Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

“Ha, ha, ha!” she laughed and clutched the arms of her chair with ungloved twisted hands.

  “A-maying, a-maying,” they bawled. “In and out and round about, a-maying, a-maying. . . .”

  It didn’t matter what the words were; or who sang what. Round and round they whirled, intoxicated by the music. Then, at a sign from Miss La Trobe behind the tree, the dance stopped. A procession formed. Great Eliza descended from her soap box. Taking her skirts in her hand, striding with long strides, surrounded by Dukes and Princes, followed by the lovers arm in arm, with Albert the idiot playing in and out, and the corpse on its bier concluding the procession, the Elizabethan age passed from the scene.

  “Curse! Blast! Damn ‘em!” Miss La Trobe in her rage stubbed her toe against a root. Here was her downfall; here was the Interval. Writing this skimble-skamble stuff in her cottage, she had agreed to cut the play here; a slave to her audience, — to Mrs. Sands’ grumble — about tea; about dinner; — she had gashed the scene here. Just as she had brewed emotion, she spilt it. So she signalled: Phyllis! And, summoned, Phyllis popped up on the mat again in the middle.

  Gentles and simples, I address you all (she piped.)

  Our act is done, our scene is over.

  Past is the day of crone and lover.

  The bud has flowered; the flower has fallen.

  But soon will rise another dawning,

  For time whose children small we be

  Hath in his keeping, you shall see,

  You shall see. . . .

  Her voice petered out. No one was listening. Heads bent, they read “Interval” on the programme. And, cutting short her words, the megaphone announced in plain English: “An interval.” Half an hour’s interval, for tea. Then the gramophone blared out:

  Armed against fate,

  The valiant Rhoderick,

  Bold and blatant,

  Firm, elatant, etc., etc.

  At that, the audience stirred. Some rose briskly; others stooped, retrieving walking-sticks, hats, bags. And then, as they raised themselves and turned about, the music modulated. The music chanted: Dispersed are we. It moaned: Dispersed are we. It lamented: Dispersed are we, as they streamed, spotting the grass with colour, across the lawns, and down the paths: Dispersed are we.

  Mrs. Manresa took up the strain. Dispersed are we. “Freely, boldly, fearing no one” (she pushed a deck chair out of her way). “Youths and maidens” (she glanced behind her; but Giles had his back turned). “Follow, follow, follow me. . . . Oh Mr. Parker, what a pleasure to see you here! I’m for tea!”

  “Dispersed are we,” Isabella followed her, humming. “All is over. The wave has broken. Left us stranded, high and dry. Single, separate on the shingle. Broken is the three-fold ply . . . Now I follow” (she pushed her chair back . . . The man in grey was lost in the crowd by the ilex) “that old strumpet” (she invoked Mrs. Manresa’s tight, flowered figure in front of her) “to have tea.”

  Dodge remained behind. “Shall I,” he murmured, “go or stay? Slip out some other way? Or follow, follow, follow the dispersing company?”

  Dispersed are we, the music wailed; dispersed are we. Giles remained like a stake in the tide of the flowing company.

  “Follow?” He kicked his chair back. “Whom? Where?” He stubbed his light tennis shoes on the wood. “Nowhere. Anywhere.” Stark still he stood.

  Here Cobbet of Cobbs Corner, alone under the monkey puzzle tree, rose and muttered: “What was in her mind, eh? What idea lay behind, eh? What made her indue the antique with this glamour — this sham lure, and set ’em climbing, climbing, climbing up the monkey puzzle tree?”

  Dispersed are we, the music wailed. Dispersed are we. He turned and sauntered slowly after the retreating company.

  Now Lucy, retrieving her bag from beneath the seat, chirruped to her brother:

  “Bart, my dear, come with me. . . . D’you remember, when we were children, the play we acted in the nursery?”

  He remembered. Red Indians the game was; a reed with a note wrapped up in a pebble.

  “But for us, my old Cindy” — he picked up his hat— “the game’s over.” The glare and the stare and the beat of the tom-tom, he meant. He gave her his arm. Off they strolled. And Mr. Page, the reporter, noted, “Mrs. Swithin: Mr. B. Oliver,” then turning, added further “Lady Haslip, of Haslip Manor,” as he spied that old lady wheeled in her chair by her footman winding up the procession.

