1927_Woolf,Virginia_TotheLighthouse

To the Lighthouse

by

Virginia Woolf

THE WINDOW

1

Yes of course if its fine tomorrow said Mrs Ramsay But youll have to be up with the lark she added

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy as if it were settled the expedition were bound to take place and the wonder to which he had looked forward for years and years it seemed was after a nights darkness and a days sail within touch Since he belonged even at the age of six to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that but must let future prospects with their joys and sorrows cloud what is actually at hand since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests James Ramsay sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss It was fringed with joy The wheelbarrow the lawnmower the sound of poplar trees leaves whitening before rain rooks cawing brooms knocking dresses rustlingall these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code his secret language though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity with his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes impeccably candid and pure frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty so that his mother watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs

But said his father stopping in front of the drawingroom window it wont be fine

Had there been an axe handy a poker or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his fathers breast and killed him there and then James would have seized it Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr Ramsay excited in his childrens breasts by his mere presence standing as now lean as a knife narrow as the blade of one grinning sarcastically not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was James thought but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement What he said was true It was always true He was incapable of untruth never tampered with a fact never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being least of all of his own children who sprung from his loins should be aware from childhood that life is difficult facts uncompromising and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished our frail barks founder in darkness here Mr Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon one that needs above all courage truth and the power to endure

But it may be fineI expect it will be fine said Mrs Ramsay making some little twist of the reddish brown stocking she was knitting impatiently If she finished it tonight if they did go to the Lighthouse after all it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy who was threatened with a tuberculous hip together with a pile of old magazines and some tobacco indeed whatever she could find lying about not really wanted but only littering the room to give those poor fellows who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden something to amuse them For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time and possibly more in stormy weather upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn she would ask and to have no letters or newspapers and to see nobody if you were married not to see your wife not to know how your children wereif they were ill if they had fallen down and broken their legs or arms to see the same dreary waves breaking week after week and then a dreadful storm coming and the windows covered with spray and birds dashed against the lamp and the whole place rocking and not be able to put your nose out of doors for fear of being swept into the sea How would you like that she asked addressing herself particularly to her daughters So she added rather differently one must take them whatever comforts one can

Its due west said the atheist Tansley holding his bony fingers spread so that the wind blew through them for he was sharing Mr Ramsays evening walk up and down up and down the terrace That is to say the wind blew from the worst possible direction for landing at the Lighthouse Yes he did say disagreeable things Mrs Ramsay admitted it was odious of him to rub this in and make James still more disappointed but at the same time she would not let them laugh at him The atheist they called him the little atheist Rose mocked him Prue mocked him Andrew Jasper Roger mocked him even old Badger without a tooth in his head had bit him for being as Nancy put it the hundred and tenth young man to chase them all the way up to the Hebrides when it was ever so much nicer to be alone

Nonsense said Mrs Ramsay with great severity Apart from the habit of exaggeration which they had from her and from the implication which was true that she asked too many people to stay and had to lodge some in the town she could not bear incivility to her guests to young men in particular who were poor as churchmice exceptionally able her husband said his great admirers and come there for a holiday Indeed she had the whole of the other sex under her protection for reasons she could not explain for their chivalry and valour for the fact that they negotiated treaties ruled India controlled finance finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable something trustful childlike reverential which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity and woe betide the girlpray Heaven it was none of her daughterswho did not feel the worth of it and all that it implied to the marrow of her bones

She turned with severity upon Nancy He had not chased them she said He had been asked

They must find a way out of it all There might be some simpler way some less laborious way she sighed When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey her cheek sunk at fifty she thought possibly she might have managed things betterher husband money his books But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision evade difficulties or slur over duties She was now formidable to behold and it was only in silence looking up from their plates after she had spoken so severely about Charles Tansley that her daughters Prue Nancy Rosecould sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers in Paris perhaps a wilder life not always taking care of some man or other for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire of ringed fingers and lace though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts and made them as they sat at table beneath their mothers eyes honour her strange severity her extreme courtesy like a queens raising from the mud to wash a beggars dirty foot when she admonished them so very severely about that wretched atheist who had chased themor speaking accurately been invited to stay with themin the Isle of Skye

Therell 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 couldnt play cricket he poked he shuffled He was a sarcastic brute Andrew said They knew what he liked bestto 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 Arent 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 himhis 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 themhe 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 dinnertable 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 Tansleys 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 inkpots paintpots 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 diningroom holding James by the hand since he would not go with the others It seemed to her such nonsenseinventing differences when people heaven knows were different enough without that The real differences she thought standing by the drawingroom 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 drawingrooms 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 notebook 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 drawingroom 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 gonethe children Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley Augustus Carmichael her husbandthey 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 cats eyes ajar so that like a cats 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 writingpaper 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 greygreen somnolence which embraced them all without need of words in a vast and benevolent lethargy of wellwishing 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 canaryyellow 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 thatand then lying as they saw 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 mans intellect even in its decay the subjection of all wivesnot that she blamed the girl and the marriage had been happy enough she believedto their husbands 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 himselfbut 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 tigersCraning forwards for she was shortsighted she read it outwill visit this town she read It was terribly dangerous work for a onearmed man she exclaimed to stand on top of a ladder like thathis 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

Lets go he said repeating her words clicking them out however with a selfconsciousness 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 children Never he answered as if she asked the very thing he wanted 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 hardseven hours a day his subject was now the influence of something upon somebodythey were walking on and Mrs Ramsay did not quite catch the meaning only the words here and theredissertationfellowshipreadershiplectureship 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 didnt 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 prigoh 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 selfconfidence had recovered from the circus and was about and now again she liked him warmly to tell herbut here the houses falling 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 greyereyed 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 lemoncoloured sailingboats and pink women on the beach

But her grandmothers 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 mans picture was skimpy was that what one said The colours werent 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 teacaddies 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 thisshe was the most beautiful person he had ever seen

With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair with cyclamen and wild violetswhat 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 hairHe had hold of her bag

Goodbye 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 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 boys 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 mowingmachine 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 mowingmachine 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 Hows that Hows 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 youI 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 ephemeral as a rainbowthis 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 her husband beat up and down the terrace something between a croak and a song she was soothed once more assured again that all was well and looking down at the book on her knee found the picture of a pocket knife with six blades which could only be cut out if James was very careful

Suddenly a loud cry as of a sleepwalker half roused something about

Stormed at with shot and shell

sung out with the utmost intensity in her ear made her turn apprehensively to see if anyone had heard him Only Lily Briscoe she was glad to find and that did not matter But the sight of the girl standing on the edge of the lawn painting reminded her she was supposed to be keeping her head as much in the same position as possible for Lilys picture Lilys picture Mrs Ramsay smiled With her little Chinese eyes and her puckeredup face she would never marry one could not take her painting very seriously she was an independent little creature and Mrs Ramsay liked her for it so remembering her promise she bent her head

4

Indeed he almost knocked her easel over coming down upon her with his hands waving shouting out Boldly we rode and well but mercifully he turned sharp and rode off to die gloriously she supposed upon the heights of Balaclava Never was anybody at once so ridiculous and so alarming But so long as he kept like that waving shouting she was safe he would not stand still and look at her picture And that was what Lily Briscoe could not have endured Even while she looked at the mass at the line at the colour at Mrs Ramsay sitting in the window with James she kept a feeler on her surroundings lest some one should creep up and suddenly she should find her picture looked at But now with all her senses quickened as they were looking straining till the colour of the wall and the jacmanna beyond burnt into her eyes she was aware of someone coming out of the house coming towards her but somehow divined from the footfall William Bankes so that though her brush quivered she did not as she would have done had it been Mr Tansley Paul Rayley Minta Doyle or practically anybody else turn her canvas upon the grass but let it stand William Bankes stood beside her

They had rooms in the village and so walking in walking out parting late on doormats had said little things about the soup about the children about one thing and another which made them allies so that when he stood beside her now in his judicial way he was old enough to be her father too a botanist a widower smelling of soap very scrupulous and clean she just stood there He just stood there Her shoes were excellent he observed They allowed the toes their natural expansion Lodging in the same house with her he had noticed too how orderly she was up before breakfast and off to paint he believed alone poor presumably and without the complexion or the allurement of Miss Doyle certainly but with a good sense which made her in his eyes superior to that young lady Now for instance when Ramsay bore down on them shouting gesticulating Miss Briscoe he felt certain understood

Some one had blundered

Mr Ramsay glared at them He glared at them without seeming to see them That did make them both vaguely uncomfortable Together they had seen a thing they had not been meant to see They had encroached upon a privacy So Lily thought it was probably an excuse of his for moving for getting out of earshot that made Mr Bankes almost immediately say something about its being chilly and suggested taking a stroll She would come yes But it was with difficulty that she took her eyes off her picture

The jacmanna was bright violet the wall staring white She would not have considered it honest to tamper with the bright violet and the staring white since she saw them like that fashionable though it was since Mr Pauncefortes visit to see everything pale elegant semitransparent Then beneath the colour there was the shape She could see it all so clearly so commandingly when she looked it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed It was in that moments flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child Such she often felt herselfstruggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage to say But this is what I see this is what I see and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her And it was then too in that chill and windy way as she began to paint that there forced themselves upon her other things her own inadequacy her insignificance keeping house for her father off the Brompton Road and had much ado to control her impulse to fling herself thank Heaven she had always resisted so far at Mrs Ramsays knee and say to herbut what could one say to her Im in love with you No that was not true Im in love with this all waving her hand at the hedge at the house at the children It was absurd it was impossible So now she laid her brushes neatly in the box side by side and said to William Bankes

It suddenly gets cold The sun seems to give less heat she said looking about her for it was bright enough the grass still a soft deep green the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers and rooks dropping cool cries from the high blue But something moved flashed turned a silver wing in the air It was September after all the middle of September and past six in the evening So off they strolled down the garden in the usual direction past the tennis lawn past the pampas grass to that break in the thick hedge guarded by red hot pokers like brasiers of clear burning coal between which the blue waters of the bay looked bluer than ever

They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need It was as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief First the pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue and the heart expanded with it and the body swam only the next instant to be checked and chilled by the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves Then up behind the great black rock almost every evening spurted irregularly so that one had to watch for it and it was a delight when it came a fountain of white water and then while one waited for that one watched on the pale semicircular beach wave after wave shedding again and again smoothly a film of mother of pearl

They both smiled standing there They both felt a common hilarity excited by the moving waves and then by the swift cutting race of a sailing boat which having sliced a curve in the bay stopped shivered let its sails drop down and then with a natural instinct to complete the picture after this swift movement both of them looked at the dunes far away and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadnessbecause the thing was completed partly and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years Lily thought the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest

Looking at the far sand hills William Bankes thought of Ramsay thought of a road in Westmorland thought of Ramsay striding along a road by himself hung round with that solitude which seemed to be his natural air But this was suddenly interrupted William Bankes remembered and this must refer to some actual incident by a hen straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks upon which Ramsay stopping pointed his stick and said Prettypretty an odd illumination in to his heart Bankes had thought it which showed his simplicity his sympathy with humble things but it seemed to him as if their friendship had ceased there on that stretch of road After that Ramsay had married After that what with one thing and another the pulp had gone out of their friendship Whose fault it was he could not say only after a time repetition had taken the place of newness It was to repeat that they met But in this dumb colloquy with the sand dunes he maintained that his affection for Ramsay had in no way diminished but there like the body of a young man laid up in peat for a century with the red fresh on his lips was his friendship in its acuteness and reality laid up across the bay among the sandhills

He was anxious for the sake of this friendship and perhaps too in order to clear himself in his own mind from the imputation of having dried and shrunkfor Ramsay lived in a welter of children whereas Bankes was childless and a widowerhe was anxious that Lily Briscoe should not disparage Ramsay a great man in his own way yet should understand how things stood between them Begun long years ago their friendship had petered out on a Westmorland road where the hen spread her wings before her chicks after which Ramsay had married and their paths lying different ways there had been certainly for no ones fault some tendency when they met to repeat

Yes That was it He finished He turned from the view And turning to walk back the other way up the drive Mr Bankes was alive to things which would not have struck him had not those sandhills revealed to him the body of his friendship lying with the red on its lips laid up in peatfor instance Cam the little girl Ramsays youngest daughter She was picking Sweet Alice on the bank She was wild and fierce She would not give a flower to the gentleman as the nursemaid told her No no no she would not She clenched her fist She stamped And Mr Bankes felt aged and saddened and somehow put into the wrong by her about his friendship He must have dried and shrunk

The Ramsays were not rich and it was a wonder how they managed to contrive it all Eight children To feed eight children on philosophy Here was another of them Jasper this time strolling past to have a shot at a bird he said nonchalantly swinging Lilys hand like a pumphandle as he passed which caused Mr Bankes to say bitterly how SHE was a favourite There was education now to be considered true Mrs Ramsay had something of her own perhaps let alone the daily wear and tear of shoes and stockings which those great fellows all well grown angular ruthless youngsters must require As for being sure which was which or in what order they came that was beyond him He called them privately after the Kings and Queens of England Cam the Wicked James the Ruthless Andrew the Just Prue the Fairfor Prue would have beauty he thought how could she help itand Andrew brains While he walked up the drive and Lily Briscoe said yes and no and capped his comments for she was in love with them all in love with this world he weighed Ramsays case commiserated him envied him as if he had seen him divest himself of all those glories of isolation and austerity which crowned him in youth to cumber himself definitely with fluttering wings and clucking domesticities They gave him somethingWilliam Bankes acknowledged that it would have been pleasant if Cam had stuck a flower in his coat or clambered over his shoulder as over her fathers to look at a picture of Vesuvius in eruption but they had also his old friends could not but feel destroyed something What would a stranger think now What did this Lily Briscoe think Could one help noticing that habits grew on him eccentricities weaknesses perhaps It was astonishing that a man of his intellect could stoop so low as he didbut that was too harsh a phrasecould depend so much as he did upon peoples praise

Oh but said Lily think of his work

Whenever she thought of his work she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table It was Andrews doing She asked him what his fathers books were about Subject and object and the nature of reality Andrew had said And when she said Heavens she had no notion what that meant Think of a kitchen table then he told her when youre not there

So now she always saw when she thought of Mr Ramsays work a scrubbed kitchen table It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree for they had reached the orchard And with a painful effort of concentration she focused her mind not upon the silverbossed bark of the tree or upon its fishshaped leaves but upon a phantom kitchen table one of those scrubbed board tables grained and knotted whose virtue seems to have been laid bare by years of muscular integrity which stuck there its four legs in air Naturally if ones days were passed in this seeing of angular essences this reducing of lovely evenings with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal fourlegged table and it was a mark of the finest minds to do so naturally one could not be judged like an ordinary person

Mr Bankes liked her for bidding him think of his work He had thought of it often and often Times without number he had said Ramsay is one of those men who do their best work before they are forty He had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only five and twenty what came after was more or less amplification repetition But the number of men who make a definite contribution to anything whatsoever is very small he said pausing by the pear tree well brushed scrupulously exact exquisitely judicial Suddenly as if the movement of his hand had released it the load of her accumulated impressions of him tilted up and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all she felt about him That was one sensation Then up rose in a fume the essence of his being That was another She felt herself transfixed by the intensity of her perception it was his severity his goodness I respect you she addressed silently him in person in every atom you are not vain you are entirely impersonal you are finer than Mr Ramsay you are the finest human being that I know you have neither wife nor child without any sexual feeling she longed to cherish that loneliness you live for science involuntarily sections of potatoes rose before her eyes praise would be an insult to you generous purehearted heroic man But simultaneously she remembered how he had brought a valet all the way up here objected to dogs on chairs would prose for hours until Mr Ramsay slammed out of the room about salt in vegetables and the iniquity of English cooks

How then did it work out all this How did one judge people think of them How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt or disliking And to those words what meaning attached after all Standing now apparently transfixed by the pear tree impressions poured in upon her of those two men and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by ones pencil and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable everlasting contradictory things so that even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity You have greatness she continued but Mr Ramsay has none of it He is petty selfish vain egotistical he is spoilt he is a tyrant he wears Mrs Ramsay to death but he has what you she addressed Mr Bankes have not a fiery unworldliness he knows nothing about trifles he loves dogs and his children He has eight Mr Bankes has none Did he not come down in two coats the other night and let Mrs Ramsay trim his hair into a pudding basin All of this danced up and down like a company of gnats each separate but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic netdanced up and down in Lilys mind in and about the branches of the pear tree where still hung in effigy the scrubbed kitchen table symbol of her profound respect for Mr Ramsays mind until her thought which had spun quicker and quicker exploded of its own intensity she felt released a shot went off close at hand and there came flying from its fragments frightened effusive tumultuous a flock of starlings

Jasper said Mr Bankes They turned the way the starlings flew over the terrace Following the scatter of swiftflying birds in the sky they stepped through the gap in the high hedge straight into Mr Ramsay who boomed tragically at them Some one had blundered

His eyes glazed with emotion defiant with tragic intensity met theirs for a second and trembled on the verge of recognition but then raising his hand halfway to his face as if to avert to brush off in an agony of peevish shame their normal gaze as if he begged them to withhold for a moment what he knew to be inevitable as if he impressed upon them his own childlike resentment of interruption yet even in the moment of discovery was not to be routed utterly but was determined to hold fast to something of this delicious emotion this impure rhapsody of which he was ashamed but in which he revelledhe turned abruptly slammed his private door on them and Lily Briscoe and Mr Bankes looking uneasily up into the sky observed that the flock of starlings which Jasper had routed with his gun had settled on the tops of the elm trees

5

And even if it isnt fine tomorrow said Mrs Ramsay raising her eyes to glance at William Bankes and Lily Briscoe as they passed it will be another day And now she said thinking that Lilys charm was her Chinese eyes aslant in her white puckered little face but it would take a clever man to see it and now stand up and let me measure your leg for they might go to the Lighthouse after all and she must see if the stocking did not need to be an inch or two longer in the leg

Smiling for it was an admirable idea that had flashed upon her this very secondWilliam and Lily should marryshe took the heathermixture stocking with its crisscross of steel needles at the mouth of it and measured it against Jamess leg

My dear stand still she said for in his jealousy not liking to serve as measuring block for the Lighthouse keepers little boy James fidgeted purposely and if he did that how could she see was it too long was it too short she asked

She looked upwhat demon possessed him her youngest her cherishedand saw the room saw the chairs thought them fearfully shabby Their entrails as Andrew said the other day were all over the floor but then what was the point she asked of buying good chairs to let them spoil up here all through the winter when the house with only one old woman to see to it positively dripped with wet Never mind the rent was precisely twopence halfpenny the children loved it it did her husband good to be three thousand or if she must be accurate three hundred miles from his libraries and his lectures and his disciples and there was room for visitors Mats camp beds crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London life of service was donethey did well enough here and a photograph or two and books Books she thought grew of themselves She never had time to read them Alas even the books that had been given her and inscribed by the hand of the poet himself For her whose wishes must be obeyedThe happier Helen of our daysdisgraceful to say she had never read them And Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage Customs of Polynesia My dear stand still she saidneither of those could one send to the Lighthouse At a certain moment she supposed the house would become so shabby that something must be done If they could be taught to wipe their feet and not bring the beach in with themthat would be something Crabs she had to allow if Andrew really wished to dissect them or if Jasper believed that one could make soup from seaweed one could not prevent it or Roses objectsshells reeds stones for they were gifted her children but all in quite different ways And the result of it was she sighed taking in the whole room from floor to ceiling as she held the stocking against Jamess leg that things got shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer The mat was fading the wallpaper was flapping You couldnt tell any more that those were roses on it Still if every door in a house is left perpetually open and no lockmaker in the whole of Scotland can mend a bolt things must spoil What was the use of flinging a green Cashemere shawl over the edge of a picture frame In two weeks it would be the colour of pea soup But it was the doors that annoyed her every door was left open She listened The drawingroom door was open the hall door was open it sounded as if the bedroom doors were open and certainly the window on the landing was open for that she had opened herself That windows should be open and doors shutsimple as it was could none of them remember it She would go into the maids bedrooms at night and find them sealed like ovens except for Maries the Swiss girl who would rather go without a bath than without fresh air but then at home she had said the mountains are so beautiful She had said that last night looking out of the window with tears in her eyes The mountains are so beautiful Her father was dying there Mrs Ramsay knew He was leaving them fatherless Scolding and demonstrating how to make a bed how to open a window with hands that shut and spread like a Frenchwomans all had folded itself quietly about her when the girl spoke as after a flight through the sunshine the wings of a bird fold themselves quietly and the blue of its plumage changes from bright steel to soft purple She had stood there silent for there was nothing to be said He had cancer of the throat At the recolectionhow she had stood there how the girl had said At home the mountains are so beautiful and there was no hope no hope whatever she had a spasm of irritation and speaking sharply said to James

Stand still Dont be tiresome so that he knew instantly that her severity was real and straightened his leg and she measured it

The stocking was too short by half an inch at least making allowance for the fact that Sorleys little boy would be less well grown than James

Its too short she said ever so much too short

Never did anybody look so sad Bitter and black halfway down in the darkness in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths perhaps a tear formed a tear fell the waters swayed this way and that received it and were at rest Never did anybody look so sad

But was it nothing but looks people said What was there behind ither beauty and splendour Had he blown his brains out they asked had he died the week before they were marriedsome other earlier lover of whom rumours reached one Or was there nothing nothing but an incomparable beauty which she lived behind and could do nothing to disturb For easily though she might have said at some moment of intimacy when stories of great passion of love foiled of ambition thwarted came her way how she too had known or felt or been through it herself she never spoke She was silent always She knew thenshe knew without having learnt Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified Her singleness of mind made her drop plumb like a stone alight exact as a bird gave her naturally this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth which delighted eased sustainedfalsely perhaps

Nature has but little clay said Mr Bankes once much moved by her voice on the telephone though she was only telling him a fact about a train like that of which she moulded you He saw her at the end of the line Greek blueeyed straightnosed How incongruous it seemed to be telephoning to a woman like that The Graces assembling seemed to have joined hands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face Yes he would catch the 1030 at Euston

But shes no more aware of her beauty than a child said Mr Bankes replacing the receiver and crossing the room to see what progress the workmen were making with an hotel which they were building at the back of his house And he thought of Mrs Ramsay as he looked at that stir among the unfinished walls For always he thought there was something incongruous to be worked into the harmony of her face She clapped a deerstalkers hat on her head she ran across the lawn in galoshes to snatch a child from mischief So that if it was her beauty merely that one thought of one must remember the quivering thing the living thing they were carrying bricks up a little plank as he watched them and work it into the picture or if one thought of her simply as a woman one must endow her with some freak of idiosyncrasyshe did not like admirationor suppose some latent desire to doff her royalty of form as if her beauty bored her and all that men say of beauty and she wanted only to be like other people insignificant He did not know He did not know He must go to his work

Knitting her reddishbrown hairy stocking with her head outlined absurdly by the gilt frame the green shawl which she had tossed over the edge of the frame and the authenticated masterpiece by Michael Angelo Mrs Ramsay smoothed out what had been harsh in her manner a moment before raised his head and kissed her little boy on the forehead Let us find another picture to cut out she said

6

But what had happened

Some one had blundered

Starting from her musing she gave meaning to words which she had held meaningless in her mind for a long stretch of time Some one had blunderedFixing her shortsighted eyes upon her husband who was now bearing down upon her she gazed steadily until his closeness revealed to her the jingle mated itself in her head that something had happened some one had blundered But she could not for the life of her think what

He shivered he quivered All his vanity all his satisfaction in his own splendour riding fell as a thunderbolt fierce as a hawk at the head of his men through the valley of death had been shattered destroyed Stormed at by shot and shell boldly we rode and well flashed through the valley of death volleyed and thunderedstraight into Lily Briscoe and William Bankes He quivered he shivered

Not for the world would she have spoken to him realising from the familiar signs his eyes averted and some curious gathering together of his person as if he wrapped himself about and needed privacy into which to regain his equilibrium that he was outraged and anguished She stroked Jamess head she transferred to him what she felt for her husband and as she watched him chalk yellow the white dress shirt of a gentleman in the Army and Navy Stores catalogue thought what a delight it would be to her should he turn out a great artist and why should he not He had a splendid forehead Then looking up as her husband passed her once more she was relieved to find that the ruin was veiled domesticity triumphed custom crooned its soothing rhythm so that when stopping deliberately as his turn came round again at the window he bent quizzically and whimsically to tickle Jamess bare calf with a sprig of something she twitted him for having dispatched that poor young man Charles Tansley Tansley had had to go in and write his dissertation he said

James will have to write HIS dissertation one of these days he added ironically flicking his sprig

Hating his father James brushed away the tickling spray with which in a manner peculiar to him compound of severity and humour he teased his youngest sons bare leg

She was trying to get these tiresome stockings finished to send to Sorleys little boy tomorrow said Mrs Ramsay

There wasnt the slightest possible chance that they could go to the Lighthouse tomorrow Mr Ramsay snapped out irascibly

