window, in the cadaverous early morning light, and the carpet had a
hole in it. But what did they say? Lily asked herself, as if by
looking she could hear them. Minta went on eating her sandwich,
annoyingly, while he spoke something violent, abusing her, in a mutter
so as not to wake the children, the two little boys. He was withered,
drawn; she flamboyant, careless. For things had worked loose after the
first year or so; the marriage had turned out rather badly.
And this, Lily thought, taking the green paint on her brush, this
making up scenes about them, is what we call "knowing" people,
"thinking" of them, "being fond" of them! Not a word of it was true;
she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the same. She
went on tunnelling her way into her picture, into the past.
Another time, Paul said he "played chess in coffee-houses." She had
built up a whole structure of imagination on that saying too. She
remembered how, as he said it, she thought how he rang up the servant,
and she said, "Mrs Rayley's out, sir," and he decided that he would not
come home either. She saw him sitting in the corner of some lugubrious
place where the smoke attached itself to the red plush seats, and the
waitresses got to know you, and he played chess with a little man who
was in the tea trade and lived at Surbiton, but that was all Paul knew
about him. And then Minta was out when he came home and then there was
that scene on the stairs, when he got the poker in case of burglars (no
doubt to frighten her too) and spoke so bitterly, saying she had ruined
his life. At any rate when she went down to see them at a cottage near
Rickmansworth, things were horribly strained. Paul took her down the
garden to look at the Belgian hares which he bred, and Minta followed
them, singing, and put her bare arm on his shoulder, lest he should
tell her anything.
Minta was bored by hares, Lily thought. But Minta never gave herself
away. She never said things like that about playing chess in coffee-
houses. She was far too conscious, far too wary. But to go on with
their story--they had got through the dangerous stage by now. She had
been staying with them last summer some time and the car broke down and
Minta had to hand him his tools. He sat on the road mending the car,
and it was the way she gave him the tools--business-like,
straightforward, friendly--that proved it was all right now. They were
"in love" no longer; no, he had taken up with another woman, a serious
woman, with her hair in a plait and a case in her hand (Minta had
described her gratefully, almost admiringly), who went to meetings and
shared Paul's views (they had got more and more pronounced) about the
taxation of land values and a capital levy. Far from breaking up the
marriage, that alliance had righted it. They were excellent friends,
obviously, as he sat on the road and she handed him his tools.
So that was the story of the Rayleys, Lily thought. She imagined
herself telling it to Mrs Ramsay, who would be full of curiosity to
know what had become of the Rayleys. She would feel a little
triumphant, telling Mrs Ramsay that the marriage had not been a
success.
But the dead, thought Lily, encountering some obstacle in her design
which made her pause and ponder, stepping back a foot or so, oh, the
dead! she murmured, one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had
even a little contempt for them. They are at our mercy. Mrs Ramsay
has faded and gone, she thought. We can over-ride her wishes, improve
away her limited, old-fashioned ideas. She recedes further and further
from us. Mockingly she seemed to see her there at the end of the
corridor of years saying, of all incongruous things, "Marry, marry!"
(sitting very upright early in the morning with the birds beginning to
cheep in the garden outside). And one would have to say to her, It has
all gone against your wishes. They're happy like that; I'm happy like
this. Life has changed completely. At that all her being, even her
beauty, became for a moment, dusty and out of date. For a moment Lily,
standing there, with the sun hot on her back, summing up the Rayleys,
triumphed over Mrs Ramsay, who would never know how Paul went to
coffee-houses and had a mistress; how he sat on the ground and Minta
handed him his tools; how she stood here painting, had never married,
not even William Bankes.
Mrs Ramsay had planned it. Perhaps, had she lived, she would have
compelled it. Already that summer he was "the kindest of men." He was
"the first scientist of his age, my husband says." He was also "poor
William--it makes me so unhappy, when I go to see him, to find nothing
nice in his house--no one to arrange the flowers." So they were sent
for walks together, and she was told, with that faint touch of irony
that made Mrs Ramsay slip through one's fingers, that she had a
scientific mind; she liked flowers; she was so exact. What was this
mania of hers for marriage? Lily wondered, stepping to and fro from
her easel.
