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.
8
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, 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, 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
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 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.
9
[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.]
10
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. 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 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
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 Ja
mes 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 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.
11
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