TO THE

LIGHTHOUSE
Virginia Woolf

InfoLivros.org
 TO THE LIGHTHOUSE SYNOPSIS

To the Lighthouse is the fifth novel written by Virginia Woolf, for

many it is her masterpiece. It was published in 1927, a few years
after World War I, which is also the historical framework of the
book.

The plot takes place over a period of 10 years, from 1910 to

1920, a rather complex interwar period. This is noticeable in the
plot, especially in the second part, where the passing of time
makes itself felt, showing us the changes it leaves in its wake.
The novel is divided into 3 parts: the first is entitled "The
Window", the second "Time Passes" and the third "The
Lighthouse".

The desire to make an excursion to a lighthouse begins what will

be the conflicts of the Ramsay family and their closest friends,
all set in their summer home.

Following link To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf at

InfoBooks.org
 Read. Learn. Grow

This document was lagally downloaded from InfoBooks, and

that's great!
At InfoBooks, we strive to make exceptional books available for
free to everyone.

But this book is not the end...

📚 Thousands of Free Books: With over 3,500 books in our

catalog, your next great read is waiting for you. Are you looking for
inspiration, adventure, or knowledge? We have it all.

💡 No Costs, No Complications: At InfoBooks, we believe in

free and easy access to knowledge. All our books are available at
no cost and without the need for registration. Yes, it's that simple!

Discover and Learn: Dive into our wide range of topics

and find exactly what you need. From literary classics to current
books, our content is designed to enrich your mind and spirit.

To read and download

books for free visit
InfoBooks.org
infobooks.org/free-pdf-books/
If you wish to read this work in other languages, just click
on the corresponding links:

● Spanish InfoLibros.org: Al faro autora Virginia Woolf

● Portuguese InfoLivros.org: Passeio ao farol autora Virginia Woolf

● French InfoLivres.org: La promenade au phare de l'auteur Virginia

Woolf

If you want to access our digital library with more than

3,500 books to read and download for free, we invite you
to visit this page:

● +3,500 free books in PDF format at InfoBooks.org

 THE WINDOW

CHAPTER I

"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay. "But you'll
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 night's darkness and a day's 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,1 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

4
rustling--all 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 drawing-room

window, "it won't be fine."

Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would
have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and
then, James would

have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr.
Ramsay excited in his children's 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

5
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 fine--I 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

6
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 were,--if 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.

7
"It's due west," said the atheist Tansley, holding his bony fingers
spread so that the wind blew through them, for he was sharing Mr.
Ramsay

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

8
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,3 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 girl--pray Heaven it was none of her
daughters!--who 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 better--her 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,

9
Rose--could 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 mother's eyes, honour her strange severity, her
extreme

courtesy, like a queen's raising from the mud to wash a beggar's

dirty foot, when she admonished them so very severely about that
wretched atheist who had chased them--or, speaking accurately,
been invited to stay with them--in the Isle of Skye.4

"There'll 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

10
miserable specimen, the children said, all humps and hollows. He
couldn't play cricket; he poked; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic
brute, Andrew

said. They knew what he liked best--to 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,"5 who had buried his light temporarily at Bristol or

Bedford,6 but

was bound to be heard of later when his Prolegomena7, 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. "Aren't you drenched to the skin?" she

11
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 him--his 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 them--he 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 dinner-table 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

12
to debate anything, everything; Tansley's tie; the passing of the
Reform

Bill;8 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,9
and lit up bats, flannels, straw hats, ink-pots, paint-pots, 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 dining-room, holding James by
the hand, since he would not go with the others. It seemed to her
such nonsense--inventing differences, when people, heaven knows,
were different enough without that. The real

13
differences, she thought, standing by the drawing-room 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
drawing-rooms 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
Scotch10; 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 note-book 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.11

14
Insoluble questions they were, it seemed to her, standing there,
holding James by the hand. He had followed her into the drawing-
room, 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 gone--the
children; Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley; Augustus Carmichael; her
husband--they 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 cat's eyes ajar, so
that like a cat's 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.

15
For they were making the great expedition, she said, laughing.
They were going to the town. "Stamps, writing-paper, 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 grey-green somnolence which embraced
them all, without need of words, in a vast and benevolent lethargy
of well-wishing; 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

canary-yellow 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;

16
an early marriage; poverty; going to India; translating a little
poetry "very beautifully, I believe," being willing to teach the boys
Persian or Hindustanee,12 but what really was the use of that?--
and 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 man's intellect, even in its decay, the

subjection of all wives--not that she blamed the girl, and the
marriage had been happy enough, she believed--to their
husband's 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

17
of anything and saw himself--but 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, tigers ... Craning forwards, for she was
short-sighted, she read it out ... "will visit this town," she read. It
was terribly dangerous work

for a one-armed man, she exclaimed, to stand on top of a ladder

like that--his 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.

"Let's go," he said, repeating her words, clicking them out,

however, with a self-consciousness 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?

18
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; shag13;

the same the old men did in the quays. He worked hard--seven
hours a day; his subject

was now the influence of something upon somebody--they were

walking on and

Mrs. Ramsay did not quite catch the meaning, only the words, here
and there ... dissertation ... fellowship ... readership ... lectureship.14
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

19
came out, instantly, with all that about his father and mother and
brothers and sisters, and she would see to it that they didn't 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
Ibsen15 with the Ramsays. He was an awful prig--oh 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

self-confidence, had recovered from the circus, and was about

(and now again she liked him warmly) to tell her--but 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,

20
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 greyer-eyed, 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.

Paunceforte16 had been there, three years before, all the pictures
were like that, she said,

green and grey, with lemon-coloured sailing-boats, and pink

women on the beach.

But her grandmother's friends, she said, glancing discreetly as

they passed, took the greatest pains; first they mixed their own

21
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 man's
picture was skimpy, was that what one said? The colours weren't
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, tea-caddies, 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

22
(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 Garter17; when all at once he

realised that it was this: it was this:--she was the most beautiful
person he had ever seen.

With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen18 and
wild violets--what 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 hair19--He had
hold of her bag.

"Good-bye, 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

23
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.

24
CHAPTER II

"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?

25
CHAPTER III

"Perhaps you will wake up and find the sun shining and the birds
singing," she said compassionately, smoothing the little boy's 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 mowing-machine, 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.

26
But here, as she turned the page, suddenly her search for the
picture of a rake or a mowing-machine 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,

"How's that? How's that?"20 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 you--I 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

27
a rainbow--this 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.

28
Suddenly a loud cry, as of a sleep-walker, 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 Lily's picture. Lily's picture! Mrs. Ramsay smiled. With her little
Chinese

eyes22 and her puckered-up 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.

29
CHAPTER IV

Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming down upon her
with his hands waving shouting out, "Boldly we rode and well,"23
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 jacmanna24 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.

30
They had rooms in the village, and so, walking in, walking out,
parting late on door-mats, 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.

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

31
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. Paunceforte's visit, to see everything pale, elegant,

semitransparent.26

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
moment's 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 herself--struggling against
terrific odds to maintain her courage; to

32
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,27 and had much ado to control
her impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted
so far) at

Mrs. Ramsay's knee and say to her--but what could one say to
her? "I'm in love with you?" No, that was not true. "I'm 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

33
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 pokers28 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

34
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
sadness--because 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 "Pretty--pretty," 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,

35
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 shrunk--for Ramsay lived in a welter of children,
whereas Bankes was childless and a widower--he 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 Westmorland29 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 one's fault, some
tendency, when they met, to repeat.

36
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

peat--for instance, Cam, the little girl, Ramsay's youngest

daughter. She

was picking Sweet Alice30 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 Lily's hand like a pump-

handle as he passed, which caused Mr. Bankes to say, bitterly, how

37
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 Fair--for Prue would have
beauty, he thought,

how could she help it?--and Andrew brains.31 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 Ramsay's 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 something--William 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 father's, to look at a
picture

of Vesuvius32 in eruption; but they had also, his old friends could
not but feel, destroyed something. What would a stranger think

38
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 did--but that was too
harsh a

phrase--could depend so much as he did upon people's 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 Andrew's doing. She asked him
what his father's 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

So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay's 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 silver-bossed bark of the tree,
or upon its fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table,

39
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 one's 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 four-legged
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

40
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, pure-hearted,
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 one's pencil, and the voice was her
own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting,
contradictory things, so that even the

41
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 net--danced up and

down in

Lily's 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. Ramsay's 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.

42
"Jasper!" said Mr. Bankes. They turned the way the starlings flew,
over the terrace. Following the scatter of swift-flying 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!"34

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, half-way 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 child-like 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
revelled--he 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.35

43
CHAPTER V

"And even if it isn't 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 Lily's 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 second--William and Lily should marry--she took the
heather-mixture stocking, with its criss-cross of steel needles at
the mouth of it, and measured it against James's leg.

"My dear, stand still," she said, for in his jealousy, not liking to
serve

44
as measuring block for the Lighthouse keeper's 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 up--what demon possessed him, her youngest, her

cherished?--and 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 half-penny; 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 done--they 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 obeyed"36 ... "The happier
Helen of our days"37 ... disgraceful to say, she had never read
them. And Croom on the Mind38 and Bates on the Savage

45
Customs of Polynesia39 ("My dear, stand still," she said)--neither
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 them--that 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 Rose's objects--shells, 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 James's leg, that
things got

shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer. The mat was
fading; the wall-paper was flapping. You couldn't 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 Cashmere 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 drawing-room door was open; the hall door was
open;

46
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 shut--simple 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
Marie's, 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 Frenchwoman's) 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

recollection--how she had stood there, how the girl had said, "At
home the mountains are so beautiful," and there was no hope, no

47
hope whatever, she had a spasm of irritation, and speaking
sharply, said to James:

"Stand still. Don't 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 Sorley's little boy would be less well
grown than James.

"It's too short," she said, "ever so much too short."

Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way 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
it--her

48
beauty and splendour? Had he blown his brains out, they asked,
had he

died the week before they were married--some other, earlier lover,
of whom rumours reached one?40 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 then--she 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, sustained--falsely 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."41 He saw her
at the end of the line, Greek, blue-eyed, straight-nosed. How
incongruous it seemed to be telephoning to a woman like that. The
Graces assembling seemed to have

49
joined hands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face.42
Yes, he would catch the 10:30 at Euston.43

"But she's 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 deer-stalker's 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 idiosyncrasy--she did not like

admiration--or 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.)

50
Knitting her reddish-brown 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,44

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.

51
CHAPTER VI

But what had happened? Some one had blundered.45

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 blundered"--Fixing her short-sighted 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 thundered46--straight
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

52
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 James's 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 James's 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.

53
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 son's bare leg.

She was trying to get these tiresome stockings finished to send to

Sorley's little boy tomorrow, said Mrs. Ramsay.

There wasn't 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 women's

minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death,
been shattered and shivered47; 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.

