Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  If the bus stopped here, Rose thought, looking down over the side, she would get up. The bus stopped, and she rose. It was a pity, she thought, as she stepped onto the pavement and caught a glimpse of her own figure in a tailor’s window, not to dress better, not to look nicer. Always reach-me-downs, coats and skirts from Whiteleys. But they saved time, and the years after all — she was over forty — made one care very little what people thought. They used to say, why don’t you marry? Why don’t you do this or that, interfering. But not any longer.

  She paused in one of the little alcoves that were scooped out in the bridge, from habit. People always stopped to look at the river. It was running fast, a muddy gold this morning with smooth breadths and ripples, for the tide was high. And there was the usual tug and the usual barges with black tarpaulins and corn showing. The water swirled round the arches. As she stood there, looking down at the water, some buried feeling began to arrange the stream into a pattern. The pattern was painful. She remembered how she had stood there on the night of a certain engagement, crying; her tears had fallen, her happiness, it seemed to her, had fallen. Then she had turned — here she turned — and had seen the churches, the masts and roofs of the city. There’s that, she had said to herself. Indeed it was a splendid view. . . . She looked, and then again she turned. There were the Houses of Parliament. A queer expression, half frown, half smile, formed on her face and she threw herself slightly backwards, as if she were leading an army.

  “Damned humbugs!” she said aloud, striking her fist on the balustrade. A clerk who was passing looked at her with surprise. She laughed. She often talked aloud. Why not? That too was one of the consolations, like her coat and skirt, and the hat she stuck on without giving a look in the glass. If people chose to laugh, let them. She strode on. She was lunching in Hyams Place with her cousins. She had asked herself on the spur of the moment, meeting Maggie in a shop. First she had heard a voice; then seen a hand. And it was odd, considering how little she knew them — they had lived abroad — how strongly, sitting there at the counter before Maggie saw her, simply from the sound of her voice, she had felt — she supposed it was affection? — some feeling bred of blood in common. She had got up and said May I come and see you? busy as she was, hating to break her day in the middle. She walked on. They lived in Hyams Place, over the river — Hyams Place, that little crescent of old houses with the name carved in the middle which she used to pass so often when she lived down here. She used to ask herself in those far-off days Who was Hyam? But she had never solved the question to her satisfaction. She walked on, across the river.

  The shabby street on the south side of the river was very noisy. Now and again a voice detached itself from the general clamour. A woman shouted to her neighbour; a child cried. A man trundling a barrow opened his mouth and bawled up at the windows as he passed. There were bedsteads, grates, pokers and odd pieces of twisted iron on his barrow. But whether he was selling old iron or buying old iron it was impossible to say; the rhythm persisted; but the words were almost rubbed out.

  The swarm of sound, the rush of traffic, the shouts of the hawkers, the single cries and the general cries, came into the upper room of the house in Hyams Place where Sara Pargiter sat at the piano. She was singing. Then she stopped; she watched her sister laying the table.

  “Go search the valleys,” she murmured, as she watched her, “pluck up every rose.” She paused. “That’s very nice,” she added, dreamily. Maggie had taken a bunch of flowers; had cut the tight little string which bound them, and had laid them side by side on the table; and was arranging them in an earthenware pot. They were differently coloured, blue, white and purple. Sara watched her arranging them. She laughed suddenly.

  “What are you laughing at?” said Maggie absent-mindedly. She added a purple flower to the bunch and looked at it.

  “Dazed in a rapture of contemplation,” said Sara, “shading her eyes with peacocks’ feathers dipped in morning dew—” she pointed to the table. “Maggie said,” she jumped up and pirouetted about the room, “three’s the same as two, three’s the same as two.” She pointed to the table upon which three places had been laid.

  “But we are three,” said Maggie. “Rose is coming.” Sara stopped. Her face fell.

  “Rose is coming?” she repeated.

