Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  His tail never wagged. He never admitted the ties of domesticity. Either he cringed or he bit. Now his wild yellow eyes gazed at her, gazed at him. He could outstare them both. Then Oliver remembered:

  “Your little boy’s a cry-baby,” he said scornfully.

  “Oh,” she sighed, pegged down on a chair arm, like a captive balloon, by a myriad of hair-thin ties into domesticity. “What’s been happening?”

  “I took the newspaper,” he explained, “so . . .”

  He took it and crumpled it into a beak over his nose. “So,” he had sprung out from behind a tree on to the children.

  “And he howled. He’s a coward, your boy is.”

  She frowned. He was not a coward, her boy wasn’t. And she loathed the domestic, the possessive; the maternal. And he knew it and did it on purpose to tease her, the old brute, her father-in-law.

  She looked away.

  “The library’s always the nicest room in the house,” she quoted, and ran her eyes along the books. “The mirror of the soul” books were. The Faerie Queene and Kinglake’s Crimea; Keats and the Kreutzer Sonata. There they were, reflecting. What? What remedy was there for her at her age — the age of the century, thirty-nine — in books? Book-shy she was, like the rest of her generation; and gun-shy too. Yet as a person with a raging tooth runs her eye in a chemist shop over green bottles with gilt scrolls on them lest one of them may contain a cure, she considered: Keats and Shelley; Yeats and Donne. Or perhaps not a poem; a life. The life of Garibaldi. The life of Lord Palmerston. Or perhaps not a person’s life; a county’s. The Antiquities of Durham; The Proceedings of the Archæological Society of Nottingham. Or not a life at all, but science — Eddington, Darwin, or Jeans.

  None of them stopped her toothache. For her generation the newspaper was a book; and, as her father-in-law had dropped the Times, she took it and read: “A horse with a green tail . . .” which was fantastic. Next, “The guard at Whitehall . . .” which was romantic and then, building word upon word she read: “The troopers told her the horse had a green tail; but she found it was just an ordinary horse. And they dragged her up to the barrack room where she was thrown upon a bed. Then one of the troopers removed part of her clothing, and she screamed and hit him about the face. . . .”

  That was real; so real that on the mahogany door panels she saw the Arch in Whitehall; through the Arch the barrack room; in the barrack room the bed, and on the bed the girl was screaming and hitting him about the face, when the door (for in fact it was a door) opened and in came Mrs. Swithin carrying a hammer.

  She advanced, sidling, as if the floor were fluid under her shabby garden shoes, and, advancing, pursed her lips and smiled, sidelong, at her brother. Not a word passed between them as she went to the cupboard in the corner and replaced the hammer, which she had taken without asking leave; together — she unclosed her fist — with a handful of nails.

  “Cindy — Cindy,” he growled, as she shut the cupboard door.

  Lucy, his sister, was three years younger than he was. The name Cindy, or Sindy, for it could be spelt either way, was short for Lucy. It was by this name that he had called her when they were children; when she had trotted after him as he fished, and had made the meadow flowers into tight little bunches, winding one long grass stalk round and round and round. Once, she remembered, he had made her take the fish off the hook herself. The blood had shocked her— “Oh!” she had cried — for the gills were full of blood. And he had growled: “Cindy!” The ghost of that morning in the meadow was in her mind as she replaced the hammer where it belonged on one shelf; and the nails where they belonged on another; and shut the cupboard about which, for he still kept his fishing tackle there, he was still so very particular.

  “I’ve been nailing the placard on the Barn,” she said, giving him a little pat on the shoulder.

  The words were like the first peal of a chime of bells. As the first peals, you hear the second; as the second peals, you hear the third. So when Isa heard Mrs. Swithin say: “I’ve been nailing the placard to the Barn,” she knew she would say next:

  “For the pageant.”

  And he would say:

  “Today? By Jupiter! I’d forgotten!”

  “If it’s fine,” Mrs. Swithin continued, “they’ll act on the terrace . . .”

  “And if it’s wet,” Bartholomew continued, “in the Barn.”

  “And which will it be?” Mrs. Swithin continued. “Wet or fine?”

  Then, for the seventh time in succession, they both looked out of the window.