54
To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for
other people's feelings, to rend the 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 sandwiches--that 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 won't rain; and instantly a
Heaven of

55
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 son's 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,"48 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

56
this at hand, used it, cracked though it was. But it sounded
ridiculous--"Some one had blundered"--said 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 one's 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
twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of
difficulty

57
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 Q--R--.
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.49

Qualities that would have saved a ship's company exposed on a

broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water--endurance and

58
justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then--what
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 saying--he was a failure--that 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 lizard's 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,
twenty-six letters in all, from start to finish;

59
on the other the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the
letters together in one flash--the 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 stock-still, 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 hope50 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

60
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 one's 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.

61
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 her--who will blame him if he does homage to the
beauty of the world?

62
CHAPTER VII

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 father's 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 mother's
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

63
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 futile, and all the rooms of the house made full
of life--the

drawing-room; behind the drawing-room 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,51 she said. But he must have more than that. He must have

64
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 drawing-room 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 climbed 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

65
herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood
stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered 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 Grimm's 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.

66
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 Fisherman's Wife,52 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 importance-
-all 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

67
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, negligible. But then again, it was
the other thing

too--not 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

them--all 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

68
convicted of unworthiness, and impeded in her proper function by
these lies, these exaggerations,--it 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?"

69
CHAPTER VIII

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 wife's doing. She
remembered

that iniquity of his wife's towards him, which had made her turn to
steel and adamant there, in the horrible little room in St John's
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?53 eighteenpence? Oh, she could not bear to think of the
little indignities

70
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?
Here's a book you might like and so on. And after all--after 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,54 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

71
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 self-satisfaction was it that
she wished so instinctively to help, to give, that people might say
of her,

"O Mrs. Ramsay! dear Mrs. Ramsay ... Mrs. 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 self-seeking,
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

72
sensitiveness (none of her children was as sensitive as he was), her
son James.

"The man's 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

73
the rush of reading--he slipped, seeing all this, smoothly into
speculation suggested by an article in The Times about the
number of Americans who visit Shakespeare's 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 Tube55 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 Cardiff56 next month, he thought; here, on his terrace, he

74
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 nut-tree 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 sea-bird, alone. It was his power, his

75
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 on--that 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 (obsequiously)and 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 boat-loads a feeling of gratitude for the duty it is
taking upon itself of marking the channel out there in the floods
alone.

76
"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,57 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 wife's beauty, in the tributes

that reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton,
Kidderminster, Oxford, Cambridge58--all had to be deprecated
and concealed under the phrase "talking nonsense," because, in
effect, he had not done the thing he might

77
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 like--this 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.

78
He was bearing down upon them. Now he stopped dead and
stood looking in silence at the sea. Now he had turned away
again.

79
CHAPTER IX

Yes, Mr. Bankes said, watching him go. It was a thousand pities.
(Lily

had said something about his frightening her--he 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 don't read Carlyle59. 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.

80
"A bit of a hypocrite?" Mr. Bankes suggested, looking too at Mr.
Ramsay's 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 wife's death, quiet rather? Of
course,

he had his work... All 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 was--Mr. Ramsay--advancing towards
them, swinging, careless, oblivious, remote. A bit of a hypocrite?
she repeated. Oh,

no--the 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

81
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.60

Mr. Bankes expected her to answer. And she was about to say
something criticizing Mrs. Ramsay, how she was alarming, too, in
her way,

high-handed, 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

82
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 rapture--for by what other name could one call it?--made

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.

83
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 butterfly's
wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral.62 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 can't paint, women can't write ..."

84
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.
Bankes's 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,

85
Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women,
and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the
Brompton Road).63 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 one's bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting
of her beauty was always that--hasty, but apt), she would enact
again whatever it

might be--Charles 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 go,--it was dawn, she could
see the sun rising,--half 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

86
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.
Ramsay's 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. Ramsay's 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 now--this was the glove's twisted finger. But into what
sanctuary had one penetrated?

87
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 uncover--the 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 one's 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. Ramsay's 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

88
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. Ramsay's knee.

Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head

against

Mrs. Ramsay's knee. And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom
were stored up

89
in Mrs. Ramsay's 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 dome-shaped 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 arm-chair in the drawing-
room window she wore, to Lily's eyes, an august shape; the shape
of a dome.

This ray passed level with Mr. Bankes's 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,

90
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

thirty-three years, the deposit of each day's 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 pen-knife, 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 indeed?--except that if
there, in that corner, it was bright, here, in this, she felt the need of

91
darkness. Simple, obvious, commonplace, as it was, Mr. Bankes
was interested. Mother and child then--objects of universal
veneration, and in this case the mother was

famous for her beauty--might 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

92
his drawing-room, 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 Kennet64. He had spent his honeymoon on the banks of the

Kennet, he said. Lily must come and see that picture, he said. But
now--he 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 explained--what 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

absent-minded 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
children--her 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

93
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 suspected--that one
could walk away down that long gallery not alone any more but
arm in arm with somebody--the strangest feeling in the world, and
the most exhilarating--she nicked

the catch of her paint-box to, more firmly than was necessary, and
the nick seemed to surround in a circle forever the paint-box, the
lawn, Mr. Bankes, and that wild villain, Cam, dashing past.

94
CHAPTER X

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 vision--of 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

95
repeat the message twice--ask Mildred if Andrew, Miss Doyle, and
Mr. Rayley have come back?--The 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 child's 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 parrot-like instinct which had

picked up Mildred's 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 haven't, and I've 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 them--what could it mean? except that she had
decided, rightly, Mrs. Ramsay thought (and she was very, very

96
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..."65

But how could Minta say now that she would not have him? Not if
she agreed to spend whole afternoons trapesing about the
country alone--for Andrew would be off after his crabs--but
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),

97
"There isn't 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 mind's 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 won't 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 I'd have her will.'

98
'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.66 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
Minta's parents--the Owl and the Poker. Her nicknames for them
shot into her

mind as she read. The Owl and the Poker--yes, they would be
annoyed if they heard--and they were certain to hear--that 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

99
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 dust-pan the sand that the parrot had

scattered,

and conversation was almost entirely reduced to the exploits--

interesting perhaps, but limited after all--of that bird? Naturally,
one had asked

her to lunch, tea, dinner, finally to stay with them up at Finlay67,

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 came...Yes, 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
daughter's affections";

100
something Mrs. Doyle had said made her remember that charge
again. Wishing to dominate, wishing to interfere, making people
do what she wished--that

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 here--those two things she
would have liked to do, herself.68 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

101
grow up into long-legged monsters. Nothing made 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 one's breath away with her beauty. Andrew--
even 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.69 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 James's 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

102
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 dining-room

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 good-night to them, and found
them netted in their cots like birds among cherries and
raspberries, still making up stories about some little bit of rubbish-
-something they had heard, something they had picked up in the
garden. They all had their little treasures... And 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 worries--

103
perhaps 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 life--and

a little strip of time presented itself to her eyes--her fifty

years. There it was before her--life. Life, she thought--but 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

104
fifty pounds). For that reason, knowing what was before them--
love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places--she
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 twenty-four, 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 needed--oh, all sorts of

qualities (the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds); one--
she need not name it--that was essential; the thing she had with
her husband. Had they that?

105
"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."70

She turned the page; there were only a few lines more, so that she
would finish the story, though it was past bed-time. 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

106
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 James's eyes:
"And there they are living still at this very time."

"And that's 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

107
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.

108
CHAPTER XI

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 of--to 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 wedge-
shaped 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;

109
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

110
stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and
looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she
looked at--that light, for example. And it would lift up on it some
little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind like that--
"Children don't forget, children don't forget"--which 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

111
looked with her needles suspended, there curled up off the floor of
the mind, rose from the lake of one's 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.71 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,72 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

112
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 irritable--he 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 reddish-brown stocking
dangling in her hands a moment. She saw the light again. With
some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one's
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,

113
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.

114
CHAPTER XII

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
couldn't 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, "It'll 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 year's flowers, and had he heard the children's nickname for
Charles Tansley, she asked. The atheist, they called him, the little
atheist.

115
"He's 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, it's all he has to count on," said Mr. Ramsay.
"Pray Heaven he won't fall in love with Prue," said Mrs. Ramsay.
He'd 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 his--when 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

116
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
red-hot pokers.73 "You're 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 I'm 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 didn't. "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 didn't, 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

117
did. Suddenly she remembered those little paths on the edge of
the cliffs.

Wasn't it late? she asked. They hadn't 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 now--here 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.

118
They had reached the gap between the two clumps of red-hot
pokers74, 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 bog75; he wanted to
laugh. But first it

was nonsense to be anxious about Andrew. When he was Andrew's

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

119
day's 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 red-hot 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,
alone--he broke off, sighing. He had no right. The father of eight
children--he 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

120
would be a beauty, her mother said. They would stem the flood a
bit. That was a good bit of work on the whole--his 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 phrase-making 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 phrase-making, and she said to him, in a

matter- of-fact 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 thinking--he would
have written better books if he had not married.

121
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 silver-green spear-like plants grew, arm in arm. His arm
was almost

like a young man's 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 eagle's. His understanding often

astonished her. But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice
the view? No. Did he even notice his own daughter's beauty, or
whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit

122
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!76

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 lecture-rooms was stuffy and
depressing to her beyond endurance almost) simply to hear him,
simply to look at him. But

123
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 full-throbbing 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 short-sighted 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!

124
CHAPTER XIII

He had been to Amsterdam, Mr. Bankes was saying as he strolled

across the lawn with Lily Briscoe. He had seen the Rembrandts.77
He had been to Madrid. Unfortunately, it was Good Friday and the
Prado78 was shut. He

had been to Rome. Had Miss Briscoe never been to Rome? Oh, she
should--It would be a wonderful experience for her--the Sistine

Chapel; Michael Angelo;79 and Padua, with its Giottos80. His wife
had been in bad health for many years, so that their sight-seeing
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 one's own work. Mr. Bankes thought

one could carry that point of view too far. We can't all be Titians81
and we can't all be Darwins82, he said; at the same time he
doubted whether you could have your Darwin and your Titian if it

125
weren't for humble people like ourselves. Lily would have liked to
pay him a compliment; you're 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 Tube83 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

126
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, she's thinking we're 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 sharp-edged
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, "Haven't 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 Lord's
Prayer,84 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,

127
"Did Nancy go with them?"

128
CHAPTER XIV

(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 Constantinople85 seen through a

mist, and then, however heavy-eyed one might be, one must needs
ask, "Is that

Santa Sofia86?" "Is that the Golden Horn87?" 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

129
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
do--she would kill herself in some idiotic way one of these days.
She seemed to be afraid of nothing--except 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 perambulator88 when she was a baby. She didn't 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.

130
They all had to join in and sing the chorus, and shout out together:
Damn your eyes, damn your eyes,89

but it would be fatal to let the tide come in and cover up all the
good

hunting-grounds before they got on to the beach.

