From the Lookout place one had then a perfectly open view of the Bay. Mr Symonds said it reminded him of the Bay of Naples. The bay was a large lap, many-curved, sand-edged, silver green with sandhills, flowing to the Lighthouse rocks at one end, which made two black stops, one of them with the black and white Lighthouse tower on it. At the other end, the Hayle river made a bar, like a vein across the sand, with the stakes marking the channel, on which the seagulls sat. This great flowing scoop of sea was always changing colour: deep blue; emerald; green; purple; silver. Ships were always steaming in or out: the Haines line, for the most part small steamers going to Cardiff for coal. In rough weather all sorts of tramp steamers came in for shelter — low ships, with a dip in the middle, painted a rusty red. Sometimes a great three-funnelled ship would anchor; and once some famous white yacht. Then there was a perpetual sailing of fishing boats from the Harbour — the luggers, with their sails rigged half across the mast; the rather heavy clumsy boats that went far out, deep sea fishing, and the lighter mackerel boats, that came racing back in the evening, rounding the Island and dropping their sails. Early in September we would cry one morning, “The pilchard boats are out!” The pilchard boats lay up on the beach most of the year. But regularly in early autumn they were hauled down by horses and lay at anchor near the shore, looking like black shoes, for each had a hood at one end, and a great coil of net at the other. There they lay week after week; waiting for the Huer up in the little white watch house at Carbis Bay to sight the pilchards, and sound his horn. Then they would shoot the seine. But year after year the boats lay waiting. The pilchards it was said had been disturbed by the steam trawlers; they never came to St Ives Bay. Once though we heard the Huer — a long clear wail sounded. All the seines were shot. We could see the dotted circles of cork and the dark net beneath. But the great shoal of pilchards, visible under the water to the Huer on his height, passed out of the bay; and the seines were drawn in again. (It was only in 1905 when, after father’s death, we four took a little lodging house at Carbis Bay, that the pilchards came; and we rowed out early one morning and the sea bubbled and spat with silver. I remember some stranger in the next boat shovelling an armful out of that bubbling mass into our boat. I remember writing an article, rejected I suppose, describing it.) All the years we were at St Ives the pilchards never came; and the pilchard boats drowsed in the bay and we used to swim out and hang onto the edge; and see some old man lying under the brown tarpaulin tent. It was a sight that made father gloomy. He had a great respect for fishermen. He minded their poverty; and mother, of course, went about, down in St Ives, starting her nursing association — The Julia Prinsep Stephen Nursing Association was founded after she died; and I think, Ka A.F. told me, still exists.
Every year the Regatta took place in the bay. There was the Judges’ boat, with lines of little flags going from mast to mast. The St Ives notables went on board. Then all the little boats came out. A band played. We went onto the Malakoff and stood in the crowd and listened to the blare of music wafted across the water; and then a gun was fired and off went the boats, racing round the bay; or the swimmers plunged. And we could see the little heads bobbing in the water and the arms flashing. One year the beautiful curly headed postman was second. “I let the other man win”, he said, “because it was his last chance.” There were races for men, for boys; races for luggers, for pleasure boats. It was very gay, with the flags flying and the gun firing and the music of the St Ives Band coming from the Regatta boat across the water. A crowd collected in the Malakoff — that octagonal space at the end of the terrace, which had been built, presumably, in the Crimean War, and was the only attempt that the town made at being a watering place. It had no pier; no parade; only this angular piece of ground with a few stone benches, upon which retired fishermen would sit in their blue jerseys, smoking and talking. Regatta Day — always a fine day — remains in my mind, and makes me think, what with its little flags and its little boats and its movement and the people dotted on the sand and on the water and the music coming over the water, of a French picture.
