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Title:   To the Lighthouse
Author:   Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
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Language:   English
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Title:   To the Lighthouse
Author:   Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)




THE WINDOW


1


"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs Ramsay. "But you'll
have to be up with the lark," she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were
settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which
he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's
darkness and a day's sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the
age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate
from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows,
cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest
childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise
and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James
Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated
catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a
refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed
with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawnmower, the sound of poplar trees,
leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses
rustling--all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he
had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the
image of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and his
fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the
sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his
scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on
the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of
public affairs.

"But," said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, "it
won't be fine."

Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed
a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would
have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr Ramsay excited
in his children's breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as
a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with
the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife,
who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was
(James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of
judgement. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable
of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word
to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of
his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from
childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to
that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail
barks founder in darkness (here Mr Ramsay would straighten his back and
narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all,
courage, truth, and the power to endure.

"But it may be fine--I expect it will be fine," said Mrs Ramsay, making
some little twist of the reddish brown stocking she was knitting,
impatiently. If she finished it tonight, if they did go to the Lighthouse
after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy,
who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old
magazines, and some tobacco, indeed, whatever she could find lying about,
not really wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor
fellows, who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but
polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden,
something to amuse them. For how would you like to be shut up for a whole
month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size
of a tennis lawn? she would ask; and to have no letters or newspapers, and
to see nobody; if you were married, not to see your wife, not to know how
your children were,--if they were ill, if they had fallen down and broken
their legs or arms; to see the same dreary waves breaking week after week,
and then a dreadful storm coming, and the windows covered with spray, and
birds dashed against the lamp, and the whole place rocking, and not be
able to put your nose out of doors for fear of being swept into the sea?
How would you like that? she asked, addressing herself particularly to her
daughters. So she added, rather differently, one must take them whatever
comforts one can.

"It's due west," said the atheist Tansley, holding his bony fingers spread
so that the wind blew through them, for he was sharing Mr Ramsay's
evening walk up and down, up and down the terrace. That is to say, the
wind blew from the worst possible direction for landing at the Lighthouse.
Yes, he did say disagreeable things, Mrs Ramsay admitted; it was odious
of him to rub this in, and make James still more disappointed; but at the
same time, she would not let them laugh at him. "The atheist," they
called him; "the little atheist." Rose mocked him; Prue mocked him;
Andrew, Jasper, Roger mocked him; even old Badger without a tooth in his
head had bit him, for being (as Nancy put it) the hundred and tenth young
man to chase them all the way up to the Hebrides when it was ever so much
nicer to be alone.

"Nonsense," said Mrs Ramsay, with great severity. Apart from the habit
of exaggeration which they had from her, and from the implication (which
was true) that she asked too many people to stay, and had to lodge some in
the town, she could not bear incivility to her guests, to young men in
particular, who were poor as churchmice, "exceptionally able," her husband
said, his great admirers, and come there for a holiday. Indeed, she had
the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not
explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated
treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards
herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something
trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a
young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl--pray Heaven it
was none of her daughters!--who did not feel the worth of it, and all
that it implied, to the marrow of her bones!

She turned with severity upon Nancy. He had not chased them, she said.
He had been asked.

They must find a way out of it all. There might be some simpler way, some
less laborious way, she sighed. When she looked in the glass and saw her
hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have
managed things better--her husband; money; his books. But for her own
part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade
difficulties, or slur over duties. She was now formidable to behold, and
it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had spoken
so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters, Prue, Nancy,
Rose--could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves
of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not
always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds
a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and
the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, though to them all there
was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the
manliness in their girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at table
beneath their mother's eyes, honour her strange severity, her extreme
courtesy, like a queen's raising from the mud to wash a beggar's dirty
foot, when she admonished them so very severely about that wretched
atheist who had chased them--or, speaking accurately, been invited to
stay with them--in the Isle of Skye.

"There'll be no landing at the Lighthouse tomorrow," said Charles Tansley,
clapping his hands together as he stood at the window with her husband.
Surely, he had said enough. She wished they would both leave her and
James alone and go on talking. She looked at him. He was such a
miserable specimen, the children said, all humps and hollows. He couldn't
play cricket; he poked; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic brute, Andrew
said. They knew what he liked best--to be for ever walking up and down,
up and down, with Mr Ramsay, and saying who had won this, who had won
that, who was a "first rate man" at Latin verses, who was "brilliant but I
think fundamentally unsound," who was undoubtedly the "ablest fellow in
Balliol," who had buried his light temporarily at Bristol or Bedford, but
was bound to be heard of later when his Prolegomena, of which Mr Tansley
had the first pages in proof with him if Mr Ramsay would like to see
them, to some branch of mathematics or philosophy saw the light of day.
That was what they talked about.

She could not help laughing herself sometimes. She said, the other day,
something about "waves mountains high." Yes, said Charles Tansley, it
was a little rough. "Aren't you drenched to the skin?" she had said.
"Damp, not wet through," said Mr Tansley, pinching his sleeve, feeling
his socks.

But it was not that they minded, the children said. It was not his face;
it was not his manners. It was him--his point of view. When they talked
about something interesting, people, music, history, anything, even said
it was a fine evening so why not sit out of doors, then what they
complained of about Charles Tansley was that until he had turned the whole
thing round and made it somehow reflect himself and disparage them--he was
not satisfied. And he would go to picture galleries they said, and he
would ask one, did one like his tie? God knows, said Rose, one did not.

Disappearing as stealthily as stags from the dinner-table directly the
meal was over, the eight sons and daughters of Mr and Mrs Ramsay sought
their bedrooms, their fastness in a house where there was no other privacy
to debate anything, everything; Tansley's tie; the passing of the Reform
Bill; sea birds and butterflies; people; while the sun poured into those
attics, which a plank alone separated from each other so that every
footstep could be plainly heard and the Swiss girl sobbing for her father
who was dying of cancer in a valley of the Grisons, and lit up bats,
flannels, straw hats, ink-pots, paint-pots, beetles, and the skulls of
small birds, while it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned
to the wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in the towels too,
gritty with sand from bathing.

Strife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very
fibre of being, oh, that they should begin so early, Mrs Ramsay deplored.
They were so critical, her children. They talked such nonsense. She went
from the dining-room, holding James by the hand, since he would not go
with the others. It seemed to her such nonsense--inventing differences,
when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that. The real
differences, she thought, standing by the drawing-room window, are enough,
quite enough. She had in mind at the moment, rich and poor, high and low;
the great in birth receiving from her, half grudging, some respect, for
had she not in her veins the blood of that very noble, if slightly
mythical, Italian house, whose daughters, scattered about English
drawing-rooms in the nineteenth century, had lisped so charmingly, had
stormed so wildly, and all her wit and her bearing and her temper came
from them, and not from the sluggish English, or the cold Scotch; but more
profoundly, she ruminated the other problem, of rich and poor, and the
things she saw with her own eyes, weekly, daily, here or in London, when
she visited this widow, or that struggling wife in person with a bag on
her arm, and a note-book and pencil with which she wrote down in columns
carefully ruled for the purpose wages and spendings, employment and
unemployment, in the hope that thus she would cease to be a private woman
whose charity was half a sop to her own indignation, half a relief to her
own curiosity, and become what with her untrained mind she greatly
admired, an investigator, elucidating the social problem.

Insoluble questions they were, it seemed to her, standing there, holding
James by the hand. He had followed her into the drawing-room, that young
man they laughed at; he was standing by the table, fidgeting with
something, awkwardly, feeling himself out of things, as she knew without
looking round. They had all gone--the children; Minta Doyle and Paul
Rayley; Augustus Carmichael; her husband--they had all gone. So she
turned with a sigh and said, "Would it bore you to come with me,
Mr Tansley?"

She had a dull errand in the town; she had a letter or two to write; she
would be ten minutes perhaps; she would put on her hat. And, with her
basket and her parasol, there she was again, ten minutes later, giving out
a sense of being ready, of being equipped for a jaunt, which, however, she
must interrupt for a moment, as they passed the tennis lawn, to ask
Mr Carmichael, who was basking with his yellow cat's eyes ajar, so that
like a cat's they seemed to reflect the branches moving or the clouds
passing, but to give no inkling of any inner thoughts or emotion
whatsoever, if he wanted anything.

For they were making the great expedition, she said, laughing. They were
going to the town. "Stamps, writing-paper, tobacco?" she suggested,
stopping by his side. But no, he wanted nothing. His hands clasped
themselves over his capacious paunch, his eyes blinked, as if he would
have liked to reply kindly to these blandishments (she was seductive but a
little nervous) but could not, sunk as he was in a grey-green somnolence
which embraced them all, without need of words, in a vast and benevolent
lethargy of well-wishing; all the house; all the world; all the people in
it, for he had slipped into his glass at lunch a few drops of something,
which accounted, the children thought, for the vivid streak of
canary-yellow in moustache and beard that were otherwise milk white. No,
nothing, he murmured.

He should have been a great philosopher, said Mrs Ramsay, as they went
down the road to the fishing village, but he had made an unfortunate
marriage. Holding her black parasol very erect, and moving with an
indescribable air of expectation, as if she were going to meet some one
round the corner, she told the story; an affair at Oxford with some girl;
an early marriage; poverty; going to India; translating a little poetry
"very beautifully, I believe," being willing to teach the boys Persian or
Hindustanee, but what really was the use of that?--and then lying, as they
saw him, on the lawn.

It flattered him; snubbed as he had been, it soothed him that Mrs Ramsay
should tell him this. Charles Tansley revived. Insinuating, too, as she
did the greatness of man's intellect, even in its decay, the subjection of
all wives--not that she blamed the girl, and the marriage had been happy
enough, she believed--to their husband's labours, she made him feel better
pleased with himself than he had done yet, and he would have liked, had
they taken a cab, for example, to have paid the fare. As for her little
bag, might he not carry that? No, no, she said, she always carried THAT
herself. She did too. Yes, he felt that in her. He felt many things,
something in particular that excited him and disturbed him for reasons
which he could not give. He would like her to see him, gowned and hooded,
walking in a procession. A fellowship, a professorship, he felt capable
of anything and saw himself--but what was she looking at? At a man
pasting a bill. The vast flapping sheet flattened itself out, and each
shove of the brush revealed fresh legs, hoops, horses, glistening reds and
blues, beautifully smooth, until half the wall was covered with the
advertisement of a circus; a hundred horsemen, twenty performing seals,
lions, tigers ... Craning forwards, for she was short-sighted, she read it
out ... "will visit this town," she read. It was terribly dangerous work
for a one-armed man, she exclaimed, to stand on top of a ladder like
that--his left arm had been cut off in a reaping machine two years ago.

