over my life—I’m forty-two—what are the great facts that stand out? What were the revelations, if I may call them so? The misery of the poor and—” (he hesitated and pitched over) “love!”

They passed each other gasping on deck; they shouted across tables. They wore fur coats; and Helen was never seen without a bandana on her head. For comfort they retreated to their cabins, where with tightly wedged feet they let the ship bounce and tumble.

Their sensations were the sensations of potatoes in a sack on a galloping horse.

The world outside was merely a violent grey tumult. For two days they had a perfect rest from their old emotions.

Instantly the world dropped into shape; they were no longer atoms flying in the void, but people riding a triumphant ship on the back of the sea.

Wind and space were banished; the world floated like an apple in a tub, and the mind of man, which had been unmoored also, once more attached itself to the old beliefs.

Having scrambled twice round the ship and received many sound cuffs from the wind, they saw a sailor’s face positively shine golden. They looked, and beheld a complete yellow circle of sun;

“Of course,” Helen agreed. “So now you can go ahead and be a person on your own account,” she added.

The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachel’s mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living.

“I can by m-m-myself,” she stammered, “in spite of you, in spite of the Dalloways, and Mr. Pepper, and Father, and my Aunts, in spite of these?” She swept her hand across a whole page of statesmen and soldiers.

The dinner-table was set between two long windows which were left uncurtained by Helen’s orders.

Darkness fell as sharply as a knife in this climate, and the town then sprang out in circles and lines of bright dots beneath them.

Buildings which never showed by day showed by night, and the sea flowed right over the land judging by the moving lights of the steamers. The sight fulfilled the same purpose as an orchestra in a London restaurant, and silence had its setting.

“If you all die of typhoid I won’t be responsible!” he snapped.

“If you die of dullness, neither will I,” Helen echoed in her heart.

She reflected that she had never yet asked him whether he had been in love.

Very different was the room through the wall, though as like in shape as one egg-box is like another. As Miss Allan read her book, Susan Warrington was brushing her hair.

Ages have consecrated this hour, and the most majestic of all domestic actions, to talk of love between women

; but Miss Warrington being alone could not talk; she could only look with extreme solicitude at her own face in the glass. She turned her head from side to side, tossing heavy locks now this way now that;

“Quite alone,” said Hirst. “You try to get out, but you can’t. You only make a mess of things by trying.”

“I’m not a hen in a circle,” said Hewet. “I’m a dove on a treetop.”

“I wonder if this is what they call an ingrowing toenail?” said Hirst, examining the big toe on his left foot.

“Could you contemplate three weeks alone in this hotel?” asked Hirst, after a moment’s pause.

“The truth of it is that one never is alone, and one never is in company,”

he concluded.

But you begin at the beginning, Miss Allan.”

“When I think of the Greeks I think of them as naked black men,” said Miss Allan, “which is quite incorrect, I’m sure.”

“And you, Mr. Hirst?” said Mrs. Thornbury, perceiving that the gaunt young man was near. “I’m sure you read everything.”

“And you, Mr. Hirst?” said Mrs. Thornbury, perceiving that the gaunt young man was near. “I’m sure you read everything.”

“I confine myself to cricket and crime,” said Hirst.

“The worst of coming from the upper classes,” he continued, “is that one’s friends are never killed in railway accidents.”

“I shall be out of it anyway,” Mr. Thornbury interrupted peevishly.

“Cats are often forgotten,” Miss Allan remarked.

“Remember, William, the Prime Minister has reserved his answer,” said Mrs. Thornbury.

Men and women sought different corners where they could lie unobserved, and from two to four it might be said without exaggeration that the hotel was inhabited by bodies without souls.

Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.

Towards four o’clock the human spirit again began to lick the body, as a flame licks a black promontory of coal. Mrs. Paley felt it unseemly to open her toothless jaw so widely, though there was no one near, and Mrs.

She’s either very ugly, appallingly uncomfortable, or absolutely terrifying. I don’t know which alarms me most—a cow or a tree.

I once met a cow in a field by night. The creature looked at me. I assure you it turned my hair grey.

It’s a disgrace that the animals should be allowed to go at large.”

Her dissolution became so complete that she could not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly still, listening and looking always at the same spot. It became stranger and stranger.

She was overcome with awe that things should exist at all.

… She forgot that she had any fingers to raise. … The things that existed were so immense and so desolate.

“I believe—I believe,” Rachel stammered, “

I believe there are things we don’t know about, and the world might change in a minute and anything appear.

