Lighthouse

A. V. Woolf

  " 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, 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

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, or a poker, 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 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 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.

   " 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's

evening walk up and down, up and down the terrace.

That is to say, the wind blew from the worst possible

direction for landing at the Lighthouse.  Yes,

he did say disagreeable things, Mrs. Ramsay admitted;

it was odious of him to rub this in, and

make James still more disappointed; but at the same

time, she would not let them laugh at him.  " The

atheist, " they called him; " the little atheist. "  Rose

mocked him; Prue mocked him; Andrew, Jasper,

Roger mocked him; even old Badger without a

tooth in his head had bit him, for being (as Nancy

put it) the hundred and tenth young man to chase

them all the way up to the Hebrides when it was

ever so much nicer to be alone.

   " Nonsense, " said Mrs. Ramsay, with great

severity.  Apart from the habit of exaggeration which

they had from her, and from the implication (which

was true) that she asked too many people to stay,

and had to lodge some in the town, she could not

bear incivility to her guests, to young men in

particular, who were poor as churchmice, " exceptionally

able, " her husband said, his great admirers, and

come there for a holiday.  Indeed, she had the whole

of the other sex under her protection; for reasons

she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour,

for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled

India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude

towards herself which no woman could fail to feel

or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike,

reverential; which an old woman could take from a

young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide

the 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, 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 .

   " 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 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, " who had buried

his light temporarily at Bristol or Bedford, but was

bound to be heard of later when his Prolegomena,

of which Mr. Tansley had the first pages in proof

with him if Mr. Ramsay would like to see them,

to some branch of mathematics or philosophy saw

the light of day.  That was what they talked about.

   She could not help laughing herself sometimes.

She said, the other day, something about " waves

mountains high. "   Yes, said Charles Tansley, it was

a little rough.  " Aren't you drenched to the skin? "

she had said.  " Damp, not wet through, " said Mr.

Tansley, pinching his sleeve, feeling his socks.

   But it was not that they minded, the children said.

It was not his face; it was not his manners.  It was

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 to debate anything,

everything; Tansley's tie; the passing of the

Reform Bill; sea birds and butterflies; people; while

the sun poured into those attics, which a plank alone

separated from each other so that every footstep

could be plainly heard and the Swiss girl sobbing

for her father who was dying of cancer in a valley

of the Grisons, and lit up bats, flannels, straw hats,

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 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, some half

grudgingly, half 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 Scotch; but more profoundly, she ruminated

the other problem, of rich and poor, and the things

she saw with her own eyes, weekly, daily, here or in

London, when she visited this widow, or that

struggling wife in person with a bag on her arm, and

a 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.

   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.

   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; an early marriage; poverty; going to India;

translating a little poetry " very beautifully, I

believe, " being willing to teach the boys Persian or

Hindustanee, but what really was the use of 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 for it.  As for

her little bag, might he not carry that?  No, no, she

said, she always carried that# herself.  She did too.

Yes, he felt that in her.  He felt many things,

something in particular that excited him and disturbed

him for reasons which he could not give.  He would

like her to see him, gowned and hooded, walking in a

procession.  A fellowship, a professorship, he felt

capable of anything and saw 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? she wondered.  What was wrong with him

then?  She liked him warmly, at the moment.  Had

they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when

they were children?  Never, he answered, as if she

asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing

all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.

It was a large family, nine brothers and sisters, and

his father was a working man.  " My father is a

chemist, Mrs. Ramsay.  He keeps a shop. "  He himself

had paid his own way since he was thirteen.

Often he went without a greatcoat in winter.  He

could never " return hospitality " (those were his

parched stiff words) at college.  He had to make

things last twice the time other people did; he

smoked the cheapest tobacco; shag; the same the

old men did in the quays.  He worked 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.

She could not follow the ugly academic jargon, that

rattled itself off so glibly, but said to herself that she

saw now why going to the circus had knocked him

off his perch, poor little man, and why he came out,

instantly, with all that about his father and mother

and brothers and sisters, and she would see to it that

they 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 Ibsen 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, 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. Paunceforte 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 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 (she must be talking to a child) when, suddenly,

in she came, stood for a moment silent (as if

she had been pretending up there, and for a moment

let herself be now), stood quite motionless for a

moment against a picture of Queen Victoria wearing

the blue ribbon of the Garter; when all at once he

realised that it was this: it was this: -- she was the

most beautiful person he had ever seen.

  With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with

cyclamen 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 hair -- He took 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 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.

  " No going to the Lighthouse, James, " he said, as

he stood by the window, speaking awkwardly, but

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?

  " 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.

  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? " 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

ephermal as 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.

   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 eyes 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.

   Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming

down upon her with his hands waving shouting

out, " Boldly we rode and well, " but, mercifully, he

turned sharp, and rode off, to die gloriously she supposed

upon the heights of Balaclava. Never was anybody

at once so ridiculous and so alarming. But so

long as he kept like that, waving, shouting, she was

safe; he would not stand still and look at her picture.

And that was what Lily Briscoe could not

have endured.  Even while she looked at the mass, at

the line, at the colour, at Mrs. Ramsay sitting in

the window with James, she kept a feeler on her

surroundings lest some one should creep up, and

suddenly she should find her picture looked at.  But

now, with all her senses quickened as they were,

looking, straining, till the colour of the wall and the

jacmanna beyond burnt into her eyes, she was aware

of someone coming out of the house, coming

towards her; but somehow divined, from the footfall,

William Bankes, so that though her brush quivered,

she did not, as she would have done had it

been Mr. Tansley, Paul Rayley, Minta Doyle, or

practically anybody else, turn her canvas upon the

grass, but let it stand.  William Bankes stood beside

her.

   They  had rooms in the village, and so, walking in,

walking out, parting late on 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.

                 " Some one had blundered. "                            c

   Mr. Ramsay glared at them.  He glared at them

without seeming to see them.  That did make them

both vaguely uncomfortable.  Together they had seen

a thing they had not been meant to see.  They had

encroached upon a privacy.  So, Lily thought, it was

probably an excuse of his for moving, for getting out of

earshot, that made Mr. Bankes almost immediately

say something about its being chilly and suggested

taking a stroll.  She would come, yes.  But it was

with difficulty that she took her eyes off her picture.

   The jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staring

white.  She would not have considered it honest to

tamper with the bright violet and the staring white,

since she saw them like that, fashionable though it

was, since Mr. Paunceforte's visit, to see everything

pale, elegant, semitransparent.  Then beneath the

colour there was the shape.  She could see it all so

clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was

when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing

changed.  It was in that 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 say: " But this is what I

see; this is what I see, "  and so to clasp some

miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a

thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.

And it was then too, in that chill and windy way, as

she began to paint, that there forced themselves

upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her

insignificance, keeping house for her father off the

Brompton Road, and had much ado to control her

impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had

always resisted so far) at Mrs. 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 something moved, flashed, turned a silver

wing in the air.  It was September after all, the

middle of September, and past six in the evening.  So

off they strolled down the garden in the usual direction,

past the tennis lawn, past the pampas grass,

to that break in the thick hedge, guarded by red hot

pokers like brasiers of clear burning coal, between

which the blue waters of the bay looked bluer than

ever.

   They came there regularly every evening drawn by

some need.  It was as if the water floated off and

set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on

dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of

physical relief.  First, the pulse of colour flooded the

bay with blue, and the heart expanded with it and

the body swam, only the next instant to be checked

and chilled by the prickly blackness on the ruffled

waves.  Then, up behind the great black rock, almost

every evening spurted irregularly, so that one had

to watch for it and it was a delight when it came,

a fountain of white water; and then, while one

waited for that, one watched, on the pale

semicircular beach, wave after wave shedding again and

again smoothly, a film of mother of pearl.

   They both smiled, standing there.  They both felt

a common hilarity, excited by the moving waves;

and then by the swift cutting race of a sailing boat,

which, having sliced a curve in the bay, stopped;

shivered; let its sails drop down; and then, with a

natural instinct to complete the picture, after this

swift movement, both of them looked at the dunes

far away, and instead of merriment felt come over

them some 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, 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

Westmorland road, where the hen spread her wings

before her chicks; after which Ramsay had married,

and their paths lying different ways, there had been,

certainly for no one's fault, some tendency, when

they met, to repeat.

   Yes.  That was it.  He finished.  He turned from the

view.  And, turning to walk back the other way, up

the drive, Mr. Bankes was alive to things which

would not have struck him had not those sandhills

revealed to him the body of his friendship lying

with the red on its lips laid up in peat -- for instance,

Cam, the little girl, Ramsay's youngest daughter.

She was picking Sweet Alice on the bank.  She was

wild and fierce.  She would not " give a flower to the

gentleman " as the nursemaid told her.  No! no! no!

she would not!  She clenched her fist.  She stamped.

And Mr. Bankes felt aged and saddened and somehow

put into the wrong by her about his friendship.

He must have dried and shrunk.

   The Ramsays were not rich, and it was a wonder

how they managed to contrive it all.  Eight children!

To feed eight children on philosophy!  Here was

another of them, Jasper this time, strolling past, to

have a shot at a bird, he said, nonchalantly, swinging

Lily's hand like a pump-handle as he passed, which

caused Mr. Bankes to say, bitterly, how she# was a

favourite.  There was education now to be considered

(true, Mrs. Ramsay had something of her own perhaps)

let alone the daily wear and tear of shoes and

stockings which those " great fellows, " all well

grown, angular, ruthless youngsters, must require.

