The Virginia Woolf Megapack. Virginia Woolf
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being silent.
“Suppose we go and see what’s to be seen over there?” said Arthur to Susan, and the pair walked off together, their departure certainly sending some thrill of emotion through the rest.
“An odd lot, aren’t they?” said Arthur. “I thought we should never get ’em all to the top. But I’m glad we came, by Jove! I wouldn’t have missed this for something.”
“I don’t like Mr. Hirst,” said Susan inconsequently. “I suppose he’s very clever, but why should clever people be so—I expect he’s awfully nice, really,” she added, instinctively qualifying what might have seemed an unkind remark.
“Hirst? Oh, he’s one of these learned chaps,” said Arthur indifferently. “He don’t look as if he enjoyed it. You should hear him talking to Elliot. It’s as much as I can do to follow ’em at all.… I was never good at my books.”
With these sentences and the pauses that came between them they reached a little hillock, on the top of which grew several slim trees.
“D’you mind if we sit down here?” said Arthur, looking about him. “It’s jolly in the shade—and the view—” They sat down, and looked straight ahead of them in silence for some time.
“But I do envy those clever chaps sometimes,” Arthur remarked. “I don’t suppose they ever…” He did not finish his sentence.
“I can’t see why you should envy them,” said Susan, with great sincerity.
“Odd things happen to one,” said Arthur. “One goes along smoothly enough, one thing following another, and it’s all very jolly and plain sailing, and you think you know all about it, and suddenly one doesn’t know where one is a bit, and everything seems different from what it used to seem. Now today, coming up that path, riding behind you, I seemed to see everything as if—” he paused and plucked a piece of grass up by the roots. He scattered the little lumps of earth which were sticking to the roots—“As if it had a kind of meaning. You’ve made the difference to me,” he jerked out, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you. I’ve felt it ever since I knew you.… It’s because I love you.”
Even while they had been saying commonplace things Susan had been conscious of the excitement of intimacy, which seemed not only to lay bare something in her, but in the trees and the sky, and the progress of his speech which seemed inevitable was positively painful to her, for no human being had ever come so close to her before.
She was struck motionless as his speech went on, and her heart gave great separate leaps at the last words. She sat with her fingers curled round a stone, looking straight in front of her down the mountain over the plain. So then, it had actually happened to her, a proposal of marriage.
Arthur looked round at her; his face was oddly twisted. She was drawing her breath with such difficulty that she could hardly answer.
“You might have known.” He seized her in his arms; again and again and again they clasped each other, murmuring inarticulately.
“Well,” sighed Arthur, sinking back on the ground, “that’s the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me.” He looked as if he were trying to put things seen in a dream beside real things.
There was a long silence.
“It’s the most perfect thing in the world,” Susan stated, very gently and with great conviction. It was no longer merely a proposal of marriage, but of marriage with Arthur, with whom she was in love.
In the silence that followed, holding his hand tightly in hers, she prayed to God that she might make him a good wife.
“And what will Mr. Perrott say?” she asked at the end of it.
“Dear old fellow,” said Arthur who, now that the first shock was over, was relaxing into an enormous sense of pleasure and contentment. “We must be very nice to him, Susan.”
He told her how hard Perrott’s life had been, and how absurdly devoted he was to Arthur himself. He went on to tell her about his mother, a widow lady, of strong character. In return Susan sketched the portraits of her own family—Edith in particular, her youngest sister, whom she loved better than any one else, “except you, Arthur.… Arthur,” she continued, “what was it that you first liked me for?”
“It was a buckle you wore one night at sea,” said Arthur, after due consideration. “I remember noticing—it’s an absurd thing to notice!—that you didn’t take peas, because I don’t either.”
From this they went on to compare their more serious tastes, or rather Susan ascertained what Arthur cared about, and professed herself very fond of the same thing. They would live in London, perhaps have a cottage in the country near Susan’s family, for they would find it strange without her at first. Her mind, stunned to begin with, now flew to the various changes that her engagement would make—how delightful it would be to join the ranks of the married women—no longer to hang on to groups of girls much younger than herself—to escape the long solitude of an old maid’s life. Now and then her amazing good fortune overcame her, and she turned to Arthur with an exclamation of love.
They lay in each other’s arms and had no notion that they were observed. Yet two figures suddenly appeared among the trees above them. “Here’s shade,” began Hewet, when Rachel suddenly stopped dead. They saw a man and woman lying on the ground beneath them, rolling slightly this way and that as the embrace tightened and slackened. The man then sat upright and the woman, who now appeared to be Susan Warrington, lay back upon the ground, with her eyes shut and an absorbed look upon her face, as though she were not altogether conscious. Nor could you tell from her expression whether she was happy, or had suffered something. When Arthur again turned to her, butting her as a lamb butts a ewe, Hewet and Rachel retreated without a word. Hewet felt uncomfortably shy.
“I don’t like that,” said Rachel after a moment.
“I can remember not liking it either,” said Hewet. “I can remember—” but he changed his mind and continued in an ordinary tone of voice, “Well, we may take it for granted that they’re engaged. D’you think he’ll ever fly, or will she put a stop to that?”
But Rachel was still agitated; she could not get away from the sight they had just seen. Instead of answering Hewet she persisted.
“Love’s an odd thing, isn’t it, making one’s heart beat.”
“It’s so enormously important, you see,” Hewet replied. “Their lives are now changed for ever.”
“And it makes one sorry for them too,” Rachel continued, as though she were tracing the course of her feelings. “I don’t know either of them, but I could almost burst into tears. That’s silly, isn’t it?”
“Just because they’re in love,” said Hewet. “Yes,” he added after a moment’s consideration, “there’s something horribly pathetic about it, I agree.”
And now, as they had walked some way from the grove of trees, and had come to a rounded hollow very tempting to the back, they proceeded to sit down, and the impression of the lovers lost some of its force, though a certain intensity of vision, which was probably the result of the sight, remained with them. As a day upon which any emotion has been repressed is different from other days, so this day was now different, merely because they had seen other people at a crisis of their lives.
“A great encampment of tents they might be,” said Hewet, looking in front of him at the mountains. “Isn’t it like a water-colour too—you know the way water-colours dry in ridges all across the paper—I’ve been wondering what they looked like.”
His eyes became dreamy, as though he were matching things, and reminded Rachel in their colour of the green flesh of a snail. She sat beside him looking at the mountains too. When it became painful to look any longer, the great size of the view seeming to enlarge her eyes beyond their natural limit, she looked at the ground; it pleased her to scrutinise this inch of the soil of South America so minutely that she noticed every grain