(Suddenly, as suddenly as a star slides in the sky, a reddish light
seemed to burn in her mind, covering Paul Rayley, issuing from him. It
rose like a fire sent up in token of some celebration by savages on a
distant beach. She heard the roar and the crackle. The whole sea for
miles round ran red and gold. Some winey smell mixed with it and
intoxicated her, for she felt again her own headlong desire to throw
herself off the cliff and be drowned looking for a pearl brooch on a
beach. And the roar and the crackle repelled her with fear and
disgust, as if while she saw its splendour and power she saw too how it
fed on the treasure of the house, greedily, disgustingly, and she
loathed it. But for a sight, for a glory it surpassed everything in
her experience, and burnt year after year like a signal fire on a
desert island at the edge of the sea, and one had only to say "in love"
and instantly, as happened now, up rose Paul's fire again. And it sank
and she said to herself, laughing, "The Rayleys"; how Paul went to
coffee-houses and played chess.)
She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth though, she thought. She
had been looking at the table-cloth, and it had flashed upon her that
she would move the tree to the middle, and need never marry anybody,
and she had felt an enormous exultation. She had felt, now she could
stand up to Mrs Ramsay--a tribute to the astonishing power that Mrs
Ramsay had over one. Do this, she said, and one did it. Even her
shadow at the window with James was full of authority. She remembered
how William Bankes had been shocked by her neglect of the significance
of mother and son. Did she not admire their beauty? he said. But
William, she remembered, had listened to her with his wise child's eyes
when she explained how it was not irreverence: how a light there needed
a shadow there and so on. She did not intend to disparage a subject
which, they agreed, Raphael had treated divinely. She was not cynical.
Quite the contrary. Thanks to his scientific mind he understood
--a
proof of disinterested intelligence which had pleased her and comforted
her enormously. One could talk of painting then seriously to a man.
Indeed, his friendship had been one of the pleasures of her life. She
loved William Bankes.
They went to Hampton Court and he always left her, like the perfect
gentleman he was, plenty of time to wash her hands, while he strolled
by the river. That was typical of their relationship. Many things were
left unsaid. Then they strolled through the courtyards, and admired,
summer after summer, the proportions and the flowers, and he would tell
her things, about perspective, about architecture, as they walked, and
he would stop to look at a tree, or the view over the lake, and admire
a child--(it was his great grief--he had no daughter) in the spent so
much time in laboratories that the world when he came out seemed to
dazzle him, so that he walked slowly, lifted his hand to screen his
eyes and paused, with his head thrown back, merely to breathe the air.
Then he would tell her how his housekeeper was on her holiday; he must
buy a new carpet for the staircase. Perhaps she would go with him to
buy a new carpet for the staircase. And once something led him to talk
about the Ramsays and he had said how when he first saw her she had
been wearing a grey hat; she was not more than nineteen or twenty. She
was astonishingly beautiful. There he stood looking down the avenue at
Hampton Court as if he could see her there among the fountains.
She looked now at the drawing-room step. She saw, through William's
eyes, the shape of a woman, peaceful and silent, with downcast eyes.
She sat musing, pondering (she was in grey that day, Lily thought).
Her eyes were bent. She would never lift them. Yes, thought Lily,
looking intently, I must have seen her look like that, but not in grey;
nor so still, nor so young, nor so peaceful. The figure came readily
enough. She was astonishingly beautiful, as William said. But beauty
was not everything. Beauty had this penalty--it came too readily, came
too completely. It stilled life--froze it. One forgot the little
agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or
shadow, which made the face unrecognisable for a moment and yet added a
quality one saw for ever after. It was simpler to smooth that all out
under the cover of beauty. But what was the look she had, Lily
wondered, when she clapped her deer-stalkers's hat on her head, or ran
across the grass, or scolded Kennedy, the gardener? Who could tell
her? Who could help her?
Against her will she had come to the surface, and found herself half
out of the picture, looking, little dazedly, as if at unreal things, at
Mr Carmichael. He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his
paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged
with existence. His book had fallen on to the grass.
She wanted to go straight up to him and say, "Mr Carmichael!" Then he
would look up benevolently as always, from his smoky vague green eyes.
But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them.
And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that
broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. "About life,
about death; about Mrs Ramsay"--no, she thought, one could say
nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark.
Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then
one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like
most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the
eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express
in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?
(She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily
empty.) It was one's body feeling, not one's mind. The physical
sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become
suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up
her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not
to have--to want and want--how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again
and again! Oh, Mrs Ramsay! she called out silently, to that essence
which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that woman in
grey, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then having gone, come
back again. It had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air,
nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time
of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand
out and wrung the heart thus. Suddenly, the empty drawing-room steps,
the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the
whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques
flourishing round a centre of complete emptiness.
