childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they
said, had promised so well.]
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.]
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,
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 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
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 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