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; 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 boards 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, 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. 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
platains with her brush. He had got his fellowship. He had married;
he lived at Golder's Green.
She had gone one day into a Hall and heard him speaking during the war.
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 ("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 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 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
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 th
at one day on the stairs. It had
been an earwig, apparently. Other people might find centipedes. They
had laughed and laughed.
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 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, 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