Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  ‘Their darts tingle. That and the rheumatism -’

  ‘The professor is already gone? Poor old man!’

  ‘But at his age how could he still possess what we at ours are already losing. I mean—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t you remember in early childhood, when, in play or talk, as one stepped across the puddle or reached the window on the landing, some imperceptible shock froze the universe to a solid ball of crystal which one held for a moment -I have some mystical belief that all time past and future too, the tears and powdered ashes of generations clotted to a ball; then we were absolute and entire; nothing then was excluded; that was certainty — happiness. But later these crystal globes dissolve as one holds them: some one talks of negroes. See what comes of trying to say what one means! Nonsense!’

  ‘Precisely. Yet how sad a thing is sense! How vast a renunciation it represents! Listen for a moment. Distinguish one among the voices. Now. “So cold it must seem after India. Seven years too. But habit is everything.” That’s sense. That’s agreement. They’ve fixed their eyes upon something visible to each of them. They attempt no more to look upon the little spark of light, the little purple shadow which may be fruitful land on the verge of the horizon, or only a flying gleam on the water. It’s all compromise — all safety, the general intercourse of human beings. Therefore we discover nothing; we cease to explore; we cease to believe that there is anything to discover. “Nonsense” you say; meaning that I shan’t see your crystal globe; and I’m half ashamed to try.’

  ‘Speech is an old torn net, through which the fish escape as one casts it over them. Perhaps silence is better. Let us try it. Come to the window.’

  ‘It’s an odd thing, silence. The mind becomes like a starless night; and then a meteor slides, splendid, right across the dark and is extinct. We never give sufficient thanks for this entertainment.’

  ‘Ah, we’re an ungrateful race! When I look at my hand upon the window sill and think what pleasure I’ve had in it, how it’s touched silk and pottery and hot walls, laid itself flat upon wet grass or sun-baked, let the Atlantic spurt through its fingers, snapped blue bells and daffodils, plucked ripe plums, never for a second since I was born ceased to tell me of hot and cold, damp or dryness, I’m amazed that I should use this wonderful composition of flesh and nerve to write the abuse of life. Yet that’s what we do. Come to think of it, literature is the record of our discontent.’

  ‘Our badge of superiority; our claim for preferment. Admit, you like the discontented people best.’

  ‘I like the melancholy sound of the distant sea’

  ‘What’s this talk of melancholy at my party? Of course if you both stand whispering in a corner -. But come and let me introduce you. There’s Mr Nevill, who likes your writing.’

  ‘In that case — Good evening.’

  ‘Somewhere, I forget the name of the paper — something or other of yours - I forget now the name of the article — or was it a story? You write stories? It’s not poetry that you write? So many of one’s friends - and then every day something new comes out which — which—’

  ‘One does not read.’

  ‘Well, ungracious as it seems, to be honest, occupied as I am all day with matters of an odious or rather fatiguing nature - what time I have for literature I spend with—’

  ‘The dead.’

  ‘I detect irony in your correction.’2

  ‘Envy, not irony. Death is of the utmost importance. Like the French, the dead write so well, and, for some reason, one can respect them, and feel, while equal, that they’re older, wiser, as our parents are; the relationship between living and dead is surely of the noblest.’

  ‘Ah, if you feel that, let us talk of the dead. Lamb, Sophocles, de Quincey, Sir Thomas Browne.’

  ‘Sir Walter Scott, Milton, Marlowe.’

  ‘Pater, Tennyson.’

  ‘Now, now, now.’

  ‘Tennyson, Pater.’

  ‘Lock the door; draw the curtains so that I see only your eyes. I fall on my knees. I cover my face with my hands. I adore Pater. I admire Tennyson.’

  ‘Daughter, proceed.’

  ‘It’s an easy thing to confess one’s faults. But what dusk is deep enough to hide one’s virtues? I love, I adore — no, I can’t tell you what a rose of worship my soul is — the name trembles on my lips — for Shakespeare.’

  ‘I grant you absolution.’