How did he know she asked The wind often changed

The extraordinary irrationality of her remark the folly of womens minds enraged him He had ridden through the valley of death been shattered and shivered and now she flew in the face of facts made his children hope what was utterly out of the question in effect told lies He stamped his foot on the stone step Damn you he said But what had she said Simply that it might be fine tomorrow So it might

Not with the barometer falling and the wind due west

To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other peoples feelings to rendthe thin veils of civilization so wantonly so brutally was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that without replying dazed and blinded she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail the drench of dirty water bespatter her unrebuked There was nothing to be said

He stood by her in silence Very humbly at length he said that he would step over and ask the Coastguards if she liked

There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him

She was quite ready to take his word for it she said Only then they need not cut sandwichesthat was all They came to her naturally since she was a woman all day long with this and that one wanting this another that the children were growing up she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions Then he said Damn you He said It must rain He said It wont rain and instantly a Heaven of security opened before her There was nobody she reverenced more She was not good enough to tie his shoe strings she felt

Already ashamed of that petulance of that gesticulation of the hands when charging at the head of his troops Mr Ramsay rather sheepishly prodded his sons bare legs once more and then as if he had her leave for it with a movement which oddly reminded his wife of the great sea lion at the Zoo tumbling backwards after swallowing his fish and walloping off so that the water in the tank washes from side to side he dived into the evening air which already thinner was taking the substance from leaves and hedges but as if in return restoring to roses and pinks a lustre which they had not had by day

Some one had blundered he said again striding off up and down the terrace

But how extraordinarily his note had changed It was like the cuckoo in June he gets out of tune as if he were trying over tentatively seeking some phrase for a new mood and having only this at hand used it cracked though it was But it sounded ridiculousSome one had blunderedsaid like that almost as a question without any conviction melodiously Mrs Ramsay could not help smiling and soon sure enough walking up and down he hummed it dropped it fell silent

He was safe he was restored to his privacy He stopped to light his pipe looked once at his wife and son in the window and as one raises ones eyes from a page in an express train and sees a farm a tree a cluster of cottages as an illustration a confirmation of something on the printed page to which one returns fortified and satisfied so without his distinguishing either his son or his wife the sight of them fortified him and satisfied him and consecrated his effort to arrive at a perfectly clear understanding of the problem which now engaged the energies of his splendid mind

It was a splendid mind For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano divided into so many notes or like the alphabet is ranged in twentysix letters all in order then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one firmly and accurately until it had reached say the letter Q He reached Q Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q Here stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums he saw but now far far away like children picking up shells divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless against a doom which he perceived his wife and son together in the window They needed his protection he gave it them But after Q What comes next After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes but glimmers red in the distance Z is only reached once by one man in a generation Still if he could reach R it would be something Here at least was Q He dug his heels in at Q Q he was sure of Q he could demonstrate If Q then is QR Here he knocked his pipe out with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the urn and proceeded Then R He braced himself He clenched himself

Qualities that would have saved a ships company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of waterendurance and justice foresight devotion skill came to his help R is thenwhat is R

A shutter like the leathern eyelid of a lizard flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R In that flash of darkness he heard people sayinghe was a failurethat R was beyond him He would never reach R On to R once more R

Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the Polar region would have made him the leader the guide the counsellor whose temper neither sanguine nor despondent surveys with equanimity what is to be and faces it came to his help again R

The lizards eye flickered once more The veins on his forehead bulged The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and displayed among its leaves he could see without wishing it that old that obvious distinction between the two classes of men on the one hand the steady goers of superhuman strength who plodding and persevering repeat the whole alphabet in order twentysix letters in all from start to finish on the other the gifted the inspired who miraculously lump all the letters together in one flashthe way of genius He had not genius he laid no claim to that but he had or might have had the power to repeat every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order Meanwhile he stuck at Q On then on to R

Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain top is covered in mist knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes stole upon him paling the colour of his eyes giving him even in the two minutes of his turn on the terrace the bleached look of withered old age Yet he would not die lying down he would find some crag of rock and there his eyes fixed on the storm trying to the end to pierce the darkness he would die standing He would never reach R

He stood stockstill by the urn with the geranium flowing over it How many men in a thousand million he asked himself reach Z after all Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that and answer without treachery to the expedition behind him One perhaps One in a generation Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one provided he has toiled honestly given to the best of his power and till he has no more left to give And his fame lasts how long It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years And what are two thousand years asked Mr Ramsay ironically staring at the hedge What indeed if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages The very stone one kicks with ones boot will outlast Shakespeare His own little light would shine not very brightly for a year or two and would then be merged in some bigger light and that in a bigger still He looked into the hedge into the intricacy of the twigs Who then could blame the leader of that forlorn party which after all has climbed high enough to see the waste of the years and the perishing of the stars if before death stiffens his limbs beyond the power of movement he does a little consciously raise his numbed fingers to his brow and square his shoulders so that when the search party comes they will find him dead at his post the fine figure of a soldier Mr Ramsay squared his shoulders and stood very upright by the urn

Who shall blame him if so standing for a moment he dwells upon fame upon search parties upon cairns raised by grateful followers over his bones Finally who shall blame the leader of the doomed expedition if having adventured to the uttermost and used his strength wholly to the last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not he now perceives by some pricking in his toes that he lives and does not on the whole object to live but requires sympathy and whisky and some one to tell the story of his suffering to at once Who shall blame him Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son who very distant at first gradually come closer and closer till lips and book and head are clearly before him though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before herwho will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world

7

But his son hated him He hated him for coming up to them for stopping and looking down on them he hated him for interrupting them he hated him for the exaltation and sublimity of his gestures for the magnificence of his head for his exactingness and egotism for there he stood commanding them to attend to him but most of all he hated the twang and twitter of his fathers emotion which vibrating round them disturbed the perfect simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother By looking fixedly at the page he hoped to make him move on by pointing his finger at a word he hoped to recall his mothers attention which he knew angrily wavered instantly his father stopped But no Nothing would make Mr Ramsay move on There he stood demanding sympathy

Mrs Ramsay who had been sitting loosely folding her son in her arm braced herself and half turning seemed to raise herself with an effort and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy a column of spray looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force burning and illuminating quietly though she sat taking up her stocking again and into this delicious fecundity this fountain and spray of life the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself like a beak of brass barren and bare He wanted sympathy He was a failure he said Mrs Ramsay flashed her needles Mr Ramsay repeated never taking his eyes from her face that he was a failure She blew the words back at him Charles Tansley she said But he must have more than that It was sympathy he wanted to be assured of his genius first of all and then to be taken within the circle of life warmed and soothed to have his senses restored to him his barrenness made furtile and all the rooms of the house made full of lifethe drawingroom behind the drawingroom the kitchen above the kitchen the bedrooms and beyond them the nurseries they must be furnished they must be filled with life

Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time she said But he must have more than that He must have sympathy He must be assured that he too lived in the heart of life was needed not only here but all over the world Flashing her needles confident upright she created drawingroom and kitchen set them all aglow bade him take his ease there go in and out enjoy himself She laughed she knitted Standing between her knees very stiff James felt all her strength flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass the arid scimitar of the male which smote mercilessly again and again demanding sympathy

He was a failure he repeated Well look then feel then Flashing her needles glancing round about her out of the window into the room at James himself she assured him beyond a shadow of a doubt by her laugh her poise her competence as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child that it was real the house was full the garden blowing If he put implicit faith in her nothing should hurt him however deep he buried himself or climed high not for a second should he find himself without her So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by all was so lavished and spent and James as he stood stiff between her knees felt her rise in a rosyflowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass the arid scimitar of his father the egotistical man plunged and smote demanding sympathy

Filled with her words like a child who drops off satisfied he said at last looking at her with humble gratitude restored renewed that he would take a turn he would watch the children playing cricket He went

Immediately Mrs Ramsey seemed to fold herself together one petal closed in another and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself so that she had only strength enough to move her finger in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion across the page of Grimms fairy story while there throbbed through her like a pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat the rapture of successful creation

Every throb of this pulse seemed as he walked away to enclose her and her husband and to give to each that solace which two different notes one high one low struck together seem to give each other as they combine Yet as the resonance died and she turned to the Fairy Tale again Mrs Ramsey felt not only exhausted in body afterwards not at the time she always felt this but also there tinged her physical fatigue some faintly disagreeable sensation with another origin Not that as she read aloud the story of the Fishermans Wife she knew precisely what it came from nor did she let herself put into words her dissatisfaction when she realized at the turn of the page when she stopped and heard dully ominously a wave fall how it came from this she did not like even for a second to feel finer than her husband and further could not bear not being entirely sure when she spoke to him of the truth of what she said Universities and people wanting him lectures and books and their being of the highest importanceall that she did not doubt for a moment but it was their relation and his coming to her like that openly so that any one could see that discomposed her for then people said he depended on her when they must know that of the two he was infinitely the more important and what she gave the world in comparison with what he gave negligable But then again it was the other thing toonot being able to tell him the truth being afraid for instance about the greenhouse roof and the expense it would be fifty pounds perhaps to mend it and then about his books to be afraid that he might guess what she a little suspected that his last book was not quite his best book she gathered that from William Bankes and then to hide small daily things and the children seeing it and the burden it laid on themall this diminished the entire joy the pure joy of the two notes sounding together and let the sound die on her ear now with a dismal flatness

A shadow was on the page she looked up It was Augustus Carmichael shuffling past precisely now at the very moment when it was painful to be reminded of the inadequacy of human relationships that the most perfect was flawed and could not bear the examination which loving her husband with her instinct for truth she turned upon it when it was painful to feel herself convicted of unworthiness and impeded in her proper function by these lies these exaggerationsit was at this moment when she was fretted thus ignobly in the wake of her exaltation that Mr Carmichael shuffled past in his yellow slippers and some demon in her made it necessary for her to call out as he passed

Going indoors Mr Carmichael

8

He said nothing He took opium The children said he had stained his beard yellow with it Perhaps What was obvious to her was that the poor man was unhappy came to them every year as an escape and yet every year she felt the same thing he did not trust her She said I am going to the town Shall I get you stamps paper tobacco and she felt him wince He did not trust her It was his wifes doing She remembered that iniquity of his wifes towards him which had made her turn to steel and adamant there in the horrible little room in St Johns Wood when with her own eyes she had seen that odious woman turn him out of the house He was unkempt he dropped things on his coat he had the tiresomeness of an old man with nothing in the world to do and she turned him out of the room She said in her odious way Now Mrs Ramsay and I want to have a little talk together and Mrs Ramsay could see as if before her eyes the innumerable miseries of his life Had he money enough to buy tobacco Did he have to ask her for it half a crown eighteenpence Oh she could not bear to think of the little indignities she made him suffer And always now why she could not guess except that it came probably from that woman somehow he shrank from her He never told her anything But what more could she have done There was a sunny room given up to him The children were good to him Never did she show a sign of not wanting him She went out of her way indeed to be friendly Do you want stamps do you want tobacco Heres a book you might like and so on And after allafter all here insensibly she drew herself together physically the sense of her own beauty becoming as it did so seldom present to her after all she had not generally any difficulty in making people like her for instance George Manning Mr Wallace famous as they were they would come to her of an evening quietly and talk alone over her fire She bore about with her she could not help knowing it the torch of her beauty she carried it erect into any room that she entered and after all veil it as she might and shrink from the monotony of bearing that it imposed on her her beauty was apparent She had been admired She had been loved She had entered rooms where mourners sat Tears had flown in her presence Men and women too letting go to the multiplicity of things had allowed themselves with her the relief of simplicity It injured her that he should shrink It hurt her And yet not cleanly not rightly That was what she minded coming as it did on top of her discontent with her husband the sense she had now when Mr Carmichael shuffled past just nodding to her question with a book beneath his arm in his yellow slippers that she was suspected and that all this desire of hers to give to help was vanity For her own selfsatisfaction was it that she wished so instinctively to help to give that people might say of her O Mrs Ramsay dear Mrs RamsayMrs Ramsay of course and need her and send for her and admire her Was it not secretly this that she wanted and therefore when Mr Carmichael shrank away from her as he did at this moment making off to some corner where he did acrostics endlessly she did not feel merely snubbed back in her instinct but made aware of the pettiness of some part of her and of human relations how flawed they are how despicable how selfseeking at their best Shabby and worn out and not presumably her cheeks were hollow her hair was white any longer a sight that filled the eyes with joy she had better devote her mind to the story of the Fisherman and his Wife and so pacify that bundle of sensitiveness none of her children was as sensitive as he was her son James

The mans heart grew heavy she read aloud and he would not go He said to himself It is not right and yet he went And when he came to the sea the water was quite purple and dark blue and grey and thick and no longer so green and yellow but it was still quiet And he stood there and said

Mrs Ramsay could have wished that her husband had not chosen that moment to stop Why had he not gone as he said to watch the children playing cricket But he did not speak he looked he nodded he approved he went on He slipped seeing before him that hedge which had over and over again rounded some pause signified some conclusion seeing his wife and child seeing again the urns with the trailing of red geraniums which had so often decorated processes of thought and bore written up among their leaves as if they were scraps of paper on which one scribbles notes in the rush of readinghe slipped seeing all this smoothly into speculation suggested by an article in THE TIMES about the number of Americans who visit Shakespeares house every year If Shakespeare had never existed he asked would the world have differed much from what it is today Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men Is the lot of the average human being better now than in the time of the Pharaohs Is the lot of the average human being however he asked himself the criterion by which we judge the measure of civilization Possibly not Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class The liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity The thought was distasteful to him He tossed his head To avoid it he would find some way of snubbing the predominance of the arts He would argue that the world exists for the average human being that the arts are merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life they do not express it Nor is Shakespeare necessary to it Not knowing precisely why it was that he wanted to disparage Shakespeare and come to the rescue of the man who stands eternally in the door of the lift he picked a leaf sharply from the hedge All this would have to be dished up for the young men at Cardiff next month he thought here on his terrace he was merely foraging and picnicking he threw away the leaf that he had picked so peevishly like a man who reaches from his horse to pick a bunch of roses or stuffs his pockets with nuts as he ambles at his ease through the lanes and fields of a country known to him from boyhood It was all familiar this turning that stile that cut across the fields Hours he would spend thus with his pipe of an evening thinking up and down and in and out of the old familiar lanes and commons which were all stuck about with the history of that campaign there the life of this statesman here with poems and with anecdotes with figures too this thinker that soldier all very brisk and clear but at length the lane the field the common the fruitful nuttree and the flowering hedge led him on to that further turn of the road where he dismounted always tied his horse to a tree and proceeded on foot alone He reached the edge of the lawn and looked out on the bay beneath

It was his fate his peculiarity whether he wished it or not to come out thus on a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away and there to stand like a desolate seabird alone It was his power his gift suddenly to shed all superfluities to shrink and diminish so that he looked barer and felt sparer even physically yet lost none of his intensity of mind and so to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand onthat was his fate his gift But having thrown away when he dismounted all gestures and fripperies all trophies of nuts and roses and shrunk so that not only fame but even his own name was forgotten by him kept even in that desolation a vigilance which spared no phantom and luxuriated in no vision and it was in this guise that he inspired in William Bankes intermittently and in Charles Tansley obsequiouslyand in his wife now when she looked up and saw him standing at the edge of the lawn profoundly reverence and pity and gratitude too as a stake driven into the bed of a channel upon which the gulls perch and the waves beat inspires in merry boatloads a feeling of gratitude for the duty it is taking upon itself of marking the channel out there in the floods alone

But the father of eight children has no choice Muttering half aloud so he broke off turned sighed raised his eyes sought the figure of his wife reading stories to his little boy filled his pipe He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on which had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over to deprecate it as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes It was true he was for the most part happy he had his wife he had his children he had promised in six weeks time to talk some nonsense to the young men of Cardiff about Locke Hume Berkeley and the causes of the French Revolution But this and his pleasure in it his glory in the phrases he made in the ardour of youth in his wifes beauty in the tributes that reached him from Swansea Cardiff Exeter Southampton Kidderminster Oxford Cambridgeall had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase talking nonsense because in effect he had not done the thing he might have done It was a disguise it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings who could not say This is what I likethis is what I am and rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe who wondered why such concealments should be necessary why he needed always praise why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time

Teaching and preaching is beyond human power Lily suspected She was putting away her things If you are exalted you must somehow come a cropper Mrs Ramsay gave him what he asked too easily Then the change must be so upsetting Lily said He comes in from his books and finds us all playing games and talking nonsense Imagine what a change from the things he thinks about she said

He was bearing down upon them Now he stopped dead and stood looking in silence at the sea Now he had turned away again

9

Yes Mr Bankes said watching him go It was a thousand pities Lily had said something about his frightening herhe changed from one mood to another so suddenly Yes said Mr Bankes it was a thousand pities that Ramsay could not behave a little more like other people For he liked Lily Briscoe he could discuss Ramsay with her quite openly It was for that reason he said that the young dont read Carlyle A crusty old grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold why should he preach to us was what Mr Bankes understood that young people said nowadays It was a thousand pities if you thought as he did that Carlyle was one of the great teachers of mankind Lily was ashamed to say that she had not read Carlyle since she was at school But in her opinion one liked Mr Ramsay all the better for thinking that if his little finger ached the whole world must come to an end It was not THAT she minded For who could be deceived by him He asked you quite openly to flatter him to admire him his little dodges deceived nobody What she disliked was his narrowness his blindness she said looking after him

A bit of a hypocrite Mr Bankes suggested looking too at Mr Ramsays back for was he not thinking of his friendship and of Cam refusing to give him a flower and of all those boys and girls and his own house full of comfort but since his wifes death quiet rather Of course he had his workAll the same he rather wished Lily to agree that Ramsay was as he said a bit of a hypocrite

Lily Briscoe went on putting away her brushes looking up looking down Looking up there he wasMr Ramsayadvancing towards them swinging careless oblivious remote A bit of a hypocrite she repeated Oh nothe most sincere of men the truest here he was the best but looking down she thought he is absorbed in himself he is tyrannical he is unjust and kept looking down purposely for only so could she keep steady staying with the Ramsays Directly one looked up and saw them what she called being in love flooded them They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love The sky stuck to them the birds sang through them And what was even more exciting she felt too as she saw Mr Ramsay bearing down and retreating and Mrs Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending how life from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up and threw one down with it there with a dash on the beach

Mr Bankes expected her to answer And she was about to say something criticizing Mrs Ramsay how she was alarming too in her way highhanded or words to that effect when Mr Bankes made it entirely unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture For such it was considering his age turned sixty and his cleanliness and his impersonality and the white scientific coat which seemed to clothe him For him to gaze as Lily saw him gazing at Mrs Ramsay was a rapture equivalent Lily felt to the loves of dozens of young men and perhaps Mrs Ramsay had never excited the loves of dozens of young men It was love she thought pretending to move her canvas distilled and filtered love that never attempted to clutch its object but like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols or poets their phrases was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain So it was indeed The world by all means should have shared it could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem so that he rested in contemplation of it and felt as he felt when he had proved something absolute about the digestive system of plants that barbarity was tamed the reign of chaos subdued

Such a rapturefor by what other name could one call itmade Lily Briscoe forget entirely what she had been about to say It was nothing of importance something about Mrs Ramsay It paled beside this rapture this silent stare for which she felt intense gratitude for nothing so solaced her eased her of the perplexity of life and miraculously raised its burdens as this sublime power this heavenly gift and one would no more disturb it while it lasted than break up the shaft of sunlight lying level across the floor

That people should love like this that Mr Bankes should feel this for Mrs Ramsey she glanced at him musing was helpful was exalting She wiped one brush after another upon a piece of old rag menially on purpose She took shelter from the reverence which covered all women she felt herself praised Let him gaze she would steal a look at her picture

She could have wept It was bad it was bad it was infinitely bad She could have done it differently of course the colour could have been thinned and faded the shapes etherealised that was how Paunceforte would have seen it But then she did not see it like that She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel the light of a butterflys wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained And it would never be seen never be hung even and there was Mr Tansley whispering in her ear Women cant paint women cant write

She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs Ramsay She did not know how she would have put it but it would have been something critical She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness Looking along the level of Mr Bankess glance at her she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr Bankes extended over them both Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people bowed over her book the best perhaps but also different too from the perfect shape which one saw there But why different and how different she asked herself scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now yet she vowed she would inspire them force them to move flow do her bidding tomorrow How did she differ What was the spirit in her the essential thing by which had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa you would have known it from its twisted finger hers indisputably She was like a bird for speed an arrow for directness She was willful she was commanding of course Lily reminded herself I am thinking of her relations with women and I am much younger an insignificant person living off the Brompton Road She opened bedroom windows She shut doors So she tried to start the tune of Mrs Ramsay in her head Arriving late at night with a light tap on ones bedroom door wrapped in an old fur coat for the setting of her beauty was always thathasty but apt she would enact again whatever it might beCharles Tansley losing his umbrella Mr Carmichael snuffling and sniffing Mr Bankes saying The vegetable salts are lost All this she would adroitly shape even maliciously twist and moving over to the window in pretence that she must goit was dawn she could see the sun risinghalf turn back more intimately but still always laughing insist that she must Minta must they all must marry since in the whole world whatever laurels might be tossed to her but Mrs Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting or triumphs won by her probably Mrs Ramsay had had her share of those and here she saddened darkened and came back to her chair there could be no disputing this an unmarried woman she lightly took her hand for a moment an unmarried woman has missed the best of life The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs Ramsay listening shaded lights and regular breathing

Oh but Lily would say there was her father her home even had she dared to say it her painting But all this seemed so little so virginal against the other Yet as the night wore on and white lights parted the curtains and even now and then some bird chirped in the garden gathering a desperate courage she would urge her own exemption from the universal law plead for it she liked to be alone she liked to be herself she was not made for that and so have to meet a serious stare from eyes of unparalleled depth and confront Mrs Ramsays simple certainty and she was childlike now that her dear Lily her little Brisk was a fool Then she remembered she had laid her head on Mrs Ramsays lap and laughed and laughed and laughed laughed almost hysterically at the thought of Mrs Ramsay presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand There she sat simple serious She had recovered her sense of her nowthis was the gloves twisted finger But into what sanctuary had one penetrated Lily Briscoe had looked up at last and there was Mrs Ramsay unwitting entirely what had caused her laughter still presiding but now with every trace of wilfulness abolished and in its stead something clear as the space which the clouds at last uncoverthe little space of sky which sleeps beside the moon

Was it wisdom Was it knowledge Was it once more the deceptiveness of beauty so that all ones perceptions half way to truth were tangled in a golden mesh or did she lock up within her some secret which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all Every one could not be as helter skelter hand to mouth as she was But if they knew could they tell one what they knew Sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs Ramsays knees close as she could get smiling to think that Mrs Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was physically touching her were stood like the treasures in the tombs of kings tablets bearing sacred inscriptions which if one could spell them out would teach one everything but they would never be offered openly never made public What art was there known to love or cunning by which one pressed through into those secret chambers What device for becoming like waters poured into one jar inextricably the same one with the object one adored Could the body achieve or the mind subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain or the heart Could loving as people called it make her and Mrs Ramsay one for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired not inscriptions on tablets nothing that could be written in any language known to men but intimacy itself which is knowledge she had thought leaning her head on Mrs Ramsays knee

Nothing happened Nothing Nothing as she leant her head against Mrs Ramsays knee And yet she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored up in Mrs Ramsays heart How then she had asked herself did one know one thing or another thing about people sealed as they were Only like a bee drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste one haunted the domeshaped hive ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings the hives which were people Mrs Ramsay rose Lily rose Mrs Ramsay went For days there hung about her as after a dream some subtle change is felt in the person one has dreamt of more vividly than anything she said the sound of murmuring and as she sat in the wicker armchair in the drawingroom window she wore to Lilys eyes an august shape the shape of a dome

This ray passed level with Mr Bankess ray straight to Mrs Ramsay sitting reading there with James at her knee But now while she still looked Mr Bankes had done He had put on his spectacles He had stepped back He had raised his hand He had slightly narrowed his clear blue eyes when Lily rousing herself saw what he was at and winced like a dog who sees a hand raised to strike it She would have snatched her picture off the easel but she said to herself One must She braced herself to stand the awful trial of some one looking at her picture One must she said one must And if it must be seen Mr Bankes was less alarming than another But that any other eyes should see the residue of her thirtythree years the deposit of each days living mixed with something more secret than she had ever spoken or shown in the course of all those days was an agony At the same time it was immensely exciting

Nothing could be cooler and quieter Taking out a penknife Mr Bankes tapped the canvas with the bone handle What did she wish to indicate by the triangular purple shape just there he asked

It was Mrs Ramsay reading to James she said She knew his objection that no one could tell it for a human shape But she had made no attempt at likeness she said For what reason had she introduced them then he asked Why indeedexcept that if there in that corner it was bright here in this she felt the need of darkness Simple obvious commonplace as it was Mr Bankes was interested Mother and child thenobjects of universal veneration and in this case the mother was famous for her beautymight be reduced he pondered to a purple shadow without irreverence

