All were retreating, withdrawing and dispersing; and he was left with the ash grown cold and no glow, no glow on the log. What word expressed the sag at his heart, the effusion in his veins, as the retreating Manresa, with Giles attendant, admirable woman, all sensation, ripped the rag doll and let the sawdust stream from his heart?
The old man made a guttural sound, and turned to the right. On with the hobble, on with the limp, since the dance was over. He strolled alone past the trees. It was here, early that very morning, that he had destroyed the little boy’s world. He had popped out with his newspaper; the child had cried.
Down in the dell, past the lily pool, the actors were undressing. He could see them among the brambles. In vests and trousers; unhooking; buttoning up: on all fours; stuffing clothes into cheap attaché cases; with silver swords, beards and emeralds on the grass. Miss La Trobe in coat and skirt — too short, for her legs were stout — battled with the billows of a crinoline. He must respect the conventions. So he stopped, by the pool. The water was opaque over the mud.
Then, coming up behind him, “Oughtn’t we to thank her?” Lucy asked him. She gave him a light pat on the arm.
How imperceptive her religion made her! The fumes of that incense obscured the human heart. Skimming the surface, she ignored the battle in the mud. After La Trobe had been excruciated by the Rector’s interpretation, by the maulings and the manglings of the actors . . . “She don’t want our thanks, Lucy,” he said gruffly. What she wanted, like that carp (something moved in the water) was darkness in the mud; a whisky and soda at the pub; and coarse words descending like maggots through the waters.
“Thank the actors, not the author,” he said. “Or ourselves, the audience.”
He looked over his shoulder. The old lady, the indigenous, the prehistoric, was being wheeled away by a footman. He rolled her through the arch. Now the lawn was empty. The line of the roof, the upright chimneys, rose hard and red against the blue of the evening. The house emerged; the house that had been obliterated. He was damned glad it was over — the scurry and the scuffle, the rouge and the rings. He stooped and raised a peony that had shed its petals. Solitude had come again. And reason and the lamplit paper. . . . But where was his dog? Chained in a kennel? The little veins swelled with rage on his temples. He whistled. And here, released by Candish, racing across the lawn with a fleck of foam on the nostril, came his dog.
Lucy still gazed at the lily pool. “All gone,” she murmured, “under the leaves.” Scared by shadows passing, the fish had withdrawn. She gazed at the water. Perfunctorily she caressed her cross. But her eyes went water searching, looking for fish. The lilies were shutting; the red lily, the white lily, each on its plate of leaf. Above, the air rushed; beneath was water. She stood between two fluidities, caressing her cross. Faith required hours of kneeling in the early morning. Often the delight of the roaming eye seduced her — a sunbeam, a shadow. Now the jagged leaf at the corner suggested, by its contours, Europe. There were other leaves. She fluttered her eye over the surface, naming leaves India, Africa, America. Islands of security, glossy and thick.
“Bart . . .” She spoke to him. She had meant to ask him about the dragon-fly — couldn’t the blue thread settle, if we destroyed it here, then there? But he had gone into the house.
Then something moved in the water; her favourite fantail. The golden orfe followed. Then she had a glimpse of silver — the great carp himself, who came to the surface so very seldom. They slid on, in and out between the stalks, silver; pink; gold; splashed; streaked; pied.
“Ourselves,” she murmured. And retrieving some glint of faith from the grey waters, hopefully, without much help from reason, she followed the fish; the speckled, streaked, and blotched; seeing in that vision beauty, power, and glory in ourselves.
Fish had faith, she reasoned. They trust us because we’ve never caught ‘em. But her brother would reply: “That’s greed.” “Their beauty!” she protested. “Sex,” he would say. “Who makes sex susceptible to beauty?” she would argue. He shrugged who? Why? Silenced, she returned to her private vision; of beauty which is goodness; the sea on which we float. Mostly impervious, but surely every boat sometimes leaks?