"Let us all go!" she cried, moving on, as if all those riders and horses
had filled her with childlike exultation and made her forget her pity.

"Let's go," he said, repeating her words, clicking them out, however, with
a self-consciousness that made her wince. "Let us all go to the circus."
No. He could not say it right. He could not feel it right. But why not?
she wondered. What was wrong with him then? She liked him warmly, at the
moment. Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were
children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted;
had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.
It was a large family, nine brothers and sisters, and his father was a
working man. "My father is a chemist, Mrs Ramsay. He keeps a shop." He
himself had paid his own way since he was thirteen. Often he went without
a greatcoat in winter. He could never "return hospitality" (those were
his parched stiff words) at college. He had to make things last twice the
time other people did; he smoked the cheapest tobacco; shag; the same the
old men did in the quays. He worked hard--seven hours a day; his subject
was now the influence of something upon somebody--they were walking on and
Mrs Ramsay did not quite catch the meaning, only the words, here and
there ... dissertation ... fellowship ... readership ... lectureship. She
could not follow the ugly academic jargon, that rattled itself off so
glibly, but said to herself that she saw now why going to the circus had
knocked him off his perch, poor little man, and why he came out,
instantly, with all that about his father and mother and brothers and
sisters, and she would see to it that they didn't laugh at him any more;
she would tell Prue about it. What he would have liked, she supposed,
would have been to say how he had gone not to the circus but to Ibsen with
the Ramsays. He was an awful prig--oh yes, an insufferable bore. For,
though they had reached the town now and were in the main street, with
carts grinding past on the cobbles, still he went on talking, about
settlements, and teaching, and working men, and helping our own class,
and lectures, till she gathered that he had got back entire
self-confidence, had recovered from the circus, and was about (and now
again she liked him warmly) to tell her--but here, the houses falling
away on both sides, they came out on the quay, and the whole bay
spread before them and Mrs Ramsay could not help exclaiming, "Oh,
how beautiful!" For the great plateful of blue water was before her;
the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right,
as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats,
the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always
seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.

That was the view, she said, stopping, growing greyer-eyed, that her
husband loved.

She paused a moment. But now, she said, artists had come here. There
indeed, only a few paces off, stood one of them, in Panama hat and yellow
boots, seriously, softly, absorbedly, for all that he was watched by ten
little boys, with an air of profound contentment on his round red face
gazing, and then, when he had gazed, dipping; imbuing the tip of his
brush in some soft mound of green or pink. Since Mr Paunceforte had been
there, three years before, all the pictures were like that, she said,
green and grey, with lemon-coloured sailing-boats, and pink women on the
beach.

But her grandmother's friends, she said, glancing discreetly as they
passed, took the greatest pains; first they mixed their own colours, and
then they ground them, and then they put damp cloths to keep them moist.

So Mr Tansley supposed she meant him to see that that man's picture was
skimpy, was that what one said? The colours weren't solid? Was that what
one said? Under the influence of that extraordinary emotion which had been
growing all the walk, had begun in the garden when he had wanted to take
her bag, had increased in the town when he had wanted to tell her
everything about himself, he was coming to see himself, and everything he
had ever known gone crooked a little. It was awfully strange.

There he stood in the parlour of the poky little house where she had taken
him, waiting for her, while she went upstairs a moment to see a woman. He
heard her quick step above; heard her voice cheerful, then low; looked at
the mats, tea-caddies, glass shades; waited quite impatiently; looked
forward eagerly to the walk home; determined to carry her bag; then heard
her come out; shut a door; say they must keep the windows open and the
doors shut, ask at the house for anything they wanted (she must be talking
to a child) when, suddenly, in she came, stood for a moment silent (as if
she had been pretending up there, and for a moment let herself be now),
stood quite motionless for a moment against a picture of Queen Victoria
wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter; when all at once he realised that
it was this: it was this:--she was the most beautiful person he had ever
seen.

With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild
violets--what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least; she had
eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her
breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in
her eyes and the wind in her hair--He had hold of her bag.

"Good-bye, Elsie," she said, and they walked up the street, she holding
her parasol erect and walking as if she expected to meet some one round
the corner, while for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an
extraordinary pride; a man digging in a drain stopped digging and looked
at her, let his arm fall down and looked at her; for the first time in his
life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the
cyclamen and the violets for he was walking with a beautiful woman. He
had hold of her bag.


2


"No going to the Lighthouse, James," he said, as trying in deference to
Mrs Ramsay to soften his voice into some semblance of geniality at least.

Odious little man, thought Mrs Ramsay, why go on saying that?


3


"Perhaps you will wake up and find the sun shining and the birds singing,"
she said compassionately, smoothing the little boy's hair, for her
husband, with his caustic saying that it would not be fine, had dashed his
spirits she could see. This going to the Lighthouse was a passion of his,
she saw, and then, as if her husband had not said enough, with his caustic
saying that it would not be fine tomorrow, this odious little man went and
rubbed it in all over again.

"Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow," she said, smoothing his hair.

All she could do now was to admire the refrigerator, and turn the pages of
the Stores list in the hope that she might come upon something like a
rake, or a mowing-machine, which, with its prongs and its handles, would
need the greatest skill and care in cutting out. All these young men
parodied her husband, she reflected; he said it would rain; they said it
would be a positive tornado.

But here, as she turned the page, suddenly her search for the picture of a
rake or a mowing-machine was interrupted. The gruff murmur, irregularly
broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had
kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat
in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily
talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its
place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as
the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then,
"How's that? How's that?" of the children playing cricket, had ceased;
so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most
part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed
consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children
the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, "I am guarding
you--I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly,
especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in
hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums
remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction
of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had
slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephermal as
a rainbow--this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the
other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up
with an impulse of terror.

They had ceased to talk; that was the explanation. Falling in one second
from the tension which had gripped her to the other extreme which, as if
to recoup her for her unnecessary expense of emotion, was cool, amused,
and even faintly malicious, she concluded that poor Charles Tansley had
been shed. That was of little account to her. If her husband required
sacrifices (and indeed he did) she cheerfully offered up to him Charles
Tansley, who had snubbed her little boy.

One moment more, with her head raised, she listened, as if she waited for
some habitual sound, some regular mechanical sound; and then, hearing
something rhythmical, half said, half chanted, beginning in the garden, as
her husband beat up and down the terrace, something between a croak and a
song, she was soothed once more, assured again that all was well, and
looking down at the book on her knee found the picture of a pocket knife
with six blades which could only be cut out if James was very careful.

Suddenly a loud cry, as of a sleep-walker, half roused, something about


Stormed at with shot and shell


sung out with the utmost intensity in her ear, made her turn
apprehensively to see if anyone had heard him. Only Lily Briscoe, she was
glad to find; and that did not matter. But the sight of the girl standing
on the edge of the lawn painting reminded her; she was supposed to be
keeping her head as much in the same position as possible for Lily's
picture. Lily's picture! Mrs Ramsay smiled. With her little Chinese
eyes and her puckered-up face, she would never marry; one could not take
her painting very seriously; she was an independent little creature, and
Mrs Ramsay liked her for it; so, remembering her promise, she bent her
head.


4


Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming down upon her with his
hands waving shouting out, "Boldly we rode and well," but, mercifully, he
turned sharp, and rode off, to die gloriously she supposed upon the
heights of Balaclava. Never was anybody at once so ridiculous and so
alarming. But so long as he kept like that, waving, shouting, she was
safe; he would not stand still and look at her picture. And that was what
Lily Briscoe could not have endured. Even while she looked at the mass,
at the line, at the colour, at Mrs Ramsay sitting in the window with
James, she kept a feeler on her surroundings lest some one should creep
up, and suddenly she should find her picture looked at. But now, with all
her senses quickened as they were, looking, straining, till the colour of
the wall and the jacmanna beyond burnt into her eyes, she was aware of
someone coming out of the house, coming towards her; but somehow divined,
from the footfall, William Bankes, so that though her brush quivered, she
did not, as she would have done had it been Mr Tansley, Paul Rayley,
Minta Doyle, or practically anybody else, turn her canvas upon the grass,
but let it stand. William Bankes stood beside her.

They had rooms in the village, and so, walking in, walking out, parting
late on door-mats, had said little things about the soup, about the
children, about one thing and another which made them allies; so that when
he stood beside her now in his judicial way (he was old enough to be her
father too, a botanist, a widower, smelling of soap, very scrupulous and
clean) she just stood there. He just stood there. Her shoes were
excellent, he observed. They allowed the toes their natural expansion.
Lodging in the same house with her, he had noticed too, how orderly she
was, up before breakfast and off to paint, he believed, alone: poor,
presumably, and without the complexion or the allurement of Miss Doyle
certainly, but with a good sense which made her in his eyes superior to
that young lady. Now, for instance, when Ramsay bore down on them,
shouting, gesticulating, Miss Briscoe, he felt certain, understood.


Some one had blundered.


Mr Ramsay glared at them. He glared at them without seeming to see them.
That did make them both vaguely uncomfortable. Together they had seen a
thing they had not been meant to see. They had encroached upon a privacy.
So, Lily thought, it was probably an excuse of his for moving, for getting
out of earshot, that made Mr Bankes almost immediately say something
about its being chilly and suggested taking a stroll. She would come,
yes. But it was with difficulty that she took her eyes off her picture.

The jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staring white. She would not
have considered it honest to tamper with the bright violet and the staring
white, since she saw them like that, fashionable though it was, since
Mr Paunceforte's visit, to see everything pale, elegant, semitransparent.
Then beneath the colour there was the shape. She could see it all so
clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush
in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight
between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often
brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to
work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often
felt herself--struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to
say: "But this is what I see; this is what I see," and so to clasp some
miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did
their best to pluck from her. And it was then too, in that chill and
windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves upon her
other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance, keeping house for
her father off the Brompton Road, and had much ado to control her impulse
to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at
Mrs Ramsay's knee and say to her--but what could one say to her? "I'm in
love with you?" No, that was not true. "I'm in love with this all,"
waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children. It was
absurd, it was impossible. So now she laid her brushes neatly in the box,
side by side, and said to William Bankes:

"It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat," she said,
looking about her, for it was bright enough, the grass still a soft deep
green, the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers, and
rooks dropping cool cries from the high blue. But something moved,
flashed, turned a silver wing in the air. It was September after all,
the middle of September, and past six in the evening. So off they
strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn,
past the pampas grass, to that break in the thick hedge, guarded by red
hot pokers like brasiers of clear burning coal, between which the blue
waters of the bay looked bluer than ever.

They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need. It was as if
the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on
dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief.
First, the pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue, and the heart
expanded with it and the body swam, only the next instant to be checked
and chilled by the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves. Then, up
behind the great black rock, almost every evening spurted irregularly, so
that one had to watch for it and it was a delight when it came, a fountain
of white water; and then, while one waited for that, one watched, on the
pale semicircular beach, wave after wave shedding again and again
smoothly, a film of mother of pearl.

