who wondered why such concealments should be necessary; why he needed
always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life;
how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time.
Teaching and preaching is beyond human power, Lily suspected. (She was
putting away her things.) If you are exalted you must somehow come a
cropper. Mrs Ramsay gave him what he asked too easily. Then the change
must be so upsetting, Lily said. He comes in from his books and finds us
all playing games and talking nonsense. Imagine what a change from the
things he thinks about, she said.
He was bearing down upon them. Now he stopped dead and stood looking in
silence at the sea. Now he had turned away again.
9
Yes, Mr Bankes said, watching him go. It was a thousand pities. (Lily
had said something about his frightening her--he changed from one mood to
another so suddenly.) Yes, said Mr Bankes, it was a thousand pities that
Ramsay could not behave a little more like other people. (For he liked
Lily Briscoe; he could discuss Ramsay with her quite openly.) It was for
that reason, he said, that the young don't read Carlyle. A crusty old
grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold, why should he
preach to us? was what Mr Bankes understood that young people said
nowadays. It was a thousand pities if you thought, as he did, that
Carlyle was one of the great teachers of mankind. Lily was ashamed to say
that she had not read Carlyle since she was at school. But in her opinion
one liked Mr Ramsay all the better for thinking that if his little finger
ached the whole world must come to an end. It was not THAT she minded.
For who could be deceived by him? He asked you quite openly to flatter
him, to admire him, his little dodges deceived nobody. What she disliked
was his narrowness, his blindness, she said, looking after him.
"A bit of a hypocrite?" Mr Bankes suggested, looking too at Mr Ramsay's
back, for was he not thinking of his friendship, and of Cam refusing to
give him a flower, and of all those boys and girls, and his own house,
full of comfort, but, since his wife's death, quiet rather? Of course,
he had his work... All the same, he rather wished Lily to agree that
Ramsay was, as he said, "a bit of a hypocrite."
Lily Briscoe went on putting away her brushes, looking up, looking down.
Looking up, there he was--Mr Ramsay--advancing towards them, swinging,
careless, oblivious, remote. A bit of a hypocrite? she repeated. Oh,
no--the most sincere of men, the truest (here he was), the best; but,
looking down, she thought, he is absorbed in himself, he is tyrannical,
he is unjust; and kept looking down, purposely, for only so could she keep
steady, staying with the Ramsays. Directly one looked up and saw them,
what she called "being in love" flooded them. They became part of that
unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen
through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through
them. And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr
Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs Ramsay sitting with James in
the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being
made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became
curled and whole like a wave which bore one up and threw one down with
it, there, with a dash on the beach.
Mr Bankes expected her to answer. And she was about to say something
criticizing Mrs Ramsay, how she was alarming, too, in her way,
high-handed, or words to that effect, when Mr Bankes made it entirely
unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture. For such it was considering
his age, turned sixty, and his cleanliness and his impersonality, and the
white scientific coat which seemed to clothe him. For him to gaze as Lily
saw him gazing at Mrs Ramsay was a rapture, equivalent, Lily felt, to the
loves of dozens of young men (and perhaps Mrs Ramsay had never excited the
loves of dozens of young men). It was love, she thought, pretending to
move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to
clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their
symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and
become part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The world by all means
should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased
him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him
precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem, so that
he rested in contemplation of it, and felt, as he felt when he had proved
something absolute about the digestive system of plants, that barbarity
was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued.
Such a rapture--for by what other name could one call it?--made Lily
Briscoe forget entirely what she had been about to say. It was nothing of
importance; something about Mrs Ramsay. It paled beside this "rapture,"
this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude; for nothing so
solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised
its burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift, and one would no
more disturb it, while it lasted, than break up the shaft of sunlight,
lying level across the floor.
