The Complete Novels - 9 Books in One Edition. Virginia Woolf
the joints, and unused to donkey-riding, but as her holidays were few she made the most of them.
The vivacious white figure rode well in front; she had somehow possessed herself of a leafy branch and wore it round her hat like a garland. They went on for a few minutes in silence.
“The view will be wonderful,” Hewet assured them, turning round in his saddle and smiling encouragement. Rachel caught his eye and smiled too. They struggled on for some time longer, nothing being heard but the clatter of hooves striving on the loose stones. Then they saw that Evelyn was off her ass, and that Mr. Perrott was standing in the attitude of a statesman in Parliament Square, stretching an arm of stone towards the view. A little to the left of them was a low ruined wall, the stump of an Elizabethan watch-tower.
“I couldn’t have stood it much longer,” Mrs. Elliot confided to Mrs. Thornbury, but the excitement of being at the top in another moment and seeing the view prevented any one from answering her. One after another they came out on the flat space at the top and stood overcome with wonder. Before them they beheld an immense space—grey sands running into forest, and forest merging in mountains, and mountains washed by air, the infinite distances of South America. A river ran across the plain, as flat as the land, and appearing quite as stationary. The effect of so much space was at first rather chilling. They felt themselves very small, and for some time no one said anything. Then Evelyn exclaimed, “Splendid!” She took hold of the hand that was next her; it chanced to be Miss Allan’s hand.
“North—South—East—West,” said Miss Allan, jerking her head slightly towards the points of the compass.
Hewet, who had gone a little in front, looked up at his guests as if to justify himself for having brought them. He observed how strangely the people standing in a row with their figures bent slightly forward and their clothes plastered by the wind to the shape of their bodies resembled naked statues. On their pedestal of earth they looked unfamiliar and noble, but in another moment they had broken their rank, and he had to see to the laying out of food. Hirst came to his help, and they handed packets of chicken and bread from one to another.
As St. John gave Helen her packet she looked him full in the face and said:
“Do you remember—two women?”
He looked at her sharply.
“I do,” he answered.
“So you’re the two women!” Hewet exclaimed, looking from Helen to Rachel.
“Your lights tempted us,” said Helen. “We watched you playing cards, but we never knew that we were being watched.”
“It was like a thing in a play,” Rachel added.
“And Hirst couldn’t describe you,” said Hewet.
It was certainly odd to have seen Helen and to find nothing to say about her.
Hughling Elliot put up his eyeglass and grasped the situation.
“I don’t know of anything more dreadful,” he said, pulling at the joint of a chicken’s leg, “than being seen when one isn’t conscious of it. One feels sure one has been caught doing something ridiculous—looking at one’s tongue in a hansom, for instance.”
Now the others ceased to look at the view, and drawing together sat down in a circle round the baskets.
“And yet those little looking-glasses in hansoms have a fascination of their own,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “One’s features look so different when one can only see a bit of them.”
“There will soon be very few hansom cabs left,” said Mrs. Elliot. “And four-wheeled cabs—I assure you even at Oxford it’s almost impossible to get a four-wheeled cab.”
“I wonder what happens to the horses,” said Susan.
“Veal pie,” said Arthur.
“It’s high time that horses should become extinct anyhow,” said Hirst. “They’re distressingly ugly, besides being vicious.”
But Susan, who had been brought up to understand that the horse is the noblest of God’s creatures, could not agree, and Venning thought Hirst an unspeakable ass, but was too polite not to continue the conversation.
“When they see us falling out of aeroplanes they get some of their own back, I expect,” he remarked.
“You fly?” said old Mr. Thornbury, putting on his spectacles to look at him.
“I hope to, some day,” said Arthur.
Here flying was discussed at length, and Mrs. Thornbury delivered an opinion which was almost a speech to the effect that it would be quite necessary in time of war, and in England we were terribly behind-hand. “If I were a young fellow,” she concluded, “I should certainly qualify.” It was odd to look at the little elderly lady, in her grey coat and skirt, with a sandwich in her hand, her eyes lighting up with zeal as she imagined herself a young man in an aeroplane. For some reason, however, the talk did not run easily after this, and all they said was about drink and salt and the view. Suddenly Miss Allan, who was seated with her back to the ruined wall, put down her sandwich, picked something off her neck, and remarked, “I’m covered with little creatures.” It was true, and the discovery was very welcome. The ants were pouring down a glacier of loose earth heaped between the stones of the ruin—large brown ants with polished bodies. She held out one on the back of her hand for Helen to look at.
“Suppose they sting?” said Helen.
“They will not sting, but they may infest the victuals,” said Miss Allan, and measures were taken at once to divert the ants from their course. At Hewet’s suggestion it was decided to adopt the methods of modern warfare against an invading army. The table-cloth represented the invaded country, and round it they built barricades of baskets, set up the wine bottles in a rampart, made fortifications of bread and dug fosses of salt. When an ant got through it was exposed to a fire of bread-crumbs, until Susan pronounced that that was cruel, and rewarded those brave spirits with spoil in the shape of tongue. Playing this game they lost their stiffness, and even became unusually daring, for Mr. Perrott, who was very shy, said, “Permit me,” and removed an ant from Evelyn’s neck.
“It would be no laughing matter really,” said Mrs. Elliot confidentially to Mrs. Thornbury, “if an ant did get between the vest and the skin.”
The noise grew suddenly more clamorous, for it was discovered that a long line of ants had found their way on to the table-cloth by a back entrance, and if success could be gauged by noise, Hewet had every reason to think his party a success. Nevertheless he became, for no reason at all, profoundly depressed.
“They are not satisfactory; they are ignoble,” he thought, surveying his guests from a little distance, where he was gathering together the plates. He glanced at them all, stooping and swaying and gesticulating round the table-cloth. Amiable and modest, respectable in many ways, lovable even in their contentment and desire to be kind, how mediocre they all were, and capable of what insipid cruelty to one another! There was Mrs. Thornbury, sweet but trivial in her maternal egoism; Mrs. Elliot, perpetually complaining of her lot; her husband a mere pea in a pod; and Susan—she had no self, and counted neither one way nor the other; Venning was as honest and as brutal as a schoolboy; poor old Thornbury merely trod his round like a horse in a mill; and the less one examined into Evelyn’s character the better, he suspected. Yet these were the people with money, and to them rather than to others was given the management of the world. Put among them some one more vital, who cared for life or for beauty, and what an agony, what a waste would they inflict on him if he tried to share with them and not to scourge!
“There’s Hirst,” he concluded, coming to the figure of his friend; with his usual little frown of concentration upon his forehead he was peeling the skin off a banana. “And he’s as ugly as sin.” For the ugliness of St. John Hirst, and the limitations that went with it, he made the rest in some way responsible. It was their fault that he had to live alone. Then he came to Helen, attracted to her by the sound of her laugh. She was laughing at Miss Allan. “You wear combinations