"What does it mean? How do you explain it all?" she wanted to say,
turning to Mr Carmichael again. For the whole world seemed to have
dissolved in this early morning hour into a pool of thought, a deep
basin of reality, and one could almost fancy that had Mr Carmichael
spoken, for instance, a little tear would have rent the surface pool.
And then? Something would emerge. A hand would be shoved up, a blade
would be flashed. It was nonsense of course.
A curious notion came to her that he did after all hear the things she
could not say. He was an inscrutable old man, with the yellow stain on
his beard, and his poetry, and his puzzles, sailing serenely through a
world which satisfied all his wants, so that she thought he had only to
put down his hand where he lay on the lawn to fish up anything he
wanted. She looked at her picture. That would have been his answer,
presumably--how "you" and "I" and "she" pass and vanish; nothing stays;
all changes; but not words, not paint. Yet it would be hung in the
attics, she thought; it would be rolled up and flung under a sofa; yet
even so, even of a picture like that, it was true. One might say, even
of this scrawl, not of that actual picture, perhaps, but of what it
attempted, that it "remained for ever," she was going to say, or, for
the words spoken sounded even to herself, too boastful, to hint,
wordlessly; when, looking at the picture, she was surprised to find
that she could not see it. Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did
not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of
her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect
control of herself--Oh, yes!--in every other way. Was she crying then
for Mrs Ramsay, without being aware of any unhappiness? She addressed
old Mr Carmichael again. What was it then? What did it mean? Could
things thrust their hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the
fist grasp? Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of
the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from
the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly
people, that this was life?--startling, unexpected, unknown? For one
moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on
the lawn, and
demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so
inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings
from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll
itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into
shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs Ramsay would return. "Mrs
Ramsay!" she said aloud, "Mrs Ramsay!" The tears ran down her face.
6
[Macalister's boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side
to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was
thrown back into the sea.]
7
"Mrs Ramsay!" Lily cried, "Mrs Ramsay!" But nothing happened. The pain
increased. That anguish could reduce one to such a pitch of
imbecility, she thought! Anyhow the old man had not heard her. He
remained benignant, calm--if one chose to think it, sublime. Heaven be
praised, no one had heard her cry that ignominious cry, stop pain,
stop! She had not obviously taken leave of her senses. No one had
seen her step off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation.
She remained a skimpy old maid, holding a paint-brush.
And now slowly the pain of the want, and the bitter anger (to be called
back, just as she thought she would never feel sorrow for Mrs Ramsay
again. Had she missed her among the coffee cups at breakfast? not in
the least) lessened; and of their anguish left, as antidote, a relief
that was balm in itself, and also, but more mysteriously, a sense of
some one there, of Mrs Ramsay, relieved for a moment of the weight that
the world had put on her, staying lightly by her side and then (for
this was Mrs Ramsay in all her beauty) raising to her forehead a wreath
of white flowers with which she went. Lily squeezed her tubes again.
She attacked that problem of the hedge. It was strange how clearly she
saw her, stepping with her usual quickness across fields among whose
folds, purplish and soft, among whose flowers, hyacinth or lilies, she
vanished. It was some trick of the painter's eye. For days after she
had heard of her death she had seen her thus, putting her wreath to her
forehead and going unquestioningly with her companion, a shade across
the fields. The sight, the phrase, had its power to console. Wherever
she happened to be, painting, here, in the country or in London, the
vision would come to her, and her eyes, half closing, sought something
to base her vision on. She looked down the railway carriage, the
omnibus; took a line from shoulder or cheek; looked at the windows
opposite; at Piccadilly, lamp-strung in the evening. All had been part
of the fields of death. But always something--it might be a face, a
voice, a paper boy crying STANDARD, NEWS--thrust through, snubbed her,
waked her, required and got in the end an effort of attention, so that
the vision must be perpetually remade. Now again, moved as she was by
some instinctive need of distance and blue, she looked at the bay
beneath her, making hillocks of the blue spaces, again she was roused
as usual by something incongruous. There was a brown spot in the
middle of the bay. It was a boat. Yes, she realised that after a
second. But whose boat? Mr Ramsay's boat, she replied. Mr Ramsay;
the man who had marched past her, with his hand raised, aloof, at the
head of a procession, in his beautiful boots, asking her for sympathy,
which she had refused. The boat was now half way across the bay.
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that
the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up
in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea. A steamer far
out at sea had drawn in the air a great scroll of smoke which stayed
there curving and circling decoratively, as if the air were a fine
gauze which held things and kept them softly in its mesh, only gently
swaying them this way and that. And as happens sometimes when the
weather is very fine, the cliffs looked as if they were conscious of