Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  They had met first in Scotland, fishing — she from one rock, he from another. Her line had got tangled; she had given over, and had watched him with the stream rushing between his legs, casting, casting — until, like a thick ingot of silver bent in the middle, the salmon had leapt, had been caught, and she had loved him.

  Bartholomew too loved him; and noted his anger — about what? But he remembered his guest. The family was not a family in the presence of strangers. He must, rather laboriously, tell them the story of the pictures at which the unknown guest had been looking when Giles came in.

  “That,” he indicated the man with a horse, “was my ancestor. He had a dog. The dog was famous. The dog has his place in history. He left it on record that he wished his dog to be buried with him.”

  They looked at the picture.

  “I always feel,” Lucy broke the silence, “he’s saying: ‘Paint my dog.’”

  “But what about the horse?” said Mrs. Manresa.

  “The horse,” said Bartholomew, putting on his glasses. He looked at the horse. The hindquarters were not satisfactory.

  But William Dodge was still looking at the lady.

  “Ah,” said Bartholomew who had bought that picture because he liked that picture, “you’re an artist.”

  Dodge denied it, for the second time in half an hour, or so Isa noted.

  What for did a good sort like the woman Manresa bring these half-breeds in her trail? Giles asked himself. And his silence made its contribution to talk — Dodge that is, shook his head. “I like that picture.” That was all he could bring himself to say.

  “And you’re right,” said Bartholomew. “A man — I forget his name — a man connected with some Institute, a man who goes about giving advice, gratis, to descendants like ourselves, degenerate descendants, said . . . said . . .” He paused. They all looked at the lady. But she looked over their heads, looking at nothing. She led them down green glades into the heart of silence.

  “Said it was by Sir Joshua?” Mrs. Manresa broke the silence abruptly.

  “No, no,” William Dodge said hastily, but under his breath.

  “Why’s he afraid?” Isabella asked herself. A poor specimen he was; afraid to stick up for his own beliefs — just as she was afraid, of her husband. Didn’t she write her poetry in a book bound like an account book lest Giles might suspect? She looked at Giles.

  He had finished his fish; he had eaten quickly, not to keep them waiting. Now there was cherry tart. Mrs. Manresa was counting the stones.

  “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, apothecary, ploughboy . . . that’s me!” she cried, delighted to have it confirmed by the cherry stones that she was a wild child of nature.

  “You believe,” said the old gentleman, courteously chaffing her, “in that too?”

  “Of course, of course I do!” she cried. Now she was on the rails again. Now she was a thorough good sort again. And they too were delighted; now they could follow in her wake and leave the silver and dun shades that led to the heart of silence.

  “I had a father,” said Dodge beneath his breath to Isa who sat next him, “who loved pictures.”

  “Oh, I too!” she exclaimed. Flurriedly, disconnectedly, she explained. She used to stay when she was a child, when she had the whooping cough, with an uncle, a clergyman; who wore a skull cap; and never did anything; didn’t even preach; but made up poems, walking in his garden, saying them aloud.

  “People thought him mad,” she said. “I didn’t. . . .”

  She stopped.

  “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, apothecary, ploughboy. . . . It appears,” said old Bartholomew, laying down his spoon, “that I am a thief. Shall we take our coffee in the garden?” He rose.

  Isa dragged her chair across the gravel, muttering: “To what dark antre of the unvisited earth, or wind-brushed forest, shall we go now? Or spin from star to star and dance in the maze of the moon? Or. . . .”

  She held her deck chair at the wrong angle. The frame with the notches was upside down.

  “Songs my uncle taught me?” said William Dodge, hearing her mutter. He unfolded the chair and fixed the bar into the right notch.

  She flushed, as if she had spoken in an empty room and someone had stepped out from behind a curtain.

  “Don’t you, if you’re doing something with your hands, talk nonsense?” she stumbled. But what did he do with his hands, the white, the fine, the shapely?