They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity,
excited by the moving waves; and then by the swift cutting race of a
sailing boat, which, having sliced a curve in the bay, stopped; shivered;
let its sails drop down; and then, with a natural instinct to complete the
picture, after this swift movement, both of them looked at the dunes
far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some
sadness--because the thing was completed partly, and partly because
distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer
and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely
at rest.

Looking at the far sand hills, William Bankes thought of Ramsay: thought
of a road in Westmorland, thought of Ramsay striding along a road by
himself hung round with that solitude which seemed to be his natural air.
But this was suddenly interrupted, William Bankes remembered (and this
must refer to some actual incident), by a hen, straddling her wings out in
protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping,
pointed his stick and said "Pretty--pretty," an odd illumination in to
his heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his simplicity, his
sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship
had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay had
married. After that, what with one thing and another, the pulp had gone
out of their friendship. Whose fault it was he could not say, only, after
a time, repetition had taken the place of newness. It was to repeat that
they met. But in this dumb colloquy with the sand dunes he maintained
that his affection for Ramsay had in no way diminished; but there, like
the body of a young man laid up in peat for a century, with the red fresh
on his lips, was his friendship, in its acuteness and reality, laid up
across the bay among the sandhills.

He was anxious for the sake of this friendship and perhaps too in order to
clear himself in his own mind from the imputation of having dried and
shrunk--for Ramsay lived in a welter of children, whereas Bankes was
childless and a widower--he was anxious that Lily Briscoe should not
disparage Ramsay (a great man in his own way) yet should understand how
things stood between them. Begun long years ago, their friendship had
petered out on a Westmorland road, where the hen spread her wings before
her chicks; after which Ramsay had married, and their paths lying
different ways, there had been, certainly for no one's fault, some
tendency, when they met, to repeat.

Yes. That was it. He finished. He turned from the view. And, turning
to walk back the other way, up the drive, Mr Bankes was alive to things
which would not have struck him had not those sandhills revealed to him
the body of his friendship lying with the red on its lips laid up in
peat--for instance, Cam, the little girl, Ramsay's youngest daughter. She
was picking Sweet Alice on the bank. She was wild and fierce. She would
not "give a flower to the gentleman" as the nursemaid told her.
No! no! no! she would not! She clenched her fist. She stamped. And
Mr Bankes felt aged and saddened and somehow put into the wrong by her
about his friendship. He must have dried and shrunk.

The Ramsays were not rich, and it was a wonder how they managed to
contrive it all. Eight children! To feed eight children on philosophy!
Here was another of them, Jasper this time, strolling past, to have a shot
at a bird, he said, nonchalantly, swinging Lily's hand like a pump-handle
as he passed, which caused Mr Bankes to say, bitterly, how SHE was a
favourite. There was education now to be considered (true, Mrs Ramsay
had something of her own perhaps) let alone the daily wear and tear of
shoes and stockings which those "great fellows," all well grown, angular,
ruthless youngsters, must require. As for being sure which was which, or
in what order they came, that was beyond him. He called them privately
after the Kings and Queens of England; Cam the Wicked, James the Ruthless,
Andrew the Just, Prue the Fair--for Prue would have beauty, he thought,
how could she help it?--and Andrew brains. While he walked up the drive
and Lily Briscoe said yes and no and capped his comments (for she was in
love with them all, in love with this world) he weighed Ramsay's case,
commiserated him, envied him, as if he had seen him divest himself of all
those glories of isolation and austerity which crowned him in youth to
cumber himself definitely with fluttering wings and clucking
domesticities. They gave him something--William Bankes acknowledged that;
it would have been pleasant if Cam had stuck a flower in his coat or
clambered over his shoulder, as over her father's, to look at a picture
of Vesuviusin eruption; but they had also, his old friends could not but
feel, destroyed something. What would a stranger think now? What did
this Lily Briscoe think? Could one help noticing that habits grew on him?
eccentricities, weaknesses perhaps? It was astonishing that a man of his
intellect could stoop so low as he did--but that was too harsh a
phrase--could depend so much as he did upon people's praise.

"Oh, but," said Lily, "think of his work!"

Whenever she "thought of his work" she always saw clearly before her a
large kitchen table. It was Andrew's doing. She asked him what his
father's books were about. "Subject and object and the nature of
reality," Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion
what that meant. "Think of a kitchen table then," he told her, "when
you're not there."

So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr Ramsay's work, a scrubbed
kitchen table. It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for they had
reached the orchard. And with a painful effort of concentration, she
focused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or upon its
fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one of those
scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to have
been laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its four
legs in air. Naturally, if one's days were passed in this seeing of
angular essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their
flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table
(and it was a mark of the finest minds to do so), naturally one could not
be judged like an ordinary person.

Mr Bankes liked her for bidding him "think of his work." He had thought
of it, often and often. Times without number, he had said, "Ramsay is one
of those men who do their best work before they are forty." He had made a
definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only
five and twenty; what came after was more or less amplification,
repetition. But the number of men who make a definite contribution to
anything whatsoever is very small, he said, pausing by the pear tree, well
brushed, scrupulously exact, exquisitely judicial. Suddenly, as if the
movement of his hand had released it, the load of her accumulated
impressions of him tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all
she felt about him. That was one sensation. Then up rose in a fume the
essence of his being. That was another. She felt herself transfixed
by the intensity of her perception; it was his severity; his goodness. I
respect you (she addressed silently him in person) in every atom; you are
not vain; you are entirely impersonal; you are finer than Mr Ramsay; you
are the finest human being that I know; you have neither wife nor child
(without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness), you
live for science (involuntarily, sections of potatoes rose before her
eyes); praise would be an insult to you; generous, pure-hearted, heroic
man! But simultaneously, she remembered how he had brought a valet all
the way up here; objected to dogs on chairs; would prose for hours (until
Mr Ramsay slammed out of the room) about salt in vegetables and the
iniquity of English cooks.

How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of
them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking
one felt or disliking? And to those words, what meaning attached, after
all? Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions
poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like
following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one's
pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting
undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the
fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably
fixed there for eternity. You have greatness, she continued, but
Mr Ramsay has none of it. He is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is
spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs Ramsay to death; but he has what you
(she addressed Mr Bankes) have not; a fiery unworldliness; he knows
nothing about trifles; he loves dogs and his children. He has eight.
Mr Bankes has none. Did he not come down in two coats the other night
and let Mrs Ramsay trim his hair into a pudding basin? All of this
danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate but all
marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net--danced up and down in
Lily's mind, in and about the branches of the pear tree, where still hung
in effigy the scrubbed kitchen table, symbol of her profound respect for
Mr Ramsay's mind, until her thought which had spun quicker and quicker
exploded of its own intensity; she felt released; a shot went off close at
hand, and there came, flying from its fragments, frightened, effusive,
tumultuous, a flock of starlings.

"Jasper!" said Mr Bankes. They turned the way the starlings flew, over
the terrace. Following the scatter of swift-flying birds in the sky they
stepped through the gap in the high hedge straight into Mr Ramsay, who
boomed tragically at them, "Some one had blundered!"

His eyes, glazed with emotion, defiant with tragic intensity, met theirs
for a second, and trembled on the verge of recognition; but then, raising
his hand, half-way to his face as if to avert, to brush off, in an agony
of peevish shame, their normal gaze, as if he begged them to withhold for
a moment what he knew to be inevitable, as if he impressed upon them his
own child-like resentment of interruption, yet even in the moment of
discovery was not to be routed utterly, but was determined to hold fast to
something of this delicious emotion, this impure rhapsody of which he was
ashamed, but in which he revelled--he turned abruptly, slammed his private
door on them; and, Lily Briscoe and Mr Bankes, looking uneasily up into
the sky, observed that the flock of starlings which Jasper had routed with
his gun had settled on the tops of the elm trees.


5


"And even if it isn't fine tomorrow," said Mrs Ramsay, raising her eyes
to glance at William Bankes and Lily Briscoe as they passed, "it will be
another day. And now," she said, thinking that Lily's charm was her
Chinese eyes, aslant in her white, puckered little face, but it would take
a clever man to see it, "and now stand up, and let me measure your leg,"
for they might go to the Lighthouse after all, and she must see if the
stocking did not need to be an inch or two longer in the leg.

Smiling, for it was an admirable idea, that had flashed upon her this very
second--William and Lily should marry--she took the heather-mixture
stocking, with its criss-cross of steel needles at the mouth of it, and
measured it against James's leg.

"My dear, stand still," she said, for in his jealousy, not liking to serve
as measuring block for the Lighthouse keeper's little boy, James fidgeted
purposely; and if he did that, how could she see, was it too long, was it
too short? she asked.

She looked up--what demon possessed him, her youngest, her cherished?--and
saw the room, saw the chairs, thought them fearfully shabby. Their
entrails, as Andrew said the other day, were all over the floor; but then
what was the point, she asked, of buying good chairs to let them spoil up
here all through the winter when the house, with only one old woman to see
to it, positively dripped with wet? Never mind, the rent was precisely
twopence half-penny; the children loved it; it did her husband good to be
three thousand, or if she must be accurate, three hundred miles from his
libraries and his lectures and his disciples; and there was room for
visitors. Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London
life of service was done--they did well enough here; and a photograph or
two, and books. Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had
time to read them. Alas! even the books that had been given her and
inscribed by the hand of the poet himself: "For her whose wishes must be
obeyed" ... "The happier Helen of our days" ... disgraceful to say, she
had never read them. And Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage
Customs of Polynesia ("My dear, stand still," she said)--neither of those
could one send to the Lighthouse. At a certain moment, she supposed, the
house would become so shabby that something must be done. If they could
be taught to wipe their feet and not bring the beach in with them--that
would be something. Crabs, she had to allow, if Andrew really wished to
dissect them, or if Jasper believed that one could make soup from seaweed,
one could not prevent it; or Rose's objects--shells, reeds, stones; for
they were gifted, her children, but all in quite different ways. And the
result of it was, she sighed, taking in the whole room from floor to
ceiling, as she held the stocking against James's leg, that things got
shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer. The mat was fading; the
wall-paper was flapping. You couldn't tell any more that those were roses
on it. Still, if every door in a house is left perpetually open, and no
lockmaker in the whole of Scotland can mend a bolt, things must spoil.
What was the use of flinging a green Cashemere shawl over the edge of
a picture frame? In two weeks it would be the colour of pea soup.
But it was the doors that annoyed her; every door was left open.
She listened. The drawing-room door was open; the hall door was open;
it sounded as if the bedroom doors were open; and certainly the window
on the landing was open, for that she had opened herself. That windows
should be open, and doors shut--simple as it was, could none of them
remember it? She would go into the maids' bedrooms at night and find
them sealed like ovens, except for Marie's, the Swiss girl, who
would rather go without a bath than without fresh air, but then
at home, she had said, "the mountains are so beautiful." She had said
that last night looking out of the window with tears in her eyes.
"The mountains are so beautiful." Her father was dying there,
Mrs Ramsay knew. He was leaving them fatherless. Scolding and
demonstrating (how to make a bed, how to open a window, with hands that
shut and spread like a Frenchwoman's) all had folded itself quietly about
her, when the girl spoke, as, after a flight through the sunshine the
wings of a bird fold themselves quietly and the blue of its plumage
changes from bright steel to soft purple. She had stood there silent for
there was nothing to be said. He had cancer of the throat. At the
recolection--how she had stood there, how the girl had said, "At home the
mountains are so beautiful," and there was no hope, no hope whatever, she
had a spasm of irritation, and speaking sharply, said to James:

"Stand still. Don't be tiresome," so that he knew instantly that her
severity was real, and straightened his leg and she measured it.