That people should love like this, that Mr Bankes should feel this for
Mrs Ramsey (she glanced at him musing) was helpful, was exalting. She
wiped one brush after another upon a piece of old rag, menially, on
purpose. She took shelter from the reverence which covered all women; she
felt herself praised. Let him gaze; she would steal a look at her
picture.
She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She
could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been
thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would
have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour
burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly's wing lying
upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks
scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen; never be
hung even, and there was Mr Tansley whispering in her ear, "Women can't
paint, women can't write ..."
She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs Ramsay. She
did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something
critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness.
Looking along the level of Mr Bankes's glance at her, she thought that no
woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could
only seek shelter under the shade which Mr Bankes extended over them both.
Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that
she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the
best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw
there. But why different, and how different? she asked herself, scraping
her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like
clods with no life in them now,
yet she vowed, she would inspire them,
force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ?
What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a
crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its
twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an
arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course,
Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am
much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She
opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune
of Mrs Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on
one's bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her
beauty was always that--hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it
might be--Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr Carmichael snuffling and
sniffing; Mr Bankes saying, "The vegetable salts are lost." All this she
would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the
window, in pretence that she must go,--it was dawn, she could see the sun
rising,--half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing,
insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole
world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs Ramsay cared not a
fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs Ramsay had
had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to
her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she
lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the
best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs Ramsay
listening; shaded lights and regular breathing.
Oh, but, Lily would say, there was her father; her home; even, had she
dared to say it, her painting. But all this seemed so little, so
virginal, against the other. Yet, as the night wore on, and white lights
parted the curtains, and even now and then some bird chirped in the
garden, gathering a desperate courage she would urge her own exemption
from the universal law; plead for it; she liked to be alone; she liked to
be herself; she was not made for that; and so have to meet a serious stare
from eyes of unparalleled depth, and confront Mrs Ramsay's simple
certainty (and she was childlike now) that her dear Lily, her little
Brisk, was a fool. Then, she remembered, she had laid her head on Mrs
Ramsay's lap and laughed and laughed and laughed, laughed almost
hysterically at the thought of Mrs Ramsay presiding with immutable calm
over destinies which she completely failed to understand. There she sat,
simple, serious. She had recovered her sense of her now--this was the
glove's twisted finger. But into what sanctuary had one penetrated?
Lily Briscoe had looked up at last, and there was Mrs Ramsay, unwitting
entirely what had caused her laughter, still presiding, but now with every
trace of wilfulness abolished, and in its stead, something clear as the
space which the clouds at last uncover--the little space of sky which
sleeps beside the moon.
Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of
beauty, so that all one's perceptions, half way to truth, were tangled in
a golden mesh? or did she lock up within her some secret which certainly
Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all?
Every one could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth as she was. But
if they knew, could they tell one what they knew? Sitting on the floor
with her arms round Mrs Ramsay's knees, close as she could get, smiling
to think that Mrs Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she
imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was,
physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of
kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them
out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly,
never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which
one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming,
like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the
object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling
in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving,
as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge
but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that
could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which
is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay's knee.
Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head against
Mrs Ramsay's knee. And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored up
in Mrs Ramsay's heart. How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one
thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a
bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch
or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air
over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with
their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people.
Mrs Ramsay rose. Lily rose. Mrs Ramsay went. For days there hung about
her, as after a dream some subtle change is felt in the person one has
dreamt of, more vividly than anything she said, the sound of murmuring
and, as she sat in the wicker arm-chair in the drawing-room window she
wore, to Lily's eyes, an august shape; the shape of a dome.
This ray passed level with Mr Bankes's ray straight to Mrs Ramsay sitting
reading there with James at her knee. But now while she still looked,
Mr Bankes had done. He had put on his spectacles. He had stepped back.