As for being sure which was which, or in what order

they came, that was beyond him. He called them

privately after the Kings and Queens of England;

Cam the Wicked, James the Ruthless, Andrew the

Just, Prue the Fair -- for Prue would have beauty,

he thought, how could she help it? -- and Andrew

brains.  While he walked up the drive and Lily

Briscoe said yes and no and capped his comments

(for she was in love with them all, in love with this

world) he weighed 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, to look at a picture of Vesuvius

in eruption; but they had also, his old friends could

not but feel, destroyed something.  What would a

stranger think now?  What did this Lily Briscoe

think?  Could one help noticing that habits grew on

him?  eccentricities, weaknesses perhaps?  It was

astonishing that a man of his intellect could stoop

so low as he 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

you're not there. "

   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, 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

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

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.

   " 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!!  "

   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.

   " 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 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 "

.. "" The happier Helen of our days "... disgraceful

to say, she had never read them. And

Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage Customs

of Polynesia (" My dear, stand still, " she 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. Every door was

left open. She listened. The drawing-room door was

open; the hall door was open; it sounded as if the

bedroom doors were open; and certainly the window

on the landing was open, for that she had opened

herself. That windows should be open, and doors

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 recolection -- how she had stood

there, how the girl had said, " At home the mountains

are so beautiful, " and there was no hope, no hope

whatever, she had a spasm of irritation, and speaking

sharply, said to James:

  " Stand still. 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 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?

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. "  He saw her at

the end of the line very clearly Greek, straight,

blue-eyed.  How incongruous it seemed to be telephoning

to a woman like that.  The Graces assembling seemed

to have joined hands in meadows of asphodel to compose

that face.  He would catch the 10:30 at Euston.

   " Yet 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..)

   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, 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.

   But what had happened?

   Some one had blundered.

   Starting from her musing she gave meaning to

words which she had held meaningless in her mind

for a long stretch of time.  " Some one had

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 thundered -- 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 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.

   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 shivered; and now, she flew in the face

of facts, made his children hope what was utterly

out of the question, in effect, told lies.  He stamped

his foot on the stone step.  " Damn you, " he said.

But what had she said?  Simply that it might be fine

tomorrow.  So it might.

   Not with the barometer falling and the wind due

west.

   To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of

consideration for other people's feelings, to rend

the thin veils of civilisation 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 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, " he said again, striding

off, up and down the terrace.

   But how extraordinarily his note had changed!

It was like the cuckoo; " in June he gets out of

tune; " as if he were trying over, tentatively

seeking, some phrase for a new mood, and having only

this at hand, used it, cracked though it was.  But

it sounded 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           053

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 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  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.

   Qualities that would have saved a ship's

company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits

and a flask of water -- endurance and justice,

foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help.   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

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; 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 hope may ask himself that ,

and answer, without treachery to the expedition

behind him, " One perhaps. "  One in a generation.

Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one?

provided he has toiled honestly, given to the best

of his power, and till he has no more left to give?

And his fame lasts how long?  It is permissible even

for a dying hero to think before he dies how men

will speak of him hereafter.  His fame lasts perhaps

two thousand years.  And what are two thousand

years? (asked Mr. Ramsay ironically, staring at the

hedge).  What, indeed, if you look from a mountain

top down the long wastes of the ages?  The very

stone one kicks with 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.

    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?

   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 spray, looking at the same time animated

and alive as if all her energies were being

fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly

though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and

into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray

of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself,

like a beak of brass, barren and bare.  He wanted

sympathy.  He was a failure, he said.  Mrs. Ramsay

flashed her needles.  Mr. Ramsay repeated, never

taking his eyes from her face, that he was a failure.

She blew the words back at him.  " Charles Tansley

.. "" she said.  But he must have more than that.

It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his

genius, first of all, and then to be taken within

the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his

senses restored to him, his barrenness made furtile,

and all the rooms of the house made full of 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, she said.  But he must have

more than that.  He must have sympathy.  he must

be assured that he too lived in the heart of life;

was needed; not only here, but all over the world.

Flashing her needles, confident, upright, she created

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.

<P 60>

  He was a failure, he repeated.  Well, look then,

feel then.  Flashing her needles, glancing round

about her, out of the window, into the room, at

James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow

of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence

(as a nurse carrying a light across a dark

room assures a fractious child), that it was real;

the house was full; the garden blowing.  If he put

implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however

deep he buried himself or climed high, not

for a second should he find himself without her.

So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect,

there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her

to know herself by; all was so lavished and

spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her

knees, felt her rise in a 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

<P 61>

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.

  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, 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

<P 62>

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

said he depended on her, when they must know that

of the two he was infinitely the more important,

and what she gave the world, in comparison with

what he gave, negligable.  But then again, it was the

other thing 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;

<P 63>

when it was painful to feel herself 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? "

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

<P 64>

in the world to do; and she turned him out of the

room.  She said, in her odious way, " Now, Mrs

Ramsay and I want to have a little talk together, "

and Mrs Ramsay could see, as if before her eyes,

the innumerable miseries of his life.  Had he money

enough to buy tobacco?  Did he have to ask her for

it? half a crown? eighteenpence? Oh, she could not

bear to think of the little indignities she made him

suffer.  And always now (why, she could not guess,

except that it came probably from that woman somehow)

he shrank from her.  He never told her anything.

But what more could she have done?  There

was a sunny room given up to him.  The children

were good to him.  Never did she show a sign of not

wanting him.  She went out of her way indeed to be

friendly.  Do you want stamps, do you want tobacco?

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, 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,

<P 65>

veil it as she might, and shrink from the monotony of

bearing that it imposed on her, her beauty was apparent.

She had been admired.  She had been loved.

She had entered rooms where mourners sat.  Tears

had flown in her presence.  Men, and women too, letting

go to the multiplicity of things, had allowed themselves

with her the relief of simplicity.  It injured

her that he should shrink.  It hurt her.  And yet not

cleanly, not rightly.  That was what she minded,

coming as it did on top of her discontent with her

husband; the sense she had now when Mr Carmichael

shuffled past, just nodding to her question,

with a book beneath his arm, in his yellow slippers,

that she was suspected; and that all this desire

of hers to give, to help, was vanity. For her own

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 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

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 civilisation 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 civilisation?

Possibly not. Possibly the greatest good

requires the existence of a slave class. The liftman

in the Tube is an eternal necessity. The thought was

distasteful to him. He tossed his head. To avoid it,

he would find some way of snubbing the predominance

of the arts. He would argue that the world

exists for the average human being; that the arts are

merely a decoration imposed on the  top of human

life; they do not express it. Nor is Shakespeare

necessary to it. Not knowing precisely why it was

that he wanted to disparage Shakespeare and come to

the rescue of the man who stands eternally in the

door of the lift, he picked a leaf sharply from the

hedge. All this would have to be dished up for the

young men at Cardiff next month, he thought; here,

on his terrace, he was merely foraging and picnicking

(he threw away the leaf that he had picked so

peevishly) like a man who reaches from his horse

to pick a bunch of roses, or stuffs his pockets with

nuts as he ambles at his ease through the lanes and

fields of a country known to him from boyhood. It

was all familiar; this turning, that stile, that cut

across the fields. Hours he would spend thus, with

his pipe, of an evening, thinking up and down and

in and out of the old familiar lanes and commons,

which were all stuck about with the history of that

campaign there, the life of this statesman here,

with poems and with anecdotes, with figures too,

this thinker, that soldier; all very brisk and clear;

but at length the lane, the field, the common, the

fruitful 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

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, he

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.

   " But the father of eight children has no choice. "

Muttering half aloud, so he broke off, turned, sighed,

raised his eyes, sought the figure of his wife reading

stories to his little boy, filled his pipe. He turned

from the sight of human ignorance and human fate

and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which,

had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might

have led to something; and found consolation in

trifles so slight compared with the august theme

just now before him that he was disposed to slur

that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught

happy in a world of misery was for an honest man

the most despicable of crimes. It was true; he was

for the most part happy; he had his wife; he had his

children; he had promised in six weeks' time

to talk " some nonsense " to the young men of Cardiff

about Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes of the

French Revolution.  But this and his pleasure

in it, his glory in the phrases he made, in the ardour

of youth, in his wife's beauty, in the tributes that

reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton,

Kidderminster, Oxford, Cambridge -- all

had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase

" talking nonsense, " because, in effect, he had not

done the thing he might have done. It was a disguise;

it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his

own feelings, who could not say, This is what I

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.

   He was bearing down upon them. Now he stopped

dead and stood looking in silence at the sea. Now

he had turned away again.

TC

   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 Carlyle. A crusty old grumbler

who lost his temper if the porridge was cold, why

should he preach to us? was what Mr. Bankes

understood that young people said nowadays. It was

a thousand pities if you thought, as he did, that

Carlyle was one of the great teachers of mankind.

Lily was ashamed to say that she had not read

Carlyle since she was at school. But in her opinion

one liked Mr. Ramsay all the better for thinking

that if his little finger ached the whole world must

come to an end. It was not that# she minded. For

who could be deceived by him?  He asked you quite

openly to flatter him, to admire him, his little dodges

deceived nobody. What she disliked was his

narrowness, his blindness, she said, looking after him.

   " A bit of a hypocrite? " Mr. Bankes suggested,

looking too at Mr. 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 them;

the birds sang through them. And, what was even

more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr.

Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs.

Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud

moving and the tree bending, how life, from being

made up of little separate incidents which one lived

one by one, became curled and whole like a wave

which bore one up and threw one down with

it, there, with a dash on the beach.

   Mr. Bankes expected her to answer. And she was

about to say something criticising 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

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.

   That people should love like this, that Mr.

