wash a beggar's dirty foot, when she admonished them so very severely
about that wretched atheist who had chased them--or, speaking accurately,
been invited to stay with them--in the Isle of Skye.
"There'll be no landing at the Lighthouse tomorrow," said Charles Tansley,
clapping his hands together as he stood at the window with her husband.
Surely, he had said enough. She wished they would both leave her and
James alone and go on talking. She looked at him. He was such a
miserable specimen, the children said, all humps and hollows. He couldn't
play cricket; he poked; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic brute, Andrew
said. They knew what he liked best--to be for ever walking up and down,
up and down, with Mr Ramsay, and saying who had won this, who had won
that, who was a "first rate man" at Latin verses, who was "brilliant but I
think fundamentally unsound," who was undoubtedly the "ablest fellow in
Balliol," who had buried his light temporarily at Bristol or Bedford, but
was bound to be heard of later when his Prolegomena, of which Mr Tansley
had the first pages in proof with him if Mr Ramsay would like to see
them, to some branch of mathematics or philosophy saw the light of day.
That was what they talked about.
She could not help laughing herself sometimes. She said, the other day,
something about "waves mountains high." Yes, said Charles Tansley, it
was a little rough. "Aren't you drenched to the skin?" she had said.
"Damp, not wet through," said Mr Tansley, pinching his sleeve, feeling
his socks.
But it was not that they minded, the children said. It was not his face;
it was not his manners. It was him--his point of view. When they talked
about something interesting, people, music, history, anything, even said
it was a fine evening so why not sit out of doors, then what they
complained of about Charles Tansley was that until he had turned the whole
thing round and made it somehow reflect himself and disparage them--he was
not satisfied. And he would go to picture galleries they said, and he
would ask one, did one like his tie? God knows, said Rose, one did not.
Disappearing as stealthily as stags from the dinner-table directly the
meal was over, the eight sons and daughters of Mr and Mrs Ramsay sought
their bedrooms, their fastness in a house where there was no other privacy
to debate anything, everything; Tansley's tie; the passing of the Reform
Bill; sea birds and butterflies; people; while the sun poured into those
attics, which a plank alone separated from each other so that every
footstep could be plainly heard and the Swiss girl sobbing for her father
who was dying of cancer in a valley of the Grisons, and lit up bats,
flannels, straw hats, ink-pots, paint-pots, beetles, and the skulls of
small birds, while it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned
to the wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in the towels too,
gritty with sand from bathing.
Strife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very
fibre of being, oh, that they should begin so early, Mrs Ramsay deplored.
They were so critical, her children. They talked such nonsense. She went
from the dining-room, holding James by the hand, since he would not go
with the others. It seemed to her such nonsense--inventing differences,
when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that. The real
differences, she thought, standing by the drawing-room window, are enough,
quite enough. She had in mind at the moment, rich and poor, high and low;
the great in birth receiving from her, half grudging, some respect, for
had she not in her veins the blood of that very noble, if slightly
mythical, Italian house, whose daughters, scattered about English
drawing-rooms in the nineteenth century, had lisped so charmingly, had
stormed so wildly, and all her wit and her bearing and her temper came
from them, and not from the sluggish English, or the cold Scotch; but more
profoundly, she ruminated the other problem, of rich and poor, and the
things she saw with her own eyes, weekly, daily, here or in London, when
she visited this widow, or that struggling wife in person with a bag on
her arm, and a note-book and pencil with which she wrote down in columns
carefully ruled for the purpose wages and spendings, employment and
unemployment, in the hope that thus she would cease to be a private woman
whose charity was half a sop to her own indignation, half a relief to her
own curiosity, and become what with her untrained mind she greatly
admired, an investigator, elucidating the social problem.
Insoluble questions they were, it seemed to her, standing there, holding
James by the hand. He had followed her into the drawing-room, that young
man they laughed at; he was standing by the table, fidgeting with
something, awkwardly, feeling himself out of things, as she knew without
looking round. They had all gone--the children; Minta Doyle and Paul
Rayley; Augustus Carmichael; her husband--they had all gone. So she
turned with a sigh and said, "Would it bore you to come with me,
Mr Tansley?"