”

… a discourse upon round dances, country dances, morris dances, and quadrilles, all of which are entirely superior to the bastard waltz and spurious polka which have ousted them most unjustly in contemporary popularity—when the waiters gently pushed him on to his table in the corner.

The dining-room at this moment had a certain fantastic resemblance to a farmyard scattered with grain on which bright pigeons kept descending.

Almost all the ladies wore dresses which they had not yet displayed, and their hair rose in waves and scrolls so as to appear like carved wood in Gothic churches rather than hair.

“It makes me sick,” he declared. “The whole thing makes me sick. … Consider the minds of those people—their feelings. Don’t you agree?”

“I always make a vow never to go to another party of any description,” Helen replied, “and I always break it.”

She leant back in her chair and looked laughingly at the young man. She could see that he was genuinely cross, if at the same time slightly excited.

“

This is the dance for people who don’t know how to dance!

” she cried. The tune changed to a minuet; St. John hopped with incredible swiftness first on his left leg, then on his right; the tune flowed melodiously;

Susan rose. “I think this has been the happiest night of my life!” she exclaimed. “I do adore music,” she said, as she thanked Rachel. “

It just seems to say all the things one can’t say oneself.

” She gave a nervous little laugh and looked from one to another with great benignity, as though she would like to say something but could not find the words in which to express it. “Everyone’s been so kind—so very kind,” she said.

Rachel added another stone and yawned. “I don’t remember,” she said, “

I feel like a fish at the bottom of the sea.

” She yawned again. None of these people possessed any power to frighten her out here in the dawn, and she felt perfectly familiar even with Mr. Hirst.

… might have walked until she had lost all knowledge of her way, had it not been for the interruption of a tree, which, although it did not grow across her path, stopped her as effectively as if the branches had struck her in the face.

It was an ordinary tree, but to her it appeared so strange that it might have been the only tree in the world.

Dark was the trunk in the middle, and the branches sprang here and there, leaving jagged intervals of light between them as distinctly as if it had but that second risen from the ground.

they raised their lids for an instant at the sound and then closed them again.

They had the appearance of crocodiles so fully gorged by their last meal that the future of the world gives them no anxiety whatever.

The only disturbance in the placid bright room was caused by a large moth which shot from light to light, whizzing over elaborate heads of hair, and causing several young women to raise their hands nervously and exclaim, “Someone ought to kill it!”

Whether too slight or too vague the ties that bind people casually meeting in a hotel at midnight, they possess one advantage at least over the bonds which unite the elderly, who have lived together once and so must live forever.

Slight they may be, but vivid and genuine, merely because the power to break them is within the grasp of each, and there is no reason for continuance except a true desire that continue they shall.

When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other’s bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort …

“Nothin’ that’s more than twenty years old interests me,” she continued. “

Mouldy old pictures, dirty old books, they stick ’em in museums when they’re only fit for burnin’.

”

Thornbury or Miss Allan—one knows nothing whatever about them. They won’t tell you. Either they’re afraid, or they’ve got a way of treating men. It’s the man’s view that’s represented, you see.

Think of a railway train: fifteen carriages for men who want to smoke. Doesn’t it make your blood boil?

If I were a woman I’d blow someone’s brains out. Don’t you laugh at us a great deal? Don’t you think it all a great humbug? You, I mean—how does it all strike you?”

“

A girl is more lonely than a boy. No one cares in the least what she does.

Nothing’s expected of her. Unless one’s very pretty people don’t listen to what you say. … And that is what I like,” she added energetically, as if the memory were very happy.

And yet I sometimes wonder whether there’s anything else in the whole world worth doing. These other people,” he indicated the hotel, “are always wanting something they can’t get. But there’s an extraordinary satisfaction in writing, even in the attempt to write.

What you said just now is true: one doesn’t want to be things; one wants merely to be allowed to see them.

”

one’s less and less capable of making judgments. D’you find that? And then one never knows what anyone feels. We’re all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person’s opinion of another person?

One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn’t know.

”

she was perpetually wishing to see him 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 never asked herself what this force driving through her life arose from.

She thought of no result any more than a tree perpetually pressed downwards by the wind considers the result of being pressed downwards by 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 would read them, and spend the whole morning in a daze of happiness;

Moreover, none of the books she read, from Wuthering Heights to Man and Superman, and the plays of Ibsen, suggested from their analysis of love that what their heroines felt was what she was feeling now.