Bankes should feel this for Mrs. Ramsay (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. 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.... "

   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 lovliest of people (bowed over her book); the

best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect

shape which one saw there. But why different, and how

different? she asked herself, scraping her

palette of all those mounds of blue and green which

seemed to her like clods with no life in them now,

yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them

to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did

she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential

thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in

the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from

its twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a

bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was

willful; she was commanding  (of course, Lily reminded

herself, I am thinking of her relations with women,

and I am much younger, an insignificant person,

living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom

windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the

tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late

at night, with a light tap on 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 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?

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 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

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, 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 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 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 Kennet.

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 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.

   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 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 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. It must have happened, one way or

the other, by now.

   But she read, " Next morning the wife awoke first,

and it was just daybreak, and from her bed she

saw the beautiful country lying before her. Her

husband was still stretching himself.... "

   But how could Minta say now that she would not

have him? Not if she agreed to spend whole

afternoons trapesing about the country 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),

   " 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. '

' Well, what does she want then? ' said the Flounder. "

And where were they now? Mrs. Ramsay wondered,

reading and thinking, quite easily, both at the

same time; for the story of the Fisherman and his

Wife was like the bass gently accompanying a tune,

which now and then ran up unexpectedly into the

melody. And when should she be told? If nothing

happened, she would have to speak seriously to

Minta. For she could not go trapesing about all over

the country, even if Nancy were with them (she

tried again, unsuccessfully, to visualize their backs

going down the path, and to count them). She was

responsible to 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 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

Finlay, which had resulted in some friction with

the Owl, her mother, and more calling, and more

conversation, and more sand, and really at the end

of it, she had told enough lies about parrots to last

her a lifetime (so she had said to her husband that

night, coming back from the party). However,

Minta 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 "; 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. But how? With all

these children? When they were older, then perhaps

she would have time; when they were all at school.

   Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day

older! or Cam either. These two she would have

liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of

wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them

grow up into long-legged monsters. Nothing made up

up for the loss. When she read just now to James,

" and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums

and trumpets, " and his eyes darkened, she

thought, why should they grow up and lose all

that? He was the most gifted, the most sensitive of

her children. But all, she thought, were full of

promise. Prue, a perfect angel with the others, and

sometimes now, at night especially, she took 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. 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 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 teaset 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 --

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 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?

     " Then he put on his trousers and ran away like

a madman, " she read.  " But outside a great storm

was raging and blowing so hard that he could

scarcely keep his feet; houses and trees toppled

over, the mountains trembled, rocks rolled into the

sea, the sky was pitch black, and it thundered and

lightened, and the sea came in with black waves as

high as church towers and mountains, and all with

white foam at the top..  "

     She turned the page; there were only a few lines

more, so that she would finish the story, though it

was past 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 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 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.

     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; but now and again we rise to the surface and

that is what you see us by.  Her horizon seemed to her

limitless. There were all the places she had not

seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing

aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome.

This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one

saw it.  They could not stop it, she thought, exulting.

There was freedom, there was peace, there was,

most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting

on a platform of stability.  Not as oneself did one

find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished

here something dexterous with her needles) but as

a wedge of darkness.  Losing personality, one

lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to

her lips always some exclamation of triumph over

life when things came together in this peace, this

rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out

to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long

steady stroke, the last of the three, which was

her stroke, for watching them in this mood

always at this hour one could not help attaching

oneself to one thing especially of the things one

saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her

stroke.  Often she found herself sitting and looking,

sitting and looking, with her work in her hands

until she became the thing she looked 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 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.  With her

mind she had always seized the fact that there

is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the

poor.  There was no treachery too base for the world

to commit; she knew that.  No happiness lasted;

she knew that.  She knitted with firm composure,

slightly pursing her lips and, without being aware

of it, so stiffened and composed the lines of her

face in a habit of sternness that when her husband

passed, though he was chuckling at the thought

that Hume, the philosopher, grown enormously fat,

had stuck in a bog, he could not help noting, as he

passed, the sternness at the heart of her beauty.  It

saddened him, and her remoteness pained him, and

he felt, as he passed, that he could not protect her,

and, when he reached the hedge, he was sad.  He

could do nothing to help her.  He must stand by and

watch her.  Indeed, the infernal truth was, he made

things worse for her.  He was 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, 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.

     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. " 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 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. " 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 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 carlessly 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.

     They had reached the gap between the two

clumps of red-hot pokers, and there was the

Lighthouse again, but she would not let herself look

at it. Had she known that he was looking at her,

she thought, she would not have let herself sit there,

thinking. She disliked anything that reminded her

that she had been seen sitting thinking. So she looked

over her shoulder, at the town. The lights were

rippling and running as if they were drops of silver

water held firm in a wind. And all the poverty,

all the suffering had turned to that, Mrs. Ramsay

thought. The lights of the town and of the harbour

and of the boats seemed like a phantom net floating

there to mark something which had sunk. Well,

if he could not share her thoughts, Mr. Ramsay

said to himself, he would be off, then, on his own.

He wanted to go on thinking, telling himself the

story how Hume was stuck in a bog; he wanted

to laugh. But first it was nonsense to be anxious

about Andrew. When he was 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 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 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.

     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 at table with them like

a person in a dream. And his habit of talking aloud,

or saying poetry aloud, was growing on him, she was

afraid; for sometimes it was awkward --

               Best and brightest come away!

poor Miss Giddings, when he shouted that at her,

almost jumped out of her skin. But then, Mrs.

Ramsay, though instantly taking his side against all

the silly Giddingses in the world, then, she thought,

intimating by a little pressure on his arm that he

walked up hill too fast for her, and she must stop

for a moment to see whether those were fresh molehills

on the bank, then, she thought, stooping down

to look, a great mind like his must be different in

every way from ours. All the great men she had

ever known, she thought, deciding that a rabbit

must have got in, were like that, and it was good for

young men (though the atmosphere of lecture-rooms

was stuffy and depressing to her beyond endurance

almost) simply to hear him, simply to look at him.

But without shooting rabbits, how was one to keep

them down? she wondered. It might be a rabbit; it

might be a mole. Some creature anyhow was ruining

her Evening Primroses. And looking up, she saw

above the thin trees the first pulse of the 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!

     He had been to Amsterdam, Mr. Bankes was

saying as he strolled across the lawn with Lily Briscoe.

He had seen the Rembrandts. He had been to Madrid.

Unfortunately, it was Good Friday and

the Prado was shut. He had been to Rome. Had

Miss Briscoe never been to Rome? Oh, she

should --  It would be a wonderful experience for

her -- the Sistine Chapel; Michael Angelo; and

Padua, with its Giottos. 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

Titians and we can't all be Darwins, he said; at

the same time he doubted whether you could have

your Darwin and your Titian if it 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 Mrs. Ramsay was

wearing a green shawl, and they were standing close

together watching Prue and Jasper throwing catches.

And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at

all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or

ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them

symbolical, making them representative, came upon

them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking,

the symbols of marriage, husband and wife.  Then,

after an instant, the symbolical outline which

transcended the real figures sank down again, and they

became, as they met them, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay

watching the children throwing catches.  But still

for a moment, though Mrs. Ramsay greeted them

with her usual smile (oh, 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, and

chuckling to himself he strolled off to his study.  Mrs.

Ramsay, bringing Prue back into throwing

catches again, from which she had escaped,

asked,

     " Did Nancy go with them? "

     (Certainly Nancy had gone with them, since

Minta Doyle had asked it with her dumb look, holding

out her hand, as Nancy made off, after lunch,

to her attic, to  escape the horror of family life.  She

supposed she must go then.  She did not want to go.

She did not want to be drawn into it all.  For as

they walked along the road to the cliff Minta kept

on taking her hand.  Then she would let it go.  Then

she would take it again.  What was it she wanted?

Nancy asked herself.  There was something, of

course, that people wanted; for when Minta took

her hand and held it, Nancy, reluctantly, saw the

whole world spread out beneath her, as if it were

Constantinople seen through a mist, and then,

however heavy-eyed one might be, one must needs ask,

" Is that Santa Sofia? " " Is that the Golden Horn? "

So Nancy asked, when Minta took her hand.  " What

is it that she wants? Is it that? "  And what was that?

Here and there emerged from the mist (as Nancy

looked down upon life spread beneath her) a

pinnacle, a dome; prominent things, without names.

But when Minta dropped her hand, as she did when

they ran down the hillside, all that, the dome, the

pinnacle, whatever it was that had protruded

through the mist, sank down into it and disappeared.

Minta, Andrew observed, was rather a good walker.

She wore more sensible clothes that most women.

She wore very short skirts and black knickerbockers.

She would jump straight into a stream and

flounder across.  He liked her rashness, but he saw

that it would not 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

perambulator 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.

They all had to join in and sing the chorus, and

shout out together:

     Damn your eyes, damn your eyes,

but it would be fatal to let the tide come in and

cover up all the good 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 Nose, taking his shoes off, and rolling his

socks in them and letting that couple look after

themselves; Nancy waded out to her own rocks and

searched her own pools and let that couple look

after themselves.  She crouched low down and

touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who

were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock.

Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and

made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast

vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand

against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation,

like God himself, to millions of ignorant and

innocent creatures, and then took her hand away

suddenly and let the sun stream down.  Out on

the pale 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, 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 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 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 Edinburgh and

buy her another, just like it but more beautiful.

He would prove what he could do.  And as they

came out on the hill and saw the lights of the town

beneath them, the lights coming out suddenly one

by one seemed like things that were going to happen

to 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 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..)

     " Yes, " said Prue, in her considering way,

answering her mother's question, " I think Nancy

did go with them. "

     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.

     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 -- B$oeuf en Daube.  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 B$oeuf 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

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 Mary were fighting.  Anyhow

they all went up again, and the air was shoved

aside by their black wings and cut into exquisite

scimitar shapes.  The movement 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.

