He strolled to the window. The sun must be setting, for the brick of the house at the corner blushed a yellowish pink. One or two high windows were burnished gold. The girl was in the room, and she distracted him; also the noise of London still bothered him. Against the dull background of traffic noises, of wheels turning and brakes squeaking, there rose near at hand the cry of a woman suddenly alarmed for her child; the monotonous cry of a man selling vegetables; and far away a barrel organ was playing. It stopped; it began again. I used to write to her, he thought, late at night, when I felt lonely, when I was young. He looked at himself in the glass. He saw his sunburnt face with the broad cheek bones and the little brown eyes.
The girl had been sucked down into the lower portion of the house. The door stood open. Nothing seemed to be happening. He waited. He felt an outsider. After all these years, he thought, everyone was paired off; settled down; busy with their own affairs. You found them telephoning, remembering other conversations; they went out of the room; they left one alone. He took up a book and read a sentence.
“A shadow like an angel with bright hair . . .”
Next moment she came in. But there seemed to be some hitch in the proceedings. The door was open; the table laid; but nothing happened. They stood together, waiting, with their backs to the fireplace.
“How strange it must be,” she resumed, “coming back after all these years — as if you’d dropped from the clouds in an aeroplane,” she pointed to the table as if that were the field in which he had landed.
“On to an unknown land,” said North. He leant forward and touched a knife on the table.
“ — and finding people talking,” she added.
“ — talking, talking,” he said, “about money and politics,” he added, giving the fender behind him a vicious little kick with his heel.
Here the girl came in. She wore an air of importance derived apparently from the dish she carried, for it was covered with a great metal cover. She raised the cover with a certain flourish. There was a leg of mutton underneath. “Let’s dine,” said Sara.
“I’m hungry,” he added.
They sat down and she took the carving-knife and made a long incision. A thin trickle of red juice ran out; it was underdone. She looked at it.
“Mutton oughtn’t to be like that,” she said. “Beef — but not mutton.”
They watched the red juice running down into the well of the dish.
“Shall we send it back,” she said, “or eat it as it is?”
“Eat it,” he said. “I’ve eaten far worse joints than this,” he added.
“In Africa . . .” she said, lifting the lids of the vegetable dishes. There was a slabbed-down mass of cabbage in one oozing green water; in the other, yellow potatoes that looked hard.
“. . . in Africa, in the wilds of Africa,” she resumed, helping him to cabbage, “in that farm you were on, where no one came for months at a time, and you sat on the verandah listening—”
“To sheep,” he said. He was cutting his mutton into strips. It was tough.
“And there was nothing to break the silence,” she went on, helping herself to potatoes, “but a tree falling, or a rock breaking from the side of a distant mountain—” She looked at him as if to verify the sentences that she was quoting from his letters.
“Yes,” he said. “It was very silent.”
“And hot,” she added. “Blazing hot at midday: an old tramp tapped on your door . . . ?”
He nodded. He saw himself again, a young man, and very lonely.
“And then—” she began again. But a great lorry came crashing down the street. Something rattled on the table. The walls and the floor seemed to tremble. She parted two glasses that were jingling together. The lorry passed; they heard it rumbling away in the distance.
“And the birds,” she went on. “The nightingales, singing in the moonlight?”
He felt uncomfortable at the vision she called up. “I must have written you a lot of nonsense!” he exclaimed. “I wish you’d torn them up — those letters!”
“No! They were beautiful letters! Wonderful letters!” she exclaimed, raising her glass. A thimbleful of wine always made her tipsy, he remembered. Her eyes shone; her cheeks glowed.
“And then you had a day off,” she went on, “and jolted along a rough white road in a springless cart to the next town—”
“Sixty miles away,” he said.
“And went to a bar; and met a man from the next — ranch?” She hesitated as if the word might be the wrong one.
“Ranch, yes, ranch,” he confirmed her. “I went to the town and had a drink at the bar—”
“And then?” she said. He laughed. There were some things he had not told her. He was silent.
“Then you stopped writing,” she said. She put her glass down.
