her husband beat up and down the terrace, something between a croak and a
song, she was soothed once more, assured again that all was well, and
looking down at the book on her knee found the picture of a pocket knife
with six blades which could only be cut out if James was very careful.
Suddenly a loud cry, as of a sleep-walker, half roused, something about
Stormed at with shot and shell
sung out with the utmost intensity in her ear, made her turn
apprehensively to see if anyone had heard him. Only Lily Briscoe, she was
glad to find; and that did not matter. But the sight of the girl standing
on the edge of the lawn painting reminded her; she was supposed to be
keeping her head as much in the same position as possible for Lily's
picture. Lily's picture! Mrs Ramsay smiled. With her little Chinese
eyes and her puckered-up face, she would never marry; one could not take
her painting very seriously; she was an independent little creature, and
Mrs Ramsay liked her for it; so, remembering her promise, she bent her
head.
4
Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming down upon her with his
hands waving shouting out, "Boldly we rode and well," but, mercifully, he
turned sharp, and rode off, to die gloriously she supposed upon the
heights of Balaclava. Never was anybody at once so ridiculous and so
alarming. But so long as he kept like that, waving, shouting, she was
safe; he would not stand still and look at her picture. And that was what
Lily Briscoe could not have endured. Even while she looked at the mass,
at the line, at the colour, at Mrs Ramsay sitting in the window with
James, she kept a feeler on her surroundings lest some one should creep
up, and suddenly she should find her picture looked at. But now, with all
her senses quickened as they were, looking, straining, till the colour of
the wall and the jacmanna beyond burnt into her eyes, she was aware of
someone coming out of the house, coming towards her; but somehow divined,
from the footfall, William Bankes, so that though her brush quivered, she
did not, as she would have done had it been Mr Tansley, Paul Rayley,
Minta Doyle, or practically anybody else, turn her canvas upon the grass,
but let it stand. William Bankes stood beside her.
They had rooms in the village, and so, walking in, walking out, parting
late on door-mats, had said little things about the soup, about the
children, about one thing and another which made them allies; so that when
he stood beside her now in his judicial way (he was old enough to be her
father too, a botanist, a widower, smelling of soap, very scrupulous and
clean) she just stood there. He just stood there. Her shoes were
excellent, he observed. They allowed the toes their natural expansion.
Lodging in the same house with her, he had noticed too, how orderly she
was, up before breakfast and off to paint, he believed, alone: poor,
presumably, and without the complexion or the allurement of Miss Doyle
certainly, but with a good sense which made her in his eyes superior to
that young lady. Now, for instance, when Ramsay bore down on them,
shouting, gesticulating, Miss Briscoe, he felt certain, understood.
Some one had blundered.
Mr Ramsay glared at them. He glared at them without seeming to see them.
That did make them both vaguely uncomfortable. Together they had seen a
thing they had not been meant to see. They had encroached upon a privacy.
So, Lily thought, it was probably an excuse of his for moving, for getting
out of earshot, that made Mr Bankes almost immediately say something
about its being chilly and suggested taking a stroll. She would come,
yes. But it was with difficulty that she took her eyes off her picture.
The jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staring white. She would not
have considered it honest to tamper with the bright violet and the staring
white, since she saw them like that, fashionable though it was, since
Mr Paunceforte's visit, to see everything pale, elegant, semitransparent.
Then beneath the colour there was the shape. She could see it all so
clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush
in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight
between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often
brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to
work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often
felt herself--struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to
say: "But this is what I see; this is what I see," and so to clasp some
miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did
their best to pluck from her. And it was then too, in that chill and
windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves upon her
other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance, keeping house for
her father off the Brompton Road, and had much ado to control her impulse
to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at
Mrs Ramsay's knee and say to her--but what could one say to her? "I'm in
love with you?" No, that was not true. "I'm in love with this all,"
waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children. It was
absurd, it was impossible. So now she laid her brushes neatly in the box,
side by side, and said to William Bankes:
"It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat," she said,
looking about her, for it was bright enough, the grass still a soft deep
green, the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers, and
rooks dropping cool cries from the high blue. But something moved,
flashed, turned a silver wing in the air. It was September after all,
the middle of September, and past six in the evening. So off they
strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn,
past the pampas grass, to that break in the thick hedge, guarded by red
hot pokers like brasiers of clear burning coal, between which the blue
waters of the bay looked bluer than ever.
They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need. It was as if
the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on
dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief.
