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22.3: To the Lighthouse

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    Virginia Woolf

    To the Lighthouse is also available as a PDF Document.

    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,[1] 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.[2]

    “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,[3] 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.[4]

    “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,”[5] who had buried his light temporarily at Bristol or Bedford,[6] but

    was bound to be heard of later when his Prolegomena[7], 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;[8] 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,[9] 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[10]; 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.[11]

    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,[12] 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[13]; 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.[14] 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[15] 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[16] 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[17]; 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[18] 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[19]–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?”[20] 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 ephemeral 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[21]

    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[22] 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,”[23] 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[24] 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.[25]

    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.[26]

    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,[27] 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[28] 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[29] 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[30] 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.[31] 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 Vesuvius[32] in 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.”[33]

    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!”[34]

    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.[35]

    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”[36] … “The happier Helen of our days”[37] … disgraceful to say, she

    had never read them. And Croom on the Mind[38] and Bates on the Savage

    Customs of Polynesia[39] (“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 Cashmere 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

    recollection–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?[40] 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.”[41] 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.[42] Yes, he would

    catch the 10:30 at Euston.[43]

    “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,[44]

    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.[45]

    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[46]–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[47]; 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 rend the 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,”[48] 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.[49]

    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[50] 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 futile, 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,[51] 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 climbed 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,[52] 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, negligible. 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?[53]

    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,[54] 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[55] 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[56] 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,[57] 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[58]–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[59]. 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.[60]

    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[61] 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.[62] 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).[63] 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[64]. 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…”[65]

    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.[66] 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[67], 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.[68] 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 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.[69] 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.”[70]

    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.[71] 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,[72]

    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.[73] “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[74], 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[75]; 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-green spear-like plants grew, arm in arm. His arm was almost

    like a young man’s arm, Mrs. Ramsay thought, thin and hard, and she

    thought with delight how strong he still was, though he was over sixty,

    and how untamed and optimistic, and how strange it was that being

    convinced, as he was, of all sorts of horrors, seemed not to depress

    him, but to cheer him. Was it not odd, she reflected? Indeed he

    seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind,

    deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary

    things, with an eye like an eagle’s. His understanding often

    astonished her. But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the

    view? No. Did he even notice his own daughter’s beauty, or whether

    there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at table

    with them like a person in a dream. And his habit of talking aloud, or

    saying poetry aloud, was growing on him, she was afraid; for sometimes

    it was awkward–

    Best and brightest come away![76]

    poor Miss Giddings, when he shouted that at her, almost jumped out of

    her skin. But then, Mrs. Ramsay, though instantly taking his side

    against all the silly Giddingses in the world, then, she thought,

    intimating by a little pressure on his arm that he walked up hill too

    fast for her, and she must stop for a moment to see whether those were

    fresh molehills on the bank, then, she thought, stooping down to look,

    a great mind like his must be different in every way from ours. All

    the great men she had ever known, she thought, deciding that a rabbit

    must have got in, were like that, and it was good for young men (though

    the atmosphere of lecture-rooms was stuffy and depressing to her beyond

    endurance almost) simply to hear him, simply to look at him. But

    without shooting rabbits, how was one to keep them down? she wondered.

    It might be a rabbit; it might be a mole. Some creature anyhow was

    ruining her Evening Primroses. And looking up, she saw above the thin

    trees the first pulse of the full-throbbing star, and wanted to make

    her husband look at it; for the sight gave her such keen pleasure. But

    she stopped herself. He never looked at things. If he did, all he

    would say would be, Poor little world, with one of his sighs.

    At that moment, he said, “Very fine,” to please her, and pretended to

    admire the flowers. But she knew quite well that he did not admire

    them, or even realise that they were there. It was only to please

    her. Ah, but was that not Lily Briscoe strolling along with William

    Bankes? She focussed her short-sighted eyes upon the backs of a

    retreating couple. Yes, indeed it was. Did that not mean that they

    would marry? Yes, it must! What an admirable idea! They must marry!

    13

    He had been to Amsterdam, Mr. Bankes was saying as he strolled across

    the lawn with Lily Briscoe. He had seen the Rembrandts.[77] He had been to

    Madrid. Unfortunately, it was Good Friday and the Prado[78] was shut. He

    had been to Rome. Had Miss Briscoe never been to Rome? Oh, she

    should–It would be a wonderful experience for her–the Sistine

    Chapel; Michael Angelo;[79] and Padua, with its Giottos[80]. His wife had been

    in bad health for many years, so that their sight-seeing had been on a

    modest scale.

    She had been to Brussels; she had been to Paris but only for a flying

    visit to see an aunt who was ill. She had been to Dresden; there were

    masses of pictures she had not seen; however, Lily Briscoe reflected,

    perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one

    hopelessly discontented with one’s own work. Mr. Bankes thought one

    could carry that point of view too far. We can’t all be Titians[81] and we

    can’t all be Darwins[82], he said; at the same time he doubted whether you

    could have your Darwin and your Titian if it weren’t for humble people

    like ourselves. Lily would have liked to pay him a compliment; you’re

    not humble, Mr. Bankes, she would have liked to have said. But he did

    not want compliments (most men do, she thought), and she was a little

    ashamed of her impulse and said nothing while he remarked that perhaps

    what he was saying did not apply to pictures. Anyhow, said Lily,

    tossing off her little insincerity, she would always go on painting,

    because it interested her. Yes, said Mr. Bankes, he was sure she would,

    and, as they reached the end of the lawn he was asking her whether she

    had difficulty in finding subjects in London when they turned and saw

    the Ramsays. So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman

    looking at a girl throwing a ball. That is what Mrs. Ramsay tried to

    tell me the other night, she thought. For she was wearing a green

    shawl, and they were standing close together watching Prue and

    Jasper throwing catches. And suddenly the meaning which, for no

    reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube[83] or

    ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical,

    making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk

    standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then,

    after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real

    figures sank down again, and they became, as they met them, Mr. and Mrs.

    Ramsay watching the children throwing catches. But still for a moment,

    though Mrs. Ramsay greeted them with her usual smile (oh, she’s thinking

    we’re going to get married, Lily thought) and said, “I have triumphed

    tonight,” meaning that for once Mr. Bankes had agreed to dine with them

    and not run off to his own lodging where his man cooked vegetables

    properly; still, for one moment, there was a sense of things having

    been blown apart, of space, of irresponsibility as the ball soared

    high, and they followed it and lost it and saw the one star and the

    draped branches. In the failing light they all looked sharp-edged and

    ethereal and divided by great distances. Then, darting backwards over

    the vast space (for it seemed as if solidity had vanished altogether),

    Prue ran full tilt into them and caught the ball brilliantly high up in

    her left hand, and her mother said, “Haven’t they come back yet?”

    whereupon the spell was broken. Mr. Ramsay felt free now to laugh out

    loud at the thought that Hume had stuck in a bog and an old woman

    rescued him on condition he said the Lord’s Prayer,[84] and chuckling to

    himself he strolled off to his study. Mrs. Ramsay, bringing Prue back

    into throwing catches again, from which she had escaped, asked,

    “Did Nancy go with them?”

    14

    (Certainly, Nancy had gone with them, since Minta Doyle had asked it

    with her dumb look, holding out her hand, as Nancy made off, after

    lunch, to her attic, to escape the horror of family life. She

    supposed she must go then. She did not want to go. She did not want to

    be drawn into it all. For as they walked along the road to the cliff

    Minta kept on taking her hand. Then she would let it go. Then she

    would take it again. What was it she wanted? Nancy asked herself.

    There was something, of course, that people wanted; for when Minta took

    her hand and held it, Nancy, reluctantly, saw the whole world spread

    out beneath her, as if it were Constantinople[85] seen through a mist, and

    then, however heavy-eyed one might be, one must needs ask, “Is that

    Santa Sofia[86]?” “Is that the Golden Horn[87]?” So Nancy asked, when Minta

    took her hand. “What is it that she wants? Is it that?” And what was

    that? Here and there emerged from the mist (as Nancy looked down upon

    life spread beneath her) a pinnacle, a dome; prominent things, without

    names. But when Minta dropped her hand, as she did when they ran down

    the hillside, all that, the dome, the pinnacle, whatever it was that

    had protruded through the mist, sank down into it and disappeared.

    Minta, Andrew observed, was rather a good walker. She wore more

    sensible clothes that most women. She wore very short skirts and black

    knickerbockers. She would jump straight into a stream and flounder

    across. He liked her rashness, but he saw that it would not do–she

    would kill herself in some idiotic way one of these days. She seemed

    to be afraid of nothing–except bulls. At the mere sight of a bull in

    a field she would throw up her arms and fly screaming, which was the

    very thing to enrage a bull of course. But she did not mind owning up

    to it in the least; one must admit that. She knew she was an awful

    coward about bulls, she said. She thought she must have been tossed in

    her perambulator[88] when she was a baby. She didn’t seem to mind what she

    said or did. Suddenly now she pitched down on the edge of the cliff

    and began to sing some song about

    Damn your eyes, damn your eyes.

    They all had to join in and sing the chorus, and shout out together:

    Damn your eyes, damn your eyes,[89]

    but it would be fatal to let the tide come in and cover up all the good

    hunting-grounds before they got on to the beach.

    “Fatal,” Paul agreed, springing up, and as they went slithering down,

    he kept quoting the guide-book about “these islands being justly

    celebrated for their park-like prospects and the extent and variety of

    their marine curiosities.” But it would not do altogether, this

    shouting and damning your eyes, Andrew felt, picking his way down the

    cliff, this clapping him on the back, and calling him “old fellow” and

    all that; it would not altogether do. It was the worst of taking women

    on walks. Once on the beach they separated, he going out on to the

    Pope’s Nose[90], taking his shoes off, and rolling his socks in them and

    letting that couple look after themselves; Nancy waded out to her own

    rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after

    themselves. She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubber-like

    sea anemones, who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the

    rock. Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows

    into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by

    holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and

    desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent

    creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream

    down. Out on the pale criss-crossed sand, high-stepping, fringed,

    gauntleted, stalked some fantastic leviathan (she was still enlarging

    the pool), and slipped into the vast fissures of the mountain side.

    And then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest

    on that wavering line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks which the

    smoke of steamers made waver on the horizon, she became with all that

    power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing, hypnotised, and

    the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had

    diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she was bound

    hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which

    reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in

    the world, for ever, to nothingness. So listening to the waves,

    crouching over the pool, she brooded.

    And Andrew shouted that the sea was coming in, so she leapt splashing

    through the shallow waves on to the shore and ran up the beach and was

    carried by her own impetuosity and her desire for rapid movement right

    behind a rock and there–oh, heavens! in each other’s arms, were Paul

    and Minta kissing probably. She was outraged, indignant. She and

    Andrew put on their shoes and stockings in dead silence without saying

    a thing about it. Indeed they were rather sharp with each other. She

    might have called him when she saw the crayfish or whatever it was,

    Andrew grumbled. However, they both felt, it’s not our fault. They

    had not wanted this horrid nuisance to happen. All the same it

    irritated Andrew that Nancy should be a woman, and Nancy that Andrew

    should be a man, and they tied their shoes very neatly and drew the

    bows rather tight.

    It was not until they had climbed right up on to the top of the cliff

    again that Minta cried out that she had lost her grandmother’s brooch–

    her grandmother’s brooch, the sole ornament she possessed–a weeping

    willow, it was (they must remember it) set in pearls. They must have

    seen it, she said, with the tears running down her cheeks, the

    brooch which her grandmother had fastened her cap with till the

    last day of her life. Now she had lost it. She would rather have

    lost anything than that! She would go back and look for it. They all

    went back. They poked and peered and looked. They kept their heads

    very low, and said things shortly and gruffly. Paul Rayley searched

    like a madman all about the rock where they had been sitting. All this

    pother about a brooch really didn’t do at all, Andrew thought, as Paul

    told him to make a “thorough search between this point and that.” The

    tide was coming in fast. The sea would cover the place where they had

    sat in a minute. There was not a ghost of a chance of their finding it

    now. “We shall be cut off!” Minta shrieked, suddenly terrified. As if

    there were any danger of that! It was the same as the bulls all over

    again–she had no control over her emotions, Andrew thought. Women

    hadn’t. The wretched Paul had to pacify her. The men (Andrew and Paul

    at once became manly, and different from usual) took counsel briefly

    and decided that they would plant Rayley’s stick where they had sat and

    come back at low tide again. There was nothing more that could be done

    now. If the brooch was there, it would still be there in the morning,

    they assured her, but Minta still sobbed, all the way up to the top of

    the cliff. It was her grandmother’s brooch; she would rather have lost

    anything but that, and yet Nancy felt, it might be true that she minded

    losing her brooch, but she wasn’t crying only for that. She was crying

    for something else. We might all sit down and cry, she felt. But she

    did not know what for.

    They drew ahead together, Paul and Minta, and he comforted her, and

    said how famous he was for finding things. Once when he was a little

    boy he had found a gold watch. He would get up at daybreak and he was

    positive he would find it. It seemed to him that it would be

    almost dark, and he would be alone on the beach, and somehow it would

    be rather dangerous. He began telling her, however, that he would

    certainly find it, and she said that she would not hear of his getting

    up at dawn: it was lost: she knew that: she had had a presentiment when

    she put it on that afternoon. And secretly he resolved that he would

    not tell her, but he would slip out of the house at dawn when they were

    all asleep and if he could not find it he would go to Edinburgh[91] and buy

    her another, just like it but more beautiful. He would prove what he

    could do. And as they came out on the hill and saw the lights of the

    town beneath them, the lights coming out suddenly one by one seemed

    like things that were going to happen to him–his marriage, his

    children, his house; and again he thought, as they came out on to the

    high road, which was shaded with high bushes, how they would retreat

    into solitude together, and walk on and on, he always leading her, and

    she pressing close to his side (as she did now). As they turned by the

    cross roads he thought what an appalling experience he had been

    through, and he must tell some one–Mrs. Ramsay of course, for it took

    his breath away to think what he had been and done. It had been far

    and away the worst moment of his life when he asked Minta to marry him.

    He would go straight to Mrs. Ramsay, because he felt somehow that she

    was the person who had made him do it. She had made him think he could

    do anything. Nobody else took him seriously. But she made him believe

    that he could do whatever he wanted. He had felt her eyes on him all

    day today, following him about (though she never said a word) as if she

    were saying, “Yes, you can do it. I believe in you. I expect it of

    you.” She had made him feel all that, and directly they got back (he

    looked for the lights of the house above the bay) he would go to her

    and say, “I’ve done it, Mrs. Ramsay; thanks to you.” And so turning into

    the lane that led to the house he could see lights moving about in the

    upper windows. They must be awfully late then. People were getting

    ready for dinner. The house was all lit up, and the lights after the

    darkness made his eyes feel full, and he said to himself, childishly,

    as he walked up the drive, Lights, lights, lights, and repeated in a

    dazed way, Lights, lights, lights, as they came into the house staring

    about him with his face quite stiff. But, good heavens, he said to

    himself, putting his hand to his tie, I must not make a fool of

    myself.)[92]

    15

    “Yes,” said Prue, in her considering way, answering her mother’s

    question, “I think Nancy did go with them.”

    16

    Well then, Nancy had gone with them, Mrs. Ramsay supposed, wondering, as

    she put down a brush, took up a comb, and said “Come in” to a tap at

    the door (Jasper and Rose came in), whether the fact that Nancy was

    with them made it less likely or more likely that anything would

    happen; it made it less likely, somehow, Mrs. Ramsay felt, very

    irrationally, except that after all holocaust on such a scale was not

    probable. They could not all be drowned. And again she felt alone in

    the presence of her old antagonist, life.

    Jasper and Rose said that Mildred wanted to know whether she should

    wait dinner.

    “Not for the Queen of England,” said Mrs. Ramsay emphatically.

    “Not for the Empress of Mexico,” she added, laughing at Jasper; for he

    shared his mother’s vice: he, too, exaggerated.

    And if Rose liked, she said, while Jasper took the message, she might

    choose which jewels she was to wear. When there are fifteen people

    sitting down to dinner, one cannot keep things waiting for ever. She

    was now beginning to feel annoyed with them for being so late; it was

    inconsiderate of them, and it annoyed her on top of her anxiety about

    them, that they should choose this very night to be out late, when, in

    fact, she wished the dinner to be particularly nice, since William

    Bankes had at last consented to dine with them; and they were having

    Mildred’s masterpiece—Boeuf en Daube.[93] Everything depended upon things

    being served up to the precise moment they were ready. The beef, the

    bayleaf, and the wine–all must be done to a turn. To keep it waiting

    was out of the question. Yet of course tonight, of all nights, out

    they went, and they came in late, and things had to be sent out,

    things had to be kept hot; the Boeuf en Daube would be entirely spoilt.

    Jasper offered her an opal necklace; Rose a gold necklace. Which

    looked best against her black dress? Which did indeed, said Mrs. Ramsay

    absent-mindedly, looking at her neck and shoulders (but avoiding her

    face) in the glass. And then, while the children rummaged among her

    things, she looked out of the window at a sight which always amused

    her–the rooks trying to decide which tree to settle on. Every time,

    they seemed to change their minds and rose up into the air again,

    because, she thought, the old rook, the father rook, old Joseph was her

    name for him, was a bird of a very trying and difficult disposition.

    He was a disreputable old bird, with half his wing feathers missing.

    He was like some seedy old gentleman in a top hat she had seen playing

    the horn in front of a public house.

    “Look!” she said, laughing. They were actually fighting. Joseph and

    Mary[94] were fighting. Anyhow they all went up again, and the air was

    shoved aside by their black wings and cut into exquisite scimitar shapes.

    The movements of the wings beating out, out, out–she could never

    describe it accurately enough to please herself–was one of the

    loveliest of all to her. Look at that, she said to Rose, hoping

    that Rose would see it more clearly than she could. For one’s children

    so often gave one’s own perceptions a little thrust forwards.

    But which was it to be? They had all the trays of her jewel-case

    open. The gold necklace, which was Italian, or the opal necklace,

    which Uncle James had brought her from India; or should she wear her

    amethysts?

    “Choose, dearests, choose,” she said, hoping that they would make

    haste.

    But she let them take their time to choose: she let Rose, particularly,

    take up this and then that, and hold her jewels against the black

    dress, for this little ceremony of choosing jewels, which was gone

    through every night, was what Rose liked best, she knew. She had some

    hidden reason of her own for attaching great importance to this

    choosing what her mother was to wear. What was the reason, Mrs. Ramsay

    wondered, standing still to let her clasp the necklace she had chosen,

    divining, through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite

    speechless feeling that one had for one’s mother at Rose’s age. Like

    all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It

    was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt

    was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was. And Rose

    would grow up; and Rose would suffer, she supposed, with these deep

    feelings, and she said she was ready now, and they would go down, and

    Jasper, because he was the gentleman, should give her his arm, and

    Rose, as she was the lady, should carry her handkerchief (she gave her

    the handkerchief), and what else? oh, yes, it might be cold: a shawl.

    Choose me a shawl, she said, for that would please Rose, who was bound

    to suffer so. “There,” she said, stopping by the window on the

    landing, “there they are again.” Joseph had settled on another tree-

    top. “Don’t you think they mind,” she said to Jasper, “having their

    wings broken?” Why did he want to shoot poor old Joseph and Mary? He

    shuffled a little on the stairs, and felt rebuked, but not seriously,

    for she did not understand the fun of shooting birds; and they did not

    feel; and being his mother she lived away in another division of the

    world, but he rather liked her stories about Mary and Joseph. She made

    him laugh. But how did she know that those were Mary and Joseph? Did

    she think the same birds came to the same trees every night? he asked.

    But here, suddenly, like all grown-up people, she ceased to pay him the

    least attention. She was listening to a clatter in the hall.

    “They’ve come back!” she exclaimed, and at once she felt much more

    annoyed with them than relieved. Then she wondered, had it happened?

    She would go down and they would tell her–but no. They could not tell

    her anything, with all these people about. So she must go down and

    begin dinner and wait. And, like some queen who, finding her people

    gathered in the hall, looks down upon them, and descends among them,

    and acknowledges their tributes silently, and accepts their devotion

    and their prostration before her (Paul did not move a muscle but looked

    straight before him as she passed) she went down, and crossed the hall

    and bowed her head very slightly, as if she accepted what they could

    not say: their tribute to her beauty.

    But she stopped. There was a smell of burning. Could they have let the

    Boeuf en Daube overboil? she wondered, pray heaven not! when the

    great clangour of the gong announced solemnly, authoritatively, that

    all those scattered about, in attics, in bedrooms, on little perches of

    their own, reading, writing, putting the last smooth to their hair, or

    fastening dresses, must leave all that, and the little odds and ends on

    their washing-tables and dressing tables, and the novels on the bed-

    tables, and the diaries which were so private, and assemble in the

    dining-room for dinner.

    17

    But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs. Ramsay, taking her

    place at the head of the table, and looking at all the plates making

    white circles on it. “William, sit by me,” she said. “Lily,” she

    said, wearily, “over there.” They had that–Paul Rayley and Minta

    Doyle–she, only this–an infinitely long table and plates and knives.

    At the far end was her husband, sitting down, all in a heap, frowning.

    What at? She did not know. She did not mind. She could not

    understand how she had ever felt any emotion or affection for him. She

    had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of

    everything, as she helped the soup, as if there was an eddy–there–

    and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of

    it. It’s all come to an end, she thought, while they came in one after

    another, Charles Tansley–“Sit there, please,” she said–Augustus

    Carmichael–and sat down. And meanwhile she waited, passively, for

    some one to answer her, for something to happen. But this is not a

    thing, she thought, ladling out soup, that one says.

    Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy–that was what she was

    thinking, this was what she was doing–ladling out soup–she felt, more

    and more strongly, outside that eddy; or as if a shade had fallen, and,

    robbed of colour, she saw things truly. The room (she looked round it)

    was very shabby. There was no beauty anywhere. She forebore to look at

    Mr. Tansley. Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate.

    And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested

    on her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of

    men, for if she did not do it nobody would do it, and so, giving

    herself a little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old

    familiar pulse began beating, as the watch begins ticking–one, two,

    three, one, two, three. And so on and so on, she repeated, listening

    to it, sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse as one might

    guard a weak flame with a news-paper. And so then, she concluded,

    addressing herself by bending silently in his direction to William

    Bankes–poor man! who had no wife, and no children and dined alone in

    lodgings except for tonight; and in pity for him, life being now strong

    enough to bear her on again, she began all this business, as a sailor

    not without weariness sees the wind fill his sail and yet hardly wants

    to be off again and thinks how, had the ship sunk, he would have

    whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea.

    “Did you find your letters? I told them to put them in the hall for

    you,” she said to William Bankes.

    Lily Briscoe watched her drifting into that strange no-man’s land where

    to follow people is impossible and yet their going inflicts such a

    chill on those who watch them that they always try at least to follow

    them with their eyes as one follows a fading ship until the sails have

    sunk beneath the horizon.

    How old she looks, how worn she looks, Lily thought, and how remote.

    Then when she turned to William Bankes, smiling, it was as if the ship

    had turned and the sun had struck its sails again, and Lily thought

    with some amusement because she was relieved, Why does she pity him?

    For that was the impression she gave, when she told him that his

    letters were in the hall. Poor William Bankes, she seemed to be

    saying, as if her own weariness had been partly pitying people, and the

    life in her, her resolve to live again, had been stirred by pity. And

    it was not true, Lily thought; it was one of those misjudgments of hers

    that seemed to be instinctive and to arise from some need of her own

    rather than of other people’s. He is not in the least pitiable. He has

    his work, Lily said to herself. She remembered, all of a sudden as if

    she had found a treasure, that she had her work. In a flash she saw

    her picture, and thought, Yes, I shall put the tree further in the

    middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space. That’s what I shall do.

    That’s what has been puzzling me. She took up the salt cellar and put

    it down again on a flower pattern in the table-cloth, so as to remind

    herself to move the tree.

    “It’s odd that one scarcely gets anything worth having by post, yet one

    always wants one’s letters,” said Mr. Bankes.

    What damned rot they talk, thought Charles Tansley, laying down his

    spoon precisely in the middle of his plate, which he had swept clean,

    as if, Lily thought (he sat opposite to her with his back to the window

    precisely in the middle of view), he were determined to make sure of

    his meals. Everything about him had that meagre fixity, that bare

    unloveliness. But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was impossible

    to dislike any one if one looked at them. She liked his eyes; they

    were blue, deep set, frightening.

    “Do you write many letters, Mr. Tansley?” asked Mrs. Ramsay, pitying him

    too, Lily supposed; for that was true of Mrs. Ramsay–she pitied men

    always as if they lacked something–women never, as if they had

    something. He wrote to his mother; otherwise he did not suppose he

    wrote one letter a month, said Mr. Tansley, shortly.

    For he was not going to talk the sort of rot these condescended to by

    these silly women. He had been reading in his room, and now he came

    down and it all seemed to him silly, superficial, flimsy. Why did they

    dress? He had come down in his ordinary clothes. He had not got any

    dress clothes. “One never gets anything worth having by post”–that

    was the sort of thing they were always saying. They made men say that

    sort of thing. Yes, it was pretty well true, he thought. They never

    got anything worth having from one year’s end to another. They did

    nothing but talk, talk, talk, eat, eat, eat. It was the women’s fault.

    Women made civilisation impossible with all their “charm,” all their

    silliness.

    “No going to the Lighthouse tomorrow, Mrs. Ramsay,” he said, asserting

    himself. He liked her; he admired her; he still thought of the man in

    the drain-pipe looking up at her; but he felt it necessary to assert

    himself.

    He was really, Lily Briscoe thought, in spite of his eyes, but then

    look at his nose, look at his hands, the most uncharming human being

    she had ever met. Then why did she mind what he said? Women can’t

    write, women can’t paint–what did that matter coming from him, since

    clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and

    that was why he said it? Why did her whole being bow, like corn under

    a wind, and erect itself again from this abasement only with a great

    and rather painful effort? She must make it once more. There’s the

    sprig on the table-cloth; there’s my painting; I must move the tree to

    the middle; that matters–nothing else. Could she not hold fast to

    that, she asked herself, and not lose her temper, and not argue; and if

    she wanted revenge take it by laughing at him?

    “Oh, Mr. Tansley,” she said, “do take me to the Lighthouse with you. I

    should so love it.”

    She was telling lies he could see. She was saying what she did not

    mean to annoy him, for some reason. She was laughing at him. He was in

    his old flannel trousers. He had no others. He felt very rough and

    isolated and lonely. He knew that she was trying to tease him for some

    reason; she didn’t want to go to the Lighthouse with him; she despised

    him: so did Prue Ramsay; so did they all. But he was not going to be

    made a fool of by women, so he turned deliberately in his chair and

    looked out of the window and said, all in a jerk, very rudely, it would

    be too rough for her tomorrow. She would be sick.

    It annoyed him that she should have made him speak like that, with Mrs.