"Fatal," Paul agreed, springing up, and as they went slithering

down, he kept quoting the guide-book about "these islands being
justly celebrated for their park-like 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 Pope's Nose90, 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 rubber-like sea anemones, who were stuck
like lumps of jelly to the side of the

131
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 criss-crossed sand, high-stepping,
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,

132
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 there--oh, heavens! in
each other's 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, it's 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 grandmother's
brooch-- her grandmother's brooch, the sole ornament she
possessed--a weeping willow, it was (they must remember it) set in

133
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 didn't 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 again--she had no control over her emotions,
Andrew thought. Women

hadn't. 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 Rayley's stick
where they had sat and

come back at low tide again. There was nothing more that could
be done

134
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 grandmother's 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 wasn't 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
Edinburgh91 and buy her another, just like it but more beautiful.

135
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 him--his
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 one--Mrs. 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

136
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, "I've 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.)92

137
CHAPTER XV

"Yes," said Prue, in her considering way, answering her mother's

question, "I think Nancy did go with them."

138
CHAPTER XVI

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 mother's vice: he, too, exaggerated.

139
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

Mildred's masterpiece—Boeuf en Daube.93 Everything depended

upon things

being served up to the precise moment they were ready. The beef,
the bayleaf, and the wine--all 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 absent-mindedly, looking at her neck and shoulders (but

140
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

her--the 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
Mary94 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,
out--she could never describe it accurately enough to please
herself--was 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 one's
children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust
forwards.

141
But which was it to be? They had all the trays of her jewel-case
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 one's
mother at Rose's age. Like

142
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. "Don't 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

143
every night? he asked. But here, suddenly, like all grown-up people,
she ceased to pay him the least attention. She was listening to a
clatter in the hall.

"They've 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 her--but 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

144
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 washing-tables and dressing tables, and the novels
on the bed- tables, and the diaries which were so private, and
assemble in the dining-room for dinner.

145
CHAPTER XVII

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 that--Paul Rayley and Minta
Doyle--she, only this--an 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 eddy-
-there--

and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of
it. It's all come to an end, she thought, while they came in one
after another, Charles Tansley--"Sit there, please," she said--
Augustus Carmichael--and 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.

146
Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy--that was what she was
thinking, this was what she was doing--ladling out soup--she 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 ticking--one,
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 news-paper. And so then, she

concluded, addressing herself by bending silently in his direction to
William

Bankes--poor 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

147
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 no-man's 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 thoughtwith 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

148
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 people's. 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. That's what I shall
do. That's what has been puzzling me. She took up the salt cellar
and put it down again on a flower pattern in the table-cloth, so as
to remind herself to move the tree.

"It's odd that one scarcely gets anything worth having by post, yet
one always wants one's 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

149
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. Ramsay--
she pitied men

always as if they lacked something--women 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 post"--that 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

150
got anything worth having from one year's end to another. They
did nothing but talk, talk, talk, eat, eat, eat. It was the women's
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 drain-pipe 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 can't write, women can't paint--what 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. There's the
sprig on the table-cloth; there's my painting; I must move the tree

151
to the middle; that matters--nothing 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 didn't 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

152
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. "You'd 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 ago--that 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 Marlow95, and
was everything still the same? Oh, she could remember it as if it

153
were yesterday--on the river, feeling it as if it were yesterday--
going 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
drawing-room

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 they're 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?

154
"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. Bankes's 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 clean-shaven lips
punctiliously. But perhaps he was rather unusual, he thought, in
this; he never let himself get into

95 A town in Buckinghamshire, England.

155
a groove. He had friends in all circles... Mrs. 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 table-cloth as a mechanic examines a tool beautifully
polished and ready for use in an interval of leisure, such are the
sacrifices one's 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 Roger's 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 table-cloth
when he might have been--he took a flashing bird's-eye 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

156
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.

"I'm so sorry," said Mrs. Ramsay, turning to him at last. He felt

rigid and barren, like a pair of boots that have been soaked and

157
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
speaker's 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

158
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 himself96 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 X-ray photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young

man's desire to impress himself, lying dark in the mist of his flesh--
that

thin mist which convention had laid over his burning desire to
break into the conversation? But, she thought, screwing up her

159
Chinese eyes, and remembering how he sneered at women, "can't
paint, can't 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 Tube97 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.

"You're 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.

160
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 Tansley--a 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 rocks--indeed I hear the grating
and the

growling at this minute. My nerves are taut as fiddle strings.

161
Another touch and they will snap"--when 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 experiment--what happens if

one is not nice to that young man there--and be nice.

Judging the turn in her mood correctly--that she was friendly to

him now--he 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 boat-hook; 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.

Ramsay's gratitude (for Mrs. Ramsay was free now to talk for a
moment herself), ah, she thought, but what haven't I paid to get it
for you?

She had not been sincere.

162
She had done the usual trick--been 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' drawing-room at
Marlow98 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

163
shot down even from this dining-room 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 room--was it
possible?

Would William go on talking about the Mannings? She wanted him

to. But, no--for 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?

164
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

165
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, you're 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 table-cloth; 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

166
don't 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 without 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 magnificent... But 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 soup--that 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 then--thank 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

167
after all should poor Augustus not ask for another plate of soup?
He had merely touched Ellen's 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):

168
"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 Augustus--he's a true
poet," which was high praise from her husband.

169
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 Rose's
arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined
shell, of the bananas,

made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of
Neptune's99 banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves
over the shoulder of Bacchus100 (in some picture), among the
leopard skins and the

torches lolloping red and gold... Thus brought up suddenly into the
light it seemed possessed of great size and depth, was like a world
in which one could take one's 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.

170
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

171
now the same effect was got by the many candles in the sparely
furnished room, and

the uncurtained windows, and the bright mask-like 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 brooch--my grandmother's 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?

172
She was by way of being terrified of him--he 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 Middlemarch101 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 too--Minta's glow; he liked

these girls, these golden-reddish girls, with something flying,
something a little wild and harum-scarum102 about them, who
didn't "scrape their hair off,"103 weren't, as he said about poor Lily

173
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 watch-chains, or interrupt him at his work, hailing him

(she heard them), "Come along, Mr. Ramsay; it's 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 herself--"Put it down
there," she said, helping

174
the Swiss girl to place gently before her the huge brown pot in
which

was the Boeuf en Daube--for her own part, she liked her
boobies104. 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 her--now
that they were all talking again--what had happened?

"We went back to look for Minta's brooch," he said, sitting down by
her. "We"--that 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." They'll 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,

175
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 occasion--a curious sense
rising in her, at once freakish

and tender, of celebrating a festival, as if two emotions were

called

up in her, one profound--for 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

176
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 grandmother's,"105 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 William's 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.

177
Always she got her own way in the end, Lily thought. Now she had
brought this off--Paul 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 up--without 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 now--the
emotion, the vibration, of love. How inconspicuous she felt herself
by Paul's side! He, glowing, burning; she, aloof, satirical; he, bound
for adventure;

she, moored to the shore; he, launched, incautious; she solitary,

left out--and, ready to implore a share, if it were a disaster, in his
disaster, she said shyly:

178
"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.

"I'm going to find it," he said, "I'm 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 half-hidden 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 meaning--it was the odd
chuckle

he gave, as if he had said, Throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I
don't 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

179
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; that's what you feel, was
one; that's 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 gem's (Paul's was exquisite) into a bully with a
crowbar (he

180
was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road.106 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 this--love; 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 one's 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

181
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,107 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

182
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 Minta's 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 boots--he 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 wife's 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.

183
They are both cold and aloof and rather self-sufficing. 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

184
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 fifty-three. 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

185
and square roots; that was what they were talking about now; on
Voltaire108 and

Madame de Stael109; on the character of Napoleon110; on the

French system of land tenure; on Lord Rosebery111; on Creevey's
Memoirs112: 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,113

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.114

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

186
it was from his manner--he 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, "I--I--I." For that was
what his

criticism of poor Sir Walter, or perhaps it was Jane Austen,115

amounted to. "I---I---I." 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

187
and separating one thing from another; she would be saying she
liked the Waverly novels116 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 it'll 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 read--he would think at
once.117 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 last--in 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

188
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

189
Tolstoi118 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,"119 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

190
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 it--a 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 one's 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, mask-like faces, for they did not join in easily; they
were like watchers, surveyors, a little raised or set apart from the
grown-up people. But when she looked at Prue tonight, she saw

191
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 table-cloth, 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 people's 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.

192
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 (Minta's) 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.120

193
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:

194
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 Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself

195
differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over
her shoulder, already the past.

196
CHAPTER XVIII

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 smoking-room, into the
drawing-room, up to the attics.

Then one saw Mrs. Ramsay in the midst of this hubbub standing
there with

Minta's 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

197
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,

198
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 mother's); at the rocking-chair (her

father's); at the map of the Hebrides. All that would be revived

199
again in the lives of Paul and Minta; "the Rayleys"--she 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

200
was nailed fast, Mildred said, and Cam couldn't 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 Cam)--must
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, it's 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 Cam's and
said how lovely it looked now; how

201
the fairies would love it; it was like a bird's 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 and... She could see the words echoing as she spoke
them

rhythmically in Cam's mind, and Cam was repeating after her how
it was like a mountain, a bird's 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 boar's 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?

202
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 boar's 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

203
see that he was better treated tomorrow; yet he was admirable
with her husband; yet his manners certainly wanted improving; yet
she liked his laugh--thinking this, as she came downstairs, she
noticed that she could now see the moon itself through the
staircase window--the yellow harvest moon-- and turned, and they
saw her, standing above them on the stairs.

"That's 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,

204
laughing; and running down the last three or four steps quickly,
she began turning from one to the other and laughing and
drawing Minta's

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 wash-leather 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, "I've 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

205
with a wash-leather bag for his watch) she went with a smile on
her lips into the other room, where her husband sat reading.

206
CHAPTER XIX

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 it--
perhaps he was

thinking himself the person in the book. She wondered what book
it was. Oh, it was one of old Sir Walter's123 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 don't read
Scott any more. Then her husband thought, "That's what they'll say
of me;"

207
so he went and got one of those books. And if he came to the
conclusion "That's 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 books--will they be read, are they good,
why aren't 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 gravings124 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 didn't matter, any of it, she thought. A great man, a great book,
fame--who could tell? She knew nothing about it. But it was his
way with him, his truthfulness--for instance at dinner she had been

208
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 want--something 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,

209
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 Mariners126

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 her--her 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. Don't interrupt me, he
seemed to be saying, don't 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 didn't exist at all. But

210
now, he felt, it didn't matter a damn who reached Z (if thought ran
like an alphabet from A to Z). Somebody would reach it--if not he,
then another. This man's strength and sanity, his feeling for
straight

forward simple things, these fishermen, the poor old crazed

creature in Mucklebackit's 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 Scott's hands being tied but
his view perhaps being as true as the other view), forgot his own
bothers and failures

completely in poor Steenie's drowning and Mucklebackit's

sorrow127 (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

211
lovers were fiddlesticks, he thought, collecting it all in his mind
again. That's fiddlesticks, that's first-rate, 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 thought--if
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 Balzac128, 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

212
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,129

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, here--the
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 don't 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 book-learned at all.