  “I told you,” said Maggie. “I said to you, Rose is coming to luncheon on Friday. It is Friday. And Rose is coming to luncheon. Any minute now,” she said. She got up and began to fold some stuff that was lying on the floor.

  “It is Friday, and Rose is coming to luncheon,” Sara repeated.

  “I told you,” said Maggie. “I was in a shop. I was buying stuff. And somebody” — she paused to make her fold more accurately— “came out from behind a counter and said, ‘I’m your cousin. I’m Rose,’ she said. ‘Can I come and see you? Any day, any time,’ she said. So I said,” she put the stuff on a chair, “lunch.”

  She looked round the room to see that everything was in readiness. Chairs were missing. Sara pulled up a chair.

  “Rose is coming,” she said, “and this is where she’ll sit.” She placed the chair at the table facing the window. “And she’ll take off her gloves; and she’ll lay one on this side, one on that. And she’ll say, I’ve never been in this part of London before.’”

  “And then?” said Maggie, looking at the table.

  “You’ll say ‘It’s so convenient for the theatres.’”

  “And then?” said Maggie.

  “And then she’ll say rather wistfully, smiling, putting her head on one side, ‘D’you often go to the theatre, Maggie?’”

  “No,” said Maggie. “Rose has red hair.”

  “Red hair?” Sara exclaimed. “I thought it was grey — a little wisp straggling from under a black bonnet,” she added.

  “No,” said Maggie. “She has a great deal of hair; and it’s red.”

  “Red hair; red Rose,” Sara exclaimed. She spun round on her toe.

  “Rose of the flaming heart; Rose of the burning breast; Rose of the weary world — red, red Rose!”

  A door slammed below; they heard footsteps mounting the stairs. “There she is,” said Maggie.

  The steps stopped. They heard a voice saying, “Still further up? On the very top? Thank you.” Then the steps began mounting the stairs again.

  “This is the worst torture . . .” Sara began, screwing her hands together and clinging to her sister, “that life. . . .”

  “Don’t be such an ass,” said Maggie, pushing her away, as the door opened.

  Rose came in.

  “It’s ages since we met,” she said, shaking hands.

  She wondered what had made her come. Everything was different from what she expected. The room was rather poverty-stricken; the carpet did not cover the floor. There was a sewing-machine in the corner, and Maggie too looked different from what she had looked in the shop. But there was a crimson-and-gilt chair; she recognised it with relief.

  “That used to stand in the hall, didn’t it?” she said, putting her bag down on the chair.

  “Yes,” said Maggie.

  “And that glass—” said Rose, looking at the old Italian glass blurred with spots that hung between the windows, “wasn’t that there too?”

  “Yes,” said Maggie, “in my mother’s bedroom.”

  There was a pause. There seemed to be nothing to say.

  “What nice rooms you’ve found!” Rose continued, making conversation. It was a large room and the door-posts had little carvings on them. “But don’t you find it rather noisy?” she continued.

  The man was crying under the window. She looked out of the window. Opposite there was a row of slate roofs, like half-opened umbrellas; and, rising high above them, a great building which, save for thin black strokes across it, seemed to be made entirely of glass. It was a factory. The man bawled in the street underneath.

  “Yes, it’s noisy,” said Maggie. “But very convenient.”

  “Very convenient for
the theatres,” said Sara, as she put down the meat.

  “So I remember finding,” said Rose, turning to look at her, “when I lived here myself.”

  “Did you live here?” said Maggie, beginning to help the cutlets.

  “Not here,” she said. “Round the corner. With a friend.”

  “We thought you lived in Abercorn Terrace,” said Sara.

  “Can’t one live in more places than one?” Rose asked, feeling vaguely annoyed, for she had lived in many places, felt many passions, and done many things.

  “I remember Abercorn Terrace,” said Maggie. She paused. “There was a long room; and a tree at the end; and a picture over the fireplace, of a girl with red hair?”

  Rose nodded. “Mama when she was young,” she said.

  “And a round table in the middle?” Maggie continued.

  Rose nodded.

