Miss La Trobe stopped her pacing and surveyed the scene. “It has the makings . . .” she murmured. For another play always lay behind the play she had just written. Shading her eyes, she looked. The butterflies circling; the light changing; the children leaping; the mothers laughing —
“No, I don’t get it,” she muttered and resumed her pacing.
“Bossy” they called her privately, just as they called Mrs. Swithin “Flimsy.” Her abrupt manner and stocky figure; her thick ankles and sturdy shoes; her rapid decisions barked out in guttural accents — all this “got their goat.” No one liked to be ordered about singly. But in little troops they appealed to her. Someone must lead. Then too they could put the blame on her. Suppose it poured?
“Miss La Trobe!” they hailed her now. “What’s the idea about this?”
She stopped. David and Iris each had a hand on the gramophone. It must be hidden; yet must be close enough to the audience to be heard. Well, hadn’t she given orders? Where were the hurdles covered in leaves? Fetch them. Mr. Streatfield had said he would see to it. Where was Mr. Streatfield? No clergyman was visible. Perhaps he’s in the Barn? “Tommy, cut along and fetch him.” “Tommy’s wanted in the first scene.” “Beryl then . . .” The mothers disputed. One child had been chosen; another not. Fair hair was unjustly preferred to dark. Mrs. Ebury had forbidden Fanny to act because of the nettle-rash. There was another name in the village for nettle-rash.
Mrs. Ball’s cottage was not what you might call clean. In the last war Mrs. Ball lived with another man while her husband was in the trenches. All this Miss La Trobe knew, but refused to be mixed up in it. She splashed into the fine mesh like a great stone into the lily pool. The criss-cross was shattered. Only the roots beneath water were of use to her. Vanity, for example, made them all malleable. The boys wanted the big parts; the girls wanted the fine clothes. Expenses had to be kept down. Ten pounds was the limit. Thus conventions were outraged. Swathed in conventions, they couldn’t see, as she could, that a dish cloth wound round a head in the open looked much richer than real silk. So they squabbled; but she kept out of it. Waiting for Mr. Streatfield, she paced between the birch trees.
The other trees were magnificently straight. They were not too regular; but regular enough to suggest columns in a church; in a church without a roof; in an open-air cathedral, a place where swallows darting seemed, by the regularity of the trees, to make a pattern, dancing, like the Russians, only not to music, but to the unheard rhythm of their own wild hearts.
The laughter died away.
“We must possess our souls in patience,” said Mrs. Manresa again. “Or could we help?” she suggested, glancing over her shoulder, “with those chairs?”
Candish, a gardener, and a maid were all bringing chairs — for the audience. There was nothing for the audience to do. Mrs. Manresa suppressed a yawn. They were silent. They stared at the view, as if something might happen in one of those fields to relieve them of the intolerable burden of sitting silent, doing nothing, in company. Their minds and bodies were too close, yet not close enough. We aren’t free, each one of them felt separately to feel or think separately, nor yet to fall asleep. We’re too close; but not close enough. So they fidgeted.
The heat had increased. The clouds had vanished. All was sun now. The view laid bare by the sun was flattened, silenced, stilled. The cows were motionless; the brick wall, no longer sheltering, beat back grains of heat. Old Mr. Oliver sighed profoundly. His head jerked; his hand fell. It fell within an inch of the dog’s head on the grass by his side. Then up he jerked it again on to his knee.
Giles glared. With his hands bound tight round his knees he stared at the flat fields. Staring, glaring, he sat silent.
Isabella felt prisoned. Through the bars of the prison, through the sleep haze that deflected them, blunt arrows bruised her; of love, then of hate. Through other people’s bodies she felt neither love nor hate distinctly. Most consciously she felt — she had drunk sweet wine at luncheon — a desire for water. “A beaker of cold water, a beaker of cold water,” she repeated, and saw water surrounded by walls of shining glass.
Mrs. Manresa longed to relax and curl in a corner with a cushion, a picture paper, and a bag of sweets.
Mrs. Swithin and William surveyed the view aloofly, and with detachment.