In those days St Ives, save for a few painters, had no visitors. Its customs were its own customs: in August there was the Regatta. Once in every twelve years the old men and women danced round Knills Steeple and the couple who danced longest was given — a shilling? half a crown? I forget — by the Mayor — Dr Nicholls, on that occasion, wearing a fur trimmed cloak. The town crier every now and then walked along the front, swinging a muffin man’s bell and crying “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” What he cried, I do not know; exception one occasion, when a visitor of ours had lost a brooch, and old Charlie Pearce cried it. He was blind, with a long, wasted face, grey eyes, like the eyes of a fish that has been boiled, and he wore a very battered top hat and a frock coat tightly buttoned round his thin body, and he shambled along, swinging his bell and crying “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” We knew him, as we knew so many St Ives characters, through the servants, through Sophie for the most part. I remember Alice Curnow, who brought the laundry in a great covered basket; and Mrs Adams, the fishwoman, who brought the fish. The lobsters were alive, still blue, hobbling about in [the] basket, and she would put them on the kitchen table, and the great claws would open and close and pinch. Can I be remembering a fact when I remember a long thick fish wriggling on a hook in the larder, and Gerald beating it to death with a broom handle?
The kitchen, Sophie’s kitchen, was directly beneath our night nursery. We would let down a basket on a string and dangle it over the kitchen window, at night while dinner was going on. If she were in a good temper, the basket would be drawn in and laden with something left from the grown-ups’ dinner; but if she were in a bad temper, the basket would be jerked in and the string cut. I can remember the different sensations: drawing up the heavy basket; and feeling the jerk; and the lightness of the string.
Every afternoon we went for a walk. Later these walks became a penance — father must have one of us to walk with him — mother, too much obsessed with his health, his pleasure, was too willing, I think now, to offer us up for sacrifice on that altar, leaving thus a legacy of dependence on his side which became a terrible imposition after her death. In spite of that, St Ives was the country. How much better it would have been for him and for us if she had left him to walk alone; to overwork if he chose. His health was her fetish; she died of overwork easily at forty-nine: he found it very difficult to die of cancer at seventy-two.
But, after making that parenthesis, St Ives gave us all the same the pure delight which is before my eyes even at this moment. The lemon-coloured leaves on the elm trees, the round apples glowing red in the orchard and the rustle of the leaves make me pause to think how many other than human forces affect us. While I am writing this, the light changes; an apple becomes a vivid green. I respond — how? And then the little owl [makes] a chattering noise.
Another response. St Ives, to cut short an obscure train of thought, about the other voice or voices and their connection with art, with religion: figuratively, I could snapshot what I mean by fancying myself afloat, [in an element] which is all the time responding to things we have no words for — exposed to some invisible ray: but instead of labouring here to express this, to analyse the third voice, to discover whether ‘pure delights’ are connected with art, or religion: whether I am telling the truth when I see myself perpetually taking the breath of these voices in my sails, and tacking this way and that, in daily life as I yield to them — instead of that, I note only this influence, suspect it to be of great importance, cannot find how to check its power on other people; and so erect a finger here, by way of signalling that here is a vein to work out later.
To return to St Ives. Tren Crom, as father liked to call it, Trick Robin as we called it, was the regular Sunday walk. You could see both seas from it — on one side, St Michael’s Mount, on the other, St Ives Bay. Like all the Cornish hills it was scattered with blocks of granite and in some holes were driven, as for gate posts. Others were piled up and logged. Th
ere was a Loggan rock on Tren Crom; onto which we scrambled; and a hollow in the rough lichened surface had been made, so they said, to hold the blood of victims. Little paths led between heather and ling to the top. Our legs were pricked and scratched as we climbed; and the gorse was yellow, sweet smelling, nutty. In Fairyland, as we called a wood, [with a wall round it], and great ferns growing higher than our heads. I think of oak apples and acorns. It was very dark and silent: we walked on the wall, looking down into the great ferns, smelling acorns and oak apples. All the granite walls were tufted with moss, and little flowers. At Halestown bog, one jumped from hay to hay; and went squelching in. There the Osmunda grew, and the rare maidenhair fern; and one would pitch down, above one’s knee, in the brown bog water. Perhaps every ten days we would go sailing. Thoby would be allowed to steer. He had to keep the sail filled with wind, and father said, “Show them you can bring her in, my boy”, and setting his face, flushing with the effort, he sat there, bringing us round the point. Once the sea was full of pale jelly fish; differently coloured; like lamps, only with streaming tentacles. They stung if you touched them. We would be given fishing lines, baited with gobbets cut from fish; and the line thrilled in one’s fingers in the water; and then there was a tug; a curious exciting throb; one hauled in; up through the water came the white twisting fish; and it was a gurnard, or a mackerel. There it lay flapping its tail in the water on the floor. Once father said to me: “I don’t like to see fish caught; so I shan’t come; but you can go if you like.” I think it was very admirably done. Not a rebuke, not a forbidding; simply a statement; about which I could think and decide for myself. It made me decide that I disliked fishing; though the passion I had for it — for the thrill and the tug — had been beyond words. The desire to fish faded, leaving no grudge. And from the memory of my own passion I am still able to construct the sporting passion. It is one of those invaluable seeds — for as it is impossible to have every experience, one must make do with seeds — germs of what might have been. I pigeon-hole ‘fishing’ thus with other momentary glimpses, like those glances I cast into basements when I walk in London streets.