But the picture was not of them she said Or not in his sense There were other senses too in which one might reverence them By a shadow here and a light there for instance Her tribute took that form if as she vaguely supposed a picture must be a tribute A mother and child might be reduced to a shadow without irreverence A light here required a shadow there He considered He was interested He took it scientifically in complete good faith The truth was that all his prejudices were on the other side he explained The largest picture in his drawingroom which painters had praised and valued at a higher price than he had given for it was of the cherry trees in blossom on the banks of the Kennet He had spent his honeymoon on the banks of the Kennet he said Lily must come and see that picture he said But nowhe turned with his glasses raised to the scientific examination of her canvas The question being one of the relations of masses of lights and shadows which to be honest he had never considered before he would like to have it explainedwhat then did she wish to make of it And he indicated the scene before them She looked She could not show him what she wished to make of it could not see it even herself without a brush in her hand She took up once more her old painting position with the dim eyes and the absentminded manner subduing all her impressions as a woman to something much more general becoming once more under the power of that vision which she had seen clearly once and must now grope for among hedges and houses and mothers and childrenher picture It was a question she remembered how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left She might do it by bringing the line of the branch across so or break the vacancy in the foreground by an object James perhaps so But the danger was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be broken She stopped she did not want to bore him she took the canvas lightly off the easel

But it had been seen it had been taken from her This man had shared with her something profoundly intimate And thanking Mr Ramsay for it and Mrs Ramsay for it and the hour and the place crediting the world with a power which she had not suspectedthat one could walk away down that long gallery not alone any more but arm in arm with somebodythe strangest feeling in the world and the most exhilaratingshe nicked the catch of her paintbox to more firmly than was necessary and the nick seemed to surround in a circle forever the paintbox the lawn Mr Bankes and that wild villain Cam dashing past

10

For Cam grazed the easel by an inch she would not stop for Mr Bankes and Lily Briscoe though Mr Bankes who would have liked a daughter of his own held out his hand she would not stop for her father whom she grazed also by an inch nor for her mother who called Cam I want you a moment as she dashed past She was off like a bird bullet or arrow impelled by what desire shot by whom at what directed who could say What what Mrs Ramsay pondered watching her It might be a visionof a shell of a wheelbarrow of a fairy kingdom on the far side of the hedge or it might be the glory of speed no one knew But when Mrs Ramsay called Cam a second time the projectile dropped in mid career and Cam came lagging back pulling a leaf by the way to her mother

What was she dreaming about Mrs Ramsay wondered seeing her engrossed as she stood there with some thought of her own so that she had to repeat the message twiceask Mildred if Andrew Miss Doyle and Mr Rayley have come backThe words seemed to be dropped into a well where if the waters were clear they were also so extraordinarily distorting that even as they descended one saw them twisting about to make Heaven knows what pattern on the floor of the childs mind What message would Cam give the cook Mrs Ramsay wondered And indeed it was only by waiting patiently and hearing that there was an old woman in the kitchen with very red cheeks drinking soup out of a basin that Mrs Ramsay at last prompted that parrotlike instinct which had picked up Mildreds words quite accurately and could now produce them if one waited in a colourless singsong Shifting from foot to foot Cam repeated the words No they havent and Ive told Ellen to clear away tea

Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley had not come back then That could only mean Mrs Ramsay thought one thing She must accept him or she must refuse him This going off after luncheon for a walk even though Andrew was with themwhat could it mean except that she had decided rightly Mrs Ramsay thought and she was very very fond of Minta to accept that good fellow who might not be brilliant but then thought Mrs Ramsay realising that James was tugging at her to make her go on reading aloud the Fisherman and his Wife she did in her own heart infinitely prefer boobies to clever men who wrote dissertations Charles Tansley for instance Anyhow it must have happened one way or the other by now

But she read Next morning the wife awoke first and it was just daybreak and from her bed she saw the beautiful country lying before her Her husband was still stretching himself

But how could Minta say now that she would not have him Not if she agreed to spend whole afternoons trapesing about the country alonefor Andrew would be off after his crabsbut possibly Nancy was with them She tried to recall the sight of them standing at the hall door after lunch There they stood looking at the sky wondering about the weather and she had said thinking partly to cover their shyness partly to encourage them to be off for her sympathies were with Paul

There isnt a cloud anywhere within miles at which she could feel little Charles Tansley who had followed them out snigger But she did it on purpose Whether Nancy was there or not she could not be certain looking from one to the other in her minds eye

She read on Ah wife said the man why should we be King I do not want to be King Well said the wife if you wont be King I will go to the Flounder for I will be King

Come in or go out Cam she said knowing that Cam was attracted only by the word Flounder and that in a moment she would fidget and fight with James as usual Cam shot off Mrs Ramsay went on reading relieved for she and James shared the same tastes and were comfortable together

And when he came to the sea it was quite dark grey and the water heaved up from below and smelt putrid Then he went and stood by it and said

Flounder flounder in the sea
Come I pray thee here to me
For my wife good Ilsabil
Wills not as Id have her will

Well what does she want then said the Flounder And where were they now Mrs Ramsay wondered reading and thinking quite easily both at the same time for the story of the Fisherman and his Wife was like the bass gently accompanying a tune which now and then ran up unexpectedly into the melody And when should she be told If nothing happened she would have to speak seriously to Minta For she could not go trapesing about all over the country even if Nancy were with them she tried again unsuccessfully to visualize their backs going down the path and to count them She was responsible to Mintas parentsthe Owl and the Poker Her nicknames for them shot into her mind as she read The Owl and the Pokeryes they would be annoyed if they heardand they were certain to hearthat Minta staying with the Ramsays had been seen etcetera etcetera etcetera He wore a wig in the House of Commons and she ably assisted him at the head of the stairs she repeated fishing them up out of her mind by a phrase which coming back from some party she had made to amuse her husband Dear dear Mrs Ramsay said to herself how did they produce this incongruous daughter this tomboy Minta with a hole in her stocking How did she exist in that portentous atmosphere where the maid was always removing in a dustpan the sand that the parrot had scattered and conversation was almost entirely reduced to the exploitsinteresting perhaps but limited after allof that bird Naturally one had asked her to lunch tea dinner finally to stay with them up at Finlay which had resulted in some friction with the Owl her mother and more calling and more conversation and more sand and really at the end of it she had told enough lies about parrots to last her a lifetime so she had said to her husband that night coming back from the party However Minta cameYes she came Mrs Ramsay thought suspecting some thorn in the tangle of this thought and disengaging it found it to be this a woman had once accused her of robbing her of her daughters affections something Mrs Doyle had said made her remember that charge again Wishing to dominate wishing to interfere making people do what she wishedthat was the charge against her and she thought it most unjust How could she help being like that to look at No one could accuse her of taking pains to impress She was often ashamed of her own shabbiness Nor was she domineering nor was she tyrannical It was more true about hospitals and drains and the dairy About things like that she did feel passionately and would if she had the chance have liked to take people by the scruff of their necks and make them see No hospital on the whole island It was a disgrace Milk delivered at your door in London positively brown with dirt It should be made illegal A model dairy and a hospital up herethose two things she would have liked to do herself But how With all these children When they were older then perhaps she would have time when they were all at school

Oh but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were demons of wickedness angels of delight never to see them grow up into longlegged monsters Nothing made up up for the loss When she read just now to James and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums and trumpets and his eyes darkened she thought why should they grow up and lose all that He was the most gifted the most sensitive of her children But all she thought were full of promise Prue a perfect angel with the others and sometimes now at night especially she took ones breath away with her beauty Andreweven her husband admitted that his gift for mathematics was extraordinary And Nancy and Roger they were both wild creatures now scampering about over the country all day long As for Rose her mouth was too big but she had a wonderful gift with her hands If they had charades Rose made the dresses made everything liked best arranging tables flowers anything She did not like it that Jasper should shoot birds but it was only a stage they all went through stages Why she asked pressing her chin on Jamess head should they grow up so fast Why should they go to school She would have liked always to have had a baby She was happiest carrying one in her arms Then people might say she was tyrannical domineering masterful if they chose she did not mind And touching his hair with her lips she thought he will never be so happy again but stopped herself remembering how it angered her husband that she should say that Still it was true They were happier now than they would ever be again A tenpenny tea set made Cam happy for days She heard them stamping and crowing on the floor above her head the moment they awoke They came bustling along the passage Then the door sprang open and in they came fresh as roses staring wide awake as if this coming into the diningroom after breakfast which they did every day of their lives was a positive event to them and so on with one thing after another all day long until she went up to say goodnight to them and found them netted in their cots like birds among cherries and raspberries still making up stories about some little bit of rubbishsomething they had heard something they had picked up in the garden They all had their little treasuresAnd so she went down and said to her husband Why must they grow up and lose it all Never will they be so happy again And he was angry Why take such a gloomy view of life he said It is not sensible For it was odd and she believed it to be true that with all his gloom and desperation he was happier more hopeful on the whole than she was Less exposed to human worriesperhaps that was it He had always his work to fall back on Not that she herself was pessimistic as he accused her of being Only she thought lifeand a little strip of time presented itself to her eyesher fifty years There it was before herlife Life she thoughtbut she did not finish her thought She took a look at life for she had a clear sense of it there something real something private which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband A sort of transaction went on between them in which she was on one side and life was on another and she was always trying to get the better of it as it was of her and sometimes they parleyed when she sat alone there were she remembered great reconciliation scenes but for the most part oddly enough she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible hostile and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance There were eternal problems suffering death the poor There was always a woman dying of cancer even here And yet she had said to all these children You shall go through it all To eight people she had said relentlessly that and the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds For that reason knowing what was before themlove and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary placesshe had often the feeling Why must they grow up and lose it all And then she said to herself brandishing her sword at life Nonsense They will be perfectly happy And here she was she reflected feeling life rather sinister again making Minta marry Paul Rayley because whatever she might feel about her own transaction she had had experiences which need not happen to every one she did not name them to herself she was driven on too quickly she knew almost as if it were an escape for her too to say that people must marry people must have children

Was she wrong in this she asked herself reviewing her conduct for the past week or two and wondering if she had indeed put any pressure upon Minta who was only twentyfour to make up her mind She was uneasy Had she not laughed about it Was she not forgetting again how strongly she influenced people Marriage neededoh all sorts of qualities the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds oneshe need not name itthat was essential the thing she had with her husband Had they that

Then he put on his trousers and ran away like a madman she read But outside a great storm was raging and blowing so hard that he could scarcely keep his feet houses and trees toppled over the mountains trembled rocks rolled into the sea the sky was pitch black and it thundered and lightened and the sea came in with black waves as high as church towers and mountains and all with white foam at the top

She turned the page there were only a few lines more so that she would finish the story though it was past bedtime It was getting late The light in the garden told her that and the whitening of the flowers and something grey in the leaves conspired together to rouse in her a feeling of anxiety What it was about she could not think at first Then she remembered Paul and Minta and Andrew had not come back She summoned before her again the little group on the terrace in front of the hall door standing looking up into the sky Andrew had his net and basket That meant he was going to catch crabs and things That meant he would climb out on to a rock he would be cut off Or coming back single file on one of those little paths above the cliff one of them might slip He would roll and then crash It was growing quite dark

But she did not let her voice change in the least as she finished the story and added shutting the book and speaking the last words as if she had made them up herself looking into Jamess eyes And there they are living still at this very time

And thats the end she said and she saw in his eyes as the interest of the story died away in them something else take its place something wondering pale like the reflection of a light which at once made him gaze and marvel Turning she looked across the bay and there sure enough coming regularly across the waves first two quick strokes and then one long steady stroke was the light of the Lighthouse It had been lit

In a moment he would ask her Are we going to the Lighthouse And she would have to say No not tomorrow your father says not Happily Mildred came in to fetch them and the bustle distracted them But he kept looking back over his shoulder as Mildred carried him out and she was certain that he was thinking we are not going to the Lighthouse tomorrow and she thought he will remember that all his life

11

No she thought putting together some of the pictures he had cut out a refrigerator a mowing machine a gentleman in evening dress children never forget For this reason it was so important what one said and what one did and it was a relief when they went to bed For now she need not think about anybody She could be herself by herself And that was what now she often felt the need ofto think well not even to think To be silent to be alone All the being and the doing expansive glittering vocal evaporated and one shrunk with a sense of solemnity to being oneself a wedgeshaped core of darkness something invisible to others Although she continued to knit and sat upright it was thus that she felt herself and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures When life sank down for a moment the range of experience seemed limitless And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources she supposed one after another she Lily Augustus Carmichael must feel our apparitions the things you know us by are simply childish Beneath it is all dark it is all spreading it is unfathomably deep but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by Her horizon seemed to her limitless There were all the places she had not seen the Indian plains she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome This core of darkness could go anywhere for no one saw it They could not stop it she thought exulting There was freedom there was peace there was most welcome of all a summoning together a resting on a platform of stability Not as oneself did one find rest ever in her experience she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles but as a wedge of darkness Losing personality one lost the fret the hurry the stir and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace this rest this eternity and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse the long steady stroke the last of the three which was her stroke for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw and this thing the long steady stroke was her stroke Often she found herself sitting and looking sitting and looking with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked atthat light for example And it would lift up on it some little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind like thatChildren dont forget children dont forgetwhich she would repeat and begin adding to it It will end it will end she said It will come it will come when suddenly she added We are in the hands of the Lord

But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that Who had said it Not she she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart purifying out of existence that lie any lie She praised herself in praising the light without vanity for she was stern she was searching she was beautiful like that light It was odd she thought how if one was alone one leant to inanimate things trees streams flowers felt they expressed one felt they became one felt they knew one in a sense were one felt an irrational tenderness thus she looked at that long steady light as for oneself There rose and she looked and looked with her needles suspended there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of ones being a mist a bride to meet her lover

What brought her to say that We are in the hands of the Lord she wondered The insincerity slipping in among the truths roused her annoyed her She returned to her knitting again How could any Lord have made this world she asked With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason order justice but suffering death the poor There was no treachery too base for the world to commit she knew that No happiness lasted she knew that She knitted with firm composure slightly pursing her lips and without being aware of it so stiffened and composed the lines of her face in a habit of sternness that when her husband passed though he was chuckling at the thought that Hume the philosopher grown enormously fat had stuck in a bog he could not help noting as he passed the sternness at the heart of her beauty It saddened him and her remoteness pained him and he felt as he passed that he could not protect her and when he reached the hedge he was sad He could do nothing to help her He must stand by and watch her Indeed the infernal truth was he made things worse for her He was irritablehe was touchy He had lost his temper over the Lighthouse He looked into the hedge into its intricacy its darkness

Always Mrs Ramsay felt one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end some sound some sight She listened but it was all very still cricket was over the children were in their baths there was only the sound of the sea She stopped knitting she held the long reddishbrown stocking dangling in her hands a moment She saw the light again With some irony in her interrogation for when one woke at all ones relations changed she looked at the steady light the pitiless the remorseless which was so much her yet so little her which had her at its beck and call she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed stroking the floor but for all that she thought watching it with fascination hypnotised as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight she had known happiness exquisite happiness intense happiness and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly as daylight faded and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt It is enough It is enough

He turned and saw her Ah She was lovely lovelier now than ever he thought But he could not speak to her He could not interrupt her He wanted urgently to speak to her now that James was gone and she was alone at last But he resolved no he would not interrupt her She was aloof from him now in her beauty in her sadness He would let her be and he passed her without a word though it hurt him that she should look so distant and he could not reach her he could do nothing to help her And again he would have passed her without a word had she not at that very moment given him of her own free will what she knew he would never ask and called to him and taken the green shawl off the picture frame and gone to him For he wished she knew to protect her

12

She folded the green shawl about her shoulders She took his arm His beauty was so great she said beginning to speak of Kennedy the gardener at once he was so awfully handsome that she couldnt dismiss him There was a ladder against the greenhouse and little lumps of putty stuck about for they were beginning to mend the greenhouse Yes but as she strolled along with her husband she felt that that particular source of worry had been placed She had it on the tip of her tongue to say as they strolled Itll cost fifty pounds but instead for her heart failed her about money she talked about Jasper shooting birds and he said at once soothing her instantly that it was natural in a boy and he trusted he would find better ways of amusing himself before long Her husband was so sensible so just And so she said Yes all children go through stages and began considering the dahlias in the big bed and wondering what about next years flowers and had he heard the childrens nickname for Charles Tansley she asked The atheist they called him the little atheist Hes not a polished specimen said Mr Ramsay Far from it said Mrs Ramsay

She supposed it was all right leaving him to his own devices Mrs Ramsay said wondering whether it was any use sending down bulbs did they plant them Oh he has his dissertation to write said Mr Ramsay She knew all about THAT said Mrs Ramsay He talked of nothing else It was about the influence of somebody upon something Well its all he has to count on said Mr Ramsay Pray Heaven he wont fall in love with Prue said Mrs Ramsay Hed disinherit her if she married him said Mr Ramsay He did not look at the flowers which his wife was considering but at a spot about a foot or so above them There was no harm in him he added and was just about to say that anyhow he was the only young man in England who admired hiswhen he choked it back He would not bother her again about his books These flowers seemed creditable Mr Ramsay said lowering his gaze and noticing something red something brown Yes but then these she had put in with her own hands said Mrs Ramsay The question was what happened if she sent bulbs down did Kennedy plant them It was his incurable laziness she added moving on If she stood over him all day long with a spade in her hand he did sometimes do a stroke of work So they strolled along towards the redhot pokers Youre teaching your daughters to exaggerate said Mr Ramsay reproving her Her Aunt Camilla was far worse than she was Mrs Ramsay remarked Nobody ever held up your Aunt Camilla as a model of virtue that Im aware of said Mr Ramsay She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw said Mrs Ramsay Somebody else was that said Mr Ramsay Prue was going to be far more beautiful than she was said Mrs Ramsay He saw no trace of it said Mr Ramsay Well then look tonight said Mrs Ramsay They paused He wished Andrew could be induced to work harder He would lose every chance of a scholarship if he didnt Oh scholarships she said Mr Ramsay thought her foolish for saying that about a serious thing like a scholarship He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship he said She would be just as proud of him if he didnt she answered They disagreed always about this but it did not matter She liked him to believe in scholarships and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did Suddenly she remembered those little paths on the edge of the cliffs

Wasnt it late she asked They hadnt come home yet He flicked his watch carelessly open But it was only just past seven He held his watch open for a moment deciding that he would tell her what he had felt on the terrace To begin with it was not reasonable to be so nervous Andrew could look after himself Then he wanted to tell her that when he was walking on the terrace just nowhere he became uncomfortable as if he were breaking into that solitude that aloofness that remoteness of hers But she pressed him What had he wanted to tell her she asked thinking it was about going to the Lighthouse that he was sorry he had said Damn you But no He did not like to see her look so sad he said Only wool gathering she protested flushing a little They both felt uncomfortable as if they did not know whether to go on or go back She had been reading fairy tales to James she said No they could not share that they could not say that

They had reached the gap between the two clumps of redhot pokers and there was the Lighthouse again but she would not let herself look at it Had she known that he was looking at her she thought she would not have let herself sit there thinking She disliked anything that reminded her that she had been seen sitting thinking So she looked over her shoulder at the town The lights were rippling and running as if they were drops of silver water held firm in a wind And all the poverty all the suffering had turned to that Mrs Ramsay thought The lights of the town and of the harbour and of the boats seemed like a phantom net floating there to mark something which had sunk Well if he could not share her thoughts Mr Ramsay said to himself he would be off then on his own He wanted to go on thinking telling himself the story how Hume was stuck in a bog he wanted to laugh But first it was nonsense to be anxious about Andrew When he was Andrews age he used to walk about the country all day long with nothing but a biscuit in his pocket and nobody bothered about him or thought that he had fallen over a cliff He said aloud he thought he would be off for a days walk if the weather held He had had about enough of Bankes and of Carmichael He would like a little solitude Yes she said It annoyed him that she did not protest She knew that he would never do it He was too old now to walk all day long with a biscuit in his pocket She worried about the boys but not about him Years ago before he had married he thought looking across the bay as they stood between the clumps of redhot pokers he had walked all day He had made a meal off bread and cheese in a public house He had worked ten hours at a stretch an old woman just popped her head in now and again and saw to the fire That was the country he liked best over there those sandhills dwindling away into darkness One could walk all day without meeting a soul There was not a house scarcely not a single village for miles on end One could worry things out alone There were little sandy beaches where no one had been since the beginning of time The seals sat up and looked at you It sometimes seemed to him that in a little house out there alonehe broke off sighing He had no right The father of eight childrenhe reminded himself And he would have been a beast and a cur to wish a single thing altered Andrew would be a better man than he had been Prue would be a beauty her mother said They would stem the flood a bit That was a good bit of work on the wholehis eight children They showed he did not damn the poor little universe entirely for on an evening like this he thought looking at the land dwindling away the little island seemed pathetically small half swallowed up in the sea

Poor little place he murmured with a sigh

She heard him He said the most melancholy things but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual All this phrasemaking was a game she thought for if she had said half what he said she would have blown her brains out by now

It annoyed her this phrasemaking and she said to him in a matter offact way that it was a perfectly lovely evening And what was he groaning about she asked half laughing half complaining for she guessed what he was thinkinghe would have written better books if he had not married

He was not complaining he said She knew that he did not complain She knew that he had nothing whatever to complain of And he seized her hand and raised it to his lips and kissed it with an intensity that brought the tears to her eyes and quickly he dropped it

They turned away from the view and began to walk up the path where the silvergreen spearlike plants grew arm in arm His arm was almost like a young mans arm Mrs Ramsay thought thin and hard and she thought with delight how strong he still was though he was over sixty and how untamed and optimistic and how strange it was that being convinced as he was of all sorts of horrors seemed not to depress him but to cheer him Was it not odd she reflected Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people born blind deaf and dumb to the ordinary things but to the extraordinary things with an eye like an eagles His understanding often astonished her But did he notice the flowers No Did he notice the view No Did he even notice his own daughters beauty or whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef He would sit at table with them like a person in a dream And his habit of talking aloud or saying poetry aloud was growing on him she was afraid for sometimes it was awkward

Best and brightest come away

poor Miss Giddings when he shouted that at her almost jumped out of her skin But then Mrs Ramsay though instantly taking his side against all the silly Giddingses in the world then she thought intimating by a little pressure on his arm that he walked up hill too fast for her and she must stop for a moment to see whether those were fresh molehills on the bank then she thought stooping down to look a great mind like his must be different in every way from ours All the great men she had ever known she thought deciding that a rabbit must have got in were like that and it was good for young men though the atmosphere of lecturerooms was stuffy and depressing to her beyond endurance almost simply to hear him simply to look at him But without shooting rabbits how was one to keep them down she wondered It might be a rabbit it might be a mole Some creature anyhow was ruining her Evening Primroses And looking up she saw above the thin trees the first pulse of the fullthrobbing star and wanted to make her husband look at it for the sight gave her such keen pleasure But she stopped herself He never looked at things If he did all he would say would be Poor little world with one of his sighs

At that moment he said Very fine to please her and pretended to admire the flowers But she knew quite well that he did not admire them or even realise that they were there It was only to please her Ah but was that not Lily Briscoe strolling along with William Bankes She focussed her shortsighted eyes upon the backs of a retreating couple Yes indeed it was Did that not mean that they would marry Yes it must What an admirable idea They must marry

13

He had been to Amsterdam Mr Bankes was saying as he strolled across the lawn with Lily Briscoe He had seen the Rembrandts He had been to Madrid Unfortunately it was Good Friday and the Prado was shut He had been to Rome Had Miss Briscoe never been to Rome Oh she shouldIt would be a wonderful experience for herthe Sistine Chapel Michael Angelo and Padua with its Giottos His wife had been in bad health for many years so that their sightseeing had been on a modest scale

She had been to Brussels she had been to Paris but only for a flying visit to see an aunt who was ill She had been to Dresden there were masses of pictures she had not seen however Lily Briscoe reflected perhaps it was better not to see pictures they only made one hopelessly discontented with ones own work Mr Bankes thought one could carry that point of view too far We cant all be Titians and we cant all be Darwins he said at the same time he doubted whether you could have your Darwin and your Titian if it werent for humble people like ourselves Lily would have liked to pay him a compliment youre not humble Mr Bankes she would have liked to have said But he did not want compliments most men do she thought and she was a little ashamed of her impulse and said nothing while he remarked that perhaps what he was saying did not apply to pictures Anyhow said Lily tossing off her little insincerity she would always go on painting because it interested her Yes said Mr Bankes he was sure she would and as they reached the end of the lawn he was asking her whether she had difficulty in finding subjects in London when they turned and saw the Ramsays So that is marriage Lily thought a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball That is what Mrs Ramsay tried to tell me the other night she thought For she was wearing a green shawl and they were standing close together watching Prue and Jasper throwing catches And suddenly the meaning which for no reason at all as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell descends on people making them symbolical making them representative came upon them and made them in the dusk standing looking the symbols of marriage husband and wife Then after an instant the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again and they became as they met them Mr and Mrs Ramsay watching the children throwing catches But still for a moment though Mrs Ramsay greeted them with her usual smile oh shes thinking were going to get married Lily thought and said I have triumphed tonight meaning that for once Mr Bankes had agreed to dine with them and not run off to his own lodging where his man cooked vegetables properly still for one moment there was a sense of things having been blown apart of space of irresponsibility as the ball soared high and they followed it and lost it and saw the one star and the draped branches In the failing light they all looked sharpedged and ethereal and divided by great distances Then darting backwards over the vast space for it seemed as if solidity had vanished altogether Prue ran full tilt into them and caught the ball brilliantly high up in her left hand and her mother said Havent they come back yet whereupon the spell was broken Mr Ramsay felt free now to laugh out loud at the thought that Hume had stuck in a bog and an old woman rescued him on condition he said the Lords Prayer and chuckling to himself he strolled off to his study Mrs Ramsay bringing Prue back into throwing catches again from which she had escaped asked