How tempting, how very tempting, to let the view triumph; to reflect its ripple; to let their own minds ripple; to let outlines elongate and pitch over — so — with a sudden jerk.
Mrs. Manresa yielded, pitched, plunged, then pulled herself up.
“What a view!” she exclaimed, pretending to dust the ashes of her cigarette, but in truth concealing her yawn. Then she sighed, pretending to express not her own drowsiness, but something connected with what she felt about views.
Nobody answered her. The flat fields glared green yellow, blue yellow, red yellow, then blue again. The repetition was senseless, hideous, stupefying.
“Then,” said Mrs. Swithin, in a low voice, as if the exact moment for speech had come, as if she had promised, and it was time to fulfil her promise, “come, come and I’ll show you the house.”
She addressed no one in particular. But William Dodge knew she meant him. He rose with a jerk, like a toy suddenly pulled straight by a string.
“What energy!” Mrs. Manresa half sighed, half yawned. “Have I the courage to go too?” Isabella asked herself. They were going; above all things, she desired cold water, a beaker of cold water; but desire petered out, suppressed by the leaden duty she owed to others. She watched them go — Mrs. Swithin tottering yet tripping; and Dodge unfurled and straightened, as he strode beside her along the blazing tiles under the hot wall, till they reached the shade of the house.
A match-box fell — Bartholomew’s. His fingers had loosed it; he had dropped it. He gave up the game; he couldn’t be bothered. With his head on one side, his hand dangling above the dog’s head he slept; he snored.
Mrs. Swithin paused for a moment in the hall among the gilt-clawed tables.
“This,” she said, “is the staircase. And now — up we go.”
She went up, two stairs ahead of her guest. Lengths of yellow satin unfurled themselves on a cracked canvas as they mounted.
“Not an ancestress,” said Mrs. Swithin, as they came level with the head in the picture. “But we claim her because we’ve known her — O, ever so many years. Who was she?” she gazed. “Who painted her?” She shook her head. She looked lit up, as if for a banquet, with the sun pouring over her.
“But I like her best in the moonlight,” Mrs. Swithin reflected, and mounted more stairs.
She panted slightly, going upstairs. Then she ran her hand over the sunk books in the wall on the landing, as if they were pan pipes.
“Here are the poets from whom we descend by way of the mind, Mr. . . .” she murmured. She had forgotten his name. Yet she had singled him out.
“My brother says, they built the house north for shelter, not south for sun. So they’re damp in the winter.” She paused. “And now what comes next?”
She stopped. There was a door.
“The morning room.” She opened the door. “Where my mother received her guests.”
Two chairs faced each other on either side of a fine fluted mantelpiece. He looked over her shoulder.
She shut the door.
“Now up, now up again.” Again they mounted. “Up and up they went,” she panted, seeing, it seemed, an invisible procession, “up and up to bed.”
“A bishop; a traveller; — I’ve forgotten even their names. I ignore. I forget.”
She stopped at a window in the passage and held back the curtain. Beneath was the garden, bathed in sun. The grass was sleek and shining. Three white pigeons were flirting and tiptoeing as ornate as ladies in ball dresses. Their elegant bodies swayed as they minced with tiny steps on their little pink feet upon the grass. Suddenly, up they rose in a flutter, circled, and flew away.
“Now,” she said, “for th
e bedrooms.” She tapped twice very distinctly on a door. With her head on one side, she listened.
“One never knows,” she murmured, “if there’s somebody there.” Then she flung open the door.
He half expected to see somebody there, naked, or half dressed, or knelt in prayer. But the room was empty. The room was tidy as a pin, not slept in for months, a spare room. Candles stood on the dressing-table. The counterpane was straight. Mrs. Swithin stopped by the bed.
“Here,” she said, “yes, here,” she tapped the counterpane, “I was born. In this bed.”
Her voice died away. She sank down on the edge of the bed. She was tired, no doubt, by the stairs, by the heat.
“But we have other lives, I think, I hope,” she murmured. “We live in others, Mr. . . . We live in things.”