She had a dull errand in the town; she had a letter or two to write; she
would be ten minutes perhaps; she would put on her hat. And, with her
basket and her parasol, there she was again, ten minutes later, giving out
a sense of being ready, of being equipped for a jaunt, which, however, she
must interrupt for a moment, as they passed the tennis lawn, to ask
Mr Carmichael, who was basking with his yellow cat's eyes ajar, so that
like a cat's they seemed to reflect the branches moving or the clouds
passing, but to give no inkling of any inner thoughts or emotion
whatsoever, if he wanted anything.
For they were making the great expedition, she said, laughing. They were
going to the town. "Stamps, writing-paper, tobacco?" she suggested,
stopping by his side. But no, he wanted nothing. His hands clasped
themselves over his capacious paunch, his eyes blinked, as if he would
have liked to reply kindly to these blandishments (she was seductive but a
little nervous) but could not, sunk as he was in a grey-green somnolence
which embraced them all, without need of words, in a vast and benevolent
lethargy of well-wishing; all the house; all the world; all the people in
it, for he had slipped into his glass at lunch a few drops of something,
which accounted, the children thought, for the vivid streak of
canary-yellow in moustache and beard that were otherwise milk white. No,
nothing, he murmured.
He should have been a great philosopher, said Mrs Ramsay, as they went
down the road to the fishing village, but he had made an unfortunate
marriage. Holding her black parasol very erect, and moving with an
indescribable air of expectation, as if she were going to meet some one
round the corner, she told the story; an affair at Oxford with some girl;
an early marriage; poverty; going to India; translating a little poetry
"very beautifully, I believe," being willing to teach the boys Persian or
Hindustanee, but what really was the use of that?--and then lying, as they
sa
w 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
had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.
It was a large family, nine brothers and sisters, and his father was a
working man. "My father is a chemist, Mrs Ramsay. He keeps a shop." He
himself had paid his own way since he was thirteen. Often he went without
a greatcoat in winter. He could never "return hospitality" (those were
his parched stiff words) at college. He had to make things last twice the
time other people did; he smoked the cheapest tobacco; shag; the same the
old men did in the quays. He worked hard--seven hours a day; his subject
was now the influence of something upon somebody--they were walking on and
Mrs Ramsay did not quite catch the meaning, only the words, here and
there ... dissertation ... fellowship ... readership ... lectureship. She
could not follow the ugly academic jargon, that rattled itself off so
glibly, but said to herself that she saw now why going to the circus had
knocked him off his perch, poor little man, and why he came out,
instantly, with all that about his father and mother and brothers and
sisters, and she would see to it that they didn't laugh at him any more;
she would tell Prue about it. What he would have liked, she supposed,
would have been to say how he had gone not to the circus but to Ibsen with
the Ramsays. He was an awful prig--oh yes, an insufferable bore. For,
though they had reached the town now and were in the main street, with
carts grinding past on the cobbles, still he went on talking, about
settlements, and teaching, and working men, and helping our own class,
and lectures, till she gathered that he had got back entire
self-confidence, had recovered from the circus, and was about (and now
again she liked him away on both sides, they came out on the quay, and the
whole bay spread before them and Mrs Ramsay could not help exclaiming,
"Oh, how beautiful!" For the great plateful of blue water was before her;
the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right,
as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats,
the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always
seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.
That was the view, she said, stopping, growing greyer-eyed, that her
husband loved.
She paused a moment. But now, she said, artists had come here. There
indeed, only a few paces off, stood one of them, in Panama hat and yellow
boots, seriously, softly, absorbedly, for all that he was watched by ten
little boys, with an air of profound contentment on his round red face
gazing, and then, when he had gazed, dipping; imbuing the tip of his
brush in some soft mound of green or pink. Since Mr Paunceforte had been
there, three years before, all the pictures were like that, she said,
green and grey, with lemon-coloured sailing-boats, and pink women on the
beach.