Did Nancy go with them

14

Certainly Nancy had gone with them since Minta Doyle had asked it with her dumb look holding out her hand as Nancy made off after lunch to her attic to escape the horror of family life She supposed she must go then She did not want to go She did not want to be drawn into it all For as they walked along the road to the cliff Minta kept on taking her hand Then she would let it go Then she would take it again What was it she wanted Nancy asked herself There was something of course that people wanted for when Minta took her hand and held it Nancy reluctantly saw the whole world spread out beneath her as if it were Constantinople seen through a mist and then however heavyeyed one might be one must needs ask Is that Santa Sofia Is that the Golden Horn So Nancy asked when Minta took her hand What is it that she wants Is it that And what was that Here and there emerged from the mist as Nancy looked down upon life spread beneath her a pinnacle a dome prominent things without names But when Minta dropped her hand as she did when they ran down the hillside all that the dome the pinnacle whatever it was that had protruded through the mist sank down into it and disappeared Minta Andrew observed was rather a good walker She wore more sensible clothes that most women She wore very short skirts and black knickerbockers She would jump straight into a stream and flounder across He liked her rashness but he saw that it would not doshe would kill herself in some idiotic way one of these days She seemed to be afraid of nothingexcept bulls At the mere sight of a bull in a field she would throw up her arms and fly screaming which was the very thing to enrage a bull of course But she did not mind owning up to it in the least one must admit that She knew she was an awful coward about bulls she said She thought she must have been tossed in her perambulator when she was a baby She didnt seem to mind what she said or did Suddenly now she pitched down on the edge of the cliff and began to sing some song about

Damn your eyes damn your eyes

They all had to join in and sing the chorus and shout out together

Damn your eyes damn your eyes

but it would be fatal to let the tide come in and cover up all the good huntinggrounds before they got on to the beach

Fatal Paul agreed springing up and as they went slithering down he kept quoting the guidebook about these islands being justly celebrated for their parklike prospects and the extent and variety of their marine curiosities But it would not do altogether this shouting and damning your eyes Andrew felt picking his way down the cliff this clapping him on the back and calling him old fellow and all that it would not altogether do It was the worst of taking women on walks Once on the beach they separated he going out on to the Popes Nose taking his shoes off and rolling his socks in them and letting that couple look after themselves Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubberlike sea anemones who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock Brooding she changed the pool into the sea and made the minnows into sharks and whales and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun and so brought darkness and desolation like God himself to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down Out on the pale crisscrossed sand highstepping fringed gauntleted stalked some fantastic leviathan she was still enlarging the pool and slipped into the vast fissures of the mountain side And then letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky on the tree trunks which the smoke of steamers made waver on the horizon she became with all that power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing hypnotised and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess the pool had diminished again flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body her own life and the lives of all the people in the world for ever to nothingness So listening to the waves crouching over the pool she brooded

And Andrew shouted that the sea was coming in so she leapt splashing through the shallow waves on to the shore and ran up the beach and was carried by her own impetuosity and her desire for rapid movement right behind a rock and thereoh heavens in each others arms were Paul and Minta kissing probably She was outraged indignant She and Andrew put on their shoes and stockings in dead silence without saying a thing about it Indeed they were rather sharp with each other She might have called him when she saw the crayfish or whatever it was Andrew grumbled However they both felt its not our fault They had not wanted this horrid nuisance to happen All the same it irritated Andrew that Nancy should be a woman and Nancy that Andrew should be a man and they tied their shoes very neatly and drew the bows rather tight

It was not until they had climbed right up on to the top of the cliff again that Minta cried out that she had lost her grandmothers brooch her grandmothers brooch the sole ornament she possesseda weeping willow it was they must remember it set in pearls They must have seen it she said with the tears running down her cheeks the brooch which her grandmother had fastened her cap with till the last day of her life Now she had lost it She would rather have lost anything than that She would go back and look for it They all went back They poked and peered and looked They kept their heads very low and said things shortly and gruffly Paul Rayley searched like a madman all about the rock where they had been sitting All this pother about a brooch really didnt do at all Andrew thought as Paul told him to make a thorough search between this point and that The tide was coming in fast The sea would cover the place where they had sat in a minute There was not a ghost of a chance of their finding it now We shall be cut off Minta shrieked suddenly terrified As if there were any danger of that It was the same as the bulls all over againshe had no control over her emotions Andrew thought Women hadnt The wretched Paul had to pacify her The men Andrew and Paul at once became manly and different from usual took counsel briefly and decided that they would plant Rayleys stick where they had sat and come back at low tide again There was nothing more that could be done now If the brooch was there it would still be there in the morning they assured her but Minta still sobbed all the way up to the top of the cliff It was her grandmothers brooch she would rather have lost anything but that and yet Nancy felt it might be true that she minded losing her brooch but she wasnt crying only for that She was crying for something else We might all sit down and cry she felt But she did not know what for

They drew ahead together Paul and Minta and he comforted her and said how famous he was for finding things Once when he was a little boy he had found a gold watch He would get up at daybreak and he was positive he would find it It seemed to him that it would be almost dark and he would be alone on the beach and somehow it would be rather dangerous He began telling her however that he would certainly find it and she said that she would not hear of his getting up at dawn it was lost she knew that she had had a presentiment when she put it on that afternoon And secretly he resolved that he would not tell her but he would slip out of the house at dawn when they were all asleep and if he could not find it he would go to Edinburgh and buy her another just like it but more beautiful He would prove what he could do And as they came out on the hill and saw the lights of the town beneath them the lights coming out suddenly one by one seemed like things that were going to happen to himhis marriage his children his house and again he thought as they came out on to the high road which was shaded with high bushes how they would retreat into solitude together and walk on and on he always leading her and she pressing close to his side as she did now As they turned by the cross roads he thought what an appalling experience he had been through and he must tell some oneMrs Ramsay of course for it took his breath away to think what he had been and done It had been far and away the worst moment of his life when he asked Minta to marry him He would go straight to Mrs Ramsay because he felt somehow that she was the person who had made him do it She had made him think he could do anything Nobody else took him seriously But she made him believe that he could do whatever he wanted He had felt her eyes on him all day today following him about though she never said a word as if she were saying Yes you can do it I believe in you I expect it of you She had made him feel all that and directly they got back he looked for the lights of the house above the bay he would go to her and say Ive done it Mrs Ramsay thanks to you And so turning into the lane that led to the house he could see lights moving about in the upper windows They must be awfully late then People were getting ready for dinner The house was all lit up and the lights after the darkness made his eyes feel full and he said to himself childishly as he walked up the drive Lights lights lights and repeated in a dazed way Lights lights lights as they came into the house staring about him with his face quite stiff But good heavens he said to himself putting his hand to his tie I must not make a fool of myself

15

Yes said Prue in her considering way answering her mothers question I think Nancy did go with them

16

Well then Nancy had gone with them Mrs Ramsay supposed wondering as she put down a brush took up a comb and said Come in to a tap at the door Jasper and Rose came in whether the fact that Nancy was with them made it less likely or more likely that anything would happen it made it less likely somehow Mrs Ramsay felt very irrationally except that after all holocaust on such a scale was not probable They could not all be drowned And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist life

Jasper and Rose said that Mildred wanted to know whether she should wait dinner

Not for the Queen of England said Mrs Ramsay emphatically

Not for the Empress of Mexico she added laughing at Jasper for he shared his mothers vice he too exaggerated

And if Rose liked she said while Jasper took the message she might choose which jewels she was to wear When there are fifteen people sitting down to dinner one cannot keep things waiting for ever She was now beginning to feel annoyed with them for being so late it was inconsiderate of them and it annoyed her on top of her anxiety about them that they should choose this very night to be out late when in fact she wished the dinner to be particularly nice since William Bankes had at last consented to dine with them and they were having Mildreds masterpieceBOEUF EN DAUBE Everything depended upon things being served up to the precise moment they were ready The beef the bayleaf and the wineall must be done to a turn To keep it waiting was out of the question Yet of course tonight of all nights out they went and they came in late and things had to be sent out things had to be kept hot the BOEUF EN DAUBE would be entirely spoilt

Jasper offered her an opal necklace Rose a gold necklace Which looked best against her black dress Which did indeed said Mrs Ramsay absentmindedly looking at her neck and shoulders but avoiding her face in the glass And then while the children rummaged among her things she looked out of the window at a sight which always amused herthe rooks trying to decide which tree to settle on Every time they seemed to change their minds and rose up into the air again because she thought the old rook the father rook old Joseph was her name for him was a bird of a very trying and difficult disposition He was a disreputable old bird with half his wing feathers missing He was like some seedy old gentleman in a top hat she had seen playing the horn in front of a public house

Look she said laughing They were actually fighting Joseph and Mary were fighting Anyhow they all went up again and the air was shoved aside by their black wings and cut into exquisite scimitar shapes The movements of the wings beating out out outshe could never describe it accurately enough to please herselfwas one of the loveliest of all to her Look at that she said to Rose hoping that Rose would see it more clearly than she could For ones children so often gave ones own perceptions a little thrust forwards

But which was it to be They had all the trays of her jewelcase open The gold necklace which was Italian or the opal necklace which Uncle James had brought her from India or should she wear her amethysts

Choose dearests choose she said hoping that they would make haste

But she let them take their time to choose she let Rose particularly take up this and then that and hold her jewels against the black dress for this little ceremony of choosing jewels which was gone through every night was what Rose liked best she knew She had some hidden reason of her own for attaching great importance to this choosing what her mother was to wear What was the reason Mrs Ramsay wondered standing still to let her clasp the necklace she had chosen divining through her own past some deep some buried some quite speechless feeling that one had for ones mother at Roses age Like all feelings felt for oneself Mrs Ramsay thought it made one sad It was so inadequate what one could give in return and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was And Rose would grow up and Rose would suffer she supposed with these deep feelings and she said she was ready now and they would go down and Jasper because he was the gentleman should give her his arm and Rose as she was the lady should carry her handkerchief she gave her the handkerchief and what else oh yes it might be cold a shawl Choose me a shawl she said for that would please Rose who was bound to suffer so There she said stopping by the window on the landing there they are again Joseph had settled on another tree top Dont you think they mind she said to Jasper having their wings broken Why did he want to shoot poor old Joseph and Mary He shuffled a little on the stairs and felt rebuked but not seriously for she did not understand the fun of shooting birds and they did not feel and being his mother she lived away in another division of the world but he rather liked her stories about Mary and Joseph She made him laugh But how did she know that those were Mary and Joseph Did she think the same birds came to the same trees every night he asked But here suddenly like all grownup people she ceased to pay him the least attention She was listening to a clatter in the hall

Theyve come back she exclaimed and at once she felt much more annoyed with them than relieved Then she wondered had it happened She would go down and they would tell herbut no They could not tell her anything with all these people about So she must go down and begin dinner and wait And like some queen who finding her people gathered in the hall looks down upon them and descends among them and acknowledges their tributes silently and accepts their devotion and their prostration before her Paul did not move a muscle but looked straight before him as she passed she went down and crossed the hall and bowed her head very slightly as if she accepted what they could not say their tribute to her beauty

But she stopped There was a smell of burning Could they have let the BOEUF EN DAUBE overboil she wondered pray heaven not when the great clangour of the gong announced solemnly authoritatively that all those scattered about in attics in bedrooms on little perches of their own reading writing putting the last smooth to their hair or fastening dresses must leave all that and the little odds and ends on their washingtables and dressing tables and the novels on the bed tables and the diaries which were so private and assemble in the diningroom for dinner

17

But what have I done with my life thought Mrs Ramsay taking her place at the head of the table and looking at all the plates making white circles on it William sit by me she said Lily she said wearily over there They had thatPaul Rayley and Minta Doyleshe only thisan infinitely long table and plates and knives At the far end was her husband sitting down all in a heap frowning What at She did not know She did not mind She could not understand how she had ever felt any emotion or affection for him She had a sense of being past everything through everything out of everything as she helped the soup as if there was an eddythere and one could be in it or one could be out of it and she was out of it Its all come to an end she thought while they came in one after another Charles TansleySit there please she saidAugustus Carmichaeland sat down And meanwhile she waited passively for some one to answer her for something to happen But this is not a thing she thought ladling out soup that one says

Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancythat was what she was thinking this was what she was doingladling out soupshe felt more and more strongly outside that eddy or as if a shade had fallen and robbed of colour she saw things truly The room she looked round it was very shabby There was no beauty anywhere She forebore to look at Mr Tansley Nothing seemed to have merged They all sat separate And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her Again she felt as a fact without hostility the sterility of men for if she did not do it nobody would do it and so giving herself a little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped the old familiar pulse began beating as the watch begins tickingone two three one two three And so on and so on she repeated listening to it sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a newspaper And so then she concluded addressing herself by bending silently in his direction to William Bankespoor man who had no wife and no children and dined alone in lodgings except for tonight and in pity for him life being now strong enough to bear her on again she began all this business as a sailor not without weariness sees the wind fill his sail and yet hardly wants to be off again and thinks how had the ship sunk he would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea

Did you find your letters I told them to put them in the hall for you she said to William Bankes

Lily Briscoe watched her drifting into that strange nomans land where to follow people is impossible and yet their going inflicts such a chill on those who watch them that they always try at least to follow them with their eyes as one follows a fading ship until the sails have sunk beneath the horizon

How old she looks how worn she looks Lily thought and how remote Then when she turned to William Bankes smiling it was as if the ship had turned and the sun had struck its sails again and Lily thought with some amusement because she was relieved Why does she pity him For that was the impression she gave when she told him that his letters were in the hall Poor William Bankes she seemed to be saying as if her own weariness had been partly pitying people and the life in her her resolve to live again had been stirred by pity And it was not true Lily thought it was one of those misjudgments of hers that seemed to be instinctive and to arise from some need of her own rather than of other peoples He is not in the least pitiable He has his work Lily said to herself She remembered all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure that she had her work In a flash she saw her picture and thought Yes I shall put the tree further in the middle then I shall avoid that awkward space Thats what I shall do Thats what has been puzzling me She took up the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower pattern in the tablecloth so as to remind herself to move the tree

Its odd that one scarcely gets anything worth having by post yet one always wants ones letters said Mr Bankes

What damned rot they talk thought Charles Tansley laying down his spoon precisely in the middle of his plate which he had swept clean as if Lily thought he sat opposite to her with his back to the window precisely in the middle of view he were determined to make sure of his meals Everything about him had that meagre fixity that bare unloveliness But nevertheless the fact remained it was impossible to dislike any one if one looked at them She liked his eyes they were blue deep set frightening

Do you write many letters Mr Tansley asked Mrs Ramsay pitying him too Lily supposed for that was true of Mrs Ramsayshe pitied men always as if they lacked somethingwomen never as if they had something He wrote to his mother otherwise he did not suppose he wrote one letter a month said Mr Tansley shortly

For he was not going to talk the sort of rot these condescended to by these silly women He had been reading in his room and now he came down and it all seemed to him silly superficial flimsy Why did they dress He had come down in his ordinary clothes He had not got any dress clothes One never gets anything worth having by postthat was the sort of thing they were always saying They made men say that sort of thing Yes it was pretty well true he thought They never got anything worth having from one years end to another They did nothing but talk talk talk eat eat eat It was the womens fault Women made civilisation impossible with all their charm all their silliness

No going to the Lighthouse tomorrow Mrs Ramsay he said asserting himself He liked her he admired her he still thought of the man in the drainpipe looking up at her but he felt it necessary to assert himself

He was really Lily Briscoe thought in spite of his eyes but then look at his nose look at his hands the most uncharming human being she had ever met Then why did she mind what he said Women cant write women cant paintwhat did that matter coming from him since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him and that was why he said it Why did her whole being bow like corn under a wind and erect itself again from this abasement only with a great and rather painful effort She must make it once more Theres the sprig on the tablecloth theres my painting I must move the tree to the middle that mattersnothing else Could she not hold fast to that she asked herself and not lose her temper and not argue and if she wanted revenge take it by laughing at him

Oh Mr Tansley she said do take me to the Lighthouse with you I should so love it

She was telling lies he could see She was saying what she did not mean to annoy him for some reason She was laughing at him He was in his old flannel trousers He had no others He felt very rough and isolated and lonely He knew that she was trying to tease him for some reason she didnt want to go to the Lighthouse with him she despised him so did Prue Ramsay so did they all But he was not going to be made a fool of by women so he turned deliberately in his chair and looked out of the window and said all in a jerk very rudely it would be too rough for her tomorrow She would be sick

It annoyed him that she should have made him speak like that with Mrs Ramsay listening If only he could be alone in his room working he thought among his books That was where he felt at his ease And he had never run a penny into debt he had never cost his father a penny since he was fifteen he had helped them at home out of his savings he was educating his sister Still he wished he had known how to answer Miss Briscoe properly he wished it had not come out all in a jerk like that Youd be sick He wished he could think of something to say to Mrs Ramsay something which would show her that he was not just a dry prig That was what they all thought him He turned to her But Mrs Ramsay was talking about people he had never heard of to William Bankes

Yes take it away she said briefly interrupting what she was saying to William Bankes to speak to the maid It must have been fifteen no twenty years agothat I last saw her she was saying turning back to him again as if she could not lose a moment of their talk for she was absorbed by what they were saying So he had actually heard from her this evening And was Carrie still living at Marlow and was everything still the same Oh she could remember it as if it were yesterdayon the river feeling it as if it were yesterdaygoing on the river feeling very cold But if the Mannings made a plan they stuck to it Never should she forget Herbert killing a wasp with a teaspoon on the bank And it was still going on Mrs Ramsay mused gliding like a ghost among the chairs and tables of that drawingroom on the banks of the Thames where she had been so very very cold twenty years ago but now she went among them like a ghost and it fascinated her as if while she had changed that particular day now become very still and beautiful had remained there all these years Had Carrie written to him herself she asked

Yes She says theyre building a new billiard room he said No No That was out of the question Building a new billiard room It seemed to her impossible

Mr Bankes could not see that there was anything very odd about it They were very well off now Should he give her love to Carrie

Oh said Mrs Ramsay with a little start No she added reflecting that she did not know this Carrie who built a new billiard room But how strange she repeated to Mr Bankess amusement that they should be going on there still For it was extraordinary to think that they had been capable of going on living all these years when she had not thought of them more than once all that time How eventful her own life had been during those same years Yet perhaps Carrie Manning had not thought about her either The thought was strange and distasteful

People soon drift apart said Mr Bankes feeling however some satisfaction when he thought that after all he knew both the Mannings and the Ramsays He had not drifted apart he thought laying down his spoon and wiping his cleanshaven lips punctiliously But perhaps he was rather unusual he thought in this he never let himself get into a groove He had friends in all circlesMrs Ramsay had to break off here to tell the maid something about keeping food hot That was why he preferred dining alone All those interruptions annoyed him Well thought William Bankes preserving a demeanour of exquisite courtesy and merely spreading the fingers of his left hand on the tablecloth as a mechanic examines a tool beautifully polished and ready for use in an interval of leisure such are the sacrifices ones friends ask of one It would have hurt her if he had refused to come But it was not worth it for him Looking at his hand he thought that if he had been alone dinner would have been almost over now he would have been free to work Yes he thought it is a terrible waste of time The children were dropping in still I wish one of you would run up to Rogers room Mrs Ramsay was saying How trifling it all is how boring it all is he thought compared with the other thing work Here he sat drumming his fingers on the tablecloth when he might have beenhe took a flashing birdseye view of his work What a waste of time it all was to be sure Yet he thought she is one of my oldest friends I am by way of being devoted to her Yet now at this moment her presence meant absolutely nothing to him her beauty meant nothing to him her sitting with her little boy at the window nothing nothing He wished only to be alone and to take up that book He felt uncomfortable he felt treacherous that he could sit by her side and feel nothing for her The truth was that he did not enjoy family life It was in this sort of state that one asked oneself What does one live for Why one asked oneself does one take all these pains for the human race to go on Is it so very desirable Are we attractive as a species Not so very he thought looking at those rather untidy boys His favourite Cam was in bed he supposed Foolish questions vain questions questions one never asked if one was occupied Is human life this Is human life that One never had time to think about it But here he was asking himself that sort of question because Mrs Ramsay was giving orders to servants and also because it had struck him thinking how surprised Mrs Ramsay was that Carrie Manning should still exist that friendships even the best of them are frail things One drifts apart He reproached himself again He was sitting beside Mrs Ramsay and he had nothing in the world to say to her

Im so sorry said Mrs Ramsy turning to him at last He felt rigid and barren like a pair of boots that have been soaked and gone dry so that you can hardly force your feet into them Yet he must force his feet into them He must make himself talk Unless he were very careful she would find out this treachery of his that he did not care a straw for her and that would not be at all pleasant he thought So he bent his head courteously in her direction

How you must detest dining in this bear garden she said making use as she did when she was distracted of her social manner So when there is a strife of tongues at some meeting the chairman to obtain unity suggests that every one shall speak in French Perhaps it is bad French French may not contain the words that express the speakers thoughts nevertheless speaking French imposes some order some uniformity Replying to her in the same language Mr Bankes said No not at all and Mr Tansley who had no knowledge of this language even spoke thus in words of one syllable at once suspected its insincerity They did talk nonsense he thought the Ramsays and he pounced on this fresh instance with joy making a note which one of these days he would read aloud to one or two friends There in a society where one could say what one liked he would sarcastically describe staying with the Ramsays and what nonsense they talked It was worth while doing it once he would say but not again The women bored one so he would say Of course Ramsay had dished himself by marrying a beautiful woman and having eight children It would shape itself something like that but now at this moment sitting stuck there with an empty seat beside him nothing had shaped itself at all It was all in scraps and fragments He felt extremely even physically uncomfortable He wanted somebody to give him a chance of asserting himself He wanted it so urgently that he fidgeted in his chair looked at this person then at that person tried to break into their talk opened his mouth and shut it again They were talking about the fishing industry Why did no one ask him his opinion What did they know about the fishing industry

Lily Briscoe knew all that Sitting opposite him could she not see as in an Xray photograph the ribs and thigh bones of the young mans desire to impress himself lying dark in the mist of his fleshthat thin mist which convention had laid over his burning desire to break into the conversation But she thought screwing up her Chinese eyes and remembering how he sneered at women cant paint cant write why should I help him to relieve himself

There is a code of behaviour she knew whose seventh article it may be says that on occasions of this sort it behoves the woman whatever her own occupation might be to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones the ribs of his vanity of his urgent desire to assert himself as indeed it is their duty she reflected in her old maidenly fairness to help us suppose the Tube were to burst into flames Then she thought I should certainly expect Mr Tansley to get me out But how would it be she thought if neither of us did either of these things So she sat there smiling

Youre not planning to go to the Lighthouse are you Lily said Mrs Ramsay Remember poor Mr Langley he had been round the world dozens of times but he told me he never suffered as he did when my husband took him there Are you a good sailor Mr Tansley she asked

Mr Tansley raised a hammer swung it high in air but realising as it descended that he could not smite that butterfly with such an instrument as this said only that he had never been sick in his life But in that one sentence lay compact like gunpowder that his grandfather was a fisherman his father a chemist that he had worked his way up entirely himself that he was proud of it that he was Charles Tansleya fact that nobody there seemed to realise but one of these days every single person would know it He scowled ahead of him He could almost pity these mild cultivated people who would be blown sky high like bales of wool and barrels of apples one of these days by the gunpowder that was in him

Will you take me Mr Tansley said Lily quickly kindly for of course if Mrs Ramsay said to her as in effect she did I am drowning my dear in seas of fire Unless you apply some balm to the anguish of this hour and say something nice to that young man there life will run upon the rocksindeed I hear the grating and the growling at this minute My nerves are taut as fiddle strings Another touch and they will snapwhen Mrs Ramsay said all this as the glance in her eyes said it of course for the hundred and fiftieth time Lily Briscoe had to renounce the experimentwhat happens if one is not nice to that young man thereand be nice

Judging the turn in her mood correctlythat she was friendly to him nowhe was relieved of his egotism and told her how he had been thrown out of a boat when he was a baby how his father used to fish him out with a boathook that was how he had learnt to swim One of his uncles kept the light on some rock or other off the Scottish coast he said He had been there with him in a storm This was said loudly in a pause They had to listen to him when he said that he had been with his uncle in a lighthouse in a storm Ah thought Lily Briscoe as the conversation took this auspicious turn and she felt Mrs Ramsays gratitude for Mrs Ramsay was free now to talk for a moment herself ah she thought but what havent I paid to get it for you She had not been sincere

