Mrs. Flushing rose to go she was obviously delighted with her new acquaintances. She made three or four different plans for meeting or going on an expedition, or showing Helen the things they had bought, on her way to the carriage. She included them all in a vague but magnificent invitation.
As Helen returned to the garden again, Ridley’s words of warning came into her head, and she hesitated a moment and looked at Rachel sitting between Hirst and Hewet. But she could draw no conclusions, for Hewet was still reading Gibbon aloud, and Rachel, for all the expression she had, might have been a shell, and his words water rubbing against her ears, as water rubs a shell on the edge of a rock.
Hewet’s voice was very pleasant. When he reached the end of the period Hewet stopped, and no one volunteered any criticism.
“I do adore the aristocracy!” Hirst exclaimed after a moment’s pause. “They’re so amazingly unscrupulous. None of us would dare to behave as that woman behaves.”
“What I like about them,” said Helen as she sat down, “is that they’re so well put together. Naked, Mrs. Flushing would be superb. Dressed as she dresses, it’s absurd, of course.”
“Yes,” said Hirst. A shade of depression crossed his face. “I’ve never weighed more than ten stone in my life,” he said, “which is ridiculous, considering my height, and I’ve actually gone down in weight since we came here. I daresay that accounts for the rheumatism.” Again he jerked his wrist back sharply, so that Helen might hear the grinding of the chalk stones. She could not help smiling.
“It’s no laughing matter for me, I assure you,” he protested. “My mother’s a chronic invalid, and I’m always expecting to be told that I’ve got heart disease myself. Rheumatism always goes to the heart in the end.”
“For goodness’ sake, Hirst,” Hewet protested; “one might think you were an old cripple of eighty. If it comes to that, I had an aunt who died of cancer myself, but I put a bold face on it—” He rose and began tilting his chair backwards and forwards on its hind legs. “Is any one here inclined for a walk?” he said. “There’s a magnificent walk, up behind the house. You come out on to a cliff and look right down into the sea. The rocks are all red; you can see them through the water. The other day I saw a sight that fairly took my breath away—about twenty jelly-fish, semi-transparent, pink, with long streamers, floating on the top of the waves.”
“Sure they weren’t mermaids?” said Hirst. “It’s much too hot to climb uphill.” He looked at Helen, who showed no signs of moving.
“Yes, it’s too hot,” Helen decided.
There was a short silence.
“I’d like to come,” said Rachel.
“But she might have said that anyhow,” Helen thought to herself as Hewet and Rachel went away together, and Helen was left alone with St. John, to St. John’s obvious satisfaction.
He may have been satisfied, but his usual difficulty in deciding that one subject was more deserving of notice than another prevented him from speaking for some time. He sat staring intently at the head of a dead match, while Helen considered—so it seemed from the expression of her eyes—something not closely connected with the present moment.
At last St. John exclaimed, “Damn! Damn everything! Damn everybody!” he added. “At Cambridge there are people to talk to.”
“At Cambridge there are people to talk to,” Helen echoed him, rhythmically and absent-mindedly. Then she woke up. “By the way, have you settled what you’re going to do—is it to be Cambridge or the Bar?”
He pursed his lips, but made no immediate answer, for Helen was still slightly inattentive. She had been thinking about Rachel and which of the two young men she was likely to fall in love with, and now sitting opposite to Hirst she thought, “He’s ugly. It’s a pity they’re so ugly.”
She did not include Hewet in this criticism; she was thinking of the clever, honest, interesting young men she knew, of whom Hirst was a good example, and wondering whether it was necessary that thought and scholarship should thus maltreat their bodies, and should thus elevate their minds to a very high tower from which the human race appeared to them like rats and mice squirming on the flat.
“And the future?” she reflected, vaguely envisaging a race of men becoming more and more like Hirst, and a race of women becoming more and more like Rachel. “Oh no,” she concluded, glancing at him, “one wouldn’t marry you. Well, then, the future of the race is in the hands of Susan and Arthur; no—that’s dreadful. Of farm labourers; no—not of the English at all, but of Russians and Chinese.” This train of thought did not satisfy her, and was interrupted by St. John, who began again:
“I wish you knew Bennett. He’s the greatest man in the world.”
“Bennett?” she enquired. Becoming more at ease, St. John dropped the concentrated abruptness of his manner, and explained that Bennett was a man who lived in an old windmill six miles out of Cambridge. He lived the perfect life, according to St. John, very lonely, very simple, caring only for the truth of things, always ready to talk, and extraordinarily modest, though his mind was of the greatest.
“Don’t you think,” said St. John, when he had done describing him, “that kind of thing makes this kind of thing rather flimsy? Did you notice at tea how poor old Hewet had to change the conversation? How they were all ready to pounce upon me because they thought I was going to say something improper? It wasn’t anything, really. If Bennett had been there he’d have said exactly what he meant to say, or he’d have got up and gone. But there’s something rather bad for the character in that—I mean if one hasn’t got Bennett’s character. It’s inclined to make one bitter. Should you say that I was bitter?”
Helen did not answer, and he continued:
“Of course I am, disgustingly bitter, and it’s a beastly thing to be. But the worst of me is that I’m so envious. I envy every one. I can’t endure people who do things better than I do—perfectly absurd things too—waiters balancing piles of plates—even Arthur, because Susan’s in love with him. I want people to like me, and they don’t. It’s partly my appearance, I expect,” he continued, “though it’s an absolute lie to say I’ve Jewish blood in me—as a matter of fact we’ve been in Norfolk, Hirst of Hirstbourne Hall, for three centuries at least. It must be awfully soothing to be like you—every one liking one at once.”
“I assure you they don’t,” Helen laughed.
“They do,” said Hirst with conviction. “In the first place, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen; in the second, you have an exceptionally nice nature.”
If Hirst had looked at her instead of looking intently at his teacup he would have seen Helen blush, partly with pleasure, partly with an impulse of affection towards the young man who had seemed, and would seem again, so ugly and so limited. She pitied him, for she suspected that he suffered, and she was interested in him, for many of the things he said seemed to her true; she admired the morality of youth, and yet she felt imprisoned. As if her instinct were to escape to something brightly coloured and impersonal, which she could hold in her hands, she went into the house and returned with her embroidery. But he was not interested in her embroidery; he did not even look at it.
“About Miss Vinrace,” he began,—“oh, look here, do let’s be St. John and Helen, and Rachel and Terence—what’s she like? Does she reason, does she feel, or is she merely a kind of footstool?”
“Oh no,” said Helen, with great decision. From her observations at tea she was inclined to doubt whether Hirst was the person to educate Rachel. She had gradually come to be interested in her niece, and fond of her; she disliked some things about her very much, she was amused by others; but she felt her, on the whole, a live if unformed human being, experimental, and not always fortunate in her experiments, but with powers of some kind, and a capacity for feeling. Somewhere in the depths of her, too, she was bound to Rachel by the indestructible if inexplicable ties of sex. “She seems vague, but she’s