The Complete Novels - 9 Books in One Edition. Virginia Woolf

Rachel were going to be married. It was different certainly. The book called Silence would not now be the same book that it would have been. He would then put down his pencil and stare in front of him, and wonder in what respects the world was different—it had, perhaps, more solidity, more coherence, more importance, greater depth. Why, even the earth sometimes seemed to him very deep; not carved into hills and cities and fields, but heaped in great masses. He would look out of the window for ten minutes at a time; but no, he did not care for the earth swept of human beings. He liked human beings—he liked them, he suspected, better than Rachel did. There she was, swaying enthusiastically over her music, quite forgetful of him,—but he liked that quality in her. He liked the impersonality which it produced in her. At last, having written down a series of little sentences, with notes of interrogation attached to them, he observed aloud, “’Women—’under the heading Women I’ve written:

      “’Not really vainer than men. Lack of self-confidence at the base of most serious faults. Dislike of own sex traditional, or founded on fact? Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an optimist, because they don’t think.’ What do you say, Rachel?” He paused with his pencil in his hand and a sheet of paper on his knee.

      Rachel said nothing. Up and up the steep spiral of a very late Beethoven sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined staircase, energetically at first, then more laboriously advancing her feet with effort until she could go no higher and returned with a run to begin at the very bottom again.

      “’Again, it’s the fashion now to say that women are more practical and less idealistic than men, also that they have considerable organising ability but no sense of honour’—query, what is meant by masculine term, honour?—what corresponds to it in your sex? Eh?”

      Attacking her staircase once more, Rachel again neglected this opportunity of revealing the secrets of her sex. She had, indeed, advanced so far in the pursuit of wisdom that she allowed these secrets to rest undisturbed; it seemed to be reserved for a later generation to discuss them philosophically.

      Crashing down a final chord with her left hand, she exclaimed at last, swinging round upon him:

      “No, Terence, it’s no good; here am I, the best musician in South America, not to speak of Europe and Asia, and I can’t play a note because of you in the room interrupting me every other second.”

      “You don’t seem to realise that that’s what I’ve been aiming at for the last half-hour,” he remarked. “I’ve no objection to nice simple tunes—indeed, I find them very helpful to my literary composition, but that kind of thing is merely like an unfortunate old dog going round on its hind legs in the rain.”

      He began turning over the little sheets of note-paper which were scattered on the table, conveying the congratulations of their friends.

      “’—all possible wishes for all possible happiness,’” he read; “correct, but not very vivid, are they?”

      “They’re sheer nonsense!” Rachel exclaimed. “Think of words compared with sounds!” she continued. “Think of novels and plays and histories—” Perched on the edge of the table, she stirred the red and yellow volumes contemptuously. She seemed to herself to be in a position where she could despise all human learning. Terence looked at them too.

      “God, Rachel, you do read trash!” he exclaimed. “And you’re behind the times too, my dear. No one dreams of reading this kind of thing now—antiquated problem plays, harrowing descriptions of life in the east end—oh, no, we’ve exploded all that. Read poetry, Rachel, poetry, poetry, poetry!”

      Picking up one of the books, he began to read aloud, his intention being to satirise the short sharp bark of the writer’s English; but she paid no attention, and after an interval of meditation exclaimed:

      “Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed entirely of vast blocks of matter, and that we’re nothing but patches of light—” she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering over the carpet and up the wall—“like that?”

      “No,” said Terence, “I feel solid; immensely solid; the legs of my chair might be rooted in the bowels of the earth. But at Cambridge, I can remember, there were times when one fell into ridiculous states of semi-coma about five o’clock in the morning. Hirst does now, I expect—oh, no, Hirst wouldn’t.”

      Rachel continued, “The day your note came, asking us to go on the picnic, I was sitting where you’re sitting now, thinking that; I wonder if I could think that again? I wonder if the world’s changed? and if so, when it’ll stop changing, and which is the real world?”

      “When I first saw you,” he began, “I thought you were like a creature who’d lived all its life among pearls and old bones. Your hands were wet, d’you remember, and you never said a word until I gave you a bit of bread, and then you said, ‘Human Beings!’”

      “And I thought you—a prig,” she recollected. “No; that’s not quite it. There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I thought you and St. John were like those ants—very big, very ugly, very energetic, with all your virtues on your backs. However, when I talked to you I liked you—”

      “You fell in love with me,” he corrected her. “You were in love with me all the time, only you didn’t know it.”

      “No, I never fell in love with you,” she asserted.

      “Rachel—what a lie—didn’t you sit here looking at my window—didn’t you wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun—?”

      “No,” she repeated, “I never fell in love, if falling in love is what people say it is, and it’s the world that tells the lies and I tell the truth. Oh, what lies—what lies!”

      She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from Mr. Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington. It was strange, considering how very different these people were, that they used almost the same sentences when they wrote to congratulate her upon her engagement.

      That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church service had done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done; and if they didn’t feel a thing why did they go and pretend to? The simplicity and arrogance and hardness of her youth, now concentrated into a single spark as it was by her love of him, puzzled Terence; being engaged had not that effect on him; the world was different, but not in that way; he still wanted the things he had always wanted, and in particular he wanted the companionship of other people more than ever perhaps. He took the letters out of her hand, and protested:

      “Of course they’re absurd, Rachel; of course they say things just because other people say them, but even so, what a nice woman Miss Allan is; you can’t deny that; and Mrs. Thornbury too; she’s got too many children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone to the bad instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees—hasn’t she a kind of beauty—of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say? Isn’t she rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river going on and on and on? By the way, Ralph’s been made governor of the Carroway Islands—the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn’t it?”

      But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast majority of the affairs of the world went on unconnected by a single thread with her own destiny.

      “I won’t have eleven children,” she asserted; “I won’t have the eyes of an old woman. She looks at one up and down, up and down, as if one were a horse.”

      “We must have a son and we must have a daughter,” said Terence, putting down the letters, “because, let alone the inestimable advantage of being our children, they’d be so well brought up.” They went on to sketch an outline of the ideal education—how their daughter should be required from infancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard painted blue, to suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too practical; and their son—he should be taught to laugh at great men, that is, at distinguished successful