Oak apples, ferns with little clusters of seeds on their backs, the Regatta, Charlie Pearce, the click of the garden gate, the ants swarming on the step, buying tintacks, sailing, the smell of Halestown bog, splits for tea in the farmhouse at Trevail, the floor of the sea changing. Mr Wolstenholme in his beehive chair, the spotted elm leaves on the lawn, the rooks cawing as they flew over the house in the morning, the escallonia leaves changing from green to grey, the arc in the air when the powder magazine exploded at Hayle, the boom of the buoy; these are for some reason uppermost in my mind, thinking of St Ives: an incongruous miscellaneous catalogue — little corks that mark a sunken net. And to pull that net, leaving its contents unsorted, to shore, I add: two or three years before mother’s death (1892-3-4) we heard ominous hints that we might leave St Ives. The distance had become a drawback. George and Gerald had work in London. Expense, always threatening, became more pressing. Thoby’s school bills. Education... And then, just opposite the Lookout place, a board appeared. The ground was for sale. Next summer an hotel had risen in the middle of our view. My mother complained, the view was spoilt. A great square building, the colour of oatcake, stood there. And so, one October, a house agent’s board appeared on our lawn. For some reason it required painting. I was allowed to fill in some of the letters from a pot of paint. No tenants came. The danger was averted. And then mother died. And perhaps a month later, Gerald went down to St Ives: some people called Millie Dow wanted to take the house. Our lease was sold to them; and St Ives vanished for ever.
I recover then today (October 12th 1940: a milky autumn day; London is being battered nightly) from these rapid notes only one actual picture of Thoby: steering us in round the point without letting the sail flap. I recover the picture of a schoolboy whose jacket was rather tight; whose arms were too long for their sleeves; whose eyes became bluer when he was thus on his mettle; his face flushed a little. He was feeling, rather earlier than most boys, the responsibility laid on him by father’s pride in him; the burden, the glory of being a man. Why do I shirk the task, not so very hard to a professional like myself, of wafting this boy from the boat into my bed sitting room at Hyde Park Gate? Because I want to think of St Ives; because I have left out many other pictures of him there; because always round him like the dew that collects on a rough coat in autumn hangs the country; butterflies; birds; mud; horses; and finally, because I do not want to go into my room at Hyde Park Gate again. I shrink from the years 1897-1904 — the seven unhappy years. So many lives were free from our burden. Why should our lives have been so tortured and fretted? by two unnecessary blunders — the lash of a random unheeding flail that pointlessly and brutally killed the two people who should, normally and naturally, have made those years, not perhaps happy but normal and natural. Mother’ s death: Stella’s death. I am not thinking of them. I am thinking of the stupid damage that their deaths inflicted. That is why I do not wish to bring Thoby out of the boat into my room.