  “And you had a parlourmaid with very prominent blue eyes?”

  “Crosby. She’s still with us.”

  They ate in silence.

  “And then?” said Sara, as if she were a child asking for a story.

  “And then?” said Rose. “Well then” — she looked at Maggie, thinking of her as a little girl who had come to tea.

  She saw them sitting round a table; and a detail that she had not thought of for years came back to her — how Milly used to take her hair-pin and fray the wick of the kettle. And she saw Eleanor sitting with her account books; and she saw herself go up to her and say: “Eleanor, I want to go to Lamley’s.”

  Her past seemed to be rising above her present. And for some reason she wanted to talk about her past; to tell them something about herself that she had never told anybody — something hidden. She paused, gazing at the flowers in the middle of the table without seeing them. There was a blue knot in the yellow glaze she noticed.

  “I remember Uncle Abel,” said Maggie. “He gave me a necklace; a blue necklace with gold spots.”

  “He’s still alive,” said Rose.

  They talked, she thought, as if Abercorn Terrace were a scene in a play. They talked as if they were speaking of people who were real, but not real in the way in which she felt herself to be real. It puzzled her; it made her feel that she was two different people at the same time; that she was living at two different times at the same moment. She was a little girl wearing a pink frock; and here she was in this room, now. But there was a great rattle under the windows. A dray went roaring past. The glasses jingled on the table. She started slightly, roused from her thoughts about her childhood, and separated the glasses.

  “Don’t you find it very noisy here?” she said.

  “Yes. But very convenient for the theatres,” said Sara.

  Rose looked up. She had repeated herself. She thinks me an old fool, Rose thought, making the same remark twice over. She blushed slightly.

  What is the use, she thought, of trying to tell people about one’s past? What is one’s past? She stared at the pot with the blue knot loosely tied in the yellow glaze. Why did I come, she thought, when they only laugh at me? Sally rose and cleared away the plates.

  “And Delia—” Maggie began as they waited. She pulled the pot towards her, and began to arrange the flowers. She was not listening; she was thinking her own thoughts. She reminded Rose, as she watched her, of Digby — absorbed in the arrangement of a bunch of flowers, as if to arrange flowers, to put the white by the blue, were the most important thing in the world.

  “She married an Irishman,” she said aloud.

  Maggie took a blue flower and placed it beside a white flower.

  “And Edward?” she asked.

  “Edward . . .” Rose was beginning, when Sally came in with the pudding.

  “Edward!” she exclaimed, catching the word.

  “Oh blasted eyes of my deceased wife’s sister — withered prop of my defunct old age . . .” She put down the pudding. “That’s Edward,” she said. “A quotation from a book he gave me. ‘My wasted youth — my wasted youth’ . . .” The voice was Edward’s; Rose could hear him say it. For he had a way of belittling himself, when in fact he had a very good opinion of himself.

  But it was not the whole of Edward. And she would not have him laughed at; for she was very fond of her brother and very proud of him.

  “There’s not much of ‘my wasted youth’ about Edward now,” she said.

  “I thought not,” said Sara, taking her place opposite.

  They were silent. Rose looked at the flower again. Why did I come? she kept asking herself. Why had she broken up her morning, and interrupted her day’s work, when it was clear to her that they had not wished to see her?

  “Go on, Rose,” said Maggie, helping the pudding. “Go on telling us about the Pargiters.”

  “About the Pargiters?” said Rose. She saw herself running along the broad avenue in the lamplight.

  “What could be more ordinary?” she said. “A large family, living in a large house . . .” And yet she felt that she had been herself very interesting. She paused. Sara looked at her.

  “It’s not ordinary,” she said. “The Pargiters—” She was holding a fork in her hand, and she drew a line on the table-cloth. “The Pargiters,” she repeated, “going on and on and on” — here her fork touched a salt-cellar— “until they come to a rock,” she said; “and then Rose” — she looked at her again: Rose drew herself up slightly, “ — Rose claps spurs to her horse, rides straight up to a man in a gold coat, and says ‘Damn your eyes!’ Isn’t that Rose, Maggie?” she said, looking at her sister as if she had been drawing her picture on the table-cloth.