But her grandmother's friends, she said, glancing discreetly as they
passed, took the greatest pains; first they mixed their own colours, and
then they ground them, and then they put damp cloths to keep them moist.
So Mr Tansley supposed she meant him to see that that man's picture was
skimpy, was that what one said? The colours weren't solid? Was that what
one said? Under the influence of that extraordinary emotion which had been
growing all the walk, had begun in the garden when he had wanted to take
her bag, had increased in the town when he had wanted to tell her
everything about himself, he was coming to see himself, and everything he
had ever known gone crooked a little. It was awfully strange.
There he stood in the parlour of the poky little house where she had taken
him, waiting for her, while she went upstairs a moment to see a woman. He
heard her quick step above; heard her voice cheerful, then low; looked at
the mats, tea-caddies, glass shades; waited quite impatiently; looked
forward eagerly to the walk home; determined to carry her bag; then heard
her come out; shut a door; say they must keep the windows open and the
doors shut, ask at the house for anything they wanted (she must be talking
to a child) when, suddenly, in she came, stood for a moment silent (as if
she had been pretending up there, and for a moment let herself be now),
stood quite motionless for a moment against a picture of Queen Victoria
wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter; when all at once he realised that
it was this: it was this:--she was the most beautiful person he had ever
seen.
violets--what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least; she had
eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her
breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in
her eyes and the wind in her hair--He had hold of her bag.
"Good-bye, Elsie," she said, and they walked up the street, she holding
her parasol erect and walking as if she expected to meet some one round
&n
bsp; the corner, while for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an
extraordinary pride; a man digging in a drain stopped digging and looked
at her, let his arm fall down and looked at her; for the first time in his
life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the
cyclamen and the violets for he was walking with a beautiful woman. He
had hold of her bag.
2
"No going to the Lighthouse, James," he said, as trying in deference to
Mrs Ramsay to soften his voice into some semblance of geniality at least.
Odious little man, thought Mrs Ramsay, why go on saying that?
3
"Perhaps you will wake up and find the sun shining and the birds singing,"
she said compassionately, smoothing the little boy's hair, for her
husband, with his caustic saying that it would not be fine, had dashed his
spirits she could see. This going to the Lighthouse was a passion of his,
she saw, and then, as if her husband had not said enough, with his caustic
saying that it would not be fine tomorrow, this odious little man went and
rubbed it in all over again.
"Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow," she said, smoothing his hair.
All she could do now was to admire the refrigerator, and turn the pages of
the Stores list in the hope that she might come upon something like a
rake, or a mowing-machine, which, with its prongs and its handles, would
need the greatest skill and care in cutting out. All these young men
parodied her husband, she reflected; he said it would rain; they said it
would be a positive tornado.
But here, as she turned the page, suddenly her search for the picture of a
rake or a mowing-machine was interrupted. The gruff murmur, irregularly
broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had
kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat
in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily
talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its
place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as
the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then,
"How's that? How's that?" of the children playing cricket, had ceased;
so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most
part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed
consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children
the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, "I am guarding
you--I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly,
especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in
hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums
remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction
of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had
slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephermal as
a rainbow--this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the
other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up
with an impulse of terror.
They had ceased to talk; that was the explanation. Falling in one second
from the tension which had gripped her to the other extreme which, as if
to recoup her for her unnecessary expense of emotion, was cool, amused,
and even faintly malicious, she concluded that poor Charles Tansley had
been shed. That was of little account to her. If her husband required
sacrifices (and indeed he did) she cheerfully offered up to him Charles
Tansley, who had snubbed her little boy.
One moment more, with her head raised, she listened, as if she waited for
some habitual sound, some regular mechanical sound; and then, hearing
something rhythmical, half said, half chanted, beginning in the garden, as