The stocking was too short by half an inch at least, making allowance for
the fact that Sorley's little boy would be less well grown than James.

"It's too short," she said, "ever so much too short."

Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the
darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps
a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received
it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.

But was it nothing but looks, people said? What was there behind it--her
beauty and splendour? Had he blown his brains out, they asked, had he
died the week before they were married--some other, earlier lover, of whom
rumours reached one? Or was there nothing? nothing but an incomparable
beauty which she lived behind, and could do nothing to disturb? For
easily though she might have said at some moment of intimacy when stories
of great passion, of love foiled, of ambition thwarted came her way how
she too had known or felt or been through it herself, she never spoke.
She was silent always. She knew then--she knew without having learnt.
Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her singleness of
mind made her drop plumb like a stone, alight exact as a bird, gave her,
naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth which delighted,
eased, sustained--falsely perhaps.

("Nature has but little clay," said Mr Bankes once, much moved by her
voice on the telephone, though she was only telling him a fact about a
train, "like that of which she moulded you." He saw her at the end of the
line, Greek, blue-eyed, straight-nosed. How incongruous it seemed to be
telephoning to a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to have
joined hands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face. Yes, he would
catch the 10:30 at Euston.

"But she's no more aware of her beauty than a child," said Mr Bankes,
replacing the receiver and crossing the room to see what progress the
workmen were making with an hotel which they were building at the back of
his house. And he thought of Mrs Ramsay as he looked at that stir among
the unfinished walls. For always, he thought, there was something
incongruous to be worked into the harmony of her face. She clapped a
deer-stalker's hat on her head; she ran across the lawn in galoshes to
snatch a child from mischief. So that if it was her beauty merely that
one thought of, one must remember the quivering thing, the living thing
(they were carrying bricks up a little plank as he watched them), and work
it into the picture; or if one thought of her simply as a woman, one must
endow her with some freak of idiosyncrasy--she did not like admiration--or
suppose some latent desire to doff her royalty of form as if her beauty
bored her and all that men say of beauty, and she wanted only to be like
other people, insignificant. He did not know. He did not know. He must
go to his work.)

Knitting her reddish-brown hairy stocking, with her head outlined absurdly
by the gilt frame, the green shawl which she had tossed over the edge of
the frame, and the authenticated masterpiece by Michael Angelo,
Mrs Ramsay smoothed out what had been harsh in her manner a moment
before, raised his head, and kissed her little boy on the forehead.
"Let us find another picture to cut out," she said.


6


But what had happened?

Some one had blundered.

Starting from her musing she gave meaning to words which she had held
meaningless in her mind for a long stretch of time. "Some one had
blundered"--Fixing her short-sighted eyes upon her husband, who was now
bearing down upon her, she gazed steadily until his closeness revealed to
her (the jingle mated itself in her head) that something had happened,
some one had blundered. But she could not for the life of her think what.

He shivered; he quivered. All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own
splendour, riding fell as a thunderbolt, fierce as a hawk at the head of
his men through the valley of death, had been shattered, destroyed.
Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well, flashed through the
valley of death, volleyed and thundered--straight into Lily Briscoe and
William Bankes. He quivered; he shivered.

Not for the world would she have spoken to him, realising, from the
familiar signs, his eyes averted, and some curious gathering together
of his person, as if he wrapped himself about and needed privacy into
which to regain his equilibrium, that he was outraged and anguished. She
stroked James's head; she transferred to him what she felt for her
husband, and, as she watched him chalk yellow the white dress shirt of a
gentleman in the Army and Navy Stores catalogue, thought what a delight it
would be to her should he turn out a great artist; and why should he not?
He had a splendid forehead. Then, looking up, as her husband passed her
once more, she was relieved to find that the ruin was veiled; domesticity
triumphed; custom crooned its soothing rhythm, so that when stopping
deliberately, as his turn came round again, at the window he bent
quizzically and whimsically to tickle James's bare calf with a sprig of
something, she twitted him for having dispatched "that poor young man,"
Charles Tansley. Tansley had had to go in and write his dissertation,
he said.

"James will have to write HIS dissertation one of these days," he added
ironically, flicking his sprig.

Hating his father, James brushed away the tickling spray with which in a
manner peculiar to him, compound of severity and humour, he teased his
youngest son's bare leg.

She was trying to get these tiresome stockings finished to send to
Sorley's little boy tomorrow, said Mrs Ramsay.

There wasn't the slightest possible chance that they could go to the
Lighthouse tomorrow, Mr Ramsay snapped out irascibly.

How did he know? she asked. The wind often changed.

The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women's minds
enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered
and shivered; and now, she flew in the face of facts, made his children
hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies. He
stamped his foot on the stone step. "Damn you," he said. But what had she
said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might.

Not with the barometer falling and the wind due west.

To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other
people's feelings, to rendthe thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so
brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without
replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of
jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There
was nothing to be said.

He stood by her in silence. Very humbly, at length, he said that he would
step over and ask the Coastguards if she liked.

There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him.

She was quite ready to take his word for it, she said. Only then they
need not cut sandwiches--that was all. They came to her, naturally, since
she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this,
another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing
but a sponge sopped full of human emotions. Then he said, Damn you. He
said, It must rain. He said, It won't rain; and instantly a Heaven of
security opened before her. There was nobody she reverenced more. She
was not good enough to tie his shoe strings, she felt.

Already ashamed of that petulance, of that gesticulation of the hands when
charging at the head of his troops, Mr Ramsay rather sheepishly prodded
his son's bare legs once more, and then, as if he had her leave for it,
with a movement which oddly reminded his wife of the great sea lion at the
Zoo tumbling backwards after swallowing his fish and walloping off so that
the water in the tank washes from side to side, he dived into the evening
air which, already thinner, was taking the substance from leaves and
hedges but, as if in return, restoring to roses and pinks a lustre which
they had not had by day.

"Some one had blundered," he said again, striding off, up and down the
terrace.

But how extraordinarily his note had changed! It was like the cuckoo;
"in June he gets out of tune"; as if he were trying over, tentatively
seeking, some phrase for a new mood, and having only this at hand, used
it, cracked though it was. But it sounded ridiculous--"Some one had
blundered"--said like that, almost as a question, without any conviction,
melodiously. Mrs Ramsay could not help smiling, and soon, sure enough,
walking up and down, he hummed it, dropped it, fell silent.

He was safe, he was restored to his privacy. He stopped to light his
pipe, looked once at his wife and son in the window, and as one raises
one's eyes from a page in an express train and sees a farm, a tree, a
cluster of cottages as an illustration, a confirmation of something on the
printed page to which one returns, fortified, and satisfied, so without
his distinguishing either his son or his wife, the sight of them fortified
him and satisfied him and consecrated his effort to arrive at a perfectly
clear understanding of the problem which now engaged the energies of his
splendid mind.

It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano,
divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six
letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty
in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until
it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in
the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for one moment
by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far, far
away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with
little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless against a
doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window. They
needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q? What comes next?
After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely
visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only
reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it
would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he
was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q--R--. Here he
knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the
urn, and proceeded. "Then R ..." He braced himself. He clenched
himself.

Qualities that would have saved a ship's company exposed on a broiling
sea with six biscuits and a flask of water--endurance and justice,
foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then--what is R?

A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the
intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of
darkness he heard people saying--he was a failure--that R was beyond him.
He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R--

Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the
Polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counsellor,
whose temper, neither sanguine nor despondent, surveys with equanimity
what is to be and faces it, came to his help again. R--

The lizard's eye flickered once more. The veins on his forehead bulged.
The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and, displayed among
its leaves, he could see, without wishing it, that old, that obvious
distinction between the two classes of men; on the one hand the steady
goers of superhuman strength who, plodding and persevering, repeat the
whole alphabet in order, twenty-six letters in all, from start to finish;
on the other the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the
letters together in one flash--the way of genius. He had not genius; he
laid no claim to that: but he had, or might have had, the power to repeat
every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile,
he stuck at Q. On, then, on to R.

Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has
begun to fall and the mountain top is covered in mist, knows that he must
lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him, paling the
colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on
the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he would not die
lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed
on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die
standing. He would never reach R.

He stood stock-still, by the urn, with the geranium flowing over it. How
many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all?
Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer,
without treachery to the expedition behind him, "One perhaps." One in a
generation. Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one? provided he
has toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, and till he has no
more left to give? And his fame lasts how long? It is permissible even
for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him
hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two
thousand years? (asked Mr Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge).
What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the
ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two,
and would then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still.
(He looked into the hedge, into the intricacy of the twigs.) Who then
could blame the leader of that forlorn party which after all has climbed
high enough to see the waste of the years and the perishing of the stars,
if before death stiffens his limbs beyond the power of movement he does a
little consciously raise his numbed fingers to his brow, and square his
shoulders, so that when the search party comes they will find him dead at
his post, the fine figure of a soldier? Mr Ramsay squared his shoulders
and stood very upright by the urn.

Who shall blame him, if, so standing for a moment he dwells upon fame,
upon search parties, upon cairns raised by grateful followers over his
bones? Finally, who shall blame the leader of the doomed expedition, if,
having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to the
last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he now
perceives by some pricking in his toes that he lives, and does not on the
whole object to live, but requires sympathy, and whisky, and some one to
tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who shall blame him? Who
will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by
the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first,
gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly
before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his
isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and
finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head
before her--who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the
world?