First, the pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue, and the heart
expanded with it and the body swam, only the next instant to be checked
and chilled by the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves. Then, up
behind the great black rock, almost every evening spurted irregularly, so
that one had to watch for it and it was a delight when it came, a fountain
of white water; and then, while one waited for that, one watched, on the
pale semicircular beach, wave after wave shedding again and again
smoothly, a film of mother of pearl.
They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity,
excited by the moving waves; and then by the swift cutting race of a
sailing boat, which, having sliced a curve in the bay, stopped; shivered;
let its sails drop down; and then, with a natural instinct to complete the
picture, after this swift
movement, both of them looked at the dunes
far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some
sadness--because the thing was completed partly, and partly because
distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer
and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely
at rest.
Looking at the far sand hills, William Bankes thought of Ramsay: thought
of a road in Westmorland, thought of Ramsay striding along a road by
himself hung round with that solitude which seemed to be his natural air.
But this was suddenly interrupted, William Bankes remembered (and this
must refer to some actual incident), by a hen, straddling her wings out in
protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping,
pointed his stick and said "Pretty--pretty," an odd illumination in to
his heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his simplicity, his
sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship
had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay had
married. After that, what with one thing and another, the pulp had gone
out of their friendship. Whose fault it was he could not say, only, after
a time, repetition had taken the place of newness. It was to repeat that
they met. But in this dumb colloquy with the sand dunes he maintained
that his affection for Ramsay had in no way diminished; but there, like
the body of a young man laid up in peat for a century, with the red fresh
on his lips, was his friendship, in its acuteness and reality, laid up
across the bay among the sandhills.
He was anxious for the sake of this friendship and perhaps too in order to
clear himself in his own mind from the imputation of having dried and
shrunk--for Ramsay lived in a welter of children, whereas Bankes was
childless and a widower--he was anxious that Lily Briscoe should not
disparage Ramsay (a great man in his own way) yet should understand how
things stood between them. Begun long years ago, their friendship had
petered out on a Westmorland road, where the hen spread her wings before
her chicks; after which Ramsay had married, and their paths lying
different ways, there had been, certainly for no one's fault, some
tendency, when they met, to repeat.
Yes. That was it. He finished. He turned from the view. And, turning
to walk back the other way, up the drive, Mr Bankes was alive to things
which would not have struck him had not those sandhills revealed to him
the body of his friendship lying with the red on its lips laid up in
peat--for instance, Cam, the little girl, Ramsay's youngest daughter. She
was picking Sweet Alice on the bank. She was wild and fierce. She would
not "give a flower to the gentleman" as the nursemaid told her.
No! no! no! she would not! She clenched her fist. She stamped. And
Mr Bankes felt aged and saddened and somehow put into the wrong by her
about his friendship. He must have dried and shrunk.
The Ramsays were not rich, and it was a wonder how they managed to
contrive it all. Eight children! To feed eight children on philosophy!
Here was another of them, Jasper this time, strolling past, to have a shot
at a bird, he said, nonchalantly, swinging Lily's hand like a pump-handle
as he passed, which caused Mr Bankes to say, bitterly, how SHE was a
favourite. There was education now to be considered (true, Mrs Ramsay
had something of her own perhaps) let alone the daily wear and tear of
shoes and stockings which those "great fellows," all well grown, angular,
ruthless youngsters, must require. As for being sure which was which, or
in what order they came, that was beyond him. He called them privately
after the Kings and Queens of England; Cam the Wicked, James the Ruthless,
Andrew the Just, Prue the Fair--for Prue would have beauty, he thought,
how could she help it?--and Andrew brains. While he walked up the drive
and Lily Briscoe said yes and no and capped his comments (for she was in
love with them all, in love with this world) he weighed Ramsay's case,
commiserated him, envied him, as if he had seen him divest himself of all
those glories of isolation and austerity which crowned him in youth to
cumber himself definitely with fluttering wings and clucking
domesticities. They gave him something--William Bankes acknowledged that;
it would have been pleasant if Cam had stuck a flower in his coat or
clambered in eruption; but they had also, his old friends could not but
feel, destroyed something. What would a stranger think now? What did
this Lily Briscoe think? Could one help noticing that habits grew on him?
eccentricities, weaknesses perhaps? It was astonishing that a man of his
intellect could stoop so low as he did--but that was too harsh a
phrase--could depend so much as he did upon people's praise.
