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.
3
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, 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 ut that right, and in so doing had subdued
the impertinences and irrelevances that plucked her attention and made
her remember how she w
as 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 apperarances
and commanded 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,"
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.) 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 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.
4
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