213
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 seem'd it winter still, and, you away,

As with your shadow I with these did play,130

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 falling--oh, no, that she had invented; and Paul
having a wash- leather case for his watch. Which should she tell
him about?

214
"They're 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 Steenie's funeral.131 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 wash-leather 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?

215
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 watch-chain to and

fro, and thinking of Scott's novels and Balzac's novels.132 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 disliked--towards
this "pessimism" as

he called it--to fidget, though he said nothing, raising his hand to

his forehead, twisting a lock of hair, letting it fall again.

"You won't finish that stocking tonight," he said, pointing to her

stocking. That was what she wanted--the asperity in his voice
reproving her. If he says it's wrong to be pessimistic probably it is
wrong, she thought; the marriage will turn out all right.

216
"No," she said, flattening the stocking out upon her knee, "I shan't
finish it."

And what then? For she felt that he was still looking at her, but
that

his look had changed. He wanted something--wanted 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 things--she 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 so--it 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
reddish-brown stocking in her hands, partly to turn away from him,
partly because she remembered how beautiful it often is--the 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

217
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. It's going to be wet tomorrow. You won't be
able to go." And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed
again. She had not said it: yet he knew

218
 TIME PASSES

CHAPTER I

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

"It's 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 one's 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,133 kept
his candle burning rather longer than the rest.

219
CHAPTER II

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 drawing-room or in the dining-room or on

the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-
moistened 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 drawing-room questioning and wondering, toying with the flap
of hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much longer, when

220
would it fall? Then smoothly brushing the walls, they passed on
musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wall-paper
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 feather-light 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

221
servants' bedrooms, to the boxes in the attics; descending,
blanched the apples on the dining-room 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,134 blew out his
candle. It was past midnight.]135

222
CHAPTER III

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,

223
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

224
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.]

225
CHAPTER IV

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 drawing-room 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 left--a pair of shoes, a shooting cap,
some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes--those

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 looking-glass 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

226
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 questions--
"Will you fade? Will you perish?"--scarcely 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 dog's bark, a man's
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

227
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 wash-tub, grinding it with boots that
had crunched the

shingle, came as directed to open all windows, and dust the

bedrooms.

228
CHAPTER V

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 world--she 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
looking-glass and leering sideways at her swinging figure a sound
issued from her lips--something that had been gay twenty years
before on the stage perhaps, had been hummed and danced to,
but now, coming from the toothless, bonneted, care-taking
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

229
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 base-born and one
had deserted her), at the public-house, 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.

230
CHAPTER VI

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 father's
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 kind--of 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

231
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.]138

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,

232
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 roomsseemed 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 sun-lanced 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 tea-cups. 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 mid-day when the
roses were bright and light turned on the wall its shape clearly

233
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
bounty--the sunset on

the sea, the pallor of dawn, the moon rising, fishing-boats 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 ashen-coloured 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

234
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.]

235
CHAPTER VII

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 wind-blown 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.

236
CHAPTER VIII

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 looking-glass) it
would want seeing to--it

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 person's 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

rain-pipe 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

237
in the cupboards; they had left clothes in all the bedrooms. What

was she to do with them? They had the moth in them--Mrs.

Ramsay's 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 beds)--she 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 dressing-table, 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 dressing-table 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.

"Good-evening, Mrs. McNab," she would say.

238
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 didn't come down again neither. She could well remember her
in her grey cloak.

"Good-evening, Mrs. McNab," she said, and told cook to keep a

plate of milk soup for her--quite 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 dressing-
table, across the wash-stand, as Mrs. McNab hobbled and ambled,
dusting, straightening. And cook's name now? Mildred? Marian?--
some name like that. Ah, she had forgotten--she did forget things.
Fiery, like all

red-haired 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.

239
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
beast's 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 didn't 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.

240
CHAPTER IX

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. Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the
chrysalis and

pattered their life out on the window-pane. 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.

241
What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of
nature? Mrs. McNab's 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 drawers--it 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 drawing-room, and
the thistle thrust aside the tiles, and the butterfly sun itself on the
faded

chintz of the arm-chairs. 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

242
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 red-hot 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;

243
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 tea-set one morning; in the afternoon
restored to sun and air a brass fender and a set of steel fire-irons.
George, Mrs. Bast's

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 damp-swollen 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!

244
They drank their tea in the bedroom sometimes, or in the study;
breaking off work at mid-day 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 white-stained, breeding pale

mushrooms and secreting furtive spiders. Once more, as she felt
the tea warm in

her, the telescope fitted itself to Mrs. McNab's 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 didn't
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
that--a red- headed woman, quick-tempered 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;

245
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 arm-chair 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
beast's 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 dining-room
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, they'd 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

246
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? They'd find it
changed.

She watched her son scything. He was a great one for work--one
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 half-heard 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

247
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.]

248
CHAPTER X

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 confirm--what else was it murmuring--as 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 said--but 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

249
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.

250
 THE LIGHTHOUSE

CHAPTER I

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 mean?--a 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, nothing--nothing 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 expedition--they were

going to the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James. They

should have gone already--they had to catch the tide or
something. And Cam was

251
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.

"What's 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 Nancy's--What does one send to the Lighthouse?--
opened doors in one's 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?

252
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 ("It's not in the
cupboard; it's 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 too--
repeat 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.140

253
CHAPTER II

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
him--to 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)141 and
like everything else this

strange morning the words became symbols, wrote themselves all

over the grey-green 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 grey-green light on the wall opposite. The empty places.
Such were some of the parts, but how bring them together? she

254
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 table-cloth, 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

old-maidish 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

255
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 approached--he was walking up and down the
terrace--ruin 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 England--the Red, the Fair, the
Wicked, the Ruthless--she felt how they raged under it. Kind old
Mrs. Beckwith said something sensible. But it was a house full of
unrelated passions--she 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

256
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 half-past

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,
they'd both be ready, they said. And it struck her, this was
tragedy--not 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

257
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 he'll be down on me in a moment, demanding--

something 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 died--

258
and 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. Ramsay's doing. She was dead. Here was
Lily, at forty-four, 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. Ramsay's 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 can't waste one's time at
forty- four, she thought. She hated playing at painting. A brush,
the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos--that one
should not play with, knowingly even: she detested it. But he made
her. You shan't touch your canvas, he seemed to say, bearing
down on her, till

you've given me what I want of you. Here he was, close upon her
again, greedy, distraught. Well, thought Lily in despair, letting her
right

259
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

self-surrender, she had seen on so many women's faces (on Mrs.

Ramsay's,

for instance) when on some occasion like this they blazed up--she
could remember the look on Mrs. Ramsay's face--into 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.

260
CHAPTER III

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 then--this 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

261
them to land at the Lighthouse, she said. The Lighthouse! The
Lighthouse! What's 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 something--
all except myself, thought Lily, girding at herself bitterly, who am
not a woman, but a peevish, ill-tempered, dried-up 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 lightkeeper's 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.

262
"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
deck-chair, 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

263
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 said--what did

one say?--Oh, 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 self-pity, 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
annoyance--for

264
after all, what woman could resist him?--he noticed that his boot-
laces 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 half-buttoned waistcoat,
his own indisputably. She could see them walking to his room of
their own accord, expressive in his absence of pathos, surliness, ill-
temper, 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 ill-temper 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 first-rate 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

265
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 play-actor) she felt her eyes
swell and tingle with tears? Thus occupied he seemed to her a

266
figure of infinite pathos. He tied knots. He bought boots. There
was no helping

Mr. Ramsay on the journey he was going. But now just as she
wished to say something, could have said something, perhaps,
here they were--Cam and James. They appeared on the terrace.
They came, lagging, side by side, a serious, melancholy couple.

But why was it like that that they came? She could not help feeling
annoyed with them; they might have come more cheerfully; they
might have given him what, now that they were off, she would not
have the chance of giving him. For she felt a sudden emptiness; a
frustration. Her feeling had come too late; there it was ready; but
he no longer needed it. He had become a very distinguished,
elderly man, who had no need of her whatsoever. She felt
snubbed. He slung a knapsack round

his shoulders. He shared out the parcels--there were a number of

them, ill tied in brown paper. He sent Cam for a cloak. He had all
the appearance of a leader making ready for an expedition. Then,
wheeling about, he led the way with his firm military tread, in
those wonderful boots, carrying brown paper parcels, down the
path, his children following him. They looked, she thought, as if
fate had devoted them

267
to some stern enterprise, and they went to it, still young enough to
be drawn acquiescent in their father's wake, obediently, but with a
pallor in their eyes which made her feel that they suffered
something beyond their years in silence. So they passed the edge
of the lawn, and it seemed to Lily that she watched a procession
go, drawn on by some

stress of common feeling which made it, faltering and flagging as

it was, a little company bound together and strangely impressive
to her. Politely, but very distantly, Mr. Ramsay raised his hand and
saluted her as they passed.

But what a face, she thought, immediately finding the sympathy

which she had not been asked to give troubling her for expression.
What had made it like that? Thinking, night after night, she
supposed--about

the reality of kitchen tables, she added, remembering the symbol

which

in her vagueness as to what Mr. Ramsay did think about Andrew

had given her. (He had been killed by the splinter of a shell
instantly, she

bethought her.) The kitchen table was something visionary,

austere;

268
something bare, hard, not ornamental. There was no colour to it; it

was all edges and angles; it was uncompromisingly plain. But Mr.
Ramsay kept always his eyes fixed upon it, never allowed himself
to be

distracted or deluded, until his face became worn too and ascetic
and partook of this unornamented beauty which so deeply
impressed her. Then, she recalled (standing where he had left her,
holding her brush), worries had fretted it--not so nobly. He must
have had his doubts

about that table, she supposed; whether the table was a real table;
whether it was worth the time he gave to it; whether he was able
after all to find it. He had had doubts, she felt, or he would have
asked

less of people. That was what they talked about late at night

sometimes, she suspected; and then next day Mrs. Ramsay looked
tired, and Lily flew into a rage with him over some absurd little
thing. But now he had nobody to talk to about that table, or his
boots, or his

knots; and he was like a lion seeking whom he could devour, and
his face had that touch of desperation, of exaggeration in it which
alarmed her, and made her pull her skirts about her. And then, she
recalled, there was that sudden revivification, that sudden flare

269
(when she praised his boots), that sudden recovery of vitality and
interest in

ordinary human things, which too passed and changed (for he was
always changing, and hid nothing) into that other final phase
which was new to her and had, she owned, made herself ashamed
of her own irritability, when it seemed as if he had shed worries
and ambitions, and the hope of sympathy and the desire for
praise, had entered some other region, was drawn on, as if by
curiosity, in dumb colloquy, whether with himself or another, at the
head of that little procession out of one's range. An extraordinary
face! The gate banged.