7


But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping
and looking down on them; he hated him for interrupting them; he hated him
for the exaltation and sublimity of his gestures; for the magnificence of
his head; for his exactingness and egotism (for there he stood, commanding
them to attend to him) but most of all he hated the twang and twitter of
his father's emotion which, vibrating round them, disturbed the perfect
simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother. By looking
fixedly at the page, he hoped to make him move on; by pointing his finger
at a word, he hoped to recall his mother's attention, which, he knew
angrily, wavered instantly his father stopped. But, no. Nothing would
make Mr Ramsay move on. There he stood, demanding sympathy.

Mrs Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm,
braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort,
and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of
spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies
were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she
sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity,
this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged
itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare. He wanted sympathy. He
was a failure, he said. Mrs Ramsay flashed her needles. Mr Ramsay
repeated, never taking his eyes from her face, that he was a failure.
She blew the words back at him. "Charles Tansley..." she said. But he
must have more than that. It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his
genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life,
warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness
made furtile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life--the
drawing-room; behind the drawing-room the kitchen; above the kitchen the
bedrooms; and beyond them the nurseries; they must be furnished, they must
be filled with life.

Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time, she
said. But he must have more than that. He must have sympathy. He must
be assured that he too lived in the heart of life; was needed; not only
here, but all over the world. Flashing her needles, confident, upright,
she created drawing-room and kitchen, set them all aglow; bade him take
his ease there, go in and out, enjoy himself. She laughed, she knitted.
Standing between her knees, very stiff, James felt all her strength
flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid
scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again,
demanding sympathy.

He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her
needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at
James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh,
her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room
assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the
garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him;
however deep he buried himself or climed high, not for a second should he
find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and
protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know
herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff
between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with
leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar
of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.

Filled with her words, like a child who drops off satisfied, he said, at
last, looking at her with humble gratitude, restored, renewed, that he
would take a turn; he would watch the children playing cricket. He went.

Immediately, Mrs Ramsey seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed
in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that
she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment
to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm's fairy story, while there
throbbed through her, like a pulse in a spring which has expanded to its
full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful
creation.

Every throb of this pulse seemed, as he walked away, to enclose her and
her husband, and to give to each that solace which two different notes,
one high, one low, struck together, seem to give each other as they
combine. Yet as the resonance died, and she turned to the Fairy Tale
again, Mrs Ramsey felt not only exhausted in body (afterwards, not at the
time, she always felt this) but also there tinged her physical fatigue
some faintly disagreeable sensation with another origin. Not that, as
she read aloud the story of the Fisherman's Wife, she knew precisely what
it came from; nor did she let herself put into words her dissatisfaction
when she realized, at the turn of the page when she stopped and heard
dully, ominously, a wave fall, how it came from this: she did not like,
even for a second, to feel finer than her husband; and further, could not
bear not being entirely sure, when she spoke to him, of the truth of what
she said. Universities and people wanting him, lectures and books and
their being of the highest importance--all that she did not doubt for a
moment; but it was their relation, and his coming to her like that,
openly, so that any one could see, that discomposed her; for then people
said he depended on her, when they must know that of the two he was
infinitely the more important, and what she gave the world, in comparison
with what he gave, negligable. But then again, it was the other thing
too--not being able to tell him the truth, being afraid, for instance,
about the greenhouse roof and the expense it would be, fifty pounds
perhaps to mend it; and then about his books, to be afraid that he might
guess, what she a little suspected, that his last book was not quite his
best book (she gathered that from William Bankes); and then to hide small
daily things, and the children seeing it, and the burden it laid on
them--all this diminished the entire joy, the pure joy, of the two notes
sounding together, and let the sound die on her ear now with a dismal
flatness.

A shadow was on the page; she looked up. It was Augustus Carmichael
shuffling past, precisely now, at the very moment when it was painful to
be reminded of the inadequacy of human relationships, that the most
perfect was flawed, and could not bear the examination which, loving her
husband, with her instinct for truth, she turned upon it; when it was
painful to feel herself convicted of unworthiness, and impeded in her
proper function by these lies, these exaggerations,--it was at this
moment when she was fretted thus ignobly in the wake of her exaltation,
that Mr Carmichael shuffled past, in his yellow slippers, and some demon
in her made it necessary for her to call out, as he passed,

"Going indoors Mr Carmichael?"


8


He said nothing. He took opium. The children said he had stained his
beard yellow with it. Perhaps. What was obvious to her was that the poor
man was unhappy, came to them every year as an escape; and yet every year
she felt the same thing; he did not trust her. She said, "I am going to
the town. Shall I get you stamps, paper, tobacco?" and she felt him
wince. He did not trust her. It was his wife's doing. She remembered
that iniquity of his wife's towards him, which had made her turn to steel
and adamant there, in the horrible little room in St John's Wood, when
with her own eyes she had seen that odious woman turn him out of the
house. He was unkempt; he dropped things on his coat; he had the
tiresomeness of an old man with nothing in the world to do; and she turned
him out of the room. She said, in her odious way, "Now, Mrs Ramsay and I
want to have a little talk together," and Mrs Ramsay could see, as if
before her eyes, the innumerable miseries of his life. Had he money
enough to buy tobacco? Did he have to ask her for it? half a crown?
eighteenpence? Oh, she could not bear to think of the little indignities
she made him suffer. And always now (why, she could not guess, except
that it came probably from that woman somehow) he shrank from her. He
never told her anything. But what more could she have done? There was a
sunny room given up to him. The children were good to him. Never did she
show a sign of not wanting him. She went out of her way indeed to be
friendly. Do you want stamps, do you want tobacco? Here's a book you
might like and so on. And after all--after all (here insensibly she drew
herself together, physically, the sense of her own beauty becoming, as it
did so seldom, present to her) after all, she had not generally any
difficulty in making people like her; for instance, George Manning; Mr
Wallace; famous as they were, they would come to her of an evening,
quietly, and talk alone over her fire. She bore about with her, she could
not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erect into
any room that she entered; and after all, veil it as she might, and shrink
from the monotony of bearing that it imposed on her, her beauty was
apparent. She had been admired. She had been loved. She had entered
rooms where mourners sat. Tears had flown in her presence. Men, and
women too, letting go to the multiplicity of things, had allowed
themselves with her the relief of simplicity. It injured her that he
should shrink. It hurt her. And yet not cleanly, not rightly. That was
what she minded, coming as it did on top of her discontent with her
husband; the sense she had now when Mr Carmichael shuffled past, just
nodding to her question, with a book beneath his arm, in his yellow
slippers, that she was suspected; and that all this desire of hers to
give, to help, was vanity. For her own self-satisfaction was it that she
wished so instinctively to help, to give, that people might say of her,
"O Mrs Ramsay! dear Mrs Ramsay ... Mrs Ramsay, of course!" and need her
and send for her and admire her? Was it not secretly this that she
wanted, and therefore when Mr Carmichael shrank away from her, as he did
at this moment, making off to some corner where he did acrostics
endlessly, she did not feel merely snubbed back in her instinct, but made
aware of the pettiness of some part of her, and of human relations, how
flawed they are, how despicable, how self-seeking, at their best. Shabby
and worn out, and not presumably (her cheeks were hollow, her hair was
white) any longer a sight that filled the eyes with joy, she had better
devote her mind to the story of the Fisherman and his Wife and so pacify
that bundle of sensitiveness (none of her children was as sensitive as he
was), her son James.

"The man's heart grew heavy," she read aloud, "and he would not go. He
said to himself, 'It is not right,' and yet he went. And when he came to
the sea the water was quite purple and dark blue, and grey and thick, and
no longer so green and yellow, but it was still quiet. And he stood there
and said--"

Mrs Ramsay could have wished that her husband had not chosen that moment
to stop. Why had he not gone as he said to watch the children playing
cricket? But he did not speak; he looked; he nodded; he approved; he went
on. He slipped, seeing before him that hedge which had over and over
again rounded some pause, signified some conclusion, seeing his wife and
child, seeing again the urns with the trailing of red geraniums which had
so often decorated processes of thought, and bore, written up among their
leaves, as if they were scraps of paper on which one scribbles notes in
the rush of reading--he slipped, seeing all this, smoothly into
speculation suggested by an article in THE TIMES about the number of
Americans who visit Shakespeare's house every year. If Shakespeare
had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what
it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is
the lot of the average human being better now than in the time of the
Pharaohs? Is the lot of the average human being, however, he asked
himself, the criterion by which we judge the measure of civilization?
Possibly not. Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a
slave class. The liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity. The
thought was distasteful to him. He tossed his head. To avoid it, he
would find some way of snubbing the predominance of the arts. He would
argue that the world exists for the average human being; that the arts are
merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life; they do not express
it. Nor is Shakespeare necessary to it. Not knowing precisely why it was
that he wanted to disparage Shakespeare and come to the rescue of the man
who stands eternally in the door of the lift, he picked a leaf sharply
from the hedge. All this would have to be dished up for the young men at
Cardiff next month, he thought; here, on his terrace, he was merely
foraging and picnicking (he threw away the leaf that he had picked so
peevishly) like a man who reaches from his horse to pick a bunch of roses,
or stuffs his pockets with nuts as he ambles at his ease through the lanes
and fields of a country known to him from boyhood. It was all familiar;
this turning, that stile, that cut across the fields. Hours he would
spend thus, with his pipe, of an evening, thinking up and down and in and
out of the old familiar lanes and commons, which were all stuck about with
the history of that campaign there, the life of this statesman here, with
poems and with anecdotes, with figures too, this thinker, that soldier;
all very brisk and clear; but at length the lane, the field, the common,
the fruitful nut-tree and the flowering hedge led him on to that further
turn of the road where he dismounted always, tied his horse to a tree,
and proceeded on foot alone. He reached the edge of the lawn and looked
out on the bay beneath.

It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether he wished it or not, to come out
thus on a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away, and there to
stand, like a desolate sea-bird, alone. It was his power, his gift,
suddenly to shed all superfluities, to shrink and diminish so that he
looked barer and felt sparer, even physically, yet lost none of his
intensity of mind, and so to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of
human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we
stand on--that was his fate, his gift. But having thrown away, when he
dismounted, all gestures and fripperies, all trophies of nuts and roses,
and shrunk so that not only fame but even his own name was forgotten
by him, kept even in that desolation a vigilance which spared no
phantom and luxuriated in no vision, and it was in this guise that
he inspired in William Bankes (intermittently) and in Charles Tansley
(obsequiously)and in his wife now, when she looked up and saw him
standing at the edge of the lawn, profoundly, reverence, and pity, and
gratitude too, as a stake driven into the bed of a channel upon which the
gulls perch and the waves beat inspires in merry boat-loads a feeling of
gratitude for the duty it is taking upon itself of marking the channel out
there in the floods alone.

