Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  “Come with us to Corinth, Flanders,” he said with more than his usual energy, stopping by Jacob’s chair. He was relieved by Jacob’s reply, or rather by the solid, direct, if shy manner in which he said that he would like very much to come with them to Corinth.

  “Here is a fellow,” thought Evan Williams, “who might do very well in politics.”

  “I intend to come to Greece every year so long as I live,” Jacob wrote to Bonamy. “It is the only chance I can see of protecting oneself from civilization.”

  “Goodness knows what he means by that,” Bonamy sighed. For as he never said a clumsy thing himself, these dark sayings of Jacob’s made him feel apprehensive, yet somehow impressed, his own turn being all for the definite, the concrete, and the rational.

  Nothing could be much simpler than what Sandra said as she descended the Acro-Corinth, keeping to the little path, while Jacob strode over rougher ground by her side. She had been left motherless at the age of four; and the Park was vast.

  “One never seemed able to get out of it,” she laughed. Of course there was the library, and dear Mr. Jones, and notions about things. “I used to stray into the kitchen and sit upon the butler’s knees,” she laughed, sadly though.

  Jacob thought that if he had been there he would have saved her; for she had been exposed to great dangers, he felt, and, he thought to himself, “People wouldn’t understand a woman talking as she talks.”

  She made little of the roughness of the hill; and wore breeches, he saw, under her short skirts.

  “Women like Fanny Elmer don’t,” he thought. “What’s-her-name Carslake didn’t; yet they pretend…”

  Mrs. Williams said things straight out. He was surprised by his own knowledge of the rules of behaviour; how much more can be said than one thought; how open one can be with a woman; and how little he had known himself before.

  Evan joined them on the road; and as they drove along up hill and down hill (for Greece is in a state of effervescence, yet astonishingly clean-cut, a treeless land, where you see the ground between the blades, each hill cut and shaped and outlined as often as not against sparkling deep blue waters, islands white as sand floating on the horizon, occasional groves of palm trees standing in the valleys, which are scattered with black goats, spotted with little olive trees and sometimes have white hollows, rayed and criss-crossed, in their flanks), as they drove up hill and down he scowled in the corner of the carriage, with his paw so tightly closed that the skin was stretched between the knuckles and the little hairs stood upright. Sandra rode opposite, dominant, like a Victory prepared to fling into the air.

  “Heartless!” thought Evan (which was untrue).

  “Brainless!” he suspected (and that was not true either). “Still…!” He envied her.

  When bedtime came the difficulty was to write to Bonamy, Jacob found.

  Yet he had seen Salamis, and Marathon in the distance. Poor old Bonamy!

  No; there was something queer about it. He could not write to Bonamy.

  “I shall go to Athens all the same,” he resolved, looking very set, with this hook dragging in his side.

  The Williamses had already been to Athens.

  Athens is still quite capable of striking a young man as the oddest combination, the most incongruous assortment. Now it is suburban; now immortal. Now cheap continental jewellery is laid upon plush trays. Now the stately woman stands naked, save for a wave of drapery above the knee. No form can he set on his sensations as he strolls, one blazing afternoon, along the Parisian boulevard and skips out of the way of the royal landau which, looking indescribably ramshackle, rattles along the pitted roadway, saluted by citizens of both sexes cheaply dressed in bowler hats and continental costumes; though a shepherd in kilt, cap, and gaiters very nearly drives his herd of goats between the royal wheels; and all the time the Acropolis surges into the air, raises itself above the town, like a large immobile wave with the yellow columns of the Parthenon firmly planted upon it.

  The yellow columns of the Parthenon are to be seen at all hours of the day firmly planted upon the Acropolis; though at sunset, when the ships in the Piraeus fire their guns, a bell rings, a man in uniform (the waistcoat unbuttoned) appears; and the women roll up the black stockings which they are knitting in the shadow of the columns, call to the children, and troop off down the hill back to their houses.

