second--William and Lily should marry--she took the heather-mixture
stocking, with its criss-cross of steel needles at the mouth of it, and
measured it against James's leg.
"My dear, stand still," she said, for in his jealousy, not liking to serve
as measuring block for the Lighthouse keeper's little boy, James fidgeted
purposely; and if he did that, how could she see, was it too long, was it
too short? she asked.
She looked up--what demon possessed him, her youngest, her cherished?--and
saw the room, saw the chairs, thought them fearfully shabby. Their
entrails, as Andrew said the other day, were all over the floor; but then
what was the point, she asked, of buying good chairs to let them spoil up
here all through the winter when the house, with only one old woman to see
to it, positively dripped with wet? Never mind, the rent was precisely
twopence half-penny; the children loved it; it did her husband good to be
three thousand, or if she must be accurate, three hundred miles from his
libraries and his lectures and his disciples; and there was room for
visitors. Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London
life of service was done--they did well enough here; and a photograph or
two, and books. Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had
time to read them. Alas! even the books that had been given her and
inscribed by the hand of the poet himself: "For her whose wishes must be
obeyed" ... "The happier Helen of our days" ... disgraceful to say, she
had never read them. And Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage
Customs of Polynesia ("My dear, stand still," she said)--neither of those
could one send to the Lighthouse. At a certain moment, she supposed, the
house would become so shabby that something must be done. If they could
be taught to wipe their feet and not bring the beach in with them--that
would be something. Crabs, she had to allow, if Andrew really wished to
dissect them, or if Jasper believed that one could make soup from seaweed,
one could not prevent it; or Rose's objects--shells, reeds, stones; for
they were gifted, her children, but all in quite different ways. And the
result of it was, she sighed, taking in the whole room from floor to
ceiling, as she held the stocking against James's leg, that things got
shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer. The mat was fading; the
wall-paper was flapping. You couldn't tell any more that those were roses
on it. Still, if every door in a house is left perpetually open, and no
lockmaker in the whole of Scotland can mend a bolt, things must spoil.
Every door was left open. She listened. The drawing-room door was open;
the hall door was open; it sounded as if the bedroom doors were open; and
certainly the window on the landing was open, for that she had opened
herself. That windows should be open, and doors shut--simple as it was,
could none of them remember it? She would go into the maids' bedrooms
at night and find them sealed like ovens, except for Marie's, the Swiss
girl, who would rather go without a bath than without fresh air, but then
at home, she had said, "the mountains are so beautiful." She had said
that last night looking out of the window with tears in her eyes.
"The mountains are so beautiful." Her father was dying there,
Mrs Ramsay knew. He was leaving them fatherless. Scolding and
demonstrating (how to make a bed, how to open a window, with hands that
shut and spread like a Frenchwoman's) all had folded itself quietly about
her, when the girl spoke, as, after a flight through the sunshine the
wings of a bird fold themselves quietly and the blue of its plumage
changes from bright steel to soft purple. She had stood there silent for
there was nothing to be said. He had cancer of the throat. At the
recolection--how she had stood there, how the girl had said, "At home the
mountains are so beautiful," and there was no hope, no hope whatever, she
had a spasm of irritation, and speaking sharply, said to James:
"Stand still. Don't be tiresome," so that he knew instantly that her
severity was real, and straightened his leg and she measured it.
The stocking was too short by half an inch at least, making allowance for
the fact that Sorley's little boy would be less well grown than James.
"It's too short," she said, "ever so much too short."
Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the
darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps
a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received
it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.
But was it nothing but looks, people said? What was there behind it--her
beauty and splendour? Had he blown his brains out, they asked, had he
died the week before they were married--some other, earlier lover, of whom
rumours reached one? Or was there nothing? nothing but an incomparable
beauty which she lived behind, and could do nothing to disturb? For
easily though she might have said at some moment of intimacy when stories
of great passion, of love foiled, of ambition thwarted came her way how
she too had known or felt or been through it herself, she never spoke.
She was silent always. She knew then--she knew without having learnt.
Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her singleness of
mind made her drop plumb like a stone, alight exact as a bird, gave her,
naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth which delighted,
eased, sustained--falsely perhaps.
("Nature has but little clay," said Mr Bankes once, much moved by her
voice on the telephone, though she was only telling him a fact about a
train, "like that of which she moulded you." He saw her at the end of the
line Greek, blue-eyed, straight-nosed. How incongruous it seemed to be
telephoning to a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to have
joined hands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face. Yes, he would
catch the 10:30 at Euston.
"But she's no more aware of her beauty than a child," said Mr Bankes,
replacing the receiver and crossing the room to see what progress the
workmen were making with an hotel which they were building at the back of
his house. And he thought of Mrs Ramsay as he looked at that stir among
the unfinished walls. For always, he thought, there was something
incongruous to be worked into the harmony of her face. She clapped a
deer-stalker's hat on her head; she ran across the lawn in galoshes to
snatch a child from mischief. So that if it was her beauty merely that
one thought of, one must remember the quivering thing, the living thing
(they were carrying bricks up a little plank as he watched them), and work
it into the picture; or if one thought of her simply as a woman, one must
endow her with some freak of idiosyncrasy--she did not like admiration--or
suppose some latent desire to doff her royalty of form as if her beauty
bored her and all that men say of beauty, and she wanted only to be like
other people, insignificant. He did not know. He did not know. He must
go to his work.)
Knitting her reddish-brown hair
y stocking, with her head outlined absurdly
by the gilt frame, the green shawl which she had tossed over the edge of
the frame, and the authenticated masterpiece by Michael Angelo,
Mrs Ramsay smoothed out what had been harsh in her manner a moment
before, raised his head, and kissed her little boy on the forehead.
"Let us find another picture to cut out," she said.
6
But what had happened?
Some one had blundered.
Starting from her musing she gave meaning to words which she had held
meaningless in her mind for a long stretch of time. "Some one had
blundered"--Fixing her short-sighted eyes upon her husband, who was now
bearing down upon her, she gazed steadily until his closeness revealed to
her (the jingle mated itself in her head) that something had happened,
some one had blundered. But she could not for the life of her think what.
He shivered; he quivered. All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own
splendour, riding fell as a thunderbolt, fierce as a hawk at the head of
his men through the valley of death, had been shattered, destroyed.
Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well, flashed through the
valley of death, volleyed and thundered--straight into Lily Briscoe and
William Bankes. He quivered; he shivered.
Not for the world would she have spoken to him, realising, from the
familiar signs, his eyes averted, and some curious gathering together
of his person, as if he wrapped himself about and needed privacy into
which to regain his equilibrium, that he was outraged and anguished. She
stroked James's head; she transferred to him what she felt for her
husband, and, as she watched him chalk yellow the white dress shirt of a
gentleman in the Army and Navy Stores catalogue, thought what a delight it
would be to her should he turn out a great artist; and why should he not?
He had a splendid forehead. Then, looking up, as her husband passed her
once more, she was relieved to find that the ruin was veiled; domesticity
triumphed; custom crooned its soothing rhythm, so that when stopping
deliberately, as his turn came round again, at the window he bent
quizzically and whimsically to tickle James's bare calf with a sprig of
something, she twitted him for having dispatched "that poor young man,"
Charles Tansley. Tansley had had to go in and write his dissertation,
he said.
"James will have to write HIS dissertation one of these days," he added
ironically, flicking his sprig.
Hating his father, James brushed away the tickling spray with which in a
manner peculiar to him, compound of severity and humour, he teased his
youngest son's bare leg.
She was trying to get these tiresome stockings finished to send to
Sorley's little boy tomorrow, said Mrs Ramsay.
There wasn't the slightest possible chance that they could go to the
Lighthouse tomorrow, Mr Ramsay snapped out irascibly.
How did he know? she asked. The wind often changed.
The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women's minds
enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered
and shivered; and now, she flew in the face of facts, made his children
hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies. He
stamped his foot on the stone step. "Damn you," he said. But what had she
said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might.
Not with the barometer falling and the wind due west.