She spoke simply. She spoke with an effort. She spoke as if she must overcome her tiredness out of charity towards a stranger, a guest. She had forgotten his name. Twice she had said “Mr.” and stopped.
The furniture was mid-Victorian, bought at Maples, perhaps, in the forties. The carpet was covered with small purple dots. And a white circle marked the place where the slop pail had stood by the washstand.
Could he say “I’m William”? He wished to. Old and frail she had climbed the stairs. She had spoken her thoughts, ignoring, not caring if he thought her, as he had, inconsequent, sentimental, foolish. She had lent him a hand to help him up a steep place. She had guessed his trouble. Sitting on the bed he heard her sing, swinging her little legs, “Come and see my sea weeds, come and see my sea shells, come and see my dicky bird hop upon its perch” — an old child’s nursery rhyme to help a child. Standing by the cupboard in the corner he saw her reflected in the glass. Cut off from their bodies, their eyes smiled, their bodiless eyes, at their eyes in the glass.
Then she slipped off the bed.
“Now,” she said, “what comes next?” and pattered down the corridor. A door stood open. Everyone was out in the garden. The room was like a ship deserted by its crew. The children had been playing — there was a spotted horse in the middle of the carpet. The nurse had been sewing — there was a piece of linen on the table. The baby had been in the cot. The cot was empty.
“The nursery,” said Mrs. Swithin.
Words raised themselves and became symbolical. “The cradle of our race,” she seemed to say.
Dodge crossed to the fireplace and looked at the Newfoundland Dog in the Christmas Annual that was pinned to the wall. The room smelt warm and sweet; of clothes drying; of milk; of biscuits and warm water. “Good Friends” the picture was called. A rushing sound came in through the open door. He turned. The old woman had wandered out into the passage and leant against the window.
He left the door open for the crew to come back to and joined her.
Down in the courtyard beneath the window cars were assembling. Their narrow black roofs were laid together like the blocks of a floor. Chauffeurs were jumping down; here old ladies gingerly advanced black legs with silver-buckled shoes; old men striped trousers. Young men in shorts leapt out on one side; girls with skin-coloured legs on the other. There was a purring and a churning of the yellow gravel. The audience was assembling. But they, looking down from the window, were truants, detached. Together they leant half out of the window.
And then a breeze blew and all the muslin blinds fluttered out, as if some majestic goddess, rising from her throne among her peers, had tossed her amber-coloured raiment, and the other gods, seeing her rise and go, laughed, and their laughter floated her on.
Mrs. Swithin put her hands to her hair, for the breeze had ruffled it.
“Mr. . . .” she began.
“I’m William,” he interrupted.
At that she smiled a ravishing girl’s smile, as if the wind had warmed the wintry blue in her eyes to amber.
“I took you,” she apologized, “away from your friends, William, because I felt wound tight here. . . .” She touched her bony forehead upon which a blue vein wriggled like a blue worm. But her eyes in their caves of bone were still lambent. He saw her eyes only. And he wished to kneel before her, to kiss her hand, and to say: “At school they held me under a bucket of dirty water, Mrs. Swithin; when I looked up, the world was dirty, Mrs. Swithin; so I married; but my child’s not my child, Mrs. Swithin. I’m a half-man, Mrs. Swithin; a flickering, mind-divided little snake in the grass, Mrs. Swithin; as Giles saw; but you’ve healed me. . . .” So he wished to say; but said nothing; and the breeze went lolloping along the corridors, blowing the blinds out.
Once more he looked and she looked down on to the yellow gravel that made a crescent round the door. Pendant from her chain her cross swung as she leant out and the sun struck it. How could she weight herself down by that sleek symbol? How stamp herself, so volatile, so vagrant, with that image? As he looked at it, they were truants no more. The purring of the wheels became vocal. “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” it seemed to say, “or you’ll be late. Hurry, hurry, hurry, or the best seats’ll be taken.”
“O,” cried Mrs. Swithin, “there’s Mr. Streatfield!” And they saw a clergyman, a strapping clergyman, carrying a hurdle, a leafy hurdle. He was striding through the cars with the air of a person of authority, who is awaited, expected, and now comes.