He would carry the torch of reason till it went out in the darkness of the cave. For herself, every morning, kneeling, she protected her vision. Every night she opened the window and looked at leaves against the sky. Then slept. Then the random ribbons of birds’ voices woke her.
The fish had come to the surface. She had nothing to give them — not a crumb of bread. “Wait, my darlings,” she addressed them. She would trot into the house and ask Mrs. Sands for a biscuit. Then a shadow fell. Off they flashed. How vexatious! Who was it? Dear me, the young man whose name she had forgotten; not Jones; nor Hodge . . .
Dodge had left Mrs. Manresa abruptly. All over the garden he had been searching for Mrs. Swithin. Now he found her; and she had forgotten his name.
“I’m William,” he said. At that she revived, like a girl in a garden in white, among roses, who came running to meet him — an unacted part.
“I was going to get a biscuit — no, to thank the actors,” she stumbled, virginal, blushing. Then she remembered her brother. “My brother,” she added “says one mustn’t thank the author, Miss La Trobe.”
It was always “my brother . . . my brother” who rose from the depths of her lily pool.
As for the actors, Hammond had detached his whiskers and was now buttoning up his coat. When the chain was inserted between the buttons he was off.
Only Miss La Trobe remained, bending over something in the grass.
“The play’s over,” he said. “The actors have departed.”
“And we mustn’t, my brother says, thank the author,” Mrs. Swithin repeated, looking in the direction of Miss La Trobe.
“So I thank you,” he said. He took her hand and pressed it. Putting one thing with another, it was unlikely that they would ever meet again.
The church bells always stopped, leaving you to ask: Won’t there be another note? Isa, half-way across the lawn, listened. . . . Ding, dong, ding . . . There was not going to be another note. The congregation was assembled, on their knees, in the church. The service was beginning. The play was over; swallows skimmed the grass that had been the stage.
There was Dodge, the lip reader, her semblable, her conspirator, a seeker like her after hidden faces. He was hurrying to rejoin Mrs. Manresa who had gone in front with Giles— “the father of my children,” she muttered. The flesh poured over her, the hot, nerve wired, now lit up, now dark as the grave physical body. By way of healing the rusty fester of the poisoned dart she sought the face that all day long she had been seeking. Preening and peering, between backs, over shoulders, she had sought the man in grey. He had given her a cup of tea at a tennis party; handed her, once, a racquet. That was all. But, she was crying, had we met before the salmon leapt like a bar of silver . . . had we met, she was crying. And when her little boy came battling through the bodies in the Barn “Had he been his son,” she had muttered . . . In passing she stripped the bitter leaf that grew, as it happened, outside the nursery window. Old Man’s Beard. Shrivelling the shreds in lieu of words, for no words grow there, nor roses either, she swept past her conspirator, her semblable, the seeker after vanished faces “like Venus” he thought, making a rough translation, “to her prey . . .” and followed after.
Turning the corner, there was Giles attached to Mrs. Manresa. She was standing at the door of her car. Giles had his foot on the edge of the running board. Did they perceive the arrows about to strike them?
“Jump in, Bill,” Mrs. Manresa chaffed him.
And the wheels scurred on the gravel, and the car drove off.
At last, Miss La Trobe could raise herself from her stooping position. It had been prolonged to avoid attention. The bells had stopped; the audience had gone; also the actors. She could straighten her back. She could open her arms. She could say to the world, You have taken my gift! G
lory possessed her — for one moment. But what had she given? A cloud that melted into the other clouds on the horizon. It was in the giving that the triumph was. And the triumph faded. Her gift meant nothing. If they had understood her meaning; if they had known their parts; if the pearls had been real and the funds illimitable — it would have been a better gift. Now it had gone to join the others.
“A failure,” she groaned, and stooped to put away the records.