“When I forgot what you were like,” he said, looking at her.
“You gave up writing too,” he said.
“Yes, I too,” she said.
The trombone had moved his station and was wailing lugubriously under the window. The doleful sound, as if a dog had thrown back its head and were baying the moon, floated up to them. She waved her fork in time to it.
“Our hearts full of tears, our lips full of laughter, we passed on the stairs” — she dragged her words out to fit the wail of the trombone— “we passed on the stair-r-r-r-s” — but here the trombone changed its measure to a jig. “He to sorrow, I to bliss,” she jigged with it, “he to bliss and I to sorrow, we passed on the stair-r-r-s.”
She set her glass down.
“Another cut off the joint?” she asked.
“No, thank you,” he said, looking at the rather stringy disagreeable object which was still bleeding into the well. The willow-pattern plate was daubed with gory streaks. She stretched her hand out and rang the bell. She rang; she rang a second time. No one came.
“Your bells don’t ring,” he said.
“No,” she smiled. “The bells don’t ring, and the taps don’t run.” She thumped on the floor. They waited. No one came. The trombone wailed outside.
“But there was one letter you wrote me,” he continued as they waited. “An angry letter; a cruel letter.”
He looked at her. She had lifted her lip like a horse that is going to bite. That, too, he remembered.
“Yes?” she said.
“The night you came in from the Strand,” he reminded her.
Here the girl came in with the pudding. It was an ornate pudding, semi-transparent, pink, ornamented with blobs of cream.
“I remember,” said Sara, sticking her spoon into the quivering jelly, “a still autumn night; the lights lit; and people padding along the pavement with wreaths in their hands?”
“Yes,” he nodded. “That was it.”
“And I said to myself,” she paused, “this is Hell. We are the damned?” He nodded.
She helped him to pudding.
“And I,” he said, as he took his plate, “was among the damned.” He stuck his spoon into the quivering mass that she had given him.
“Coward; hypocrite, with your switch in your hand; and your cap on your head—” He seemed to quote from a letter that she had written him. He paused. She smiled at him.
“But what was the word — the word I used?” she asked, as if she were trying to remember.
“Poppycock!” he reminded her. She nodded.
“And then I went over the bridge,” she resumed, raising her spoon half-way to her mouth, “and stopped in one of those little alcoves, bays, what d’you call ‘em? — scooped out over the water, and looked down—” She looked down at her plate.
“When you lived on the other side of the river,” he prompted her.
“Stood and looked down,” she said, looking at her glass which she held in front of her, “and thought; Running water, flowing water, water that crinkles up the lights; moonlight; starlight—” She drank and was silent.
“Then the car came,” he prompted her.
/> “Yes; the Rolls-Royce. It stopped in the lamplight and there they sat—”
“Two people,” he reminded her.
“Two people. Yes,” she said. “He was smoking a cigar. An upper-class Englishman with a big nose, in a dress suit. And she, sitting beside him, in a fur-trimmed cloak, took advantage of the pause under the lamplight to raise her hand” — she raised her hand— “and polish that spade, her mouth.”
She swallowed her mouthful.
“And the peroration?” he prompted her.
She shook her head.
They were silent. North had finished his pudding. He took out his cigarette-case. Save for a dish of rather fly-blown fruit, apples and bananas, there was no more to eat apparently.
“We were very foolish when we were young, Sal,” he said, as he lit his cigarette, “writing purple passages . . .”
“At dawn with the sparrows chirping,” she said, pulling the plate of fruit towards her. She began peeling a banana, as if she were unsheathing some soft glove. He took an apple and peeled it. The curl of apple-skin lay on his plate, coiled up like a snake’s skin, he thought; and the banana-skin was like the finger of a glove that had been ripped open.
The street was now quiet. The woman had stopped singing. The trombone-player had moved off. The rush hour was over and nothing went down the street. He looked at her, biting little bits off her banana.
When she came to the fourth of June, he remembered, she wore her skirt the wrong way round. She was crooked in those days too; and they had laughed at her — he and Peggy. She had never married; he wondered why not. He swept up the broken coils of apple-peel on his plate.