He had raised his hand. He had slightly narrowed his clear blue eyes,
when Lily, rousing herself, saw what he was at, and winced like a dog who
sees a hand raised to strike it. She would have snatched her picture off
the easel, but she said to herself, One must. She braced herself to stand
the awful trial of some one looking at her picture. One must, she said,
one must. And if it must be seen, Mr Bankes was less alarming than
another. But that any other eyes should see the residue of her
thirty-three years, the deposit of each day's living mixed with something
more secret than she had ever spoken or shown in the course of all those
days was an agony. At the same time it was immensely exciting.
Nothing could be cooler and quieter. Taking out a pen-knife, Mr Bankes
tapped the canvas with the bone handle. What did she wish to indicate by
the triangular purple shape, "just there"? he asked.
It was Mrs Ramsay reading to James, she said. She knew his objection--
that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt
at likeness, she said. For what reason had she introduced them then? he
asked. Why indeed?--except that if there, in that corner, it was bright,
here, in this, she felt the need of darkness. Simple, obvious,
commonplace, as it was, Mr Bankes was interested. Mother and child
th
en--objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was
famous for her beauty--might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow
without irreverence.
But the picture was not of them, she said. Or, not in his sense. There
were other senses too in which one might reverence them. By a shadow here
and a light there, for instance. Her tribute took that form if, as she
vaguely supposed, a picture must be a tribute. A mother and child might
be reduced to a shadow without irreverence. A light here required a
shadow there. He considered. He was interested. He took it
scientifically in complete good faith. The truth was that all his
prejudices were on the other side, he explained. The largest picture in
his drawing-room, which painters had praised, and valued at a higher price
than he had given for it, was of the cherry trees in blossom on the banks
of the Kennet. He had spent his honeymoon on the banks of the Kennet, he
said. Lily must come and see that picture, he said. But now--he turned,
with his glasses raised to the scientific examination of her canvas. The
question being one of the relations of masses, of lights and shadows,
which, to be honest, he had never considered before, he would like to have
it explained--what then did she wish to make of it? And he indicated the
scene before them. She looked. She could not show him what she wished to
make of it, could not see it even herself, without a brush in her hand.
She took up once more her old painting position with the dim eyes and the
absent-minded manner, subduing all her impressions as a woman to something
much more general; becoming once more under the power of that vision which
she had seen clearly once and must now grope for among hedges and houses
and mothers and children--her picture. It was a question, she remembered,
how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left. She
might do it by bringing the line of the branch across so; or break the
vacancy in the foreground by an object (James perhaps) so. But the danger
was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be broken. She
stopped; she did not want to bore him; she took the canvas lightly off the
easel.
But it had been seen; it had been taken from her. This man had shared
with her something profoundly intimate. And, thanking Mr Ramsay for it
and Mrs Ramsay for it and the hour and the place, crediting the world with
a power which she had not suspected--that one could walk away down that
long gallery not alone any more but arm in arm with somebody--the
strangest feeling in the world, and the most exhilarating--she nicked
the catch of her paint-box to, more firmly than was necessary, and the
nick seemed to surround in a circle forever the paint-box, the lawn,
Mr Bankes, and that wild villain, Cam, dashing past.
10
For Cam grazed the easel by an inch; she would not stop for Mr Bankes
and Lily Briscoe; though Mr Bankes, who would have liked a daughter of
his own, held out his hand; she would not stop for her father, whom she
grazed also by an inch; nor for her mother, who called "Cam! I want
you a moment!" as she dashed past. She was off like a bird, bullet, or
arrow, impelled by what desire, shot by whom, at what directed, who
could say? What, what? Mrs Ramsay pondered, watching her. It might
be a vision--of a shell, of a wheelbarrow, of a fairy kingdom on the
far side of the hedge; or it might be the glory of speed; no one knew.
But when Mrs Ramsay called "Cam!" a second time, the projectile dropped
in mid career, and Cam came lagging back, pulling a leaf by the way, to
her mother.
What was she dreaming about, Mrs Ramsay wondered, seeing her engrossed,
as she stood there, with some thought of her own, so that she had to
repeat the message twice--ask Mildred if Andrew, Miss Doyle, and Mr
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