She had done the usual trickbeen nice She would never know him He would never know her Human relations were all like that she thought and the worst if it had not been for Mr Bankes were between men and women Inevitably these were extremely insincere she thought Then her eye caught the salt cellar which she had placed there to remind her and she remembered that next morning she would move the tree further towards the middle and her spirits rose so high at the thought of painting tomorrow that she laughed out loud at what Mr Tansley was saying Let him talk all night if he liked it

But how long do they leave men on a Lighthouse she asked He told her He was amazingly well informed And as he was grateful and as he liked her and as he was beginning to enjoy himself so now Mrs Ramsay thought she could return to that dream land that unreal but fascinating place the Mannings drawingroom at Marlow twenty years ago where one moved about without haste or anxiety for there was no future to worry about She knew what had happened to them what to her It was like reading a good book again for she knew the end of that story since it had happened twenty years ago and life which shot down even from this diningroom table in cascades heaven knows where was sealed up there and lay like a lake placidly between its banks He said they had built a billiard roomwas it possible Would William go on talking about the Mannings She wanted him to But nofor some reason he was no longer in the mood She tried He did not respond She could not force him She was disappointed

The children are disgraceful she said sighing He said something about punctuality being one of the minor virtues which we do not acquire until later in life

If at all said Mrs Ramsay merely to fill up space thinking what an old maid William was becoming Conscious of his treachery conscious of her wish to talk about something more intimate yet out of mood for it at present he felt come over him the disagreeableness of life sitting there waiting Perhaps the others were saying something interesting What were they saying

That the fishing season was bad that the men were emigrating They were talking about wages and unemployment The young man was abusing the government William Bankes thinking what a relief it was to catch on to something of this sort when private life was disagreeable heard him say something about one of the most scandalous acts of the present government Lily was listening Mrs Ramsay was listening they were all listening But already bored Lily felt that something was lacking Mr Bankes felt that something was lacking Pulling her shawl round her Mrs Ramsay felt that something was lacking All of them bending themselves to listen thought Pray heaven that the inside of my mind may not be exposed for each thought The others are feeling this They are outraged and indignant with the government about the fishermen Whereas I feel nothing at all But perhaps thought Mr Bankes as he looked at Mr Tansley here is the man One was always waiting for the man There was always a chance At any moment the leader might arise the man of genius in politics as in anything else Probably he will be extremely disagreeable to us old fogies thought Mr Bankes doing his best to make allowances for he knew by some curious physical sensation as of nerves erect in his spine that he was jealous for himself partly partly more probably for his work for his point of view for his science and therefore he was not entirely open minded or altogether fair for Mr Tansley seemed to be saying You have wasted your lives You are all of you wrong Poor old fogies youre hopelessly behind the times He seemed to be rather cocksure this young man and his manners were bad But Mr Bankes bade himself observe he had courage he had ability he was extremely well up in the facts Probably Mr Bankes thought as Tansley abused the government there is a good deal in what he says

Tell me now he said So they argued about politics and Lily looked at the leaf on the tablecloth and Mrs Ramsay leaving the argument entirely in the hands of the two men wondered why she was so bored by this talk and wished looking at her husband at the other end of the table that he would say something One word she said to herself For if he said a thing it would make all the difference He went to the heart of things He cared about fishermen and their wages He could not sleep for thinking of them It was altogether different when he spoke one did not feel then pray heaven you dont see how little I care because one did care Then realising that it was because she admired him so much that she was waiting for him to speak she felt as if somebody had been praising her husband to her and their marriage and she glowed all over withiut realising that it was she herself who had praised him She looked at him thinking to find this in his face he would be looking magnificentBut not in the least He was screwing his face up he was scowling and frowning and flushing with anger What on earth was it about she wondered What could be the matter Only that poor old Augustus had asked for another plate of soupthat was all It was unthinkable it was detestable so he signalled to her across the table that Augustus should be beginning his soup over again He loathed people eating when he had finished She saw his anger fly like a pack of hounds into his eyes his brow and she knew that in a moment something violent would explode and thenthank goodness she saw him clutch himself and clap a brake on the wheel and the whole of his body seemed to emit sparks but not words He sat there scowling He had said nothing he would have her observe Let her give him the credit for that But why after all should poor Augustus not ask for another plate of soup He had merely touched Ellens arm and said

Ellen please another plate of soup and then Mr Ramsay scowled like that

And why not Mrs Ramsay demanded Surely they could let Augustus have his soup if he wanted it He hated people wallowing in food Mr Ramsay frowned at her He hated everything dragging on for hours like this But he had controlled himself Mr Ramsay would have her observe disgusting though the sight was But why show it so plainly Mrs Ramsay demanded they looked at each other down the long table sending these questions and answers across each knowing exactly what the other felt Everybody could see Mrs Ramsay thought There was Rose gazing at her father there was Roger gazing at his father both would be off in spasms of laughter in another second she knew and so she said promptly indeed it was time

Light the candles and they jumped up instantly and went and fumbled at the sideboard

Why could he never conceal his feelings Mrs Ramsay wondered and she wondered if Augustus Carmichael had noticed Perhaps he had perhaps he had not She could not help respecting the composure with which he sat there drinking his soup If he wanted soup he asked for soup Whether people laughed at him or were angry with him he was the same He did not like her she knew that but partly for that very reason she respected him and looking at him drinking soup very large and calm in the failing light and monumental and contemplative she wondered what he did feel then and why he was always content and dignified and she thought how devoted he was to Andrew and would call him into his room and Andrew said show him things And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry till he reminded one of a cat watching birds and then he clapped his paws together when he had found the word and her husband said Poor old Augustushes a true poet which was high praise from her husband

Now eight candles were stood down the table and after the first stoop the flames stood upright and drew with them into visibility the long table entire and in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit What had she done with it Mrs Ramsay wondered for Roses arrangement of the grapes and pears of the horny pinklined shell of the bananas made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea of Neptunes banquet of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus in some picture among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and goldThus brought up suddenly into the light it seemed possessed of great size and depth was like a world in which one could take ones staff and climb hills she thought and go down into valleys and to her pleasure for it brought them into sympathy momentarily she saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit plunged in broke off a bloom there a tassel here and returned after feasting to his hive That was his way of looking different from hers But looking together united them

Now all the candles were lit up and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light and composed as they had not been in the twilight into a party round a table for the night was now shut off by panes of glass which far from giving any accurate view of the outside world rippled it so strangely that here inside the room seemed to be order and dry land there outside a reflection in which things waved and vanished waterily

Some change at once went through them all as if this had really happened and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow on an island had their common cause against that fluidity out there Mrs Ramsay who had been uneasy waiting for Paul and Minta to come in and unable she felt to settle to things now felt her uneasiness changed to expectation For now they must come and Lily Briscoe trying to analyse the cause of the sudden exhilaration compared it with that moment on the tennis lawn when solidity suddenly vanished and such vast spaces lay between them and now the same effect was got by the many candles in the sparely furnished room and the uncurtained windows and the bright masklike look of faces seen by candlelight Some weight was taken off them anything might happen she felt They must come now Mrs Ramsay thought looking at the door and at that instant Minta Doyle Paul Rayley and a maid carrying a great dish in her hands came in together They were awfully late they were horribly late Minta said as they found their way to different ends of the table

I lost my broochmy grandmothers brooch said Minta with a sound of lamentation in her voice and a suffusion in her large brown eyes looking down looking up as she sat by Mr Ramsay which roused his chivalry so that he bantered her

How could she be such a goose he asked as to scramble about the rocks in jewels

She was by way of being terrified of himhe was so fearfully clever and the first night when she had sat by him and he talked about George Eliot she had been really frightened for she had left the third volume of MIDDLEMARCH in the train and she never knew what happened in the end but afterwards she got on perfectly and made herself out even more ignorant than she was because he liked telling her she was a fool And so tonight directly he laughed at her she was not frightened Besides she knew directly she came into the room that the miracle had happened she wore her golden haze Sometimes she had it sometimes not She never knew why it came or why it went or if she had it until she came into the room and then she knew instantly by the way some man looked at her Yes tonight she had it tremendously she knew that by the way Mr Ramsay told her not to be a fool She sat beside him smiling

It must have happened then thought Mrs Ramsay they are engaged And for a moment she felt what she had never expected to feel again jealousy For he her husband felt it tooMintas glow he liked these girls these goldenreddish girls with something flying something a little wild and harumscarum about them who didnt scrape their hair off werent as he said about poor Lily Briscoe skimpy There was some quality which she herself had not some lustre some richness which attracted him amused him led him to make favourites of girls like Minta They might cut his hair from him plait him watchchains or interrupt him at his work hailing him she heard them Come along Mr Ramsay its our turn to beat them now and out he came to play tennis

But indeed she was not jealous only now and then when she made herself look in her glass a little resentful that she had grown old perhaps by her own fault The bill for the greenhouse and all the rest of it She was grateful to them for laughing at him How many pipes have you smoked today Mr Ramsay and so on till he seemed a young man a man very attractive to women not burdened not weighed down with the greatness of his labours and the sorrows of the world and his fame or his failure but again as she had first known him gaunt but gallant helping her out of a boat she remembered with delightful ways like that she looked at him and he looked astonishingly young teasing Minta For herselfPut it down there she said helping the Swiss girl to place gently before her the huge brown pot in which was the BOEUF EN DAUBEfor her own part she liked her boobies Paul must sit by her She had kept a place for him Really she sometimes thought she liked the boobies best They did not bother one with their dissertations How much they missed after all these very clever men How dried up they did become to be sure There was something she thought as he sat down very charming about Paul His manners were delightful to her and his sharp cut nose and his bright blue eyes He was so considerate Would he tell hernow that they were all talking againwhat had happened

We went back to look for Mintas brooch he said sitting down by her Wethat was enough She knew from the effort the rise in his voice to surmount a difficult word that it was the first time he had said we We did this we did that Theyll say that all their lives she thought and an exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice rose from the great brown dish as Marthe with a little flourish took the cover off The cook had spent three days over that dish And she must take great care Mrs Ramsay thought diving into the soft mass to choose a specially tender piece for William Bankes And she peered into the dish with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine and thought This will celebrate the occasiona curious sense rising in her at once freakish and tender of celebrating a festival as if two emotions were called up in her one profoundfor what could be more serious than the love of man for woman what more commanding more impressive bearing in its bosom the seeds of death at the same time these lovers these people entering into illusion glittering eyed must be danced round with mockery decorated with garlands

It is a triumph said Mr Bankes laying his knife down for a moment He had eaten attentively It was rich it was tender It was perfectly cooked How did she manage these things in the depths of the country he asked her She was a wonderful woman All his love all his reverence had returned and she knew it

It is a French recipe of my grandmothers said Mrs Ramsay speaking with a ring of great pleasure in her voice Of course it was French What passes for cookery in England is an abomination they agreed It is putting cabbages in water It is roasting meat till it is like leather It is cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables In which said Mr Bankes all the virtue of the vegetable is contained And the waste said Mrs Ramsay A whole French family could live on what an English cook throws away Spurred on by her sense that Williams affection had come back to her and that everything was all right again and that her suspense was over and that now she was free both to triumph and to mock she laughed she gesticulated till Lily thought How childlike how absurd she was sitting up there with all her beauty opened again in her talking about the skins of vegetables There was something frightening about her She was irresistible Always she got her own way in the end Lily thought Now she had brought this offPaul and Minta one might suppose were engaged Mr Bankes was dining here She put a spell on them all by wishing so simply so directly and Lily contrasted that abundance with her own poverty of spirit and supposed that it was partly that belief for her face was all lit upwithout looking young she looked radiant in this strange this terrifying thing which made Paul Rayley sitting at her side all of a tremor yet abstract absorbed silent Mrs Ramsay Lily felt as she talked about the skins of vegetables exalted that worshipped that held her hands over it to warm them to protect it and yet having brought it all about somehow laughed led her victims Lily felt to the altar It came over her too nowthe emotion the vibration of love How inconspicuous she felt herself by Pauls side He glowing burning she aloof satirical he bound for adventure she moored to the shore he launched incautious she solitary left outand ready to implore a share if it were a disaster in his disaster she said shyly

When did Minta lose her brooch

He smiled the most exquisite smile veiled by memory tinged by dreams He shook his head On the beach he said

Im going to find it he said Im getting up early This being kept secret from Minta he lowered his voice and turned his eyes to where she sat laughing beside Mr Ramsay

Lily wanted to protest violently and outrageously her desire to help him envisaging how in the dawn on the beach she would be the one to pounce on the brooch halfhidden by some stone and thus herself be included among the sailors and adventurers But what did he reply to her offer She actually said with an emotion that she seldom let appear Let me come with you and he laughed He meant yes or no either perhaps But it was not his meaningit was the odd chuckle he gave as if he had said Throw yourself over the cliff if you like I dont care He turned on her cheek the heat of love its horror its cruelty its unscrupulosity It scorched her and Lily looking at Minta being charming to Mr Ramsay at the other end of the table flinched for her exposed to these fangs and was thankful For at any rate she said to herself catching sight of the salt cellar on the pattern she need not marry thank Heaven she need not undergo that degradation She was saved from that dilution She would move the tree rather more to the middle

Such was the complexity of things For what happened to her especially staying with the Ramsays was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time thats what you feel was one thats what I feel was the other and then they fought together in her mind as now It is so beautiful so exciting this love that I tremble on the verge of it and offer quite out of my own habit to look for a brooch on a beach also it is the stupidest the most barbaric of human passions and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gems Pauls was exquisite into a bully with a crowbar he was swaggering he was insolent in the Mile End Road Yet she said to herself from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love wreaths heaped and roses and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but thislove while the women judging from her own experience would all the time be feeling This is not what we want there is nothing more tedious puerile and inhumane than this yet it is also beautiful and necessary Well then well then she asked somehow expecting the others to go on with the argument as if in an argument like this one threw ones own little bolt which fell short obviously and left the others to carry it on So she listened again to what they were saying in case they should throw any light upon the question of love

Then said Mr Bankes there is that liquid the English call coffee

Oh coffee said Mrs Ramsay But it was much rather a question she was thoroughly roused Lily could see and talked very emphatically of real butter and clean milk Speaking with warmth and eloquence she described the iniquity of the English dairy system and in what state milk was delivered at the door and was about to prove her charges for she had gone into the matter when all round the table beginning with Andrew in the middle like a fire leaping from tuft to tuft of furze her children laughed her husband laughed she was laughed at fire encircled and forced to veil her crest dismount her batteries and only retaliate by displaying the raillery and ridicule of the table to Mr Bankes as an example of what one suffered if one attacked the prejudices of the British Public

Purposely however for she had it on her mind that Lily who had helped her with Mr Tansley was out of things she exempted her from the rest said Lily anyhow agrees with me and so drew her in a little fluttered a little startled For she was thinking about love They were both out of things Mrs Ramsay had been thinking both Lily and Charles Tansley Both suffered from the glow of the other two He it was clear felt himself utterly in the cold no woman would look at him with Paul Rayley in the room Poor fellow Still he had his dissertation the influence of somebody upon something he could take care of himself With Lily it was different She faded under Mintas glow became more inconspicuous than ever in her little grey dress with her little puckered face and her little Chinese eyes Everything about her was so small Yet thought Mrs Ramsay comparing her with Minta as she claimed her help for Lily should bear her out she talked no more about her dairies than her husband did about his bootshe would talk by the hour about his boots of the two Lily at forty will be the better There was in Lily a thread of something a flare of something something of her own which Mrs Ramsay liked very much indeed but no man would she feared Obviously not unless it were a much older man like William Bankes But then he cared well Mrs Ramsay sometimes thought that he cared since his wifes death perhaps for her He was not in love of course it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many Oh but nonsense she thought William must marry Lily They have so many things in common Lily is so fond of flowers They are both cold and aloof and rather selfsufficing She must arrange for them to take a long walk together

Foolishly she had set them opposite each other That could be remedied tomorrow If it were fine they should go for a picnic Everything seemed possible Everything seemed right Just now but this cannot last she thought dissociating herself from the moment while they were all talking about boots just now she had reached security she hovered like a hawk suspended like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly not noisily solemnly rather for it arose she thought looking at them all eating there from husband and children and friends all of which rising in this profound stillness she was helping William Bankes to one very small piece more and peered into the depths of the earthenware pot seemed now for no special reason to stay there like a smoke like a fume rising upwards holding them safe together Nothing need be said nothing could be said There it was all round them It partook she felt carefully helping Mr Bankes to a specially tender piece of eternity as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon there is a coherence in things a stability something she meant is immune from change and shines out she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights in the face of the flowing the fleeting the spectral like a ruby so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today already of peace of rest Of such moments she thought the thing is made that endures

Yes she assured William Bankes there is plenty for everybody

Andrew she said hold your plate lower or I shall spill it The BOEUF EN DAUBE was a perfect triumph Here she felt putting the spoon down where one could move or rest could wait now they were all helped listening could then like a hawk which lapses suddenly from its high station flaunt and sink on laughter easily resting her whole weight upon what at the other end of the table her husband was saying about the square root of one thousand two hundred and fiftythree That was the number it seemed on his watch

What did it all mean To this day she had no notion A square root What was that Her sons knew She leant on them on cubes and square roots that was what they were talking about now on Voltaire and Madame de Stael on the character of Napoleon on the French system of land tenure on Lord Rosebery on Creeveys Memoirs she let it uphold her and sustain her this admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence which ran up and down crossed this way and that like iron girders spanning the swaying fabric upholding the world so that she could trust herself to it utterly even shut her eyes or flicker them for a moment as a child staring up from its pillow winks at the myriad layers of the leaves of a tree Then she woke up It was still being fabricated William Bankes was praising the Waverly novels

He read one of them every six months he said And why should that make Charles Tansley angry He rushed in all thought Mrs Ramsay because Prue will not be nice to him and denounced the Waverly novels when he knew nothing about it nothing about it whatsoever Mrs Ramsay thought observing him rather than listening to what he said She could see how it was from his mannerhe wanted to assert himself and so it would always be with him till he got his Professorship or married his wife and so need not be always saying III For that was what his criticism of poor Sir Walter or perhaps it was Jane Austen amounted to III He was thinking of himself and the impression he was making as she could tell by the sound of his voice and his emphasis and his uneasiness Success would be good for him At any rate they were off again Now she need not listen It could not last she knew but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people and their thoughts and their feelings without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging trembling So she saw them she heard them but whatever they said had also this quality as if what they said was like the movement of a trout when at the same time one can see the ripple and the gravel something to the right something to the left and the whole is held together for whereas in active life she would be netting and separating one thing from another she would be saying she liked the Waverly novels or had not read them she would be urging herself forward now she said nothing For the moment she hung suspended

Ah but how long do you think itll last said somebody It was as if she had antennae trembling out from her which intercepting certain sentences forced them upon her attention This was one of them She scented danger for her husband A question like that would lead almost certainly to something being said which reminded him of his own failure How long would he be readhe would think at once William Bankes who was entirely free from all such vanity laughed and said he attached no importance to changes in fashion Who could tell what was going to lastin literature or indeed in anything else

Let us enjoy what we do enjoy he said His integrity seemed to Mrs Ramsay quite admirable He never seemed for a moment to think But how does this affect me But then if you had the other temperament which must have praise which must have encouragement naturally you began and she knew that Mr Ramsay was beginning to be uneasy to want somebody to say Oh but your work will last Mr Ramsay or something like that He showed his uneasiness quite clearly now by saying with some irritation that anyhow Scott or was it Shakespeare would last him his lifetime He said it irritably Everybody she thought felt a little uncomfortable without knowing why Then Minta Doyle whose instinct was fine said bluffly absurdly that she did not believe that any one really enjoyed reading Shakespeare Mr Ramsay said grimly but his mind was turned away again that very few people liked it as much as they said they did But he added there is considerable merit in some of the plays nevertheless and Mrs Ramsay saw that it would be all right for the moment anyhow he would laugh at Minta and she Mrs Ramsay saw realising his extreme anxiety about himself would in her own way see that he was taken care of and praise him somehow or other But she wished it was not necessary perhaps it was her fault that it was necessary Anyhow she was free now to listen to what Paul Rayley was trying to say about books one had read as a boy They lasted he said He had read some of Tolstoi at school There was one he always remembered but he had forgotten the name Russian names were impossible said Mrs Ramsay Vronsky said Paul He remembered that because he always thought it such a good name for a villain Vronsky said Mrs Ramsay Oh ANNA KARENINA but that did not take them very far books were not in their line No Charles Tansley would put them both right in a second about books but it was all so mixed up with Am I saying the right thing Am I making a good impression that after all one knew more about him than about Tolstoi whereas what Paul said was about the thing simply not himself nothing else Like all stupid people he had a kind of modesty too a consideration for what you were feeling which once in a way at least she found attractive Now he was thinking not about himself or about Tolstoi but whether she was cold whether she felt a draught whether she would like a pear

No she said she did not want a pear Indeed she had been keeping guard over the dish of fruit without realising it jealously hoping that nobody would touch it Her eyes had been going in and out among the curves and shadows of the fruit among the rich purples of the lowland grapes then over the horny ridge of the shell putting a yellow against a purple a curved shape against a round shape without knowing why she did it or why every time she did it she felt more and more serene until oh what a pity that they should do ita hand reached out took a pear and spoilt the whole thing In sympathy she looked at Rose She looked at Rose sitting between Jasper and Prue How odd that ones child should do that

How odd to see them sitting there in a row her children Jasper Rose Prue Andrew almost silent but with some joke of their own going on she guessed from the twitching at their lips It was something quite apart from everything else something they were hoarding up to laugh over in their own room It was not about their father she hoped No she thought not What was it she wondered sadly rather for it seemed to her that they would laugh when she was not there There was all that hoarded behind those rather set still masklike faces for they did not join in easily they were like watchers surveyors a little raised or set apart from the grownup people But when she looked at Prue tonight she saw that this was not now quite true of her She was just beginning just moving just descending The faintest light was on her face as if the glow of Minta opposite some excitement some anticipation of happiness was reflected in her as if the sun of the love of men and women rose over the rim of the tablecloth and without knowing what it was she bent towards it and greeted it She kept looking at Minta shyly yet curiously so that Mrs Ramsay looked from one to the other and said speaking to Prue in her own mind You will be as happy as she is one of these days You will be much happier she added because you are my daughter she meant her own daughter must be happier than other peoples daughters But dinner was over It was time to go They were only playing with things on their plates She would wait until they had done laughing at some story her husband was telling He was having a joke with Minta about a bet Then she would get up

She liked Charles Tansley she thought suddenly she liked his laugh She liked him for being so angry with Paul and Minta She liked his awkwardness There was a lot in that young man after all And Lily she thought putting her napkin beside her plate she always has some joke of her own One need never bother about Lily She waited She tucked her napkin under the edge of her plate Well were they done now No That story had led to another story Her husband was in great spirits tonight and wishing she supposed to make it all right with old Augustus after that scene about the soup had drawn him in they were telling stories about some one they had both known at college She looked at the window in which the candle flames burnt brighter now that the panes were black and looking at that outside the voices came to her very strangely as if they were voices at a service in a cathedral for she did not listen to the words The sudden bursts of laughter and then one voice Mintas speaking alone reminded her of men and boys crying out the Latin words of a service in some Roman Catholic cathedral She waited Her husband spoke He was repeating something and she knew it was poetry from the rhythm and the ring of exultation and melancholy in his voice

Come out and climb the garden path Luriana Lurilee The China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the yellow bee

The words she was looking at the window sounded as if they were floating like flowers on water out there cut off from them all as if no one had said them but they had come into existence of themselves

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be Are full of trees and changing leaves

She did not know what they meant but like music the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice outside her self saying quite easily and naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things She knew without looking round that every one at the table was listening to the voice saying

I wonder if it seems to you Luriana Lurilee

with the same sort of relief and pleasure that she had as if this were at last the natural thing to say this were their own voice speaking

But the voice had stopped She looked round She made herself get up Augustus Carmichael had risen and holding his table napkin so that it looked like a long white robe he stood chanting

To see the Kings go riding by Over lawn and daisy lea With their palm leaves and cedar Luriana Lurilee

and as she passed him he turned slightly towards her repeating the last words

Luriana Lurilee

and bowed to her as if he did her homage Without knowing why she felt that he liked her better than he ever had done before and with a feeling of relief and gratitude she returned his bow and passed through the door which he held open for her

It was necessary now to carry everything a step further With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked and then as she moved and took Mintas arm and left the room it changed it shaped itself differently it had become she knew giving one last look at it over her shoulder already the past