270
CHAPTER IV

So they're gone, she thought, sighing with relief and

disappointment. Her sympathy seemed to be cast back on her, like
a bramble sprung across her face. She felt curiously divided, as if
one part of her

were drawn out there--it was a still day, hazy; the Lighthouse
looked this morning at an immense distance; the other had fixed
itself doggedly, solidly, here on the lawn. She saw her canvas as if
it had floated up and placed itself white and uncompromising
directly before her. It seemed to rebuke her with its cold stare for
all this hurry

and agitation; this folly and waste of emotion; it drastically

recalled her and spread through her mind first a peace, as her
disorderly sensations (he had gone and she had been so sorry for
him and she had said nothing) trooped off the field; and then,
emptiness. She looked blankly at the canvas, with its
uncompromising white stare; from the canvas to the garden. There
was something (she stood screwing up her little Chinese eyes in
her small puckered face), something she

remembered in the relations of those lines cutting across, slicing

down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green cave of blues
and browns, which had stayed in her mind; which had tied a knot

271
in her mind so that at odds and ends of time, involuntarily, as she
walked along

the Brompton Road,142 as she brushed her hair, she found herself
painting that picture, passing her eye over it, and untying the knot
in

imagination. But there was all the difference in the world between

this planning airily away from the canvas and actually taking her
brush and making the first mark.

She had taken the wrong brush in her agitation at Mr. Ramsay's
presence, and her easel, rammed into the earth so nervously, was
at the wrong angle. And now that she had got 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 begin?--that was the question at what point to make
the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to

innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in

idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as

the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but

272
to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and
foaming crests. Still the

risk must be run; the mark made.

With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward

and at the same time must hold herself back, she made her first
quick decisive stroke. The brush descended. It flickered brown over
the white canvas; it left a running mark. A second time she did it--
a third time. And

so pausing and so flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical

movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the
strokes another, and all were related; and so, lightly and swiftly
pausing, striking, she scored her canvas with brown running
nervous lines which had no sooner settled there than they enclosed
( she felt it looming

out at her) a space. Down in the hollow of one wave she saw the
next wave towering higher and higher above her. For what could
be more formidable than that space? Here she was again, she
thought, stepping back to look at it, drawn out of gossip, out of
living, out of

community with people into the presence of this formidable

ancient enemy of hers--this other thing, this truth, this reality,
which

273
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 lamp-shade looming on a
wicker table, roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a
fight

in which one was bound to be worsted. Always (it was in her

nature, or in her sex, she did not know which) before she
exchanged the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting she
had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn
soul, a soul reft of body,

hesitating on some windy pinnacle and exposed without

protection to all the blasts of doubt. Why then did she do it? She
looked at the

canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be hung in the

servants' bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a
sofa.

What was the good of doing it then, and she heard some voice
saying she

274
couldn't paint, saying she couldn't create, as if she were caught up
in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time
experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without
being aware any longer who originally spoke them.

Can't paint, can't write, she murmured monotonously, anxiously

considering what her plan of attack should be. For the mass
loomed before her; it protruded; she felt it pressing on her
eyeballs. Then,

as if some juice necessary for the lubrication of her faculties were

spontaneously squirted, she began precariously dipping among
the blues and umbers, moving her brush hither and thither, but it
was now heavier and went slower, as if it had fallen in with some
rhythm which was dictated to her (she kept looking at the hedge,
at the canvas) by what

she rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with it on its
current. Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things.
And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and
her personality

and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or

not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and
names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain

275
spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while
she modelled it with greens and blues.

Charles Tansley used to say that, she remembered, women can't

paint, can't write. Coming up behind her, he had stood close
beside her, a thing she hated, as she painted her on this very spot.
"Shag tobacco,"143 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.)144 He was always carrying a
book about under his arm--a purple book. He "worked." He sat,
she remembered, working in a blaze of sun. At dinner he would sit
right in the middle of the view. But after all, she reflected, there
was the

scene on the beach. One must remember that. It was a windy

morning. They had all gone down to the beach. Mrs. Ramsay sat
down and wrote letters by a rock. She wrote and wrote. "Oh," she
said, looking up at

something floating in the sea, "is it a lobster pot? Is it an upturned

boat?" She was so short-sighted that she could not see, and then
Charles Tansley became as nice as he could possibly be. He began
playing ducks and drakes. They chose little flat black stones and
sent

276
them skipping over the waves. Every now and then Mrs. Ramsay
looked up over her spectacles and laughed at them. What they
said she could not remember, but only she and Charles throwing
stones and getting on very well all of a sudden and Mrs. Ramsay
watching them. She was highly conscious of that. Mrs. Ramsay,
she thought, stepping back and screwing

up her eyes. (It must have altered the design a good deal when
she was sitting on the step with James. There must have been a
shadow.) When she thought of herself and Charles throwing ducks
and drakes and of the

whole scene on the beach, it seemed to depend somehow upon

Mrs. Ramsay sitting under the rock, with a pad on her knee, writing
letters. (She

wrote innumerable letters, and sometimes the wind took them and
she and Charles just saved a page from the sea.) But what a
power was in the human soul! she thought. That woman sitting
there writing under the

rock resolved everything into simplicity; made these angers,

irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and that
and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite
(she and Charles squabbling, sparring, had been silly and spiteful)
something--this scene on the beach for example, this moment of

277
friendship and liking--which survived, after all these years
complete, so that she dipped into it to re-fashion her memory of
him, and there it stayed in the mind affecting one almost like a
work of art.

"Like a work of art," she repeated, looking from her canvas to the
drawing-room steps and back again. She must rest for a moment.
And, resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old
question which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast,
the general

question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as

these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain,
stood over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the
meaning of life? That was all--a simple question; one that tended
to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come.
The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there 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

278
make of the moment something permanent)--this was of the
nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this
eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and
the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here,
Mrs. Ramsay

said. "Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!" she repeated. She owed it all to
her.

All was silence. Nobody seemed yet to be stirring in the house. She
looked at it there sleeping in the early sunlight with its windows
green and blue with the reflected leaves. The faint thought she was

thinking of Mrs. Ramsay seemed in consonance with this quiet

house; this smoke; this fine early morning air. Faint and unreal, it
was amazingly

pure and exciting. She hoped nobody would open the window or
come out of the house, but that she might be left alone to go on
thinking, to go

on painting. She turned to her canvas. But impelled by some

curiosity, driven by the discomfort of the sympathy which she held
undischarged, she walked a pace or so to the end of the lawn to
see whether, down there on the beach, she could see that little
company setting sail.

279
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.

280
CHAPTER V

The sails flapped over their heads. The water chuckled and
slapped the sides of the boat, which drowsed motionless in the
sun. Now and then the sails rippled with a little breeze in them, but
the ripple ran over

them and ceased. The boat made no motion at all. Mr. Ramsay sat
in the middle of the boat. He would be impatient in a moment,
James thought, and Cam thought, looking at her father, who sat in
the middle of the

boat between them (James steered; Cam sat alone in the bow)
with his legs tightly curled. He hated hanging about. Sure enough,
after fidgeting a second or two, he said something sharp to
Macalister's boy, who got out his oars and began to row. But their
father, they knew, would never be content until they were flying
along. He would keep looking for a breeze, fidgeting, saying things
under his breath, which

Macalister and and Macalister's boy would overhear, and they

would both be made horribly uncomfortable. He had made them
come. He had forced them to come. In their anger they hoped that
the breeze would never

rise, that he might be thwarted in every possible way, since he had

forced them to come against their wills.

281
All the way down to the beach they had lagged behind together,
though he bade them "Walk up, walk up," without speaking. Their
heads were bent down, their heads were pressed down by some
remorseless gale. Speak to him they could not. They must come;
they must follow. They must walk behind him carrying brown
paper parcels. But they vowed, in silence, as they walked, to stand
by each other and carry out the great compact--to resist tyranny
to the death. So there they would sit, one

at one end of the boat, one at the other, in silence. They would say
nothing, only look at him now and then where he sat with his legs

twisted, frowning and fidgeting, and pishing and pshawing and

muttering 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 Macalister's 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.

282
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 question--about the great

storm last winter probably--and 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

283
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 point--Macalister told the story; and though they only

caught a word here and there, they were conscious all the time of
their father--how he leant forward, how he brought his voice into
tune with Macalister's 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

284
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

285
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."145 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

286
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,"146 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 women's sympathy, and he imagined how they would

soothe him and sympathise with him, and so getting in his dream
some reflection of

287
the exquisite pleasure women's 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 her--it 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 waves--all this was real. Thinking this,
she was

murmuring to herself, "We perished, each alone,"147 for her

father's words broke and broke again in her mind, when her father,
seeing her gazing

so vaguely, began to tease her. Didn't she know the points of the
compass? he asked. Didn't she know the North from the South?

288
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
me--which 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 her--
his 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

289
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 sister's
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

entreaty--forgive 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

290
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 god-like, 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. He'd 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. She'll 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

291
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 won't give way, he thought; she's 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. I'll 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 Macalister's boy had
caught

292
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, you're

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 Macalister's
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

293
asleep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and
go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.

294
CHAPTER VI

Yes, that is their boat, Lily Briscoe decided, standing on the edge
of the lawn. It was the boat with greyish-brown 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.

"D'you remember, Mr. Carmichael?" she was inclined to ask,

looking at the old man. But he had pulled his hat half over his

295
forehead; he was asleep, or he was dreaming, or he was lying
there catching words, she supposed.

"D'you 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 butterfly's 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.148 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

296
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

cathedral-like 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? Aren't things
spoilt then,

Mrs. Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so

often, this silence by her side) by saying them? Aren't we more
expressive thus? The moment at least seemed extraordinarily
fertile. She rammed a

297
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 canvas--so--into 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 house--time 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 mid-day--all 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 now--
holding his hand in front of

298
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 o'clock in the
morning. Paul came out in his pyjamas carrying a poker in case of
burglars. Minta was eating a sandwich, standing half-way 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;

299
she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the
same. She went on tunnelling her way into her picture, into the
past.

Another time, Paul said he "played chess in coffee-houses." She

had built up a whole structure of imagination on that saying too.
She remembered how, as he said it, she thought how he rang up
the servant, and she said, "Mrs. Rayley's out, sir," and he decided
that he would not come home either. She saw him sitting in the
corner of some lugubrious place where the smoke attached itself
to the red plush seats, and the waitresses got to know you, and he
played chess with a little man who

was in the tea trade and lived at Surbiton,149 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,150 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

300
tell her anything.

Minta was bored by hares, Lily thought. But Minta never gave
herself away. She never said things like that about playing chess in
coffee- houses. She was far too conscious, far too wary. But to go
on with their story--they had got through the dangerous stage by
now. She had

been staying with them last summer some time and the car broke
down and

Minta had to hand him his tools. He sat on the road mending the
car, and it was the way she gave him the tools--business-like,
straightforward, friendly--that proved it was all right now. They
were "in love" no longer; no, he had taken up with another woman,
a serious woman, with her hair in a plait and a case in her hand
(Minta had described her gratefully, almost admiringly), who went
to meetings and

shared Paul's views (they had got more and more pronounced)
about the taxation of land values and a capital levy. Far from
breaking up the marriage, that alliance had righted it. They were
excellent friends, obviously, as he sat on the road and she handed
him his tools.