Then suddenly the starlings attacked the tree behind which she had hidden. In one flock they pelted it like so many winged stones. The whole tree hummed with the whizz they made, as if each bird plucked a wire. A whizz, a buzz rose from the bird-buzzing, bird-vibrant, bird-blackened tree. The tree became a rhapsody, a quivering cacophony, a whizz and vibrant rapture, branches, leaves, birds syllabling discordantly life, life, life, without measure, without stop devouring the tree. Then up! Then off!
What interrupted? It was old Mrs. Chalmers, creeping through the grass with a bunch of flowers — pinks apparently — to fill the vase that stood on her husband’s grave. In winter it was holly, or ivy. In summer, a flower. It was she who had scared the starlings. Now she passed.
Miss La Trobe nicked the lock and hoisted the heavy case of gramophone records to her shoulder. She crossed the terrace and stopped by the tree where the starlings had gathered. It was here that she had suffered triumph, humiliation, ecstasy, despair — for nothing. Her heels had ground a hole in the grass.
It was growing dark. Since there were no clouds to trouble the sky, the blue was bluer, the green greener. There was no longer a view — no Folly, no spire of Bolney Minster. It was land merely, no land in particular. She put down her case and stood looking at the land. Then something rose to the surface.
“I should group them,” she murmured, “here.” It would be midnight; there would be two figures, half concealed by a rock. The curtain would rise. What would the first words be? The words escaped her.
Again she lifted the heavy suit case to her shoulder. She strode off across the lawn. The house was dormant; one thread of smoke thickened against the trees. It was strange that the earth, with all those flowers incandescent — the lilies, the roses, and clumps of white flowers and bushes of burning green — should still be hard. From the earth green waters seemed to rise over her. She took her voyage away from the shore, and, raising her hand, fumbled for the latch of the iron entrance gate.
She would drop her suit case in at the kitchen window, and then go on up to the Inn. Since the row with the actress who had shared her bed and her purse the need of drink had grown on her. And the horror and the terror of being alone. One of these days she would break — which of the village laws? Sobriety? Chastity? Or take something that did not properly belong to her?
At the corner she ran into old Mrs. Chalmers returning from the grave. The old woman looked down at the dead flowers she was carrying and cut her. The women in the cottages with the red geraniums always did that. She was an outcast. Nature had somehow set her apart from her kind. Yet she had scribbled in the margin of her manuscript: “I am the slave of my audience.”
She thrust her suit case in at the scullery window and walked on, till at the corner she saw the red curtain at the bar window. There would be shelter; voices; oblivion. She turned the handle of the public house door. The acrid smell of stale beer saluted her; and voices talking. They stopped. They had been talking about Bossy as they called her — it didn’t matter. She took her chair and looked through the smoke at a crude glass painting of a cow in a stable; also at a cock and a hen. She raised her glass to her lips. And drank. And listened. Words of one syllable sank down into the mud. She drowsed; she nodded. The mud became fertile. Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning — wonderful words.
The cheap clock ticked; smoke obscured the pictures. Smoke became tart on the roof of her mouth. Smoke obscured the earth-coloured jackets. She no longer saw them, yet they upheld her, sitting arms akimbo with her glass before her. There was the high ground at midnight; there the rock; and two scarcely perceptible figures. Suddenly the tree was pelted with starlings. She set down her glass. She heard the first words.
Down in the hollow, at Pointz Hall, beneath the trees, the table was cleared in the dining room. Candish, with his curved brush had swept the crumbs; had spared the petals and finally left the family to dessert. The play was over, the strangers gone, and they were alone — the family.
Still the play hung in the sky of the mind — moving, diminishing, but still there. Dipping her raspberry in sugar, Mrs. Swithin looked at the play. She said, popping the berry into her mouth, “What did it mean?” and added: “The peasants; the kings; the fool and” (she swallowed) “ourselves?”
They all looked at the play; Isa, Giles and Mr. Oliver. Each of course saw something different. In another moment it would be beneath the horizon, gone to join the other plays. Mr. Oliver, holding out his cheroot said: “Too ambitious.” And, lighting his cheroot he added: “Considering her means.”