     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 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 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 B$oeuf en Daube overboil?

she wondered, pray heaven not! when the great

clangour of the gong announced solemnly, authoritatively,

that all those scattered about, in attics, in

bedrooms, on little perches of their own, reading,

writing, putting the last smooth to their hair, or

fastening dresses, must leave all that, and the little

odds and ends on their 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.

     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.

     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 newspaper.  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 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 thought with some amusement because she was

relieved, Why does she pity him?  For that was the

impression she gave, when she told him that his

letters were in the hall.  Poor William Bankes, she

seemed to be saying, as if her own weariness had

been partly pitying people, and the life in her, her

resolve to live again, had been stirred by pity.  And

it was not true, Lily thought; it was one of those

misjudgments of hers that seemed to be instinctive

and to arise from some need of her own rather than

of other 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 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

people wanted him to talk.  He was not going to be

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 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 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 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 Marlow, and

was everything still the same?  Oh, she could remember

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?

     " 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 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 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

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. Ramsy, turning to him

at last.  He felt rigid and barren, like a pair of boots

that have been soaked and gone dry so that you

can hardly force your feet into them.  Yet he must

force his feet into them.  He must make himself talk.

Unless he were very careful, she would find out

this treachery of his; that he did not care a straw

for her, and that would not be at all pleasant, he

thought.  So he bent his head courteously in her

direction.

     " How you must detest dining in this bear garden, "

she said, making use, as she did when she was

distracted, of her social manner.  So, when there is a

strife of tongues, at some meeting, the chairman, to

obtain unity, suggests that every one shall speak in

French.  Perhaps it is bad French; French may not

contain the words that express the 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  describe " staying

with the Ramsays " and what nonsense they talked.

It was worth while doing it once, he would

say; but not again.  The women bored one so, he

would say.  Of course Ramsay had dished himself

by marrying a beautiful woman and having eight

children.  It would shape itself something like that,

but now, at this moment, sitting stuck there with

an empty seat beside him, nothing had shaped itself

at all.  It was all in scraps and fragments.  He felt

extremely, even physically, uncomfortable.  He wanted

somebody to give him a chance of asserting himself.

He wanted it so urgently that he fidgeted in his chair,

looked at this person, then at that person, tried to

break into their talk, opened his mouth and shut it

again.  They were talking about the fishing industry.

Why did no one ask him his opinion?  What did they

know about the fishing industry?

     Lily Briscoe knew all that.  Sitting opposite him,

could she not see, as in an 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 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 Tube were to burst into flames.

Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr.

Tansley to get me out.  But how would it be, she

thought, if neither of us did either of these things?

So she sat there smiling.

     " 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.

     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.  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.

     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 Marlow twenty

years ago; where one moved about without haste or

anxiety, for there was no future to worry about.  She

knew what had happened to them, what to her.  It was

like reading a good book again, for she knew the end

of that story, since it had happened twenty years ago,

and life, which shot down even from this 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?

     That the fishing season was bad; that the men

were emigrating.  They were talking about wages

and unemployment.  The young man was abusing

the government.  William Bankes, thinking what a

relief it was to catch on to something of this sort

when private life was disagreeable, heard him say

something about " one of the most scandalous acts

of the present government. "  Lily was listening;

Mrs. Ramsay was listening; they were all listening.

But already bored, Lily felt that something

was lacking; Mr. Bankes felt that something

was lacking.  Pulling her shawl round her

Mrs. Ramsay felt that something was lacking.

All of them bending themselves to listen thought,

" Pray heaven that the inside of my mind may not

be exposed, " for each thought, " The others are

feeling this.  They are outraged and indignant with the

government about the fishermen.  Whereas, I feel

nothing at all. "  But perhaps, thought Mr. Bankes,

as he looked at Mr. Tansley, here is the man.  One

was always waiting for the man.  There was always

a chance.  At any moment the leader might arise;

the man of genius, in politics as in anything else.

Probably he will be extremely disagreeable to us

old fogies, thought Mr. Bankes, doing his best to

make allowances, for he knew by some curious

physical sensation, as of nerves erect in his spine,

that he was jealous, for himself partly, partly more

probably for his work, for his point of view, for his

science; and therefore he was not entirely open-minded

or altogether fair, for Mr. Tansley seemed to

be saying, You have wasted your lives.  You are

all of you wrong.  Poor old fogies, 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 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

withiut realising that it was she herself who had

praised him.  She looked at him thinking to find this

in his face; he would be looking 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 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):

     " 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.

     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's banquet, of the bunch that hangs

with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in

some picture), among the leopard skins and the

torches lolloping red and 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.

     Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces

on both sides of the table were brought nearer by

the candle light, and composed, as they had not been

in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the

night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far

from giving any accurate view of the outside world,

rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room,

seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a

reflection in which things waved and vanished,

waterily.

     Some change at once went through them all, as

if this had really happened, and they were all

conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on

an island; had their common cause against that

fluidity out there.  Mrs. Ramsay, who had been

uneasy, waiting for Paul and Minta to come in, and

unable, she felt, to settle to things, now felt her

uneasiness changed to expectation.  For now they must

come, and Lily Briscoe, trying to analyse the cause

of the sudden exhilaration, compared it with that

moment on the tennis lawn, when solidity suddenly

vanished, and such vast spaces lay between them;

and now the same effect was got by the many candles

in the sparely furnished room, and the uncurtained

windows, and the bright 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?

     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 Middlemarch# in the train and

she never knew what happened in the end; but

afterwards she got on perfectly, and made herself

out even more ignorant than she was, because he

liked telling her she was a fool.  And so tonight,

directly he laughed at her, she was not frightened.

Besides, she knew, directly she came into the room

that the miracle had happened; she wore her golden

haze.  Sometimes she had it; sometimes not.  She

never knew why it came or why it went, or if she

had it until she came into the room and then she

knew instantly by the way some man looked at her.

Yes, tonight she had it, tremendously; she knew

that by the way Mr. Ramsay told her not to be a

fool.  She sat beside him, smiling.

     It must have happened then, thought Mrs. Ramsay;

they are engaged.  And for a moment she felt

what she had never expected to feel again -- jealousy.

For he, her husband, felt it too -- Minta's glow; he

liked these girls, these golden-reddish girls, with

something flying, something a little wild and

harum-scarum about them, who didn't " scrape their hair

off, " weren't, as he said about poor Lily Briscoe,

"... skimpy. "  There was some quality which she

herself had not, some lustre, some richness, which

attracted him, amused him, led him to make favourites

of girls like Minta.  They might cut his hair

from him, plait him 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 the Swiss girl

to place gently before her the huge brown pot in which

was the B$oeuf en Daube -- for her own part, she

liked her boobies.  Paul must sit by her.  She had

kept a place for him.  Really, she sometimes thought

she liked the boobies best.  They did not bother one

with their dissertations.  How much they missed,

after all, these very clever men!  How dried up they

did become, to be sure.  There was something, she

thought as he sat down, very charming about Paul.

His manners were delightful to her, and his sharp-cut

nose and his bright blue eyes.  He was so considerate.

Would he tell 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, 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, mor impressive, bearing in its bosom

the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers,

these people entering into illusion glittering eyed,

must be danced round with mockery, decorated with

garlands.

     " It is a triumph, " said Mr. Bankes, laying his

knife down for a moment.  He had eaten attentively.

It was rich; it was tender.  It was perfectly cooked.

How did she manage these things in the depths of

the country? he asked her.  She was a wonderful

woman.  All his love, all his reverence, had returned;

and she knew it.

     " It is a French recipe of my grandmother's, "

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.

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:

     " 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 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 was

swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road.

Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes

have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses;

and if you asked nine people out of ten they would

say they wanted nothing but 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 system, and in what state milk was delivered

at the door, and was about to prove her charges, for

she had gone into the matter, when all round the

table, beginning with Andrew in the middle, like

a fire leaping from tuft to tuft of furze, her children

laughed; her husband laughed; she was laughed at,

fire-encircled, and forced to veil her crest, dismount

her batteries, and only retaliate by displaying the

raillery and ridicule of the table to Mr. Bankes

as an example of what one suffered if one attacked the

prejudices of the British Public.

     Purposely, however, for she had it on her mind

that Lily, who had helped her with Mr. Tansley, was

out of things, she exempted her from the rest; said

" Lily anyhow agrees with me, " and so drew her in,

a little fluttered, a little startled.  (For she was

thinking about love.)  They were both out of things, Mrs.

Ramsay had been thinking, both Lily and Charles

Tansley.  Both suffered from the glow of the other

two.  He, it was clear, felt himself utterly in the

cold; no woman would look at him with Paul Rayley

in the room.  Poor fellow!  Still, he had his dissertation,

the influence of somebody upon something: he

could take care of himself.  With Lily it was different.

She faded, under 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.

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 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 B$oeuf en Daube was a perfect

triumph.)  Here, she felt, putting the spoon down,

was the still space that lies about the heart of things,

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 and square

roots; that was what they were talking about now;

on Voltaire and Madame de Stael; on the character

of Napoleon; on the French system of land tenure;

on Lord Rosebery; on Creevey's Memoirs: she let it

uphold her and sustain her, this admirable fabric

of the masculine intelligence, which ran up and

down, crossed this way and that, like iron girders

spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world,

so that she could trust herself to it utterly, even shut

her eyes, or flicker them for a moment, as a child

staring up from its pillow winks at the myriad

layers of the leaves of a tree.  Then she woke up.  It

was still being fabricated.  William Bankes was praising

the Waverly novels.

     He read one of them every six months, he said.

And why should that make Charles Tansley angry?