    Ramsay listening. If only he could be alone in his room working, he

    thought, among his books. That was where he felt at his ease. And he

    had never run a penny into debt; he had never cost his father a penny

    since he was fifteen; he had helped them at home out of his savings; he

    was educating his sister. Still, he wished he had known how to answer

    Miss Briscoe properly; he wished it had not come out all in a jerk like

    that. “You’d be sick.” He wished he could think of something to say to

    Mrs. Ramsay, something which would show her that he was not just a dry

    prig. That was what they all thought him. He turned to her. But Mrs.

    Ramsay was talking about people he had never heard of to William

    Bankes.

    “Yes, take it away,” she said briefly, interrupting what she was saying

    to William Bankes to speak to the maid. “It must have been fifteen–

    no, twenty years ago–that I last saw her,” she was saying, turning

    back to him again as if she could not lose a moment of their talk, for

    she was absorbed by what they were saying. So he had actually heard

    from her this evening! And was Carrie still living at Marlow[95], and was

    everything still the same? Oh, she could remember it as if it were

    yesterday–on the river, feeling it as if it were yesterday–going on

    the river, feeling very cold. But if the Mannings made a plan they

    stuck to it. Never should she forget Herbert killing a wasp with a

    teaspoon on the bank! And it was still going on, Mrs. Ramsay mused,

    gliding like a ghost among the chairs and tables of that drawing-room

    on the banks of the Thames where she had been so very, very cold twenty

    years ago; but now she went among them like a ghost; and it fascinated

    her, as if, while she had changed, that particular day, now become very

    still and beautiful, had remained there, all these years. Had Carrie

    written to him herself? she asked.

    “Yes. She says they’re building a new billiard room,” he said. No!

    No! That was out of the question! Building a new billiard room!

    It seemed to her impossible.

    Mr. Bankes could not see that there was anything very odd about it.

    They were very well off now. Should he give her love to Carrie?

    “Oh,” said Mrs. Ramsay with a little start, “No,” she added, reflecting

    that she did not know this Carrie who built a new billiard room. But

    how strange, she repeated, to Mr. Bankes’s amusement, that they should

    be going on there still. For it was extraordinary to think that they

    had been capable of going on living all these years when she had not

    thought of them more than once all that time. How eventful her own

    life had been, during those same years. Yet perhaps Carrie Manning

    had not thought about her, either. The thought was strange and

    distasteful.

    “People soon drift apart,” said Mr. Bankes, feeling, however, some

    satisfaction when he thought that after all he knew both the Mannings

    and the Ramsays. He had not drifted apart he thought, laying down his

    spoon and wiping his clean-shaven lips punctiliously. But perhaps he

    was rather unusual, he thought, in this; he never let himself get into

    a groove. He had friends in all circles… Mrs. Ramsay had to break

    off here to tell the maid something about keeping food hot. That was

    why he preferred dining alone. All those interruptions annoyed him.

    Well, thought William Bankes, preserving a demeanour of exquisite

    courtesy and merely spreading the fingers of his left hand on the

    table-cloth as a mechanic examines a tool beautifully polished and

    ready for use in an interval of leisure, such are the sacrifices one’s

    friends ask of one. It would have hurt her if he had refused to come.

    But it was not worth it for him. Looking at his hand he thought that

    if he had been alone dinner would have been almost over now; he would

    have been free to work. Yes, he thought, it is a terrible waste of

    time. The children were dropping in still. “I wish one of you would

    run up to Roger’s room,” Mrs. Ramsay was saying. How trifling it all

    is, how boring it all is, he thought, compared with the other thing–

    work. Here he sat drumming his fingers on the table-cloth when he

    might have been–he took a flashing bird’s-eye view of his work. What

    a waste of time it all was to be sure! Yet, he thought, she is one of

    my oldest friends. I am by way of being devoted to her. Yet now, at

    this moment her presence meant absolutely nothing to him: her beauty

    meant nothing to him; her sitting with her little boy at the window–

    nothing, nothing. He wished only to be alone and to take up that book.

    He felt uncomfortable; he felt treacherous, that he could sit by her

    side and feel nothing for her. The truth was that he did not enjoy

    family life. It was in this sort of state that one asked oneself, What

    does one live for? Why, one asked oneself, does one take all these

    pains for the human race to go on? Is it so very desirable? Are we

    attractive as a species? Not so very, he thought, looking at those

    rather untidy boys. His favourite, Cam, was in bed, he supposed.

    Foolish questions, vain questions, questions one never asked

    if one was occupied. Is human life this? Is human life that? One

    never had time to think about it. But here he was asking himself that

    sort of question, because Mrs. Ramsay was giving orders to servants, and

    also because it had struck him, thinking how surprised Mrs. Ramsay was

    that Carrie Manning should still exist, that friendships, even the best

    of them, are frail things. One drifts apart. He reproached himself

    again. He was sitting beside Mrs. Ramsay and he had nothing in the

    world to say to her.

    “I’m so sorry,” said Mrs. Ramsay, turning to him at last. He felt rigid

    and barren, like a pair of boots that have been soaked and gone dry so

    that you can hardly force your feet into them. Yet he must force his

    feet into them. He must make himself talk. Unless he were very

    careful, she would find out this treachery of his; that he did not care

    a straw for her, and that would not be at all pleasant, he thought. So

    he bent his head courteously in her direction.

    “How you must detest dining in this bear garden,” she said, making use,

    as she did when she was distracted, of her social manner. So, when

    there is a strife of tongues, at some meeting, the chairman, to obtain

    unity, suggests that every one shall speak in French. Perhaps it is

    bad French; French may not contain the words that express the speaker’s

    thoughts; nevertheless speaking French imposes some order, some

    uniformity. Replying to her in the same language, Mr. Bankes said, “No,

    not at all,” and Mr. Tansley, who had no knowledge of this language,

    even spoke thus in words of one syllable, at once suspected its

    insincerity. They did talk nonsense, he thought, the Ramsays; and he

    pounced on this fresh instance with joy, making a note which, one of

    these days, he would read aloud, to one or two friends. There, in a

    society where one could say what one liked he would sarcastically

    describe “staying with the Ramsays” and what nonsense they talked. It

    was worth while doing it once, he would say; but not again. The women

    bored one so, he would say. Of course Ramsay had dished himself[96] by

    marrying a beautiful woman and having eight children. It would shape

    itself something like that, but now, at this moment, sitting stuck

    there with an empty seat beside him, nothing had shaped itself at all.

    It was all in scraps and fragments. He felt extremely, even

    physically, uncomfortable. He wanted somebody to give him a chance of

    asserting himself. He wanted it so urgently that he fidgeted in his

    chair, looked at this person, then at that person, tried to break into

    their talk, opened his mouth and shut it again. They were talking

    about the fishing industry. Why did no one ask him his opinion? What

    did they know about the fishing industry?

    Lily Briscoe knew all that. Sitting opposite him, could she not see,

    as in an X-ray photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young man’s

    desire to impress himself, lying dark in the mist of his flesh–that

    thin mist which convention had laid over his burning desire to break

    into the conversation? But, she thought, screwing up her Chinese

    eyes, and remembering how he sneered at women, “can’t paint, can’t

    write,” why should I help him to relieve himself?

    There is a code of behaviour, she knew, whose seventh article (it may

    be) says that on occasions of this sort it behoves the woman, whatever

    her own occupation might be, to go to the help of the young man

    opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs,

    of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is

    their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us,

    suppose the Tube[97] were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should

    certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she

    thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there

    smiling.

    “You’re not planning to go to the Lighthouse, are you, Lily,” said Mrs.

    Ramsay. “Remember poor Mr. Langley; he had been round the world dozens

    of times, but he told me he never suffered as he did when my husband

    took him there. Are you a good sailor, Mr. Tansley?” she asked.

    Mr. Tansley raised a hammer: swung it high in air; but realising, as it

    descended, that he could not smite that butterfly with such an

    instrument as this, said only that he had never been sick in his life.

    But in that one sentence lay compact, like gunpowder, that his

    grandfather was a fisherman; his father a chemist; that he had worked

    his way up entirely himself; that he was proud of it; that he was

    Charles Tansley–a fact that nobody there seemed to realise; but one of

    these days every single person would know it. He scowled ahead of him.

    He could almost pity these mild cultivated people, who would be blown

    sky high, like bales of wool and barrels of apples, one of these days

    by the gunpowder that was in him.

    “Will you take me, Mr. Tansley?” said Lily, quickly, kindly, for, of

    course, if Mrs. Ramsay said to her, as in effect she did, “I am

    drowning, my dear, in seas of fire. Unless you apply some balm to the

    anguish of this hour and say something nice to that young man there,

    life will run upon the rocks–indeed I hear the grating and the

    growling at this minute. My nerves are taut as fiddle strings.

    Another touch and they will snap”–when Mrs. Ramsay said all this, as

    the glance in her eyes said it, of course for the hundred and fiftieth

    time Lily Briscoe had to renounce the experiment–what happens if one

    is not nice to that young man there–and be nice.

    Judging the turn in her mood correctly–that she was friendly to him

    now–he was relieved of his egotism, and told her how he had been

    thrown out of a boat when he was a baby; how his father used to fish

    him out with a boat-hook; that was how he had learnt to swim. One of

    his uncles kept the light on some rock or other off the Scottish coast,

    he said. He had been there with him in a storm. This was said loudly

    in a pause. They had to listen to him when he said that he had been

    with his uncle in a lighthouse in a storm. Ah, thought Lily Briscoe,

    as the conversation took this auspicious turn, and she felt Mrs.

    Ramsay’s gratitude (for Mrs. Ramsay was free now to talk for a moment

    herself), ah, she thought, but what haven’t I paid to get it for you?

    She had not been sincere.

    She had done the usual trick–been nice. She would never know him. He

    would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought,

    and the worst (if it had not been for Mr. Bankes) were between men and

    women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere she thought. Then

    her eye caught the salt cellar, which she had placed there to remind

    her, and she remembered that next morning she would move the tree

    further towards the middle, and her spirits rose so high at the thought

    of painting tomorrow that she laughed out loud at what Mr. Tansley was

    saying. Let him talk all night if he liked it.

    “But how long do they leave men on a Lighthouse?” she asked. He told

    her. He was amazingly well informed. And as he was grateful, and as

    he liked her, and as he was beginning to enjoy himself, so now, Mrs.

    Ramsay thought, she could return to that dream land, that unreal but

    fascinating place, the Mannings’ drawing-room at Marlow[98] twenty years

    ago; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no

    future to worry about. She knew what had happened to them, what to

    her. It was like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of

    that story, since it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which

    shot down even from this dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows

    where, was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its

    banks. He said they had built a billiard room–was it possible?

    Would William go on talking about the Mannings? She wanted him to.

    But, no–for some reason he was no longer in the mood. She tried.

    He did not respond. She could not force him. She was disappointed.

    “The children are disgraceful,” she said, sighing. He said something

    about punctuality being one of the minor virtues which we do not

    acquire until later in life.

    “If at all,” said Mrs. Ramsay merely to fill up space, thinking what an

    old maid William was becoming. Conscious of his treachery, conscious

    of her wish to talk about something more intimate, yet out of mood for

    it at present, he felt come over him the disagreeableness of life,

    sitting there, waiting. Perhaps the others were saying something

    interesting? What were they saying?

    That the fishing season was bad; that the men were emigrating. They

    were talking about wages and unemployment. The young man was abusing

    the government. William Bankes, thinking what a relief it was to catch

    on to something of this sort when private life was disagreeable, heard

    him say something about “one of the most scandalous acts of the present

    government.” Lily was listening; Mrs. Ramsay was listening; they were

    all listening. But already bored, Lily felt that something was lacking;

    Mr. Bankes felt that something was lacking. Pulling her shawl round her

    Mrs. Ramsay felt that something was lacking. All of them bending

    themselves to listen thought, “Pray heaven that the inside of my mind

    may not be exposed,” for each thought, “The others are feeling this.

    They are outraged and indignant with the government about the

    fishermen. Whereas, I feel nothing at all.” But perhaps, thought Mr.

    Bankes, as he looked at Mr. Tansley, here is the man. One was always

    waiting for the man. There was always a chance. At any moment the

    leader might arise; the man of genius, in politics as in anything else.

    Probably he will be extremely disagreeable to us old fogies, thought Mr.

    Bankes, doing his best to make allowances, for he knew by some curious

    physical sensation, as of nerves erect in his spine, that he was

    jealous, for himself partly, partly more probably for his work, for his

    point of view, for his science; and therefore he was not entirely open-

    minded or altogether fair, for Mr. Tansley seemed to be saying, You have

    wasted your lives. You are all of you wrong. Poor old fogies, you’re

    hopelessly behind the times. He seemed to be rather cocksure, this

    young man; and his manners were bad. But Mr. Bankes bade himself

    observe, he had courage; he had ability; he was extremely well up in

    the facts. Probably, Mr. Bankes thought, as Tansley abused the

    government, there is a good deal in what he says.

    “Tell me now…” he said. So they argued about politics, and Lily

    looked at the leaf on the table-cloth; and Mrs. Ramsay, leaving the

    argument entirely in the hands of the two men, wondered why she was so

    bored by this talk, and wished, looking at her husband at the other end

    of the table, that he would say something. One word, she said to

    herself. For if he said a thing, it would make all the difference. He

    went to the heart of things. He cared about fishermen and their wages.

    He could not sleep for thinking of them. It was altogether different

    when he spoke; one did not feel then, pray heaven you don’t see how

    little I care, because one did care. Then, realising that it was because

    she admired him so much that she was waiting for him to speak, she

    felt as if somebody had been praising her husband to her and their

    marriage, and she glowed all over without realising that it was

    she herself who had praised him. She looked at him thinking to find

    this in his face; he would be looking magnificent… But not in the

    least! He was screwing his face up, he was scowling and frowning, and

    flushing with anger. What on earth was it about? she wondered. What

    could be the matter? Only that poor old Augustus had asked for

    another plate of soup–that was all. It was unthinkable, it was

    detestable (so he signalled to her across the table) that Augustus

    should be beginning his soup over again. He loathed people eating when

    he had finished. She saw his anger fly like a pack of hounds into his

    eyes, his brow, and she knew that in a moment something violent would

    explode, and then–thank goodness! she saw him clutch himself and clap

    a brake on the wheel, and the whole of his body seemed to emit sparks

    but not words. He sat there scowling. He had said nothing, he would

    have her observe. Let her give him the credit for that! But why

    after all should poor Augustus not ask for another plate of soup? He

    had merely touched Ellen’s arm and said:

    “Ellen, please, another plate of soup,” and then Mr. Ramsay scowled like

    that.

    And why not? Mrs. Ramsay demanded. Surely they could let Augustus have

    his soup if he wanted it. He hated people wallowing in food, Mr. Ramsay

    frowned at her. He hated everything dragging on for hours like this.

    But he had controlled himself, Mr. Ramsay would have her observe,

    disgusting though the sight was. But why show it so plainly, Mrs.

    Ramsay demanded (they looked at each other down the long table sending

    these questions and answers across, each knowing exactly what the other

    felt). Everybody could see, Mrs. Ramsay thought. There was Rose gazing

    at her father, there was Roger gazing at his father; both would be off

    in spasms of laughter in another second, she knew, and so she said

    promptly (indeed it was time):

    “Light the candles,” and they jumped up instantly and went and fumbled

    at the sideboard.

    Why could he never conceal his feelings? Mrs. Ramsay wondered, and she

    wondered if Augustus Carmichael had noticed. Perhaps he had; perhaps

    he had not. She could not help respecting the composure with which he

    sat there, drinking his soup. If he wanted soup, he asked for soup.

    Whether people laughed at him or were angry with him he was the same.

    He did not like her, she knew that; but partly for that very reason she

    respected him, and looking at him, drinking soup, very large and calm

    in the failing light, and monumental, and contemplative, she wondered

    what he did feel then, and why he was always content and dignified; and

    she thought how devoted he was to Andrew, and would call him into his

    room, and Andrew said, “show him things.” And there he would lie all

    day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he

    reminded one of a cat watching birds, and then he clapped his paws

    together when he had found the word, and her husband said, “Poor old

    Augustus–he’s a true poet,” which was high praise from her husband.

    Now eight candles were stood down the table, and after the first stoop

    the flames stood upright and drew with them into visibility the long

    table entire, and in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit. What

    had she done with it, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, for Rose’s arrangement of

    the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell, of the bananas,

    made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of

    Neptune’s[99] banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the

    shoulder of Bacchus[100] (in some picture), among the leopard skins and the

    torches lolloping red and gold… Thus brought up suddenly into the

    light it seemed possessed of great size and depth, was like a world in

    which one could take one’s staff and climb hills, she thought, and go

    down into valleys, and to her pleasure (for it brought them into

    sympathy momentarily) she saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the

    same plate of fruit, plunged in, broke off a bloom there, a tassel

    here, and returned, after feasting, to his hive. That was his way of

    looking, different from hers. But looking together united them.

    Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the

    table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they

    had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night

    was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate

    view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside

    the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection

    in which things waved and vanished, waterily.

    Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really

    happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a

    hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out

    there. Mrs. Ramsay, who had been uneasy, waiting for Paul and Minta to

    come in, and unable, she felt, to settle to things, now felt her

    uneasiness changed to expectation. For now they must come, and Lily

    Briscoe, trying to analyse the cause of the sudden exhilaration,

    compared it with that moment on the tennis lawn, when solidity suddenly

    vanished, and such vast spaces lay between them; and now the same

    effect was got by the many candles in the sparely furnished room, and

    the uncurtained windows, and the bright mask-like look of faces seen by

    candlelight. Some weight was taken off them; anything might happen,

    she felt. They must come now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, looking at the door,

    and at that instant, Minta Doyle, Paul Rayley, and a maid carrying a

    great dish in her hands came in together. They were awfully late; they

    were horribly late, Minta said, as they found their way to different

    ends of the table.

    “I lost my brooch–my grandmother’s brooch,” said Minta with a sound of

    lamentation in her voice, and a suffusion in her large brown eyes,

    looking down, looking up, as she sat by Mr. Ramsay, which roused his

    chivalry so that he bantered her.

    How could she be such a goose, he asked, as to scramble about the rocks

    in jewels?

    She was by way of being terrified of him–he was so fearfully clever,

    and the first night when she had sat by him, and he talked about George

    Eliot, she had been really frightened, for she had left the third

    volume of Middlemarch[101] in the train and she never knew what happened in

    the end; but afterwards she got on perfectly, and made herself out even

    more ignorant than she was, because he liked telling her she was a

    fool. And so tonight, directly he laughed at her, she was not

    frightened. Besides, she knew, directly she came into the room that the

    miracle had happened; she wore her golden haze. Sometimes she had it;

    sometimes not. She never knew why it came or why it went, or if she

    had it until she came into the room and then she knew instantly by the

    way some man looked at her. Yes, tonight she had it, tremendously; she

    knew that by the way Mr. Ramsay told her not to be a fool. She sat

    beside him, smiling.

    It must have happened then, thought Mrs. Ramsay; they are engaged. And

    for a moment she felt what she had never expected to feel again–

    jealousy. For he, her husband, felt it too–Minta’s glow; he liked

    these girls, these golden-reddish girls, with something flying,

    something a little wild and harum-scarum[102] about them, who didn’t

    “scrape their hair off,”[103] weren’t, as he said about poor Lily Briscoe,

    “skimpy”. There was some quality which she herself had not, some

    lustre, some richness, which attracted him, amused him, led him to make

    favourites of girls like Minta. They might cut his hair from him,

    plait him watch-chains, or interrupt him at his work, hailing him (she

    heard them), “Come along, Mr. Ramsay; it’s our turn to beat them now,”

    and out he came to play tennis.

    But indeed she was not jealous, only, now and then, when she made

    herself look in her glass, a little resentful that she had grown old,

    perhaps, by her own fault. (The bill for the greenhouse and all the

    rest of it.) She was grateful to them for laughing at him. (“How many

    pipes have you smoked today, Mr. Ramsay?” and so on), till he seemed a

    young man; a man very attractive to women, not burdened, not weighed

    down with the greatness of his labours and the sorrows of the world and

    his fame or his failure, but again as she had first known him, gaunt

    but gallant; helping her out of a boat, she remembered; with delightful

    ways, like that (she looked at him, and he looked astonishingly young,

    teasing Minta). For herself–“Put it down there,” she said, helping

    the Swiss girl to place gently before her the huge brown pot in which

    was the Boeuf en Daube–for her own part, she liked her boobies[104]. Paul

    must sit by her. She had kept a place for him. Really, she sometimes

    thought she liked the boobies best. They did not bother one with their

    dissertations. How much they missed, after all, these very clever men!

    How dried up they did become, to be sure. There was something, she

    thought as he sat down, very charming about Paul. His manners were

    delightful to her, and his sharp cut nose and his bright blue eyes. He

    was so considerate. Would he tell her–now that they were all talking

    again–what had happened?

    “We went back to look for Minta’s brooch,” he said, sitting down by

    her. “We”–that was enough. She knew from the effort, the rise in his

    voice to surmount a difficult word that it was the first time he had

    said “we.” “We did this, we did that.” They’ll say that all their

    lives, she thought, and an exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice

    rose from the great brown dish as Marthe, with a little flourish, took

    the cover off. The cook had spent three days over that dish. And she

    must take great care, Mrs. Ramsay thought, diving into the soft mass, to

    choose a specially tender piece for William Bankes. And she peered into

    the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and

    yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine, and thought, This will

    celebrate the occasion–a curious sense rising in her, at once freakish

    and tender, of celebrating a festival, as if two emotions were called

    up in her, one profound–for what could be more serious than the love

    of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its

    bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people

    entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with

    mockery, decorated with garlands.

    “It is a triumph,” said Mr. Bankes, laying his knife down for a moment.

    He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly

    cooked. How did she manage these things in the depths of the country?

    he asked her. She was a wonderful woman. All his love, all his

    reverence, had returned; and she knew it.

    “It is a French recipe of my grandmother’s,”[105] said Mrs. Ramsay, speaking

    with a ring of great pleasure in her voice. Of course it was French.

    What passes for cookery in England is an abomination (they agreed). It

    is putting cabbages in water. It is roasting meat till it is like

    leather. It is cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables. “In

    which,” said Mr. Bankes, “all the virtue of the vegetable is contained.”

    And the waste, said Mrs. Ramsay. A whole French family could live on

    what an English cook throws away. Spurred on by her sense that

    William’s affection had come back to her, and that everything was all

    right again, and that her suspense was over, and that now she was free

    both to triumph and to mock, she laughed, she gesticulated, till Lily

    thought, How childlike, how absurd she was, sitting up there with all

    her beauty opened again in her, talking about the skins of vegetables.

    There was something frightening about her. She was irresistible.

    Always she got her own way in the end, Lily thought. Now she had

    brought this off–Paul and Minta, one might suppose, were engaged. Mr.

    Bankes was dining here. She put a spell on them all, by wishing, so

    simply, so directly, and Lily contrasted that abundance with her own

    poverty of spirit, and supposed that it was partly that belief (for her

    face was all lit up–without looking young, she looked radiant) in this

    strange, this terrifying thing, which made Paul Rayley, sitting at her

    side, all of a tremor, yet abstract, absorbed, silent. Mrs. Ramsay,

    Lily felt, as she talked about the skins of vegetables, exalted that,

    worshipped that; held her hands over it to warm them, to protect it,

    and yet, having brought it all about, somehow laughed, led her victims,

    Lily felt, to the altar. It came over her too now–the emotion, the

    vibration, of love. How inconspicuous she felt herself by Paul’s side!

    He, glowing, burning; she, aloof, satirical; he, bound for adventure;

    she, moored to the shore; he, launched, incautious; she solitary,

    left out–and, ready to implore a share, if it were a disaster, in

    his disaster, she said shyly:

    “When did Minta lose her brooch?”

    He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.

    He shook his head. “On the beach,” he said.

    “I’m going to find it,” he said, “I’m getting up early.” This being

    kept secret from Minta, he lowered his voice, and turned his eyes to

    where she sat, laughing, beside Mr. Ramsay.

    Lily wanted to protest violently and outrageously her desire to help

    him, envisaging how in the dawn on the beach she would be the one to

    pounce on the brooch half-hidden by some stone, and thus herself be

    included among the sailors and adventurers. But what did he reply to

    her offer? She actually said with an emotion that she seldom let

    appear, “Let me come with you,” and he laughed. He meant yes or no–

    either perhaps. But it was not his meaning–it was the odd chuckle

    he gave, as if he had said, Throw yourself over the cliff if you like,

    I don’t care. He turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror, its

    cruelty, its unscrupulosity. It scorched her, and Lily, looking at

    Minta, being charming to Mr. Ramsay at the other end of the table,

    flinched for her exposed to these fangs, and was thankful. For at any

    rate, she said to herself, catching sight of the salt cellar on the

    pattern, she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that

    degradation. She was saved from that dilution. She would move the tree

    rather more to the middle.

    Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her,

    especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently

    two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one;

    that’s what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her

    mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I

    tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to

    look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most

    barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile

    like a gem’s (Paul’s was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he

    was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road.[106] Yet, she said to

    herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths

    heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would

    say they wanted nothing but this–love; while the women, judging from

    her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we

    want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this;

    yet it is also beautiful and necessary. Well then, well then? she

    asked, somehow expecting the others to go on with the argument, as if

    in an argument like this one threw one’s own little bolt which fell

    short obviously and left the others to carry it on. So she listened

    again to what they were saying in case they should throw any light upon

    the question of love.

    “Then,” said Mr. Bankes, “there is that liquid the English call coffee.”

    “Oh, coffee!” said Mrs. Ramsay. But it was much rather a question (she

    was thoroughly roused, Lily could see, and talked very emphatically) of

    real butter and clean milk. Speaking with warmth and eloquence, she

    described the iniquity of the English dairy system, and in what state

    milk was delivered at the door, and was about to prove her charges, for

    she had gone into the matter,[107] when all round the table, beginning with

    Andrew in the middle, like a fire leaping from tuft to tuft of furze,

    her children laughed; her husband laughed; she was laughed at, fire-

    encircled, and forced to veil her crest, dismount her batteries, and

    only retaliate by displaying the raillery and ridicule of the table

    to Mr. Bankes as an example of what one suffered if one attacked the

    prejudices of the British Public.

    Purposely, however, for she had it on her mind that Lily, who had

    helped her with Mr. Tansley, was out of things, she exempted her from

    the rest; said “Lily anyhow agrees with me,” and so drew her in, a

    little fluttered, a little startled. (For she was thinking about

    love.) They were both out of things, Mrs. Ramsay had been thinking,

    both Lily and Charles Tansley. Both suffered from the glow of the

    other two. He, it was clear, felt himself utterly in the cold; no

    woman would look at him with Paul Rayley in the room. Poor fellow!

    Still, he had his dissertation, the influence of somebody upon

    something: he could take care of himself. With Lily it was different.

    She faded, under Minta’s glow; became more inconspicuous than ever, in

    her little grey dress with her little puckered face and her little

    Chinese eyes. Everything about her was so small. Yet, thought Mrs.

    Ramsay, comparing her with Minta, as she claimed her help (for Lily

    should bear her out she talked no more about her dairies than her

    husband did about his boots–he would talk by the hour about his boots)

    of the two, Lily at forty will be the better. There was in Lily a

    thread of something; a flare of something; something of her own which

    Mrs. Ramsay liked very much indeed, but no man would, she feared.

