The Voyage Out

life. Unfortunately, as age puts one barrier between human beings, and learning another, and sex a third, Mr. Ambrose in his study was some thousand miles distant from the nearest human being, who in this household was inevitably a woman. He sat hour after hour among white-leaved books, alone like an idol in an empty church, still except for the passage of his hand from one side of the sheet to another, silent save for an occasional choke, which drove him to extend his pipe a moment in the air. As he worked his way further and further into the heart of the poet, his chair became more and more deeply encircled by books, which lay open on the floor, and could only be crossed by a careful process of stepping, so delicate that his visitors generally stopped and addressed him from the outskirts.

On the morning after the dance, however, Rachel came into her uncle’s room and hailed him twice, “Uncle Ridley,” before he paid her any attention.

At length he looked over his spectacles.

“Well?” he asked.

“I want a book,” she replied. “Gibbon’s History of the Roman Empire. May I have it?”

She watched the lines on her uncle’s face gradually rearrange themselves at her question. It had been smooth as a mask before she spoke.

“Please say that again,” said her uncle, either because he had not heard or because he had not understood.

She repeated the same words and reddened slightly as she did so.

“Gibbon! What on earth d’you want him for?” he enquired.

“Somebody advised me to read it,” Rachel stammered.

“But I don’t travel about with a miscellaneous collection of eighteenth-century historians!” her uncle exclaimed. “Gibbon! Ten big volumes at least.”

Rachel said that she was sorry to interrupt, and was turning to go.

“Stop!” cried her uncle. He put down his pipe, placed his book on one side, and rose and led her slowly round the room, holding her by the arm. “Plato,” he said, laying one finger on the first of a row of small dark books, “and Jorrocks next door, which is wrong. Sophocles, Swift. You don’t care for German commentators, I presume. French, then. You read French? You should read Balzac. Then we come to Wordsworth and Coleridge, Pope, Johnson, Addison, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats. One thing leads to another. Why is Marlowe here? Mrs. Chailey, I presume. But what’s the use of reading if you don’t read Greek? After all, if you read Greek, you need never read anything else, pure waste of time⁠—pure waste of time,” thus speaking half to himself, with quick movements of his hands; they had come round again to the circle of books on the floor, and their progress was stopped.

“Well,” he demanded, “which shall it be?”

“Balzac,” said Rachel, “or have you the Speech on the American Revolution, Uncle Ridley?”

“The Speech on the American Revolution?” he asked. He looked at her very keenly again. “Another young man at the dance?”

“No. That was Mr. Dalloway,” she confessed.

“Good Lord!” he flung back his head in recollection of Mr. Dalloway.

She chose for herself a volume at random, submitted it to her uncle, who, seeing that it was La Cousine Bette, bade her throw it away if she found it too horrible, and was about to leave him when he demanded whether she had enjoyed her dance?

He then wanted to know what people did at dances, seeing that he had only been to one thirty-five years ago, when nothing had seemed to him more meaningless and idiotic. Did they enjoy turning round and round to the screech of a fiddle? Did they talk, and say pretty things, and if so, why didn’t they do it, under reasonable conditions? As for himself⁠—he sighed and pointed at the signs of industry lying all about him, which, in spite of his sigh, filled his face with such satisfaction that his niece thought good to leave. On bestowing a kiss she was allowed to go, but not until she had bound herself to learn at any rate the Greek alphabet, and to return her French novel when done with, upon which something more suitable would be found for her.

As the rooms in which people live are apt to give off something of the same shock as their faces when seen for the first time, Rachel walked very slowly downstairs, lost in wonder at her uncle, and his books, and his neglect of dances, and his queer, utterly inexplicable, but apparently satisfactory view of life, when her eye was caught by a note with her name on it lying in the hall. The address was written in a small strong hand unknown to her, and the note, which had no beginning, ran:⁠—

I send the first volume of Gibbon as I promised. Personally I find little to be said for the moderns, but I’m going to send you Wedekind when I’ve done him. Donne? Have you read Webster and all that set? I envy you reading them for the first time. Completely exhausted after last night. And you?

The flourish of initials which she took to be St. J. A. H., wound up the letter. She was very much flattered that Mr. Hirst should have remembered her, and fulfilled his promise so quickly.

There was still an hour to luncheon, and with Gibbon in one hand, and Balzac in the other she strolled out of the gate and down the little path of beaten mud between the olive trees on the slope of the hill. It was too hot for climbing hills, but along the valley there were trees and a grass path running by the river bed. In this land where the population was centred in the towns it was possible to lose sight of civilisation in a very short time, passing only an occasional farmhouse, where the women were handling red roots in the courtyard; or a little boy lying on his elbows on the hillside surrounded by a flock of black strong-smelling goats. Save for a thread of water at the bottom,