  Giles went back to the house and brought more chairs and placed them in a semi-circle, so that the view might be shared, and the shelter of the old wall. For by some lucky chance a wall had been built continuing the house, it might be with the intention of adding another wing, on the raised ground in the sun. But funds were lacking; the plan was abandoned, and the wall remained, nothing but a wall. Later, another generation had planted fruit trees, which in time had spread their arms widely across the red orange weathered brick. Mrs. Sands called it a good year if she could make six pots of apricot jam from them — the fruit was never sweet enough for dessert. Perhaps three apricots were worth enclosing in muslin bags. But they were so beautiful, naked, with one flushed cheek, one green, that Mrs. Swithin left them naked, and the wasps burrowed holes.

  The ground sloped up, so that to quote Figgis’s Guide Book (1833), “it commanded a fine view of the surrounding country. . . . The spire of Bolney Minster, Rough Norton woods, and on an eminence rather to the left, Hogben’s Folly, so called because. . . .”

  The Guide Book still told the truth. 1833 was true in 1939. No house had been built; no town had sprung up. Hogben’s Folly was still eminent; the very flat, field-parcelled land had changed only in this — the tractor had to some extent superseded the plough. The horse had gone; but the cow remained. If Figgis were here now, Figgis would have said the same. So they always said when in summer they sat there to drink coffee, if they had guests. When they were alone, they said nothing. They looked at the view; they looked at what they knew, to see if what they knew might perhaps be different today. Most days it was the same.

  “That’s what makes a view so sad,” said Mrs. Swithin, lowering herself into the deck-chair which Giles had brought her. “And so beautiful. It’ll be there,” she nodded at the strip of gauze laid upon the distant fields, “when we’re not.”

  Giles nicked his chair into position with a jerk. Thus only could he show his irritation, his rage with old fogies who sat and looked at views over coffee and cream when the whole of Europe — over there — was bristling like. . . . He had no command of metaphor. Only the ineffective word “hedgehog” illustrated his vision of Europe, bristling with guns, poised with planes. At any moment guns would rake that land into furrows; planes splinter Bolney Minster into smithereens and blast the Folly. He, too, loved the view. And blamed Aunt Lucy, looking at views, instead of — doing what? What she had done was to marry a squire now dead; she had borne two children, one in Canada, the other, married, in Birmingham. His father, whom he loved, he exempted from censure; as for himself, one thing followed another; and so he sat, with old fogies, looking at views.

  “Beautiful,” said Mrs. Manresa, “beautiful . . .” she mumbled. She was lighting a cigarette. The breeze blew out her match. Giles hollowed his hand and lit another. She too was exempted — why, he could not say.

  “Since you’re interested in pictures,” said Bartholomew, turning to the silent guest, “why, tell me, are we, as a race, so incurious, irresponsive and insensitive” — the champagne had given him a flow of unusual three-decker words— “to that noble art, whereas, Mrs. Manresa, if she’ll allow me my old man’s liberty, has her Shakespeare by heart?”

  “Shakespeare by heart!” Mrs. Manresa protested. She struck an attitude. “To be, or not to be, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler . . . Go on!” she nudged Giles, who sat next her.

  “Fade far away and quite forget what thou amongst the leaves hast never known . . .” Isa supplied the first words that came into her head by way of helping her husband ou
t of his difficulty.

  “The weariness, the torture, and the fret . . .” William Dodge added, burying the end of his cigarette in a grave between two stones.

  “There!” Bartholomew exclaimed, cocking his forefinger aloft. “That proves it! What springs touched, what secret drawer displays its treasures, if I say” — he raised more fingers— “Reynolds! Constable! Crome!”

  “Why called ‘Old’?” Mrs. Manresa thrust in.

  “We haven’t the words — we haven’t the words,” Mrs. Swithin protested. “Behind the eyes; not on the lips; that’s all.”

  “Thoughts without words,” her brother mused. “Can that be?”

  “Quite beyond me!” cried Mrs. Manresa, shaking her head. “Much too clever! May I help myself? I know it’s wrong. But I’ve reached the age — and the figure — when I do what I like.”

  She took the little silver cream jug and let the smooth fluid curl luxuriously into her coffee, to which she added a shovel full of brown sugar candy. Sensuously, rhythmically, she stirred the mixture round and round.