  ‘And yet how often does one read Shakespeare?’

  ‘How often is the summer’s night flawless, the moon up, the spaces between the stars deep as the Atlantic, through the dusk the roses showing white? The mind before reading Shakespeare -’

  ‘The summer’s night. O this is the way to read!’

  ‘The roses nodding -’

  ‘The waves breaking -’

  ‘Over the fields coming those strange airs of dawn that try the doors of the house and fall flat—’

  ‘Then, lying down to sleep, the bed’s -’

  ‘A boat! A boat! Over the sea all night long -’

  ‘And sitting upright, the stars—’

  ‘Out alone in mid-ocean our little boat floating isolated yet upheld, drawn on by the compulsion of the Northern lights, safe, surrounded, melts where the night rests upon the water; there diminishes and disappears, and we, submerged, sealed cold as smooth stones, widen our eyes again; dash, stroke, dot, splash, bedroom furniture, and the rattle of the curtain on the pole -1 earn my living. - Introduce me! O he knew my brother at Oxford.’

  ‘And you too. Come into the middle of the room. Here’s someone who remembers you.’

  ‘As a child, my dear. You wore a pink frock.’

  ‘The dog bit me.’

  ‘So dangerous, throwing sticks into the sea. But your mother -’

  ‘On the beach, by the tent -’

  ‘Sat smiling. She was fond of dogs. - You know my daughter? That’s her husband. — Tray was he called? the big brown one, and there was another, smaller, who bit the postman. I can see it now. What one remembers! But I’m preventing -’

  ‘O please (Yes, yes, I wrote, I’m coming) Please, please - Damn you, Helen, interrupting! There she goes, never again — pushing through the people, pinning on her shawl, slowly descending the steps: gone! The past! the past! -’

  ‘Ah, but listen. Tell me; I’m afraid; so many strangers; some with beards; some so beautiful; she’s touched the peony; all the petals fall. And fierce — the woman with the eyes. The Armenians die. And penal servitude. Why? Such a chatter too; except now — whisper — we all must whisper — are we listening - waiting — what for then? The lantern’s caught! O take care of your gauze! A woman died once. They say it’s waked the swan.’

  ‘Helen’s afraid. These paper lanterns catching, and the windows open letting the breeze lift our flounces. But I’m not afraid of the flame, you know. It’s the garden -I mean the world. That frightens me. Those little lights out there each with a circle of earth beneath it — hills and towns; then the shadows; the lilac stirs. Don’t stay talking. Let’s be off. Through the garden; your hand in mine.’

  ‘Away. The moon is dark upon the moor. Away, we’ll breast them, those waves of darkness crested by the trees, rising for ever, lonely and dark. The lights rise and fall; the water’s thin as air; the moon’s behind it. D’you sink? D’you rise? D’you see the islands? Alone with me.’

  SOLID OBJECTS

  The only thing that moved upon the vast semicircle of the beach was one small black spot. As it came nearer to the ribs and spine of the stranded pilchard boat, it became apparent from a certain tenuity in its blackness that this spot possessed four legs; and moment by moment it became more unmistakable that it was composed of the persons of two young men. Even thus in outline against the sand there was an unmistakable vitality in them; an indescribable vigour in the approach and withdrawal of the bodies, slight though it was, which proclaimed some violent argument issuing from the tiny mouths of the little round heads. This was corro
borated on closer view by the repeated lunging of a walking-stick on the right-hand side. “You mean to tell me . . . You actually believe . . .” thus the walkingstick on the right-hand side next the waves seemed to be asserting as it cut long straight stripes upon the sand.

  “Politics be damned!” issued clearly from the body on the left-hand side, and, as these words were uttered, the mouths, noses, chins, little moustaches, tweed caps, rough boots, shooting coats, and check stockings of the two speakers became clearer and clearer; the smoke of their pipes went up into the air; nothing was so solid, so living, so hard, red, hirsute and virile as these two bodies for miles and miles of sea and sandhill.