"But the father of eight children has no choice." Muttering half aloud,
so he broke off, turned, sighed, raised his eyes, sought the figure of his
wife reading stories to his little boy, filled his pipe. He turned from
the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground
we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have
led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with
the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that
comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of
misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes. It was true;
he was for the most part happy; he had his wife; he had his children; he
had promised in six weeks' time to talk "some nonsense" to the young men
of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes of the French
Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it, his glory in the phrases he
made, in the ardour of youth, in his wife's beauty, in the tributes that
reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton, Kidderminster,
Oxford, Cambridge--all had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase
"talking nonsense," because, in effect, he had not done the thing he might
have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own
his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I like--this is what I
am; and rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe,
who wondered why such concealments should be necessary; why he needed
always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life;
how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time.

Teaching and preaching is beyond human power, Lily suspected. (She was
putting away her things.) If you are exalted you must somehow come a
cropper. Mrs Ramsay gave him what he asked too easily. Then the change
must be so upsetting, Lily said. He comes in from his books and finds us
all playing games and talking nonsense. Imagine what a change from the
things he thinks about, she said.

He was bearing down upon them. Now he stopped dead and stood looking in
silence at the sea. Now he had turned away again.


9


Yes, Mr Bankes said, watching him go. It was a thousand pities. (Lily
had said something about his frightening her--he changed from one mood to
another so suddenly.) Yes, said Mr Bankes, it was a thousand pities that
Ramsay could not behave a little more like other people. (For he liked
Lily Briscoe; he could discuss Ramsay with her quite openly.) It was for
that reason, he said, that the young don't read Carlyle. A crusty old
grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold, why should he
preach to us? was what Mr Bankes understood that young people said
nowadays. It was a thousand pities if you thought, as he did, that
Carlyle was one of the great teachers of mankind. Lily was ashamed to say
that she had not read Carlyle since she was at school. But in her opinion
one liked Mr Ramsay all the better for thinking that if his little finger
ached the whole world must come to an end. It was not THAT she minded.
For who could be deceived by him? He asked you quite openly to flatter
him, to admire him, his little dodges deceived nobody. What she disliked
was his narrowness, his blindness, she said, looking after him.

"A bit of a hypocrite?" Mr Bankes suggested, looking too at Mr Ramsay's
back, for was he not thinking of his friendship, and of Cam refusing to
give him a flower, and of all those boys and girls, and his own house,
full of comfort, but, since his wife's death, quiet rather? Of course,
he had his work... All the same, he rather wished Lily to agree that
Ramsay was, as he said, "a bit of a hypocrite."

Lily Briscoe went on putting away her brushes, looking up, looking down.
Looking up, there he was--Mr Ramsay--advancing towards them, swinging,
careless, oblivious, remote. A bit of a hypocrite? she repeated. Oh,
no--the most sincere of men, the truest (here he was), the best; but,
looking down, she thought, he is absorbed in himself, he is tyrannical,
he is unjust; and kept looking down, purposely, for only so could she keep
steady, staying with the Ramsays. Directly one looked up and saw them,
what she called "being in love" flooded them. They became part of that
unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen
through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through
them. And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr
Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs Ramsay sitting with James in
the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being
made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became
curled and whole like a wave which bore one up and threw one down with
it, there, with a dash on the beach.

Mr Bankes expected her to answer. And she was about to say something
criticizing Mrs Ramsay, how she was alarming, too, in her way,
high-handed, or words to that effect, when Mr Bankes made it entirely
unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture. For such it was considering
his age, turned sixty, and his cleanliness and his impersonality, and the
white scientific coat which seemed to clothe him. For him to gaze as Lily
saw him gazing at Mrs Ramsay was a rapture, equivalent, Lily felt, to the
loves of dozens of young men (and perhaps Mrs Ramsay had never excited the
loves of dozens of young men). It was love, she thought, pretending to
move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to
clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their
symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and
become part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The world by all means
should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased
him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him
precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem, so that
he rested in contemplation of it, and felt, as he felt when he had proved
something absolute about the digestive system of plants, that barbarity
was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued.

Such a rapture--for by what other name could one call it?--made Lily
Briscoe forget entirely what she had been about to say. It was nothing of
importance; something about Mrs Ramsay. It paled beside this "rapture,"
this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude; for nothing so
solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised
its burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift, and one would no
more disturb it, while it lasted, than break up the shaft of sunlight,
lying level across the floor.

That people should love like this, that Mr Bankes should feel this for
Mrs Ramsey (she glanced at him musing) was helpful, was exalting. She
wiped one brush after another upon a piece of old rag, menially, on
purpose. She took shelter from the reverence which covered all women; she
felt herself praised. Let him gaze; she would steal a look at her
picture.

She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She
could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been
thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would
have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour
burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly's wing lying
upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks
scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen; never be
hung even, and there was Mr Tansley whispering in her ear, "Women can't
paint, women can't write ..."

She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs Ramsay. She
did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something
critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness.
Looking along the level of Mr Bankes's glance at her, she thought that no
woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could
only seek shelter under the shade which Mr Bankes extended over them both.
Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that
she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the
best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw
there. But why different, and how different? she asked herself, scraping
her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like
clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them,
force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ?
What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a
crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its
twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an
arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course,
Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am
much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She
opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune
of Mrs Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on
one's bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her
beauty was always that--hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it
might be--Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr Carmichael snuffling and
sniffing; Mr Bankes saying, "The vegetable salts are lost." All this she
would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the
window, in pretence that she must go,--it was dawn, she could see the sun
rising,--half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing,
insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole
world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs Ramsay cared not a
fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs Ramsay had
had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to
her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she
lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the
best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs Ramsay
listening; shaded lights and regular breathing.

Oh, but, Lily would say, there was her father; her home; even, had she
dared to say it, her painting. But all this seemed so little, so
virginal, against the other. Yet, as the night wore on, and white lights
parted the curtains, and even now and then some bird chirped in the
garden, gathering a desperate courage she would urge her own exemption
from the universal law; plead for it; she liked to be alone; she liked to
be herself; she was not made for that; and so have to meet a serious stare
from eyes of unparalleled depth, and confront Mrs Ramsay's simple
certainty (and she was childlike now) that her dear Lily, her little
Brisk, was a fool. Then, she remembered, she had laid her head on Mrs
Ramsay's lap and laughed and laughed and laughed, laughed almost
hysterically at the thought of Mrs Ramsay presiding with immutable calm
over destinies which she completely failed to understand. There she sat,
simple, serious. She had recovered her sense of her now--this was the
glove's twisted finger. But into what sanctuary had one penetrated?
Lily Briscoe had looked up at last, and there was Mrs Ramsay, unwitting
entirely what had caused her laughter, still presiding, but now with every
trace of wilfulness abolished, and in its stead, something clear as the
space which the clouds at last uncover--the little space of sky which
sleeps beside the moon.

Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of
beauty, so that all one's perceptions, half way to truth, were tangled in
a golden mesh? or did she lock up within her some secret which certainly
Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all?
Every one could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth as she was. But
if they knew, could they tell one what they knew? Sitting on the floor
with her arms round Mrs Ramsay's knees, close as she could get, smiling
to think that Mrs Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she
imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was,
physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of
kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them
out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly,
never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which
one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming,
like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the
object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling
in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving,
as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge
but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that
could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which
is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay's knee.

Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head against
Mrs Ramsay's knee. And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored up
in Mrs Ramsay's heart. How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one
thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a
bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch
or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air
over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with
their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people.
Mrs Ramsay rose. Lily rose. Mrs Ramsay went. For days there hung about
her, as after a dream some subtle change is felt in the person one has
dreamt of, more vividly than anything she said, the sound of murmuring
and, as she sat in the wicker arm-chair in the drawing-room window she
wore, to Lily's eyes, an august shape; the shape of a dome.

This ray passed level with Mr Bankes's ray straight to Mrs Ramsay sitting
reading there with James at her knee. But now while she still looked,
Mr Bankes had done. He had put on his spectacles. He had stepped back.
He had raised his hand. He had slightly narrowed his clear blue eyes,
when Lily, rousing herself, saw what he was at, and winced like a dog who
sees a hand raised to strike it. She would have snatched her picture off
the easel, but she said to herself, One must. She braced herself to stand
the awful trial of some one looking at her picture. One must, she said,
one must. And if it must be seen, Mr Bankes was less alarming than
another. But that any other eyes should see the residue of her
thirty-three years, the deposit of each day's living mixed with something
more secret than she had ever spoken or shown in the course of all those
days was an agony. At the same time it was immensely exciting.

Nothing could be cooler and quieter. Taking out a pen-knife, Mr Bankes
tapped the canvas with the bone handle. What did she wish to indicate by
the triangular purple shape, "just there"? he asked.

It was Mrs Ramsay reading to James, she said. She knew his objection--
that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt
at likeness, she said. For what reason had she introduced them then? he
asked. Why indeed?--except that if there, in that corner, it was bright,
here, in this, she felt the need of darkness. Simple, obvious,
commonplace, as it was, Mr Bankes was interested. Mother and child
then--objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was
famous for her beauty--might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow
without irreverence.

But the picture was not of them, she said. Or, not in his sense. There
were other senses too in which one might reverence them. By a shadow here
and a light there, for instance. Her tribute took that form if, as she
vaguely supposed, a picture must be a tribute. A mother and child might
be reduced to a shadow without irreverence. A light here required a
shadow there. He considered. He was interested. He took it
scientifically in complete good faith. The truth was that all his
prejudices were on the other side, he explained. The largest picture in
his drawing-room, which painters had praised, and valued at a higher price
than he had given for it, was of the cherry trees in blossom on the banks
of the Kennet. He had spent his honeymoon on the banks of the Kennet, he
said. Lily must come and see that picture, he said. But now--he turned,
with his glasses raised to the scientific examination of her canvas. The
question being one of the relations of masses, of lights and shadows,
which, to be honest, he had never considered before, he would like to have
it explained--what then did she wish to make of it? And he indicated the
scene before them. She looked. She could not show him what she wished to
make of it, could not see it even herself, without a brush in her hand.
She took up once more her old painting position with the dim eyes and the
absent-minded manner, subduing all her impressions as a woman to something
much more general; becoming once more under the power of that vision which
she had seen clearly once and must now grope for among hedges and houses
and mothers and children--her picture. It was a question, she remembered,
how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left. She
might do it by bringing the line of the branch across so; or break the
vacancy in the foreground by an object (James perhaps) so. But the danger
was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be broken. She
stopped; she did not want to bore him; she took the canvas lightly off the
easel.

But it had been seen; it had been taken from her. This man had shared
with her something profoundly intimate. And, thanking Mr Ramsay for it
and Mrs Ramsay for it and the hour and the place, crediting the world with
a power which she had not suspected--that one could walk away down that
long gallery not alone any more but arm in arm with somebody--the
strangest feeling in the world, and the most exhilarating--she nicked
the catch of her paint-box to, more firmly than was necessary, and the
nick seemed to surround in a circle forever the paint-box, the lawn,
Mr Bankes, and that wild villain, Cam, dashing past.