He rushed in (all, thought Mrs. Ramsay, because

Prue will not be nice to him) and denounced the

Waverly novels when he knew nothing about it,

nothing about it whatsoever, Mrs. Ramsay thought,

observing him rather than listening to what he

said.  She could see how it was from his 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, 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 and separating one thing from another; she

would be saying she liked the Waverly novels or

had not read them; she would be urging herself

forward; now she said nothing.  For the moment, she

hung suspended.

     " Ah, but how long do you think 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.  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 must have praise, which must

have encouragement, naturally you began (and she

knew that Mr. Ramsay was beginning) to be uneasy;

to want somebody to say, Oh, but your work

will last, Mr. Ramsay, or something like that.  He

showed his uneasiness quite clearly now by saying,

with some irritation, that, anyhow, Scott (or was it

Shakespeare ?) would last him his lifetime.  He said

it irritably.  Everybody, she thought, felt a little

uncomfortable, without knowing why.  Then Minta

Doyle, whose instinct was fine, said bluffly, absurdly,

that she did not believe that any one really enjoyed

reading Shakespeare.  Mr. Ramsay said grimly (but

his mind was turned away again) that very few

people liked it as much as they said they did.  But,

he added, there is considerable merit in some of the

plays nevertheless, and Mrs. Ramsay saw that it

would be all right for the moment anyhow; he would

laugh at Minta, and she, Mrs. Ramsay saw, realising

his extreme anxiety about himself, would, in her

own way, see that he was taken care of, and

praise him, somehow or other.  But she wished it

was not necessary: perhaps it was her fault that it

was necessary. Anyhow, she was free now to listen

to what Paul Rayley was trying to say about books

one had read as a boy.  They lasted, he said.  He

had read some of Tolstoi at school.  There was one

he always remembered, but he had forgotten the

name. Russian names were impossible, said Mrs.

Ramsay. " Vronsky, " said Paul.  He remembered that

because he always thought it such a good name for

a villain.  " Vronsky, " said Mrs. Ramsay; " Oh, Anna#

Karenina#, " but that did not take them very far;

books were not in their line.  No, Charles Tansley

would put them both right in a second about books,

but it was all so mixed up with, Am I saying the

right thing?  Am I making a good impression?  that,

after all, one knew more about him than about Tolstoi,

whereas, what Paul said was about the thing,

simply, not himself, nothing else.  Like all stupid

people, he had a kind of modesty too, a consideration

for what you were feeling, which, once in a

way at least, she found attractive.  Now he was

thinking, not about himself, or about Tolstoi, but

whether she was cold, whether she felt a draught,

whether she would like a pear.

     No, she said, she did not want a pear.  Indeed

she had been keeping guard over the dish of fruit

(without realising it)  jealously, hoping that nobody

would touch it.  Her eyes had been going in and out

among the curves and shadows of the fruit, among

the rich purples of the lowland grapes, then over

the horny ridge of the shell, putting a yellow against

a purple, a curved shape against a round shape,

without knowing why she did it, or why, every time

she did it, she felt more and more serene; until, oh,

what a pity that they should do 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 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.  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.

     The words (she was looking at the window)

sounded as if they were floating like flowers on

water out there, cut off from them all, as if no one

had said them, but they had come into existence

of themselves.

     " And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to

be are full of trees and changing leaves. "  She did

not know what they meant, but, like music, the

words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside

her self, saying quite easily and naturally what

had been in her mind the whole evening while she

said different things.  She knew, without looking

round, that every one at the table was listening to the

voice saying:

   I wonder if it seems to you,

     Luriana, Lurilee

with the same sort of relief and pleasure that she

had, as if this were, at last, the natural thing to say,

this were their own voice speaking.

     But the voice had stopped.  She looked round.  She

made herself get up.  Augustus Carmichael had risen

and, holding his table napkin so that it looked like

a long white robe he stood chanting:

   To see the Kings go riding by

   Over lawn and daisy lea

   With their palm leaves and cedar sheaves,

     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 differently; it had become, she knew, giving

one last look at it over her shoulder, already the

past.

     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 were taking

their bearings; the change from poetry to politics

struck her like that; so Mr. Bankes and Charles

Tansley went off, while the others stood looking at

Mrs. Ramsay going upstairs in the lamplight alone.

Where, Lily wondered, was she going so quickly?

     Not that she did in fact run or hurry; she went

indeed rather slowly.  She felt rather inclined just

for a moment to stand still after all that chatter,

and pick out one particular thing; the thing that

mattered; to detach it; separate it off; clean it of

all the emotions and odds and ends of things,

and so hold it before her, and bring it to the tribunal

where, ranged about in conclave, sat the judges she

had set up to decide these things.  Is it good, is it

bad, is it right or wrong?  Where are we all

going to?  and so on.  So she righted herself after

the shock of the event, and quite unconsciously and

incongruously, used the branches of the elm trees

outside to help her to stabilise her position.  Her

world was changing: they were still.  The event had

given her a sense of movement.  All must be in

order.  She must get that right and that right, she

thought, insensibly approving of the dignity of the

trees' stillness, and now again of the superb upward

rise (like the beak of a ship up a wave) of the elm

branches as the wind raised them.  For it was windy

(she stood a moment to look out).  It was windy, so

that the leaves now and then brushed open a star,

and the stars themselves seemed to be shaking and

darting light and trying to flash out between the

edges of the leaves.  Yes, that was done then, accomplished;

and as with all things done, became

solemn.  Now one thought of it, cleared of chatter

and emotion, it seemed always to have been, only

was shown now and so being shown, struck everything

into stability.  They would, she thought, going

on again, however long they lived, come back to this

night; this moon; this wind; this house: and to

her too.  It flattered her, where she was most

susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in

their hearts, however long they lived she would be

woven; and this, and this, and this, she thought,

going upstairs, laughing, but affectionately, at the

sofa on the landing (her mother's); at the rocking-chair

(her father's); at the map of the Hebrides.  All

that would be revived 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 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 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?

     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 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, 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 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.

     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's 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; " 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 stocking

out, and all the fine gravings came drawn

with steel instruments about her lips and forehead,

and she grew still like a tree which has been tossing

and quivering and now, when the breeze falls,

settles, leaf by leaf, into quiet.

     It 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

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, upwards,

shoving her way up under petals that curved over

her, so that she only knew this is white, or this is

red.  She did not know at first what the words meant

at all.

   Steer, hither steer your winged pines, all beaten Mariners

she read and turned the page, swinging herself,

zigzagging this way and that, from one line to

another as from one branch to another, from one

red and white flower to another, until a little sound

roused 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 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 sorrow

(that was Scott at his best)  and the astonishing

delight and feeling of vigour that it gave him.

  Well, let them improve upon that, he thought as

he finished the chapter. He felt that he had been

arguing with somebody, and had got the better of

him. They could not improve upon that, whatever

they might say; and his own position became more

secure. The lovers were fiddlesticks, he thought,

collecting it all in his mind again. 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 Balzac, to the

English novel and the French novel.

  Mrs. Ramsay raised her head and like a person

in a light sleep seemed to say that if he wanted her

to wake she would, she really would, but otherwise,

might she go on sleeping, just a little longer, just a

little longer ? She was climbing up those branches,

this way and that, laying hands on one flower and

then another.

  " Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose, " she

read, and so reading she was ascending, she felt, on

to the top, on to the summit. How satisfying! How

restful! All the odds and ends of the day stuck to

this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And

then there it was, suddenly entire; she held it in her

hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete,

the essence sucked out of life and held rounded

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. 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,

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?

  " 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. 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? 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. 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.

  " 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 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.

<S II>

  " 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, kept his candle burning rather

longer than the rest.

  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 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,

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 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,

blew out his candle. It was midnight..

  But what after all is one night? A short space,

especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so

soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green

quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the

wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter

holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally,

evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen;

they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets,

plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as

they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling

in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold

letters on marble pages describe death in battle and

how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian

sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight,

in  the light of harvest moons, the light which

mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the

stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the

shore.

  It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence

and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain

and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the

hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking;

which, did we deserve them, should be ours always.

But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws

the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his

treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them,

so confuses them that it seems impossible that their

calm should ever return or that we should ever compose

from their fragments a perfect whole or read

in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For

our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil

respite only.

  The nights now are full of wind and destruction;

the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter

skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and

they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and

scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and

breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that

he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts,

a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and

go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image

with semblance of serving and divine promptitude

comes readily to hand bringing the night to order

and making the world reflect the compass of the soul.

The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in

his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless

in such confusion to ask the night those questions as

to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the

sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.

      [Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark

morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay

having died rather suddenly the night before, his

arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]]

  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 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 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.

  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 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.

  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. Õ [Prue Pamsay, 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!]] å

  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 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.

  Õ [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.]] å

  And now in the heat of summer the wind sent its

spies about the house again. Flies wove a web in the

sunny rooms; weeds that had grown close to the

glass in the night tapped methodically at the window

pane. When darkness fell, the stroke of the Lighthouse,

which had laid itself with such authority

upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern,

came now in the softer light of spring mixed with

moonlight gliding gently as if it laid its caress and

lingered steathily and looked and came lovingly

again. But in the very lull of this loving caress, as

the long stroke leant upon the bed, the rock was rent

asunder; another fold of the shawl loosened; there

it hung, and swayed. Through the short summer

nights and the long summer days, when the empty

rooms seemed to murmur with the echoes of the

fields and the hum of flies, the long streamer waved

gently, swayed aimlessly; while the sun so striped

and barred the rooms and filled them with yellow

haze that Mrs. McNab, when she broke in and

lurched about, dusting, sweeping, looked like a

tropical fish oaring its way through 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 there

seemed to drop into this silence, this indifference,

this integrity, the thud of something falling.

  Õ [A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men

were blown up in France, among them Andrew

Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]] å

  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 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.