It was drifting away to join the other clouds: becoming invisible. Through the smoke Isa saw not the play but the audience dispersing. Some drove; others cycled. A gate swung open. A car swept up the drive to the red villa in the cornfields. Low hanging boughs of acacia brushed the roof. Acacia petalled the car arrived.
“The looking-glasses and the voices in the bushes,” she murmured. “What did she mean?”
“When Mr. Streatfield asked her to explain, she wouldn’t,” said Mrs. Swithin.
Here, with its sheaf sliced in four, exposing a white cone, Giles offered his wife a banana. She refused it. He stubbed his match on the plate. Out it went with a little fizz in the raspberry juice.
“We should be thankful,” said Mrs. Swithin, folding her napkin, “for the weather, which was perfect, save for one shower.”
Here she rose, Isa followed her across the hall to the big room.
They never pulled the curtains till it was too dark to see, nor shut the windows till it was too cold. Why shut out the day before it was over? The flowers were still bright; the birds chirped. You could see more in the evening often when nothing interrupted, when there was no fish to order, no telephone to answer. Mrs. Swithin stopped by the great picture of Venice — school of Canaletto. Possibly in the hood of the gondola there was a little figure — a woman, veiled; or a man?
Isa, sweeping her sewing from the table, sank, her knee doubled, into the chair by the window. Within the shell of the room she overlooked the summer night. Lucy returned from her voyage into the picture and stood silent. The sun made each pane of her glasses shine red. Silver sparkled on her black shawl. For a moment she looked like a tragic figure from another play.
Then she spoke in her usual voice. “We made more this year than last, he said. But then last year it rained.”
“This year, last year, next year, never . . .” Isa murmured. Her hand burnt in the sun on the window sill. Mrs. Swithin took her knitting from the table.
“Did you feel,” she asked “what he said: we act different parts but are the same?”
“Yes,” Isa answered. “No,” she added. It was Yes, No. Yes, yes, yes, the tide rushed out embracing. No, no no, it contracted. The old boot appeared on the shingle.
“Orts, scraps and fragments,” she quoted what she remembered of the vanishing play.
Lucy had just opened her lips to reply, and had laid her hand on her cross caressingly, when the gentlemen came in. She made her little chirruping sound of welcome. She shuffled her feet to clear a space. But in fact there was more space than was needed, and great hooded chairs.
They sat down, ennobled both of them by the setting sun. Both had changed. Giles now wore the black coat and white tie of the professional classes, which needed — Isa looked down at his feet — patent leather pumps. “Our representative, our spokesman,” she sneered. Yet he was extraordinarily handsome. “The father of my children, whom I love and hate.” Love an
d hate — how they tore her asunder! Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes . . .
Here Candish came in. He brought the second post on a silver salver. There were letters; bills; and the morning paper — the paper that obliterated the day before. Like a fish rising to a crumb of biscuit, Bartholomew snapped at the paper. Giles slit the flap of an apparently business document. Lucy read a criss-cross from an old friend at Scarborough. Isa had only bills.
The usual sounds reverberated through the shell; Sands making up the fire; Candish stoking the boiler. Isa had done with her bills. Sitting in the shell of the room she watched the pageant fade. The flowers flashed before they faded. She watched them flash.
The paper crackled. The second hand jerked on. M. Daladier had pegged down the franc. The girl had gone skylarking with the troopers. She had screamed. She had hit him. . . . What then?
When Isa looked at the flowers again, the flowers had faded.
Bartholomew flicked on the reading lamp. The circle of the readers, attached to white papers, was lit up. There in that hollow of the sun-baked field were congregated the grasshopper, the ant, and the beetle, rolling pebbles of sun-baked earth through the glistening stubble. In that rosy corner of the sun-baked field Bartholomew, Giles and Lucy polished and nibbled and broke off crumbs. Isa watched them.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 256