“Is it time,” said Mrs. Swithin, “to go and join—” She left the sentence unfinished, as if she were of two minds, and they fluttered to right and to left, like pigeons rising from the grass.
The audience was assembling. They came streaming along the paths and spreading across the lawn. Some were old; some were in the prime of life. There were children among them. Among them, as Mr. Figgis might have observed, were representatives of our most respected families — the Dyces of Denton; the Wickhams of Owlswick; and so on. Some had been there for centuries, never selling an acre. On the other hand there were new-comers, the Manresas, bringing the old houses up to date, adding bathrooms. And a scatter of odds and ends, like Cobbet of Cobbs Corner, retired, it was understood, on a pension from a tea plantation. Not an asset. He did his own housework and dug in his garden. The building of a car factory and of an aerodrome in the neighbourhood had attracted a number of unattached floating residents. Also there was Mr. Page, the reporter, representing the local paper. Roughly speaking, however, had Figgis been there in person and called a roll call, half the ladies and gentlemen present would have said: “Adsum; I’m here, in place of my grandfather or great-grandfather,” as the case might be. At this very moment, half-past three on a June day in 1939 they greeted each other, and as they took their seats, finding if possible a seat next one another, they said: “That hideous new house at Pyes Corner! What an eyesore! And those bungalows! — have you seen ‘em?”
Again, had Figgis called the names of the villagers, they too would have answered. Mrs. Sands was born Iliffe; Candish’s mother was one of the Perrys. The green mounds in the churchyard had been cast up by their molings, which for centuries had made the earth friable. True, there were absentees when Mr. Streatfield called his roll call in the church. The motor bike, the motor bus, and the movies — when Mr. Streatfield called his roll call, he laid the blame on them.
Rows of chairs, deck chairs, gilt chairs, hired cane chairs, and indigenous garden seats had been drawn up on the terrace. There were plenty of seats for everybody. But some preferred to sit on the ground. Certainly Miss La Trobe had spoken the truth when she said: “The very place for a pageant!” The lawn was as flat as the floor of a theatre. The terrace, rising, made a natural stage. The trees barred the stage like pillars. And the human figure was seen to great advantage against a background of sky. As for the weather, it was turning out, against all expectation, a very fine day. A perfect summer afternoon.
“What luck!” Mrs. Carter was saying. “Last year . . .” Then the play began. Was it, or was it not, the play? Chuff, chuff, chuff sounded from the bushes. It was the noise a machine makes when something has gone wrong. Some sat down hastily, others stopped talking guilt
ily. All looked at the bushes. For the stage was empty. Chuff, chuff, chuff the machine buzzed in the bushes. While they looked apprehensively and some finished their sentences, a small girl, like a rosebud in pink, advanced; took her stand on a mat, behind a conch, hung with leaves and piped:
Gentles and simples, I address you all . . .
So it was the play then. Or was it the prologue?
Come hither for our festival (she continued)
This is a pageant, all may see
Drawn from our island history.
England am I. . . .
“She’s England,” they whispered. “It’s begun.” “The prologue,” they added, looking down at the programme.
“England am I,” she piped again; and stopped.
She had forgotten her lines.
“Hear! Hear!” said an old man in a white waistcoat briskly. “Bravo! Bravo!”
“Blast ‘em!” cursed Miss La Trobe, hidden behind the tree. She looked along the front row. They glared as if they were exposed to a frost that nipped them and fixed them all at the same level. Only Bond the cowman looked fluid and natural.
“Music!” she signalled. “Music!” But the machine continued: Chuff, chuff, chuff.
“A child new born . . .” she prompted.
“A child new born,” Phyllis Jones continued,
Sprung from the sea
Whose billows blown by mighty storm
Cut off from France and Germany
This isle.
She glanced back over her shoulder. Chuff, chuff, chuff, the machine buzzed. A long line of villagers in shirts made of sacking began passing in and out in single file behind her between the trees. They were singing, but not a word reached the audience.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 247