“What does he do,” he said suddenly, “ — that man who throws his hands out?”
“Like this?” she said. She threw her hands out.
“Yes,” he nodded. That was the man — one of those voluble foreigners with a theory about everything. Yet he had liked him — he gave off an aroma; a whirr; his flexible supple face worked amusingly; he had a round forehead; good eyes; and was bald.
“What does he do?” he repeated.
“Talks,” she replied, “about the soul.” She smiled. Again he felt an outsider; so many talks there must have been between them; such intimacy.
“About the soul,” she continued, taking a cigarette. “Lectures,” she added, lighting it. “Ten and six for a seat in the front row,” she puffed her smoke out. “There’s standing room at half a crown; but then,” she puffed, “you don’t hear so well. You only catch half the lesson of the Teacher, the Master,” she laughed.
She was sneering at him now; she conveyed the impression that he was a charlatan. Yet Peggy had said that they were very intimate — she and this foreigner. The vision of the man at Eleanor’s changed slightly like an air ball blown aside.
“I thought he was a friend of yours,” he said aloud.
“Nicholas?” she exclaimed. “I love him!”
Her eyes certainly glowed. They fixed themselves upon a salt cellar with a look of rapture that made North feel once more puzzled.
“You love him. . .” he began. But here the telephone rang.
“There he is!” she exclaimed. “That’s him! That’s Nicholas!”
She spoke with extreme irritation.
The telephone rang again. “I’m not here!” she said. The telephone rang again. “Not here! Not here! Not here!” she repeated in time to the bell. She made no attempt to answer it. He could stand the stab of her voice and the bell no longer. He went over to the telephone. There was a pause as he stood with the receiver in his hand.
“Tell him I’m not here!” she said.
“Hullo,” he said, answering the telephone. But there was a pause. He looked at her sitting on the edge of her chair, swinging her foot up and down. Then a voice spoke.
“I’m North,” he answered the telephone. “I’m dining with Sara. . . . Yes, I’ll tell her. . . .” He looked at her again. “She is sitting on the edge of her chair,” he said, “with a smudge on her face, swinging her foot up and down.”
Eleanor stood holding the telephone. She smiled, and for a moment after she had put the receiver back stood there, still smiling, before she turned to her niece Peggy who had been dining with her.
“North is dining with Sara,” she said, smiling at the little telephone picture of two people at the other end of London, one of whom was sitting on the edge of her chair with a smudge on her face.
“He’s dining with Sara,” she said again. But her niece did not smile, for she had not seen the picture, and she was slightly irritated because, in the middle of what they were saying, Eleanor suddenly got up and said, “I’ll just remind Sara.”
“Oh, is he?” she said casually.
Eleanor came and sat down.
“We were saying—” she began.
“You’ve had it cleaned,” said Peggy simultaneously. While Eleanor telephoned, she had been looking at the picture of her grandmother over the writing-table.
“Yes,” Eleanor glanced back over her shoulder. “Yes. And do you see there’s a flower fallen on the grass?” she said. She turned and looked at the picture. The face, the dress, the basket of flowers all shone softly melting into each other, as if the paint were one smooth coat of enamel. There was a flower — a little sprig of blue — lying in the grass.
“It was hidden by the dirt,” said Eleanor. “But I can just remember it, when I was a child. That reminds me, if you want a good man to clean pictures—”
“But was it like her?” Peggy interrupted.
Somebody had told her that she was like her grandmother: and she did not want to be like her. She wanted to be dark and aquiline: but in fact she was blue-eyed and round-faced — like her grandmother.
“I’ve got the address somewhere,” Eleanor went on.
“Don’t bother — don’t bother,” said Peggy, irritated by her aunt’s habit of adding unnecessary details. It was age coming on, she supposed: age that loosened screws and made the whole apparatus of the mind rattle and jingle.
“Was it like her?” she asked again.