  Õ [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.]] å

  Night after night, summer and winter, the torment

of storms, the arrow-like stillness of fine

weather, held their court without interference. Listening

(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.

  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 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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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 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; 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!

  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; 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 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 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.]

  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 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.

<S III>

  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 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?

  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.

  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) 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 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 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 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 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 -- 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 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.

  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 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.

  " 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 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 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 annihiliation.

  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 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 figure of

infinite pathos. He tied knots. He bought boots.

There was no helping Mr. Ramsay on the journey he

was going. But now just as she wished to say something,

could have said something, perhaps, here

they were -- Cam and James. They appeared on the

terrace. They came, lagging, side by side, a serious,

melancholy couple.

  But why was it like that# that they came? She

could not help feeling annoyed with them; they

might have come more cheerfully; they might have

given him what, now that they were off, she would

not have the chance of giving him. For she felt a

sudden emptiness; a frustration. Her feeling had

come too late; there it was ready; but he no longer

needed it. He had become a very distinguished,

elderly man, who had no need of her whatsoever.

She felt snubbed. He slung a knapsack round his

shoulders. He shared out the parcels -- there were

a number of them, ill tied in brown paper. He sent

Cam for a cloak. He had all the appearance of a

leader making ready for an expedition. Then, wheeling

about, he led the way with his firm military

tread, in those wonderful boots, carrying brown

paper parcels, down the path, his children following

him. They looked, she thought, as if fate had

devoted them to some stern enterprise, and they

went to it, still young enough to be drawn acquiescent

in their father's wake, obediently, but with

a pallor in their eyes which made her feel that they

suffered something beyond their years in silence.

So they passed the edge of the lawn, and it seemed

to Lily that she watched a procession go, drawn

on by some stress of common feeling which made it,

faltering and flagging as it was, a little company

bound together and strangely impressive to her.

Politely, but very distantly, Mr. Ramsay raised

his hand and saluted her as they passed.

  But what a face, she thought, immediately finding

the sympathy which she had not been asked to

give troubling her for expression. What had made

it like that? Thinking, night after night, she supposed

-- about the reality of kitchen tables, she

added, remembering the symbol which in her vagueness

as to what Mr. Ramsay did think about Andrew

had given her. (He had been killed by the splinter of

a shell instantly, she bethought her.) The kitchen

table was something visionary, austere; something

bare, hard, not ornamental. There was no colour

to it; it was all edges and angles; it was uncompromisingly

plain. But Mr. Ramsay kept always his

eyes fixed upon it, never allowed himself to be distracted

or deluded, until his face became worn too

and ascetic and partook of this unornamented

beauty which so deeply impressed her. Then, she

recalled (standing where he had left her, holding her

brush), worries had fretted it -- not so nobly. He

must have had his doubts about that table, she

supposed; whether the table was a real table;

whether it was worth the time he gave to it; whether

he was able after all to find it. He had had doubts,

she felt, or he would have asked less of people.

That was what they talked about late at night sometimes,

she suspected; and then next day Mrs.

Ramsay looked tired, and Lily flew into a rage with

him over some absurd little thing. But now he had

nobody to talk to about that table , or his boots,

or his knots; and he was like a lion seeking whom

he could devour, and his face had that touch of desperation,

of exaggeration in it which alarmed her,

and made her pull her skirts about her. And then,

she recalled, there was that sudden revivification,

that sudden flare (when she praised his boots),

that sudden recovery of vitality and interest

in ordinary human things, which too passed and

changed (for he was always changing, and hid nothing)

into that other final phase which was new to

her and had, she owned, made herself ashamed of

her own irritability, when it seemed as if he had

shed worries and ambitions, and the hope of sympathy

and the desire for praise, had entered some

other region, was drawn on, as if by curiosity, in

dumb colloquy, whether with himself or another, at

the head of that little procession out of one's range.

An extraordinary face! The gate banged.

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

and disappointment. Her sympathy seemed to be

cast back on her, like a bramble sprung across her

face. She felt curiously divided, as if one part of her

were drawn out there -- it was a still day, hazy; the

Lighthouse looked this morning at an immense distance;

the other had fixed itself doggedly, solidly,

here on the lawn. She saw her canvas as if it had

floated up and placed itself white and uncompromising

directly before her. It seemed to rebuke her with

its cold stare for all this hurry and agitation; this

folly and waste of emotion; it drastically recalled

her and spread through her mind first a peace, as her

disorderly sensations (he had gone and she had been

so sorry for him and she had said nothing) trooped

off the field; and then, emptiness. She looked

blankly at the canvas, with its uncompromising

white stare; from the canvas to the garden. There

was something (she stood screwing up her little

Chinese eyes in her small puckered face), something

she remembered in the relations of those lines cutting

across, slicing down, and in the mass of the

hedge with its green cave of blues and browns, which

had stayed in her mind; which had tied a knot in

her mind so that at odds and ends of time, involuntarily,

as she walked along the Brompton Road,

as she brushed her hair, she found herself painting

that picture, passing her eye over it, and untying

the knot in imagination. But there was all the difference

in the world between this planning airily

away from the canvas and actually taking her brush

and making the first mark.

  She had taken the wrong brush in her agitation at

Mr. Ramsay's presence, and her easel, rammed into

the earth so nervously, was at the wrong angle. And

now that she had put 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 to

the swimmer among them are divided by steep

gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must be

run; the mark made.

  With a curious physical sensation, as if she were

urged forward and at the same time must hold herself

back, she made her first quick decisive stroke.

The brush descended. It flickered brown over the

white canvas; it left a running mark. A second time

she did it -- a third time. And so pausing and so

flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical movement,

as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm

and the strokes another, and all were related; and

so, lightly and swiftly pausing, striking, she scored

her canvas with brown running nervous lines which

had no sooner settled there than they enclosed ( she

felt it looming out at her) a space. Down in the

hollow of one wave she saw the next wave towering

higher and higher above her. For what could be

more formidable than that space? Here she was

again, she thought, stepping back to look at it,

drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community

with people into the presence of this formidable

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

this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her,

emerged stark at the back of apperarances and commanded

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 with protection

to all the blasts of doubt. Why then did she

do it? She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with

running lines. It would be hung in the servants' bedrooms.

It would be rolled up and stuffed under a

sofa. What was the good of doing it then, and she

heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying

she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one

of those habitual currents in which after a certain

time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats

words without being aware any longer who

originally spoke them.

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

anxiously considering what her plan of attack

should be. For the mass loomed before her; it

protruded; she felt it pressing on her eyeballs. Then,

as if some juice necessary for the lubrication of her

faculties were spontaneously squirted, she began

precariously dipping among the blues and umbers,

moving her brush hither and thither, but it was now

heavier and went slower, as if it had fallen in with

some rhythm which was dictated to her (she kept

looking at the hedge, at the canvas) by what she

saw, so that while her hand quivered with life, this

rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with

it on its current. Certainly she was losing consciousness

of outer things. And as she lost consciousness

of outer things, and her name and her personality

and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael

was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its

depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories

and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that

glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she

modelled it with greens and blues.

  Charles Tansley used to say that, she remembered,

women can't paint, can't write. Coming up

behind her, he had stood close beside her, a thing she

hated, as she painted her on this very spot. " Shag

tobacco, " he said, " fivepence an ounce, " parading

his poverty, his principles. (But the war had drawn

the sting of her femininity. Poor devils, one thought,

poor devils, of both sexes.) He was always carrying

a book about under his arm -- a purple book. He

" worked. " He sat, she remembered, working in a

blaze of sun. At dinner he would sit right in the

middle of the view. But after all, she reflected, there

was the scene on the beach. One must remember

that. It was a windy morning. They had all gone

down to the beach. Mrs. Ramsay sat down and

wrote letters by a rock. She wrote and wrote. " Oh, "

she said, looking up at something floating in the

sea, " is it a lobster pot? Is it an upturned boat? "

She was so short-sighted that she could not see, and

then Charles Tansley became as nice as he could

possibly be. He began playing ducks and drakes.

They chose little flat black stones and sent them

skipping over the waves. Every now and then Mrs.

Ramsay looked up over her spectacles and laughed

at them. What they said she could not remember,

but only she and Charles throwing stones and getting

on very well all of a sudden and Mrs. Ramsay

watching them. She was highly conscious of that.

Mrs. Ramsay, she thought, stepping back and

screwing up her eyes. (It must have altered the

design a good deal when she was sitting on the

step with James. There must have been a shadow.)

When she thought of herself and Charles throwing

ducks and drakes and of the whole scene on the

beach, it seemed to depend somehow upon Mrs.

Ramsay sitting under the rock, with a pad on her

knee, writing letters. (She wrote innumerable letters,

and sometimes the wind took them and she and

Charles just saved a page from the sea.) But what

a power was in the human soul! she thought. That

woman sitting there writing under the rock resolved

everything into simplicity; made these angers, irritations

fall off like old rags; she brought together

this and that and then this, and so made out

of that miserable silliness and spite (she and Charles

squabbling, sparring, had been silly and spiteful)

something -- this scene on the beach for example, this

moment of friendship and liking -- which survived,

after all these years complete, so that she dipped

into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and there

it stayed in the mind affecting one almost like a

work of art.

  " Like a work of art, " she repeated, looking from

her canvas to the drawing-room steps and back

again. She must rest for a moment. And, resting,

looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question

which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually,

the vast, the general question which was apt to particularise

itself at such moments as these, when she

released faculties that had been on the strain, stood

over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What

is the meaning of life? That was all -- a simple question;

one that tended to close in on one with years.

The great revelation had never come. The great

revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there

were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches

struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This,

that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and

the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together;

Mrs. Ramsay saying, " Life stand still here ";

Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something

permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried

to make of the moment something permanent) -- this

was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of

chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and

flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the

leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand

still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. " Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs.