"Oh, but," said Lily, "think of his work!"
Whenever she "thought of his work" she always saw clearly before her a
large kitchen table. It was Andrew's doing. She asked him what his
father's books were about. "Subject and object and the nature of
reality," Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion
what that meant. "Think of a kitchen table then," he told her, "when
you're not there."
So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr Ramsay's work, a scrubbed
kitchen table. It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for they had
reached the orchard. And with a painful effort of concentration, she
focused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or upon its
fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one of those
scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to have
been laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its four
legs in air. Naturally, if one's days were passed in this seeing of
angular essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their
flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table
(and it was a mark of the finest minds to do so), naturally one could not
be judged like an ordinary person.
Mr Bankes liked her for bidding him "think of his work." He had thought
of it, often and often. Times without number, he had said, "Ramsay is one
of those men who do their best work before they are forty." He had made a
definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only
five and twenty; what came after was more or less amplification,
repetition. But the number of men who make a definite contribution to
anything whatsoever is very small, he said, pausing by the pear tree, well
brushed, scrupulously exact, exquisitely judicial. Suddenly, as if the
movement of his hand had released it, the load of her accumulated
impressions of him tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all
she felt about him. That was one sensation. Then up rose in a fume the
essence of his being. That was another. She felt herself transfixed
by the intensity of her perception; it was his severity; his goodness. I
respect you (she addressed silently him in person) in every atom; you are
not vain; you are entirely impersonal; you are finer
than Mr Ramsay; you
are the finest human being that I know; you have neither wife nor child
(without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness), you
live for science (involuntarily, sections of potatoes rose before her
eyes); praise would be an insult to you; generous, pure-hearted, heroic
man! But simultaneously, she remembered how he had brought a valet all
the way up here; objected to dogs on chairs; would prose for hours (until
Mr Ramsay slammed out of the room) about salt in vegetables and the
iniquity of English cooks.
How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of
them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking
one felt or disliking? And to those words, what meaning attached, after
all? Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions
poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like
following a voice which speaks too quickly to be her own voice saying
without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things, so that
even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably
fixed there for eternity. You have greatness, she continued, but
Mr Ramsay has none of it. He is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is
spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs Ramsay to death; but he has what you
(she addressed Mr Bankes) have not; a fiery unworldliness; he knows
nothing about trifles; he loves dogs and his children. He has eight.
Mr Bankes has none. Did he not come down in two coats the other night
and let Mrs Ramsay trim his hair into a pudding basin? All of this
danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate but all
marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net--danced up and down in
Lily's mind, in and about the branches of the pear tree, where still hung
in effigy the scrubbed kitchen table, symbol of her profound respect for
Mr Ramsay's mind, until her thought which had spun quicker and quicker
exploded of its own intensity; she felt released; a shot went off close at
hand, and there came, flying from its fragments, frightened, effusive,
tumultuous, a flock of starlings.
"Jasper!" said Mr Bankes. They turned the way the starlings flew, over
the terrace. Following the scatter of swift-flying birds in the sky they
stepped through the gap in the high hedge straight into Mr Ramsay, who
boomed tragically at them, "Some one had blundered!"
His eyes, glazed with emotion, defiant with tragic intensity, met theirs
for a second, and trembled on the verge of recognition; but then, raising
his hand, half-way to his face as if to avert, to brush off, in an agony
of peevish shame, their normal gaze, as if he begged them to withhold for
a moment what he knew to be inevitable, as if he impressed upon them his
own child-like resentment of interruption, yet even in the moment of
discovery was not to be routed utterly, but was determined to hold fast to
something of this delicious emotion, this impure rhapsody of which he was
ashamed, but in which he revelled--he turned abruptly, slammed his private
door on them; and, Lily Briscoe and Mr Bankes, looking uneasily up into
the sky, observed that the flock of starlings which Jasper had routed with
his gun had settled on the tops of the elm trees.
5
"And even if it isn't fine tomorrow," said Mrs Ramsay, raising her eyes
to glance at William Bankes and Lily Briscoe as they passed, "it will be
another day. And now," she said, thinking that Lily's charm was her
Chinese eyes, aslant in her white, puckered little face, but it would take
a clever man to see it, "and now stand up, and let me measure your leg,"
for they might go to the Lighthouse after all, and she must see if the
stocking did not need to be an inch or two longer in the leg.
Smiling, for it was an admirable idea, that had flashed upon her this very
To The Lighthouse Page 3