  Every summer, for seven summers now, Isa had heard the same words; about the hammer and the nails; the pageant and the weather. Every year they said, would it be wet or fine; and every year it was — one or the other. The same chime followed the same chime, only this year beneath the chime she heard: “The girl screamed and hit him about the face with a hammer.”

  “The forecast,” said Mr. Oliver, turning the pages till he found it, “says: Variable winds; fair average temperature; rain at times.”

  He put down the paper, and they all looked at the sky to see whether the sky obeyed the meteorologist. Certainly the weather was variable. It was green in the garden; grey the next. Here came the sun — an illimitable rapture of joy, embracing every flower, every leaf. Then in compassion it withdrew, covering its face, as if it forebore to look on human suffering. There was a fecklessness, a lack of symmetry and order in the clouds, as they thinned and thickened. Was it their own law, or no law, they obeyed? Some were wisps of white hair merely. One, high up, very distant, had hardened to golden alabaster; was made of immortal marble. Beyond that was blue, pure blue, black blue; blue that had never filtered down; that had escaped registration. It never fell as sun, shadow, or rain upon the world, but disregarded the little coloured ball of earth entirely. No flower felt it; no field; no garden.

  Mrs. Swithin’s eyes glazed as she looked at it. Isa thought her gaze was fixed because she saw God there, God on his throne. But as a shadow fell next moment on the garden Mrs. Swithin loosed and lowered her fixed look and said:

  “It’s very unsettled. It’ll rain, I’m afraid. We can only pray,” she added, and fingered her crucifix.

  “And provide umbrellas,” said her brother.

  Lucy flushed. He had struck her faith. When she said “pray,” he added “umbrellas.” She half covered the cross with her fingers. She shrank; she cowered; but next moment she exclaimed:

  “Oh there they are — the darlings!”

  The perambulator was passing across the lawn.

  Isa looked too. What an angel she was — the old woman! Thus to salute the children; to beat up against those immensities and the old man’s irreverences her skinny hands, her laughing eyes! How courageous to defy Bart and the weather!

  “He looks blooming,” said Mrs. Swithin.

  “It’s astonishing how they pick up,” said Isa.

  “He ate his breakfast?” Mrs. Swithin asked.

  “Every scrap,” said Isa.

  “And baby? No sign of measles?”

  Isa shook her head. “Touch wood,” she added, tapping the table.

  “Tell me, Bart,” said Mrs. Swithin turning to her brother, “what’s the origin of that? Touch wood . . . Antaeus, didn’t he touch earth?”

  She would have been, he thought, a very clever woman, had she fixed her gaze. But this led to that; that to the other. What went in at this ear, went out at that. And all were circled, as happens after seventy, by one recurring question. Hers was, should she live at Kensington or at Kew? But every year, when winter came, she did neither. She took lodgings at Hastings.

  “Touch wood; touch earth; Antaeus,” he muttered, bringing the scattered bits together. Lempriere would settle it; or the Encyclopædia. But it was not in books the answer to his question — why, in Lucy’s skull, shaped so much like his own, there existed a prayable being? She didn’t, he supposed, invest it with hair, teeth or toe-nails. It was, he supposed more of a force or a radiance, contr
olling the thrush and the worm; the tulip and the hound; and himself, too, an old man with swollen veins. It got her out of bed on a cold morning and sent her down the muddy path to worship it, whose mouthpiece was Streatfield. A good fellow, who smoked cigars in the vestry. He needed some solace, doling out preachments to asthmatic elders, perpetually repairing the perpetually falling steeple, by means of placards nailed to Barns. The love, he was thinking, that they should give to flesh and blood they give to the church . . . when Lucy rapping her fingers on the table said:

  “What’s the origin — the origin — of that?”

  “Superstition,” he said.

  She flushed, and the little breath too was audible that she drew in as once more he struck a blow at her faith. But, brother and sister, flesh and blood was not a barrier, but a mist. Nothing changed their affection; no argument; no fact; no truth. What she saw he didn’t; what he saw she didn’t — and so on, ad infinitum.

  “Cindy,” he growled. And the quarrel was over.