    Obviously, not, unless it were a much older man, like William Bankes.

    But then he cared, well, Mrs. Ramsay sometimes thought that he cared,

    since his wife’s death, perhaps for her. He was not “in love” of

    course; it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are

    so many. Oh, but nonsense, she thought; William must marry Lily. They

    have so many things in common. Lily is so fond of flowers. They are

    both cold and aloof and rather self-sufficing. She must arrange for

    them to take a long walk together.

    Foolishly, she had set them opposite each other. That could be remedied

    tomorrow. If it were fine, they should go for a picnic. Everything

    seemed possible. Everything seemed right. Just now (but this cannot

    last, she thought, dissociating herself from the moment while they were

    all talking about boots) just now she had reached security; she hovered

    like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which

    filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not noisily, solemnly

    rather, for it arose, she thought, looking at them all eating there,

    from husband and children and friends; all of which rising in this

    profound stillness (she was helping William Bankes to one very small

    piece more, and peered into the depths of the earthenware pot) seemed

    now for no special reason to stay there like a smoke, like a fume

    rising upwards, holding them safe together. Nothing need be said;

    nothing could be said. There it was, all round them. It partook, she

    felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of

    eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before

    that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something,

    she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the

    window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing,

    the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had

    the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of

    such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.

    “Yes,” she assured William Bankes, “there is plenty for everybody.”

    “Andrew,” she said, “hold your plate lower, or I shall spill it.” (The

    Boeuf en Daube was a perfect triumph.) Here, she felt, putting the

    spoon down, where one could move or rest; could wait now (they were all

    helped) listening; could then, like a hawk which lapses suddenly from

    its high station, flaunt and sink on laughter easily, resting her whole

    weight upon what at the other end of the table her husband was saying

    about the square root of one thousand two hundred and fifty-three.

    That was the number, it seemed, on his watch.

    What did it all mean? To this day she had no notion. A square root?

    What was that? Her sons knew. She leant on them; on cubes and square

    roots; that was what they were talking about now; on Voltaire[108] and

    Madame de Stael[109]; on the character of Napoleon[110]; on the French system of

    land tenure; on Lord Rosebery[111]; on Creevey’s Memoirs[112]: she let it uphold

    her and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the masculine

    intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, like

    iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world,[113] so that

    she could trust herself to it utterly, even shut her eyes, or flicker

    them for a moment, as a child staring up from its pillow winks at the

    myriad layers of the leaves of a tree. Then she woke up. It was still

    being fabricated. William Bankes was praising the Waverly novels.[114]

    He read one of them every six months, he said. And why should that make

    Charles Tansley angry? He rushed in (all, thought Mrs. Ramsay, because

    Prue will not be nice to him) and denounced the Waverly novels when he

    knew nothing about it, nothing about it whatsoever, Mrs. Ramsay thought,

    observing him rather than listening to what he said. She could see how

    it was from his manner–he wanted to assert himself, and so it would

    always be with him till he got his Professorship or married his wife,

    and so need not be always saying, “I–I–I.” For that was what his

    criticism of poor Sir Walter, or perhaps it was Jane Austen,[115] amounted

    to. “I—I—I.” He was thinking of himself and the impression he

    was making, as she could tell by the sound of his voice, and his

    emphasis and his uneasiness. Success would be good for him. At any

    rate they were off again. Now she need not listen. It could not last,

    she knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to

    go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts

    and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so

    that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing

    themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging,

    trembling. So she saw them; she heard them; but whatever they said had

    also this quality, as if what they said was like the movement of a

    trout when, at the same time, one can see the ripple and the gravel,

    something to the right, something to the left; and the whole is held

    together; for whereas in active life she would be netting and

    separating one thing from another; she would be saying she liked the

    Waverly novels[116] or had not read them; she would be urging herself

    forward; now she said nothing. For the moment, she hung suspended.

    “Ah, but how long do you think it’ll last?” said somebody. It was as

    if she had antennae trembling out from her, which, intercepting certain

    sentences, forced them upon her attention. This was one of them. She

    scented danger for her husband. A question like that would lead,

    almost certainly, to something being said which reminded him of his own

    failure. How long would he be read–he would think at once.[117] William

    Bankes (who was entirely free from all such vanity) laughed, and said

    he attached no importance to changes in fashion. Who could tell what

    was going to last–in literature or indeed in anything else?

    “Let us enjoy what we do enjoy,” he said. His integrity seemed to Mrs.

    Ramsay quite admirable. He never seemed for a moment to think, But how

    does this affect me? But then if you had the other temperament, which

    must have praise, which must have encouragement, naturally you began

    (and she knew that Mr. Ramsay was beginning) to be uneasy; to want

    somebody to say, Oh, but your work will last, Mr. Ramsay, or something

    like that. He showed his uneasiness quite clearly now by saying, with

    some irritation, that, anyhow, Scott (or was it Shakespeare ?) would

    last him his lifetime. He said it irritably. Everybody, she thought,

    felt a little uncomfortable, without knowing why. Then Minta Doyle,

    whose instinct was fine, said bluffly, absurdly, that she did not

    believe that any one really enjoyed reading Shakespeare. Mr. Ramsay

    said grimly (but his mind was turned away again) that very few people

    liked it as much as they said they did. But, he added, there is

    considerable merit in some of the plays nevertheless, and Mrs. Ramsay

    saw that it would be all right for the moment anyhow; he would laugh at

    Minta, and she, Mrs. Ramsay saw, realising his extreme anxiety about

    himself, would, in her own way, see that he was taken care of, and

    praise him, somehow or other. But she wished it was not necessary:

    perhaps it was her fault that it was necessary. Anyhow, she was free

    now to listen to what Paul Rayley was trying to say about books one had

    read as a boy. They lasted, he said. He had read some of Tolstoi[118] at

    school. There was one he always remembered, but he had forgotten the

    name. Russian names were impossible, said Mrs. Ramsay. “Vronsky,” said

    Paul. He remembered that because he always thought it such a good name

    for a villain. “Vronsky,” said Mrs. Ramsay; “Oh, Anna Karenina,”[119] but

    that did not take them very far; books were not in their line. No,

    Charles Tansley would put them both right in a second about books, but

    it was all so mixed up with, Am I saying the right thing? Am I making

    a good impression? that, after all, one knew more about him than

    about Tolstoi, whereas, what Paul said was about the thing, simply, not

    himself, nothing else. Like all stupid people, he had a kind of

    modesty too, a consideration for what you were feeling, which, once in

    a way at least, she found attractive. Now he was thinking, not about

    himself, or about Tolstoi, but whether she was cold, whether she felt a

    draught, whether she would like a pear.

    No, she said, she did not want a pear. Indeed she had been keeping

    guard over the dish of fruit (without realising it) jealously, hoping

    that nobody would touch it. Her eyes had been going in and out among

    the curves and shadows of the fruit, among the rich purples of the

    lowland grapes, then over the horny ridge of the shell, putting a

    yellow against a purple, a curved shape against a round shape, without

    knowing why she did it, or why, every time she did it, she felt more

    and more serene; until, oh, what a pity that they should do it–a hand

    reached out, took a pear, and spoilt the whole thing. In sympathy she

    looked at Rose. She looked at Rose sitting between Jasper and Prue.

    How odd that one’s child should do that!

    How odd to see them sitting there, in a row, her children, Jasper,

    Rose, Prue, Andrew, almost silent, but with some joke of their own

    going on, she guessed, from the twitching at their lips. It was

    something quite apart from everything else, something they were

    hoarding up to laugh over in their own room. It was not about their

    father, she hoped. No, she thought not. What was it, she wondered,

    sadly rather, for it seemed to her that they would laugh when she was

    not there. There was all that hoarded behind those rather set, still,

    mask-like faces, for they did not join in easily; they were like

    watchers, surveyors, a little raised or set apart from the grown-up

    people. But when she looked at Prue tonight, she saw that this was

    not now quite true of her. She was just beginning, just moving,

    just descending. The faintest light was on her face, as if the

    glow of Minta opposite, some excitement, some anticipation of happiness

    was reflected in her, as if the sun of the love of men and women rose

    over the rim of the table-cloth, and without knowing what it was she

    bent towards it and greeted it. She kept looking at Minta, shyly, yet

    curiously, so that Mrs. Ramsay looked from one to the other and said,

    speaking to Prue in her own mind, You will be as happy as she is one of

    these days. You will be much happier, she added, because you are my

    daughter, she meant; her own daughter must be happier than other

    people’s daughters. But dinner was over. It was time to go. They

    were only playing with things on their plates. She would wait until

    they had done laughing at some story her husband was telling. He was

    having a joke with Minta about a bet. Then she would get up.

    She liked Charles Tansley, she thought, suddenly; she liked his laugh.

    She liked him for being so angry with Paul and Minta. She liked his

    awkwardness. There was a lot in that young man after all. And Lily,

    she thought, putting her napkin beside her plate, she always has some

    joke of her own. One need never bother about Lily. She waited. She

    tucked her napkin under the edge of her plate. Well, were they done

    now? No. That story had led to another story. Her husband was in

    great spirits tonight, and wishing, she supposed, to make it all right

    with old Augustus after that scene about the soup, had drawn him in–

    they were telling stories about some one they had both known at

    college. She looked at the window in which the candle flames burnt

    brighter now that the panes were black, and looking at that outside

    the voices came to her very strangely, as if they were voices at a

    service in a cathedral, for she did not listen to the words. The

    sudden bursts of laughter and then one voice (Minta’s) speaking

    alone, reminded her of men and boys crying out the Latin words

    of a service in some Roman Catholic cathedral. She waited. Her

    husband spoke. He was repeating something, and she knew it was poetry

    from the rhythm and the ring of exultation, and melancholy in his

    voice:

    Come out and climb the garden path, Luriana Lurilee.

    The China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the yellow bee.[120]

    The words (she was looking at the window) sounded as if they were

    floating like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all, as if

    no one had said them, but they had come into existence of themselves.

    And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be

    Are full of trees and changing leaves.[121]

    She did not know what they meant, but, like music, the words seemed to

    be spoken by her own voice, outside her self, saying quite easily and

    naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said

    different things. She knew, without looking round, that every one at

    the table was listening to the voice saying:

    I wonder if it seems to you, Luriana, Lurilee

    with the same sort of relief and pleasure that she had, as if this

    were, at last, the natural thing to say, this were their own voice

    speaking.

    But the voice had stopped. She looked round. She made herself get up.

    Augustus Carmichael had risen and, holding his table napkin so that it

    looked like a long white robe he stood chanting:

    To see the Kings go riding by

    Over lawn and daisy lea

    With their palm leaves and cedar

    Luriana, Lurilee,[122]

    and as she passed him, he turned slightly towards her repeating the

    last words:

    Luriana, Lurilee

    and bowed to her as if he did her homage. Without knowing why, she

    felt that he liked her better than he ever had done before; and with a

    feeling of relief and gratitude she returned his bow and passed through

    the door which he held open for her.

    It was necessary now to carry everything a step further. With her foot

    on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was

    vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta’s

    arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had

    become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already

    the past.

    18

    As usual, Lily thought. There was always something that had to be done

    at that precise moment, something that Mrs. Ramsay had decided for

    reasons of her own to do instantly, it might be with every one standing

    about making jokes, as now, not being able to decide whether they were

    going into the smoking-room, into the drawing-room, up to the attics.

    Then one saw Mrs. Ramsay in the midst of this hubbub standing there with

    Minta’s arm in hers, bethink her, “Yes, it is time for that now,” and

    so make off at once with an air of secrecy to do something alone. And

    directly she went a sort of disintegration set in; they wavered about,

    went different ways, Mr. Bankes took Charles Tansley by the arm and went

    off to finish on the terrace the discussion they had begun at dinner

    about politics, thus giving a turn to the whole poise of the evening,

    making the weight fall in a different direction, as if, Lily thought,

    seeing them go, and hearing a word or two about the policy of the

    Labour Party, they had gone up on to the bridge of the ship and were

    taking their bearings; the change from poetry to politics struck her

    like that; so Mr. Bankes and Charles Mrs. Ramsay going upstairs in the

    lamplight alone. Where, Lily wondered, was she going so quickly?

    Not that she did in fact run or hurry; she went indeed rather slowly.

    She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all

    that chatter, and pick out one particular thing; the thing that

    mattered; to detach it; separate it off; clean it of all the emotions

    and odds and ends of things, and so hold it before her, and bring it to

    the tribunal where, ranged about in conclave, sat the judges she had

    set up to decide these things. Is it good, is it bad, is it right or

    wrong? Where are we all going to? and so on. So she righted

    herself after the shock of the event, and quite unconsciously and

    incongruously, used the branches of the elm trees outside to help her

    to stabilise her position. Her world was changing: they were still.

    The event had given her a sense of movement. All must be in order.

    She must get that right and that right, she thought, insensibly

    approving of the dignity of the trees’ stillness, and now again of the

    superb upward rise (like the beak of a ship up a wave) of the elm

    branches as the wind raised them. For it was windy (she stood a moment

    to look out). It was windy, so that the leaves now and then brushed

    open a star, and the stars themselves seemed to be shaking and darting

    light and trying to flash out between the edges of the leaves. Yes,

    that was done then, accomplished; and as with all things done, became

    solemn. Now one thought of it, cleared of chatter and emotion, it

    seemed always to have been, only was shown now and so being shown,

    struck everything into stability. They would, she thought, going on

    again, however long they lived, come back to this night; this moon;

    this wind; this house: and to her too. It flattered her, where she was

    most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their

    hearts, however long they lived she would be woven; and this, and this,

    and this, she thought, going upstairs, laughing, but affectionately, at

    the sofa on the landing (her mother’s); at the rocking-chair (her

    father’s); at the map of the Hebrides. All that would be revived again

    in the lives of Paul and Minta; “the Rayleys”–she tried the new name

    over; and she felt, with her hand on the nursery door, that community

    of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of

    partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of

    relief and happiness) it was all one stream, and chairs, tables, maps,

    were hers, were theirs, it did not matter whose, and Paul and Minta

    would carry it on when she was dead.

    She turned the handle, firmly, lest it should squeak, and went in,

    pursing her lips slightly, as if to remind herself that she must not

    speak aloud. But directly she came in she saw, with annoyance, that the

    precaution was not needed. The children were not asleep. It was most

    annoying. Mildred should be more careful. There was James wide awake

    and Cam sitting bolt upright, and Mildred out of bed in her bare feet,

    and it was almost eleven and they were all talking. What was the

    matter? It was that horrid skull again. She had told Mildred to move

    it, but Mildred, of course, had forgotten, and now there was Cam wide

    awake, and James wide awake quarreling when they ought to have been

    asleep hours ago. What had possessed Edward to send them this horrid

    skull? She had been so foolish as to let them nail it up there. It

    was nailed fast, Mildred said, and Cam couldn’t go to sleep with it in

    the room, and James screamed if she touched it.

    Then Cam must go to sleep (it had great horns said Cam)–must go to

    sleep and dream of lovely palaces, said Mrs. Ramsay, sitting down

    on the bed by her side. She could see the horns, Cam said, all over

    the room. It was true. Wherever they put the light (and James could

    not sleep without a light) there was always a shadow somewhere.

    “But think, Cam, it’s only an old pig,” said Mrs. Ramsay, “a nice black

    pig like the pigs at the farm.” But Cam thought it was a horrid thing,

    branching at her all over the room.

    “Well then,” said Mrs. Ramsay, “we will cover it up,” and they all

    watched her go to the chest of drawers, and open the little drawers

    quickly one after another, and not seeing anything that would do, she

    quickly took her own shawl off and wound it round the skull, round and

    round and round, and then she came back to Cam and laid her head almost

    flat on the pillow beside Cam’s and said how lovely it looked now; how

    the fairies would love it; it was like a bird’s nest; it was like a

    beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and

    flowers and bells ringing and birds singing and little goats and

    antelopes and… She could see the words echoing as she spoke them

    rhythmically in Cam’s mind, and Cam was repeating after her how it was

    like a mountain, a bird’s nest, a garden, and there were little

    antelopes, and her eyes were opening and shutting, and Mrs. Ramsay went

    on speaking still more monotonously, and more rhythmically and more

    nonsensically, how she must shut her eyes and go to sleep and dream of

    mountains and valleys and stars falling and parrots and antelopes and

    gardens, and everything lovely, she said, raising her head very slowly

    and speaking more and more mechanically, until she sat upright and saw

    that Cam was asleep.

    Now, she whispered, crossing over to his bed, James must go to sleep

    too, for see, she said, the boar’s skull was still there; they had not

    touched it; they had done just what he wanted; it was there quite

    unhurt. He made sure that the skull was still there under the shawl.

    But he wanted to ask her something more. Would they go to the Lighthouse

    tomorrow?

    No, not tomorrow, she said, but soon, she promised him; the next fine

    day. He was very good. He lay down. She covered him up. But he

    would never forget, she knew, and she felt angry with Charles Tansley,

    with her husband, and with herself, for she had raised his hopes. Then

    feeling for her shawl and remembering that she had wrapped it round the

    boar’s skull, she got up, and pulled the window down another inch or

    two, and heard the wind, and got a breath of the perfectly indifferent

    chill night air and murmured good night to Mildred and left the room

    and let the tongue of the door slowly lengthen in the lock and went

    out.

    She hoped he would not bang his books on the floor above their heads,

    she thought, still thinking how annoying Charles Tansley was. For

    neither of them slept well; they were excitable children, and since he

    said things like that about the Lighthouse, it seemed to her likely

    that he would knock a pile of books over, just as they were going to

    sleep, clumsily sweeping them off the table with his elbow. For she

    supposed that he had gone upstairs to work. Yet he looked so desolate;

    yet she would feel relieved when he went; yet she would see that he was

    better treated tomorrow; yet he was admirable with her husband; yet his

    manners certainly wanted improving; yet she liked his laugh–thinking

    this, as she came downstairs, she noticed that she could now see the

    moon itself through the staircase window–the yellow harvest moon–

    and turned, and they saw her, standing above them on the stairs.

    “That’s my mother,” thought Prue. Yes; Minta should look at her; Paul

    Rayley should look at her. That is the thing itself, she felt, as if

    there were only one person like that in the world; her mother. And,

    from having been quite grown up, a moment before, talking with the

    others, she became a child again, and what they had been doing was a

    game, and would her mother sanction their game, or condemn it, she

    wondered. And thinking what a chance it was for Minta and Paul and

    Lily to see her, and feeling what an extraordinary stroke of fortune it

    was for her, to have her, and how she would never grow up and never

    leave home, she said, like a child, “We thought of going down to the

    beach to watch the waves.”

    Instantly, for no reason at all, Mrs. Ramsay became like a girl of

    twenty, full of gaiety. A mood of revelry suddenly took possession of

    her. Of course they must go; of course they must go, she cried,

    laughing; and running down the last three or four steps quickly, she

    began turning from one to the other and laughing and drawing Minta’s

    wrap round her and saying she only wished she could come too, and would

    they be very late, and had any of them got a watch?

    “Yes, Paul has,” said Minta. Paul slipped a beautiful gold watch out

    of a little wash-leather case to show her. And as he held it in the

    palm of his hand before her, he felt, “She knows all about it. I need

    not say anything.” He was saying to her as he showed her the watch,

    “I’ve done it, Mrs. Ramsay. I owe it all to you.” And seeing the gold

    watch lying in his hand, Mrs. Ramsay felt, How extraordinarily lucky

    Minta is! She is marrying a man who has a gold watch in a wash-

    leather bag!

    “How I wish I could come with you!” she cried. But she was withheld by

    something so strong that she never even thought of asking herself what

    it was. Of course it was impossible for her to go with them. But she

    would have liked to go, had it not been for the other thing, and

    tickled by the absurdity of her thought (how lucky to marry a man

    with a wash-leather bag for his watch) she went with a smile on her

    lips into the other room, where her husband sat reading.

    19

    Of course, she said to herself, coming into the room, she had to come

    here to get something she wanted. First she wanted to sit down in a

    particular chair under a particular lamp. But she wanted something

    more, though she did not know, could not think what it was that she

    wanted. She looked at her husband (taking up her stocking and

    beginning to knit), and saw that he did not want to be interrupted–

    that was clear. He was reading something that moved him very much. He

    was half smiling and then she knew he was controlling his emotion. He

    was tossing the pages over. He was acting it–perhaps he was

    thinking himself the person in the book. She wondered what book it was.

    Oh, it was one of old Sir Walter’s[123] she saw, adjusting the shade of her

    lamp so that the light fell on her knitting. For Charles Tansley had

    been saying (she looked up as if she expected to hear the crash of

    books on the floor above), had been saying that people don’t read Scott

    any more. Then her husband thought, “That’s what they’ll say of me;”

    so he went and got one of those books. And if he came to the

    conclusion “That’s true” what Charles Tansley said, he would accept it

    about Scott. (She could see that he was weighing, considering, putting

    this with that as he read.) But not about himself. He was always

    uneasy about himself. That troubled her. He would always be worrying

    about his own books–will they be read, are they good, why aren’t they

    better, what do people think of me? Not liking to think of him so,

    and wondering if they had guessed at dinner why he suddenly became

    irritable when they talked about fame and books lasting, wondering if

    the children were laughing at that, she twitched the stockings out, and

    all the fine gravings[124] came drawn with steel instruments about her lips

    and forehead, and she grew still like a tree which has been tossing and

    quivering and now, when the breeze falls, settles, leaf by leaf, into

    quiet.

    It didn’t matter, any of it, she thought. A great man, a great book,

    fame–who could tell? She knew nothing about it. But it was his way

    with him, his truthfulness–for instance at dinner she had been

    thinking quite instinctively, If only he would speak! She had complete

    trust in him. And dismissing all this, as one passes in diving now a

    weed, now a straw, now a bubble, she felt again, sinking deeper, as she

    had felt in the hall when the others were talking, There is something I

    want–something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper

    without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed. And she

    waited a little, knitting, wondering, and slowly rose those words they

    had said at dinner, “the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the

    honey bee,” began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically,

    and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one

    blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind, and seemed leaving

    their perches up there to fly across and across, or to cry out and to

    be echoed; so she turned and felt on the table beside her for a book.

    And all the lives we ever lived

    And all the lives to be,

    Are full of trees and changing leaves,[125]

    she murmured, sticking her needles into the stocking. And she opened

    the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so,

    she felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up

    under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white,

    or this is red. She did not know at first what the words meant at all.

    Steer, hither steer your winged pines, all beaten Mariners[126]

    she read and turned the page, swinging herself, zigzagging this way and

    that, from one line to another as from one branch to another, from one

    red and white flower to another, until a little sound roused her–her

    husband slapping his thighs. Their eyes met for a second; but they did

    not want to speak to each other. They had nothing to say, but

    something seemed, nevertheless, to go from him to her. It was the

    life, it was the power of it, it was the tremendous humour, she knew,

    that made him slap his thighs. Don’t interrupt me, he seemed to be

    saying, don’t say anything; just sit there. And he went on reading.

    His lips twitched. It filled him. It fortified him. He clean forgot

    all the little rubs and digs of the evening, and how it bored him

    unutterably to sit still while people ate and drank interminably, and

    his being so irritable with his wife and so touchy and minding when

    they passed his books over as if they didn’t exist at all. But now, he

    felt, it didn’t matter a damn who reached Z (if thought ran like an

    alphabet from A to Z). Somebody would reach it–if not he, then

    another. This man’s strength and sanity, his feeling for straight

    forward simple things, these fishermen, the poor old crazed creature in

    Mucklebackit’s cottage made him feel so vigorous, so relieved of

    something that he felt roused and triumphant and could not choke back

    his tears. Raising the book a little to hide his face, he let them

    fall and shook his head from side to side and forgot himself completely

    (but not one or two reflections about morality and French novels and

    English novels and Scott’s hands being tied but his view perhaps being

    as true as the other view), forgot his own bothers and failures

    completely in poor Steenie’s drowning and Mucklebackit’s sorrow[127] (that

    was Scott at his best) and the astonishing delight and feeling of

    vigour that it gave him.

    Well, let them improve upon that, he thought as he finished the

    chapter. He felt that he had been arguing with somebody, and had got

    the better of him. They could not improve upon that, whatever they

    might say; and his own position became more secure. The lovers were

    fiddlesticks, he thought, collecting it all in his mind again. That’s

    fiddlesticks, that’s first-rate, he thought, putting one thing beside

    another. But he must read it again. He could not remember the whole

    shape of the thing. He had to keep his judgement in suspense. So he

    returned to the other thought–if young men did not care for this,

    naturally they did not care for him either. One ought not to complain,

    thought Mr. Ramsay, trying to stifle his desire to complain to his wife

    that young men did not admire him. But he was determined; he would not

    bother her again. Here he looked at her reading. She looked very

    peaceful, reading. He liked to think that every one had taken

    themselves off and that he and she were alone. The whole of life did

    not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to

    Scott and Balzac[128], to the English novel and the French novel.

    Mrs. Ramsay raised her head and like a person in a light sleep seemed to

    say that if he wanted her to wake she would, she really would, but

    otherwise, might she go on sleeping, just a little longer, just a

    little longer? She was climbing up those branches, this way and that,

    laying hands on one flower and then another.

    Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose,[129]

    she read, and so reading she was ascending, she felt, on to the top,

    on to the summit. How satisfying! How restful! All the odds and ends

    of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And

    then there it was, suddenly entire; she held it in her hands, beautiful

    and reasonable, clear and complete, here–the sonnet.

    But she was becoming conscious of her husband looking at her. He was

    smiling at her, quizzically, as if he were ridiculing her gently for

    being asleep in broad daylight, but at the same time he was thinking,

    Go on reading. You don’t look sad now, he thought. And he wondered

    what she was reading, and exaggerated her ignorance, her simplicity,

    for he liked to think that she was not clever, not book-learned at all.

    He wondered if she understood what she was reading. Probably not, he

    thought. She was astonishingly beautiful. Her beauty seemed to him,

    if that were possible, to increase

    Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,

    As with your shadow I with these did play,[130]

    she finished.

    “Well?” she said, echoing his smile dreamily, looking up from her book.

    As with your shadow I with these did play,

    she murmured, putting the book on the table.

    What had happened, she wondered, as she took up her knitting, since she

    had seen him alone? She remembered dressing, and seeing the moon;

    Andrew holding his plate too high at dinner; being depressed by

    something William had said; the birds in the trees; the sofa on the

    landing; the children being awake; Charles Tansley waking them with his

    books falling–oh, no, that she had invented; and Paul having a wash-

    leather case for his watch. Which should she tell him about?

    “They’re engaged,” she said, beginning to knit, “Paul and Minta.”

    “So I guessed,” he said. There was nothing very much to be said about

    it. Her mind was still going up and down, up and down with the poetry;

    he was still feeling very vigorous, very forthright, after reading

    about Steenie’s funeral.[131] So they sat silent. Then she became aware

    that she wanted him to say something.

    Anything, anything, she thought, going on with her knitting. Anything

    will do.

    “How nice it would be to marry a man with a wash-leather bag for his

    watch,” she said, for that was the sort of joke they had together.