“Not as I remember her,” said Eleanor, glancing once more at the picture. “When I was a child perhaps — no, I don’t think even as a child. What’s so interesting,” she continued, “is that what they thought ugly — red hair for instance — we think pretty; so that I often ask myself,” she paused, puffing at her cheroot, “‘What is pretty?’”
“Yes,” said Peggy. “That’s what we were saying.”
For when Eleanor suddenly took it into her head that she must remind Sara of the party, they had been talking about Eleanor’s childhood — how things had changed; one thing seemed good to one generation, another to another. She liked getting Eleanor to talk about her past; it seemed to her so peaceful and so safe.
“Is there any standard, d’you think?” she said, wishing to bring her back to what they were saying.
“I wonder,” said Eleanor absentmindedly. She was thinking of something else.
“How annoying!” she exclaimed suddenly. “I had it on the tip of my tongue — something I want to ask you. Then I thought of Delia’s party: then North made me laugh — Sally sitting on the edge of her chair with a smudge on her nose; and that’s put it out of my head.” She shook her head.
“D’you know the feeling when one’s been on the point of saying something, and been interrupted; how it seems to stick here,” she tapped her forehead, “so that it stops everything else? Not that it was anything of importance,” she added. She wandered about the room for a moment. “No, I give it up; I give it up,” she said, shaking her head.
“I shall go and get ready now, if you’ll call a cab.”
She went into the bedroom. Soon there was the sound of running water.
Peggy lit another cigarette. If Eleanor were going to wash, as seemed likely from the sounds in the bedroom, there was no need to hurry about the cab. She glanced at the letters on the mantelpiece. An address stuck out on the top of one
of them— “Mon Repos, Wimbledon.” One of Eleanor’s dentists, Peggy thought to herself. The man she went botanising with on Wimbledon Common perhaps. A charming man. Eleanor had described him. “He says every tooth is quite unlike every other tooth. And he knows all about plants. . . .” It was difficult to get her to stick to her childhood.
She crossed to the telephone; she gave the number. There was a pause. As she waited she looked at her hands holding the telephone. Efficient, shell-like, polished but not painted, they’re a compromise, she thought, looking at her finger-nails, between science and . . . But here a voice said “Number, please,” and she gave it.
Again she waited. As she sat where Eleanor had sat she saw the telephone picture that Eleanor had seen — Sally sitting on the edge of her chair with a smudge on her face. What a fool, she thought bitterly, and a thrill ran down her thigh. Why was she bitter? For she prided herself upon being honest — she was a doctor — and that thrill she knew meant bitterness. Did she envy her because she was happy, or was it the croak of some ancestral prudery — did she disapprove of these friendships with men who did not love women? She looked at the picture of her grandmother as if to ask her opinion. But she had assumed the immunity of a work of art; she seemed as she sat there, smiling at her roses, to be indifferent to our right and wrong.
“Hullo,” said a gruff voice, which suggested sawdust and a shelter, and she gave the address and put down the telephone just as Eleanor came in — she was wearing a red-gold Arab cloak with a silver veil over her hair.
“One of these days d’you think you’ll be able to see things at the end of the telephone?” Peggy said, getting up. Eleanor’s hair was her beauty, she thought; and her silver-washed dark eyes — a fine old prophetess, a queer old bird, venerable and funny at one and the same time. She was burnt from her travels so that her hair looked whiter than ever.
“What’s that?” said Eleanor, for she had not caught her remark about the telephone. Peggy did not repeat it. They stood at the window waiting for the cab. They stood there side by side, silent, looking out, because there was a pause to fill up, and the view from the window, which was so high over the roofs, over the squares and angles of back gardens to the blue line of hills in the distance served, like another voice speaking, to fill up the pause. The sun was setting; one cloud lay curled like a red feather in the blue. She looked down. It was queer to see cabs turning corners, going round this street and down the other, and not to hear the sound they made. It was like a map of London; a section laid beneath them. The summer day was fading; lights were being lit, primrose lights, still separate, for the glow of the sunset was still in the air. Eleanor pointed at the sky.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 232