  The Barn to which Lucy had nailed her placard was a great building in the farmyard. It was as old as the church, and built of the same stone, but it had no steeple. It was raised on cones of grey stone at the corners to protect it from rats and damp. Those who had been to Greece always said it reminded them of a temple. Those who had never been to Greece — the majority — admired it all the same. The roof was weathered red-orange; and inside it was a hollow hall, sun-shafted, brown, smelling of corn, dark when the doors were shut, but splendidly illuminated when the doors at the end stood open, as they did to let the wagons in — the long low wagons, like ships of the sea, breasting the corn, not the sea, returning in the evening shagged with hay. The lanes caught tufts where the wagons had passed.

  Now benches were drawn across the floor of the Barn. If it rained, the actors were to act in the Barn; planks had been laid together at one end to form a stage. Wet or fine, the audience would take tea there. Young men and women — Jim, Iris, David, Jessica — were even now busy with garlands of red and white paper roses left over from the Coronation. The seeds and the dust from the sacks made them sneeze. Iris had a handkerchief bound round her forehead; Jessica wore breeches. The young men worked in shirt sleeves. Pale husks had stuck in their hair, and it was easy to run a splinter of wood into the fingers.

  “Old Flimsy” (Mrs. Swithin’s nickname) had been nailing another placard on the Barn. The first had been blown down, or the village idiot, who always tore down what had been nailed up, had done it, and was chuckling over the placard under the shade of some hedge. The workers were laughing too, as if old Swithin had left a wake of laughter behind her. The old girl with a wisp of white hair flying, knobbed shoes as if she had claws corned like a canary’s, and black stockings wrinkled over the ankles, naturally made David cock his eye and Jessica wink back, as she handed him a length of paper roses. Snobs they were; long enough stationed that is in that one corner of the world to have taken indelibly the print of some three hundred years of customary behaviour. So they laughed; but respected. If she wore pearls, pearls they were.

  “Old Flimsy on the hop,” said David. She would be in and out twenty times, and finally bring them lemonade in a great jug and a plate of sandwiches. Jessie held the garland; he hammered. A hen strayed in; a file of cows passed the door; then a sheep dog; then the cowman, Bond, who stopped.

  He contemplated the young people hanging roses from one rafter to another. He thought very little of anybody, simples or gentry. Leaning, silent, sardonic, against the door he was like a withered willow, bent over a stream, all its leaves shed, and in his eyes the whimsical flow of the waters.

  “Hi — huh!” he cried suddenly. It was cow language presumably, for the parti-coloured cow, who had thrust her head in at the door lowered her horns, lashed her tail and ambled off. Bond followed after.

  “That’s the problem,” said Mrs. Swithin. While Mr. Oliver consulted the Encyclopædia searching under Superstition for the origin of the expression “Touch Wood,” she and Isa discussed fish: whether, coming from a distance, it would be fresh.

  They were so far from the sea. A hundred miles away, Mrs. Swithin said; no, perhaps a hundred and fifty. “But they do say,” she continued, “one can hear the waves on a still night. After a storm, they say, you can hear a wave break. . . . I like that story,” she reflected. “Hearing the waves in the middle of the night he saddled a horse and rode to the sea. Who was it, Bart, who rode to the sea?”

  He was reading.

  “You can’t expect it brought to your door in a pail of water,” said Mrs. Swithin, “as I remember when we were children, living in a house by the sea. Lobsters, fresh from the lobster pots. How they pinched the stick cook gave them! And salmon. You know if they’re fresh because they have lice in their scales.”

  Bartholomew nodded. A fact that was. He remembered, the house by the sea. And the lobster.

  They were bringing up nets full of fish from the sea; but Isa was seeing — the garden, variable as the forecast said, in the light breeze. Again, the children passed, and she tapped on the window and blew them a kiss. In the drone of the garden it went unheeded.

  “Are we really,” she said, turning round, “a hundred miles from the sea?”

  “Thirty-five only,” her father-in-law said, as if he had whipped a tape measure from his pocket and measured it exactly.

  “It seems more,” said Isa. “It seems from the terrace as if the land went on for ever and ever.”

  “Once there was no sea,” said Mrs. Swithin. “No sea at all between us and the continent. I was reading that in a book this morning. There were rhododendrons in the Strand; and mammoths in Piccadilly.”

