The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf (best english novels to read .TXT) 📕

quarters, and, sitting on the edge of a brassbound table, looking uncommonly like a seagull, with her white tapering body and thin alert face, Mrs. Dalloway had to listen to the tirade of a fanatical man. Did she realise, to begin with, what a very small part of the world the land was? How peaceful, how beautiful, how benignant in comparison the sea? The deep waters could sustain Europe unaided if every earthly animal died of the plague tomorrow. Mr. Grice recalled dreadful sights which he had seen in the richest city of the world⁠—men and women standing in line hour after hour to receive a mug of greasy soup. “And I thought of the good flesh down here waiting and asking to be caught. I’m not exactly a Protestant, and I’m not a Catholic, but I could almost pray for the days of popery to come again⁠—because of the fasts.”

As he talked he kept opening drawers and moving little glass jars. Here were the treasures which the great ocean had bestowed upon him⁠—pale fish in greenish liquids, blobs of jelly with streaming tresses, fish with lights in their heads, they lived so deep.

“They have swum about among bones,” Clarissa sighed.

“You’re thinking of Shakespeare,” said Mr. Grice, and taking down a copy from a shelf well lined with books, recited in an emphatic nasal voice:

“Full fathom five thy father lies,

“A grand fellow, Shakespeare,” he said, replacing the volume.

Clarissa was so glad to hear him say so.

“Which is your favourite play? I wonder if it’s the same as mine?”

“Henry the Fifth,” said Mr. Grice.

“Joy!” cried Clarissa. “It is!”

Hamlet was what you might call too introspective for Mr. Grice, the sonnets too passionate; Henry the Fifth was to him the model of an English gentleman. But his favourite reading was Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George; while Emerson and Thomas Hardy he read for relaxation. He was giving Mrs. Dalloway his views upon the present state of England when the breakfast bell rung so imperiously that she had to tear herself away, promising to come back and be shown his seaweeds.

The party, which had seemed so odd to her the night before, was already gathered round the table, still under the influence of sleep, and therefore uncommunicative, but her entrance sent a little flutter like a breath of air through them all.

“I’ve had the most interesting talk of my life!” she exclaimed, taking her seat beside Willoughby. “D’you realise that one of your men is a philosopher and a poet?”

“A very interesting fellow⁠—that’s what I always say,” said Willoughby, distinguishing Mr. Grice. “Though Rachel finds him a bore.”

“He’s a bore when he talks about currents,” said Rachel. Her eyes were full of sleep, but Mrs. Dalloway still seemed to her wonderful.

“I’ve never met a bore yet!” said Clarissa.

“And I should say the world was full of them!” exclaimed Helen. But her beauty, which was radiant in the morning light, took the contrariness from her words.

“I agree that it’s the worst one can possibly say of anyone,” said Clarissa. “How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!” she added, with her usual air of saying something profound. “One can fancy liking a murderer. It’s the same with dogs. Some dogs are awful bores, poor dears.”

It happened that Richard was sitting next to Rachel. She was curiously conscious of his presence and appearance⁠—his well-cut clothes, his crackling shirtfront, his cuffs with blue rings round them, and the square-tipped, very clean fingers with the red stone on the little finger of the left hand.

“We had a dog who was a bore and knew it,” he said, addressing her in cool, easy tones. “He was a Skye terrier, one of those long chaps, with little feet poking out from their hair like⁠—like caterpillars⁠—no, like sofas I should say. Well, we had another dog at the same time, a black brisk animal⁠—a Schipperke, I think, you call them. You can’t imagine a greater contrast. The Skye so slow and deliberate, looking up at you like some old gentleman in the club, as much as to say, ‘You don’t really mean it, do you?’ and the Schipperke as quick as a knife. I liked the Skye best, I must confess. There was something pathetic about him.”

The story seemed to have no climax.

“What happened to him?” Rachel asked.

“That’s a very sad story,” said Richard, lowering his voice and peeling an apple. “He followed my wife in the car one day and got run over by a brute of a cyclist.”

“Was he killed?” asked Rachel.

But Clarissa at her end of the table had overheard.

“Don’t talk of it!” she cried. “It’s a thing I can’t bear to think of to this day.”

Surely the tears stood in her eyes?

“That’s the painful thing about pets,” said Mr. Dalloway; “they die. The first sorrow I can remember was for the death of a dormouse. I regret to say that I sat upon it. Still, that didn’t make one any the less sorry. Here lies the duck that Samuel Johnson sat on, eh? I was big for my age.”

“Then we had canaries,” he continued, “a pair of ringdoves, a lemur, and at one time a martin.”

“Did you live in the country?” Rachel asked him.

“We lived in the country for six months of the year. When I say ‘we’ I mean four sisters, a brother, and myself. There’s nothing like coming of a large family. Sisters particularly are delightful.”

“Dick, you were horribly spoilt!” cried Clarissa across the table.

“No, no. Appreciated,” said Richard.

Rachel had other questions on the tip of her tongue; or rather one enormous question, which she did not in the least know how to put into words. The talk appeared too airy to admit of it.

“Please tell me⁠—everything.” That was what she wanted to say. He had drawn apart one little chink and showed astonishing treasures. It seemed to her incredible that a man like that should be willing to talk to her. He had sisters and pets, and once lived in the country. She stirred her