18

As usual Lily thought There was always something that had to be done at that precise moment something that Mrs Ramsay had decided for reasons of her own to do instantly it might be with every one standing about making jokes as now not being able to decide whether they were going into the smokingroom into the drawingroom up to the attics Then one saw Mrs Ramsay in the midst of this hubbub standing there with Mintas arm in hers bethink her Yes it is time for that now and so make off at once with an air of secrecy to do something alone And directly she went a sort of disintegration set in they wavered about went different ways Mr Bankes took Charles Tansley by the arm and went off to finish on the terrace the discussion they had begun at dinner about politics thus giving a turn to the whole poise of the evening making the weight fall in a different direction as if Lily thought seeing them go and hearing a word or two about the policy of the Labour Party they had gone up on to the bridge of the ship and were taking their bearings the change from poetry to politics struck her like that so Mr Bankes and Charles Mrs Ramsay going upstairs in the lamplight alone Where Lily wondered was she going so quickly

Not that she did in fact run or hurry she went indeed rather slowly She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chatter and pick out one particular thing the thing that mattered to detach it separate it off clean it of all the emotions and odds and ends of things and so hold it before her and bring it to the tribunal where ranged about in conclave sat the judges she had set up to decide these things Is it good is it bad is it right or wrong Where are we all going to and so on So she righted herself after the shock of the event and quite unconsciously and incongruously used the branches of the elm trees outside to help her to stabilise her position Her world was changing they were still The event had given her a sense of movement All must be in order She must get that right and that right she thought insensibly approving of the dignity of the trees stillness and now again of the superb upward rise like the beak of a ship up a wave of the elm branches as the wind raised them For it was windy she stood a moment to look out It was windy so that the leaves now and then brushed open a star and the stars themselves seemed to be shaking and darting light and trying to flash out between the edges of the leaves Yes that was done then accomplished and as with all things done became solemn Now one thought of it cleared of chatter and emotion it seemed always to have been only was shown now and so being shown struck everything into stability They would she thought going on again however long they lived come back to this night this moon this wind this house and to her too It flattered her where she was most susceptible of flattery to think how wound about in their hearts however long they lived she would be woven and this and this and this she thought going upstairs laughing but affectionately at the sofa on the landing her mothers at the rockingchair her fathers at the map of the Hebrides All that would be revived again in the lives of Paul and Minta the Rayleysshe tried the new name over and she felt with her hand on the nursery door that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically the feeling was one of relief and happiness it was all one stream and chairs tables maps were hers were theirs it did not matter whose and Paul and Minta would carry it on when she was dead

She turned the handle firmly lest it should squeak and went in pursing her lips slightly as if to remind herself that she must not speak aloud But directly she came in she saw with annoyance that the precaution was not needed The children were not asleep It was most annoying Mildred should be more careful There was James wide awake and Cam sitting bolt upright and Mildred out of bed in her bare feet and it was almost eleven and they were all talking What was the matter It was that horrid skull again She had told Mildred to move it but Mildred of course had forgotten and now there was Cam wide awake and James wide awake quarreling when they ought to have been asleep hours ago What had possessed Edward to send them this horrid skull She had been so foolish as to let them nail it up there It was nailed fast Mildred said and Cam couldnt go to sleep with it in the room and James screamed if she touched it

Then Cam must go to sleep it had great horns said Cammust go to sleep and dream of lovely palaces said Mrs Ramsay sitting down on the bed by her side She could see the horns Cam said all over the room It was true Wherever they put the light and James could not sleep without a light there was always a shadow somewhere

But think Cam its only an old pig said Mrs Ramsay a nice black pig like the pigs at the farm But Cam thought it was a horrid thing branching at her all over the room

Well then said Mrs Ramsay we will cover it up and they all watched her go to the chest of drawers and open the little drawers quickly one after another and not seeing anything that would do she quickly took her own shawl off and wound it round the skull round and round and round and then she came back to Cam and laid her head almost flat on the pillow beside Cams and said how lovely it looked now how the fairies would love it it was like a birds nest it was like a beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing and little goats and antelopes andShe could see the words echoing as she spoke them rhythmically in Cams mind and Cam was repeating after her how it was like a mountain a birds nest a garden and there were little antelopes and her eyes were opening and shutting and Mrs Ramsay went on speaking still more monotonously and more rhythmically and more nonsensically how she must shut her eyes and go to sleep and dream of mountains and valleys and stars falling and parrots and antelopes and gardens and everything lovely she said raising her head very slowly and speaking more and more mechanically until she sat upright and saw that Cam was asleep

Now she whispered crossing over to his bed James must go to sleep too for see she said the boars skull was still there they had not touched it they had done just what he wanted it was there quite unhurt He made sure that the skull was still there under the shawl But he wanted to ask her something more Would they go to the Lighthouse tomorrow

No not tomorrow she said but soon she promised him the next fine day He was very good He lay down She covered him up But he would never forget she knew and she felt angry with Charles Tansley with her husband and with herself for she had raised his hopes Then feeling for her shawl and remembering that she had wrapped it round the boars skull she got up and pulled the window down another inch or two and heard the wind and got a breath of the perfectly indifferent chill night air and murmured good night to Mildred and left the room and let the tongue of the door slowly lengthen in the lock and went out

She hoped he would not bang his books on the floor above their heads she thought still thinking how annoying Charles Tansley was For neither of them slept well they were excitable children and since he said things like that about the Lighthouse it seemed to her likely that he would knock a pile of books over just as they were going to sleep clumsily sweeping them off the table with his elbow For she supposed that he had gone upstairs to work Yet he looked so desolate yet she would feel relieved when he went yet she would see that he was better treated tomorrow yet he was admirable with her husband yet his manners certainly wanted improving yet she liked his laughthinking this as she came downstairs she noticed that she could now see the moon itself through the staircase windowthe yellow harvest moon and turned and they saw her standing above them on the stairs

Thats my mother thought Prue Yes Minta should look at her Paul Rayley should look at her That is the thing itself she felt as if there were only one person like that in the world her mother And from having been quite grown up a moment before talking with the others she became a child again and what they had been doing was a game and would her mother sanction their game or condemn it she wondered And thinking what a chance it was for Minta and Paul and Lily to see her and feeling what an extraordinary stroke of fortune it was for her to have her and how she would never grow up and never leave home she said like a child We thought of going down to the beach to watch the waves

Instantly for no reason at all Mrs Ramsay became like a girl of twenty full of gaiety A mood of revelry suddenly took possession of her Of course they must go of course they must go she cried laughing and running down the last three or four steps quickly she began turning from one to the other and laughing and drawing Mintas wrap round her and saying she only wished she could come too and would they be very late and had any of them got a watch

Yes Paul has said Minta Paul slipped a beautiful gold watch out of a little washleather case to show her And as he held it in the palm of his hand before her he felt She knows all about it I need not say anything He was saying to her as he showed her the watch Ive done it Mrs Ramsay I owe it all to you And seeing the gold watch lying in his hand Mrs Ramsay felt How extraordinarily lucky Minta is She is marrying a man who has a gold watch in a wash leather bag

How I wish I could come with you she cried But she was withheld by something so strong that she never even thought of asking herself what it was Of course it was impossible for her to go with them But she would have liked to go had it not been for the other thing and tickled by the absurdity of her thought how lucky to marry a man with a washleather bag for his watch she went with a smile on her lips into the other room where her husband sat reading

19

Of course she said to herself coming into the room she had to come here to get something she wanted First she wanted to sit down in a particular chair under a particular lamp But she wanted something more though she did not know could not think what it was that she wanted She looked at her husband taking up her stocking and beginning to knit and saw that he did not want to be interrupted that was clear He was reading something that moved him very much He was half smiling and then she knew he was controlling his emotion He was tossing the pages over He was acting itperhaps he was thinking himself the person in the book She wondered what book it was Oh it was one of old Sir Walters she saw adjusting the shade of her lamp so that the light fell on her knitting For Charles Tansley had been saying she looked up as if she expected to hear the crash of books on the floor above had been saying that people dont read Scott any more Then her husband thought Thats what theyll say of me so he went and got one of those books And if he came to the conclusion Thats true what Charles Tansley said he would accept it about Scott She could see that he was weighing considering putting this with that as he read But not about himself He was always uneasy about himself That troubled her He would always be worrying about his own bookswill they be read are they good why arent they better what do people think of me Not liking to think of him so and wondering if they had guessed at dinner why he suddenly became irritable when they talked about fame and books lasting wondering if the children were laughing at that she twitched the stockings out and all the fine gravings came drawn with steel instruments about her lips and forehead and she grew still like a tree which has been tossing and quivering and now when the breeze falls settles leaf by leaf into quiet

It didnt matter any of it she thought A great man a great book famewho could tell She knew nothing about it But it was his way with him his truthfulnessfor instance at dinner she had been thinking quite instinctively If only he would speak She had complete trust in him And dismissing all this as one passes in diving now a weed now a straw now a bubble she felt again sinking deeper as she had felt in the hall when the others were talking There is something I wantsomething I have come to get and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was with her eyes closed And she waited a little knitting wondering and slowly rose those words they had said at dinner the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the honey bee began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically and as they washed words like little shaded lights one red one blue one yellow lit up in the dark of her mind and seemed leaving their perches up there to fly across and across or to cry out and to be echoed so she turned and felt on the table beside her for a book

And all the lives we ever lived
And all the lives to be
Are full of trees and changing leaves

she murmured sticking her needles into the stocking And she opened the book and began reading here and there at random and as she did so she felt that she was climbing backwards upwards shoving her way up under petals that curved over her so that she only knew this is white or this is red She did not know at first what the words meant at all

Steer hither steer your winged pines all beaten Mariners

she read and turned the page swinging herself zigzagging this way and that from one line to another as from one branch to another from one red and white flower to another until a little sound roused herher husband slapping his thighs Their eyes met for a second but they did not want to speak to each other They had nothing to say but something seemed nevertheless to go from him to her It was the life it was the power of it it was the tremendous humour she knew that made him slap his thighs Dont interrupt me he seemed to be saying dont say anything just sit there And he went on reading His lips twitched It filled him It fortified him He clean forgot all the little rubs and digs of the evening and how it bored him unutterably to sit still while people ate and drank interminably and his being so irritable with his wife and so touchy and minding when they passed his books over as if they didnt exist at all But now he felt it didnt matter a damn who reached Z if thought ran like an alphabet from A to Z Somebody would reach itif not he then another This mans strength and sanity his feeling for straight forward simple things these fishermen the poor old crazed creature in Mucklebackits cottage made him feel so vigorous so relieved of something that he felt roused and triumphant and could not choke back his tears Raising the book a little to hide his face he let them fall and shook his head from side to side and forgot himself completely but not one or two reflections about morality and French novels and English novels and Scotts hands being tied but his view perhaps being as true as the other view forgot his own bothers and failures completely in poor Steenies drowning and Mucklebackits sorrow that was Scott at his best and the astonishing delight and feeling of vigour that it gave him

Well let them improve upon that he thought as he finished the chapter He felt that he had been arguing with somebody and had got the better of him They could not improve upon that whatever they might say and his own position became more secure The lovers were fiddlesticks he thought collecting it all in his mind again Thats fiddlesticks thats firstrate he thought putting one thing beside another But he must read it again He could not remember the whole shape of the thing He had to keep his judgement in suspense So he returned to the other thoughtif young men did not care for this naturally they did not care for him either One ought not to complain thought Mr Ramsay trying to stifle his desire to complain to his wife that young men did not admire him But he was determined he would not bother her again Here he looked at her reading She looked very peaceful reading He liked to think that every one had taken themselves off and that he and she were alone The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman he thought returning to Scott and Balzac to the English novel and the French novel

Mrs Ramsay raised her head and like a person in a light sleep seemed to say that if he wanted her to wake she would she really would but otherwise might she go on sleeping just a little longer just a little longer She was climbing up those branches this way and that laying hands on one flower and then another

Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose

she read and so reading she was ascending she felt on to the top on to the summit How satisfying How restful All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet her mind felt swept felt clean And then there it was suddenly entire she held it in her hands beautiful and reasonable clear and complete herethe sonnet

But she was becoming conscious of her husband looking at her He was smiling at her quizzically as if he were ridiculing her gently for being asleep in broad daylight but at the same time he was thinking Go on reading You dont look sad now he thought And he wondered what she was reading and exaggerated her ignorance her simplicity for he liked to think that she was not clever not booklearned at all He wondered if she understood what she was reading Probably not he thought She was astonishingly beautiful Her beauty seemed to him if that were possible to increase

Yet seemd it winter still and you away
As with your shadow I with these did play

she finished

Well she said echoing his smile dreamily looking up from her book

As with your shadow I with these did play

she murmured putting the book on the table

What had happened she wondered as she took up her knitting since she had seen him alone She remembered dressing and seeing the moon Andrew holding his plate too high at dinner being depressed by something William had said the birds in the trees the sofa on the landing the children being awake Charles Tansley waking them with his books fallingoh no that she had invented and Paul having a wash leather case for his watch Which should she tell him about

Theyre engaged she said beginning to knit Paul and Minta

So I guessed he said There was nothing very much to be said about it Her mind was still going up and down up and down with the poetry he was still feeling very vigorous very forthright after reading about Steenies funeral So they sat silent Then she became aware that she wanted him to say something

Anything anything she thought going on with her knitting Anything will do

How nice it would be to marry a man with a washleather bag for his watch she said for that was the sort of joke they had together

He snorted He felt about this engagement as he always felt about any engagement the girl is much too good for that young man Slowly it came into her head why is it then that one wants people to marry What was the value the meaning of things Every word they said now would be true Do say something she thought wishing only to hear his voice For the shadow the thing folding them in was beginning she felt to close round her again Say anything she begged looking at him as if for help

He was silent swinging the compass on his watchchain to and fro and thinking of Scotts novels and Balzacs novels But through the crepuscular walls of their intimacy for they were drawing together involuntarily coming side by side quite close she could feel his mind like a raised hand shadowing her mind and he was beginning now that her thoughts took a turn he dislikedtowards this pessimism as he called itto fidget though he said nothing raising his hand to his forehead twisting a lock of hair letting it fall again

You wont finish that stocking tonight he said pointing to her stocking That was what she wantedthe asperity in his voice reproving her If he says its wrong to be pessimistic probably it is wrong she thought the marriage will turn out all right

No she said flattening the stocking out upon her knee I shant finish it

And what then For she felt that he was still looking at her but that his look had changed He wanted somethingwanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him wanted her to tell him that she loved him And that no she could not do He found talking so much easier than she did He could say thingsshe never could So naturally it was always he that said the things and then for some reason he would mind this suddenly and would reproach her A heartless woman he called her she never told him that she loved him But it was not soit was not so It was only that she never could say what she felt Was there no crumb on his coat Nothing she could do for him Getting up she stood at the window with the reddishbrown stocking in her hands partly to turn away from him partly because she remembered how beautiful it often isthe sea at night But she knew that he had turned his head as she turned he was watching her She knew that he was thinking You are more beautiful than ever And she felt herself very beautiful Will you not tell me just for once that you love me He was thinking that for he was roused what with Minta and his book and its being the end of the day and their having quarrelled about going to the Lighthouse But she could not do it she could not say it Then knowing that he was watching her instead of saying anything she turned holding her stocking and looked at him And as she looked at him she began to smile for though she had not said a word he knew of course he knew that she loved him He could not deny it And smiling she looked out of the window and said thinking to herself Nothing on earth can equal this happiness

Yes you were right Its going to be wet tomorrow You wont be able to go And she looked at him smiling For she had triumphed again She had not said it yet he knew

TIME PASSES

1

Well we must wait for the future to show said Mr Bankes coming in from the terrace

Its almost too dark to see said Andrew coming up from the beach

One can hardly tell which is the sea and which is the land said Prue

Do we leave that light burning said Lily as they took their coats off indoors

No said Prue not if every ones in

Andrew she called back just put out the light in the hall

One by one the lamps were all extinguished except that Mr Carmichael who liked to lie awake a little reading Virgil kept his candle burning rather longer than the rest

2

So with the lamps all put out the moon sunk and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began Nothing it seemed could survive the flood the profusion of darkness which creeping in at keyholes and crevices stole round window blinds came into bedrooms swallowed up here a jug and basin there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers Not only was furniture confounded there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say This is he or This is she Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something or somebody groaned or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness

Nothing stirred in the drawingroom or in the diningroom or on the staircase Only through the rusty hinges and swollen seamoistened woodwork certain airs detached from the body of the wind the house was ramshackle after all crept round corners and ventured indoors Almost one might imagine them as they entered the drawingroom questioning and wondering toying with the flap of hanging wallpaper asking would it hang much longer when would it fall Then smoothly brushing the walls they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wallpaper whether they would fade and questioning gently for there was time at their disposal the torn letters in the wastepaper basket the flowers the books all of which were now open to them and asking Were they allies Were they enemies How long would they endure

So some random light directing them with its pale footfall upon stair and mat from some uncovered star or wandering ship or the Lighthouse even with its pale footfall upon stair and mat the little airs mounted the staircase and nosed round bedroom doors But here surely they must cease Whatever else may perish and disappear what lies here is steadfast Here one might say to those sliding lights those fumbling airs that breathe and bend over the bed itself here you can neither touch nor destroy Upon which wearily ghostlily as if they had featherlight fingers and the light persistency of feathers they would look once on the shut eyes and the loosely clasping fingers and fold their garments wearily and disappear And so nosing rubbing they went to the window on the staircase to the servants bedrooms to the boxes in the attics descending blanched the apples on the diningroom table fumbled the petals of roses tried the picture on the easel brushed the mat and blew a little sand along the floor At length desisting all ceased together gathered together all sighed together all together gave off an aimless gust of lamentation to which some door in the kitchen replied swung wide admitted nothing and slammed to

Here Mr Carmichael who was reading Virgil blew out his candle It was past midnight

3

But what after all is one night A short space especially when the darkness dims so soon and so soon a bird sings a cock crows or a faint green quickens like a turning leaf in the hollow of the wave Night however succeeds to night The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally evenly with indefatigable fingers They lengthen they darken Some of them hold aloft clear planets plates of brightness The autumn trees ravaged as they are take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight in the light of harvest moons the light which mellows the energy of labour and smooths the stubble and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore

It seemed now as if touched by human penitence and all its toil divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it single distinct the hare erect the wave falling the boat rocking which did we deserve them should be ours always But alas divine goodness twitching the cord draws the curtain it does not please him he covers his treasures in a drench of hail and so breaks them so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth For our penitence deserves a glimpse only our toil respite only

The nights now are full of wind and destruction the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts a sharer of his solitude throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul The hand dwindles in his hand the voice bellows in his ear Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what and why and wherefore which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer

Mr Ramsay stumbling along a passage one dark morning stretched his arms out but Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before his arms though stretched out remained empty

4

So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled round those stray airs advance guards of great armies blustered in brushed bare boards nibbled and fanned met nothing in bedroom or drawingroom that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped wood that creaked the bare legs of tables saucepans and china already furred tarnished cracked What people had shed and lefta pair of shoes a shooting cap some faded skirts and coats in wardrobesthose alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons how once the lookingglass had held a face had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned a hand flashed the door opened in came children rushing and tumbling and went out again Now day after day light turned like a flower reflected in water its sharp image on the wall opposite Only the shadows of the trees flourishing in the wind made obeisance on the wall and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself or birds flying made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor

So loveliness reigned and stillness and together made the shape of loveliness itself a form from which life had parted solitary like a pool at evening far distant seen from a train window vanishing so quickly that the pool pale in the evening is scarcely robbed of its solitude though once seen Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs rubbing snuffling iterating and reiterating their questionsWill you fade Will you perishscarcely disturbed the peace the indifference the air of pure integrity as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer we remain

Nothing it seemed could break that image corrupt that innocence or disturb the swaying mantle of silence which week after week in the empty room wove into itself the falling cries of birds ships hooting the drone and hum of the fields a dogs bark a mans shout and folded them round the house in silence Once only a board sprang on the landing once in the middle of the night with a roar with a rupture as after centuries of quiescence a rock rends itself from the mountain and hurtles crashing into the valley one fold of the shawl loosened and swung to and fro Then again peace descended and the shadow wavered light bent to its own image in adoration on the bedroom wall and Mrs McNab tearing the veil of silence with hands that had stood in the washtub grinding it with boots that had crunched the shingle came as directed to open all windows and dust the bedrooms

5

As she lurched for she rolled like a ship at sea and leered for her eyes fell on nothing directly but with a sidelong glance that deprecated the scorn and anger of the worldshe was witless she knew it as she clutched the banisters and hauled herself upstairs and rolled from room to room she sang Rubbing the glass of the long lookingglass and leering sideways at her swinging figure a sound issued from her lipssomething that had been gay twenty years before on the stage perhaps had been hummed and danced to but now coming from the toothless bonneted caretaking woman was robbed of meaning was like the voice of witlessness humour persistency itself trodden down but springing up again so that as she lurched dusting wiping she seemed to say how it was one long sorrow and trouble how it was getting up and going to bed again and bringing things out and putting them away again It was not easy or snug this world she had known for close on seventy years Bowed down she was with weariness How long she asked creaking and groaning on her knees under the bed dusting the boards how long shall it endure but hobbled to her feet again pulled herself up and again with her sidelong leer which slipped and turned aside even from her own face and her own sorrows stood and gaped in the glass aimlessly smiling and began again the old amble and hobble taking up mats putting down china looking sideways in the glass as if after all she had her consolations as if indeed there twined about her dirge some incorrigible hope Visions of joy there must have been at the wash tub say with her children yet two had been baseborn and one had deserted her at the publichouse drinking turning over scraps in her drawers Some cleavage of the dark there must have been some channel in the depths of obscurity through which light enough issued to twist her face grinning in the glass and make her turning to her job again mumble out the old music hall song The mystic the visionary walking the beach on a fine night stirring a puddle looking at a stone asking themselves What am I What is this had suddenly an answer vouchsafed them they could not say what it was so that they were warm in the frost and had comfort in the desert But Mrs McNab continued to drink and gossip as before

6

The Spring without a leaf to toss bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity scornful in her purity was laid out on fields wide eyed and watchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought by the beholders Prue Ramsay leaning on her fathers arm was given in marriage What people said could have been more fitting And they added how beautiful she looked

As summer neared as the evenings lengthened there came to the wakeful the hopeful walking the beach stirring the pool imaginations of the strangest kindof flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind of stars flashing in their hearts of cliff sea cloud and sky brought purposely together to assemble outwardly the scattered parts of the vision within In those mirrors the minds of men in those pools of uneasy water in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form dreams persisted and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull flower tree man and woman and the white earth itself seemed to declare but if questioned at once to withdraw that good triumphs happiness prevails order rules or to resist the extraordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search of some absolute good some crystal of intensity remote from the known pleasures and familiar virtues something alien to the processes of domestic life single hard bright like a diamond in the sand which would render the possessor secure Moreover softened and acquiescent the spring with her bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloak about her veiled her eyes averted her head and among passing shadows and flights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her a knowledge of the sorrows of mankind

Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth which was indeed a tragedy people said everything they said had promised so well

And now in the heat of summer the wind sent its spies about the house again Flies wove a web in the sunny rooms weeds that had grown close to the glass in the night tapped methodically at the window pane When darkness fell the stroke of the Lighthouse which had laid itself with such authority upon the carpet in the darkness tracing its pattern came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding gently as if it laid its caress and lingered steathily and looked and came lovingly again But in the very lull of this loving caress as the long stroke leant upon the bed the rock was rent asunder another fold of the shawl loosened there it hung and swayed Through the short summer nights and the long summer days when the empty rooms seemed to murmur with the echoes of the fields and the hum of flies the long streamer waved gently swayed aimlessly while the sun so striped and barred the rooms and filled them with yellow haze that Mrs McNab when she broke in and lurched about dusting sweeping looked like a tropical fish oaring its way through sunlanced waters

But slumber and sleep though it might there came later in the summer ominous sounds like the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt which with their repeated shocks still further loosened the shawl and cracked the teacups Now and again some glass tinkled in the cupboard as if a giant voice had shrieked so loud in its agony that tumblers stood inside a cupboard vibrated too Then again silence fell and then night after night and sometimes in plain midday when the roses were bright and light turned on the wall its shape clearly there seemed to drop into this silence this indifference this integrity the thud of something falling

A shell exploded Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France among them Andrew Ramsay whose death mercifully was instantaneous

At that season those who had gone down to pace the beach and ask of the sea and sky what message they reported or what vision they affirmed had to consider among the usual tokens of divine bountythe sunset on the sea the pallor of dawn the moon rising fishingboats against the moon and children making mud pies or pelting each other with handfuls of grass something out of harmony with this jocundity and this serenity There was the silent apparition of an ashencoloured ship for instance come gone there was a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled invisibly beneath This intrusion into a scene calculated to stir the most sublime reflections and lead to the most comfortable conclusions stayed their pacing It was difficult blandly to overlook them to abolish their significance in the landscape to continue as one walked by the sea to marvel how beauty outside mirrored beauty within

Did Nature supplement what man advanced Did she complete what he began With equal complacence she saw his misery his meanness and his torture That dream of sharing completing of finding in solitude on the beach an answer was then but a reflection in a mirror and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in quiescence when the nobler powers sleep beneath Impatient despairing yet loth to go for beauty offers her lures has her consolations to pace the beach was impossible contemplation was unendurable the mirror was broken

Mr Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring which had an unexpected success The war people said had revived their interest in poetry