  “Take what you like! Help yourself!” Bartholomew exclaimed. He felt the champagne withdrawing and hastened, before the last trace of geniality was withdrawn, to make the most of it, as if he cast one last look into a lit-up chamber before going to bed.

  The wild child, afloat once more on the tide of the old man’s benignity, looked over her coffee cup at Giles, with whom she felt in conspiracy. A thread united them — visible, invisible, like those threads, now seen, now not, that unite trembling grass blades in autumn before the sun rises. She had met him once only, at a cricket match. And then had been spun between them an early morning thread before the twigs and leaves of real friendship emerge. She looked before she drank. Looking was part of drinking. Why waste sensation, she seemed to ask, why waste a single drop that can be pressed out of this ripe, this melting, this adorable world? Then she drank. And the air round her became threaded with sensation. Bartholomew felt it; Giles felt it. Had he been a horse, the thin brown skin would have twitched, as if a fly had settled. Isabella twitched too. Jealousy, anger pierced her skin.

  “And now,” said Mrs. Manresa, putting down her cup, “about this entertainment — this pageant, into which we’ve gone and butted” — she made it, too, seem ripe like the apricot into which the wasps were burrowing— “Tell me, what’s it to be?” She turned. “Don’t I hear?” She listened. She heard laughter, down among the bushes, where the terrace dipped to the bushes.

  Beyond the lily pool the ground sank again, and in that dip of the ground, bushes and brambles had mobbed themselves together. It was always shady; sun-flecked in summer, dark and damp in winter. In the summer there were always butterflies; fritillaries darting through; Red Admirals feasting and floating; cabbage whites, unambitiously fluttering round a bush, like muslin milkmaids, content to spend a life there. Butterfly catching, for generation after generation, began there; for Bartholomew and Lucy; for Giles; for George it had began only the day before yesterday, when, in his little green net, he had caught a cabbage white.

  It was the very place for a dressing-room, just as, obviously, the terrace was the very place for a play.

  “The very place!” Miss La Trobe had exclaimed the first time she came to call and was shown the grounds. It was a winter’s day. The trees were leafless then.

  “That’s the place for a pageant, Mr. Oliver!” she had exclaimed. “Winding in and out between the trees. . . .” She waved her hand at the trees standing bare in the clear light of January.

  “There the stage; here the audience; and down there among the bushes a perfect dressing-room for the actors.”

  She was always all agog to get things up. But where did she spring from? With that name she wasn’t presumably pure English. From the Channel Islands perhaps? Only her eyes and something about her always made Mrs. Bingham suspect that she had Russian blood in her. “Those deep-set eyes; that very square jaw” reminded her — not that she had been to Russia — of the Tartars. Rumour said that she had kept a tea shop at Winchester; that had failed. She had been an actress. That had failed. She had bought a four-roomed cottage and shared it with an actress. They had quarrelled. Very little was actually known about her. Outwardly she was swarthy, sturdy and thick set; strode about the fields in a smock frock; sometimes with a cigarette in her mouth; often with a whip in her hand; and used rather strong language — perhaps, then, she wasn’t altogether a lady? At any rate, she had a passion for getting things up.

  The laughter died away.

  “Are they going to act?” Mrs. Manresa asked.

  “Act; dance; sing; a little bit of everything,” said Giles.

  “Miss La Trobe is a lady of wonderful energy,” said Mrs. Swithin.

  “She makes everyone do something,” said Isabella.

  “Our part,” said Bartholomew, “is to be the audience. And a very important part too.”

  “Also, we provide the tea,” said Mrs. Swithin.

  “Shan’t we go and help?” said Mrs. Manresa. “Cut up bread and butter?”

  “No, no,” said Mr. Oliver. “We are the audience.”

  “One year we had Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” said Mrs. Swithin. “One year we wrote the play ourselves. The son of our blacksmith — Tony? Tommy? — had the loveliest voice. And Elsie at the Crossways — how she mimicked! Took us all off. Bart; Giles; Old Flimsy — that’s me. People are gifted — very. The question is — how to bring it out? That’s where she’s so clever — Miss La Trobe. Of course, there’s the whole of English literature to choose from. But how can one choose? Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read; what I haven’t read.”