  They flung themselves down by the six ribs and spine of the black pilchard boat. You know how the body seems to shake itself free from an argument, and to apologize for a mood of exaltation; flinging itself down and expressing in the looseness of its attitude a readiness to take up with something new — whatever it may be that comes next to hand. So Charles, whose stick had been slashing the beach for half a mile or so, began skimming flat pieces of slate over the water; and John, who had exclaimed “Politics be damned!” began burrowing his fingers down, down, into the sand. As his hand went further and further beyond the wrist, so that he had to hitch his sleeve a little higher, his eyes lost their intensity, or rather the background of thought and experience which gives an inscrutable depth to the eyes of grown people disappeared, leaving only the clear transparent surface, expressing nothing but wonder, which the eyes of young children display. No doubt the act of burrowing in the sand had something to do with it. He remembered that, after digging for a little, the water oozes round your finger-tips; the hole then becomes a moat; a well; a spring; a secret channel to the sea. As he was choosing which of these things to make it, still working his fingers in the water, they curled round something hard — a full drop of solid matter — and gradually dislodged a large irregular lump, and brought it to the surface. When the sand coating was wiped off, a green tint appeared. It was a lump of glass, so thick as to be almost opaque; the smoothing of the sea had completely worn off any edge or shape, so that it was impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler or window-pane; it was nothing but glass; it was almost a precious stone. You had only to enclose it in a rim of gold, or pierce it with a wire, and it became a jewel; part of a necklace, or a dull, green light upon a finger. Perhaps after all it was really a gem; something worn by a dark Princess trailing her finger in the water as she sat in the stern of the boat and listened to the slaves singing as they rowed her across the Bay. Or the oak sides of a sunk Elizabethan treasure-chest had split apart, and, rolled over and over, over and over, its emeralds had come at last to shore. John turned it in his hands; he held it to the light; he held it so that its irregular mass blotted out the body and extended right arm of his friend. The green thinned and thickened slightly as it was held against the sky or against the body. It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore.

  Now a sigh disturbed him — profound, final, making him aware that his friend Charles had thrown all the flat stones within reach, or had come to the conclusion that it was not worth while to throw them. They ate their sandwiches side by side. When they had done, and were shaking themselves and rising to their feet, John took the lump of glass and looked at it in silence. Charles looked at it too. But he saw immediately that it was not flat, and filling his pipe he said with the energy that dismisses a foolish strain of thought:

  “To return to what I was saying — —”

  He did not see, or if he had seen would hardly have noticed, that John, after looking at the lump for a moment, as if in hesitation, slipped it inside his pocket. That impulse, too, may have been the impulse which leads a child to pick up one pebble on a path strewn with them, promising it a life of warmth and security upon the nursery mantelpiece, delighting in the sense of power and benignity which such an action confers, and believing that the heart of the stone leaps with joy when it sees itself chosen from a million like it, to enjoy this bliss instead of a life of cold and wet upon the high road. “It might so easily have been any other of the millions of stones, but it was I, I, I!”

  Whether this thought or not was in John’s mind, the lump of glass had its place upon the mantelpiece, where it stood heavy upon a little pile of bills and letters and served not only as an excellent paper-weight, but also as a natural stopping place for the young man’s eyes when they wandered from his book. Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it. So John found himself attracted to the windows of curiosity shops when he was out walking, merely because he saw something which reminded him of the lump of glass. Anything, so long as it was an object of some kind, more or less round, perhaps with a dying flame deep sunk in its mass, anything — china, glass, amber, rock, marble — even the smooth oval egg of a prehistoric bird would do. He took, also, to keeping his eyes upon the ground, especially in the neighbourhood of waste land where the household refuse is thrown away. Such objects often occurred there — thrown away, of no use to anybody, shapeless, discarded. In a few months he had collected four or five specimens that took their place upon the mantelpiece. They were useful, too, for a man who is standing for Parliament upon the brink of a brilliant career has any number of papers to keep in order — addresses to constituents, declarations of policy, appeals for subscriptions, invitations to dinner, and so on.