7

Night after night summer and winter the torment of storms the arrow like stillness of fine had there been any one to listen from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason and mounted one on top of another and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight for night and day month and year ran shapelessly together in idiot games until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself

In spring the garden urns casually filled with windblown plants were gay as ever Violets came and daffodils But the stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night with the trees standing there and the flowers standing there looking before them looking up yet beholding nothing eyeless and so terrible

8

Thinking no harm for the family would not come never again some said and the house would be sold at Michaelmas perhaps Mrs McNab stooped and picked a bunch of flowers to take home with her She laid them on the table while she dusted She was fond of flowers It was a pity to let them waste Suppose the house were sold she stood arms akimbo in front of the lookingglass it would want seeing toit would There it had stood all these years without a soul in it The books and things were mouldy for what with the war and help being hard to get the house had not been cleaned as she could have wished It was beyond one persons strength to get it straight now She was too old Her legs pained her All those books needed to be laid out on the grass in the sun there was plaster fallen in the hall the rainpipe had blocked over the study window and let the water in the carpet was ruined quite But people should come themselves they should have sent somebody down to see For there were clothes in the cupboards they had left clothes in all the bedrooms What was she to do with them They had the moth in themMrs Ramsays things Poor lady She would never want THEM again She was dead they said years ago in London There was the old grey cloak she wore gardening Mrs McNab fingered it She could see her as she came up the drive with the washing stooping over her flowers the garden was a pitiful sight now all run to riot and rabbits scuttling at you out of the bedsshe could see her with one of the children by her in that grey cloak There were boots and shoes and a brush and comb left on the dressingtable for all the world as if she expected to come back tomorrow She had died very sudden at the end they said And once they had been coming but had put off coming what with the war and travel being so difficult these days they had never come all these years just sent her money but never wrote never came and expected to find things as they had left them ah dear Why the dressingtable drawers were full of things she pulled them open handkerchiefs bits of ribbon Yes she could see Mrs Ramsay as she came up the drive with the washing

Goodevening Mrs McNab she would say

She had a pleasant way with her The girls all liked her But dear many things had changed since then she shut the drawer many families had lost their dearest So she was dead and Mr Andrew killed and Miss Prue dead too they said with her first baby but everyone had lost some one these years Prices had gone up shamefully and didnt come down again neither She could well remember her in her grey cloak

Goodevening Mrs McNab she said and told cook to keep a plate of milk soup for herquite thought she wanted it carrying that heavy basket all the way up from town She could see her now stooping over her flowers and faint and flickering like a yellow beam or the circle at the end of a telescope a lady in a grey cloak stooping over her flowers went wandering over the bedroom wall up the dressingtable across the washstand as Mrs McNab hobbled and ambled dusting straightening And cooks name now Mildred Mariansome name like that Ah she had forgottenshe did forget things Fiery like all redhaired women Many a laugh they had had She was always welcome in the kitchen She made them laugh she did Things were better then than now

She sighed there was too much work for one woman She wagged her head this side and that This had been the nursery Why it was all damp in here the plaster was falling Whatever did they want to hang a beasts skull there gone mouldy too And rats in all the attics The rain came in But they never sent never came Some of the locks had gone so the doors banged She didnt like to be up here at dusk alone neither It was too much for one woman too much too much She creaked she moaned She banged the door She turned the key in the lock and left the house alone shut up locked

9

The house was left the house was deserted It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it The long night seemed to have set in the trifling airs nibbling the clammy breaths fumbling seemed to have triumphed The saucepan had rusted and the mat decayed Toads had nosed their way in Idly aimlessly the swaying shawl swung to and fro A thistle thrust itself between the tiles in the larder The swallows nested in the drawing roon the floor was strewn with straw the plaster fell in shovelfuls rafters were laid bare rats carried off this and that to gnaw behind the wainscots Tortoiseshell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the windowpane Poppies sowed themselves among the dahlias the lawn waved with long grass giant artichokes towered among roses a fringed carnation flowered among the cabbages while the gentle tapping of a weed at the window had become on winters nights a drumming from sturdy trees and thorned briars which made the whole room green in summer

What power could now prevent the fertility the insensibility of nature Mrs McNabs dream of a lady of a child of a plate of milk soup It had wavered over the walls like a spot of sunlight and vanished She had locked the door she had gone It was beyond the strength of one woman she said They never sent They never wrote There were things up there rotting in the drawersit was a shame to leave them so she said The place was gone to rack and ruin Only the Lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow the rat and the straw Nothing now withstood them nothing said no to them Let the wind blow let the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the cabbage Let the swallow build in the drawingroom and the thistle thrust aside the tiles and the butterfly sun itself on the faded chintz of the armchairs Let the broken glass and the china lie out on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries

For now had come that moment that hesitation when dawn trembles and night pauses when if a feather alight in the scale it will be weighed down One feather and the house sinking falling would have turned and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness In the ruined room picnickers would have lit their kettles lovers sought shelter there lying on the bare boards and the shepherd stored his dinner on the bricks and the tramp slept with his coat round him to ward off the cold Then the roof would have fallen briars and hemlocks would have blotted out path step and window would have grown unequally but lustily over the mound until some trespasser losing his way could have told only by a redhot poker among the nettles or a scrap of china in the hemlock that here once some one had lived there had been a house

If the feather had fallen if it had tipped the scale downwards the whole house would have plunged to the depths to lie upon the sands of oblivion But there was a force working something not highly conscious something that leered something that lurched something not inspired to go about its work with dignified ritual or solemn chanting Mrs McNab groaned Mrs Bast creaked They were old they were stiff their legs ached They came with their brooms and pails at last they got to work All of a sudden would Mrs McNab see that the house was ready one of the young ladies wrote would she get this done would she get that done all in a hurry They might be coming for the summer had left everything to the last expected to find things as they had left them Slowly and painfully with broom and pail mopping scouring Mrs McNab Mrs Bast stayed the corruption and the rot rescued from the pool of Time that was fast closing over them now a basin now a cupboard fetched up from oblivion all the Waverley novels and a teaset one morning in the afternoon restored to sun and air a brass fender and a set of steel fireirons George Mrs Basts son caught the rats and cut the grass They had the builders Attended with the creaking of hinges and the screeching of bolts the slamming and banging of dampswollen woodwork some rusty laborious birth seemed to be taking place as the women stooping rising groaning singing slapped and slammed upstairs now now down in the cellars Oh they said the work

They drank their tea in the bedroom sometimes or in the study breaking off work at midday with the smudge on their faces and their old hands clasped and cramped with the broom handles Flopped on chairs they contemplated now the magnificent conquest over taps and bath now the more arduous more partial triumph over long rows of books black as ravens once now whitestained breeding pale mushrooms and secreting furtive spiders Once more as she felt the tea warm in her the telescope fitted itself to Mrs McNabs eyes and in a ring of light she saw the old gentleman lean as a rake wagging his head as she came up with the washing talking to himself she supposed on the lawn He never noticed her Some said he was dead some said she was dead Which was it Mrs Bast didnt know for certain either The young gentleman was dead That she was sure She had read his name in the papers

There was the cook now Mildred Marian some such name as thata red headed woman quicktempered like all her sort but kind too if you knew the way with her Many a laugh they had had together She saved a plate of soup for Maggie a bite of ham sometimes whatever was over They lived well in those days They had everything they wanted glibly jovially with the tea hot in her she unwound her ball of memories sitting in the wicker armchair by the nursery fender There was always plenty doing people in the house twenty staying sometimes and washing up till long past midnight

Mrs Bast she had never known them had lived in Glasgow at that time wondered putting her cup down whatever they hung that beasts skull there for Shot in foreign parts no doubt

It might well be said Mrs McNab wantoning on with her memories they had friends in eastern countries gentlemen staying there ladies in evening dress she had seen them once through the diningroom door all sitting at dinner Twenty she dared say all in their jewellery and she asked to stay help wash up might be till after midnight

Ah said Mrs Bast theyd find it changed She leant out of the window She watched her son George scything the grass They might well ask what had been done to it seeing how old Kennedy was supposed to have charge of it and then his leg got so bad after he fell from the cart and perhaps then no one for a year or the better part of one and then Davie Macdonald and seeds might be sent but who should say if they were ever planted Theyd find it changed

She watched her son scything He was a great one for workone of those quiet ones Well they must be getting along with the cupboards she supposed They hauled themselves up

At last after days of labour within of cutting and digging without dusters were flicked from the windows the windows were shut to keys were turned all over the house the front door was banged it was finished

And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that halfheard melody that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall a bark a bleat irregular intermittent yet somehow related the hum of an insect the tremor of cut grass disevered yet somehow belonging the jar of a dorbeetle the squeak of a wheel loud low but mysteriously related which the ear strains to bring together and is always on the verge of harmonising but they are never quite heard never fully harmonised and at last in the evening one after another the sounds die out and the harmony falters and silence falls With the sunset sharpness was lost and like mist rising quiet rose quiet spread the wind settled loosely the world shook itself down to sleep darkly here without a light to it save what came green suffused through leaves or pale on the white flowers in the bed by the window

Lily Briscoe had her bag carried up to the house late one evening in September Mr Carmichael came by the same train

10

Then indeed peace had come Messages of peace breathed from the sea to the shore Never to break its sleep any more to lull it rather more deeply to rest and whatever the dreamers dreamt holily dreamt wisely to confirmwhat else was it murmuringas Lily Briscoe laid her head on the pillow in the clean still room and heard the sea Through the open window the voice of the beauty of the world came murmuring too softly to hear exactly what it saidbut what mattered if the meaning were plain entreating the sleepers the house was full again Mrs Beckwith was staying there also Mr Carmichael if they would not actually come down to the beach itself at least to lift the blind and look out They would see then night flowing down in purple his head crowned his sceptre jewelled and how in his eyes a child might look And if they still faltered Lily was tired out with travelling and slept almost at once but Mr Carmichael read a book by candlelight if they still said no that it was vapour this splendour of his and the dew had more power than he and they preferred sleeping gently then without complaint or argument the voice would sing its song Gently the waves would break Lily heard them in her sleep tenderly the light fell it seemed to come through her eyelids And it all looked Mr Carmichael thought shutting his book falling asleep much as it used to look

Indeed the voice might resume as the curtains of dark wrapped themselves over the house over Mrs Beckwith Mr Carmichael and Lily Briscoe so that they lay with several folds of blackness on their eyes why not accept this be content with this acquiesce and resign The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them the night wrapped them nothing broke their sleep until the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness a cart grinding a dog somewhere barking the sun lifted the curtains broke the veil on their eyes and Lily Briscoe stirring in her sleep She clutched at her blankets as a faller clutches at the turf on the edge of a cliff Her eyes opened wide Here she was again she thought sitting bold upright in bed Awake

THE LIGHTHOUSE

1

What does it mean then what can it all mean Lily Briscoe asked herself wondering whether since she had been left alone it behoved her to go to the kitchen to fetch another cup of coffee or wait here What does it meana catchword that was caught up from some book fitting her thought loosely for she could not this first morning with the Ramsays contract her feelings could only make a phrase resound to cover the blankness of her mind until these vapours had shrunk For really what did she feel come back after all these years and Mrs Ramsay dead Nothing nothingnothing that she could express at all

She had come late last night when it was all mysterious dark Now she was awake at her old place at the breakfast table but alone It was very early too not yet eight There was this expeditionthey were going to the Lighthouse Mr Ramsay Cam and James They should have gone alreadythey had to catch the tide or something And Cam was not ready and James was not ready and Nancy had forgotten to order the sandwiches and Mr Ramsay had lost his temper and banged out of the room

Whats the use of going now he had stormed

Nancy had vanished There he was marching up and down the terrace in a rage One seemed to hear doors slamming and voices calling all over the house Now Nancy burst in and asked looking round the room in a queer half dazed half desperate way What does one send to the Lighthouse as if she were forcing herself to do what she despaired of ever being able to do

What does one send to the Lighthouse indeed At any other time Lily could have suggested reasonably tea tobacco newspapers But this morning everything seemed so extraordinarily queer that a question like NancysWhat does one send to the Lighthouseopened doors in ones mind that went banging and swinging to and fro and made one keep asking in a stupefied gape What does one send What does one do Why is one sitting here after all

Sitting alone for Nancy went out again among the clean cups at the long table she felt cut off from other people and able only to go on watching asking wondering The house the place the morning all seemed strangers to her She had no attachment here she felt no relations with it anything might happen and whatever did happen a step outside a voice calling Its not in the cupboard its on the landing some one cried was a question as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut and they floated up here down there off anyhow How aimless it was how chaotic how unreal it was she thought looking at her empty coffee cup Mrs Ramsay dead Andrew killed Prue dead toorepeat it as she might it roused no feeling in her And we all get together in a house like this on a morning like this she said looking out of the window It was a beautiful still day

2

Suddenly Mr Ramsay raised his head as he passed and looked straight at her with his distraught wild gaze which was yet so penetrating as if he saw you for one second for the first time for ever and she pretended to drink out of her empty coffee cup so as to escape himto escape his demand on her to put aside a moment longer that imperious need And he shook his head at her and strode on Alone she heard him say Perished she heard him say and like everything else this strange morning the words became symbols wrote themselves all over the greygreen walls If only she could put them together she felt write them out in some sentence then she would have got at the truth of things Old Mr Carmichael came padding softly in fetched his coffee took his cup and made off to sit in the sun The extraordinary unreality was frightening but it was also exciting Going to the Lighthouse But what does one send to the Lighthouse Perished Alone The greygreen light on the wall opposite The empty places Such were some of the parts, but how bring them together she asked As if any interruption would break the frail shape she was building on the table she turned her back to the window lest Mr Ramsay should see her She must escape somewhere be alone somewhere Suddenly she remembered When she had sat there last ten years ago there had been a little sprig or leaf pattern on the tablecloth which she had looked at in a moment of revelation There had been a problem about a foreground of a picture Move the tree to the middle she had said She had never finished that picture She would paint that picture now It had been knocking about in her mind all these years Where were her paints she wondered Her paints yes She had left them in the hall last night She would start at once She got up quickly before Mr Ramsay turned

She fetched herself a chair She pitched her easel with her precise oldmaidish movements on the edge of the lawn not too close to Mr Carmichael but close enough for his protection Yes it must have been precisely here that she had stood ten years ago There was the wall the hedge the tree The question was of some relation between those masses She had borne it in her mind all these years It seemed as if the solution had come to her she knew now what she wanted to do

But with Mr Ramsay bearing down on her she could do nothing Every time he approachedhe was walking up and down the terraceruin approached chaos approached She could not paint She stooped she turned she took up this rag she squeezed that tube But all she did was to ward him off a moment He made it impossible for her to do anything For if she gave him the least chance if he saw her disengaged a moment looking his way a moment he would be on her saying as he had said last night You find us much changed Last night he had got up and stopped before her and said that Dumb and staring though they had all sat the six children whom they used to call after the Kings and Queens of Englandthe Red the Fair the Wicked the Ruthlessshe felt how they raged under it Kind old Mrs Beckwith said something sensible But it was a house full of unrelated passionsshe had felt that all the evening And on top of this chaos Mr Ramsay got up pressed her hand and said You will find us much changed and none of them had moved or had spoken but had sat there as if they were forced to let him say it Only James certainly the Sullen scowled at the lamp and Cam screwed her handkerchief round her finger Then he reminded them that they were going to the Lighthouse tomorrow They must be ready in the hall on the stroke of halfpast seven Then with his hand on the door he stopped he turned upon them Did they not want to go he demanded Had they dared say No he had some reason for wanting it he would have flung himself tragically backwards into the bitter waters of depair Such a gift he had for gesture He looked like a king in exile Doggedly James said yes Cam stumbled more wretchedly Yes oh yes theyd both be ready they said And it struck her this was tragedynot palls dust and the shroud but children coerced their spirits subdued James was sixteen Cam seventeen perhaps She had looked round for some one who was not there for Mrs Ramsay presumably But there was only kind Mrs Beckwith turning over her sketches under the lamp Then being tired her mind still rising and falling with the sea the taste and smell that places have after long absence possessing her the candles wavering in her eyes she had lost herself and gone under It was a wonderful night starlit the waves sounded as they went upstairs the moon surprised them enormous pale as they passed the staircase window She had slept at once

She set her clean canvas firmly upon the easel as a barrier frail but she hoped sufficiently substantial to ward off Mr Ramsay and his exactingness She did her best to look when his back was turned at her picture that line there that mass there But it was out of the question Let him be fifty feet away let him not even speak to you let him not even see you he permeated he prevailed he imposed himself He changed everything She could not see the colour she could not see the lines even with his back turned to her she could only think But hell be down on me in a moment demandingsomething she felt she could not give him She rejected one brush she chose another When would those children come When would they all be off she fidgeted That man she thought her anger rising in her never gave that man took She on the other hand would be forced to give Mrs Ramsay had given Giving giving giving she had diedand had left all this Really she was angry with Mrs Ramsay With the brush slightly trembling in her fingers she looked at the hedge the step the wall It was all Mrs Ramsays doing She was dead Here was Lily at fortyfour wasting her time unable to do a thing standing there playing at painting playing at the one thing one did not play at and it was all Mrs Ramsays fault She was dead The step where she used to sit was empty She was dead

But why repeat this over and over again Why be always trying to bring up some feeling she had not got There was a kind of blasphemy in it It was all dry all withered all spent They ought not to have asked her she ought not to have come One cant waste ones time at forty four she thought She hated playing at painting A brush the one dependable thing in a world of strife ruin chaosthat one should not play with knowingly even she detested it But he made her You shant touch your canvas he seemed to say bearing down on her till youve given me what I want of you Here he was close upon her again greedy distraught Well thought Lily in despair letting her right hand fall at her side it would be simpler then to have it over Surely she could imitate from recollection the glow the rhapsody the selfsurrender she had seen on so many womens faces on Mrs Ramsays for instance when on some occasion like this they blazed upshe could remember the look on Mrs Ramsays faceinto a rapture of sympathy of delight in the reward they had which though the reason of it escaped her evidently conferred on them the most supreme bliss of which human nature was capable Here he was stopped by her side She would give him what she could

3

She seemed to have shrivelled slightly he thought She looked a little skimpy wispy but not unattractive He liked her There had been some talk of her marrying William Bankes once but nothing had come of it His wife had been fond of her He had been a little out of temper too at breakfast And then and thenthis was one of those moments when an enormous need urged him without being conscious what it was to approach any woman to force them he did not care how his need was so great to give him what he wanted sympathy

Was anybody looking after her he said Had she everything she wanted

Oh thanks everything said Lily Briscoe nervously No she could not do it She ought to have floated off instantly upon some wave of sympathetic expansion the pressure on her was tremendous But she remained stuck There was an awful pause They both looked at the sea Why thought Mr Ramsay should she look at the sea when I am here She hoped it would be calm enough for them to land at the Lighthouse she said The Lighthouse The Lighthouse Whats that got to do with it he thought impatiently Instantly with the force of some primeval gust for really he could not restrain himself any longer there issued from him such a groan that any other woman in the whole world would have done something said somethingall except myself thought Lily girding at herself bitterly who am not a woman but a peevish illtempered driedup old maid presumably

Mr Ramsay sighed to the full He waited Was she not going to say anything Did she not see what he wanted from her Then he said he had a particular reason for wanting to go to the Lighthouse His wife used to send the men things There was a poor boy with a tuberculous hip the lightkeepers son He sighed profoundly He sighed significantly All Lily wished was that this enormous flood of grief this insatiable hunger for sympathy this demand that she should surrender herself up to him entirely and even so he had sorrows enough to keep her supplied for ever should leave her should be diverted she kept looking at the house hoping for an interruption before it swept her down in its flow

Such expeditions said Mr Ramsay scraping the ground with his toe are very painful Still Lily said nothing She is a stock she is a stone he said to himself They are very exhausting he said looking with a sickly look that nauseated her he was acting she felt this great man was dramatising himself at his beautiful hands It was horrible it was indecent Would they never come she asked for she could not sustain this enormous weight of sorrow support these heavy draperies of grief he had assumed a pose of extreme decreptitude he even tottered a little as he stood there a moment longer

Still she could say nothing the whole horizon seemed swept bare of objects to talk about could only feel amazedly as Mr Ramsay stood there how his gaze seemed to fall dolefully over the sunny grass and discolour it and cast over the rubicund drowsy entirely contented figure of Mr Carmichael reading a French novel on a deckchair a veil of crape as if such an existence flaunting its prosperity in a world of woe were enough to provoke the most dismal thoughts of all Look at him he seemed to be saying look at me and indeed all the time he was feeling Think of me think of me Ah could that bulk only be wafted alongside of them Lily wished had she only pitched her easel a yard or two closer to him a man any man would staunch this effusion would stop these lamentations A woman she had provoked this horror a woman she should have known how to deal with it It was immensely to her discredit sexually to stand there dumb One saidwhat did one sayOh Mr Ramsay Dear Mr Ramsay That was what that kind old lady who sketched Mrs Beckwith would have said instantly and rightly But no They stood there isolated from the rest of the world His immense selfpity his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at ther feet and all she did miserable sinner that she was was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles lest she should get wet In complete silence she stood there grasping her paint brush

Heaven could never be sufficiently praised She heard sounds in the house James and Cam must be coming But Mr Ramsay as if he knew that his time ran short exerted upon her solitary figure the immense pressure of his concentrated woe his age his frailty his desolation when suddenly tossing his head impatiently in his annoyancefor after all what woman could resist himhe noticed that his bootlaces were untied Remarkable boots they were too Lily thought looking down at them sculptured colossal like everything that Mr Ramsay wore from his frayed tie to his halfbuttoned waistcoat his own indisputably She could see them walking to his room of their own accord expressive in his absence of pathos surliness illtemper charm

What beautiful boots she exclaimed She was ashamed of herself To praise his boots when he asked her to solace his soul when he had shown her his bleeding hands his lacerated heart and asked her to pity them then to say cheerfully Ah but what beautiful boots you wear deserved she knew and she looked up expecting to get it in one of his sudden roars of illtemper complete annihilation

Instead Mr Ramsay smiled His pall his draperies his infirmities fell from him Ah yes he said holding his foot up for her to look at they were firstrate boots There was only one man in England who could make boots like that Boots are among the chief curses of mankind he said Bootmakers make it their business he exclaimed to cripple and torture the human foot They are also the most obstinate and perverse of mankind It had taken him the best part of his youth to get boots made as they should be made He would have her 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 playactor 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 wereCam 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 parcelsthere 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 fathers 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 supposedabout 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 itnot 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 ones range An extraordinary face The gate banged

4

So theyre 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 thereit 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 Ramsays 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 was 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 beginthat 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 ita 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 hersthis other thing this truth this reality which suddenly laid hands on her emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention She was half unwilling half 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 lampshade 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 couldnt paint saying she couldnt 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

Cant paint cant 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 cant paint cant 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 arma 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 shortsighted 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 somethingthis scene on the beach for example this moment of friendship and likingwhich survived after all these years complete so that she dipped into it to refashion 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 drawingroom 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 alla 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 were little daily miracles illuminations matches 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 permanentthis 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

5

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 Macalisters 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 Macalisters 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 compactto 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 things to himself and waiting impatiently for a breeze And they hoped it would be calm They hoped he would be thwarted They hoped the whole expedition would fail and they would have to put back with their parcels to the beach

But now when Macalisters boy had rowed a little way out the sails slowly swung round the boat quickened itself flattened itself and shot off Instantly as if some great strain had been relieved Mr Ramsay uncurled his legs took out his tobacco pouch handed it with a little grunt to Macalister and felt they knew for all they suffered perfectly content Now they would sail on for hours like this and Mr Ramsay would ask old Macalister a questionabout the great storm last winter probablyand old Macalister would answer it and they would puff their pipes together and Macalister would take a tarry rope in his fingers tying or untying some knot and the boy would fish and never say a word to any one James would be forced to keep his eye all the time on the sail For if he forgot then the sail puckered and shivered and the boat slackened and Mr Ramsay would say sharply Look out Look out and old Macalister would turn slowly on his seat So they heard Mr Ramsay asking some question about the great storm at Christmas She comes driving round the point old Macalister said describing the great storm last Christmas when ten ships had been driven into the bay for shelter and he had seen one there one there one there he pointed slowly round the bay Mr Ramsay followed him turning his head He had seen four men clinging to the mast Then she was gone And at last we shoved her off he went on but in their anger and their silence they only caught a word here and there sitting at opposite ends of the boat united by their compact to fight tyranny to the death At last they had shoved her off they had launched the lifeboat and they had got her out past the pointMacalister told the story and though they only caught a word here and there they were conscious all the time of their fatherhow he leant forward how he brought his voice into tune with Macalisters voice how puffing at his pipe and looking there and there where Macalister pointed he relished the thought of the storm and the dark night and the fishermen striving there He liked that men should labour and sweat on the windy beach at night pitting muscle and brain against the waves and the wind he liked men to work like that and women to keep house and sit beside sleeping children indoors while men were drowned out there in a storm So James could tell so Cam could tell they looked at him they looked at each other from his toss and his vigilance and the ring in his voice and the little tinge of Scottish accent which came into his voice making him seem like a peasant himself as he questioned Macalister about the eleven ships that had been driven into the bay in a storm Three had sunk