It seemed to her that her sensations had no name.

She met Terence frequently. When they did not meet, he was apt to send a note with a book or about a book, for he had not been able after all to neglect that approach to intimacy.

As the greater number of visitors at the hotel were English, there was almost as much difference between Sunday and Wednesday as there is in England, and Sunday appeared here as there, the mute black ghost or penitent spirit of the busy weekday.

The English could not pale the sunshine, but they could in some miraculous way slow down the hours, dull the incidents, lengthen the meals, and make even the servants and pageboys wear a look of boredom and propriety.

The best clothes which everyone put on helped the general effect; it seemed that no lady could sit down without bending a clean starched petticoat, and no gentleman could breathe without a sudden crackle from a stiff shirtfront.

She was adoring something shallow and smug, clinging to it, so the obstinate mouth witnessed, with the assiduity of a limpet; nothing would tear her from her demure 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, forever dead to the rush of fresh and beautiful things past her.

The face of this single worshipper became printed on Rachel’s mind with an impression of keen horror, and she had it suddenly revealed to her what Helen meant and St. John meant when they proclaimed their hatred of Christianity.

Bax was not the son of Mr. William Bax. There was a pause. Then Mrs. Thornbury remarked that she was still in the habit of saying Queen instead of King in the National Anthem. There was another pause. Then

Miss Allan observed reflectively that going to church abroad always made her feel as if she had been to a sailor’s funeral.

There was then a very long pause, which threatened to be final, when, mercifully, a bird about the size of a magpie, but of a metallic blue colour, appeared on the section of the terrace that could be seen from where they sat. Mrs.

Rachel at last put down the photographs, walked to the window and remarked,

“It’s odd. People talk as much about love as they do about religion.”

“I wish you’d sit down and talk,” said Evelyn impatiently.

“Then I consider that it is your duty to try now. Why, you may add a new pleasure to life, and as you are still young—” She wondered whether a buttonhook would do. “I make it a rule to try everything,” she said.

“Don’t you think it would be very annoying if you tasted ginger for the first time on your deathbed, and found you never liked anything so much? I should be so exceedingly annoyed that I think I should get well on that account alone.”

She was now successful, and a lump of ginger emerged on the end of the buttonhook. While she went to wipe the buttonhook, Rachel bit the ginger and at once cried, “I must spit it out!”

As they walked down the passage they passed many pairs of boots and shoes, some black and some brown, all side by side, and all different, even to the way in which they lay together.

“I always think that people are so like their boots,” said Miss Allan.

“That is Mrs. Paley’s—” but as she spoke the door opened, and Mrs. Paley rolled out in her chair, equipped also for tea.

“Thank God, Helen, I’m not like you! I sometimes think you don’t think or feel or care to do anything but exist! You’re like Mr. Hirst.

You see that things are bad, and you pride yourself on saying so. It’s what you call being honest; as a matter of fact it’s being lazy, being dull, being nothing.

You don’t help; you put an end to things.”

Instead of answering him she asked,

“Why don’t people write about the things they do feel?”

“Ah, that’s the difficulty!” he sighed, tossing the book away.

“And we’re certain to have it too,” she said. “It isn’t as if we were expecting a great deal—only to walk about and look at things.”

“Only a thousand a year and perfect freedom,” he replied. “How many people in London d’you think have that?”

“And now you’ve spoilt it,” she complained. “Now we’ve got to think of the horrors.”

… once caused her perhaps an hour’s discomfort, so that she had never opened it again, but kept it on her table, and looked at it occasionally, as some medieval monk kept 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.”

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:

“Only seventy thousand words!” Terence exclaimed.

“Yes, and one has to say something about everybody,” Miss Allan added. “That is what I find so difficult, saying something different about everybody.”

Then she thought that she had said enough about herself, and she asked whether they had come down to join the tennis tournament. “The young people are very keen about it. It begins again in half an hour.”

It was a good thing to have some occupation which was quite independent of other people, she said, when one got old. But the odd thing was that one never felt old.

She always felt that she was twenty-five, not a day more or a day less, but, of course, one couldn’t expect other people to agree to that.

“It must be very wonderful to be twenty-five, and not merely to imagine that you’re twenty-five,” she said, looking from one to the other with her smooth, bright glance. “It must be very wonderful, very wonderful indeed.”

Only the stiff and hostile plants of the south, whose fleshy leaves seemed to be grown upon spines, still remained standing upright and defied the sun to beat them down.