  One day, starting from his rooms in the Temple to catch a train in order to address his constituents, his eyes rested upon a remarkable object lying half-hidden in one of those little borders of grass which edge the bases of vast legal buildings. He could only touch it with the point of his stick through the railings; but he could see that it was a piece of china of the most remarkable shape, as nearly resembling a starfish as anything — shaped, or broken accidentally, into five irregular but unmistakable points. The colouring was mainly blue, but green stripes or spots of some kind overlaid the blue, and lines of crimson gave it a richness and lustre of the most attractive kind. John was determined to possess it; but the more he pushed, the further it receded. At length he was forced to go back to his rooms and improvise a wire ring attached to the end of a stick, with which, by dint of great care and skill, he finally drew the piece of china within reach of his hands. As he seized hold of it he exclaimed in triumph. At that moment the clock struck. It was out of the question that he should keep his appointment. The meeting was held without him. But how had the piece of china been broken into this remarkable shape? A careful examination put it beyond doubt that the star shape was accidental, which made it all the more strange, and it seemed unlikely that there should be another such in existence. Set at the opposite end of the mantelpiece from the lump of glass that had been dug from the sand, it looked like a creature from another world — freakish and fantastic as a harlequin. It seemed to be pirouetting through space, winking light like a fitful star. The contrast between the china so vivid and alert, and the glass so mute and contemplative, fascinated him, and wondering and amazed he asked himself how the two came to exist in the same world, let alone to stand upon the same narrow strip of marble in the same room. The question remained unanswered.

  He now began to haunt the places which are most prolific of broken china, such as pieces of waste land between railway lines, sites of demolished houses, and commons in the neighbourhood of London. But china is seldom thrown from a great height; it is one of the rarest of human actions. You have to find in conjunction a very high house, and a woman of such reckless impulse and passionate prejudice that she flings her jar or pot straight from the window without thought of who is below. Broken china was to be found in plenty, but broken in some trifling domestic accident, without purpose or characte
r. Nevertheless, he was often astonished as he came to go into the question more deeply, by the immense variety of shapes to be found in London alone, and there was still more cause for wonder and speculation in the differences of qualities and designs. The finest specimens he would bring home and place upon his mantelpiece, where, however, their duty was more and more of an ornamental nature, since papers needing a weight to keep them down became scarcer and scarcer.

  He neglected his duties, perhaps, or discharged them absent-mindedly, or his constituents when they visited him were unfavourably impressed by the appearance of his mantelpiece. At any rate he was not elected to represent them in Parliament, and his friend Charles, taking it much to heart and hurrying to condole with him, found him so little cast down by the disaster that he could only suppose that it was too serious a matter for him to realize all at once.

  In truth, John had been that day to Barnes Common, and there under a furze bush had found a very remarkable piece of iron. It was almost identical with the glass in shape, massy and globular, but so cold and heavy, so black and metallic, that it was evidently alien to the earth and had its origin in one of the dead stars or was itself the cinder of a moon. It weighed his pocket down; it weighed the mantelpiece down; it radiated cold. And yet the meteorite stood upon the same ledge with the lump of glass and the star-shaped china.

  As his eyes passed from one to another, the determination to possess objects that even surpassed these tormented the young man. He devoted himself more and more resolutely to the search. If he had not been consumed by ambition and convinced that one day some newly-discovered rubbish heap would reward him, the disappointments he had suffered, let alone the fatigue and derision, would have made him give up the pursuit. Provided with a bag and a long stick fitted with an adaptable hook, he ransacked all deposits of earth; raked beneath matted tangles of scrub; searched all alleys and spaces between walls where he had learned to expect to find objects of this kind thrown away. As his standard became higher and his taste more severe the disappointments were innumerable, but always some gleam of hope, some piece of china or glass curiously marked or broken lured him on. Day after day passed. He was no longer young. His career — that is his political career — was a thing of the past. People gave up visiting him. He was too silent to be worth asking to dinner. He never talked to anyone about his serious ambitions; their lack of understanding was apparent in their behaviour.