    He snorted. He felt about this engagement as he always felt about any

    engagement; the girl is much too good for that young man. Slowly it

    came into her head, why is it then that one wants people to marry?

    What was the value, the meaning of things? (Every word they said now

    would be true.) Do say something, she thought, wishing only to hear his

    voice. For the shadow, the thing folding them in was beginning, she

    felt, to close round her again. Say anything, she begged, looking at

    him, as if for help.

    He was silent, swinging the compass on his watch-chain to and fro, and

    thinking of Scott’s novels and Balzac’s novels.[132] But through the

    crepuscular walls of their intimacy, for they were drawing together,

    involuntarily, coming side by side, quite close, she could feel his

    mind like a raised hand shadowing her mind; and he was beginning, now

    that her thoughts took a turn he disliked–towards this “pessimism” as

    he called it–to fidget, though he said nothing, raising his hand to

    his forehead, twisting a lock of hair, letting it fall again.

    “You won’t finish that stocking tonight,” he said, pointing to her

    stocking. That was what she wanted–the asperity in his voice

    reproving her. If he says it’s wrong to be pessimistic probably it is

    wrong, she thought; the marriage will turn out all right.

    “No,” she said, flattening the stocking out upon her knee, “I shan’t

    finish it.”

    And what then? For she felt that he was still looking at her, but that

    his look had changed. He wanted something–wanted the thing she always

    found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she

    loved him. And that, no, she could not do. He found talking so much

    easier than she did. He could say things–she never could. So

    naturally it was always he that said the things, and then for some

    reason he would mind this suddenly, and would reproach her. A

    heartless woman he called her; she never told him that she loved him.

    But it was not so–it was not so. It was only that she never could say

    what she felt. Was there no crumb on his coat? Nothing she could do

    for him? Getting up, she stood at the window with the reddish-brown

    stocking in her hands, partly to turn away from him, partly because she

    remembered how beautiful it often is–the sea at night. But she knew

    that he had turned his head as she turned; he was watching her. She

    knew that he was thinking, You are more beautiful than ever. And she

    felt herself very beautiful. Will you not tell me just for once that

    you love me? He was thinking that, for he was roused, what with Minta

    and his book, and its being the end of the day and their having

    quarrelled about going to the Lighthouse. But she could not do it; she

    could not say it. Then, knowing that he was watching her, instead of

    saying anything she turned, holding her stocking, and looked at him.

    And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not

    said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him. He could

    not deny it. And smiling she looked out of the window and said

    (thinking to herself, Nothing on earth can equal this happiness)–

    “Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet tomorrow. You won’t be able

    to go.” And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again.

    She had not said it: yet he knew.

    II

    TIME PASSES

    1

    “Well, we must wait for the future to show,” said Mr. Bankes, coming in

    from the terrace.

    “It’s almost too dark to see,” said Andrew, coming up from the beach.

    “One can hardly tell which is the sea and which is the land,” said

    Prue.

    “Do we leave that light burning?” said Lily as they took their coats

    off indoors.

    “No,” said Prue, “not if every one’s in.”

    “Andrew,” she called back, “just put out the light in the hall.”

    One by one the lamps were all extinguished, except that Mr. Carmichael,

    who liked to lie awake a little reading Virgil,[133] kept his candle burning

    rather longer than the rest.

    2

    So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming

    on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it

    seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which,

    creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came

    into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red

    and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of

    drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely

    anything left of body or mind by which one could say, “This is he” or

    “This is she.” Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or

    ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as

    if sharing a joke with nothingness.

    Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the

    staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened

    woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house

    was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors.

    Almost one might imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room

    questioning and wondering, toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper,

    asking, would it hang much longer, when would it fall? Then smoothly

    brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and

    yellow roses on the wall-paper whether they would fade, and questioning

    (gently, for there was time at their disposal) the torn letters in

    the wastepaper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were now

    open to them and asking, Were they allies? Were they enemies? How

    long would they endure?

    So some random light directing them with its pale footfall upon stair

    and mat, from some uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Lighthouse

    even, with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, the little airs

    mounted the staircase and nosed round bedroom doors. But here surely,

    they must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear, what lies here

    is steadfast. Here one might say to those sliding lights, those

    fumbling airs that breathe and bend over the bed itself, here you can

    neither touch nor destroy. Upon which, wearily, ghostlily, as if they

    had feather-light fingers and the light persistency of feathers, they

    would look, once, on the shut eyes, and the loosely clasping fingers,

    and fold their garments wearily and disappear. And so, nosing,

    rubbing, they went to the window on the staircase, to the servants’

    bedrooms, to the boxes in the attics; descending, blanched the apples

    on the dining-room table, fumbled the petals of roses, tried the

    picture on the easel, brushed the mat and blew a little sand along the

    floor. At length, desisting, all ceased together, gathered together,

    all sighed together; all together gave off an aimless gust of

    lamentation to which some door in the kitchen replied; swung wide;

    admitted nothing; and slammed to.

    [Here Mr. Carmichael, who was reading Virgil,[134] blew out his candle. It

    was past midnight.][135]

    3

    But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the

    darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a

    faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave.

    Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in

    store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers.

    They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets,

    plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take

    on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool

    cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in

    battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The

    autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest

    moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the

    stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.

    It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil,

    divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single,

    distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking; which,

    did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness,

    twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he

    covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so

    confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever

    return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect

    whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our

    penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.

    The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and

    bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered

    with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and

    scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and

    should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer

    to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and

    go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of

    serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night

    to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The

    hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it

    would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night

    those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the

    sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.

    [Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his

    arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before,

    his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.][136]

    4

    So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled

    round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in,

    brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or

    drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped,

    wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already

    furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had shed and left–a pair of

    shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes–those

    alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they

    were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and

    buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world

    hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened,

    in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day

    after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp

    image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing

    in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the

    pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft

    spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.

    So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of

    loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted; solitary like a

    pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so

    quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its

    solitude, though once seen. Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in

    the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the

    prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing,

    snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions–“Will you fade?

    Will you perish?”–scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the

    air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed

    that they should answer: we remain.

    Nothing it seemed could break that image, corrupt that innocence, or

    disturb the swaying mantle of silence which, week after week, in the

    empty room, wove into itself the falling cries of birds, ships hooting,

    the drone and hum of the fields, a dog’s bark, a man’s shout, and

    folded them round the house in silence. Once only a board sprang on

    the landing; once in the middle of the night with a roar, with a

    rupture, as after centuries of quiescence, a rock rends itself from the

    mountain and hurtles crashing into the valley, one fold of the shawl

    loosened and swung to and fro. Then again peace descended; and the

    shadow wavered; light bent to its own image in adoration on the bedroom

    wall; and Mrs. McNab, tearing the veil of silence with hands that had

    stood in the wash-tub, grinding it with boots that had crunched the

    shingle,[137] came as directed to open all windows, and dust the bedrooms.

    5

    As she lurched (for she rolled like a ship at sea) and leered (for her

    eyes fell on nothing directly, but with a sidelong glance that

    deprecated the scorn and anger of the world–she was witless, she knew

    it), as she clutched the banisters and hauled herself upstairs and

    rolled from room to room, she sang. Rubbing the glass of the long

    looking-glass and leering sideways at her swinging figure a sound

    issued from her lips–something that had been gay twenty years before

    on the stage perhaps, had been hummed and danced to, but now,

    coming from the toothless, bonneted, care-taking woman, was robbed

    of meaning, was like the voice of witlessness, humour, persistency

    itself, trodden down but springing up again, so that as she

    lurched, dusting, wiping, she seemed to say how it was one long sorrow

    and trouble, how it was getting up and going to bed again, and bringing

    things out and putting them away again. It was not easy or snug this

    world she had known for close on seventy years. Bowed down she was

    with weariness. How long, she asked, creaking and groaning on her

    knees under the bed, dusting the boards, how long shall it endure? but

    hobbled to her feet again, pulled herself up, and again with her

    sidelong leer which slipped and turned aside even from her own face,

    and her own sorrows, stood and gaped in the glass, aimlessly smiling,

    and began again the old amble and hobble, taking up mats, putting down

    china, looking sideways in the glass, as if, after all, she had her

    consolations, as if indeed there twined about her dirge some

    incorrigible hope. Visions of joy there must have been at the wash-

    tub, say with her children (yet two had been base-born and one had

    deserted her), at the public-house, drinking; turning over scraps in

    her drawers. Some cleavage of the dark there must have been, some

    channel in the depths of obscurity through which light enough issued to

    twist her face grinning in the glass and make her, turning to her job

    again, mumble out the old music hall song. The mystic, the visionary,

    walking the beach on a fine night, stirring a puddle, looking at a

    stone, asking themselves “What am I,” “What is this?” had suddenly an

    answer vouchsafed them: (they could not say what it was) so that they

    were warm in the frost and had comfort in the desert. But Mrs. McNab

    continued to drink and gossip as before.

    6

    The Spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce

    in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide-

    eyed and watchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought by

    the beholders. [Prue Ramsay, leaning on her father’s arm, was given in

    marriage. What, people said, could have been more fitting? And, they

    added, how beautiful she looked!]

    As summer neared, as the evenings lengthened, there came to the

    wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool,

    imaginations of the strangest kind–of flesh turned to atoms which

    drove before the wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of cliff,

    sea, cloud, and sky brought purposely together to assemble outwardly

    the scattered parts of the vision within. In those mirrors, the minds

    of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds for ever turn

    and shadows form, dreams persisted, and it was impossible to resist the

    strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and

    the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if questioned at once to

    withdraw) that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules; or to

    resist the extraordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search

    of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity, remote from the known

    pleasures and familiar virtues, something alien to the processes of

    domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand, which

    would render the possessor secure. Moreover, softened and acquiescent,

    the spring with her bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloak

    about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among passing shadows

    and flights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her a knowledge of

    the sorrows of mankind.

    [Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with

    childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they

    said, had promised so well.][138]

    And now in the heat of summer the wind sent its spies about the house

    again. Flies wove a web in the sunny rooms; weeds that had grown close

    to the glass in the night tapped methodically at the window pane. When

    darkness fell, the stroke of the Lighthouse, which had laid itself with

    such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern,

    came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding

    gently as if it laid its caress and lingered steathily and looked and

    came lovingly again. But in the very lull of this loving caress, as

    the long stroke leant upon the bed, the rock was rent asunder; another

    fold of the shawl loosened; there it hung, and swayed. Through the

    short summer nights and the long summer days, when the empty rooms

    seemed to murmur with the echoes of the fields and the hum of flies,

    the long streamer waved gently, swayed aimlessly; while the sun so

    striped and barred the rooms and filled them with yellow haze that Mrs.

    McNab, when she broke in and lurched about, dusting, sweeping, looked

    like a tropical fish oaring its way through sun-lanced waters.

    But slumber and sleep though it might there came later in the summer

    ominous sounds like the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt,

    which, with their repeated shocks still further loosened the shawl and

    cracked the tea-cups. Now and again some glass tinkled in the cupboard

    as if a giant voice had shrieked so loud in its agony that tumblers

    stood inside a cupboard vibrated too. Then again silence fell; and

    then, night after night, and sometimes in plain mid-day when the roses

    were bright and light turned on the wall its shape clearly there seemed

    to drop into this silence, this indifference, this integrity, the thud

    of something falling.

    [A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France,

    among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.][139]

    At that season those who had gone down to pace the beach and ask of the

    sea and sky what message they reported or what vision they affirmed had

    to consider among the usual tokens of divine bounty–the sunset on

    the sea, the pallor of dawn, the moon rising, fishing-boats against the

    moon, and children making mud pies or pelting each other with handfuls

    of grass, something out of harmony with this jocundity and this

    serenity. There was the silent apparition of an ashen-coloured ship

    for instance, come, gone; there was a purplish stain upon the bland

    surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly,

    beneath. This intrusion into a scene calculated to stir the most

    sublime reflections and lead to the most comfortable conclusions stayed

    their pacing. It was difficult blandly to overlook them; to abolish

    their significance in the landscape; to continue, as one walked by the

    sea, to marvel how beauty outside mirrored beauty within.

    Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he

    began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, his meanness, and

    his torture. That dream, of sharing, completing, of finding in

    solitude on the beach an answer, was then but a reflection in a mirror,

    and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in

    quiescence when the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient, despairing

    yet loth to go (for beauty offers her lures, has her consolations), to

    pace the beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the

    mirror was broken.

    [Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring, which had an

    unexpected success. The war, people said, had revived their interest

    in poetry.]

    7

    Night after night, summer and winter, the torment of storms, the arrow-

    like stillness of fine (had there been any one to listen) from the

    upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with

    lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and

    waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose

    brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of

    another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for

    night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games,

    until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute

    confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.

    In spring the garden urns, casually filled with wind-blown plants, were

    gay as ever. Violets came and daffodils. But the stillness and the

    brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night,

    with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking

    before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and so

    terrible.

    8

    Thinking no harm, for the family would not come, never again, some

    said, and the house would be sold at Michaelmas perhaps, Mrs. McNab

    stooped and picked a bunch of flowers to take home with her. She laid

    them on the table while she dusted. She was fond of flowers. It was a

    pity to let them waste. Suppose the house were sold (she stood arms

    akimbo in front of the looking-glass) it would want seeing to–it

    would. There it had stood all these years without a soul in it. The

    books and things were mouldy, for, what with the war and help being

    hard to get, the house had not been cleaned as she could have wished.

    It was beyond one person’s strength to get it straight now. She was

    too old. Her legs pained her. All those books needed to be laid out

    on the grass in the sun; there was plaster fallen in the hall; the

    rain-pipe had blocked over the study window and let the water in;

    the carpet was ruined quite. But people should come themselves;

    they should have sent somebody down to see. For there were clothes

    in the cupboards; they had left clothes in all the bedrooms. What

    was she to do with them? They had the moth in them–Mrs. Ramsay’s

    things. Poor lady! She would never want them again. She was dead,

    they said; years ago, in London. There was the old grey cloak she wore

    gardening (Mrs. McNab fingered it). She could see her, as she came up

    the drive with the washing, stooping over her flowers (the garden was a

    pitiful sight now, all run to riot, and rabbits scuttling at you out of

    the beds)–she could see her with one of the children by her in that

    grey cloak. There were boots and shoes; and a brush and comb left on

    the dressing-table, for all the world as if she expected to come back

    tomorrow. (She had died very sudden at the end, they said.) And once

    they had been coming, but had put off coming, what with the war, and

    travel being so difficult these days; they had never come all these

    years; just sent her money; but never wrote, never came, and expected

    to find things as they had left them, ah, dear! Why the dressing-table

    drawers were full of things (she pulled them open), handkerchiefs, bits

    of ribbon. Yes, she could see Mrs. Ramsay as she came up the drive with

    the washing.

    “Good-evening, Mrs. McNab,” she would say.

    She had a pleasant way with her. The girls all liked her. But, dear,

    many things had changed since then (she shut the drawer); many families

    had lost their dearest. So she was dead; and Mr. Andrew killed; and

    Miss Prue dead too, they said, with her first baby; but everyone had

    lost some one these years. Prices had gone up shamefully, and didn’t

    come down again neither. She could well remember her in her grey

    cloak.

    “Good-evening, Mrs. McNab,” she said, and told cook to keep a plate of

    milk soup for her–quite thought she wanted it, carrying that heavy

    basket all the way up from town. She could see her now, stooping over

    her flowers; and faint and flickering, like a yellow beam or the circle

    at the end of a telescope, a lady in a grey cloak, stooping over her

    flowers, went wandering over the bedroom wall, up the dressing-table,

    across the wash-stand, as Mrs. McNab hobbled and ambled, dusting,

    straightening. And cook’s name now? Mildred? Marian?–some name like

    that. Ah, she had forgotten–she did forget things. Fiery, like all

    red-haired women. Many a laugh they had had. She was always welcome

    in the kitchen. She made them laugh, she did. Things were better then

    than now.

    She sighed; there was too much work for one woman. She wagged her head

    this side and that. This had been the nursery. Why, it was all damp in

    here; the plaster was falling. Whatever did they want to hang a

    beast’s skull there? gone mouldy too. And rats in all the attics. The

    rain came in. But they never sent; never came. Some of the locks had

    gone, so the doors banged. She didn’t like to be up here at dusk alone

    neither. It was too much for one woman, too much, too much. She

    creaked, she moaned. She banged the door. She turned the key in the

    lock, and left the house alone, shut up, locked.

    9

    The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell

    on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it.

    The long night seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the

    clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had

    rusted and the mat decayed. Toads had nosed their way in. Idly,

    aimlessly, the swaying shawl swung to and fro. A thistle thrust itself

    between the tiles in the larder. The swallows nested in the drawing-

    roon; the floor was strewn with straw; the plaster fell in shovelfuls;

    rafters were laid bare; rats carried off this and that to gnaw behind

    the wainscots. Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and

    pattered their life out on the window-pane. Poppies sowed themselves

    among the dahlias; the lawn waved with long grass; giant artichokes

    towered among roses; a fringed carnation flowered among the cabbages;

    while the gentle tapping of a weed at the window had become, on

    winters’ nights, a drumming from sturdy trees and thorned briars which

    made the whole room green in summer.

    What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of

    nature? Mrs. McNab’s dream of a lady, of a child, of a plate of milk

    soup? It had wavered over the walls like a spot of sunlight and

    vanished. She had locked the door; she had gone. It was beyond the

    strength of one woman, she said. They never sent. They never wrote.

    There were things up there rotting in the drawers–it was a shame to

    leave them so, she said. The place was gone to rack and ruin. Only

    the Lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden

    stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with

    equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw.

    Nothing now withstood them; nothing said no to them. Let the wind

    blow; let the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the

    cabbage. Let the swallow build in the drawing-room, and the thistle

    thrust aside the tiles, and the butterfly sun itself on the faded

    chintz of the arm-chairs. Let the broken glass and the china lie out

    on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries.

    For now had come that moment, that hesitation when dawn trembles and

    night pauses, when if a feather alight in the scale it will be weighed

    down. One feather, and the house, sinking, falling, would have turned

    and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness. In the ruined room,

    picnickers would have lit their kettles; lovers sought shelter there,

    lying on the bare boards; and the shepherd stored his dinner on the

    bricks, and the tramp slept with his coat round him to ward off the

    cold. Then the roof would have fallen; briars and hemlocks would have

    blotted out path, step and window; would have grown, unequally but

    lustily over the mound, until some trespasser, losing his way, could

    have told only by a red-hot poker among the nettles, or a scrap of

    china in the hemlock, that here once some one had lived; there had been

    a house.

    If the feather had fallen, if it had tipped the scale downwards, the

    whole house would have plunged to the depths to lie upon the sands of

    oblivion. But there was a force working; something not highly

    conscious; something that leered, something that lurched; something not

    inspired to go about its work with dignified ritual or solemn chanting.

    Mrs. McNab groaned; Mrs. Bast creaked. They were old; they were stiff;

    their legs ached. They came with their brooms and pails at last; they

    got to work. All of a sudden, would Mrs. McNab see that the house was

    ready, one of the young ladies wrote: would she get this done; would

    she get that done; all in a hurry. They might be coming for the

    summer; had left everything to the last; expected to find things as

    they had left them. Slowly and painfully, with broom and pail,

    mopping, scouring, Mrs. McNab, Mrs. Bast, stayed the corruption and the

    rot; rescued from the pool of Time that was fast closing over them now

    a basin, now a cupboard; fetched up from oblivion all the Waverley

    novels and a tea-set one morning; in the afternoon restored to sun and

    air a brass fender and a set of steel fire-irons. George, Mrs. Bast’s

    son, caught the rats, and cut the grass. They had the builders.

    Attended with the creaking of hinges and the screeching of bolts, the

    slamming and banging of damp-swollen woodwork, some rusty laborious

    birth seemed to be taking place, as the women, stooping, rising,

    groaning, singing, slapped and slammed, upstairs now, now down in the

    cellars. Oh, they said, the work!

    They drank their tea in the bedroom sometimes, or in the study;

    breaking off work at mid-day with the smudge on their faces, and their

    old hands clasped and cramped with the broom handles. Flopped on

    chairs, they contemplated now the magnificent conquest over taps and

    bath; now the more arduous, more partial triumph over long rows of

    books, black as ravens once, now white-stained, breeding pale mushrooms

    and secreting furtive spiders. Once more, as she felt the tea warm in

    her, the telescope fitted itself to Mrs. McNab’s eyes, and in a ring of

    light she saw the old gentleman, lean as a rake, wagging his head, as

    she came up with the washing, talking to himself, she supposed, on the

    lawn. He never noticed her. Some said he was dead; some said she was

    dead. Which was it? Mrs. Bast didn’t know for certain either. The

    young gentleman was dead. That she was sure. She had read his name in

    the papers.

    There was the cook now, Mildred, Marian, some such name as that–a red-

    headed woman, quick-tempered like all her sort, but kind, too, if you

    knew the way with her. Many a laugh they had had together. She saved a

    plate of soup for Maggie; a bite of ham, sometimes; whatever was over.

    They lived well in those days. They had everything they wanted

    (glibly, jovially, with the tea hot in her, she unwound her ball of

    memories, sitting in the wicker arm-chair by the nursery fender).

    There was always plenty doing, people in the house, twenty staying

    sometimes, and washing up till long past midnight.

    Mrs. Bast (she had never known them; had lived in Glasgow at that time)

    wondered, putting her cup down, whatever they hung that beast’s skull

    there for? Shot in foreign parts no doubt.

    It might well be, said Mrs. McNab, wantoning on with her memories; they

    had friends in eastern countries; gentlemen staying there, ladies in

    evening dress; she had seen them once through the dining-room door all

    sitting at dinner. Twenty she dared say all in their jewellery, and

    she asked to stay help wash up, might be till after midnight.

    Ah, said Mrs. Bast, they’d find it changed. She leant out of the

    window. She watched her son George scything the grass. They might

    well ask, what had been done to it? seeing how old Kennedy was

    supposed to have charge of it, and then his leg got so bad after he

    fell from the cart; and perhaps then no one for a year, or the better

    part of one; and then Davie Macdonald, and seeds might be sent, but who

    should say if they were ever planted? They’d find it changed.

    She watched her son scything. He was a great one for work–one of

    those quiet ones. Well they must be getting along with the cupboards,

    she supposed. They hauled themselves up.

    At last, after days of labour within, of cutting and digging without,

    dusters were flicked from the windows, the windows were shut to, keys

    were turned all over the house; the front door was banged; it was

    finished.

    And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the

    mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that

    intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a

    bleat; irregular, intermittent, yet somehow related; the hum of an

    insect, the tremor of cut grass, disevered yet somehow belonging; the

    jar of a dorbeetle, the squeak of a wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously

    related; which the ear strains to bring together and is always on the

    verge of harmonising, but they are never quite heard, never fully

    harmonised, and at last, in the evening, one after another the sounds

    die out, and the harmony falters, and silence falls. With the sunset

    sharpness was lost, and like mist rising, quiet rose, quiet spread,

    the wind settled; loosely the world shook itself down to sleep, darkly

    here without a light to it, save what came green suffused through

    leaves, or pale on the white flowers in the bed by the window.

    [Lily Briscoe had her bag carried up to the house late one evening in

    September. Mr. Carmichael came by the same train.]

    10

    Then indeed peace had come. Messages of peace breathed from the sea to

    the shore. Never to break its sleep any more, to lull it rather more

    deeply to rest, and whatever the dreamers dreamt holily, dreamt wisely,

    to confirm–what else was it murmuring–as Lily Briscoe laid her head

    on the pillow in the clean still room and heard the sea. Through the

    open window the voice of the beauty of the world came murmuring, too

    softly to hear exactly what it said–but what mattered if the meaning

    were plain? entreating the sleepers (the house was full again; Mrs.

    Beckwith was staying there, also Mr. Carmichael), if they would not

    actually come down to the beach itself at least to lift the blind and

    look out. They would see then night flowing down in purple; his head

    crowned; his sceptre jewelled; and how in his eyes a child might look.

    And if they still faltered (Lily was tired out with travelling and

    slept almost at once; but Mr. Carmichael read a book by candlelight), if

    they still said no, that it was vapour, this splendour of his, and the

    dew had more power than he, and they preferred sleeping; gently then

    without complaint, or argument, the voice would sing its song. Gently

    the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the

    light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked,

    Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it

    used to look.

    Indeed the voice might resume, as the curtains of dark wrapped

    themselves over the house, over Mrs. Beckwith, Mr. Carmichael, and Lily

    Briscoe so that they lay with several folds of blackness on their eyes,

    why not accept this, be content with this, acquiesce and resign? The

    sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them;

    the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds

    beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness, a

    cart grinding, a dog somewhere barking, the sun lifted the curtains,

    broke the veil on their eyes, and Lily Briscoe stirring in her sleep.

    She clutched at her blankets as a faller clutches at the turf on the

    edge of a cliff. Her eyes opened wide. Here she was again, she

    thought, sitting bold upright in bed. Awake.

    III

    THE LIGHTHOUSE

    1

    What does it mean then, what can it all mean? Lily Briscoe asked

    herself, wondering whether, since she had been left alone, it behoved

    her to go to the kitchen to fetch another cup of coffee or wait here.

    What does it mean?–a catchword that was, caught up from some book,

    fitting her thought loosely, for she could not, this first morning with

    the Ramsays, contract her feelings, could only make a phrase resound to

    cover the blankness of her mind until these vapours had shrunk. For

    really, what did she feel, come back after all these years and Mrs.

    Ramsay dead? Nothing, nothing–nothing that she could express at all.

    She had come late last night when it was all mysterious, dark. Now she

    was awake, at her old place at the breakfast table, but alone. It was

    very early too, not yet eight. There was this expedition–they were

    going to the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James. They should have

    gone already–they had to catch the tide or something. And Cam was

    not ready and James was not ready and Nancy had forgotten to order the

    sandwiches and Mr. Ramsay had lost his temper and banged out of the

    room.

    “What’s the use of going now?” he had stormed.

    Nancy had vanished. There he was, marching up and down the terrace in

    a rage. One seemed to hear doors slamming and voices calling all over

    the house. Now Nancy burst in, and asked, looking round the room, in a

    queer half dazed, half desperate way, “What does one send to the

    Lighthouse?” as if she were forcing herself to do what she despaired of

    ever being able to do.

    What does one send to the Lighthouse indeed! At any other time Lily

    could have suggested reasonably tea, tobacco, newspapers. But this

    morning everything seemed so extraordinarily queer that a question like

    Nancy’s–What does one send to the Lighthouse?–opened doors in one’s

    mind that went banging and swinging to and fro and made one keep

    asking, in a stupefied gape, What does one send? What does one do?

    Why is one sitting here, after all?