  “When we were savages,” said Isa.

  Then she remembered; her dentist had told her that savages could perform very skilful operations on the brain. Savages had false teeth, he said. False teeth were invented, she thought he said, in the time of the Pharaohs.

  “At least so my dentist told me,” she concluded.

  “Which man d’you go to now?” Mrs. Swithin asked her.

  “The same old couple; Batty and Bates in Sloane Street.”

  “And Mr. Batty told you they had false teeth in the time of the Pharaohs?” Mrs. Swithin pondered.

  “Batty? Oh not Batty. Bates,” Isa corrected her.

  Batty, she recalled, only talked about Royalty. Batty, she told Mrs. Swithin, had a patient a Princess.

  “So he kept me waiting well over an hour. And you know, when one’s a child, how long that seems.”

  “Marriages with cousins,” said Mrs. Swithin, “can’t be good for the teeth.”

  Bart put his finger inside his mouth and projected the upper row outside his lips. They were false. Yet, he said, the Olivers hadn’t married cousins. The Olivers couldn’t trace their descent for more than two or three hundred years. But the Swithins could. The Swithins were there before the Conquest.

  “The Swithins,” Mrs. Swithin began. Then she stopped. Bart would crack another joke about Saints, if she gave him the chance. And she had had two jokes cracked at her already; one about an umbrella; another about superstition.

  So she stopped and said, “How did we begin this talk?” She counted on her fingers. “The Pharaohs. Dentists. Fish . . . Oh yes, you were saying, Isa, you’d ordered fish; and you were afraid it wouldn’t be fresh. And I said ‘That’s the problem. . . .’”

  The fish had been delivered, Mitchell’s boy, holding them in a crook of his arm, jumped off his motor bike. There was no feeding the pony with lumps of sugar at the kitchen door, nor time for gossip, since his round had been increased. He had to deliver right over the hill at Bickley; also go round by Waythorn, Roddam, and Pyeminster, whose names, like his own, were in Domesday Book. But the cook — Mrs. Sands she was called, but by old friends Trixie — had never in all her fifty years been over the hill, nor wanted to.

  He dabbed them down on the kitchen table, the filleted soles, the semi-transparent boneless fish. And before Mrs
. Sands had time to peel the paper off, he was gone, giving a slap to the very fine yellow cat who rose majestically from the basket chair and advanced superbly to the table, winding the fish.

  Were they a bit whiffy? Mrs. Sands held them to her nose. The cat rubbed itself this way, that way against the table legs, against her legs. She would save a slice for Sunny — his drawing-room name Sung-Yen had undergone a kitchen change into Sunny. She took them, the cat attendant, to the larder, and laid them on a plate in that semi-ecclesiastical apartment. For the house before the Reformation, like so many houses in that neighbourhood, had a chapel; and the chapel had become a larder, changing, like the cat’s name, as religion changed. The Master (his drawing-room name; in the kitchen they called him Bartie) would bring gentlemen sometimes to see the larder — often when cook wasn’t dressed. Not to see the hams that hung from hooks, or the butter on a blue slate, or the joint for tomorrow’s dinner, but to see the cellar that opened out of the larder and its carved arch. If you tapped — one gentleman had a hammer — there was a hollow sound; a reverberation; undoubtedly, he said, a concealed passage where once somebody had hid. So it might be. But Mrs. Sands wished they wouldn’t come into her kitchen telling stories with the girls about. It put ideas into their silly heads. They heard dead men rolling barrels. They saw a white lady walking under the trees. No one would cross the terrace after dark. If a cat sneezed, “There’s the ghost!”

  Sunny had his little bit off the fillet. Then Mrs. Sands took an egg from the brown basket full of eggs; some with yellow fluff sticking to the shells; then a pinch of flour to coat those semi-transparent slips; and a crust from the great earthenware crock full of crusts. Then, returning to the kitchen, she made those quick movements at the oven, cinder raking, stoking, damping, which sent strange echoes through the house, so that in the library, the sitting-room, the dining-room, and the nursery, whatever they were doing, thinking, saying, they knew, they all knew, it was getting on for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.