301
So that was the story of the Rayleys, Lily thought. She imagined
herself telling it to Mrs. Ramsay, who would be full of curiosity to
know what had become of the Rayleys. She would feel a little
triumphant, telling Mrs. Ramsay that the marriage had not been a
success.

But the dead, thought Lily, encountering some obstacle in her

design which made her pause and ponder, stepping back a foot or
so, oh, the dead! she murmured, one pitied them, one brushed
them aside, one had even a little contempt for them. They are at
our mercy. Mrs. Ramsay has faded and gone, she thought. We can
over-ride her wishes, improve away her limited, old-fashioned
ideas. She recedes further and further from us. Mockingly she
seemed to see her there at the end of the corridor of years saying,
of all incongruous things, "Marry, marry!" (sitting very upright early
in the morning with the birds beginning to cheep in the garden
outside). And one would have to say to her, It has all gone against
your wishes. They're happy like that; I'm happy like this. Life has
changed completely. At that all her being, even her

beauty, became for a moment, dusty and out of date. For a

moment Lily, standing there, with the sun hot on her back,
summing up the Rayleys, triumphed over Mrs. Ramsay, who would
never know how Paul went to coffee-houses and had a mistress;

302
how he sat on the ground and Minta handed him his tools; how she
stood here painting, had never married, not even William Bankes.

Mrs. Ramsay had planned it. Perhaps, had she lived, she would
have compelled it. Already that summer he was "the kindest of
men." He was "the first scientist of his age, my husband says." He
was also "poor William--it makes me so unhappy, when I go to see
him, to find nothing nice in his house--no one to arrange the
flowers." So they were sent

for walks together, and she was told, with that faint touch of irony
that made Mrs. Ramsay slip through one's fingers, that she had a
scientific mind; she liked flowers; she was so exact. What was this
mania of hers for marriage? Lily wondered, stepping to and fro
from her easel.

(Suddenly, as suddenly as a star slides in the sky, a reddish light

seemed to burn in her mind, covering Paul Rayley, issuing from

him. It rose like a fire sent up in token of some celebration by
savages on a distant beach. She heard the roar and the crackle.
The whole sea for miles round ran red and gold. Some winey smell
mixed with it and intoxicated her, for she felt again her own
headlong desire to throw herself off the cliff and be drowned

303
looking for a pearl brooch on a beach. And the roar and the
crackle repelled her with fear and

disgust, as if while she saw its splendour and power she saw too
how it fed on the treasure of the house, greedily, disgustingly, and
she

loathed it. But for a sight, for a glory it surpassed everything in her
experience, and burnt year after year like a signal fire on a

desert island at the edge of the sea, and one had only to say "in
love" and instantly, as happened now, up rose Paul's fire again.
And it sank and she said to herself, laughing, "The Rayleys"; how
Paul went to coffee-houses and played chess.)

She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth though, she thought.
She had been looking at the table-cloth, and it had flashed upon
her that

she would move the tree to the middle, and need never marry
anybody, and she had felt an enormous exultation. She had felt,
now she could stand up to Mrs. Ramsay--a tribute to the
astonishing power that Mrs. Ramsay had over one. Do this, she
said, and one did it. Even her

shadow at the window with James was full of authority. She

remembered how William Bankes had been shocked by her

304
neglect of the significance of mother and son. Did she not admire
their beauty? he said. But

William, she remembered, had listened to her with his wise child's
eyes when she explained how it was not irreverence: how a light
there needed a shadow there and so on. She did not intend to
disparage a subject

which, they agreed, Raphael151 had treated divinely. She was not
cynical. Quite the contrary. Thanks to his scientific mind he
understood--a

proof of disinterested intelligence which had pleased her and

comforted

her enormously. One could talk of painting then seriously to a man.

Indeed, his friendship had been one of the pleasures of her life.
She loved William Bankes.

They went to Hampton Court and he always left her, like the
perfect gentleman he was, plenty of time to wash her hands,153
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,

305
and he would tell her things, about perspective, about
architecture, as they walked, and

he would stop to look at a tree, or the view over the lake, and
admire

a child--(it was his great grief--he had no daughter) in the 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 drawing-room step. She saw, through

William's eyes, the shape of a woman, peaceful and silent, with
downcast eyes. She sat musing, pondering (she was in grey that
day, Lily thought).

306
Her eyes were bent. She would never lift them. Yes, thought Lily,
looking intently, I must have seen her look like that, but not in
grey; nor so still, nor so young, nor so peaceful. The figure came
readily enough. She was astonishingly beautiful, as William said.
But beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty--it came
too readily, came too completely. It stilled life--froze it. One forgot
the little

agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light
or shadow, which made the face unrecognisable for a moment
and yet added a quality one saw for ever after. It was simpler to
smooth that all out

under the cover of beauty. But what was the look she had, Lily
wondered, when she clapped her deer-stalker's hat on her head, or
ran

across the grass, or scolded Kennedy, the gardener? Who could

tell her? Who could help her?

Against her will she had come to the surface, and found herself
half out of the picture, looking, little dazedly, as if at unreal things,
at

307
Mr. Carmichael. He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above
his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature
gorged with existence. His book had fallen on to the grass.

She wanted to go straight up to him and say, "Mr. Carmichael!"

Then he would look up benevolently as always, from his smoky
vague green eyes. But one only woke people if one knew what one
wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but
everything. Little words that broke up the thought and
dismembered it said nothing. "About life,

about death; about Mrs. Ramsay"--no, she thought, one could say
nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its
mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too
low. Then

one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became
like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles
between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how
could one express in words these emotions of the body? express
that emptiness there?

(She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked

extraordinarily empty.) It was one's body feeling, not one's mind.
The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps
had become

308
suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all
up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want
and not

to have--to want and want--how that wrung the heart, and wrung
it again and again! Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! she called out silently, to that
essence which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that
woman in

grey, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then having gone,
come back again. It had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost,
air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at
any time

of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her
hand out and wrung the heart thus. Suddenly, the empty drawing-
room steps, the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the
terrace, the

whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and
arabesques flourishing round a centre of complete emptiness.

"What does it mean? How do you explain it all?" she wanted to

say, turning to Mr. Carmichael again. For the whole world seemed
to have dissolved in this early morning hour into a pool of thought,
a deep basin of reality, and one could almost fancy that had Mr.

309
Carmichael spoken, for instance, a little tear would have rent the
surface pool.

And then? Something would emerge. A hand would be shoved up,

a blade would be flashed. It was nonsense of course.

A curious notion came to her that he did after all hear the things
she could not say. He was an inscrutable old man, with the yellow
stain on his beard, and his poetry, and his puzzles, sailing serenely
through a world which satisfied all his wants, so that she thought
he had only to put down his hand where he lay on the lawn to fish
up anything he

wanted. She looked at her picture. That would have been his
answer, presumably--how "you" and "I" and "she" pass and vanish;
nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint. Yet it would
be hung in the

attics, she thought; it would be rolled up and flung under a sofa;

yet even so, even of a picture like that, it was true. One might say,
even of this scrawl, not of that actual picture, perhaps, but of what
it attempted, that it "remained for ever," she was going to say, or,
for the words spoken sounded even to herself, too boastful, to
hint, wordlessly; when, looking at the picture, she was surprised to
find that she could not see it. Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she
did not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the

310
firmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks.
She had perfect control of herself--Oh, yes!--in every other way.
Was she crying then

for Mrs. Ramsay, without being aware of any unhappiness? She

addressed old Mr. Carmichael again. What was it then? What did it
mean? Could things thrust their hands up and grip one; could the
blade cut; the

fist grasp? Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways

of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping
from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for
elderly people, that this was life?--startling, unexpected, unknown?
For one moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the
lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was
it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped
human beings

from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would
roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would
form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would
return. "Mrs.

Ramsay!" she said aloud, "Mrs. Ramsay!" The tears ran down her
face.

311
CHAPTER VII

[Macalister's boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its
side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still)
was thrown back into the sea.]

312
CHAPTER VIII

"Mrs. Ramsay!" Lily cried, "Mrs. Ramsay!" But nothing happened.

The pain increased. That anguish could reduce one to such a pitch
of

imbecility, she thought! Anyhow the old man had not heard her. He
remained benignant, calm--if one chose to think it, sublime.
Heaven be praised, no one had heard her cry that ignominious cry,
stop pain,

stop! She had not obviously taken leave of her senses. No one had

seen her step off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation.
She remained a skimpy old maid, holding a paint-brush.

And now slowly the pain of the want, and the bitter anger (to be
called back, just as she thought she would never feel sorrow for
Mrs. Ramsay again. Had she missed her among the coffee cups at
breakfast? not in the least) lessened; and of their anguish left, as
antidote, a relief

that was balm in itself, and also, but more mysteriously, a sense of

some one there, of Mrs. Ramsay, relieved for a moment of the

weight that the world had put on her, staying lightly by her side
and then (for

313
this was Mrs. Ramsay in all her beauty) raising to her forehead a
wreath of white flowers with which she went. Lily squeezed her
tubes again. She attacked that problem of the hedge. It was
strange how clearly she saw her, stepping with her usual quickness
across fields among whose folds, purplish and soft, among whose
flowers, hyacinth or lilies, she vanished. It was some trick of the
painter's eye. For days after she

had heard of her death she had seen her thus, putting her wreath
to her forehead and going unquestioningly with her companion, a
shade across the fields. The sight, the phrase, had its power to
console. Wherever

she happened to be, painting, here, in the country or in London,

the vision would come to her, and her eyes, half closing, sought
something to base her vision on. She looked down the railway
carriage, the omnibus; took a line from shoulder or cheek; looked
at the windows opposite; at Piccadilly, lamp-strung in the evening.
All had been part

of the fields of death. But always something--it might be a face, a

voice, a paper boy crying Standard, News154--thrust through,

snubbed her, waked her, required and got in the end an effort of
attention, so that

314
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. Ramsay's boat, she replied. Mr. Ramsay; the man
who had marched past her, with his hand raised, aloof, at the
head of a procession, in his beautiful boots, asking her for
sympathy, which

she had refused. The boat was now half way across the bay.

So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and
there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were
stuck high up

in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea. A steamer
far out at sea had drawn in the air a great scroll of smoke which
stayed there curving and circling decoratively, as if the air were a
fine

gauze which held things and kept them softly in its mesh, only
gently swaying them this way and that. And as happens
sometimes when the

315
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.

316
CHAPTER IX

They don't feel a thing there, Cam thought, looking at the shore,
which, rising and falling, became steadily more distant and more
peaceful. Her hand cut a trail in the sea, as her mind made the
green swirls and streaks into patterns and, numbed and shrouded,
wandered in imagination in that underworld of waters where the
pearls stuck in clusters to white sprays, where in the green light a
change came over one's entire mind and one's body shone half
transparent enveloped in a green cloak.