    Sitting alone (for Nancy went out again) among the clean cups at the

    long table, she felt cut off from other people, and able only to go on

    watching, asking, wondering. The house, the place, the morning, all

    seemed strangers to her. She had no attachment here, she felt, no

    relations with it, anything might happen, and whatever did happen, a

    step outside, a voice calling (“It’s not in the cupboard; it’s on the

    landing,” some one cried), was a question, as if the link that usually

    bound things together had been cut, and they floated up here, down

    there, off, anyhow. How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it

    was, she thought, looking at her empty coffee cup. Mrs. Ramsay dead;

    Andrew killed; Prue dead too–repeat it as she might, it roused no

    feeling in her. And we all get together in a house like this on a

    morning like this, she said, looking out of the window. It was a

    beautiful still day.[140]

    2

    Suddenly Mr. Ramsay raised his head as he passed and looked straight at

    her, with his distraught wild gaze which was yet so penetrating, as if

    he saw you, for one second, for the first time, for ever; and she

    pretended to drink out of her empty coffee cup so as to escape him–to

    escape his demand on her, to put aside a moment longer that imperious

    need. And he shook his head at her, and strode on (“Alone” she heard

    him say, “Perished” she heard him say)[141] and like everything else this

    strange morning the words became symbols, wrote themselves all over the

    grey-green walls. If only she could put them together, she felt, write

    them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of

    things. Old Mr. Carmichael came padding softly in, fetched his coffee,

    took his cup and made off to sit in the sun. The extraordinary

    unreality was frightening; but it was also exciting. Going to the

    Lighthouse. But what does one send to the Lighthouse? Perished. Alone.

    The grey-green light on the wall opposite. The empty places. Such were

    some of the parts, but how bring them together? she asked. As if any

    interruption would break the frail shape she was building on the table

    she turned her back to the window lest Mr. Ramsay should see her. She

    must escape somewhere, be alone somewhere. Suddenly she remembered.

    When she had sat there last ten years ago there had been a little sprig

    or leaf pattern on the table-cloth, which she had looked at in a moment

    of revelation. There had been a problem about a foreground of a

    picture. Move the tree to the middle, she had said. She had never

    finished that picture. She would paint that picture now. It had been

    knocking about in her mind all these years. Where were her paints, she

    wondered? Her paints, yes. She had left them in the hall last night.

    She would start at once. She got up quickly, before Mr. Ramsay turned.

    She fetched herself a chair. She pitched her easel with her precise

    old-maidish movements on the edge of the lawn, not too close to Mr.

    Carmichael, but close enough for his protection. Yes, it must have

    been precisely here that she had stood ten years ago. There was the

    wall; the hedge; the tree. The question was of some relation between

    those masses. She had borne it in her mind all these years. It seemed

    as if the solution had come to her: she knew now what she wanted to do.

    But with Mr. Ramsay bearing down on her, she could do nothing. Every

    time he approached–he was walking up and down the terrace–ruin

    approached, chaos approached. She could not paint. She stooped, she

    turned; she took up this rag; she squeezed that tube. But all she did

    was to ward him off a moment. He made it impossible for her to do

    anything. For if she gave him the least chance, if he saw her

    disengaged a moment, looking his way a moment, he would be on her,

    saying, as he had said last night, “You find us much changed.” Last

    night he had got up and stopped before her, and said that. Dumb and

    staring though they had all sat, the six children whom they used to

    call after the Kings and Queens of England–the Red, the Fair, the

    Wicked, the Ruthless–she felt how they raged under it. Kind old Mrs.

    Beckwith said something sensible. But it was a house full of unrelated

    passions–she had felt that all the evening. And on top of this chaos

    Mr. Ramsay got up, pressed her hand, and said: “You will find us much

    changed” and none of them had moved or had spoken; but had sat there as

    if they were forced to let him say it. Only James (certainly the

    Sullen) scowled at the lamp; and Cam screwed her handkerchief round her

    finger. Then he reminded them that they were going to the Lighthouse

    tomorrow. They must be ready, in the hall, on the stroke of half-past

    seven. Then, with his hand on the door, he stopped; he turned upon

    them. Did they not want to go? he demanded. Had they dared say

    No (he had some reason for wanting it) he would have flung himself

    tragically backwards into the bitter waters of depair. Such a

    gift he had for gesture. He looked like a king in exile. Doggedly

    James said yes. Cam stumbled more wretchedly. Yes, oh, yes, they’d

    both be ready, they said. And it struck her, this was tragedy–not

    palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits

    subdued. James was sixteen, Cam, seventeen, perhaps. She had looked

    round for some one who was not there, for Mrs. Ramsay, presumably. But

    there was only kind Mrs. Beckwith turning over her sketches under the

    lamp. Then, being tired, her mind still rising and falling with the

    sea, the taste and smell that places have after long absence possessing

    her, the candles wavering in her eyes, she had lost herself and gone

    under. It was a wonderful night, starlit; the waves sounded as they

    went upstairs; the moon surprised them, enormous, pale, as they passed

    the staircase window. She had slept at once.

    She set her clean canvas firmly upon the easel, as a barrier, frail,

    but she hoped sufficiently substantial to ward off Mr. Ramsay and his

    exactingness. She did her best to look, when his back was turned, at

    her picture; that line there, that mass there. But it was out of the

    question. Let him be fifty feet away, let him not even speak to you,

    let him not even see you, he permeated, he prevailed, he imposed

    himself. He changed everything. She could not see the colour; she

    could not see the lines; even with his back turned to her, she could

    only think, But he’ll be down on me in a moment, demanding–something

    she felt she could not give him. She rejected one brush; she chose

    another. When would those children come? When would they all be off?

    she fidgeted. That man, she thought, her anger rising in her, never

    gave; that man took. She, on the other hand, would be forced to give.

    Mrs. Ramsay had given. Giving, giving, giving, she had died–and had

    left all this. Really, she was angry with Mrs. Ramsay. With the brush

    slightly trembling in her fingers she looked at the hedge, the step,

    the wall. It was all Mrs. Ramsay’s doing. She was dead. Here was Lily,

    at forty-four, wasting her time, unable to do a thing, standing there,

    playing at painting, playing at the one thing one did not play at, and

    it was all Mrs. Ramsay’s fault. She was dead. The step where she used

    to sit was empty. She was dead.

    But why repeat this over and over again? Why be always trying to bring

    up some feeling she had not got? There was a kind of blasphemy in it.

    It was all dry: all withered: all spent. They ought not to have asked

    her; she ought not to have come. One can’t waste one’s time at forty-

    four, she thought. She hated playing at painting. A brush, the one

    dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos–that one should not

    play with, knowingly even: she detested it. But he made her. You

    shan’t touch your canvas, he seemed to say, bearing down on her, till

    you’ve given me what I want of you. Here he was, close upon her again,

    greedy, distraught. Well, thought Lily in despair, letting her right

    hand fall at her side, it would be simpler then to have it over.

    Surely, she could imitate from recollection the glow, the rhapsody, the

    self-surrender, she had seen on so many women’s faces (on Mrs. Ramsay’s,

    for instance) when on some occasion like this they blazed up–she could

    remember the look on Mrs. Ramsay’s face–into a rapture of sympathy, of

    delight in the reward they had, which, though the reason of it escaped

    her, evidently conferred on them the most supreme bliss of which human

    nature was capable. Here he was, stopped by her side. She would give

    him what she could.

    3

    She seemed to have shrivelled slightly, he thought. She looked a little

    skimpy, wispy; but not unattractive. He liked her. There had been some

    talk of her marrying William Bankes once, but nothing had come of it.

    His wife had been fond of her. He had been a little out of temper too

    at breakfast. And then, and then–this was one of those moments when

    an enormous need urged him, without being conscious what it was, to

    approach any woman, to force them, he did not care how, his need was so

    great, to give him what he wanted: sympathy.

    Was anybody looking after her? he said. Had she everything she

    wanted?

    “Oh, thanks, everything,” said Lily Briscoe nervously. No; she could

    not do it. She ought to have floated off instantly upon some wave of

    sympathetic expansion: the pressure on her was tremendous. But she

    remained stuck. There was an awful pause. They both looked at the

    sea. Why, thought Mr. Ramsay, should she look at the sea when I am

    here? She hoped it would be calm enough for them to land at the

    Lighthouse, she said. The Lighthouse! The Lighthouse! What’s that

    got to do with it? he thought impatiently. Instantly, with the force

    of some primeval gust (for really he could not restrain himself any

    longer), there issued from him such a groan that any other woman in the

    whole world would have done something, said something–all except

    myself, thought Lily, girding at herself bitterly, who am not a woman,

    but a peevish, ill-tempered, dried-up old maid, presumably.

    [Mr. Ramsay sighed to the full. He waited. Was she not going to say

    anything? Did she not see what he wanted from her? Then he said he

    had a particular reason for wanting to go to the Lighthouse. His

    wife used to send the men things. There was a poor boy with a

    tuberculous hip, the lightkeeper’s son. He sighed profoundly.

    He sighed significantly. All Lily wished was that this enormous flood

    of grief, this insatiable hunger for sympathy, this demand that she

    should surrender herself up to him entirely, and even so he had sorrows

    enough to keep her supplied for ever, should leave her, should be

    diverted (she kept looking at the house, hoping for an interruption)

    before it swept her down in its flow.

    “Such expeditions,” said Mr. Ramsay, scraping the ground with his toe,

    “are very painful.” Still Lily said nothing. (She is a stock, she is a

    stone, he said to himself.) “They are very exhausting,” he said,

    looking, with a sickly look that nauseated her (he was acting, she

    felt, this great man was dramatising himself), at his beautiful hands.

    It was horrible, it was indecent. Would they never come, she asked,

    for she could not sustain this enormous weight of sorrow, support these

    heavy draperies of grief (he had assumed a pose of extreme

    decreptitude; he even tottered a little as he stood there) a moment

    longer.

    Still she could say nothing; the whole horizon seemed swept bare of

    objects to talk about; could only feel, amazedly, as Mr. Ramsay stood

    there, how his gaze seemed to fall dolefully over the sunny grass and

    discolour it, and cast over the rubicund, drowsy, entirely contented

    figure of Mr. Carmichael, reading a French novel on a deck-chair, a veil

    of crape, as if such an existence, flaunting its prosperity in a world

    of woe, were enough to provoke the most dismal thoughts of all. Look

    at him, he seemed to be saying, look at me; and indeed, all the time he

    was feeling, Think of me, think of me. Ah, could that bulk only be

    wafted alongside of them, Lily wished; had she only pitched her easel a

    yard or two closer to him; a man, any man, would staunch this effusion,

    would stop these lamentations. A woman, she had provoked this horror;

    a woman, she should have known how to deal with it. It was immensely

    to her discredit, sexually, to stand there dumb. One said–what did

    one say?–Oh, Mr. Ramsay! Dear Mr. Ramsay! That was what that kind old

    lady who sketched, Mrs. Beckwith, would have said instantly, and

    rightly. But, no. They stood there, isolated from the rest of the

    world. His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and

    spread itself in pools at ther feet, and all she did, miserable sinner

    that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles,

    lest she should get wet. In complete silence she stood there, grasping

    her paint brush.

    Heaven could never be sufficiently praised! She heard sounds in the

    house. James and Cam must be coming. But Mr. Ramsay, as if he knew

    that his time ran short, exerted upon her solitary figure the immense

    pressure of his concentrated woe; his age; his frailty: his desolation;

    when suddenly, tossing his head impatiently, in his annoyance–for

    after all, what woman could resist him?–he noticed that his boot-laces

    were untied. Remarkable boots they were too, Lily thought, looking

    down at them: sculptured; colossal; like everything that Mr. Ramsay

    wore, from his frayed tie to his half-buttoned waistcoat, his own

    indisputably. She could see them walking to his room of their own

    accord, expressive in his absence of pathos, surliness, ill-temper,

    charm.

    “What beautiful boots!” she exclaimed. She was ashamed of herself. To

    praise his boots when he asked her to solace his soul; when he had

    shown her his bleeding hands, his lacerated heart, and asked her to

    pity them, then to say, cheerfully, “Ah, but what beautiful boots you

    wear!” deserved, she knew, and she looked up expecting to get it in one

    of his sudden roars of ill-temper complete annihilation.

    Instead, Mr. Ramsay smiled. His pall, his draperies, his infirmities

    fell from him. Ah, yes, he said, holding his foot up for her to look

    at, they were first-rate boots. There was only one man in England who

    could make boots like that. Boots are among the chief curses of

    mankind, he said. “Bootmakers make it their business,” he exclaimed,

    “to cripple and torture the human foot.” They are also the most

    obstinate and perverse of mankind. It had taken him the best part of

    his youth to get boots made as they should be made. He would have her

    observe (he lifted his right foot and then his left) that she had never

    seen boots made quite that shape before. They were made of the finest

    leather in the world, also. Most leather was mere brown paper and

    cardboard. He looked complacently at his foot, still held in the air.

    They had reached, she felt, a sunny island where peace dwelt, sanity

    reigned and the sun for ever shone, the blessed island of good boots.

    Her heart warmed to him. “Now let me see if you can tie a knot,” he

    said. He poohpoohed her feeble system. He showed her his own

    invention. Once you tied it, it never came undone. Three times he

    knotted her shoe; three times he unknotted it.

    Why, at this completely inappropriate moment, when he was stooping over

    her shoe, should she be so tormented with sympathy for him that, as she

    stooped too, the blood rushed to her face, and, thinking of her

    callousness (she had called him a play-actor) she felt her eyes swell

    and tingle with tears? Thus occupied he seemed to her a figure of

    infinite pathos. He tied knots. He bought boots. There was no helping

    Mr. Ramsay on the journey he was going. But now just as she wished to

    say something, could have said something, perhaps, here they were–Cam

    and James. They appeared on the terrace. They came, lagging, side by

    side, a serious, melancholy couple.

    But why was it like that that they came? She could not help feeling

    annoyed with them; they might have come more cheerfully; they might

    have given him what, now that they were off, she would not have the

    chance of giving him. For she felt a sudden emptiness; a frustration.

    Her feeling had come too late; there it was ready; but he no longer

    needed it. He had become a very distinguished, elderly man, who had no

    need of her whatsoever. She felt snubbed. He slung a knapsack round

    his shoulders. He shared out the parcels–there were a number of them,

    ill tied in brown paper. He sent Cam for a cloak. He had all the

    appearance of a leader making ready for an expedition. Then, wheeling

    about, he led the way with his firm military tread, in those wonderful

    boots, carrying brown paper parcels, down the path, his children

    following him. They looked, she thought, as if fate had devoted them

    to some stern enterprise, and they went to it, still young enough to be

    drawn acquiescent in their father’s wake, obediently, but with a pallor

    in their eyes which made her feel that they suffered something beyond

    their years in silence. So they passed the edge of the lawn, and it

    seemed to Lily that she watched a procession go, drawn on by some

    stress of common feeling which made it, faltering and flagging as it

    was, a little company bound together and strangely impressive to her.

    Politely, but very distantly, Mr. Ramsay raised his hand and saluted her

    as they passed.

    But what a face, she thought, immediately finding the sympathy which

    she had not been asked to give troubling her for expression. What had

    made it like that? Thinking, night after night, she supposed–about

    the reality of kitchen tables, she added, remembering the symbol which

    in her vagueness as to what Mr. Ramsay did think about Andrew had given

    her. (He had been killed by the splinter of a shell instantly, she

    bethought her.) The kitchen table was something visionary, austere;

    something bare, hard, not ornamental. There was no colour to it; it

    was all edges and angles; it was uncompromisingly plain. But Mr. Ramsay

    kept always his eyes fixed upon it, never allowed himself to be

    distracted or deluded, until his face became worn too and ascetic and

    partook of this unornamented beauty which so deeply impressed her.

    Then, she recalled (standing where he had left her, holding her brush),

    worries had fretted it–not so nobly. He must have had his doubts

    about that table, she supposed; whether the table was a real table;

    whether it was worth the time he gave to it; whether he was able after

    all to find it. He had had doubts, she felt, or he would have asked

    less of people. That was what they talked about late at night

    sometimes, she suspected; and then next day Mrs. Ramsay looked tired,

    and Lily flew into a rage with him over some absurd little thing. But

    now he had nobody to talk to about that table, or his boots, or his

    knots; and he was like a lion seeking whom he could devour, and his

    face had that touch of desperation, of exaggeration in it which alarmed

    her, and made her pull her skirts about her. And then, she recalled,

    there was that sudden revivification, that sudden flare (when she

    praised his boots), that sudden recovery of vitality and interest in

    ordinary human things, which too passed and changed (for he was always

    changing, and hid nothing) into that other final phase which was new to

    her and had, she owned, made herself ashamed of her own irritability,

    when it seemed as if he had shed worries and ambitions, and the hope of

    sympathy and the desire for praise, had entered some other region, was

    drawn on, as if by curiosity, in dumb colloquy, whether with himself or

    another, at the head of that little procession out of one’s range. An

    extraordinary face! The gate banged.

    4

    So they’re gone, she thought, sighing with relief and disappointment.

    Her sympathy seemed to be cast back on her, like a bramble sprung

    across her face. She felt curiously divided, as if one part of her

    were drawn out there–it was a still day, hazy; the Lighthouse looked

    this morning at an immense distance; the other had fixed itself

    doggedly, solidly, here on the lawn. She saw her canvas as if it had

    floated up and placed itself white and uncompromising directly before

    her. It seemed to rebuke her with its cold stare for all this hurry

    and agitation; this folly and waste of emotion; it drastically recalled

    her and spread through her mind first a peace, as her disorderly

    sensations (he had gone and she had been so sorry for him and she had

    said nothing) trooped off the field; and then, emptiness. She looked

    blankly at the canvas, with its uncompromising white stare; from the

    canvas to the garden. There was something (she stood screwing up her

    little Chinese eyes in her small puckered face), something she

    remembered in the relations of those lines cutting across, slicing

    down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green cave of blues and

    browns, which had stayed in her mind; which had tied a knot in her mind

    so that at odds and ends of time, involuntarily, as she walked along

    the Brompton Road,[142] as she brushed her hair, she found herself painting

    that picture, passing her eye over it, and untying the knot in

    imagination. But there was all the difference in the world between

    this planning airily away from the canvas and actually taking her brush

    and making the first mark.

    She had taken the wrong brush in her agitation at Mr. Ramsay’s presence,

    and her easel, rammed into the earth so nervously, was at the wrong

    angle. And now that she had got that right, and in so doing had subdued

    the impertinences and irrelevances that plucked her attention and made

    her remember how she was such and such a person, had such and such

    relations to people, she took her hand and raised her brush. For a

    moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the

    air. Where to begin?–that was the question at what point to make

    the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to

    innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in

    idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves

    shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer

    among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the

    risk must be run; the mark made.

    With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at

    the same time must hold herself back, she made her first quick decisive

    stroke. The brush descended. It flickered brown over the white canvas;

    it left a running mark. A second time she did it–a third time. And

    so pausing and so flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical

    movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes

    another, and all were related; and so, lightly and swiftly pausing,

    striking, she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which

    had no sooner settled there than they enclosed ( she felt it looming

    out at her) a space. Down in the hollow of one wave she saw the next

    wave towering higher and higher above her. For what could be more

    formidable than that space? Here she was again, she thought, stepping

    back to look at it, drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of

    community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient

    enemy of hers–this other thing, this truth, this reality, which

    suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances

    and commanded her attention. She was half unwilling, half reluctant.

    Why always be drawn out and haled away? Why not left in peace, to

    talk to Mr. Carmichael on the lawn? It was an exacting form of

    intercourse anyhow. Other worshipful objects were content with

    worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this

    form, were it only the shape of a white lamp-shade looming on a

    wicker table, roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight

    in which one was bound to be worsted. Always (it was in her nature, or

    in her sex, she did not know which) before she exchanged the fluidity

    of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of

    nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body,

    hesitating on some windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all

    the blasts of doubt. Why then did she do it? She looked at the

    canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be hung in the

    servants’ bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa.

    What was the good of doing it then, and she heard some voice saying she

    couldn’t paint, saying she couldn’t create, as if she were caught up in

    one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience

    forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any

    longer who originally spoke them.

    Can’t paint, can’t write, she murmured monotonously, anxiously

    considering what her plan of attack should be. For the mass loomed

    before her; it protruded; she felt it pressing on her eyeballs. Then,

    as if some juice necessary for the lubrication of her faculties were

    spontaneously squirted, she began precariously dipping among the blues

    and umbers, moving her brush hither and thither, but it was now heavier

    and went slower, as if it had fallen in with some rhythm which was

    dictated to her (she kept looking at the hedge, at the canvas) by what

    she rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with it on its current.

    Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as she

    lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality

    and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her

    mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings,

    and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring,

    hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and

    blues.

    Charles Tansley used to say that, she remembered, women can’t paint,

    can’t write. Coming up behind her, he had stood close beside her, a

    thing she hated, as she painted her on this very spot. “Shag tobacco,”[143]

    he said, “fivepence an ounce,” parading his poverty, his principles.

    (But the war had drawn the sting of her femininity. Poor devils, one

    thought, poor devils, of both sexes.)[144] He was always carrying a book

    about under his arm–a purple book. He “worked.” He sat, she

    remembered, working in a blaze of sun. At dinner he would sit right in

    the middle of the view. But after all, she reflected, there was the

    scene on the beach. One must remember that. It was a windy morning.

    They had all gone down to the beach. Mrs. Ramsay sat down and wrote

    letters by a rock. She wrote and wrote. “Oh,” she said, looking up at

    something floating in the sea, “is it a lobster pot? Is it an upturned

    boat?” She was so short-sighted that she could not see, and then

    Charles Tansley became as nice as he could possibly be. He began

    playing ducks and drakes. They chose little flat black stones and sent

    them skipping over the waves. Every now and then Mrs. Ramsay looked up

    over her spectacles and laughed at them. What they said she could not

    remember, but only she and Charles throwing stones and getting on very

    well all of a sudden and Mrs. Ramsay watching them. She was highly

    conscious of that. Mrs. Ramsay, she thought, stepping back and screwing

    up her eyes. (It must have altered the design a good deal when she was

    sitting on the step with James. There must have been a shadow.) When

    she thought of herself and Charles throwing ducks and drakes and of the

    whole scene on the beach, it seemed to depend somehow upon Mrs. Ramsay

    sitting under the rock, with a pad on her knee, writing letters. (She

    wrote innumerable letters, and sometimes the wind took them and she and

    Charles just saved a page from the sea.) But what a power was in the

    human soul! she thought. That woman sitting there writing under the

    rock resolved everything into simplicity; made these angers,

    irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and that

    and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite

    (she and Charles squabbling, sparring, had been silly and spiteful)

    something–this scene on the beach for example, this moment of

    friendship and liking–which survived, after all these years complete,

    so that she dipped into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and there

    it stayed in the mind affecting one almost like a work of art.

    “Like a work of art,” she repeated, looking from her canvas to the

    drawing-room steps and back again. She must rest for a moment. And,

    resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which

    traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general

    question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as

    these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood

    over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of

    life? That was all–a simple question; one that tended to close in on

    one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great

    revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily

    miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark;

    here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley

    and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay

    saying, “Life stand still here”; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment

    something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to

    make of the moment something permanent)–this was of the nature

    of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal

    passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves

    shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay

    said. “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” she repeated. She owed it all to her.

    All was silence. Nobody seemed yet to be stirring in the house. She

    looked at it there sleeping in the early sunlight with its windows

    green and blue with the reflected leaves. The faint thought she was

    thinking of Mrs. Ramsay seemed in consonance with this quiet house; this

    smoke; this fine early morning air. Faint and unreal, it was amazingly

    pure and exciting. She hoped nobody would open the window or come out

    of the house, but that she might be left alone to go on thinking, to go

    on painting. She turned to her canvas. But impelled by some curiosity,

    driven by the discomfort of the sympathy which she held undischarged,

    she walked a pace or so to the end of the lawn to see whether, down

    there on the beach, she could see that little company setting sail.

    Down there among the little boats which floated, some with their sails

    furled, some slowly, for it was very calm moving away, there was one

    rather apart from the others. The sail was even now being hoisted.

    She decided that there in that very distant and entirely silent little

    boat Mr. Ramsay was sitting with Cam and James. Now they had got the

    sail up; now after a little flagging and silence, she watched the boat

    take its way with deliberation past the other boats out to sea.

    5

    The sails flapped over their heads. The water chuckled and slapped the

    sides of the boat, which drowsed motionless in the sun. Now and then

    the sails rippled with a little breeze in them, but the ripple ran over

    them and ceased. The boat made no motion at all. Mr. Ramsay sat in the

    middle of the boat. He would be impatient in a moment, James thought,

    and Cam thought, looking at her father, who sat in the middle of the

    boat between them (James steered; Cam sat alone in the bow) with his

    legs tightly curled. He hated hanging about. Sure enough, after

    fidgeting a second or two, he said something sharp to Macalister’s boy,

    who got out his oars and began to row. But their father, they knew,

    would never be content until they were flying along. He would keep

    looking for a breeze, fidgeting, saying things under his breath, which

    Macalister and and Macalister’s boy would overhear, and they would both

    be made horribly uncomfortable. He had made them come. He had forced

    them to come. In their anger they hoped that the breeze would never

    rise, that he might be thwarted in every possible way, since he had

    forced them to come against their wills.

    All the way down to the beach they had lagged behind together, though

    he bade them “Walk up, walk up,” without speaking. Their heads were

    bent down, their heads were pressed down by some remorseless gale.

    Speak to him they could not. They must come; they must follow. They

    must walk behind him carrying brown paper parcels. But they vowed, in

    silence, as they walked, to stand by each other and carry out the great

    compact–to resist tyranny to the death. So there they would sit, one

    at one end of the boat, one at the other, in silence. They would say

    nothing, only look at him now and then where he sat with his legs

    twisted, frowning and fidgeting, and pishing and pshawing and muttering

    things to himself, and waiting impatiently for a breeze. And they

    hoped it would be calm. They hoped he would be thwarted. They hoped

    the whole expedition would fail, and they would have to put back, with

    their parcels, to the beach.

    But now, when Macalister’s boy had rowed a little way out, the sails

    slowly swung round, the boat quickened itself, flattened itself, and

    shot off. Instantly, as if some great strain had been relieved, Mr.

    Ramsay uncurled his legs, took out his tobacco pouch, handed it with a

    little grunt to Macalister, and felt, they knew, for all they suffered,

    perfectly content. Now they would sail on for hours like this, and Mr.

    Ramsay would ask old Macalister a question–about the great storm

    last winter probably–and old Macalister would answer it, and they

    would puff their pipes together, and Macalister would take a tarry rope

    in his fingers, tying or untying some knot, and the boy would fish, and

    never say a word to any one. James would be forced to keep his eye all

    the time on the sail. For if he forgot, then the sail puckered and

    shivered, and the boat slackened, and Mr. Ramsay would say sharply,

    “Look out! Look out!” and old Macalister would turn slowly on his

    seat. So they heard Mr. Ramsay asking some question about the great

    storm at Christmas. “She comes driving round the point,” old

    Macalister said, describing the great storm last Christmas, when ten

    ships had been driven into the bay for shelter, and he had seen “one

    there, one there, one there” (he pointed slowly round the bay. Mr.