  That is true, Rose thought as she took her pudding. That is myself. Again she had the odd feeling of being two people at the same time.

  “Well, that’s done,” said Maggie, pushing away her plate. “Come and sit in the armchair, Rose,” she said.

  She went over to the fireplace and pulled out an armchair, which had springs like hoops, Rose noticed, in the seat.

  They were poor, Rose thought, glancing round her. That was why they had chosen this house to live in — because it was cheap. They cooked their own food — Sally had gone into the kitchen to make the coffee. She drew her chair up beside Maggie’s.

  “You make your own clothes?” she said, pointing to the sewing-machine in the corner. There was silk folded on it.

  “Yes,” said Maggie, looking at the sewing-machine.

  “For a party?” said Rose. The stuff was silk, green, with blue rays on it.

  “Tomorrow night,” said Maggie. She raised her hand with a curious gesture to her face, as if she wanted to conceal something. She wants to hide herself from me, Rose thought, as I want to hide myself from her. She watched her; she had got up, had fetched the silk and the sewing-machine, and was threading the needle. Her hands were large and thin and strong, Rose noticed.

  “I never could make my own clothes,” she said, watching her arrange the silk smoothly under the needle. She was beginning to feel at her ease. She took off her hat and threw it on the floor. Maggie looked at her with approval. She was handsome, in a ravaged way; more like a man than a woman.

  “But then,” said Maggie, beginning to turn the handle rather cautiously, “you did other things.” She spoke in the absorbed tones of someone who is using their hands.

  The machine made a comfortable whirring sound as the needle pricked through the silk.

  “Yes, I did other things,” said Rose, stroking the cat that had stretched itself against her knee, “when I lived down here.”

  “But that was years ago,” she added, “when I was young. I lived here with a friend,” she sighed, “and taught little thieves.”

  Maggie said nothing; she was whirring the machine round and round.

  “I always liked thieves better than other people,” Rose added after a time.

  “Yes,” said Maggie.

  “I never liked being at home,” said Rose. “I liked being on my own much better.”

  “Yes,” said Maggie.
/>   Rose went on talking.

  It was quite easy to talk, she found; quite easy. And there was no need to say anything clever; or to talk about one’s self. She was talking about the Waterloo Road as she remembered it when Sara came in with the coffee.

  “What was that about clinging to a fat man in the Campagna?” she asked, setting her tray down.

  “The Campagna?” said Rose. “There was nothing about the Campagna.”

  “Heard through a door,” said Sara, pouring out the coffee, “talk sounds very odd.” She gave Rose her cup.

  “I thought you were talking about Italy; about the Campagna, about the moonlight.”

  Rose shook her head. “We were talking about the Waterloo Road,” she said. But what had she been talking about? Not simply about the Waterloo Road. Perhaps she had been talking nonsense. She had been saying the first thing that came into her head.

  “All talk would be nonsense, I suppose, if it were written down,” she said, stirring her coffee.

  Maggie stopped the machine for a moment and smiled.

  “And even if it isn’t,” she said.

  “But it’s the only way we have of knowing each other,” Rose protested. She looked at her watch. It was later than she thought. She got up.

  “I must go,” she said. “But why don’t you come with me?” she added on the spur of the moment.

  Maggie looked up at her. “Where?” she said.

  Rose was silent. “To a meeting,” she said at length. She wanted to conceal the thing that interested her most; she felt extraordinarily shy. And yet she wanted them to come. But why? she asked herself, as she stood there awkwardly waiting. There was a pause.

  “You could wait upstairs,” she said suddenly. “And you’d see Eleanor; you’d see Martin — the Pargiters in the flesh,” she added. She remembered Sara’s phrase, “the caravan crossing the desert,” she said.