  There they are again, the pillars, the pediment, the Temple of Victory and the Erechtheum, set on a tawny rock cleft with shadows, directly you unlatch your shutters in the morning and, leaning out, hear the clatter, the clamour, the whip cracking in the street below. There they are.

  The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white, again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere dissipated in elegant trifles. But this durability exists quite independently of our admiration. Although the beauty is sufficiently humane to weaken us, to stir the deep deposit of mud — memories, abandonments, regrets, sentimental devotions — the Parthenon is separate from all that; and if you consider how it has stood out all night, for centuries, you begin to connect the blaze (at midday the glare is dazzling and the frieze almost invisible) with the idea that perhaps it is beauty alone that is immortal.

  Added to this, compared with the blistered stucco, the new love songs rasped out to the strum of guitar and gramophone, and the mobile yet insignificant faces of the street, the Parthenon is really astonishing in its silent composure; which is so vigorous that, far from being decayed, the Parthenon appears, on the contrary, likely to outlast the entire world.

  “And the Greeks, like sensible men, never bothered to finish the backs of their statues,” said Jacob, shading his eyes and observing that the side of the figure which is turned away from view is left in the rough.

  He noted the slight irregularity in the line of the steps which “the artistic sense of the Greeks preferred to mathematical accuracy,” he read in his guide-book.

  He stood on the exact spot where the great statue of Athena used to stand, and identified the more famous landmarks of the scene beneath.

  In short he was accurate and diligent; but profoundly morose. Moreover he was pestered by guides. This was on Monday.

  But on Wednesday he wrote a telegram to Bonamy, telling him to come at once. And then he crumpled it in his hand and threw it in the gutter.

  “For one thing he wouldn’t come,” he thought. “And then I daresay this sort of thing wears off.” “This sort of thing” being that uneasy, painful feeling, something like selfishness — one wishes almost that the thing would stop — it is getting more and more beyond what is possible— “If it goes on much longer I shan’t be able to cope with it — but if some one else were seeing it at the same time — Bonamy is stuffed in his room in Lincoln’s Inn — oh, I say, damn it all, I say,” — the sight of Hymettus, Pentelicus, Lycabettus on one side, and the sea on the other, as one stands in the Parthenon at sunset, the sky pink feathered, the plain all colours, the marble tawny in one’s eyes, is thus oppressive. Luckily Jacob had little sense of personal association; he seldom thought of Plato or Socrates in the flesh; on the other hand his feeling for architecture was very strong; he preferred statues to pictures; and he was beginning to think a great deal about the problems of civilization, which were solved, of course, so very remarkably by the ancient Greeks, though their solution is no help to us. Then the hook gave a great tug in his side as he lay in bed on Wednesday night; and he turned over with a desperate sort of tumble, remembering Sandra Wentworth Williams with whom he was in love.

  Next day he climbed Pentelicus.

  The day after he went up to the Acropolis. The hour was early; the place almost deserted; and possibly there was thunder in the air. But the sun struck full upon the Acropolis.

  Jacob’s intention was to sit down and read, and, finding a drum of marble conveniently placed, from which Marathon could be seen, and yet it was in the shade, w
hile the Erechtheum blazed white in front of him, there he sat. And after reading a page he put his thumb in his book. Why not rule countries in the way they should be ruled? And he read again.

  No doubt his position there overlooking Marathon somehow raised his spirits. Or it may have been that a slow capacious brain has these moments of flowering. Or he had, insensibly, while he was abroad, got into the way of thinking about politics.

  And then looking up and seeing the sharp outline, his meditations were given an extraordinary edge; Greece was over; the Parthenon in ruins; yet there he was.

  (Ladies with green and white umbrellas passed through the courtyard — French ladies on their way to join their husbands in Constantinople.)

  Jacob read on again. And laying the book on the ground he began, as if inspired by what he had read, to write a note upon the importance of history — upon democracy — one of those scribbles upon which the work of a lifetime may be based; or again, it falls out of a book twenty years later, and one can’t remember a word of it. It is a little painful. It had better be burnt.