    Ramsay followed him, turning his head). He had seen four men clinging

    to the mast. Then she was gone. “And at last we shoved her off,” he

    went on (but in their anger and their silence they only caught a word

    here and there, sitting at opposite ends of the boat, united by their

    compact to fight tyranny to the death). At last they had shoved

    her off, they had launched the lifeboat, and they had got her out

    past the point–Macalister told the story; and though they only

    caught a word here and there, they were conscious all the time of their

    father–how he leant forward, how he brought his voice into tune with

    Macalister’s voice; how, puffing at his pipe, and looking there and

    there where Macalister pointed, he relished the thought of the storm

    and the dark night and the fishermen striving there. He liked that men

    should labour and sweat on the windy beach at night; pitting muscle and

    brain against the waves and the wind; he liked men to work like that,

    and women to keep house, and sit beside sleeping children indoors,

    while men were drowned, out there in a storm. So James could tell, so

    Cam could tell (they looked at him, they looked at each other), from

    his toss and his vigilance and the ring in his voice, and the little

    tinge of Scottish accent which came into his voice, making him seem

    like a peasant himself, as he questioned Macalister about the eleven

    ships that had been driven into the bay in a storm. Three had sunk.

    He looked proudly where Macalister pointed; and Cam thought, feeling

    proud of him without knowing quite why, had he been there he would have

    launched the lifeboat, he would have reached the wreck, Cam thought.

    He was so brave, he was so adventurous, Cam thought. But she

    remembered. There was the compact; to resist tyranny to the death.

    Their grievance weighed them down. They had been forced; they had been

    bidden. He had borne them down once more with his gloom and his

    authority, making them do his bidding, on this fine morning, come,

    because he wished it, carrying these parcels, to the Lighthouse; take

    part in these rites he went through for his own pleasure in memory of

    dead people, which they hated, so that they lagged after him, all

    the pleasure of the day was spoilt.

    Yes, the breeze was freshening. The boat was leaning, the water was

    sliced sharply and fell away in green cascades, in bubbles, in

    cataracts. Cam looked down into the foam, into the sea with all its

    treasure in it, and its speed hypnotised her, and the tie between her

    and James sagged a little. It slackened a little. She began to think,

    How fast it goes. Where are we going? and the movement hypnotised her,

    while James, with his eye fixed on the sail and on the horizon, steered

    grimly. But he began to think as he steered that he might escape; he

    might be quit of it all. They might land somewhere; and be free then.

    Both of them, looking at each other for a moment, had a sense of escape

    and exaltation, what with the speed and the change. But the breeze

    bred in Mr. Ramsay too the same excitement, and, as old Macalister

    turned to fling his line overboard, he cried out aloud,

    “We perished,” and then again, “each alone.”[145] And then with his usual

    spasm of repentance or shyness, pulled himself up, and waved his hand

    towards the shore.

    “See the little house,” he said pointing, wishing Cam to look. She

    raised herself reluctantly and looked. But which was it? She could no

    longer make out, there on the hillside, which was their house. All

    looked distant and peaceful and strange. The shore seemed refined, far

    away, unreal. Already the little distance they had sailed had put them

    far from it and given it the changed look, the composed look, of

    something receding in which one has no longer any part. Which was

    their house? She could not see it.

    “But I beneath a rougher sea,”[146] Mr. Ramsay murmured. He had found the

    house and so seeing it, he had also seen himself there; he had seen

    himself walking on the terrace, alone. He was walking up and down

    between the urns; and he seemed to himself very old and bowed. Sitting

    in the boat, he bowed, he crouched himself, acting instantly his part–

    the part of a desolate man, widowed, bereft; and so called up before

    him in hosts people sympathising with him; staged for himself as he sat

    in the boat, a little drama; which required of him decrepitude and

    exhaustion and sorrow (he raised his hands and looked at the thinness

    of them, to confirm his dream) and then there was given him in

    abundance women’s sympathy, and he imagined how they would soothe him

    and sympathise with him, and so getting in his dream some reflection of

    the exquisite pleasure women’s sympathy was to him, he sighed and said

    gently and mournfully:

    But I beneath a rougher sea

    Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he,

    so that the mournful words were heard quite clearly by them all. Cam

    half started on her seat. It shocked her–it outraged her. The

    movement roused her father; and he shuddered, and broke off,

    exclaiming: “Look! Look!” so urgently that James also turned his head

    to look over his shoulder at the island. They all looked. They looked

    at the island.

    But Cam could see nothing. She was thinking how all those paths and

    the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were

    gone: were rubbed out; were past; were unreal, and now this was real;

    the boat and the sail with its patch; Macalister with his earrings; the

    noise of the waves–all this was real. Thinking this, she was

    murmuring to herself, “We perished, each alone,”[147] for her father’s words

    broke and broke again in her mind, when her father, seeing her gazing

    so vaguely, began to tease her. Didn’t she know the points of the

    compass? he asked. Didn’t she know the North from the South? Did she

    really think they lived right out there? And he pointed again, and

    showed her where their house was, there, by those trees. He wished she

    would try to be more accurate, he said: “Tell me–which is East, which

    is West?” he said, half laughing at her, half scolding her, for he

    could not understand the state of mind of any one, not absolutely

    imbecile, who did not know the points of the compass. Yet she did not

    know. And seeing her gazing, with her vague, now rather frightened,

    eyes fixed where no house was Mr. Ramsay forgot his dream; how he walked

    up and down between the urns on the terrace; how the arms were

    stretched out to him. He thought, women are always like that; the

    vagueness of their minds is hopeless; it was a thing he had never been

    able to understand; but so it was. It had been so with her–his wife.

    They could not keep anything clearly fixed in their minds. But he had

    been wrong to be angry with her; moreover, did he not rather like this

    vagueness in women? It was part of their extraordinary charm. I will

    make her smile at me, he thought. She looks frightened. She was so

    silent. He clutched his fingers, and determined that his voice and his

    face and all the quick expressive gestures which had been at his

    command making people pity him and praise him all these years should

    subdue themselves. He would make her smile at him. He would find some

    simple easy thing to say to her. But what? For, wrapped up in his

    work as he was, he forgot the sort of thing one said. There was a

    puppy. They had a puppy. Who was looking after the puppy today? he

    asked. Yes, thought James pitilessly, seeing his sister’s head against

    the sail, now she will give way. I shall be left to fight the tyrant

    alone. The compact would be left to him to carry out. Cam would never

    resist tyranny to the death, he thought grimly, watching her face, sad,

    sulky, yielding. And as sometimes happens when a cloud falls on a

    green hillside and gravity descends and there among all the surrounding

    hills is gloom and sorrow, and it seems as if the hills themselves

    must ponder the fate of the clouded, the darkened, either in pity,

    or maliciously rejoicing in her dismay: so Cam now felt herself

    overcast, as she sat there among calm, resolute people and wondered

    how to answer her father about the puppy; how to resist his

    entreaty–forgive me, care for me; while James the lawgiver, with the

    tablets of eternal wisdom laid open on his knee (his hand on the tiller

    had become symbolical to her), said, Resist him. Fight him. He said

    so rightly; justly. For they must fight tyranny to the death, she

    thought. Of all human qualities she reverenced justice most. Her

    brother was most god-like, her father most suppliant. And to which did

    she yield, she thought, sitting between them, gazing at the shore whose

    points were all unknown to her, and thinking how the lawn and the

    terrace and the house were smoothed away now and peace dwelt there.

    “Jasper,” she said sullenly. He’d look after the puppy.

    And what was she going to call him? her father persisted. He had had

    a dog when he was a little boy, called Frisk. She’ll give way, James

    thought, as he watched a look come upon her face, a look he remembered.

    They look down he thought, at their knitting or something. Then

    suddenly they look up. There was a flash of blue, he remembered, and

    then somebody sitting with him laughed, surrendered, and he was very

    angry. It must have been his mother, he thought, sitting on a low

    chair, with his father standing over her. He began to search among the

    infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon

    leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents,

    sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms

    tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea, how a man had marched up and

    down and stopped dead, upright, over them. Meanwhile, he noticed, Cam

    dabbled her fingers in the water, and stared at the shore and said

    nothing. No, she won’t give way, he thought; she’s different, he

    thought. Well, if Cam would not answer him, he would not bother her Mr.

    Ramsay decided, feeling in his pocket for a book. But she would answer

    him; she wished, passionately, to move some obstacle that lay upon her

    tongue and to say, Oh, yes, Frisk. I’ll call him Frisk. She wanted

    even to say, Was that the dog that found its way over the moor alone?

    But try as she might, she could think of nothing to say like that,

    fierce and loyal to the compact, yet passing on to her father,

    unsuspected by James, a private token of the love she felt for him.

    For she thought, dabbling her hand (and now Macalister’s boy had caught

    a mackerel, and it lay kicking on the floor, with blood on its gills)

    for she thought, looking at James who kept his eyes dispassionately on

    the sail, or glanced now and then for a second at the horizon, you’re

    not exposed to it, to this pressure and division of feeling, this

    extraordinary temptation. Her father was feeling in his pockets; in

    another second, he would have found his book. For no one attracted her

    more; his hands were beautiful, and his feet, and his voice, and his

    words, and his haste, and his temper, and his oddity, and his passion,

    and his saying straight out before every one, we perish, each alone,

    and his remoteness. (He had opened his book.) But what remained

    intolerable, she thought, sitting upright, and watching Macalister’s

    boy tug the hook out of the gills of another fish, was that crass

    blindness and tyranny of his which had poisoned her childhood and

    raised bitter storms, so that even now she woke in the night trembling

    with rage and remembered some command of his; some insolence: “Do

    this,” “Do that,” his dominance: his “Submit to me.”

    So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore,

    wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen

    asleep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go

    like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.

    6

    Yes, that is their boat, Lily Briscoe decided, standing on the edge of

    the lawn. It was the boat with greyish-brown sails, which she saw now

    flatten itself upon the water and shoot off across the bay. There he

    sits, she thought, and the children are quite silent still. And she

    could not reach him either. The sympathy she had not given him weighed

    her down. It made it difficult for her to paint.

    She had always found him difficult. She never had been able to praise

    him to his face, she remembered. And that reduced their relationship to

    something neutral, without that element of sex in it which made his

    manner to Minta so gallant, almost gay. He would pick a flower for

    her, lend her his books. But could he believe that Minta read them?

    She dragged them about the garden, sticking in leaves to mark the

    place.

    “D’you remember, Mr. Carmichael?” she was inclined to ask, looking at

    the old man. But he had pulled his hat half over his forehead; he was

    asleep, or he was dreaming, or he was lying there catching words, she

    supposed.

    “D’you remember?” she felt inclined to ask him as she passed him,

    thinking again of Mrs. Ramsay on the beach; the cask bobbing up and

    down; and the pages flying. Why, after all these years had that

    survived, ringed round, lit up, visible to the last detail, with all

    before it blank and all after it blank, for miles and miles?

    “Is it a boat? Is it a cork?” she would say, Lily repeated, turning

    back, reluctantly again, to her canvas. Heaven be praised for it, the

    problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It

    glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that

    weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and

    evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a

    butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with

    bolts of iron. It was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath;

    and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.[148] And she began

    to lay on a red, a grey, and she began to model her way into the hollow

    there. At the same time, she seemed to be sitting beside Mrs. Ramsay on

    the beach.

    “Is it a boat? Is it a cask?” Mrs. Ramsay said. And she began hunting

    round for her spectacles. And she sat, having found them, silent,

    looking out to sea. And Lily, painting steadily, felt as if a door had

    opened, and one went in and stood gazing silently about in a high

    cathedral-like place, very dark, very solemn. Shouts came from a world

    far away. Steamers vanished in stalks of smoke on the horizon.

    Charles threw stones and sent them skipping.

    Mrs. Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence,

    uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human

    relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at

    the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren’t things spoilt then,

    Mrs. Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this

    silence by her side) by saying them? Aren’t we more expressive thus?

    The moment at least seemed extraordinarily fertile. She rammed a

    little hole in the sand and covered it up, by way of burying in it the

    perfection of the moment. It was like a drop of silver in which one

    dipped and illumined the darkness of the past.

    Lily stepped back to get her canvas–so–into perspective. It was an

    odd road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went,

    further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly

    alone, over the sea. And as she dipped into the blue paint, she

    dipped too into the past there. Now Mrs. Ramsay got up, she

    remembered. It was time to go back to the house–time for

    luncheon. And they all walked up from the beach together, she walking

    behind with William Bankes, and there was Minta in front of them with a

    hole in her stocking. How that little round hole of pink heel seemed

    to flaunt itself before them! How William Bankes deplored it, without,

    so far as she could remember, saying anything about it! It meant to

    him the annihilation of womanhood, and dirt and disorder, and servants

    leaving and beds not made at mid-day–all the things he most abhorred.

    He had a way of shuddering and spreading his fingers out as if to cover

    an unsightly object which he did now–holding his hand in front of

    him. And Minta walked on ahead, and presumably Paul met her and she

    went off with Paul in the garden.

    The Rayleys, thought Lily Briscoe, squeezing her tube of green paint.

    She collected her impressions of the Rayleys. Their lives appeared to

    her in a series of scenes; one, on the staircase at dawn. Paul had

    come in and gone to bed early; Minta was late. There was Minta,

    wreathed, tinted, garish on the stairs about three o’clock in the

    morning. Paul came out in his pyjamas carrying a poker in case of

    burglars. Minta was eating a sandwich, standing half-way up by a

    window, in the cadaverous early morning light, and the carpet had a

    hole in it. But what did they say? Lily asked herself, as if by

    looking she could hear them. Minta went on eating her sandwich,

    annoyingly, while he spoke something violent, abusing her, in a mutter

    so as not to wake the children, the two little boys. He was withered,

    drawn; she flamboyant, careless. For things had worked loose after the

    first year or so; the marriage had turned out rather badly.

    And this, Lily thought, taking the green paint on her brush, this

    making up scenes about them, is what we call “knowing” people,

    “thinking” of them, “being fond” of them! Not a word of it was true;

    she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the same. She

    went on tunnelling her way into her picture, into the past.

    Another time, Paul said he “played chess in coffee-houses.” She had

    built up a whole structure of imagination on that saying too. She

    remembered how, as he said it, she thought how he rang up the servant,

    and she said, “Mrs. Rayley’s out, sir,” and he decided that he would not

    come home either. She saw him sitting in the corner of some lugubrious

    place where the smoke attached itself to the red plush seats, and the

    waitresses got to know you, and he played chess with a little man who

    was in the tea trade and lived at Surbiton,[149] but that was all Paul knew

    about him. And then Minta was out when he came home and then there was

    that scene on the stairs, when he got the poker in case of burglars (no

    doubt to frighten her too) and spoke so bitterly, saying she had ruined

    his life. At any rate when she went down to see them at a cottage near

    Rickmansworth,[150] things were horribly strained. Paul took her down the

    garden to look at the Belgian hares which he bred, and Minta followed

    them, singing, and put her bare arm on his shoulder, lest he should

    tell her anything.

    Minta was bored by hares, Lily thought. But Minta never gave herself

    away. She never said things like that about playing chess in coffee-

    houses. She was far too conscious, far too wary. But to go on with

    their story–they had got through the dangerous stage by now. She had

    been staying with them last summer some time and the car broke down and

    Minta had to hand him his tools. He sat on the road mending the car,

    and it was the way she gave him the tools–business-like,

    straightforward, friendly–that proved it was all right now. They were

    “in love” no longer; no, he had taken up with another woman, a serious

    woman, with her hair in a plait and a case in her hand (Minta had

    described her gratefully, almost admiringly), who went to meetings and

    shared Paul’s views (they had got more and more pronounced) about the

    taxation of land values and a capital levy. Far from breaking up the

    marriage, that alliance had righted it. They were excellent friends,

    obviously, as he sat on the road and she handed him his tools.

    So that was the story of the Rayleys, Lily thought. She imagined

    herself telling it to Mrs. Ramsay, who would be full of curiosity to

    know what had become of the Rayleys. She would feel a little

    triumphant, telling Mrs. Ramsay that the marriage had not been a

    success.

    But the dead, thought Lily, encountering some obstacle in her design

    which made her pause and ponder, stepping back a foot or so, oh, the

    dead! she murmured, one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had

    even a little contempt for them. They are at our mercy. Mrs. Ramsay

    has faded and gone, she thought. We can over-ride her wishes, improve

    away her limited, old-fashioned ideas. She recedes further and further

    from us. Mockingly she seemed to see her there at the end of the

    corridor of years saying, of all incongruous things, “Marry, marry!”

    (sitting very upright early in the morning with the birds beginning to

    cheep in the garden outside). And one would have to say to her, It has

    all gone against your wishes. They’re happy like that; I’m happy like

    this. Life has changed completely. At that all her being, even her

    beauty, became for a moment, dusty and out of date. For a moment Lily,

    standing there, with the sun hot on her back, summing up the Rayleys,

    triumphed over Mrs. Ramsay, who would never know how Paul went to

    coffee-houses and had a mistress; how he sat on the ground and Minta

    handed him his tools; how she stood here painting, had never married,

    not even William Bankes.

    Mrs. Ramsay had planned it. Perhaps, had she lived, she would have

    compelled it. Already that summer he was “the kindest of men.” He was

    “the first scientist of his age, my husband says.” He was also “poor

    William–it makes me so unhappy, when I go to see him, to find nothing

    nice in his house–no one to arrange the flowers.” So they were sent

    for walks together, and she was told, with that faint touch of irony

    that made Mrs. Ramsay slip through one’s fingers, that she had a

    scientific mind; she liked flowers; she was so exact. What was this

    mania of hers for marriage? Lily wondered, stepping to and fro from

    her easel.

    (Suddenly, as suddenly as a star slides in the sky, a reddish light

    seemed to burn in her mind, covering Paul Rayley, issuing from him. It

    rose like a fire sent up in token of some celebration by savages on a

    distant beach. She heard the roar and the crackle. The whole sea for

    miles round ran red and gold. Some winey smell mixed with it and

    intoxicated her, for she felt again her own headlong desire to throw

    herself off the cliff and be drowned looking for a pearl brooch on a

    beach. And the roar and the crackle repelled her with fear and

    disgust, as if while she saw its splendour and power she saw too how it

    fed on the treasure of the house, greedily, disgustingly, and she

    loathed it. But for a sight, for a glory it surpassed everything in

    her experience, and burnt year after year like a signal fire on a

    desert island at the edge of the sea, and one had only to say “in love”

    and instantly, as happened now, up rose Paul’s fire again. And it sank

    and she said to herself, laughing, “The Rayleys”; how Paul went to

    coffee-houses and played chess.)

    She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth though, she thought. She

    had been looking at the table-cloth, and it had flashed upon her that

    she would move the tree to the middle, and need never marry anybody,

    and she had felt an enormous exultation. She had felt, now she could

    stand up to Mrs. Ramsay–a tribute to the astonishing power that Mrs.

    Ramsay had over one. Do this, she said, and one did it. Even her

    shadow at the window with James was full of authority. She remembered

    how William Bankes had been shocked by her neglect of the significance

    of mother and son. Did she not admire their beauty? he said. But

    William, she remembered, had listened to her with his wise child’s eyes

    when she explained how it was not irreverence: how a light there needed

    a shadow there and so on. She did not intend to disparage a subject

    which, they agreed, Raphael[151] had treated divinely. She was not cynical.

    Quite the contrary. Thanks to his scientific mind he understood–a

    proof of disinterested intelligence which had pleased her and comforted

    her enormously. One could talk of painting then seriously to a man.

    Indeed, his friendship had been one of the pleasures of her life. She

    loved William Bankes.

    They went to Hampton Court[152] and he always left her, like the perfect

    gentleman he was, plenty of time to wash her hands,[153] while he strolled

    by the river. That was typical of their relationship. Many things were

    left unsaid. Then they strolled through the courtyards, and admired,

    summer after summer, the proportions and the flowers, and he would tell

    her things, about perspective, about architecture, as they walked, and

    he would stop to look at a tree, or the view over the lake, and admire

    a child–(it was his great grief–he had no daughter) in the vague aloof

    way that was natural to a man who spent spent so much time in

    laboratories that the world when he came out seemed to dazzle him,

    so that he walked slowly, lifted his hand to screen his eyes and

    paused, with his head thrown back, merely to breathe the air. Then

    he would tell her how his housekeeper was on her holiday; he must

    buy a new carpet for the staircase. Perhaps she would go with him to

    buy a new carpet for the staircase. And once something led him to talk

    about the Ramsays and he had said how when he first saw her she had

    been wearing a grey hat; she was not more than nineteen or twenty. She

    was astonishingly beautiful. There he stood looking down the avenue at

    Hampton Court as if he could see her there among the fountains.

    She looked now at the drawing-room step. She saw, through William’s

    eyes, the shape of a woman, peaceful and silent, with downcast eyes.

    She sat musing, pondering (she was in grey that day, Lily thought).

    Her eyes were bent. She would never lift them. Yes, thought Lily,

    looking intently, I must have seen her look like that, but not in grey;

    nor so still, nor so young, nor so peaceful. The figure came readily

    enough. She was astonishingly beautiful, as William said. But beauty

    was not everything. Beauty had this penalty–it came too readily, came

    too completely. It stilled life–froze it. One forgot the little

    agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or

    shadow, which made the face unrecognisable for a moment and yet added a

    quality one saw for ever after. It was simpler to smooth that all out

    under the cover of beauty. But what was the look she had, Lily

    wondered, when she clapped her deer-stalker’s hat on her head, or ran

    across the grass, or scolded Kennedy, the gardener? Who could tell

    her? Who could help her?

    Against her will she had come to the surface, and found herself half

    out of the picture, looking, little dazedly, as if at unreal things, at

    Mr. Carmichael. He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his

    paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged

    with existence. His book had fallen on to the grass.

    She wanted to go straight up to him and say, “Mr. Carmichael!” Then he

    would look up benevolently as always, from his smoky vague green eyes.

    But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them.

    And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that

    broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. “About life,

    about death; about Mrs. Ramsay”–no, she thought, one could say

    nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark.

    Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then

    one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like

    most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the

    eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express

    in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?

    (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily

    empty.) It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind. The physical

    sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become

    suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up

    her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not

    to have–to want and want–how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again

    and again! Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! she called out silently, to that essence

    which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that woman in

    grey, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then having gone, come

    back again. It had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air,

    nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time

    of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand

    out and wrung the heart thus. Suddenly, the empty drawing-room steps,

    the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the

    whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques

    flourishing round a centre of complete emptiness.

    “What does it mean? How do you explain it all?” she wanted to say,

    turning to Mr. Carmichael again. For the whole world seemed to have

    dissolved in this early morning hour into a pool of thought, a deep

    basin of reality, and one could almost fancy that had Mr. Carmichael

    spoken, for instance, a little tear would have rent the surface pool.

    And then? Something would emerge. A hand would be shoved up, a blade

    would be flashed. It was nonsense of course.

    A curious notion came to her that he did after all hear the things she

    could not say. He was an inscrutable old man, with the yellow stain on

    his beard, and his poetry, and his puzzles, sailing serenely through a

    world which satisfied all his wants, so that she thought he had only to

    put down his hand where he lay on the lawn to fish up anything he

    wanted. She looked at her picture. That would have been his answer,

    presumably–how “you” and “I” and “she” pass and vanish; nothing stays;

    all changes; but not words, not paint. Yet it would be hung in the

    attics, she thought; it would be rolled up and flung under a sofa; yet

    even so, even of a picture like that, it was true. One might say, even

    of this scrawl, not of that actual picture, perhaps, but of what it

    attempted, that it “remained for ever,” she was going to say, or, for

    the words spoken sounded even to herself, too boastful, to hint,

    wordlessly; when, looking at the picture, she was surprised to find

    that she could not see it. Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did

    not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of

    her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect

    control of herself–Oh, yes!–in every other way. Was she crying then

    for Mrs. Ramsay, without being aware of any unhappiness? She addressed

    old Mr. Carmichael again. What was it then? What did it mean? Could

    things thrust their hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the

    fist grasp? Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of

    the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from

    the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly

    people, that this was life?–startling, unexpected, unknown? For one

    moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and

    demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so

    inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings

    from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll

    itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into

    shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. “Mrs.

    Ramsay!” she said aloud, “Mrs. Ramsay!” The tears ran down her face.

    7

    [Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side

    to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was

    thrown back into the sea.]

    8

    “Mrs. Ramsay!” Lily cried, “Mrs. Ramsay!” But nothing happened. The pain

    increased. That anguish could reduce one to such a pitch of

    imbecility, she thought! Anyhow the old man had not heard her. He

    remained benignant, calm–if one chose to think it, sublime. Heaven be

    praised, no one had heard her cry that ignominious cry, stop pain,

    stop! She had not obviously taken leave of her senses. No one had

    seen her step off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation.

    She remained a skimpy old maid, holding a paint-brush.

    And now slowly the pain of the want, and the bitter anger (to be called

    back, just as she thought she would never feel sorrow for Mrs. Ramsay

    again. Had she missed her among the coffee cups at breakfast? not in

    the least) lessened; and of their anguish left, as antidote, a relief

    that was balm in itself, and also, but more mysteriously, a sense of

    some one there, of Mrs. Ramsay, relieved for a moment of the weight that

    the world had put on her, staying lightly by her side and then (for

    this was Mrs. Ramsay in all her beauty) raising to her forehead a wreath

    of white flowers with which she went. Lily squeezed her tubes again.

    She attacked that problem of the hedge. It was strange how clearly she

    saw her, stepping with her usual quickness across fields among whose

    folds, purplish and soft, among whose flowers, hyacinth or lilies, she

    vanished. It was some trick of the painter’s eye. For days after she

    had heard of her death she had seen her thus, putting her wreath to her

    forehead and going unquestioningly with her companion, a shade across

    the fields. The sight, the phrase, had its power to console. Wherever

    she happened to be, painting, here, in the country or in London, the

    vision would come to her, and her eyes, half closing, sought something

    to base her vision on. She looked down the railway carriage, the

    omnibus; took a line from shoulder or cheek; looked at the windows

    opposite; at Piccadilly, lamp-strung in the evening. All had been part

    of the fields of death. But always something–it might be a face, a

    voice, a paper boy crying Standard, News[154]–thrust through, snubbed her,

    waked her, required and got in the end an effort of attention, so that

    the vision must be perpetually remade. Now again, moved as she was by

    some instinctive need of distance and blue, she looked at the bay

    beneath her, making hillocks of the blue bars of the waves, and

    stony fields of the purpler spaces, again she was roused as usual by

    something incongruous. There was a brown spot in the middle of the

    bay. It was a boat. Yes, she realised that after a second. But whose

    boat? Mr. Ramsay’s boat, she replied. Mr. Ramsay; the man who had

    marched past her, with his hand raised, aloof, at the head of a

    procession, in his beautiful boots, asking her for sympathy, which

    she had refused. The boat was now half way across the bay.

    So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that

    the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up

    in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea. A steamer far

    out at sea had drawn in the air a great scroll of smoke which stayed

    there curving and circling decoratively, as if the air were a fine

    gauze which held things and kept them softly in its mesh, only gently

    swaying them this way and that. And as happens sometimes when the

    weather is very fine, the cliffs looked as if they were conscious of

    the ships, and the ships looked as if they were conscious of the

    cliffs, as if they signalled to each other some message of their own.