He looked proudly where Macalister pointed and Cam thought feeling proud of him without knowing quite why had he been there he would have launched the lifeboat he would have reached the wreck Cam thought He was so brave he was so adventurous Cam thought But she remembered There was the compact to resist tyranny to the death Their grievance weighed them down They had been forced they had been bidden He had borne them down once more with his gloom and his authority making them do his bidding on this fine morning come because he wished it carrying these parcels to the Lighthouse take part in these rites he went through for his own pleasure in memory of dead people which they hated so that they lagged after him all the pleasure of the day was spoilt

Yes the breeze was freshening The boat was leaning the water was sliced sharply and fell away in green cascades in bubbles in cataracts Cam looked down into the foam into the sea with all its treasure in it and its speed hypnotised her and the tie between her and James sagged a little It slackened a little She began to think How fast it goes Where are we going and the movement hypnotised her while James with his eye fixed on the sail and on the horizon steered grimly But he began to think as he steered that he might escape he might be quit of it all They might land somewhere and be free then Both of them looking at each other for a moment had a sense of escape and exaltation what with the speed and the change But the breeze bred in Mr Ramsay too the same excitement and as old Macalister turned to fling his line overboard he cried out aloud

We perished and then again each alone And then with his usual spasm of repentance or shyness pulled himself up and waved his hand towards the shore

See the little house he said pointing wishing Cam to look She raised herself reluctantly and looked But which was it She could no longer make out there on the hillside which was their house All looked distant and peaceful and strange The shore seemed refined far away unreal Already the little distance they had sailed had put them far from it and given it the changed look the composed look of something receding in which one has no longer any part Which was their house She could not see it

But I beneath a rougher sea Mr Ramsay murmured He had found the house and so seeing it he had also seen himself there he had seen himself walking on the terrace alone He was walking up and down between the urns and he seemed to himself very old and bowed Sitting in the boat he bowed he crouched himself acting instantly his part the part of a desolate man widowed bereft and so called up before him in hosts people sympathising with him staged for himself as he sat in the boat a little drama which required of him decrepitude and exhaustion and sorrow he raised his hands and looked at the thinness of them to confirm his dream and then there was given him in abundance womens sympathy and he imagined how they would soothe him and sympathise with him and so getting in his dream some reflection of the exquisite pleasure womens sympathy was to him he sighed and said gently and mournfully

But I beneath a rougher sea
Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he

so that the mournful words were heard quite clearly by them all Cam half started on her seat It shocked herit outraged her The movement roused her father and he shuddered and broke off exclaiming Look Look so urgently that James also turned his head to look over his shoulder at the island They all looked They looked at the island

But Cam could see nothing She was thinking how all those paths and the lawn thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there were gone were rubbed out were past were unreal and now this was real the boat and the sail with its patch Macalister with his earrings the noise of the wavesall this was real Thinking this she was murmuring to herself We perished each alone for her fathers words broke and broke again in her mind when her father seeing her gazing so vaguely began to tease her Didnt she know the points of the compass he asked Didnt she know the North from the South Did she really think they lived right out there And he pointed again and showed her where their house was there by those trees He wished she would try to be more accurate he said Tell mewhich is East which is West he said half laughing at her half scolding her for he could not understand the state of mind of any one not absolutely imbecile who did not know the points of the compass Yet she did not know And seeing her gazing with her vague now rather frightened eyes fixed where no house was Mr Ramsay forgot his dream how he walked up and down between the urns on the terrace how the arms were stretched out to him He thought women are always like that the vagueness of their minds is hopeless it was a thing he had never been able to understand but so it was It had been so with herhis wife They could not keep anything clearly fixed in their minds But he had been wrong to be angry with her moreover did he not rather like this vagueness in women It was part of their extraordinary charm I will make her smile at me he thought She looks frightened She was so silent He clutched his fingers and determined that his voice and his face and all the quick expressive gestures which had been at his command making people pity him and praise him all these years should subdue themselves He would make her smile at him He would find some simple easy thing to say to her But what For wrapped up in his work as he was he forgot the sort of thing one said There was a puppy They had a puppy Who was looking after the puppy today he asked Yes thought James pitilessly seeing his sisters head against the sail now she will give way I shall be left to fight the tyrant alone The compact would be left to him to carry out Cam would never resist tyranny to the death he thought grimly watching her face sad sulky yielding And as sometimes happens when a cloud falls on a green hillside and gravity descends and there among all the surrounding hills is gloom and sorrow and it seems as if the hills themselves must ponder the fate of the clouded the darkened either in pity or maliciously rejoicing in her dismay so Cam now felt herself overcast as she sat there among calm resolute people and wondered how to answer her father about the puppy how to resist his entreatyforgive me care for me while James the lawgiver with the tablets of eternal wisdom laid open on his knee his hand on the tiller had become symbolical to her said Resist him Fight him He said so rightly justly For they must fight tyranny to the death she thought Of all human qualities she reverenced justice most Her brother was most godlike her father most suppliant And to which did she yield she thought sitting between them gazing at the shore whose points were all unknown to her and thinking how the lawn and the terrace and the house were smoothed away now and peace dwelt there

Jasper she said sullenly Hed look after the puppy

And what was she going to call him her father persisted He had had a dog when he was a little boy called Frisk Shell give way James thought as he watched a look come upon her face a look he remembered They look down he thought at their knitting or something Then suddenly they look up There was a flash of blue he remembered and then somebody sitting with him laughed surrendered and he was very angry It must have been his mother he thought sitting on a low chair with his father standing over her He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down leaf upon leaf fold upon fold softly incessantly upon his brain among scents sounds voices harsh hollow sweet and lights passing and brooms tapping and the wash and hush of the sea how a man had marched up and down and stopped dead upright over them Meanwhile he noticed Cam dabbled her fingers in the water and stared at the shore and said nothing No she wont give way he thought shes different he thought Well if Cam would not answer him he would not bother her Mr Ramsay decided feeling in his pocket for a book But she would answer him she wished passionately to move some obstacle that lay upon her tongue and to say Oh yes Frisk Ill call him Frisk She wanted even to say Was that the dog that found its way over the moor alone But try as she might she could think of nothing to say like that fierce and loyal to the compact yet passing on to her father unsuspected by James a private token of the love she felt for him For she thought dabbling her hand and now Macalisters boy had caught a mackerel and it lay kicking on the floor with blood on its gills for she thought looking at James who kept his eyes dispassionately on the sail or glanced now and then for a second at the horizon youre not exposed to it to this pressure and division of feeling this extraordinary temptation Her father was feeling in his pockets in another second he would have found his book For no one attracted her more his hands were beautiful and his feet and his voice and his words and his haste and his temper and his oddity and his passion and his saying straight out before every one we perish each alone and his remoteness He had opened his book But what remained intolerable she thought sitting upright and watching Macalisters boy tug the hook out of the gills of another fish was that crass blindness and tyranny of his which had poisoned her childhood and raised bitter storms so that even now she woke in the night trembling with rage and remembered some command of his some insolence Do this Do that his dominance his Submit to me

So she said nothing but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore wrapped in its mantle of peace as if the people there had fallen asleep she thought were free like smoke were free to come and go like ghosts They have no suffering there she thought

6

Yes that is their boat Lily Briscoe decided standing on the edge of the lawn It was the boat with greyishbrown sails which she saw now flatten itself upon the water and shoot off across the bay There he sits she thought and the children are quite silent still And she could not reach him either The sympathy she had not given him weighed her down It made it difficult for her to paint

She had always found him difficult She never had been able to praise him to his face she remembered And that reduced their relationship to something neutral without that element of sex in it which made his manner to Minta so gallant almost gay He would pick a flower for her lend her his books But could he believe that Minta read them She dragged them about the garden sticking in leaves to mark the place

Dyou remember Mr Carmichael she was inclined to ask looking at the old man But he had pulled his hat half over his forehead he was asleep or he was dreaming or he was lying there catching words she supposed

Dyou remember she felt inclined to ask him as she passed him thinking again of Mrs Ramsay on the beach the cask bobbing up and down and the pages flying Why after all these years had that survived ringed round lit up visible to the last detail with all before it blank and all after it blank for miles and miles

Is it a boat Is it a cork she would say Lily repeated turning back reluctantly again to her canvas Heaven be praised for it the problem of space remained she thought taking up her brush again It glared at her The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface feathery and evanescent one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterflys wing but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron It was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses And she began to lay on a red a grey and she began to model her way into the hollow there At the same time she seemed to be sitting beside Mrs Ramsay on the beach

Is it a boat Is it a cask Mrs Ramsay said And she began hunting round for her spectacles And she sat having found them silent looking out to sea And Lily painting steadily felt as if a door had opened and one went in and stood gazing silently about in a high cathedrallike place very dark very solemn Shouts came from a world far away Steamers vanished in stalks of smoke on the horizon Charles threw stones and sent them skipping

Mrs Ramsay sat silent She was glad Lily thought to rest in silence uncommunicative to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships Who knows what we are what we feel Who knows even at the moment of intimacy This is knowledge Arent things spoilt then Mrs Ramsay may have asked it seemed to have happened so often this silence by her side by saying them Arent we more expressive thus The moment at least seemed extraordinarily fertile She rammed a little hole in the sand and covered it up by way of burying in it the perfection of the moment It was like a drop of silver in which one dipped and illumined the darkness of the past

Lily stepped back to get her canvassointo perspective It was an odd road to be walking this of painting Out and out one went further until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank perfectly alone over the sea And as she dipped into the blue paint she dipped too into the past there Now Mrs Ramsay got up she remembered It was time to go back to the housetime for luncheon And they all walked up from the beach together she walking behind with William Bankes and there was Minta in front of them with a hole in her stocking How that little round hole of pink heel seemed to flaunt itself before them How William Bankes deplored it without so far as she could remember saying anything about it It meant to him the annihilation of womanhood and dirt and disorder and servants leaving and beds not made at middayall the things he most abhorred He had a way of shuddering and spreading his fingers out as if to cover an unsightly object which he did nowholding his hand in front of him And Minta walked on ahead and presumably Paul met her and she went off with Paul in the garden

The Rayleys thought Lily Briscoe squeezing her tube of green paint She collected her impressions of the Rayleys Their lives appeared to her in a series of scenes one on the staircase at dawn Paul had come in and gone to bed early Minta was late There was Minta wreathed tinted garish on the stairs about three oclock in the morning Paul came out in his pyjamas carrying a poker in case of burglars Minta was eating a sandwich standing halfway up by a 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 coffeehouses 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 Rayleys 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 storythey 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 toolsbusinesslike straightforward friendlythat 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 Pauls 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 override her wishes improve away her limited oldfashioned 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 Theyre happy like that Im 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 coffeehouses 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 Williamit makes me so unhappy when I go to see him to find nothing nice in his houseno 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 ones 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 Pauls fire again And it sank and she said to herself laughing The Rayleys how Paul went to coffeehouses and played chess

She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth though she thought She had been looking at the tablecloth 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 Ramsaya 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 childs 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 understooda 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 childit was his great griefhe had no daughter in the vague aloof way that was natural to a man who spent 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 drawingroom step She saw through Williams 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 penaltyit came too readily came too completely It stilled lifefroze 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 deerstalkerss 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 Ramsayno 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 middleaged 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 drawingroom steps they looked extraordinarily empty It was ones body feeling not ones 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 haveto want and wanthow 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 drawingroom 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 presumablyhow 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 herselfOh yesin 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 lifestartling 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

7

Macalisters 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

8

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 calmif 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 paintbrush

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 painters 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 lampstrung in the evening All had been part of the fields of death But always somethingit might be a face a voice a paper boy crying STANDARD NEWSthrust 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 bars of the waves and stony fields of the purpler 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 Ramsays 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 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

9

They dont 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 ones entire mind and ones 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 others presence which they had almost forgotten Macalisters 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 plovers 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 as he grew older and sat staring at his father in an impotent rage it was not him that old man reading whom he wanted to kill but it was the thing that descended on himwithout his knowing it perhaps that fierce sudden blackwinged 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 didand 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 outtyranny despotism he called itmaking people do what they did not want to do cutting off their right to speak How could any of them say But I wont 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 upone never knewquite reasonably He might talk to the Macalisters He might be pressing a sovereign into some frozen old womans hand in the street James thought and he might be shouting out at some fishermans 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 fathers They alone knew each other What then was this terror this hatred Turning back among the many leaves 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 ones 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 ones knee he had seen a waggon crush ignorantly and innocently some ones 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 Cams foot over anybodys 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 leaflike 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 persons 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 wont be able to go to the Lighthouse

The Lighthouse was then a silvery mistylooking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening Now

James looked at the Lighthouse He could see the whitewashed 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 Whats 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 whatever came into her head She alone spoke the truth to her alone 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 ones 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 itBut 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 at their ease and the fishinglines slanted taut across 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

10

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

11

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 fathers anger about the points of the compass Jamess 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 universeeven 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 armchairs 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 greycoloured 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 crackling then it was right And watching her father as he wrote in 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 plovers egg No it was right Look at him now she wanted to say aloud to James But James 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 flyleaf 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 when she crept in from the garden and took a book 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

12

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 ones 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 goodmorning Mrs Beckwith What a lovely day Are you going to be so bold as to sit in the sun Jaspers hidden the chairs Do let me find you one and all the rest of the usual chatter One need not speak at all One glided one shook ones 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 childrens and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides A washerwoman with her basket a rook a redhot poker the purples and greygreens 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 Ramsays 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 boats 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 thinkingshe 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 And if 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 mulecart 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 samegreyer rather Yes he looked the same but somebody had said she recalled that when he had heard of Andrew Ramsays 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 meanthat 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 Johns 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 wont be fine But this was one way of knowing people she thought to know the outline not the detail to sit in ones 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 drawingroom 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 wouldnt 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 matteroffact in her She was so direct

A noise drew her attention to the drawingroom windowthe 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 drawingroom step was empty but it had no effect on her whatever She did not want Mrs Ramsay nowPeople 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 typethe 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 ones 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 itshe 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 ones 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 Golders Green

She had gone one day into a Hall and heard him speaking during the war He was denouncing something he was condemning somebody He was 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 cant write women cant 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 brushred energetic shiny ants rather like Charles Tansley She had looked at him ironically from her seat in the halfempty 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 Dont 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 ones notions of other people were after all grotesque They served private purposes of ones own He did for her instead of a whippingboy 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 Ramsays 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 Hows that Hows 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 oldfashioned scene that was which required very nearly crinolines and pegtop 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 themobviously 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 repetitionof 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 blissshe with her impulses and quicknesses he with his shudders and glooms Oh no The bedroom door would slam violently early in the morning He would start from the 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 that one day on the stairs They had laughed and laughed like a couple of children all because Mr Ramsay finding an earwig in his milk at breakfast had sent the whole thing flying through the air on to the terrace outside An earwig Prue murmured awestruck in his milk Other people might find centipedes But he had built round him such a fence of sanctity and occupied the space with such a demeanour of majesty that an earwig in his milk was a monster

But it tired Mrs Ramsay it cowed her a littlethe plates whizzing and the doors slamming And there would fall between them sometimes long rigid silences when in a state of mind which annoyed 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 wasroaming 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 dont some of you take up botany With all those legs and arms why doesnt one of you So they would talk as usual laughing among the children All would be as usual save only 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 complainthad she not the faculty of obedience to perfectionwent too Down fields across valleys white flowerstrewnthat 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 drawingroom somebody was sitting in the chair For Heavens sake she prayed let them sit still there and not come floundering out to talk to her Mercifully whoever it was stayed still inside had settled by some stroke of luck so as to throw an oddshaped triangular shadow over the step It altered the composition of the picture a little It was interesting It might be useful Her mood was coming back to her One must keep on looking without for a second relaxing the intensity of emotion the determination not to be put off not to be bamboozled One must hold the scenesoin a vise and let nothing come in and spoil it One wanted she thought dipping her brush deliberately to be on a level with ordinary experience to feel simply thats a chair thats a table and yet at the same time Its a miracle its an ecstasy The problem might be solved after all Ah but what had happened Some wave of white went over the window pane The air must have stirred some flounce in the room Her heart leapt at her and seized her and tortured her

Mrs Ramsay Mrs Ramsay she cried feeling the old horror come backto want and want and not to have Could she inflict that still And then quietly as if she refrained that too became part of ordinary experience was on a level with the chair with the table Mrs Ramsayit was part of her perfect goodnesssat there quite simply in the chair flicked her needles to and fro knitted her reddishbrown stocking cast her shadow on the step There she sat

And as if she had something she must share yet could hardly leave her easel so full her mind was of what she was thinking of what she was seeing Lily went past Mr Carmichael holding her brush to the edge of the lawn Where was that boat now And Mr Ramsay She wanted him

13

Mr Ramsay had almost done reading One hand hovered over the page as if to be in readiness to turn it the very instant he had finished it He sat there bareheaded with the wind blowing his hair about extraordinarily exposed to everything He looked very old He looked James thought getting his head now against the Lighthouse now against the waste of waters running away into the open like some old stone lying on the sand he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their mindsthat loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things

He was reading very quickly as if he were eager to get to the end Indeed they were very close to the Lighthouse now There it loomed up stark and straight glaring white and black and one could see the waves breaking in white splinters like smashed glass upon the rocks One could see lines and creases in the rocks One could see the windows clearly a dab of white on one of them and a little tuft of green on the rock A man had come out and looked at them through a glass and gone in again So it was like that James thought the Lighthouse one had seen across the bay all these years it was a stark tower on a bare rock It satisfied him It confirmed some obscure feeling of his about his own character The old ladies he thought thinking of the garden at home went dragging their chairs about on the lawn Old Mrs Beckwith for example was always saying how nice it was and how sweet it was and how they ought to be so proud and they ought to be so happy but as a matter of fact James thought looking at the Lighthouse stood there on its rock its like that He looked at his father reading fiercely with his legs curled tight They shared that knowledge We are driving before a galewe must sink he began saying to himself half aloud exactly as his father said it

Nobody seemed to have spoken for an age Cam was tired of looking at the sea Little bits of black cork had floated past the fish were dead in the bottom of the boat Still her father read and James looked at him and she looked at him and they vowed that they would fight tyranny to the death and he went on reading quite unconscious of what they thought It was thus that he escaped she thought Yes with his great forehead and his great nose holding his little mottled book firmly in front of him he escaped You might try to lay hands on him but then like a bird he spread his wings he floated off to settle out of your reach somewhere far away on some desolate stump She gazed at the immense expanse of the sea The island had grown so small that it scarcely looked like a leaf any longer It looked like the top of a rock which some wave bigger than the rest would cover Yet in its frailty were all those paths those terraces those bedrooms all those innumberable things But as just before sleep things simplify themselves so that only one of all the myriad details has power to assert itself so she felt looking drowsily at the island all those paths and terraces and bedrooms were fading and disappearing and nothing was left but a pale blue censer swinging rhythmically this way and that across her mind It was a hanging garden it was a valley full of birds and flowers and antelopesShe was falling asleep

Come now said Mr Ramsay suddenly shutting his book

Come where To what extraordinary adventure She woke with a start To land somewhere to climb somewhere Where was he leading them For after his immense silence the words startled them But it was absurd He was hungry he said It was time for lunch Besides look he said Theres the Lighthouse Were almost there

Hes doing very well said Macalister praising James Hes keeping her very steady

But his father never praised him James thought grimly

Mr Ramsay opened the parcel and shared out the sandwiches among them Now he was happy eating bread and cheese with these fishermen He would have liked to live in a cottage and lounge about in the harbour spitting with the other old men James thought watching him slice his cheese into thin yellow sheets with his penknife

This is right this is it Cam kept feeling as she peeled her hard boiled egg Now she felt as she did in the study when the old men were reading THE TIMES Now I can go on thinking whatever I like and I shant fall over a precipice or be drowned for there he is keeping his eye on me she thought

At the same time they were sailing so fast along by the rocks that it was very excitingit seemed as if they were doing two things at once they were eating their lunch here in the sun and they were also making for safety in a great storm after a shipwreck Would the water last Would the provisions last she asked herself telling herself a story but knowing at the same time what was the truth

They would soon be out of it Mr Ramsay was saying to old Macalister but their children would see some strange things Macalister said he was seventyfive last March Mr Ramsay was seventyone Macalister said he had never seen a doctor he had never lost a tooth And thats the way Id like my children to liveCam was sure that her father was thinking that for he stopped her throwing a sandwich into the sea and told her as if he were thinking of the fishermen and how they lived that if she did not want it she should put it back in the parcel She should not waste it He said it so wisely as if he knew so well all the things that happened in the world that she put it back at once and then he gave her from his own parcel a gingerbread nut as if he were a great Spanish gentleman she thought handing a flower to a lady at a window so courteous his manner was He was shabby and simple eating bread and cheese and yet he was leading them on a great expedition where for all she knew they would be drowned

That was where she sunk said Macalisters boy suddenly

Three men were drowned where we are now the old man said He had seen them clinging to the mast himself And Mr Ramsay taking a look at the spot was about James and Cam were afraid to burst out

But I beneath a rougher sea

and if he did they could not bear it they would shriek aloud they could not endure another explosion of the passion that boiled in him but to their surprise all he said was Ah as if he thought to himself But why make a fuss about that Naturally men are drowned in a storm but it is a perfectly straightforward affair and the depths of the sea he sprinkled the crumbs from his sandwich paper over them are only water after all Then having lighted his pipe he took out his watch He looked at it attentively he made perhaps some mathematical calculation At last he said triumphantly

Well done James had steered them like a born sailor

There Cam thought addressing herself silently to James Youve got it at last For she knew that this was what James had been wanting and she knew that now he had got it he was so pleased that he would not look at her or at his father or at any one There he sat with his hand on the tiller sitting bolt upright looking rather sulky and frowning slightly He was so pleased that he was not going to let anybody share a grain of his pleasure His father had praised him They must think that he was perfectly indifferent But youve got it now Cam thought

They had tacked and they were sailing swiftly buoyantly on long rocking waves which handed them on from one to another with an extraordinary lilt and exhilaration beside the reef On the left a row of rocks showed brown through the water which thinned and became greener and on one a higher rock a wave incessantly broke and spurted a little column of drops which fell down in a shower One could hear the slap of the water and the patter of falling drops and a kind of hushing and hissing sound from the waves rolling and gambolling and slapping the rocks as if they were wild creatures who were perfectly free and tossed and tumbled and sported like this for ever

Now they could see two men on the Lighthouse watching them and making ready to meet them

Mr Ramsay buttoned his coat and turned up his trousers He took the large badly packed brown paper parcel which Nancy had got ready and sat with it on his knee Thus in complete readiness to land he sat looking back at the island With his longsighted eyes perhaps he could see the dwindled leaflike shape standing on end on a plate of gold quite clearly What could he see Cam wondered It was all a blur to her What was he thinking now she wondered What was it he sought so fixedly so intently so silently They watched him both of them sitting bareheaded with his parcel on his knee staring and staring at the frail blue shape which seemed like the vapour of something that had burnt itself away What do you want they both wanted to ask They both wanted to say Ask us anything and we will give it you But he did not ask them anything He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking We perished each alone or he might be thinking I have reached it I have found it but he said nothing

Then he put on his hat

Bring those parcels he said nodding his head at the things Nancy had done up for them to take to the Lighthouse The parcels for the Lighthouse men he said He rose and stood in the bow of the boat very straight and tall for all the world James thought as if he were saying There is no God and Cam thought as if he were leaping into space and they both rose to follow him as he sprang lightly like a young man holding his parcel on to the rock

14

He must have reached it said Lily Briscoe aloud feeling suddenly completely tired out For the Lighthouse had become almost invisible had melted away into a blue haze and the effort of looking at it and the effort of thinking of him landing there which both seemed to be one and the same effort had stretched her body and mind to the utmost Ah but she was relieved Whatever she had wanted to give him when he left her that morning she had given him at last

He has landed she said aloud It is finished Then surging up puffing slightly old Mr Carmichael stood beside her looking like an old pagan god shaggy with weeds in his hair and the trident it was only a French novel in his hand He stood by her on the edge of the lawn swaying a little in his bulk and said shading his eyes with his hand They will have landed and she felt that she had been right They had not needed to speak They had been thinking the same things and he had answered her without her asking him anything He stood there as if he were spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of mankind she thought he was surveying tolerantly and compassionately their final destiny Now he has crowned the occasion she thought when his hand slowly fell as if she had seen him let fall from his great height a wreath of violets and asphodels which fluttering slowly lay at length upon the earth

Quickly as if she were recalled by something over there she turned to her canvas There it washer picture Yes with all its greens and blues its lines running up and across its attempt at something It would be hung in the attics she thought it would be destroyed But what did that matter she asked herself taking up her brush again She looked at the steps they were empty she looked at her canvas it was blurred With a sudden intensity as if she saw it clear for a second she drew a line there in the centre It was done it was finished Yes she thought laying down her brush in extreme fatigue I have had my vision

THE END

1927_Woolf,Virginia_TotheLighthouse_Novel.html