  To the valediction of the gramophone hid in the bushes the audience departed. Dispersed, it wailed, Dispersed are we.

  Now Miss La Trobe stepped from her hiding. Flowing, and streaming, on the grass, on the gravel, still for one moment she held them together — the dispersing company. Hadn’t she, for twenty-five minutes, made them see? A vision imparted was relief from agony . . . for one moment . . . one moment. Then the music petered out on the last word we. She heard the breeze rustle in the branches. She saw Giles Oliver with his back to the audience. Also Cobbet of Cobbs Corner. She hadn’t made them see. It was a failure, another damned failure! As usual. Her vision escaped her. And turning, she strode to the actors, undressing, down in the hollow, where butterflies feasted upon swords of silver paper; where the dish cloths in the shadow made pools of yellow.

  Cobbet had out his watch. Three hours till seven, he noted; then water the plants. He turned.

  Giles, nicking his chair into its notch, turned too, in the other direction. He took the short cut by the fields to the Barn. This dry summer the path was hard as brick across the fields. This dry summer the path was strewn with stones. He kicked — a flinty yellow stone, a sharp stone, edged as if cut by a savage for an arrow. A barbaric stone; a pre-historic. Stone-kicking was a child’s game. He remembered the rules. By the rules of the game, one stone, the same stone, must be kicked to the goal. Say a gate, or a tree. He played it alone. The gate was a goal; to be reached in ten. The first kick was Manresa (lust). The second, Dodge (perversion). The third himself (coward). And the fourth and the fifth and all the others were the same.

  He reached it in ten. There, couched in the grass, curled in an olive green ring, was a snake. Dead? No, choked with a toad in its mouth. The snake was unable to swallow, the toad was unable to die. A spasm made the ribs contract; blood oozed. It was birth the wrong way round — a monstrous inversion. So, raising his foot, he stamped on them. The mass crushed and slithered. The white canvas on his tennis shoes was bloodstained and sticky. But it was action. Action relieved him. He strode to the Barn, with blood on his shoes.

  The Barn, the Noble Barn, the barn that had been built over seven hundred years ago and reminded some people of a Greek temple, others of the middle ages, most people of an age before their own, scarcely anybody of the present moment, was empty.

  The great doors stood open. A shaft of light like a yellow banner sloped from roof to floor. Festoons of paper roses, left over from the Coronation, drooped from the rafters. A long table, on which stood an urn, plates and cups, cakes and bread and butter, stretched across one end. The Barn was empty. Mice slid in and out of holes or stood upright, nibbling. Swallows were busy with straw in pockets of earth in the rafters. Countless beetles and insects of various sorts burrowed in the dry wood. A stray bitch had made the dark corner where the sacks stood a lying-in ground for her puppies. All these eyes, expanding and narrowing, some adapted to light, others to darkness, looked from different angles and edges. Minute nibblings and rustlings broke the silence. Whiffs of sweetness and richness veined the air. A blue-bottle had settled on the cake and stabbed its yellow rock with its short drill. A butterfly sunned itself sensuously on a sunlit yellow plate.

  But Mrs. Sands was approaching. She was pushing her way through the crowd. She had turned the corner. She could see the great open door. But butterflies she never saw, mice were only black pellets in kitchen drawers; moths she bundled in her hands and put out of the window. Bitches suggested only servant girls misbehaving. Had there been a cat she would have seen it — any cat, a starved cat with a patch
of mange on its rump opened the flood gates of her childless heart. But there was no cat. The Barn was empty. And so running, panting, set upon reaching the Barn and taking up her station behind the tea urn before the company came, she reached the Barn. And the butterfly rose and the bluebottle.

  Following her in a scud came the servants and helpers — David, John, Irene, Lois. Water boiled. Steam issued. Cake was sliced. Swallows swooped from rafter to rafter. And the company entered.

  “This fine old Barn . . .” said Mrs. Manresa, stopping in the doorway. It was not for her to press ahead of the villagers. It was for her, moved by the beauty of the Barn, to stand still; to draw aside; to gaze; to let other people come first.

  “We have one, much like it, at Lathom,” said Mrs. Parker, stopping, for the same reasons. “Perhaps,” she added, “not quite so large.”

  The villagers hung back. Then, hesitating, dribbled past.