    For sometimes quite close to the shore, the Lighthouse looked this

    morning in the haze an enormous distance away.

    “Where are they now?” Lily thought, looking out to sea. Where was he,

    that very old man who had gone past her silently, holding a brown paper

    parcel under his arm? The boat was in the middle of the bay.

    9

    They don’t feel a thing there, Cam thought, looking at the shore,

    which, rising and falling, became steadily more distant and more

    peaceful. Her hand cut a trail in the sea, as her mind made the green

    swirls and streaks into patterns and, numbed and shrouded, wandered in

    imagination in that underworld of waters where the pearls stuck in

    clusters to white sprays, where in the green light a change came over

    one’s entire mind and one’s body shone half transparent enveloped in a

    green cloak.

    Then the eddy slackened round her hand. The rush of the water ceased;

    the world became full of little creaking and squeaking sounds. One

    heard the waves breaking and flapping against the side of the boat as

    if they were anchored in harbour. Everything became very close to one.

    For the sail, upon which James had his eyes fixed until it had become

    to him like a person whom he knew, sagged entirely; there they came to

    a stop, flapping about waiting for a breeze, in the hot sun, miles from

    shore, miles from the Lighthouse. Everything in the whole world seemed

    to stand still. The Lighthouse became immovable, and the line of the

    distant shore became fixed. The sun grew hotter and everybody seemed

    to come very close together and to feel each other’s presence, which

    they had almost forgotten. Macalister’s fishing line went plumb down

    into the sea. But Mr. Ramsay went on reading with his legs curled under

    him.

    He was reading a little shiny book with covers mottled like a plover’s

    egg. Now and again, as they hung about in that horrid calm, he turned

    a page. And James felt that each page was turned with a peculiar

    gesture aimed at him; now assertively, now commandingly; now with the

    intention of making people pity him; and all the time, as his father

    read and turned one after another of those little pages, James kept

    dreading the moment when he would look up and speak sharply to him

    about something or other. Why were they lagging about here? he would

    demand, or something quite unreasonable like that. And if he does,

    James thought, then I shall take a knife and strike him to the heart.

    He had always kept this old symbol of taking a knife and striking

    his father to the heart. Only now, as he grew older, and sat

    staring at his father in an impotent rage, it was not him, that old

    man reading, whom he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that

    descended on him–without his knowing it perhaps: that fierce sudden

    black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and hard,

    that struck and struck at you (he could feel the beak on his bare legs,

    where it had struck when he was a child) and then made off, and there

    he was again, an old man, very sad, reading his book. That he would

    kill, that he would strike to the heart. Whatever he did–(and he

    might do anything, he felt, looking at the Lighthouse and the distant

    shore) whether he was in a business, in a bank, a barrister, a man at

    the head of some enterprise, that he would fight, that he would track

    down and stamp out–tyranny, despotism, he called it–making people

    do what they did not want to do, cutting off their right to speak. How

    could any of them say, But I won’t, when he said, Come to the

    Lighthouse. Do this. Fetch me that. The black wings spread, and the

    hard beak tore. And then next moment, there he sat reading his book;

    and he might look up–one never knew–quite reasonably. He might talk

    to the Macalisters. He might be pressing a sovereign into some frozen

    old woman’s hand in the street, James thought, and he might be shouting

    out at some fisherman’s sports; he might be waving his arms in the air

    with excitement. Or he might sit at the head of the table dead silent

    from one end of dinner to the other. Yes, thought James, while the

    boat slapped and dawdled there in the hot sun; there was a waste of

    snow and rock very lonely and austere; and there he had come to feel,

    quite often lately, when his father said something or did something

    which surprised the others, there were two pairs of footprints only;

    his own and his father’s. They alone knew each other. What then was

    this terror, this hatred?[155] Turning back among the many leaves

    which the past had folded in him, peering into the heart of that

    forest where light and shade so chequer each other that all shape

    is distorted, and one blunders, now with the sun in one’s eyes,

    now with a dark shadow, he sought an image to cool and detach and round

    off his feeling in a concrete shape. Suppose then that as a child

    sitting helpless in a perambulator, or on some one’s knee, he had seen

    a waggon crush ignorantly and innocently, some one’s foot? Suppose he

    had seen the foot first, in the grass, smooth, and whole; then the

    wheel; and the same foot, purple, crushed. But the wheel was innocent.

    So now, when his father came striding down the passage knocking them up

    early in the morning to go to the Lighthouse down it came over his

    foot, over Cam’s foot, over anybody’s foot. One sat and watched it.

    But whose foot was he thinking of, and in what garden did all this

    happen? For one had settings for these scenes; trees that grew there;

    flowers; a certain light; a few figures. Everything tended to set

    itself in a garden where there was none of this gloom. None of this

    throwing of hands about; people spoke in an ordinary tone of voice.

    They went in and out all day long. There was an old woman gossiping in

    the kitchen; and the blinds were sucked in and out by the breeze; all

    was blowing, all was growing; and over all those plates and bowls and

    tall brandishing red and yellow flowers a very thin yellow veil would

    be drawn, like a vine leaf, at night. Things became stiller and darker

    at night. But the leaf-like veil was so fine, that lights lifted it,

    voices crinkled it; he could see through it a figure stooping, hear,

    coming close, going away, some dress rustling, some chain tinkling.

    It was in this world that the wheel went over the person’s foot.

    Something, he remembered, stayed flourished up in the air, something

    arid and sharp descended even there, like a blade, a scimitar, smiting

    through the leaves and flowers even of that happy world and making it

    shrivel and fall.

    “It will rain,” he remembered his father saying. “You won’t be able to

    go to the Lighthouse.”

    The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow

    eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now–

    James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks;

    the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with

    black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing

    spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it?

    No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one

    thing. The other Lighthouse was true too. It was sometimes hardly to

    be seen across the bay. In the evening one looked up and saw the eye

    opening and shutting and the light seemed to reach them in that airy

    sunny garden where they sat.

    But he pulled himself up. Whenever he said “they” or “a person,” and

    then began hearing the rustle of some one coming, the tinkle of some

    one going, he became extremely sensitive to the presence of whoever

    might be in the room. It was his father now. The strain was acute.

    For in one moment if there was no breeze, his father would slap the

    covers of his book together, and say: “What’s happening now? What are

    we dawdling about here for, eh?” as, once before he had brought his

    blade down among them on the terrace and she had gone stiff all over,

    and if there had been an axe handy, a knife, or anything with a sharp

    point he would have seized it and struck his father through the heart.

    She had gone stiff all over, and then, her arm slackening, so that he

    felt she listened to him no longer, she had risen somehow and gone away

    and left him there, impotent, ridiculous, sitting on the floor grasping

    a pair of scissors.

    Not a breath of wind blew. The water chuckled and gurgled in the

    bottom of the boat where three or four mackerel beat their tails up and

    down in a pool of water not deep enough to cover them. At any moment

    Mr. Ramsay (he scarcely dared look at him) might rouse himself, shut his

    book, and say something sharp; but for the moment he was reading, so

    that James stealthily, as if he were stealing downstairs on bare feet,

    afraid of waking a watchdog by a creaking board, went on thinking what

    was she like, where did she go that day? He began following her from

    room to room and at last they came to a room where in a blue light, as

    if the reflection came from many china dishes, she talked to somebody;

    he listened to her talking. She talked to a servant, saying simply

    whatever came into her head. She alone spoke the truth; to her alone

    could he speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction

    for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into

    one’s head. But all the time he thought of her, he was conscious of

    his father following his thought, surveying it, making it shiver and

    falter. At last he ceased to think.

    There he sat with his hand on the tiller in the sun, staring at the

    Lighthouse, powerless to move, powerless to flick off these grains of

    misery which settled on his mind one after another. A rope seemed to

    bind him there, and his father had knotted it and he could only escape

    by taking a knife and plunging it… But at that moment the sail

    swung slowly round, filled slowly out, the boat seemed to shake

    herself, and then to move off half conscious in her sleep, and then she

    woke and shot through the waves. The relief was extraordinary. They

    all seemed to fall away from each other again and to be at their

    ease, and the fishing-lines slanted taut across the side of the

    boat. But his father did not rouse himself. He only raised his right

    hand mysteriously high in the air, and let it fall upon his knee again

    as if he were conducting some secret symphony.

    10

    [The sea without a stain on it, thought Lily Briscoe, still standing

    and looking out over the bay. The sea stretched like silk across the

    bay. Distance had an extraordinary power; they had been swallowed up

    in it, she felt, they were gone for ever, they had become part of the

    nature of things. It was so calm; it was so quiet. The steamer itself

    had vanished, but the great scroll of smoke still hung in the air and

    drooped like a flag mournfully in valediction.]

    11

    It was like that then, the island, thought Cam, once more drawing her

    fingers through the waves. She had never seen it from out at sea

    before. It lay like that on the sea, did it, with a dent in the middle

    and two sharp crags, and the sea swept in there, and spread away for

    miles and miles on either side of the island. It was very small;

    shaped something like a leaf stood on end. So we took a little boat,

    she thought, beginning to tell herself a story of adventure about

    escaping from a sinking ship. But with the sea streaming through her

    fingers, a spray of seaweed vanishing behind them, she did not want to

    tell herself seriously a story; it was the sense of adventure and

    escape that she wanted, for she was thinking, as the boat sailed on,

    how her father’s anger about the points of the compass, James’s

    obstinacy about the compact, and her own anguish, all had slipped, all

    had passed, all had streamed away. What then came next? Where were

    they going? From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there

    spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the

    adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there). And

    the drops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell

    here and there on the dark, the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of

    a world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and

    there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople.[156] Small as it

    was, and shaped something like a leaf stood on its end with the gold-

    sprinkled waters flowing in and about it, it had, she supposed, a place

    in the universe–even that little island? The old gentlemen in the

    study she thought could have told her. Sometimes she strayed in from

    the garden purposely to catch them at it. There they were (it might be

    Mr. Carmichael or Mr. Bankes who was sitting with her father) sitting

    opposite each other in their low arm-chairs. They were crackling in

    front of them the pages of The Times, when she came in from the garden,

    all in a muddle, about something some one had said about Christ, or

    hearing that a mammoth had been dug up in a London street, or wondering

    what Napoleon[157] was like. Then they took all this with their clean hands

    (they wore grey-coloured clothes; they smelt of heather) and they

    brushed the scraps together, turning the paper, crossing their knees,

    and said something now and then very brief. Just to please herself she

    would take a book from the shelf and stand there, watching her father

    write, so equally, so neatly from one side of the page to another, with

    a little cough now and then, or something said briefly to the other old

    gentleman opposite. And she thought, standing there with her book open,

    one could let whatever one thought expand here like a leaf in water;

    and if it did well here, among the old gentlemen smoking and The Times

    crackling then it was right. And watching her father as he wrote in

    his study, she thought (now sitting in the boat) he was not vain, nor a

    tyrant and did not wish to make you pity him. Indeed, if he saw she

    was there, reading a book, he would ask her, as gently as any one

    could, Was there nothing he could give her?

    Lest this should be wrong, she looked at him reading the little book

    with the shiny cover mottled like a plover’s egg. No; it was right.

    Look at him now, she wanted to say aloud to James. (But James had his

    eye on the sail.) He is a sarcastic brute, James would say. He brings

    the talk round to himself and his books, James would say. He is

    intolerably egotistical. Worst of all, he is a tyrant. But look! she

    said, looking at him. Look at him now. She looked at him reading the

    little book with his legs curled; the little book whose yellowish pages

    she knew, without knowing what was written on them. It was small; it

    was closely printed; on the fly-leaf, she knew, he had written that he

    had spent fifteen francs on dinner; the wine had been so much; he had

    given so much to the waiter; all was added up neatly at the bottom of

    the page. But what might be written in the book which had rounded its

    edges off in his pocket, she did not know. What he thought they none

    of them knew. But he was absorbed in it, so that when he looked up, as

    he did now for an instant, it was not to see anything; it was to pin

    down some thought more exactly. That done, his mind flew back again

    and he plunged into his reading. He read, she thought, as if he were

    guiding something, or wheedling a large flock of sheep, or pushing his

    way up and up a single narrow path; and sometimes he went fast and

    straight, and broke his way through the bramble, and sometimes it

    seemed a branch struck at him, a bramble blinded him, but he was not

    going to let himself be beaten by that; on he went, tossing over page

    after page. And she went on telling herself a story about escaping

    from a sinking ship, for she was safe, while he sat there; safe, as she

    felt herself when she crept in from the garden, and took a book

    down, and the old gentleman, lowering the paper suddenly, said

    something very brief over the top of it about the character of Napoleon.

    She gazed back over the sea, at the island. But the leaf was losing

    its sharpness. It was very small; it was very distant. The sea was

    more important now than the shore. Waves were all round them, tossing

    and sinking, with a log wallowing down one wave; a gull riding on

    another. About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a

    ship had sunk, and she murmured, dreamily half asleep, how we perished,

    each alone.[158]

    12

    So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea which

    had scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and the

    clouds seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon

    distance: whether people are near us or far from us; for her feeling

    for Mr. Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay.

    It seemed to be elongated, stretched out; he seemed to become more and

    more remote. He and his children seemed to be swallowed up in that

    blue, that distance; but here, on the lawn, close at hand, Mr.

    Carmichael suddenly grunted. She laughed. He clawed his book up from

    the grass. He settled into his chair again puffing and blowing like

    some sea monster. That was different altogether, because he was so

    near. And now again all was quiet. They must be out of bed by this

    time, she supposed, looking at the house, but nothing appeared there.

    But then, she remembered, they had always made off directly a meal was

    over, on business of their own. It was all in keeping with this

    silence, this emptiness, and the unreality of the early morning hour.

    It was a way things had sometimes, she thought, lingering for a moment

    and looking at the long glittering windows and the plume of blue smoke:

    they became illness, before habits had spun themselves across the

    surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt

    something emerge. Life was most vivid then. One could be at one’s

    ease. Mercifully one need not say, very briskly, crossing the lawn to

    greet old Mrs. Beckwith, who would be coming out to find a corner to sit

    in, “Oh, good-morning, Mrs. Beckwith! What a lovely day! Are you going

    to be so bold as to sit in the sun? Jasper’s hidden the chairs. Do

    let me find you one!” and all the rest of the usual chatter. One need

    not speak at all. One glided, one shook one’s sails (there was a good

    deal of movement in the bay, boats were starting off) between things,

    beyond things. Empty it was not, but full to the brim. She seemed to

    be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and

    sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them

    had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays’; the children’s; and all sorts

    of waifs and strays of things besides. A washer-woman with her basket;

    a rook, a red-hot poker[159]; the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some

    common feeling which held the whole together.

    It was some such feeling of completeness perhaps which, ten years ago,

    standing almost where she stood now, had made her say that she must be

    in love with the place. Love had a thousand shapes. There might be

    lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place

    them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make

    of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of

    those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love

    plays.

    Her eyes rested on the brown speck of Mr. Ramsay’s sailing boat. They

    would be at the Lighthouse by lunch time she supposed. But the wind

    had freshened, and, as the sky changed slightly and the sea changed

    slightly and the boats altered their positions, the view, which a

    moment before had seemed miraculously fixed, was now unsatisfactory.

    The wind had blown the trail of smoke about; there was something

    displeasing about the placing of the ships.

    The disproportion there seemed to upset some harmony in her own mind.

    She felt an obscure distress. It was confirmed when she turned to her

    picture. She had been wasting her morning. For whatever reason she

    could not achieve that razor edge of balance between two opposite

    forces; Mr. Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary. There was

    something perhaps wrong with the design? Was it, she wondered, that

    the line of the wall wanted breaking, was it that the mass of the trees

    was too heavy? She smiled ironically; for had she not thought, when

    she began, that she had solved her problem?

    What was the problem then? She must try to get hold of something tht

    evaded her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay; it evaded

    her now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came.

    Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold

    of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been

    made anything. Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh;

    she said desperately, pitching herself firmly again before her easel.

    It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the

    human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at

    the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on. She stared,

    frowning. There was the hedge, sure enough. But one got nothing by

    soliciting urgently. One got only a glare in the eye from looking at

    the line of the wall, or from thinking–she wore a grey hat. She was

    astonishingly beautiful. Let it come, she thought, if it will come.

    For there are moments when one can neither think nor feel. And if

    one can neither think nor feel, she thought, where is one?

    Here on the grass, on the ground, she thought, sitting down, and

    examining with her brush a little colony of plantains.[160] For the lawn

    was very rough. Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could

    not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was

    happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a

    traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the

    train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town,

    or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again. The

    lawn was the world; they were up here together, on this exalted

    station, she thought, looking at old Mr. Carmichael, who seemed (though

    they had not said a word all this time) to share her thoughts. And she

    would never see him again perhaps. He was growing old. Also, she

    remembered, smiling at the slipper that dangled from his foot, he was

    growing famous. People said that his poetry was “so beautiful.” They

    went and published things he had written forty years ago. There was a

    famous man now called Carmichael, she smiled, thinking how many shapes

    one person might wear, how he was that in the newspapers, but here the

    same as he had always been. He looked the same–greyer, rather.

    Yes, he looked the same, but somebody had said, she recalled, that when

    he had heard of Andrew Ramsay’s death (he was killed in a second by a

    shell; he should have been a great mathematician) Mr. Carmichael had

    “lost all interest in life.” What did it mean–that? she wondered. Had

    he marched through Trafalgar Square grasping a big stick? Had he

    turned pages over and over, without reading them, sitting in his room

    in St. John’s Wood alone? She did not know what he had done, when he

    heard that Andrew was killed, but she felt it in him all the same.

    They only mumbled at each other on staircases; they looked up at the

    sky and said it will be fine or it won’t be fine. But this was one way

    of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to

    sit in one’s garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple

    down into the distant heather. She knew him in that way. She knew

    that he had changed somehow. She had never read a line of his poetry.

    She thought that she knew how it went though, slowly and sonorously.

    It was seasoned and mellow. It was about the desert and the camel. It

    was about the palm tree and the sunset. It was extremely impersonal;

    it said something about death; it said very little about love. There

    was an impersonality about him. He wanted very little of other people.

    Had he not always lurched rather awkwardly past the drawing-room window

    with some newspaper under his arm, trying to avoid Mrs. Ramsay whom for

    some reason he did not much like? On that account, of course, she

    would always try to make him stop. He would bow to her. He would halt

    unwillingly and bow profoundly. Annoyed that he did not want anything

    of her, Mrs. Ramsay would ask him (Lily could hear her) wouldn’t he like

    a coat, a rug, a newspaper? No, he wanted nothing. (Here he bowed.)

    There was some quality in her which he did not much like. It was

    perhaps her masterfulness, her positiveness, something matter-of-fact

    in her. She was so direct.

    (A noise drew her attention to the drawing-room window–the squeak of a

    hinge. The light breeze was toying with the window.)

    There must have been people who disliked her very much, Lily thought

    (Yes; she realised that the drawing-room step was empty, but it had no

    effect on her whatever. She did not want Mrs. Ramsay now.)–People who

    thought her too sure, too drastic.

    Also, her beauty offended people probably. How monotonous, they would

    say, and the same always! They preferred another type–the dark, the

    vivacious. Then she was weak with her husband. She let him make those

    scenes. Then she was reserved. Nobody knew exactly what had happened

    to her. And (to go back to Mr. Carmichael and his dislike) one could not

    imagine Mrs. Ramsay standing painting, lying reading, a whole morning on

    the lawn. It was unthinkable. Without saying a word, the only token of

    her errand a basket on her arm, she went off to the town, to the poor,

    to sit in some stuffy little bedroom. Often and often Lily had seen

    her go silently in the midst of some game, some discussion, with her

    basket on her arm, very upright. She had noted her return. She had

    thought, half laughing (she was so methodical with the tea cups), half

    moved (her beauty took one’s breath away), eyes that are closing in

    pain have looked on you. You have been with them there.

    And then Mrs. Ramsay would be annoyed because somebody was late, or the

    butter not fresh, or the teapot chipped. And all the time she was

    saying that the butter was not fresh one would be thinking of Greek

    temples, and how beauty had been with them there in that stuffy little

    room. She never talked of it–she went, punctually, directly. It was

    her instinct to go, an instinct like the swallows for the south, the

    artichokes for the sun, turning her infallibly to the human race,

    making her nest in its heart. And this, like all instincts, was a

    little distressing to people who did not share it; to Mr. Carmichael

    perhaps, to herself certainly. Some notion was in both of them about

    the ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought. Her going was

    a reproach to them, gave a different twist to the world, so that they

    were led to protest, seeing their own prepossessions disappear, and

    clutch at them vanishing. Charles Tansley did that too: it was part of

    the reason why one disliked him. He upset the proportions of one’s

    world. And what had happened to him, she wondered, idly stirring the

    plantains[161] with her brush. He had got his fellowship. He had married;

    he lived at Golder’s Green.[162]

    She had gone one day into a Hall and heard him speaking during the war.

    He was denouncing something: he was condemning somebody. He was

    preaching brotherly love. And all she felt was how could he love his

    kind who did not know one picture from another, who had stood behind

    her smoking shag[163] (“fivepence an ounce, Miss Briscoe”) and making it his

    business to tell her women can’t write, women can’t paint, not so much

    that he believed it, as that for some odd reason he wished it? There

    he was lean and red and raucous, preaching love from a platform (there

    were ants crawling about among the plantains which she disturbed with

    her brush–red, energetic, shiny ants, rather like Charles Tansley).

    She had looked at him ironically from her seat in the half-empty hall,

    pumping love into that chilly space, and suddenly, there was the old

    cask or whatever it was bobbing up and down among the waves and Mrs.

    Ramsay looking for her spectacle case among the pebbles. “Oh, dear!

    What a nuisance! Lost again. Don’t bother, Mr. Tansley. I lose

    thousands every summer,” at which he pressed his chin back against his

    collar, as if afraid to sanction such exaggeration, but could stand it

    in her whom he liked, and smiled very charmingly. He must have

    confided in her on one of those long expeditions when people got

    separated and walked back alone. He was educating his little sister,

    Mrs. Ramsay had told her. It was immensely to his credit. Her own idea

    of him was grotesque, Lily knew well, stirring the plantains[164] with her

    brush. Half one’s notions of other people were, after all, grotesque.

    They served private purposes of one’s own. He did for her instead of a

    whipping-boy. She found herself flagellating his lean flanks when she

    was out of temper. If she wanted to be serious about him she had to

    help herself to Mrs. Ramsay’s sayings, to look at him through her eyes.

    She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb over. She reduced

    them to a frenzy of indecision by this interference in their cosmogony.

    Some ran this way, others that.

    One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs

    of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought.

    Among them, must be one that was stone blind to her beauty. One wanted

    most some secret sense, fine as air, with which to steal through

    keyholes and surround her where she sat knitting, talking, sitting

    silent in the window alone; which took to itself and treasured up like

    the air which held the smoke of the steamer, her thoughts, her

    imaginations, her desires. What did the hedge mean to her, what did

    the garden mean to her, what did it mean to her when a wave broke?

    (Lily looked up, as she had seen Mrs. Ramsay look up; she too heard a

    wave falling on the beach.) And then what stirred and trembled in her

    mind when the children cried, “How’s that? How’s that?” cricketing?

    She would stop knitting for a second. She would look intent. Then she

    would lapse again, and suddenly Mr. Ramsay stopped dead in his pacing in

    front of her and some curious shock passed through her and seemed to

    rock her in profound agitation on its breast when stopping there he

    stood over her and looked down at her. Lily could see him.

    He stretched out his hand and raised her from her chair. It seemed

    somehow as if he had done it before; as if he had once bent in the same

    way and raised her from a boat which, lying a few inches off some

    island, had required that the ladies should thus be helped on shore by

    the gentlemen. An old-fashioned scene that was, which required,

    very nearly, crinolines and peg-top trousers. Letting herself be

    helped by him, Mrs. Ramsay had thought (Lily supposed) the time

    has come now. Yes, she would say it now. Yes, she would marry him.

    And she stepped slowly, quietly on shore. Probably she said one

    word only, letting her hand rest still in his. I will marry you,

    she might have said, with her hand in his; but no more. Time

    after time the same thrill had passed between them–obviously it

    had, Lily thought, smoothing a way for her ants. She was not

    inventing; she was only trying to smooth out something she had been

    given years ago folded up; something she had seen. For in the rough

    and tumble of daily life, with all those children about, all those

    visitors, one had constantly a sense of repetition–of one thing

    falling where another had fallen, and so setting up an echo which

    chimed in the air and made it full of vibrations.

    But it would be a mistake, she thought, thinking how they walked off

    together, arm in arm, past the greenhouse, to simplify their

    relationship. It was no monotony of bliss–she with her impulses and

    quicknesses; he with his shudders and glooms. Oh, no. The bedroom door

    would slam violently early in the morning. He would start from the

    table in a temper. He would whizz his plate through the window. Then

    all through the house there would be a sense of doors slamming and

    blinds fluttering, as if a gusty wind were blowing and people scudded

    about trying in a hasty way to fasten hatches and make things ship-

    shape. She had met Paul Rayley like that one day on the stairs.

    They had laughed and laughed, like a couple of children, all because

    Mr. Ramsay, finding an earwig in his milk at breakfast had sent the

    whole thing flying through the air on to the terrace outside. ‘An earwig,

    Prue murmured, awestruck, ‘in his milk.’ Other people might find

    centipedes. But he had built round him such a fence of sanctity, and

    occupied the space with such a demeanour of majesty that an earwig

    in his milk was a monster.

    But it tired Mrs. Ramsay, it cowed her a little–the plates whizzing

    and the doors slamming. And there would fall between them sometimes

    long rigid silences, when, in a state of mind which annoyed Lily

    in her, half plaintive, half resentful, she seemed unable to surmount

    the tempest calmly, or to laugh as they laughed, but in her weariness

    perhaps concealed something. She brooded and sat silent. After a

    time he would hang stealthily about the places where she was–roaming

    under the window where she sat writing letters or talking, for she

    would take care to be busy when he passed, and evade him, and pretend

    not to see him. Then he would turn smooth as silk, affable, urbane,

    and try to win her so. Still she would hold off, and now she would

    assert for a brief season some of those prides and airs the due

    of her beauty which she was generally utterly without; would turn

    her head; would look so, over her shoulder, always with some

    Minta, Paul, or William Bankes at her side. At length, standing

    outside the group the very figure of a famished wolfhound (Lily got up

    off the grass and stood looking at the steps, at the window, where she

    had seen him), he would say her name, once only, for all the world like

    a wolf barking in the snow, but still she held back; and he would say

    it once more, and this time something in the tone would rouse her, and

    she would go to him, leaving them all of a sudden, and they would walk

    off together among the pear trees, the cabbages, and the raspberry

    beds. They would have it out together. But with what attitudes and

    with what words? Such a dignity was theirs in this relationship that,

    turning away, she and Paul and Minta would hide their curiosity and

    their discomfort, and begin picking flowers, throwing balls,

    chattering, until it was time for dinner, and there they were, he at

    one end of the table, she at the other, as usual.