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

  All was silence. Nobody seemed yet to be stirring

in the house. She looked at it there sleeping in the

early sunlight with its windows green and blue with

the reflected leaves. The faint thought she was

thinking of Mrs. Ramsay seemed in consonance

with this quiet house; this smoke; this fine early

morning air. Faint and unreal, it was amazingly

pure and exciting. She hoped nobody would open the

window or come out of the house, but that she might

be left alone to go on thinking, to go on painting.

She turned to her canvas. But impelled by some

curiosity, driven by the discomfort of the sympathy

which she held undischarged, she walked a pace or

so to the end of the lawn to see whether, down there

on the beach, she could see that little company setting

sail. Down there among the little boats which

floated, some with their sails furled, some slowly,

for it was very calm moving away, there was one

rather apart from the others. The sail was even

now being hoisted. She decided that there in that

very distant and entirely silent little boat Mr. Ramsay

was sitting with Cam and James. Now they

had got the sail up; now after a little flagging and

hesitation the sails filled and, shrouded in profound

silence, she watched the boat take its way with

deliberation past the other boats out to sea.

  The sails flapped over their heads. The water

chuckled and slapped the sides of the boat, which

drowsed motionless in the sun. Now and then the

sails rippled with a little breeze in them, but the

ripple ran over them and ceased. The boat made no

motion at all. Mr. Ramsay sat in the middle of the

boat. He would be impatient in a moment, James

thought, and Cam thought, looking at her father,

who sat in the middle of the boat between them

(James steered; Cam sat alone in the bow) with his

legs tightly curled. He hated hanging about. Sure

enough, after fidgeting a second or two, he said something

sharp to Macalister's boy, who got out his oars

and began to row. But their father, they knew, would

never be content until they were flying along. He

would keep looking for a breeze, fidgeting, saying

things under his breath, which Macalister and

and Macalister's boy would overhear, and they would

both be made horribly uncomfortable. He had made

them come. He had forced them to come. In their

anger they hoped that the breeze would never rise,

that he might be thwarted in every possible way,

since he had forced them to come against their wills.

  All the way down to the beach they had lagged

behind together, though he bade them " Walk up,

walk up, " without speaking. Their heads were bent

down, their heads were pressed down by some remorseless

gale. Speak to him they could not. They

must come; they must follow. They must walk behind

him carrying brown paper parcels. But they

vowed, in silence, as they walked, to stand by each

other and carry out the great compact -- to resist

tyranny to the death. So there they would sit, one

at one end of the boat, one at the other, in silence.

They would say nothing, only look at him now and

then where he sat with his legs twisted, frowning

and fidgeting, and pishing and pshawing and muttering

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.

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 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 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 conpact; to resist tyranny to the

death. Their grievance weighed them down. They

had been forced; they had been bidden. He had

borne them down once more with his gloom and his

authority, making them do his bidding, on this fine

morning, come, because he wished it, carrying these

parcels, to the Lighthouse; take part in these rites

he went through for his own pleasure in memory of

dead people, which they hated, so that they lagged

after him, all the pleasure of the day was spoilt.

  Yes, the breeze was freshening. The boat was

leaning, the water was sliced sharply and fell away

in green cascades, in bubbles, in cataracts. Cam

looked down into the foam, into the sea with all its

treasure in it, and its speed hypnotised her, and the

tie between her and James sagged a little. It slackened

a little. She began to think, How fast it goes.

Where are we going? and the movement hypnotised

her, while James, with his eye fixed on the sail and

on the horizon, steered grimly. But he began to

think as he steered that he might escape; he might

be quit of it all. They might land somewhere; and

be free then. Both of them, looking at each other

for a moment, had a sense of escape and exaltation,

what with the speed and the change. But the breeze

bred in Mr. Ramsay too the same excitement, and,

as old Macalister turned to fling his line overboard,

he cried out aloud,

  " We perished, " and then again, " each alone. "

And then with his usual spasm of repentance or shyness,

pulled himself up, and waved his hand towards

the shore.

  " See the little house, " he said pointing, wishing

Cam to look. She raised herself reluctantly and

looked. But which was it? She could no longer make

out, there on the hillside, which was their house. All

looked distant and peaceful and strange. The shore

seemed refined, far away, unreal. Already the little

distance they had sailed had put them far from it

and given it the changed look, the composed look,

of something receding in which one has no longer

any part. Which was their house? She could not see

it.

  " But I beneath a rougher sea, " Mr. Ramsay murmured.

He had found the house and so seeing it,

he had also seen himself there; he had seen himself

walking on the terrace, alone. He was walking up

and down between the urns; and he seemed to himself

very old and bowed. Sitting in the boat, he

bowed, he crouched himself, acting instantly his

part -- the part of a desolate man, widowed, bereft;

and so called up before him in hosts people sympathising

with him; staged for himself as he sat

in the boat, a little drama; which required of him

decrepitude and exhaustion and sorrow (he raised

his hands and looked at the thinness of them,

to confirm his dream) and then there was given him

in abundance women's sympathy, and he imagined

how they would soothe him and sympathise with

him, and so getting in his dream some reflection

of the exquisite pleasure 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, " 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? 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

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 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 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 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 asleep, she thought;

were free like smoke, were free to come and go like

ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.

  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 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.

And she began to lay on a red, a grey, and she began

to model her way into the hollow there. At the same

time, she seemed to be sitting beside Mrs. Ramsay

on the beach.

  " Is it a boat? Is it a cask? " Mrs. Ramsay said.

And she began hunting round for her spectacles.

And she sat, having found them, silent, looking

out to sea. And Lily, painting steadily, felt as if

a door had opened, and one went in and stood gazing

silently about in a high 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 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 and

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 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; she had made it up; but it was what she knew

them by all the same. She went on tunnelling her

way into her picture, into the past.

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

She had built up a whole structure of

imagination on that saying too. She remembered

how, as he said it, she thought how he rang up the

servant, and she said, " Mrs. Rayley's out, sir, " and

he decided that he would not come home either. She

saw him sitting in the corner of some lugubrious

place where the smoke attached itself to the red

plush seats, and the waitresses got to know you,

and he played chess with a little man who was in

the tea trade and lived at Surbiton, but that was

all Paul knew about him. And then Minta was out

when he came home and then there was that scene

on the stairs, when he got the poker in case of

burglars (no doubt to frighten her too) and spoke

so bitterly, saying she had ruined his life. At any

rate when she went down to see them at a cottage

near Rickmansworth, things were horribly strained.

Paul took her down the garden to look at the

Belgian hares which he bred, and Minta followed

them, singing, and put her bare arm on his shoulder,

lest he should tell her anything.

  Minta was bored by hares, Lily thought. But

Minta never gave herself away. She never said

things like that about playing chess in coffee-houses.

She was far too conscious, far too wary. But to go

on with their story -- they had got through the

dangerous stage by now. She had been staying with

them last summer some time and the car broke

down and Minta had to hand him his tools. He sat

on the road mending the car, and it was the way she

gave him the tools -- business-like, straightforward,

friendly -- that proved it was all right now. They

were " in love " no longer; no, he had taken up with

another woman, a serious woman, with her hair in

a plait and a case in her hand (Minta had described

her gratefully, almost admiringly), who went to

meetings and shared Paul's views (they had got

more and more pronounced) about the taxation of

land values and a capital levy. Far from breaking

up the marriage, that alliance had righted it. They

were excellent friends, obviously, as he sat on the

road and she handed him his tools.

  So that was the story of the Rayleys, Lily thought.

She imagined herself telling it to Mrs. Ramsay, who

would be full of curiosity to know what had become

of the Rayleys. She would feel a little triumphant,

telling Mrs. Ramsay that the marriage

had not been a success.

  But the dead, thought Lily, encountering some

obstacle in her design which made her pause and

ponder, stepping back a foot or so, oh, the dead!

she murmured, one pitied them, one brushed them

aside, one had even a little contempt for them. They

are at our mercy. Mrs. Ramsay has faded and gone,

she thought. We can over-ride her wishes, improve

away her limited, old-fashioned ideas. She recedes

further and further from us. Mockingly she seemed

to see her there at the end of the corridor of years

saying, of all incongruous things, " Marry, marry! "

(sitting very upright early in the morning with the

birds beginning to cheep in the garden outside). And

one would have to say to her, It has all gone against

your wishes. They're happy like that; I'm happy

like this. Life has changed completely. At that all

her being, even her beauty, became for a moment,

dusty and out of date. For a moment Lily, standing

there, with the sun hot on her back, summing up the

Rayleys, triumphed over Mrs. Ramsay, who would

never know how Paul went to coffee-houses and had

a mistress; how he sat on the ground and Minta

handed him his tools; how she stood here painting,

had never married, not even William Bankes.

  Mrs. Ramsay had planned it. Perhaps, had she

lived, she would have compelled it. Already that

summer he was " the kindest of men. " He was " the

first scientist of his age, my husband says. " He was

also " poor William -- it makes me so unhappy, when

I go to see him, to find nothing nice in his house --

no one to arrange the flowers. " So they were sent

for walks together, and she was told, with that

faint touch of irony that made Mrs. Ramsay slip

through one's fingers, that she had a scientific mind;

she liked flowers; she was so exact. What was this

mania of hers for marriage? Lily wondered, stepping

to and fro from her easel.