It was too hot to talk, and it was not easy to find any book that would withstand the power of the sun.

Many books had been tried and then let fall, and now Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the words of Milton had substance and shape, so that it was not necessary to understand what he was saying;

On the other hand, every object in the room, and the bed itself, and her own body with its various limbs and their different sensations were more and more important each day.

She was completely cut off, and unable to communicate with the rest of the world, isolated alone with her body.

Hours and hours would pass thus, without getting any further through the morning, or again a few minutes would lead from broad daylight to the depths of the night.

… pillow Rachel woke to find herself in the midst of one of those interminable nights which do not end at twelve, but go on into the double figures—thirteen, fourteen, and so on until they reach the twenties, and then the thirties, and then the forties.

She realised that there is nothing to prevent nights from doing this if they choose.

At a great distance an elderly woman sat with her head bent down; Rachel raised herself slightly and saw with dismay that she was playing cards by the light of a candle which stood in the hollow of a newspaper.

She put down the candle and began to arrange the bedclothes.

It struck Rachel that a woman who sat playing cards in a cavern all night long would have very cold hands, and she shrunk from the touch of them.

“Why, there’s a toe all the way down there!” the woman said, proceeding to tuck in the bedclothes. Rachel did not realise that the toe was hers.

He always forgot to pull down the blinds, so that he sat in bright sunshine, which worried him without his knowing what was the cause of it.

The room was terribly stiff and uncomfortable. There were hats in the chairs, and medicine bottles among the books.

He tried to read, but good books were too good, and bad books were too bad, and the only thing he could tolerate was the newspaper, which with its news of London, and the movements of real people who were giving dinner-parties and making speeches, …

Involved in this long dreary nightmare, he did not attempt to think what it amounted to. Rachel was ill; that was all; he must see that there was medicine and milk, and that things were ready when they were wanted.

Thought had ceased; life itself had come to a standstill.

Sunday was rather worse than Saturday had been, simply because the strain was a little greater every day, although nothing else had changed.

He allowed himself to lapse into forgetfulness of everything.

As if a wind that had been raging incessantly suddenly fell asleep, the fret and strain and anxiety which had been pressing on him passed away.

He seemed to stand in an unvexed space of air, on a little island by himself; he was free and immune from pain. It did not matter whether Rachel was well or ill; it did not matter whether they were apart or together;

He allowed himself to lapse into forgetfulness of everything. As if a wind that had been raging incessantly suddenly fell asleep, the fret and strain and anxiety which had been pressing on him passed away.

He seemed to stand in an unvexed space of air, on a little island by himself; he was free and immune from pain.

It did not matter whether Rachel was well or ill; it did not matter whether they were apart or together; nothing mattered—nothing mattered.

He looked at the scattered lights in the town beneath, and thought of Arthur and Susan, or Evelyn and Perrott venturing out unwittingly, and by their happiness laying themselves open to suffering such as this.

How did they dare to love each other, he wondered; how had he himself dared to live as he had lived, rapidly and carelessly, passing from one thing to another, loving Rachel as he had loved her?

Never again would he feel secure; he would never believe in the stability of life, or forget what depths of pain lie beneath small happiness and feelings of content and safety.

They seemed to join together in their effort to extract the greatest possible amount of suffering from him. He could not get used to his pain, it was a revelation to him.

He had never realised before that underneath every action, underneath the life of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to be able to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the edges of all action, eating away the lives of men and women.

He thought for the first time with understanding of words which had before seemed to him empty: the struggle of life; the hardness of life. Now he knew for himself that life is hard and full of suffering.

And in those towns were little men and women, tiny men and women.

Oh, it was absurd, when one thought of it, to sit here in a little room suffering and caring. What did anything matter?

Rachel, a tiny creature, lay ill beneath him, and here in his little room he suffered on her account. The nearness of their bodies in this vast universe, and the minuteness of their bodies, seemed to him absurd and laughable. Nothing mattered, he repeated;

Sometimes she could see through the wall in front of her. Sometimes when Helen went away she seemed to go so far that Rachel’s eyes could hardly follow her.

The room also had an odd power of expanding, and though she pushed her voice out as far as possible until sometimes it became a bird and flew away, she thought it doubtful whether it ever reached the person she was talking to.

There were immense intervals or chasms, for things still had the power to appear visibly before her, between one moment and the next; it sometimes took an hour for Helen to raise her arm, pausing long between each jerky movement, and pour out medicine.