    “Why don’t some of you take up botany?.. With all those legs and arms

    why doesn’t one of you…?” So they would talk as usual, laughing,

    among the children. All would be as usual, save only for some quiver,

    as of a blade in the air, which came and went between them as if

    the usual sight of the children sitting round their soup plates

    had freshened itself in their eyes after that hour among the pears and

    the cabbages. Especially, Lily thought, Mrs. Ramsay would glance at

    Prue. She sat in the middle between brothers and sisters, always

    occupied, it seemed, seeing that nothing went wrong so that she

    scarcely spoke herself. How Prue must have blamed herself for that

    earwig in the milk How white she had gone when Mr. Ramsay threw his

    plate through the window! How she drooped under those long silences

    between them! Anyhow, her mother now would seem to be making it up to

    her; assuring her that everything was well; promising her that one of

    these days that same happiness would be hers. She had enjoyed it for

    less than a year, however.

    She had let the flowers fall from her basket, Lily thought, screwing up

    her eyes and standing back as if to look at her picture, which she was

    not touching, however, with all her faculties in a trance, frozen over

    superficially but moving underneath with extreme speed.

    She let her flowers fall from her basket, scattered and tumbled them on

    to the grass and, reluctantly and hesitatingly, but without question or

    complaint–had she not the faculty of obedience to perfection?–went

    too. Down fields, across valleys, white, flower-strewn–that was

    how she would have painted it. The hills were austere. It was rocky;

    it was steep. The waves sounded hoarse on the stones beneath. They

    went, the three of them together, Mrs. Ramsay walking rather fast in

    front, as if she expected to meet some one round the corner.

    Suddenly the window at which she was looking was whitened by some light

    stuff behind it. At last then somebody had come into the drawing-room;

    somebody was sitting in the chair. For Heaven’s sake, she prayed, let

    them sit still there and not come floundering out to talk to her.

    Mercifully, whoever it was stayed still inside; had settled by some

    stroke of luck so as to throw an odd-shaped triangular shadow over the

    step. It altered the composition of the picture a little. It was

    interesting. It might be useful. Her mood was coming back to her. One

    must keep on looking without for a second relaxing the intensity of

    emotion, the determination not to be put off, not to be bamboozled.

    One must hold the scene–so–in a vise and let nothing come in and

    spoil it. One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to

    be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair,

    that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an

    ecstasy. The problem might be solved after all. Ah, but what had

    happened? Some wave of white went over the window pane. The air must

    have stirred some flounce in the room. Her heart leapt at her and

    seized her and tortured her.

    “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” she cried, feeling the old horror come

    back–to want and want and not to have. Could she inflict that still?

    And then, quietly, as if she refrained, that too became part of

    ordinary experience, was on a level with the chair, with the table.

    Mrs. Ramsay–it was part of her perfect goodness–sat there quite

    simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her

    reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. There she sat.

    And as if she had something she must share, yet could hardly leave her

    easel, so full her mind was of what she was thinking, of what she was

    seeing, Lily went past Mr. Carmichael holding her brush to the edge of

    the lawn. Where was that boat now? And Mr. Ramsay? She wanted him.

    13

    Mr. Ramsay had almost done reading. One hand hovered over the page as

    if to be in readiness to turn it the very instant he had finished it.

    He sat there bareheaded with the wind blowing his hair about,

    extraordinarily exposed to everything. He looked very old. He looked,

    James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against

    the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone

    lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was

    always at the back of both of their minds–that loneliness which was

    for both of them the truth about things.

    He was reading very quickly, as if he were eager to get to the end.

    Indeed they were very close to the Lighthouse now. There it loomed up,

    stark and straight, glaring white and black, and one could see the

    waves breaking in white splinters like smashed glass upon the rocks.

    One could see lines and creases in the rocks. One could see the

    windows clearly; a dab of white on one of them, and a little tuft of

    green on the rock. A man had come out and looked at them through a

    glass and gone in again. So it was like that, James thought, the

    Lighthouse one had seen across the bay all these years; it was a stark

    tower on a bare rock. It satisfied him. It confirmed some obscure

    feeling of his about his own character. The old ladies, he thought,

    thinking of the garden at home, went dragging their chairs about on the

    lawn. Old Mrs. Beckwith, for example, was always saying how nice it was

    and how sweet it was and how they ought to be so proud and they ought

    to be so happy, but as a matter of fact, James thought, looking at the

    Lighthouse stood there on its rock, it’s like that. He looked at his

    father reading fiercely with his legs curled tight. They shared that

    knowledge. “We are driving before a gale–we must sink,” he began

    saying to himself, half aloud, exactly as his father said it.

    Nobody seemed to have spoken for an age. Cam was tired of looking at

    the sea. Little bits of black cork had floated past; the fish were

    dead in the bottom of the boat. Still her father read, and James

    looked at him and she looked at him, and they vowed that they would

    fight tyranny to the death, and he went on reading quite unconscious of

    what they thought. It was thus that he escaped, she thought. Yes,

    with his great forehead and his great nose, holding his little mottled

    book firmly in front of him, he escaped. You might try to lay hands on

    him, but then like a bird, he spread his wings, he floated off to

    settle out of your reach somewhere far away on some desolate stump.

    She gazed at the immense expanse of the sea. The island had grown so

    small that it scarcely looked like a leaf any longer. It looked like

    the top of a rock which some wave bigger than the rest would cover.

    Yet in its frailty were all those paths, those terraces, those bedrooms–

    all those innumerable things. But as, just before sleep, things

    simplify themselves so that only one of all the myriad details has

    power to assert itself, so, she felt, looking drowsily at the island,

    all those paths and terraces and bedrooms were fading and disappearing,

    and nothing was left but a pale blue censer swinging rhythmically this

    way and that across her mind. It was a hanging garden; it was a

    valley, full of birds, and flowers, and antelopes… She was falling

    asleep.

    “Come now,” said Mr. Ramsay, suddenly shutting his book.

    Come where? To what extraordinary adventure? She woke with a start.

    To land somewhere, to climb somewhere? Where was he leading them? For

    after his immense silence the words startled them. But it was absurd.

    He was hungry, he said. It was time for lunch. Besides, look, he

    said. “There’s the Lighthouse. We’re almost there.”

    “He’s doing very well,” said Macalister, praising James. “He’s keeping

    her very steady.”

    But his father never praised him, James thought grimly.

    Mr. Ramsay opened the parcel and shared out the sandwiches among them.

    Now he was happy, eating bread and cheese with these fishermen. He

    would have liked to live in a cottage and lounge about in the harbour

    spitting with the other old men, James thought, watching him slice his

    cheese into thin yellow sheets with his penknife.

    This is right, this is it, Cam kept feeling, as she peeled her hard-

    boiled egg. Now she felt as she did in the study when the old men were

    reading The Times. Now I can go on thinking whatever I like, and I

    shan’t fall over a precipice or be drowned, for there he is, keeping

    his eye on me, she thought.

    At the same time they were sailing so fast along by the rocks that it

    was very exciting–it seemed as if they were doing two things at once;

    they were eating their lunch here in the sun and they were also making

    for safety in a great storm after a shipwreck. Would the water last?

    Would the provisions last? she asked herself, telling herself a story

    but knowing at the same time what was the truth.

    They would soon be out of it, Mr. Ramsay was saying to old Macalister;

    but their children would see some strange things. Macalister said he

    was seventy-five last March; Mr. Ramsay was seventy-one. Macalister said

    he had never seen a doctor; he had never lost a tooth. And that’s the

    way I’d like my children to live–Cam was sure that her father was

    thinking that, for he stopped her throwing a sandwich into the sea and

    told her, as if he were thinking of the fishermen and how they lived,

    that if she did not want it she should put it back in the parcel. She

    should not waste it. He said it so wisely, as if he knew so well all

    the things that happened in the world that she put it back at once, and

    then he gave her, from his own parcel, a gingerbread nut, as if he were

    a great Spanish gentleman, she thought, handing a flower to a lady at a

    window (so courteous his manner was). He was shabby, and simple,

    eating bread and cheese; and yet he was leading them on a great

    expedition where, for all she knew, they would be drowned.

    “That was where she sunk,” said Macalister’s boy suddenly.

    Three men were drowned where we are now, the old man said. He had seen

    them clinging to the mast himself. And Mr. Ramsay taking a look at the

    spot was about, James and Cam were afraid, to burst out:

    But I beneath a rougher sea,[165]

    and if he did, they could not bear it; they would shriek aloud; they

    could not endure another explosion of the passion that boiled in him;

    but to their surprise all he said was “Ah” as if he thought to himself.

    But why make a fuss about that? Naturally men are drowned in a storm,

    but it is a perfectly straightforward affair, and the depths of the sea

    (he sprinkled the crumbs from his sandwich paper over them) are only

    water after all. Then having lighted his pipe he took out his watch.

    He looked at it attentively; he made, perhaps, some mathematical

    calculation. At last he said, triumphantly:

    “Well done!” James had steered them like a born sailor.

    There! Cam thought, addressing herself silently to James. You’ve got

    it at last. For she knew that this was what James had been wanting,

    and she knew that now he had got it he was so pleased that he would not

    look at her or at his father or at any one. There he sat with his hand

    on the tiller sitting bolt upright, looking rather sulky and frowning

    slightly. He was so pleased that he was not going to let anybody share

    a grain of his pleasure. His father had praised him. They must think

    that he was perfectly indifferent. But you’ve got it now, Cam thought.

    They had tacked, and they were sailing swiftly, buoyantly on long

    rocking waves which handed them on from one to another with an

    extraordinary lilt and exhilaration beside the reef. On the left a

    row of rocks showed brown through the water which thinned and

    became greener and on one, a higher rock, a wave incessantly broke

    and spurted a little column of drops which fell down in a shower. One

    could hear the slap of the water and the patter of falling drops and a

    kind of hushing and hissing sound from the waves rolling and gambolling

    and slapping the rocks as if they were wild creatures who were

    perfectly free and tossed and tumbled and sported like this for ever.

    Now they could see two men on the Lighthouse, watching them and making

    ready to meet them.

    Mr. Ramsay buttoned his coat, and turned up his trousers. He took the

    large, badly packed, brown paper parcel which Nancy had got ready and

    sat with it on his knee. Thus in complete readiness to land he sat

    looking back at the island. With his long-sighted eyes perhaps he

    could see the dwindled leaf-like shape standing on end on a plate of

    gold quite clearly. What could he see? Cam wondered. It was all a

    blur to her. What was he thinking now? she wondered. What was it he

    sought, so fixedly, so intently, so silently? They watched him, both

    of them, sitting bareheaded with his parcel on his knee staring and

    staring at the frail blue shape which seemed like the vapour of

    something that had burnt itself away. What do you want? they both

    wanted to ask. They both wanted to say, Ask us anything and we will

    give it you. But he did not ask them anything. He sat and looked at

    the island and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone, or he

    might be thinking, I have reached it. I have found it; but he said

    nothing.

    Then he put on his hat.

    “Bring those parcels,” he said, nodding his head at the things Nancy

    had done up for them to take to the Lighthouse. “The parcels for the

    Lighthouse men,” he said. He rose and stood in the bow of the boat,

    very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were

    saying, “There is no God,”[166] and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into

    space, and they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly like a

    young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock.

    14

    “He must have reached it,” said Lily Briscoe aloud, feeling suddenly

    completely tired out. For the Lighthouse had become almost invisible,

    had melted away into a blue haze, and the effort of looking at it and

    the effort of thinking of him landing there, which both seemed to be

    one and the same effort, had stretched her body and mind to the utmost.

    Ah, but she was relieved. Whatever she had wanted to give him, when he

    left her that morning, she had given him at last.

    “He has landed,” she said aloud. “It is finished.” Then, surging up,

    puffing slightly, old Mr. Carmichael stood beside her, looking like an

    old pagan god, shaggy, with weeds in his hair and the trident (it was

    only a French novel) in his hand. He stood by her on the edge of the

    lawn, swaying a little in his bulk and said, shading his eyes with his

    hand: “They will have landed,” and she felt that she had been right.

    They had not needed to speak. They had been thinking the same things

    and he had answered her without her asking him anything. He stood

    there as if he were spreading his hands over all the weakness and

    suffering of mankind; she thought he was surveying, tolerantly and

    compassionately, their final destiny. Now he has crowned the occasion,

    she thought, when his hand slowly fell, as if she had seen him let fall

    from his great height a wreath of violets and asphodels[167] which,

    fluttering slowly, lay at length upon the earth.

    Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to

    her canvas. There it was–her picture. Yes, with all its greens and

    blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It

    would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But

    what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again.

    She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it

    was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a

    second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was

    finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue,

    I have had my vision.

    Contributors and Attributions


    1. Large department store chain whose flagship shop was on Victoria Street in London, where the Ramsays live when they are not at the holiday house here.
    2. James is partly based on Woolf’s younger brother Adrian Stephen (1883-1948), her mother’s favourite. He seems to have had a difficult time in childhood, feeling inferior to his bright and popular brother Thoby, and clashed with his father. As children, Woolf and her sister wrote in the Hyde Park Gate News, the family newsletter, that nine-year-old Adrian was “much disappointed at not being allowed to go” on a trip to Godrevy Lighthouse off the coast of their summer home in Cornwall (British Library MS, 12 September, 1892).
    3. A reference to British rule over India at the time.
    4. One of the Hebrides islands off Scotland, where the novel is set.
    5. A college of Oxford University.
    6. Universities the Ramsays consider inferior.
    7. A critical introduction to a book. ↵
    8. The most recent Reform Bill was passed in 1884, and gave the vote to most adult males in Britain. Other voting reforms had been passed in 1832 and 1867.
    9. A canton (district) in Switzerland. ↵
    10. Julia Stephen’s mother Maria was one of the seven Pattle sisters, who had noble French ancestry and were notable for their beauty or talent. The famous Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron was one also.
    11. Julia Stephen spent much energy visiting the poor and caring for the sick, like many middle-class Victorian women.
    12. An old spelling for Hindustani, one of the major languages of India.
    13. Shag tobacco is loose and has to be rolled by hand in papers, hence its cheapness. ↵
    14. Fellowship, readership, and lectureship are academic ranks in Britain. ↵
    15. Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), the Norwegian playwright whose works, such as “A Doll’s House,” were revolutionary, realistic representations of modern life.
    16. Mr. Paunceforte is an invented artist who represents actual painters of the late-Victorian period, such as Whistler and Sickert. These artists worked at St. Ives, where Woolf’s childhood holiday home was, often painting beach and sea scenes in pale colours. Mrs. Ramsay speaks in the next paragraph of “her grandmother’s friends,” showing her preference for the art of the past, which she generally represents.
    17. The Order of the Garter, the highest royal honour in Britain, whose members wear a blue ribbon.
    18. A flowering plant, an ancient symbol of love.
    19. Many critics have commented on Mrs. Ramsay’s symbolic connection to Demeter, the goddess of the harvest. Tansley seems to see her this way here.
    20. An appeal to the umpire in cricket. Woolf and her siblings loved playing the game as children.
    21. A quotation from Tennyson’s famous Victorian poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854) which depicted a disastrous attack during the Crimean War in which almost a third of the British were killed or wounded. Mr. Ramsay tends to feel himself a similar brave and doomed hero. ↵
    22. Some critics have pointed out the casual racism of Mrs. Ramsay’s comment as a reference to a British sense of superiority over others during the period of the Empire.
    23. Another quotation from Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”; see note 21.
    24. A colourful climbing plant.
    25. Tennyson; see note 21.
    26. See note 16 on Paunceforte and art.
    27. A somewhat unfashionable area in London. Charles Dickens Jr. noted in 1879 that the Brompton Road was favoured by artists, and was the site of a tuberculosis hospital. See http://www.victorianlondon.org/districts/brompton.htm.
    28. Bright, tall, red and orange flowers.
    29. A county in north-west England, now part of Cumbria, popular for walking and hiking. Leslie Stephen, Woolf’s father, was a renowned walker.
    30. A flowering plant, and perhaps a reference to the conflict between childhood and adulthood, which is also strong in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), well known to Woolf.
    31. These characters are partly based on some of Woolf’s family: Cam on the young Woolf herself; James on Adrian Stephen (see note 1); Andrew on the clever and sociable Thoby Stephen (see note 114); and Prue on Stella Duckworth, her beautiful half-sister (see note 113). Lily Briscoe is similar to both Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, an artist.
    32. The volcano that destroyed the ancient city of Pompeii.
    33. Perhaps a reflection of Leslie Stephen’s philosophy, or of G. E. Moore’s ideas. He was a realist philosopher whose work strongly influenced Woolf’s brother Thoby Stephen when he was at Cambridge University.
    34. Tennyson; see note 21. ↵
    35. Jasper may represent Woolf’s half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, whom she saw as crass. Her writing makes reference to both of them having abused her sexually; what exactly happened is not clear, but her distaste for them was lifelong. Louise DeSalvo’s Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work (New York: Ballantine, 1990) and Hermione Lee’s biography Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999) both discuss the abuse possibilities in detail.
    36. A joking reference to “She-who-must-be-obeyed,” the terrifying queen of H. Rider Haggard’s Victorian adventure novel She (serialized 1886-7). Julia Stephen inspired love and reverence in many writers and artists, and had grown up knowing many famous ones. ↵
    37. A reference to Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman of the ancient world. See note 19 on Mrs. Ramsay as a mythical figure.
    38. George Croom Robertson (1842-92), a Scottish philosopher and logician. Note Mrs. Ramsay’s disinterest.
    39. As in the previous note, Mrs. Ramsay has little interest in works of serious realism.
    40. Woolf wrote in “A Sketch of the Past” that her mother eternally mourned the sudden death of her first husband, Herbert Duckworth (see page 89 in Moments of Being. 2nd ed. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. San Diego: Harvest Brace Jovanovich, 1985).
    41. A variation of a line from the nineteenth-century writer Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall (1815).
    42. The Three Graces in Greek mythology are goddesses of beauty and charm. Asphodel flowers were said to grow in the underworld of the dead. ↵
    43. The 10:30 train from Euston Station in London. ↵
    44. Another spelling of Michelangelo (Buonarotti, 1475-1564), the influential sculptor, artist, and engineer. ↵
    45. Tennyson; see note 21.
    46. Tennyson; see note 21.
    47. See note 4.
    48. Tennyson; see note 21.
    49. Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf, both highly intelligent, frequently shared the fear that their minds were second-rate and their books failures.
    50. Originally a storming party.
    51. Leslie Stephen wrote several works on moral philosophy, and was highly thought of as a critic.
    52. One of the Grimm brothers’ collected German fairy tales, first published in English in 1825. It tells of a poor fisherman who catches and releases a prince in the form of a flounder. In return, the fisherman’s wife asks more and more favours of the fish, until she seeks to become godlike, at which she finds herself returned to her original wretched state.
    53. A coin worth thirty pence.
    54. See note 36 on Julia Stephen’s connection with the famous.
    55. The elevator operator in the London subway.
    56. Probably Cardiff University or the University of Wales, founded in 1883 and 1893 respectively.
    57. All famous British philosophers: John Locke (1632-1704); David Hume (1711-76); George Berkeley (1685-1753).
    58. British cities.
    59. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), a very well-known Scottish philosopher and social commentator.
    60. See Woolf’s later novel, The Waves (1931), which extends this image.
    61. An invented artist; see note 16.
    62. Compare this with Lily’s later vision of her painting (see note 148), and with Mrs. Ramsay’s view of male and female (note 113).
    63. See note 11.
    64. A tributary river of the Thames in England.
    65. See note 52 on the fairy tale.
    66. See note 52 on the fairy tale. ↵
    67. The site of the holiday house in the Hebrides islands off Scotland.
    68. Julia Stephen sought better health for the poor, frequently visiting them, and wrote a book, Notes from Sick Rooms (1883).
    69. Rose is partly based on Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, the artist, as is Lily Briscoe.
    70. See note 52 on the fairy tale.
    71. Julia Stephen became an atheist in adulthood, like her husband, which was fairly unusual for the time. See note 163 on Leslie Stephen.
    72. A story about the famous atheist philosopher David Hume (1711-76), who had to recite the Lord’s Prayer for a fish seller before she would pull him from the bog, which amused Leslie Stephen and his children.
    73. Flowers; see note 28.
    74. Flowers; see note 28.
    75. See note 72.
    76. A line from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, “To Jane – The Invitation” (1811).
    77. Rembrandt van Rijn (1506-1669), Dutch Renaissance painter.
    78. The national Spanish art museum.
    79. Michelangelo. See note 44.
    80. Giotto di Bondone (1266/7 – 1337), the best-known Italian painter and architect of the very early Renaissance.
    81. Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1485 – 1576), known in English as Titian, a great Venetian artist.
    82. Charles Darwin (1809-82), who first postulated the theory of evolution. Leslie Stephen was one of the first in England to accept his ideas.
    83. The London subway.
    84. See note 72.
    85. The Byzantine and ancient Roman name for Istanbul.
    86. Also known as Hagia Sofia, a landmark church that became a mosque and is now a museum.
    87. An inlet forming a harbour in Istanbul. ↵
    88. Baby carriage. ↵
    89. Music-hall lyrics, the pop music of Victorian times.
    90. Intended to mean a point of land.
    91. A city in Scotland. Woolf admitted that her knowledge of Scottish geography was lacking; critics have noted that the city of Glasgow would be much nearer to the island the characters are supposed to be on.
    92. This chapter, like Part Two, “Time Passes,” is in parentheses as an indication that its events go on in the background.
    93. A French beef stew in which the meat is braised with herbs, wine, olives, and vegetables.
    94. Note the reference to Jesus Christ’s parents.
    95. A town in Buckinghamshire, England.
    96. Cheated or frustrated himself.
    97. The London subway.
    98. See note 95.
    99. Roman god of the sea.
    100. Roman god of wine.
    101. George Eliot was the pen name of Marian Evans (1819-1880), the author of Middlemarch, a great Victorian novel.
    102. Wild, reckless.
    103. I.e., wore their hair loosely in a modern fashion, not pinned up tightly and formally.
    104. A gentle term for fools.
    105. See note 10 on Julia Stephen’s ancestry.
    106. In London’s East End, then a rough area.
    107. See notes 11 and 68 on Julia Stephen’s good works.
    108. Pen name of the famously witty French writer Francois-Marie d’Arouet (1694-1778).
    109. The Swiss-French writer Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (1766-1817), who opposed Napoleon.
    110. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), French military leader and emperor, enemy of the British.
    111. Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847-1929) was British Prime Minister from 1894-5. There were rumours that he was bisexual, which caused some scandal.
    112. Thomas Creevey (1768-1838), a lawyer and politician whose memoirs depict the politics and society of his time.
    113. Compare Mrs. Ramsay’s image with Lily Briscoe’s vision for her own (see notes 62 and 148).
    114. Sir Walter Scott’s (1771-1832) popular historical novels about Scotland.
    115. Jane Austen (1775-1817), the great English novelist. Note that most of the writers discussed are from the past.
    116. See note 114 on Scott.
    117. See note 49 on Leslie Stephen’s worry that he was a failure, and his concern for his own literary legacy.
    118. Leo Tolstoy (also spelled Tolstoi) (1828-1910), the great Russian novelist.
    119. Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina (1878) depicts a woman’s adultery; Vronsky is the title character’s lover.
    120. Lines from Charles Elton’s (1839-1900) poem “Luriana, Lurilee” (first published in 1943 in an anthology compiled by Woolf’s friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West). ↵
    121. Elton; see note 120. ↵
    122. Elton; see note 120. ↵
    123. Sir Walter Scott; see note 114. ↵
    124. Engraved lines.
    125. Elton; see note 120.
    126. From William Browne’s (1588-1643) poem “The Sirens’ Song,” which describes the fatal call of mermaids seeking to charm sailors to their deaths beneath the waves.
    127. Mucklebackit and Steenie are characters from Sir Walter Scott’s dramatic Scottish historical novel The Antiquary (1816). See note 114.
    128. Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), great French novelist.
    129. From Shakespeare’s Sonnet 98, “From you I have been absent in the spring.” Note that again, the Ramsays are turning to the past in their reading. This sonnet, like many of Shakespeare’s, depicts the struggle for immortality, whether through great art or through children, which echoes the conflict between the Ramsays.
    130. Shakespeare; see note 129.
    131. Scott; see note 114 and 127.
    132. See notes 114 and 128.
    133. Ancient Roman poet (70-19 B.C.). ↵
    134. See note 133.
    135. Here and below in this section, Woolf uses parentheses to show action going on in the background.
    136. See note 135 on the use of parentheses. Woolf powerfully recalled her father’s similar posture after her mother’s sudden death, writing years later, “How that early morning picture has stayed with me!” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 5 (5 May, 1924). San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. 85).
    137. The rocks of the beach.
    138. Woolf’s half-sister Stella Duckworth Hills (1869-97) died, soon after her marriage, of a somewhat mysterious illness connected with her early pregnancy, diagnosed as peritonitis.
    139. The First World War is only referred to obliquely in the novel, but its destructive chaos is a clear influence. This reference is also a metaphor for Woolf’s brother Thoby Stephen’s sudden death of typhus in 1904.
    140. Note the echoes of the opening of Part One, here and throughout Part Three.
    141. Mr. Ramsay is quoting from William Cowper’s poem, “The Castaway” (1803), which describes a drowning sailor. The final lines are: “We perish’d, each alone: / But I, beneath a rougher sea, / And whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he.”
    142. Lily’s home in London; see note 27.
    143. A cheap type of tobacco; see note 13..
    144. Another brief reference to the changes brought about by the First World War, and to Woolf’s vision of the problems brought about by traditional gender roles.
    145. Cowper; see note 113.
    146. Cowper; see note 113.
    147. This and the offset lines above are from Cowper; see note 113.
    148. Compare Lily’s vision of her work with her earlier view (see note 62) and with Mrs. Ramsay’s vision of male and female (note 113).
    149. Then a relatively new suburb of London.
    150. A small commuter town northwest of London.
    151. Raphael (1483-1520), the Italian Renaissance painter, produced several images of the Mary with the infant Jesus.
    152. A palace on the outskirts of London, built by Cardinal Wolsey in 1514 and appropriated by Henry VIII. A popular tourist site.
    153. A euphemism for using the bathroom.
    154. A boy selling London’s Evening Standard newspaper.
    155. See note 2 on Woolf’s brother Adrian Stephen and his relationship with his father. Adrian became a Freudian psychoanalyst, and many critics have noted the Oedipal conflict between James and Mr. Ramsay here.
    156. Istanbul; see note 85.
    157. Napoleon Bonaparte; see note 110.
    158. Cowper, as Mr. Ramsay has previously quoted; see note 113.
    159. A flower; see note 28.
    160. A weedy herb with healing properties.
    161. Weeds; see note 160.
    162. Golders Green is a then relatively new, and predominantly Jewish, suburb of London.
    163. Cheap tobacco; see note 13.
    164. Weeds; see note 160.
    165. Cowper, as before; see note 113.
    166. Leslie Stephen was openly an atheist, quite unusually for his time.
    167. A reference to the flowers supposed to grow in the underworld of Greek mythology. Elsewhere in the book, they are associated with Mrs. Ramsay; see note 42.

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