Then the eddy slackened round her hand. The rush of the water
ceased; the world became full of little creaking and squeaking
sounds. One heard the waves breaking and flapping against the
side of the boat as

if they were anchored in harbour. Everything became very close to

one. For the sail, upon which James had his eyes fixed until it had
become

to him like a person whom he knew, sagged entirely; there they

came to a stop, flapping about waiting for a breeze, in the hot sun,
miles from shore, miles from the Lighthouse. Everything in the
whole world seemed to stand still. The Lighthouse became
immovable, and the line of the distant shore became fixed. The

317
sun grew hotter and everybody seemed to come very close
together and to feel each other's presence, which

they had almost forgotten. Macalister's fishing line went plumb

down into the sea. But Mr. Ramsay went on reading with his legs
curled under him.

He was reading a little shiny book with covers mottled like a

plover's egg. Now and again, as they hung about in that horrid
calm, he turned a page. And James felt that each page was
turned with a peculiar

gesture aimed at him; now assertively, now commandingly; now

with the intention of making people pity him; and all the time, as
his father

read and turned one after another of those little pages, James
kept dreading the moment when he would look up and speak
sharply to him about something or other. Why were they lagging
about here? he would demand, or something quite unreasonable
like that. And if he does, James thought, then I shall take a knife
and strike him to the heart.

He had always kept this old symbol of taking a knife and striking
his father to the heart. Only now, as he grew older, and sat

318
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 him--without his knowing it perhaps: that fierce
sudden black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold
and hard,

that struck and struck at you (he could feel the beak on his bare
legs, where it had struck when he was a child) and then made off,
and there he was again, an old man, very sad, reading his book.
That he would kill, that he would strike to the heart. Whatever he
did--(and he

might do anything, he felt, looking at the Lighthouse and the

distant shore) whether he was in a business, in a bank, a barrister,
a man at the head of some enterprise, that he would fight, that he
would track down and stamp out--tyranny, despotism, he called it-
-making people do what they did not want to do, cutting off their
right to speak. How could any of them say, But I won't, when he
said, Come to the Lighthouse. Do this. Fetch me that. The black
wings spread, and the hard beak tore. And then next moment,
there he sat reading his book;

and he might look up--one never knew--quite reasonably. He

might talk to the Macalisters. He might be pressing a sovereign
into some frozen old woman's hand in the street, James thought,
and he might be shouting out at some fisherman's sports; he

319
might be waving his arms in the air with excitement. Or he might
sit at the head of the table dead silent

from one end of dinner to the other. Yes, thought James, while the
boat slapped and dawdled there in the hot sun; there was a waste
of snow and rock very lonely and austere; and there he had come
to feel, quite often lately, when his father said something or did
something which surprised the others, there were two pairs of
footprints only;

his own and his father's. They alone knew each other. What then
was this terror, this hatred?155 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 one's eyes,

now with a dark shadow, he sought an image to cool and detach

and round off his feeling in a concrete shape. Suppose then that
as a child

sitting helpless in a perambulator, or on some one's knee, he had

seen

a waggon crush ignorantly and innocently, some one's foot?

Suppose he had seen the foot first, in the grass, smooth, and
whole; then the

320
wheel; and the same foot, purple, crushed. But the wheel was
innocent.

So now, when his father came striding down the passage knocking
them up early in the morning to go to the Lighthouse down it
came over his

foot, over Cam's foot, over anybody's foot. One sat and watched
it.

But whose foot was he thinking of, and in what garden did all this
happen? For one had settings for these scenes; trees that grew
there; flowers; a certain light; a few figures. Everything tended to
set

itself in a garden where there was none of this gloom. None of this
throwing of hands about; people spoke in an ordinary tone of
voice.

They went in and out all day long. There was an old woman
gossiping in the kitchen; and the blinds were sucked in and out by
the breeze; all

was blowing, all was growing; and over all those plates and bowls
and tall brandishing red and yellow flowers a very thin yellow veil
would be drawn, like a vine leaf, at night. Things became stiller and
darker

321
at night. But the leaf-like veil was so fine, that lights lifted it, voices
crinkled it; he could see through it a figure stooping, hear, coming
close, going away, some dress rustling, some chain tinkling.

It was in this world that the wheel went over the person's foot.
Something, he remembered, stayed flourished up in the air,
something arid and sharp descended even there, like a blade, a
scimitar, smiting through the leaves and flowers even of that
happy world and making it shrivel and fall.

"It will rain," he remembered his father saying. "You won't be able
to go to the Lighthouse."

The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a

yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now--

James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed

rocks;

the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with

black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see
washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse,
was it?

322
No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one
thing. The other Lighthouse was true too. It was sometimes hardly
to be seen across the bay. In the evening one looked up and saw
the eye opening and shutting and the light seemed to reach them
in that airy sunny garden where they sat.

But he pulled himself up. Whenever he said "they" or "a person,"

and then began hearing the rustle of some one coming, the tinkle
of some one going, he became extremely sensitive to the presence
of whoever might be in the room. It was his father now. The strain
was acute.

For in one moment if there was no breeze, his father would slap
the covers of his book together, and say: "What's happening now?
What are we dawdling about here for, eh?" as, once before he had
brought his blade down among them on the terrace and she had
gone stiff all over, and if there had been an axe handy, a knife, or
anything with a sharp point he would have seized it and struck his
father through the heart. She had gone stiff all over, and then, her
arm slackening, so that he

felt she listened to him no longer, she had risen somehow and
gone away and left him there, impotent, ridiculous, sitting on the
floor grasping

323
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 one's head. But all the time he thought of her, he was
conscious of

his father following his thought, surveying it, making it shiver and
falter. At last he ceased to think.

324
There he sat with his hand on the tiller in the sun, staring at the
Lighthouse, powerless to move, powerless to flick off these grains
of misery which settled on his mind one after another. A rope
seemed to bind him there, and his father had knotted it and he
could only escape by taking a knife and plunging it... But at that
moment the sail

swung slowly round, filled slowly out, the boat seemed to shake
herself, and then to move off half conscious in her sleep, and then
she woke and shot through the waves. The relief was
extraordinary. They all seemed to fall away from each other again
and to be at their

ease, and the fishing-lines 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.

325
CHAPTER X

[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.]

326
CHAPTER XI

It was like that then, the island, thought Cam, once more drawing
her fingers through the waves. She had never seen it from out at
sea before. It lay like that on the sea, did it, with a dent in the
middle

and two sharp crags, and the sea swept in there, and spread away
for miles and miles on either side of the island. It was very small;

shaped something like a leaf stood on end. So we took a little

boat, she thought, beginning to tell herself a story of adventure
about escaping from a sinking ship. But with the sea streaming
through her fingers, a spray of seaweed vanishing behind them,
she did not want to tell herself seriously a story; it was the sense of
adventure and

escape that she wanted, for she was thinking, as the boat sailed
on, how her father's anger about the points of the compass,
James's obstinacy about the compact, and her own anguish, all
had slipped, all had passed, all had streamed away. What then
came next? Where were they going? From her hand, ice cold, held
deep in the sea, there

spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the

adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there). And

327
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.156 Small as it was, and shaped something like a
leaf stood on its end with the gold- sprinkled waters flowing in and
about it, it had, she supposed, a place

in the universe--even that little island? The old gentlemen in the

study she thought could have told her. Sometimes she strayed in
from the garden purposely to catch them at it. There they were (it
might be Mr. Carmichael or Mr. Bankes who was sitting with her
father) sitting opposite each other in their low arm-chairs. They
were crackling in

front of them the pages of The Times, when she came in from the
garden, all in a muddle, about something some one had said
about Christ, or hearing that a mammoth had been dug up in a
London street, or wondering what Napoleon157 was like. Then they
took all this with their clean hands (they wore grey-coloured
clothes; they smelt of heather) and they

brushed the scraps together, turning the paper, crossing their

knees,

and said something now and then very brief. Just to please herself
she would take a book from the shelf and stand there, watching

328
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 plover's 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

329
said, looking at him. Look at him now. She looked at him reading
the little book with his legs curled; the little book whose yellowish
pages she knew, without knowing what was written on them. It
was small; it was closely printed; on the fly-leaf, she knew, he had
written that he had spent fifteen francs on dinner; the wine had
been so much; he had given so much to the waiter; all was added
up neatly at the bottom of the page. But what might be written in
the book which had rounded its edges off in his pocket, she did
not know. What he thought they none

of them knew. But he was absorbed in it, so that when he looked

up, as he did now for an instant, it was not to see anything; it was
to pin

down some thought more exactly. That done, his mind flew back
again and he plunged into his reading. He read, she thought, as if
he were guiding something, or wheedling a large flock of sheep, or
pushing his way up and up a single narrow path; and sometimes
he went fast and straight, and broke his way through the bramble,
and sometimes it seemed a branch struck at him, a bramble
blinded him, but he was not going to let himself be beaten by that;
on he went, tossing over page after page. And she went on telling
herself a story about escaping

from a sinking ship, for she was safe, while he sat there; safe, as
she felt herself when she crept in from the garden, and took a

330
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.

331
CHAPTER XII

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

332
silence, this emptiness, and the unreality of the early morning hour.

It was a way things had sometimes, she thought, lingering for a

moment and looking at the long glittering windows and the plume
of blue smoke: they became illness, before habits had spun
themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which
was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.
One could be at one's

ease. Mercifully one need not say, very briskly, crossing the lawn to

greet old Mrs. Beckwith, who would be coming out to find a corner
to sit in, "Oh, good-morning, Mrs. Beckwith! What a lovely day! Are
you going to be so bold as to sit in the sun? Jasper's hidden the
chairs. Do

let me find you one!" and all the rest of the usual chatter. One need
not speak at all. One glided, one shook one's sails (there was a
good deal of movement in the bay, boats were starting off)
between things, beyond things. Empty it was not, but full to the
brim. She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance,
to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were
unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The
Ramsays'; the children's; and all sorts

of waifs and strays of things besides. A washer-woman with her

basket; a rook, a red-hot poker159; the purples and grey-greens of
flowers: some common feeling which held the whole together.

333
It was some such feeling of completeness perhaps which, ten
years ago, standing almost where she stood now, had made her
say that she must be in love with the place. Love had a thousand
shapes. There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the
elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a
wholeness not theirs in life, make

of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate),

one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers,
and love plays.

Her eyes rested on the brown speck of Mr. Ramsay's sailing boat.
They would be at the Lighthouse by lunch time she supposed. But
the wind had freshened, and, as the sky changed slightly and the
sea changed slightly and the 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

334
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

335
nothing by soliciting urgently. One got only a glare in the eye from
looking at the line of the wall, or from thinking--she wore a grey
hat. She was astonishingly beautiful. Let it come, she thought, if it
will come.

For there are moments when one can neither think nor feel. 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.160 For the

lawn was very rough. Here sitting on the world, she thought, for
she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything
this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last
time, as a

traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the

train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that
town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.
The lawn was the world; they were up here together, on this
exalted

station, she thought, looking at old Mr. Carmichael, who seemed

(though they had not said a word all this time) to share her
thoughts. And she would never see him again perhaps. He was
growing old. Also, she remembered, smiling at the slipper that
dangled from his foot, he was growing famous. People said that
his poetry was "so beautiful." They

336
went and published things he had written forty years ago. There
was a famous man now called Carmichael, she smiled, thinking
how many shapes one person might wear, how he was that in the
newspapers, but here the same as he had always been. He looked
the same--greyer, rather.