  “And leaving books on the floor,” said her brother. “Like the pig in the story; or was it a donkey?”

  She laughed, tapping him lightly on the knee.

  “The donkey who couldn’t choose between hay and turnips and so starved,” Isabella explained, interposing — anything — between her aunt and her husband, who hated this kind of talk this afternoon. Books open; no conclusion come to; and he sitting in the audience.

  “We remain seated”— “We are the audience.” Words this afternoon ceased to lie flat in the sentence. They rose, became menacing and shook their fists at you. This afternoon he wasn’t Giles Oliver come to see the villagers act their annual pageant; manacled to a rock he was, and forced passively to behold indescribable horror. His face showed it; and Isa, not knowing what to say, abruptly, half purposely, knocked over a coffee cup.

  William Dodge caught it as it fell. He held it for a moment. He turned it. From the faint blue mark, as of crossed daggers, in the glaze at the bottom he knew that it was English, made perhaps at Nottingham; date about 1760. His expression, considering the daggers, coming to this conclusion, gave Giles another peg on which to hang his rage as one hangs a coat on a peg, conveniently. A toady; a lickspittle; not a downright plain man of his senses; but a teaser and twitcher; a fingerer of sensations; picking and choosing; dillying and dallying; not a man to have straightforward love for a woman — his head was close to Isa’s head — but simply a —— At this word, which he could not speak in public, he pursed his lips; and the signet-ring on his little finger looked redder, for the flesh next it whitened as he gripped the arm of his chair.

  “Oh what fun!” cried Mrs. Manresa in her fluty voice. “A little bit of everything. A song; a dance; then a play acted by the villagers themselves. Only,” here she turned with her head on one side to Isabella, “I’m sure she’s written it. Haven’t you, Mrs. Giles?”

  Isa flushed and denied it.

  “For myself,” Mrs. Manresa continued, “speaking plainly, I can’t put two words together. I don’t know how it is — such a chatterbox as I am with my tongue, once I hold a pen—” She made a face, screwed her fingers as if she held a pen in them. But the pen she held thus on the little table absolutely refused to move.

  “And my handwriting — so huge — so clumsy—” She made another face an
d dropped the invisible pen.

  Very delicately William Dodge set the cup in its saucer. “Now he,” said Mrs. Manresa, as if referring to the delicacy with which he did this, and imputing to him the same skill in writing, “writes beautifully. Every letter perfectly formed.”

  Again they all looked at him. Instantly he put his hands in his pockets.

  Isabella guessed the word that Giles had not spoken. Well, was it wrong if he was that word? Why judge each other? Do we know each other? Not here, not now. But somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dust — She waited for a rhyme, it failed her; but somewhere surely one sun would shine and all, without a doubt, would be clear.

  She started. Again, sounds of laughter reached her.

  “I think I hear them,” she said. “They’re getting ready. They’re dressing up in the bushes.”

  Miss La Trobe was pacing to and fro between the leaning birch trees. One hand was deep stuck in her jacket pocket; the other held a foolscap sheet. She was reading what was written there. She had the look of a commander pacing his deck. The leaning graceful trees with black bracelets circling the silver bark were distant about a ship’s length.

  Wet would it be, or fine? Out came the sun; and, shading her eyes in the attitude proper to an Admiral on his quarter-deck, she decided to risk the engagement out of doors. Doubts were over. All stage properties, she commanded, must be moved from the Barn to the bushes. It was done. And the actors, while she paced, taking all responsibility and plumping for fine, not wet, dressed among the brambles. Hence the laughter.

  The clothes were strewn on the grass. Cardboard crowns, swords made of silver paper, turbans that were sixpenny dish cloths, lay on the grass or were flung on the bushes. There were pools of red and purple in the shade; flashes of silver in the sun. The dresses attracted the butterflies. Red and silver, blue and yellow gave off warmth and sweetness. Red Admirals gluttonously absorbed richness from dish cloths, cabbage whites drank icy coolness from silver paper. Flitting, tasting, returning, they sampled the colours.