  “And the decorations . . .” said Mrs. Manresa, looking round for someone to congratulate. She stood smiling, waiting. Then old Mrs. Swithin came in. She was gazing up too, but not at the decorations. At the swallows apparently.

  “They come every year,” she said, “the same birds.” Mrs. Manresa smiled benevolently, humouring the old lady’s whimsy. It was unlikely, she thought, that the birds were the same.

  “The decorations, I suppose, are left over from the Coronation,” said Mrs. Parker. “We kept ours too. We built a village hall.”

  Mrs. Manresa laughed. She remembered. An anecdote was on the tip of her tongue, about a public lavatory built to celebrate the same occasion, and how the Mayor . . . Could she tell it? No. The old lady, gazing at the swallows, looked too refined. “Refeened” — Mrs. Manresa qualified the word to her own advantage, thus confirming her approval of the wild child she was, whose nature was somehow “just human nature.” Somehow she could span the old lady’s “refeenment,” also the boy’s fun — Where was that nice fellow Giles? She couldn’t see him; nor Bill either. The villagers still hung back. They must have someone to start the ball rolling.

  “Well, I’m dying for my tea!” she said in her public voice; and strode forward. She laid hold of a thick china mug. Mrs. Sands giving precedence, of course, to one of the gentry, filled it at once. David gave her cake. She was the first to drink, the first to bite. The villagers still hung back. “It’s all my eye about democracy,” she concluded. So did Mrs. Parker, taking her mug too. The people looked to them. They led; the rest followed.

  “What delicious tea!” each exclaimed, disgusting though it was, like rust boiled in water, and the cake fly-blown. But they had a duty to society.

  “They come every year,” said Mrs. Swithin, ignoring the fact that she spoke to the empty air. “From Africa.” As they had come, she supposed, when the Barn was a swamp.

  The Barn filled. Fumes rose. China clattered; voices chattered. Isa pressed her way to the table.

  “Dispersed are we,” she murmured. And held her cup out to be filled. She took it. “Let me turn away,” she murmured, turning, “from the array” — she looked desolately round her— “of china faces, glazed and hard. Down the ride, that leads under the nut tree and the may tree, away, till I come to the wishing well, where the washerwoman’s little boy—” she dropped sugar, two lumps, into her tea, “dropped a pin. He got his horse, so they say. But what wish should I drop into the well?” She looked round. She could not see the man in grey, the gentleman farmer; nor anyone known to her. “That the waters should cover me,” she added, “of the wishing well.”

  The noise of china and chatter drowned her murmur. “Sugar for you?” they were saying. “Just a spot of milk? And you?” “Tea without milk or sugar. That’s the way I like it.” “A bit too strong? Let me add water.”

  “That’s what I wished,” Isa added, “when I dropped my pin. Water. Water . . .”

  “I must say,” the voice said behind her, “it’s brave of the King and Queen. They’re said to be going to India. She looks such a dear. Someone I know said his hair. . . .”

  “There,” Isa mused, “would the dead leaf fall, when the leaves fall, on the water. Should I mind not again to see may tree or nut tree? Not again to hear on the trembling spray the thrush sing, or to see, dipping and diving as if he skimmed waves in the air, the yellow woodpecker?”

  She was looking at the canary yellow festoons left over from the Coronation.

  “I thought they said Canada, not India,” the voice said behind her back. To which the other voice answered: “D’you believe what the papers say? For instance, about the Duke of Windsor. He landed on the south coast. Queen Mary met him. She’d been buying furniture — that’s a fact. And the papers say she met him . . .”

  “Alone, under a tree, the withered tree that keeps all day, murmuring of the sea, and hears the Rider gallop . . .”

  Isa filled in the phrase. Then she started. William Dodge was by her side.

  He smiled. She smiled. They were conspirators; each murmuring some song my uncle taught me.

  “It’s the play,” she said. “The play keeps running in my head.”

  “Hail, sweet Carinthia. My love. My life,” he quoted.

  “My lord, my liege,” she bowed ironically.

  She was handsome. He wanted to see her, not against the tea urn, but with her glass green eyes and thick body, the neck was broad as a pillar, against an arum lily or a vine. He wished she would say: “Come along. I’ll show you the greenhouse, the pig sty, or the stable.” But she said nothing, and they stood there holding their cups, remembering the play. Then he saw her face change, as if she had got out of one dress and put on another. A small boy battled his way through the crowd, striking against skirts and trousers as if he were swimming blindly.

