The Waves

Bernard takes an early train into London  to meet Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, Rhoda, and Percival for a farewell dinner. Percival is going to India. Bernard is bursting with joy and excitement. Being in a crowd always dissolves Bernard’s sense of individuality, a sensation he relishes. He feels at one with the great rush and jumble of humanity around him, at least until he remembers the events of his one, specific, particular life. For instance, he just got engaged a few days earlier. He looks forward to seeing his friends in part because it’s easier to remember who he is in their presence. In a way, he envies Louis and Rhoda’s solitary existences—the way they are who they are whether alone or in a crowd. Bernard needs people around him to perform, to fully create the stories always bubbling in his mind.

Neville arrives at the appointed restaurant early so he can relish the anticipation—and the agony—of waiting for Percival to appear. Each time someone who isn’t Percival comes into the room, Neville feels the full weight of the world’s cruelty and indifference. He watches Louis—proud and desperate for approval—enter, then plain and simple but decisive Susan. Rhoda slips in almost invisibly, hiding behind others as she slinks toward the table. Neville is acutely aware that her friends both draw and repel her, and that she both wants and fears being in their presence. It’s Susan who first notices Jinny enter, so beautiful and splendidly dressed that she draws the eyes of everyone in the room. Then Bernard, affable and gregarious, arrives. His love of life and humanity makes everything feel like a party.

Finally, Percival walks into the restaurant, much to Neville’s relief. Bernard looks at his friend and thinks about how he’s always stood out among the crowd, always been a hero to others. His presence imposes hierarchy and order on his friends, if not on the whole world. He draws them from isolation into communion. The six think about their shared childhood experiences at Elvedon and their years at primary school, when they were still together. Louis feels that they were broken up after that, when Neville and Bernard went to college and he did not. Jinny is aware of how her and Rhoda’s socialite lives diverge from Susan’s country one, but she’s less aware of how isolated Rhoda always felt. They are drawn together again by an emotion deeper than love. All the while, though, each friend remains distinct from the others in their own mind.

Louis wants love and respect, and he clings to a series of imagined past lives more glorious than his present one. Although he neither respects nor likes anyone in the group other than Susan and Percival, he skipped lunch hoping to excite Jinny’s sympathy. Jinny experiences life on a superficial level, focused on the way she and others look and carry themselves. Driven, determined Neville thinks himself as graceless as Jinny is beautiful and feels unlovable because of it. He suffers, but privately, not performatively, like Louis.

Rhoda feels an even deeper sense of isolation than Louis. She finds life terrifying, as if she’s always waiting for something terrifying to pounce on her like a tiger. For her, time isn’t a flow of connected moments or a web of relationships but a series of discrete experiences. Her life is a swirling, disorienting series of images. She can only pretend to experience continuity, to know where she’s going.

Susan also feels distinct from the others, separated by her maternal and natural sensibilities. She understands only the most primal feelings—“love, hate, rage and pain”—everything else seems empty and pointless. She imagines herself in and also as the fields around her house, participating in the cycles of life by bearing and raising children. She knows her children will be the center and purpose of her life.

In a way, Bernard envies Louis and Rhoda for their autonomy, for the way they continue to be—or feel most comfortable as—their own selves when they’re alone. He feels that he only comes into existence in a crowd. Still, he has confidence in his ability to craft stories out of air and nothing (at least when he’s in the company of others). He feels that his stories are his gift to the world, and he knows that he shares them generously.

The friends are keenly aware of the bustle of London around them, but they also start to imagine exotic, faraway India, where Percival is bound. Bernard imagines Percival like a savior god in India, bringing Western order to “oriental” chaos. Rhoda likewise imagines a magnificent Percival facing alone the challenges of a land of “desolate trees” and “enormous mountains.”

Rhoda sees something else, too, imagining a distant landscape in which a white, moving figure stands in front of the sea. It is not one of the friends. Rhoda tries to sneak behind it to the sea to “replenish [her] emptiness” in the waves, and for an instant, she feels like she’s arrived at her destination.

Together, Rhoda and Louis imagine a scene from some far-off place, in which naked men with spears dance to the sound of horns, trumpets, and drums. The dancers are foreign and exotic, and they form a procession bearing flowered garlands that “forbode[s] decay.” Death, Louis observes, “is woven in with violets.” But flowers bring Jinny back to the superficial world of appearances. She sees flowering trees outside the windows, and it makes her think about how young and beautiful she and her friends are, how far away from death. 

As the dinner comes to an end, the friends share a sense that their circle is about to break—not just for the evening, but irrevocably, by life itself. Bernard is engaged to be married. Percival is about to go off to India. But Louis knows that, even as they part, something will hold them together. None of them can say for sure what the force is—love or hate or Percival, or “youth and beauty”—but none of them can deny it. It is large enough to encompass the whole world and everything in it. Likewise, Bernard pities Percival because he’s the one calling a cab and leaving. Rhoda notices the gathering clouds. Agony overtakes Neville as Percival—the source of his light and happiness—drives away.