Yes, he looked the same, but somebody had said, she recalled,
that when he had heard of Andrew Ramsay's death (he was killed
in a second by a shell; he should have been a great
mathematician) Mr. Carmichael had "lost all interest in life." What
did it mean--that? she wondered. Had

he marched through Trafalgar Square grasping a big stick? Had

he turned pages over and over, without reading them, sitting in his
room

in St. John's Wood alone? She did not know what he had done,
when he heard that Andrew was killed, but she felt it in him all the
same.

They only mumbled at each other on staircases; they looked up at

the

sky and said it will be fine or it won't be fine. But this was one way

of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail,
to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple

337
down into the distant heather. She knew him in that way. She knew
that he had changed somehow. She had never read a line of his
poetry. She thought that she knew how it went though, slowly and
sonorously. It was seasoned and mellow. It was about the desert
and the camel. It was about the palm tree and the sunset. It was
extremely impersonal;

it said something about death; it said very little about love. There

was an impersonality about him. He wanted very little of other

people.

Had he not always lurched rather awkwardly past the drawing-

room window with some newspaper under his arm, trying to avoid
Mrs. Ramsay whom for some reason he did not much like? On that
account, of course, she

would always try to make him stop. He would bow to her. He

would halt unwillingly and bow profoundly. Annoyed that he did
not want anything of her, Mrs. Ramsay would ask him (Lily could
hear her) wouldn't he like a coat, a rug, a newspaper? No, he
wanted nothing. (Here he bowed.) There was some quality in her
which he did not much like. It was

perhaps her masterfulness, her positiveness, something matter-of-

fact

in her. She was so direct.

338
(A noise drew her attention to the drawing-room window--the
squeak of a hinge. The light breeze was toying with the window.)

There must have been people who disliked her very much, Lily
thought (Yes; she realised that the drawing-room step was empty,
but it had no effect on her whatever. She did not want Mrs.
Ramsay now.)--People who thought her too sure, too drastic.

Also, her beauty offended people probably. How monotonous,

they would say, and the same always! They preferred another
type--the dark, the vivacious. Then she was weak with her
husband. She let him make those scenes. Then she was reserved.
Nobody knew exactly what had happened to her. And (to go back
to Mr. Carmichael and his dislike) one could not

imagine Mrs. Ramsay standing painting, lying reading, a whole

morning on the lawn. It was unthinkable. Without saying a word,
the only token of

her errand a basket on her arm, she went off to the town, to the
poor, to sit in some stuffy little bedroom. Often and often Lily had
seen

her go silently in the midst of some game, some discussion, with

her basket on her arm, very upright. She had noted her return. She

339
had thought, half laughing (she was so methodical with the tea
cups), half moved (her beauty took one's breath away), eyes that
are closing in pain have looked on you. You have been with them
there.

And then Mrs. Ramsay would be annoyed because somebody was

late, or the butter not fresh, or the teapot chipped. And all the time
she was

saying that the butter was not fresh one would be thinking of
Greek temples, and how beauty had been with them there in that
stuffy little room. She never talked of it--she went, punctually,
directly. It was

her instinct to go, an instinct like the swallows for the south, the
artichokes for the sun, turning her infallibly to the human race,
making her nest in its heart. And this, like all instincts, was a

little distressing to people who did not share it; to Mr. Carmichael
perhaps, to herself certainly. Some notion was in both of them
about the ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought. Her
going was a reproach to them, gave a different twist to the world,
so that they were led to protest, seeing their own prepossessions
disappear, and

clutch at them vanishing. Charles Tansley did that too: it was part
of the reason why one disliked him. He upset the proportions of

340
one's world. And what had happened to him, she wondered, idly
stirring the plantains161 with her brush. He had got his fellowship.
He had married; he lived at Golder's Green.162

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 shag163 ("fivepence an ounce, Miss Briscoe") and

making it his business to tell her women can't write, women can't
paint, not so much

that he believed it, as that for some odd reason he wished it?
There

he was lean and red and raucous, preaching love from a platform
(there were ants crawling about among the plantains which she
disturbed with her brush--red, energetic, shiny ants, rather like
Charles Tansley).

She had looked at him ironically from her seat in the half-empty
hall, pumping love into that chilly space, and suddenly, there was
the old

341
cask or whatever it was bobbing up and down among the waves
and Mrs. Ramsay looking for her spectacle case among the
pebbles. "Oh, dear! What a nuisance! Lost again. Don't bother, Mr.
Tansley. I lose

thousands every summer," at which he pressed his chin back

against his collar, as if afraid to sanction such exaggeration, but
could stand it

in her whom he liked, and smiled very charmingly. He must have

confided in her on one of those long expeditions when people got
separated and walked back alone. He was educating his little
sister,

Mrs. Ramsay had told her. It was immensely to his credit. Her own
idea of him was grotesque, Lily knew well, stirring the plantains164
with her brush. Half one's notions of other people were, after all,
grotesque.

They served private purposes of one's own. He did for her instead
of a whipping-boy. She found herself flagellating his lean flanks
when she was out of temper. If she wanted to be serious about
him she had to

help herself to Mrs. Ramsay's sayings, to look at him through her

eyes.

342
She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb over. She reduced
them to a frenzy of indecision by this interference in their
cosmogony. Some ran this way, others that.

One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs

of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she
thought. Among them, must be one that was stone blind to her
beauty. One wanted most some secret sense, fine as air, with
which to steal through

keyholes and surround her where she sat knitting, talking, sitting
silent in the window alone; which took to itself and treasured up
like the air which held the smoke of the steamer, her thoughts, her
imaginations, her desires. What did the hedge mean to her, what
did the garden mean to her, what did it mean to her when a wave
broke?

(Lily looked up, as she had seen Mrs. Ramsay look up; she too
heard a wave falling on the beach.) And then what stirred and
trembled in her mind when the children cried, "How's that? How's
that?" cricketing?

She would stop knitting for a second. She would look intent. Then
she would lapse again, and suddenly Mr. Ramsay stopped dead in

343
his pacing in front of her and some curious shock passed through
her and seemed to

rock her in profound agitation on its breast when stopping there

he stood over her and looked down at her. Lily could see him.

He stretched out his hand and raised her from her chair. It seemed
somehow as if he had done it before; as if he had once bent in the
same way and raised her from a boat which, lying a few inches off
some island, had required that the ladies should thus be helped on
shore by the gentlemen. An old-fashioned scene that was, which
required,

very nearly, crinolines and peg-top trousers. Letting herself be

helped by him, Mrs. Ramsay had thought (Lily supposed) the time

has come now. Yes, she would say it now. Yes, she would marry
him. And she stepped slowly, quietly on shore. Probably she said
one

word only, letting her hand rest still in his. I will marry you, she
might have said, with her hand in his; but no more. Time after time
the same thrill had passed between them--obviously it had, Lily
thought, smoothing a way for her ants. She was not

inventing; she was only trying to smooth out something she had
been given years ago folded up; something she had seen. For in

344
the rough and tumble of daily life, with all those children about, all
those visitors, one had constantly a sense of repetition--of one
thing

falling where another had fallen, and so setting up an echo which

chimed in the air and made it full of vibrations.

But it would be a mistake, she thought, thinking how they walked

off together, arm in arm, past the greenhouse, to simplify their
relationship. It was no monotony of bliss--she with her impulses
and

quicknesses; he with his shudders and glooms. Oh, no. The

bedroom door 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

345
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 little--the 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 was--
roaming under the window where she sat writing letters or talking,
for she

would take care to be busy when he passed, and evade him, and
pretend not to see him. Then he would turn smooth as silk, affable,
urbane,

and try to win her so. Still she would hold off, and now she would
assert for a brief season some of those prides and airs the due

346
of her beauty which she was generally utterly without; would turn
her head; would look so, over her shoulder, always with some
Minta, Paul, or William Bankes at her side. At length, standing

outside the group the very figure of a famished wolfhound (Lily

got up off the grass and stood looking at the steps, at the window,
where she had seen him), he would say her name, once only, for all
the world like a wolf barking in the snow, but still she held back;
and he would say

it once more, and this time something in the tone would rouse her,
and she would go to him, leaving them all of a sudden, and they
would walk off together among the pear trees, the cabbages, and
the raspberry

beds. They would have it out together. But with what attitudes and
with what words? Such a dignity was theirs in this relationship
that, turning away, she and Paul and Minta would hide their
curiosity and their discomfort, and begin picking flowers, throwing
balls, chattering, until it was time for dinner, and there they were,
he at

one end of the table, she at the other, as usual.

"Why don't some of you take up botany?.. With all those legs and
arms why doesn't one of you...?" So they would talk as usual,
laughing, among the children. All would be as usual, save only for

347
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

348
not touching, however, with all her faculties in a trance, frozen
over superficially but moving underneath with extreme speed.

She let her flowers fall from her basket, scattered and tumbled
them on to the grass and, reluctantly and hesitatingly, but without
question or complaint--had she not the faculty of obedience to
perfection?--went too. Down fields, across valleys, white, flower-
strewn--that was

how she would have painted it. The hills were austere. It was rocky;
it was steep. The waves sounded hoarse on the stones beneath.
They went, the three of them together, Mrs. Ramsay walking rather
fast in front, as if she expected to meet some one round the
corner.

Suddenly the window at which she was looking was whitened by

some light stuff behind it. At last then somebody had come into
the drawing-room; somebody was sitting in the chair. For
Heaven's sake, she prayed, let

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 odd-shaped triangular shadow
over the step. It altered the composition of the picture a little. It
was

349
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 scene--so--in 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 that's a chair,

that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's 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
back--to 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. Ramsay--it was part of her perfect goodness--sat there quite
simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her
reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. There she
sat.

350
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.

351
CHAPTER XIII

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 minds--that 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

352
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, it's like that. He looked at
his father reading fiercely with his legs curled tight. They shared
that knowledge. "We are driving before a gale--we 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,

353
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 innumerable 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 antelopes... She was falling
asleep.

"Come now," said Mr. Ramsay, suddenly shutting his book.

354
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. "There's the Lighthouse. We're almost there."

"He's doing very well," said Macalister, praising James. "He's

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.

355
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 shan't 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 exciting--it 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 seventy-five last March; Mr. Ramsay was seventy-one.

Macalister said he had never seen a doctor; he had never lost a
tooth. And that's the

356
way I'd like my children to live--Cam 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 Macalister's 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

357
spot was about, James and Cam were afraid, to burst out: But I
beneath a rougher sea,165

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. You've

got it at last. For she knew that this was what James had been
wanting,

358
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 you've 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.

359
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 long-sighted eyes perhaps he

could see the dwindled leaf-like 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

360
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,"166 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.

361
C H A P T E R IV

"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

362
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 asphodels167 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 was--her 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.

363