  “Here!” she cried raising her arm.

  He made a bee-line for her. He was her little boy, apparently, her son, her George. She gave him cake; then a mug of milk. Then Nurse came up. Then again she changed her dress. This time, from the expression in her eyes it was apparently something in the nature of a strait waistcoat. Hirsute, handsome, virile, the young man in blue jacket and brass buttons, standing in a beam of dusty light, was her husband. And she his wife. Their relations, as he had noted at lunch, were as people say in novels “strained.” As he had noted at the play, her bare arm had raised itself nervously to her shoulder when she turned — looking for whom? But here he was; and the muscular, the hirsute, the virile plunged him into emotions in which the mind had no share. He forgot how she would have looked against vine leaf in a greenhouse. Only at Giles he looked; and looked and looked. Of whom was he thinking as he stood with his face turned? Not of Isa. Of Mrs. Manresa?

  Mrs. Manresa half-way down the Barn had gulped her cup of tea. How can I rid myself, she asked, of Mrs. Parker? If they were of her own class, how they bored her — her own sex! Not the class below — cooks, shopkeepers, farmers’ wives; nor the class above — peeresses, countesses; it was the women of her own class that bored her. So she left Mrs. Parker, abruptly.

  “Oh Mrs. Moore,” she hailed the keeper’s wife. “What did you think of it? And what did baby think of it?” Here she pinched baby. “I thought it every bit as good as anything I’d seen in London. . . . But we mustn’t be outdone. We’ll have a play of our own. In our Barn. We’ll show ‘em” (here she winked obliquely at the table; so many bought cakes, so few made at home) “how we do it.”

  Then cracking her jokes, she turned; saw Giles; caught his eye; and swept him in, beckoning. He came. And what — she looked down — had he done with his shoes? They were bloodstained. Vaguely some sense that he had proved his valour for her admiration flattered her. If vague it was sweet. Taking him in tow, she felt: I am the Queen, he my hero, my sulky hero.

  “That’s Mrs. Neale!” she exclaimed. “A perfect marvel of a woman, aren’t you, Mrs. Neale! She runs our post office, Mrs. Neale. She can do sums in her head, can’t you, Mrs. Neale? Twenty-five halfpenny stamps, two packets of stamped envelopes and a packet of
postcards — how much does that come to, Mrs. Neale?”

  Mrs. Neale laughed; Mrs. Manresa laughed; Giles too smiled, and looked down at his shoes.

  She drew him down the Barn, in and out, from one to another. She knew ’em all. Every one was a thorough good sort. No, she wouldn’t allow it, not for a moment — Pinsent’s bad leg. “No, no. We’re not going to take that for an excuse, Pinsent.” If he couldn’t bowl, he could bat. Giles agreed. A fish on a line meant the same to him and Pinsent; also jays and magpies. Pinsent stayed on the land; Giles went to an office. That was all. And she was a thorough good sort, making him feel less of an audience, more of an actor, going round the Barn in her wake.

  Then, at the end by the door, they came upon the old couple, Lucy and Bartholomew, sitting on their Windsor chairs.

  Chairs had been reserved for them. Mrs. Sands had sent them tea. It would have caused more bother than it was worth — asserting the democratic principle; standing in the crowd at the table.

  “Swallows,” said Lucy, holding her cup, looking at the birds. Excited by the company they were flitting from rafter to rafter. Across Africa, across France they had come to nest here. Year after year they came. Before there was a channel, when the earth, upon which the Windsor chair was planted, was a riot of rhododendrons, and humming birds quivered at the mouths of scarlet trumpets, as she had read that morning in her Outline of History, they had come . . . Here Bart rose from his chair.

  But Mrs. Manresa absolutely refused to take his seat. “Go on sitting, go on sitting,” she pressed him down again. “I’ll squat on the floor.” She squatted. The surly knight remained in attendance.

  “And what did you think of the play?” she asked.

  Bartholomew looked at his son. His son remained silent.

  “And you Mrs. Swithin?” Mrs. Manresa pressed the old lady.

  Lucy mumbled, looking at the swallows.

  “I was hoping you’d tell me,” said Mrs. Manresa. “Was it an old play? Was it a new play?”