Without their deaths, to hark back to an earlier train of thought, he would not have been so dumbly, yet genuinely, bound to us. If there is any good (I doubt it) in this mutilation [of] natural feelings, it is that it sensitizes — if to be aware of the insecurity of life; [to] remember something gone; to feel, now and then, as I felt for father when he made no claim, an odd fumbling fellowship — if it is a good thing to be at fifteen or sixteen or seventeen aware of this; to feel, by fits and starts, this sort of profound feeling, this unchildish feeling — if, if, if — . But was it good? Would it not have been better (if there is any sense in using good and better when there is no possible judge) to go on feeling at St Ives the rush and tumble of things? to go on exploring and adventuring privately, while all the while the family as a whole continued its solid rumbling progress, from year to year? To be so surrounded would have given one perhaps a greater scope, more variety. But at fifteen to have that protection removed, to be tumbled out of the family shelter, to see cracks and gashes in that fabric, to be cut by them, to see beyond them — was that good? Did it give one an experience that even if it was painful, yet meant that the gods (as I used to phrase it) were taking one seriously; and giving one a job which they would not think it worthwhile giving, say to Meg and Imogen Booth, say to Ida and Sylvia Milman? I had my visual way of putting it. I would see (after Thoby’s death) two great grindstones (as I walked round Goode Tye) and myself between them. I would typify a contest between myself and “them” — some invisible giant. I would reason, or fancy, that if life were thus made to rear and kick, it was at any rate, the real thing. Nobody could say I had been fobbed off with an unmeaning slip of the precious matter. So I came to think of life as something of extreme reality. And this, of course, increased my feeling of my own importance. Not in relation to human beings: in relation to the force which had respected me sufficiently to make me feel what was real.
It seems to me therefore that our relation (mine and Thoby’s) was more serious than it would have been without those deaths. The unspoken thought — something like what I have visualized — was there, in him, in me; when he came into my back room at Hyde Park Gate. It was behind our arguments. We were of course naturally attracted to each other. Besides his brother’s feeling, he had, I think, an amused, surprised, questioning attitude towards me. I was a year and a half younger than he. I was a girl. And he found me reading Greek, writing an essay — the first, the only essay I ever showed father, upon the Elizabethan voyagers — when he was writing one for a prize at Trinity. A shell-less little creature, I think he thought me; so sequestered, in the room at Hyde Park Gate, compared with himself; a very simple, eager recipient of his school stories; without any experience of my own with which to cap his; but all the same, not passive; rather, on the contrary, bubbling, inquisitive, restless, carrying on my own contradicting, at any rate questioning. We had each branched out, after those early ramblings u
p and down stairs; to read on our own. He had consumed Shakespeare, somehow or other, by himself. He had possessed himself of it, in his large clumsy way, and our first arguments — about books, that is — were heated; because out he would come with his sweeping assertion that everything was in Shakespeare: somehow I felt he had it all in his grasp; at which I revolted. He swept down on me. How could I oppose that? Rather feebly I suppose; but still it was then my genuine feeling. A play was antipathetic. How did they begin? With some dull speech; about a hundred miles from anything that interested me. I opened [Twelfth Night] to prove this; I opened at “If music be the food of love, play on....” I was downed that time. That was, I had to admit, a good beginning. And I remember his pride, for it seemed like a pride he took in a friend, at Shakespeare’s shuffling Falstaff off without a sign of sympathy. That large impartial sweep in Shakespeare delighted him. I mean the impartiality of a tree that sheds leaves; and so on. On the other hand, when Desdemona wakes again, he thought possibly Shakespeare was ‘sentimental’. These are the only particular criticisms I remember — for he was not, as I was, a breaker off of single words or sentences — not a note-taker — he was much more casual and rough and ready and comprehensive. And so I felt that Shakespeare was to him his other world; the place where he got the measure of his daily world: where he took his bearings; in which he took his way freely from Shakespeare, upon what happened. I wonder if I am right in thinking that [Shakespeare] had worked itself into his mind, so that he was half thinking of Falstaff and Hal and Cordelia and the rest — in the third-class smoker on the Underground when there was some squabble between drunken men: and Thoby with his pipe in his mouth sat in the corner, surveyed it over the edge of a paper, motionless, with a look that stuck in my memory; a look of one equipped, unperturbed, knowing his place, relishing his inheritance and his part in life, aware of his competence, scenting the battle; already, in anticipation, a law maker; proud of being a man and playing his part among Shakespeare’s men. Had he been put on, he would have played his part most royally. The words Walter Lamb used of him were very fitting.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 549