10


For Cam grazed the easel by an inch; she would not stop for Mr Bankes
and Lily Briscoe; though Mr Bankes, who would have liked a daughter of
his own, held out his hand; she would not stop for her father, whom she
grazed also by an inch; nor for her mother, who called "Cam! I want
you a moment!" as she dashed past. She was off like a bird, bullet, or
arrow, impelled by what desire, shot by whom, at what directed, who
could say? What, what? Mrs Ramsay pondered, watching her. It might
be a vision--of a shell, of a wheelbarrow, of a fairy kingdom on the
far side of the hedge; or it might be the glory of speed; no one knew.
But when Mrs Ramsay called "Cam!" a second time, the projectile dropped
in mid career, and Cam came lagging back, pulling a leaf by the way, to
her mother.

What was she dreaming about, Mrs Ramsay wondered, seeing her engrossed,
as she stood there, with some thought of her own, so that she had to
repeat the message twice--ask Mildred if Andrew, Miss Doyle, and Mr
Rayley have come back?--The words seemed to be dropped into a well,
where, if the waters were clear, they were also so extraordinarily
distorting that, even as they descended, one saw them twisting about to
make Heaven knows what pattern on the floor of the child's mind. What
message would Cam give the cook? Mrs Ramsay wondered. And indeed it
was only by waiting patiently, and hearing that there was an old woman in
the kitchen with very red cheeks, drinking soup out of a basin, that
Mrs Ramsay at last prompted that parrot-like instinct which had picked up
Mildred's words quite accurately and could now produce them, if one
waited, in a colourless singsong. Shifting from foot to foot, Cam
repeated the words, "No, they haven't, and I've told Ellen to clear away
tea."

Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley had not come back then. That could only
mean, Mrs Ramsay thought, one thing. She must accept him, or she must
refuse him. This going off after luncheon for a walk, even though
Andrew was with them--what could it mean? except that she had decided,
rightly, Mrs Ramsay thought (and she was very, very fond of Minta), to
accept that good fellow, who might not be brilliant, but then, thought
Mrs Ramsay, realising that James was tugging at her, to make her go on
reading aloud the Fisherman and his Wife, she did in her own heart
infinitely prefer boobies to clever men who wrote dissertations;
Charles Tansley, for instance. Anyhow it must have happened, one way
or the other, by now.

But she read, "Next morning the wife awoke first, and it was just
daybreak, and from her bed she saw the beautiful country lying before
her. Her husband was still stretching himself..."

But how could Minta say now that she would not have him? Not if she
agreed to spend whole afternoons trapesing about the country alone--for
Andrew would be off after his crabs--but possibly Nancy was with them.
She tried to recall the sight of them standing at the hall door after
lunch. There they stood, looking at the sky, wondering about the
weather, and she had said, thinking partly to cover their shyness,
partly to encourage them to be off (for her sympathies were with Paul),

"There isn't a cloud anywhere within miles," at which she could feel
little Charles Tansley, who had followed them out, snigger. But she
did it on purpose. Whether Nancy was there or not, she could not be
certain, looking from one to the other in her mind's eye.

She read on: "Ah, wife," said the man, "why should we be King? I do
not want to be King." "Well," said the wife, "if you won't be King, I
will; go to the Flounder, for I will be King."

"Come in or go out, Cam," she said, knowing that Cam was attracted only
by the word "Flounder" and that in a moment she would fidget and fight
with James as usual. Cam shot off. Mrs Ramsay went on reading,
relieved, for she and James shared the same tastes and were comfortable
together.

"And when he came to the sea, it was quite dark grey, and the water heaved
up from below, and smelt putrid. Then he went and stood by it and said,


'Flounder, flounder, in the sea,
Come, I pray thee, here to me;
For my wife, good Ilsabil,
Wills not as I'd have her will.'


'Well, what does she want then?' said the Flounder." And where were
they now? Mrs Ramsay wondered, reading and thinking, quite easily,
both at the same time; for the story of the Fisherman and his Wife was
like the bass gently accompanying a tune, which now and then ran up
unexpectedly into the melody. And when should she be told? If nothing
happened, she would have to speak seriously to Minta. For she could
not go trapesing about all over the country, even if Nancy were with
them (she tried again, unsuccessfully, to visualize their backs going
down the path, and to count them). She was responsible to Minta's
parents--the Owl and the Poker. Her nicknames for them shot into her
mind as she read. The Owl and the Poker--yes, they would be annoyed if
they heard--and they were certain to hear--that Minta, staying with the
Ramsays, had been seen etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. "He wore a wig in
the House of Commons and she ably assisted him at the head of the
stairs," she repeated, fishing them up out of her mind by a phrase
which, coming back from some party, she had made to amuse her husband.
Dear, dear, Mrs Ramsay said to herself, how did they produce this
incongruous daughter? this tomboy Minta, with a hole in her stocking?
How did she exist in that portentous atmosphere where the maid was
always removing in a dust-pan the sand that the parrot had scattered,
and conversation was almost entirely reduced to the exploits--interesting
perhaps, but limited after all--of that bird? Naturally, one had asked
her to lunch, tea, dinner, finally to stay with them up at Finlay, which
had resulted in some friction with the Owl, her mother, and more calling,
and more conversation, and more sand, and really at the end of it, she had
told enough lies about parrots to last her a lifetime (so she had said
to her husband that night, coming back from the party). However,
Minta came...Yes, she came, Mrs Ramsay thought, suspecting some thorn
in the tangle of this thought; and disengaging it found it to be this: a
woman had once accused her of "robbing her of her daughter's affections";
something Mrs Doyle had said made her remember that charge again. Wishing
to dominate, wishing to interfere, making people do what she wished--that
was the charge against her, and she thought it most unjust. How could
she help being "like that" to look at? No one could accuse her of
taking pains to impress. She was often ashamed of her own shabbiness.
Nor was she domineering, nor was she tyrannical. It was more true
about hospitals and drains and the dairy. About things like that she
did feel passionately, and would, if she had the chance, have liked to
take people by the scruff of their necks and make them see. No
hospital on the whole island. It was a disgrace. Milk delivered at
your door in London positively brown with dirt. It should be made
illegal. A model dairy and a hospital up here--those two things she
would have liked to do, herself. But how? With all these children?
When they were older, then perhaps she would have time; when they were
all at school.

Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older! or Cam either.
These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were,
demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into
long-legged monsters. Nothing made up up for the loss. When she read
just now to James, "and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums
and trumpets," and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow
up and lose all that? He was the most gifted, the most sensitive of
her children. But all, she thought, were full of promise. Prue, a
perfect angel with the others, and sometimes now, at night especially,
she took one's breath away with her beauty. Andrew--even her husband
admitted that his gift for mathematics was extraordinary. And Nancy
and Roger, they were both wild creatures now, scampering about over the
country all day long. As for Rose, her mouth was too big, but she had
a wonderful gift with her hands. If they had charades, Rose made the
dresses; made everything; liked best arranging tables, flowers,
anything. She did not like it that Jasper should shoot birds; but it
was only a stage; they all went through stages. Why, she asked,
pressing her chin on James's head, should they grow up so fast? Why
should they go to school? She would have liked always to have had a
baby. She was happiest carrying one in her arms. Then people might
say she was tyrannical, domineering, masterful, if they chose; she did
not mind. And, touching his hair with her lips, she thought, he will
never be so happy again, but stopped herself, remembering how it
angered her husband that she should say that. Still, it was true. They
were happier now than they would ever be again. A tenpenny tea set
made Cam happy for days. She heard them stamping and crowing on the
floor above her head the moment they awoke. They came bustling along
the passage. Then the door sprang open and in they came, fresh as
roses, staring, wide awake, as if this coming into the dining-room
after breakfast, which they did every day of their lives, was a
positive event to them, and so on, with one thing after another, all
day long, until she went up to say good-night to them, and found them
netted in their cots like birds among cherries and raspberries, still
making up stories about some little bit of rubbish--something they had
heard, something they had picked up in the garden. They all had their
little treasures... And so she went down and said to her husband, Why
must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again.
And he was angry. Why take such a gloomy view of life? he said. It
is not sensible. For it was odd; and she believed it to be true; that
with all his gloom and desperation he was happier, more hopeful on the
whole, than she was. Less exposed to human worries--perhaps that was
it. He had always his work to fall back on. Not that she herself was
"pessimistic," as he accused her of being. Only she thought life--and
a little strip of time presented itself to her eyes--her fifty
years. There it was before her--life. Life, she thought--but she did
not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear
sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared
neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction
went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on
another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was
of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were,
she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part,
oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called
life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a
chance. There were eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There
was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to
all these children, You shall go through it all. To eight people she
had said relentlessly that (and the bill for the greenhouse would be
fifty pounds). For that reason, knowing what was before them--love and
ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places--she had often the
feeling, Why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to
herself, brandishing her sword at life, Nonsense. They will be
perfectly happy. And here she was, she reflected, feeling life rather
sinister again, making Minta marry Paul Rayley; because whatever she
might feel about her own transaction, she had had experiences which
need not happen to every one (she did not name them to herself); she
was driven on, too quickly she knew, almost as if it were an escape for
her too, to say that people must marry; people must have children.

Was she wrong in this, she asked herself, reviewing her conduct for the
past week or two, and wondering if she had indeed put any pressure upon
Minta, who was only twenty-four, to make up her mind. She was uneasy.
Had she not laughed about it? Was she not forgetting again how
strongly she influenced people? Marriage needed--oh, all sorts of
qualities (the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds); one--she
need not name it--that was essential; the thing she had with her
husband. Had they that?

"Then he put on his trousers and ran away like a madman," she read.
"But outside a great storm was raging and blowing so hard that he could
scarcely keep his feet; houses and trees toppled over, the mountains
trembled, rocks rolled into the sea, the sky was pitch black, and it
thundered and lightened, and the sea came in with black waves as high
as church towers and mountains, and all with white foam at the top."

She turned the page; there were only a few lines more, so that she
would finish the story, though it was past bed-time. It was getting
late. The light in the garden told her that; and the whitening of the
flowers and something grey in the leaves conspired together, to rouse
in her a feeling of anxiety. What it was about she could not think at
first. Then she remembered; Paul and Minta and Andrew had not come
back. She summoned before her again the little group on the terrace in
front of the hall door, standing looking up into the sky. Andrew had
his net and basket. That meant he was going to catch crabs and things.
That meant he would climb out on to a rock; he would be cut off. Or
coming back single file on one of those little paths above the cliff
one of them might slip. He would roll and then crash. It was growing
quite dark.