  Jacob wrote; began to draw a straight nose; when all the French ladies opening and shutting their umbrellas just beneath him exclaimed, looking at the sky, that one did not know what to expect — rain or fine weather?

  Jacob got up and strolled across to the Erechtheum. There are still several women standing there holding the roof on their heads. Jacob straightened himself slightly; for stability and balance affect the body first. These statues annulled things so! He stared at them, then turned, and there was Madame Lucien Grave perched on a block of marble with her kodak pointed at his head. Of course she jumped down, in spite of her age, her figure, and her tight boots — having, now that her daughter was married, lapsed with a luxurious abandonment, grand enough in its way, into the fleshy grotesque; she jumped down, but not before Jacob had seen her.

  “Damn these women — damn these women!” he thought. And he went to fetch his book which he had left lying on the ground in the Parthenon.

  “How they spoil things,” he murmured, leaning against one of the pillars, pressing his book tight between his arm and his side. (As for the weather, no doubt the storm would break soon; Athens was under cloud.)

  “It is those damned women,” said Jacob, without any trace of bitterness, but rather with sadness and disappointment that what might have been should never be.

  (This violent disillusionment is generally to be expected in young men in the prime of life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon become fathers of families and directors of banks.)

  Then, making sure that the Frenchwomen had gone, and looking cautiously round him, Jacob strolled over to the Erechtheum and looked rather furtively at the goddess on the left-hand side holding the roof on her head. She reminded him of Sandra Wentworth Williams. He looked at her, then looked away. He looked at her, then looked away. He was extraordinarily moved, and with the battered Greek nose in his head, with Sandra in his head, with all sorts of things in his head, off he started to walk right up to the top of Mount Hymettus, alone, in the heat.

  That very afternoon Bonamy went expressly to talk about Jacob to tea with Clara Durrant in the square behind Sloane Street where, on hot spring days, there are striped blinds over the front windows, single horses pawing the macadam outside the doors, and elderly gentlemen in yellow waistcoats ringing bells and stepping in very politely when the maid demurely replies that Mrs. Durrant is at home.

  Bonamy sat with Clara in the sunny front room with the barrel organ piping sweetly outside; the water-cart going slowly along spraying the pavement; the carriages jingling, and all the silver and chintz, brown and blue rugs and vases filled with green boughs, striped with trembling yellow bars.

  The insipidity of what was said needs no illustration — Bonamy kept on gently returning quiet answers and accumulating amazement at an existence squeezed and emasculated within a white satin shoe (Mrs. Durrant meanwhile enunciating strident politics with Sir Somebody in the back room) until the virginity of Clara’s soul appeared to him candid; the depths unknown; and he would have brought out Jacob’s name had he not begun to feel positively certain that Clara loved him — and could do nothing whatever.

  “Nothing whatever!” he exclaimed, as the door shut, and, for a man of his temperament, got a very queer feeling, as he walked through the park, of carriages irresistibly driven; of flower beds uncompromisingly geometrical; of force rushing round geometrical patterns in the most senseless way in the world. “Was Clara,” he thought, pausing to watch the boys bathing in the Serpentine, “the silent woman? — would Jacob marry her?”

  But in Athens in the sunshine, in Athens, where it is almost impossible to get afternoon tea, and elderly gentlemen who talk politics talk them all the other way round, in Athens sat Sandra Wentworth Williams, veiled, in white, her legs stretched in front of her, one elbow on the arm of the bamboo chair, blue clouds wavering and drifting from her cigarette.

  The orange trees which flourish in the Square of the Constitution, the band, the dragging of feet, the sky, the houses, lemon and rose coloured — all this became so significant to Mrs. Wentworth Williams after her second cup of coffee that she began dramatizing the story of the noble and impulsive Englishwoman who had offered a seat in her carriage to the old American lady at Mycenae (Mrs. Duggan) — not altogether a false story, though it said nothing of Evan, standing first on one foot, then on the other, waiting for the women to stop chattering.