To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other
people's feelings, to rendthe thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so
brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without
replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of
jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There
was nothing to be said.
He stood by her in silence. Very humbly, at length, he said that he would
step over and ask the Coastguards if she liked.
There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him.
She was quite ready to take his word for it, she said. Only then they
need not cut sandwiches--that was all. They came to her, naturally, since
she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this,
another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing
but a sponge sopped full of human emotions. Then he said, Damn you. He
said, It must rain. He said, It won't rain; and instantly a Heaven of
security opened before her. There was nobody she reverenced more. She
was not good enough to tie his shoe strings, she felt.
Already ashamed of that petulance, of that gesticulation of the hands when
charging at the head of his troops, Mr Ramsay rather sheepishly prodded
his son's bare legs once more, and then, as if he had her leave for it,
with a movement which oddly reminded his wife of the great sea lion at the
Zoo tumbling backwards after swallowing his fish and walloping off so that
the water in the tank washes from side to side, he dived into the evening
air which, already thinner, was taking the substance from leaves and
hedges but, as if in return, restoring to roses and pinks a lustre which
they had not had by day.
"Some one had blundered," he said again, striding off, up and down the
terrace.
But how extraordinarily his note had changed! It was like the cuckoo;
"in June he gets out of tune"; as if he were trying over, tentatively
seeking, some phrase for a new mood, and having only this at hand, used
it, cracked though it was. But it sounded ridiculous--"Some one had
blundered"--said like that, almost as a question, without any conviction,
melodiously. Mrs Ramsay could not help smiling, and soon, sure enough,
walking up and down, he hummed it, dropped it, fell silent.
He was safe, he was restored to his privacy. He stopped to light his
pipe, looked once at his wife and son in the window, and as one raises
one's eyes from a page in an express train and sees a farm, a tree, a
cluster of cottages as an illustration, a confirmation of something on the
printed page to which one returns, fortified, and satisfied, so without
his distinguishing either his son or his wife, the sight of them fortified
him and satisfied him and consecrated his effort to arrive at a perfectly
clear understanding of the problem which now engaged the energies of his
splendid mind.
It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano,
divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six
letters all in order, then his splendid mind had one by one, firmly and
accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very
few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for one
moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far, far
away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with
little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless against a
doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window. They
needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q? What comes nex
t?
After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely
visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only
reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it
would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he
was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q--R--. Here he
knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the
urn, and proceeded. "Then R ..." He braced himself. He clenched
himself.
Qualities that would have saved a ship's company exposed on a broiling
sea with six biscuits and a flask of water--endurance and justice,
foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then--what is R?
A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the
intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of
darkness he heard people saying--he was a failure--that R was beyond him.
He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R--
Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the
Polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counsellor,
whose temper, neither sanguine nor despondent, surveys with equanimity
what is to be and faces it, came to his help again. R--
The lizard's eye flickered once more. The veins on his forehead bulged.
The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and, displayed among
its leaves, he could see, without wishing it, that old, that obvious
distinction between the two classes of men; on the one hand the steady
goers of superhuman strength who, plodding and persevering, repeat the
whole alphabet in order, twenty-six letters in all, from start to finish;
on the other the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the
letters together in one flash--the way of genius. He had not genius; he
laid no claim to that: but he had, or might have had, the power to repeat
every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile,
he stuck at Q. On, then, on to R.
Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has
begun to fall and the mountain top is covered in mist, knows that he must
lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him, paling the
colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on
the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he would not die
lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed
on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die
standing. He would never reach R.
He stood stock-still, by the urn, with the geranium flowing over it. How
many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all?
Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer,
without treachery to the expedition behind him, "One perhaps." One in a
generation. Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one? provided he
has toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, and till he has no
more left to give? And his fame lasts how long? It is permissible even
for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him
hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two
thousand years? (asked Mr Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge).
What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the
ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two,
and would then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still.
(He looked into the hedge, into the intricacy of the twigs.) Who then
could blame the leader of that forlorn party which after all has climbed
high enough to see the waste of the years and the perishing of the stars,
if before death stiffens his limbs beyond the power of movement he does a
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