But she did not let her voice change in the least as she finished the
story, and added, shutting the book, and speaking the last words as if
she had made them up herself, looking into James's eyes: "And there
they are living still at this very time."

"And that's the end," she said, and she saw in his eyes, as the
interest of the story died away in them, something else take its place;
something wondering, pale, like the reflection of a light, which at
once made him gaze and marvel. Turning, she looked across the bay, and
there, sure enough, coming regularly across the waves first two quick
strokes and then one long steady stroke, was the light of the
Lighthouse. It had been lit.

In a moment he would ask her, "Are we going to the Lighthouse?" And
she would have to say, "No: not tomorrow; your father says not."
Happily, Mildred came in to fetch them, and the bustle distracted them.
But he kept looking back over his shoulder as Mildred carried him out,
and she was certain that he was thinking, we are not going to the
Lighthouse tomorrow; and she thought, he will remember that all his
life.

11

No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out--
a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress--
children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one
said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For
now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by
herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of--to think;
well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and
the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk,
with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of
darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to
knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self
having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When
life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.
And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources,
she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must
feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish.
Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep;
but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us
by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places
she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the
thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of darkness could
go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought,
exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most
welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform
of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience
(she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a
wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry,
the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph
over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this
eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the
Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was
her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one
could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things
one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often
she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her
work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at--that light,
for example. And it would lift up on it some little phrase or other
which had been lying in her mind like that--"Children don't forget,
children don't forget"--which she would repeat and begin adding to it,
It will end, it will end, she said. It will come, it will come, when
suddenly she added, We are in the hands of the Lord.

But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had
said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did
not mean. She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and
it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as
she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of
existence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the
light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was
beautiful like that light. It was odd, she thought, how if one was
alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt
they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a
sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that
long steady light) as for oneself. There rose, and she looked and
looked with her needles suspended, there curled up off the floor of the
mind, rose from the lake of one's being, a mist, a bride to meet her
lover.

What brought her to say that: "We are in the hands of the Lord?" she
wondered. The insincerity slipping in among the truths roused her,
annoyed her. She returned to her knitting again. How could any Lord
have made this world? she asked. With her mind she had always seized
the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death,
the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she
knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that. She knitted with firm
composure, slightly pursing her lips and, without being aware of it, so
stiffened and composed the lines of her face in a habit of sternness
that when her husband passed, though he was chuckling at the thought
that Hume, the philosopher, grown enormously fat, had stuck in a bog,
he could not help noting, as he passed, the sternness at the heart of
her beauty. It saddened him, and her remoteness pained him, and he
felt, as he passed, that he could not protect her, and, when he reached
the hedge, he was sad. He could do nothing to help her. He must stand
by and watch her. Indeed, the infernal truth was, he made things worse
for her. He was irritable--he was touchy. He had lost his temper over
the Lighthouse. He looked into the hedge, into its intricacy, its
darkness.

Always, Mrs Ramsay felt, one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly
by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight. She
listened, but it was all very still; cricket was over; the children
were in their baths; there was only the sound of the sea. She stopped
knitting; she held the long reddish-brown stocking dangling in her
hands a moment. She saw the light again. With some irony in her
interrogation, for when one woke at all, one's relations changed, she
looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so
much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she
woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the
floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination,
hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed
vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she
had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it
silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and
the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which
curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in
her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and
she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

He turned and saw her. Ah! She was lovely, lovelier now than ever he
thought. But he could not speak to her. He could not interrupt her.
He wanted urgently to speak to her now that James was gone and she was
alone at last. But he resolved, no; he would not interrupt her. She
was aloof from him now in her beauty, in her sadness. He would let her
be, and he passed her without a word, though it hurt him that she
should look so distant, and he could not reach her, he could do nothing
to help her. And again he would have passed her without a word had she
not, at that very moment, given him of her own free will what she knew
he would never ask, and called to him and taken the green shawl off the
picture frame, and gone to him. For he wished, she knew, to protect
her.

12

She folded the green shawl about her shoulders. She took his arm. His
beauty was so great, she said, beginning to speak of Kennedy the
gardener, at once he was so awfully handsome, that she couldn't dismiss
him. There was a ladder against the greenhouse, and little lumps of
putty stuck about, for they were beginning to mend the greenhouse.
Yes, but as she strolled along with her husband, she felt that that
particular source of worry had been placed. She had it on the tip of
her tongue to say, as they strolled, "It'll cost fifty pounds," but
instead, for her heart failed her about money, she talked about Jasper
shooting birds, and he said, at once, soothing her instantly, that it
was natural in a boy, and he trusted he would find better ways of
amusing himself before long. Her husband was so sensible, so just.
And so she said, "Yes; all children go through stages," and began
considering the dahlias in the big bed, and wondering what about next
year's flowers, and had he heard the children's nickname for Charles
Tansley, she asked. The atheist, they called him, the little atheist.
"He's not a polished specimen," said Mr Ramsay. "Far from it," said
Mrs Ramsay.

She supposed it was all right leaving him to his own devices, Mrs
Ramsay said, wondering whether it was any use sending down bulbs; did
they plant them? "Oh, he has his dissertation to write," said Mr
Ramsay. She knew all about THAT, said Mrs Ramsay. He talked of
nothing else. It was about the influence of somebody upon something.
"Well, it's all he has to count on," said Mr Ramsay. "Pray Heaven he
won't fall in love with Prue," said Mrs Ramsay. He'd disinherit her if
she married him, said Mr Ramsay. He did not look at the flowers,
which his wife was considering, but at a spot about a foot or
so above them. There was no harm in him, he added, and was just
about to say that anyhow he was the only young man in England who
admired his--when he choked it back. He would not bother her again
about his books. These flowers seemed creditable, Mr Ramsay said,
lowering his gaze and noticing something red, something brown. Yes, but
then these she had put in with her own hands, said Mrs Ramsay. The
question was, what happened if she sent bulbs down; did Kennedy plant
them? It was his incurable laziness; she added, moving on. If she
stood over him all day long with a spade in her hand, he did sometimes
do a stroke of work. So they strolled along, towards the red-hot
pokers. "You're teaching your daughters to exaggerate," said Mr
Ramsay, reproving her. Her Aunt Camilla was far worse than she was, Mrs
Ramsay remarked. "Nobody ever held up your Aunt Camilla as a model of
virtue that I'm aware of," said Mr Ramsay. "She was the most beautiful
woman I ever saw," said Mrs Ramsay. "Somebody else was that," said Mr
Ramsay. Prue was going to be far more beautiful than she was, said Mrs
Ramsay. He saw no trace of it, said Mr Ramsay. "Well, then, look
tonight," said Mrs Ramsay. They paused. He wished Andrew could be
induced to work harder. He would lose every chance of a scholarship if
he didn't. "Oh, scholarships!" she said. Mr Ramsay thought her foolish
for saying that, about a serious thing, like a scholarship. He should
be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be
just as proud of him if he didn't, she answered. They disagreed always
about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in
scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.
Suddenly she remembered those little paths on the edge of the cliffs.

Wasn't it late? she asked. They hadn't come home yet. He flicked his
watch carelessly open. But it was only just past seven. He held his
watch open for a moment, deciding that he would tell her what he had
felt on the terrace. To begin with, it was not reasonable to be so
nervous. Andrew could look after himself. Then, he wanted to tell her
that when he was walking on the terrace just now--here he became
uncomfortable, as if he were breaking into that solitude, that
aloofness, that remoteness of hers. But she pressed him. What had
he wanted to tell her, she asked, thinking it was about going to the
Lighthouse; that he was sorry he had said "Damn you." But no. He did
not like to see her look so sad, he said. Only wool gathering, she
protested, flushing a little. They both felt uncomfortable, as if they
did not know whether to go on or go back. She had been reading fairy
tales to James, she said. No, they could not share that; they could
not say that.

They had reached the gap between the two clumps of red-hot pokers, and
there was the Lighthouse again, but she would not let herself look at
it. Had she known that he was looking at her, she thought, she would
not have let herself sit there, thinking. She disliked anything that
reminded her that she had been seen sitting thinking. So she looked
over her shoulder, at the town. The lights were rippling and running
as if they were drops of silver water held firm in a wind. And all the
poverty, all the suffering had turned to that, Mrs Ramsay thought. The
lights of the town and of the harbour and of the boats seemed like a
phantom net floating there to mark something which had sunk. Well, if
he could not share her thoughts, Mr Ramsay said to himself, he would be
off, then, on his own. He wanted to go on thinking, telling himself the
story how Hume was stuck in a bog; he wanted to laugh. But first it
was nonsense to be anxious about Andrew. When he was Andrew's age he
used to walk about the country all day long, with nothing but a biscuit
in his pocket and nobody bothered about him, or thought that he had
fallen over a cliff. He said aloud he thought he would be off for a
day's walk if the weather held. He had had about enough of Bankes and
of Carmichael. He would like a little solitude. Yes, she said. It
annoyed him that she did not protest. She knew that he would never do
it. He was too old now to walk all day long with a biscuit in his
pocket. She worried about the boys, but not about him. Years ago,
before he had married, he thought, looking across the bay, as they
stood between the clumps of red-hot pokers, he had walked all day. He
had made a meal off bread and cheese in a public house. He had worked
ten hours at a stretch; an old woman just popped her head in now and
again and saw to the fire. That was the country he liked best, over
there; those sandhills dwindling away into darkness. One could walk
all day without meeting a soul. There was not a house scarcely, not a
single village for miles on end. One could worry things out alone.
There were little sandy beaches where no one had been since the
beginning of time. The seals sat up and looked at you. It sometimes
seemed to him that in a little house out there, alone--he broke off,
sighing. He had no right. The father of eight children--he reminded
himself. And he would have been a beast and a cur to wish a single
thing altered. Andrew would be a better man than he had been. Prue
would be a beauty, her mother said. They would stem the flood a bit.
That was a good bit of work on the whole--his eight children. They
showed he did not damn the poor little universe entirely, for on an
evening like this, he thought, looking at the land dwindling away, the
little island seemed pathetically small, half swallowed up in the sea.

"Poor little place," he murmured with a sigh.

She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed
that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than
usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had
said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.

It annoyed her, this phrase-making, and she said to him, in a matter-
of-fact way, that it was a perfectly lovely evening. And what was he
groaning about, she asked, half laughing, half complaining, for she
guessed what he was thinking--he would have written better books if he
had not married.

He was not complaining, he said. She knew that he did not complain.
She knew that he had nothing whatever to complain of. And he seized
her hand and raised it to his lips and kissed it with an intensity that
brought the tears to her eyes, and quickly he dropped it.

They turned away from the view and began to walk up the path where the
silver-gre