  “I am putting the life of Father Damien into verse,” Mrs. Duggan had said, for she had lost everything — everything in the world, husband and child and everything, but faith remained.

  Sandra, floating from the particular to the universal, lay back in a trance.

  The flight of time which hurries us so tragically along; the eternal drudge and drone, now bursting into fiery flame like those brief balls of yellow among green leaves (she was looking at orange trees); kisses on lips that are to die; the world turning, turning in mazes of heat and sound — though to be sure there is the quiet evening with its lovely pallor, “For I am sensitive to every side of it,” Sandra thought, “and Mrs. Duggan will write to me for ever, and I shall answer her letters.” Now the royal band marching by with the national flag stirred wider rings of emotion, and life became something that the courageous mount and ride out to sea on — the hair blown back (so she envisaged it, and the breeze stirred slightly among the orange trees) and she herself was emerging from silver spray — when she saw Jacob. He was standing in the Square with a book under his arm looking vacantly about him. That he was heavily built and might become stout in time was a fact.

  But she suspected him of being a mere bumpkin.

  “There is that young man,” she said, peevishly, throwing away her cigarette, “that Mr. Flanders.”

  “Where?” said Evan. “I don’t see him.”

  “Oh, walking away — behind the trees now. No, you can’t see him. But we are sure to run into him,” which, of course, they did.

  But how far was he a mere bumpkin? How far was Jacob Flanders at the age of twenty-six a stupid fellow? It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done. Some, it is true, take ineffaceable impressions of character at once. Others dally, loiter, and get blown this way and that. Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man, they say; but then, Mrs. Whitehorn, Jacob’s landlady, loathed cats.

  There is also the highly respectable opinion that character-mongering is much overdone nowadays. After all, what does it matter — that Fanny Elmer was all sentiment and sensation, and Mrs. Durrant hard as iron? that Clara, owing (so the character-mongers said) largely to her mother’s influence, never yet had the chance to do anything off her own bat, and only to very observant eyes displayed deeps of feeling which were positively alarming; and would certainly throw herself away upon some one unworthy of her one of these days unless, so the charact
er-mongers said, she had a spark of her mother’s spirit in her — was somehow heroic. But what a term to apply to Clara Durrant! Simple to a degree, others thought her. And that is the very reason, so they said, why she attracts Dick Bonamy — the young man with the Wellington nose. Now HE’S a dark horse if you like. And there these gossips would suddenly pause. Obviously they meant to hint at his peculiar disposition — long rumoured among them.

  “But sometimes it is precisely a woman like Clara that men of that temperament need…” Miss Julia Eliot would hint.

  “Well,” Mr. Bowley would reply, “it may be so.”

  For however long these gossips sit, and however they stuff out their victims’ characters till they are swollen and tender as the livers of geese exposed to a hot fire, they never come to a decision.

  “That young man, Jacob Flanders,” they would say, “so distinguished looking — and yet so awkward.” Then they would apply themselves to Jacob and vacillate eternally between the two extremes. He rode to hounds — after a fashion, for he hadn’t a penny.

  “Did you ever hear who his father was?” asked Julia Eliot.

  “His mother, they say, is somehow connected with the Rocksbiers,” replied Mr. Bowley.

  “He doesn’t overwork himself anyhow.”

  “His friends are very fond of him.”

  “Dick Bonamy, you mean?”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. It’s evidently the other way with Jacob. He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life.”

  “Oh, Mr. Bowley,” said Mrs. Durrant, sweeping down upon them in her imperious manner, “you remember Mrs. Adams? Well, that is her niece.” And Mr. Bowley, getting up, bowed politely and fetched strawberries.

  So we are driven back to see what the other side means — the men in clubs and Cabinets — when they say that character-drawing is a frivolous fireside art, a matter of pins and needles, exquisite outlines enclosing vacancy, flourishes, and mere scrawls.