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

a reddish light seemed to burn in her mind, covering

Paul Rayley, issuing from him. It rose like a

fire sent up in token of some celebration by savages

on a distant beach. She heard the roar and the

crackle. The whole sea for miles round ran red

and gold. Some winey smell mixed with it and intoxicated

her, for she felt again her own headlong

desire to throw herself off the cliff and be drowned

looking for a pearl brooch on a beach. And the

roar and the crackle repelled her with fear and disgust,

as if while she saw its splendour and power

she saw too how it fed on the treasure of the house,

greedily, disgustingly, and she loathed it. But for

a sight, for a glory it surpassed everything in her

experience, and burnt year after year like a signal

fire on a desert island at the edge of the sea, and one

had only to say " in love " and instantly, as happened

now, up rose Paul's fire again. And it sank and she

said to herself, laughing, " The Rayleys "; how Paul

went to coffee-houses and played chess..)

  She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth

though, she thought. She had been looking at the

table-cloth, and it had flashed upon her that she

would move the tree to the middle, and need never

marry anybody, and she had felt an enormous exultation.

She had felt, now she could stand up to Mrs.

Ramsay -- a tribute to the astonishing power that

Mrs. Ramsay had over one. Do this, she said, and

one did it. Even her shadow at the window with

James was full of authority. She remembered how

William Bankes had been shocked by her neglect

of the significance of mother and son. Did she not

admire their beauty? he said. But William, she remembered,

had listened to her with his wise child's

eyes when she explained how it was not irreverence:

how a light there needed a shadow there and so on.

She did not intend to disparage a subject which, they

agreed, Raphael had treated divinely. She was not

cynical. Quite the contrary. Thanks to his scientific

mind he understood -- a proof of disinterested intelligence

which had pleased her and comforted her

enormously. One could talk of painting then seriously

to a man. Indeed, his friendship had been one

of the pleasures of her life. She loved William

Bankes.

  They went to Hampton Court and he always left

her, like the perfect gentleman he was, plenty of

time to wash her hands, while he strolled by the

river. That was typical of their relationship. Many

things were left unsaid. Then they strolled through

the courtyards, and admired, summer after summer,

the proportions and the flowers, and he would tell

her things, about perspective, about architecture,

as they walked, and he would stop to look at a tree,

or the view over the lake, and admire a child -- (it

was his great grief -- he had no daughter) in the

vague aloof way that was natural to a man who

spent so much time in laboratories that the world

when he came out seemed to dazzle him, so that he

walked slowly, lifted his hand to screen his eyes

and paused, with his head thrown back, merely

to breathe the air. Then he would tell her how his

housekeeper was on her holiday; he must buy a new

carpet for the staircase. Perhaps she would go with

him to buy a new carpet for the staircase. And once

something led him to talk about the Ramsays and

he had said how when he first saw her she had been

wearing a grey hat; she was not more than nineteen

or twenty. She was astonishingly beautiful. There

he stood looking down the avenue at Hampton

Court as if he could see her there among the

fountains.

  She looked now at the drawing-room step. She

saw, through William's eyes, the shape of a woman,

peaceful and silent, with downcast eyes. She sat

musing, pondering (she was in grey that day, Lily

thought). Her eyes were bent. She would never

lift them. Yes, thought Lily, looking intently, I must

have seen her look like that, but not in grey; nor so

still, nor so young, nor so peaceful. The figure came

readily enough. She was astonishingly beautiful, as

William said. But beauty was not everything.

Beauty had this penalty -- it came too readily, came

too completely. It stilled life -- froze it. One forgot

the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some

queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made

the face unrecognisable for a moment and yet

added a quality one saw for ever after. It was

simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of

beauty. But what was the look she had, Lily wondered,

when she clapped her deer-stalkers's hat on

her head, or ran across the grass, or scolded

Kennedy, the gardener? Who could tell her? Who

could help her?

  Against her will she had come to the surface, and

found herself half out of the picture, looking, a

little dazedly, as if at unreal things, at Mr. Carmichael.

He lay on his chair with his hands clasped

above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking

like a creature gorged with existence. His book

had fallen on to the grass.

  She wanted to go straight up to him and say,

"Mr. Carmichael! " Then he would look up benevolently

as always, from his smoky vague green

eyes. But one only woke people if one knew what

one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say

not one thing, but everything. Little words that

broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing.

" About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay "

-- no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody.

The urgency of the moment always missed its mark.

Words fluttered sideways and struck the object

inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea

sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged

people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between

the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For

how could one express in words these emotions of

the body? express that emptiness there? (She was

looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily

empty.) It was one's body feeling, not

one's mind. The physical sensations that went with

the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely

unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent

all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain.

And then to want and not to have -- to want and

want -- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again

and again! Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! she called out silently,

to that essence which sat by the boat, that abstract

one made of her, that woman in grey, as if to abuse

her for having gone, and then having gone, come

back again. It had seemed so safe, thinking of her.

Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with

easily and safely at any time of day or night, she

had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand

out and wrung the heart thus. Suddenly, the empty

drawing-room steps, the frill of the chair inside, the

puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and

whisper of the garden became like curves and

arabesques flourishing round a centre of complete

emptiness.

  " What does it mean? How do you explain it all? "

she wanted to say, turning to Mr. Carmichael again.

For the whole world seemed to have dissolved in

this early morning hour into a pool of thought, a

deep basin of reality, and one could almost fancy

that had Mr. Carmichael spoken, for instance, a

little tear would have rent the surface pool. And

then? Something would emerge. A hand would be

shoved up, a blade would be flashed. It was nonsense

of course.

  A curious notion came to her that he did after all

hear the things she could not say. He was an inscrutable

old man, with the yellow stain on his

beard, and his poetry, and his puzzles, sailing

serenely through a world which satisfied all his

wants, so that she thought he had only to put down

his hand where he lay on the lawn to fish up anything

he wanted. She looked at her picture. That would

have been his answer, presumably -- how " you " and

" I " and " she " pass and vanish; nothing stays; all

changes; but not words, not paint. Yet it would be

hung in the attics, she thought; it would be rolled

up and flung under a sofa; yet even so, even of a

picture like that, it was true. One might say, even

of this scrawl, not of that actual picture, perhaps,

but of what it attempted, that it " remained for

ever, " she was going to say, or, for the words spoken

sounded even to herself, too boastful, to hint, wordlessly;

when, looking at the picture, she was surprised

to find that she could not see it. Her eyes were

full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at

first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her

lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks.

She had perfect control of herself -- Oh, yes! -- in

every other way. Was she crying then for Mrs.

Ramsay, without being aware of any unhappiness?

She addressed old Mr. Carmichael again. What was

it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust their

hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the fist

grasp? Was there no safety? No learning by heart

of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but

all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of

a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly

people, that this was life? -- startling, unexpected,

unknown? For one moment she felt that if they both

got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an

explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable,

said it with violence, as two fully

equipped human beings from whom nothing should

be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself

up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes

would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough

Mrs. Ramsay would return. " Mrs. Ramsay! " she

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

face.

  Õ [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.]] å

  " Mrs. Ramsay! " Lily cried, " Mrs. Ramsay! "

But nothing happened. The pain increased. That

anguish could reduce one to such a pitch of imbecility,

she thought! Anyhow the old man had not

heard her. He remained benignant, calm -- if one

chose to think it, sublime. Heaven be praised, no

one had heard her cry that ignominious cry, stop

pain, stop! She had not obviously taken leave of her

senses. No one had seen her step off her strip of

board into the waters of annihilation. She remained

a skimpy old maid, holding a paint-brush.

  And now slowly the pain of the want, and the

bitter anger (to be called back, just as she thought

she would never feel sorrow for Mrs. Ramsay again.

Had she missed her among the coffee cups at breakfast?

not in the least) lessened; and of their anguish

left, as antidote, a relief that was balm in itself, and

also, but more mysteriously, a sense of some one

there, of Mrs. Ramsay, relieved for a moment of

the weight that the world had put on her, staying

lightly by her side and then (for this was Mrs.

Ramsay in all her beauty) raising to her forehead a

wreath of white flowers with which she went. Lily

squeezed her tubes again. She attacked that problem

of the hedge. It was strange how clearly she saw

her, stepping with her usual quickness across fields

among whose folds, purplish and soft, among whose

flowers, hyacinth or lilies, she vanished. It was

some trick of the painter's eye. For days after she

had heard of her death she had seen her thus, putting

her wreath to her forehead and going unquestioningly

with her companion, a shade across the fields.

The sight, the phrase, had its power to console.

Wherever she happened to be, painting, here, in

the country or in London, the vision would come

to her, and her eyes, half closing, sought something

to base her vision on. She looked down the railway

carriage, the omnibus; took a line from shoulder

or cheek; looked at the windows opposite; at Piccadilly,

lamp-strung in the evening. All had been

part of the fields of death. But always something -- it

might be a face, a voice, a paper boy crying

Standard#, News# -- thrust through, snubbed her,

waked her, required and got in the end an effort

of attention, so that the vision must be perpetually

remade. Now again, moved as she was by some

instinctive need of distance and blue, she looked

at the bay beneath her, making hillocks of the blue

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 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.

  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 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 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 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? 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 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 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

and darkened over him; would not move; something

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?

  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 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.

  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.

  [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.]

  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 the drops falling

from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell

here and there on the dark, the slumbrous shapes in

her mind; shapes of a world not realised but turning

in their darkness, catching here and there, a

spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople. Small

as it was, and shaped something like a leaf stood

on its end with the gold-sprinkled waters flowing in

and about it, it had, she supposed, a place in the

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 Napoleon 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 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 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 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.

  So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe,

looking at the sea which had scarcely a stain on it,

which was so soft that the sails and the clouds

seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought,

upon distance: whether people are near us or far

from us; for her feeling for Mr. Ramsay changed

as he sailed further and further across the bay. It

seemed to be elongated, stretched out; he seemed

to become more and more remote. He and his children

seemed to be swallowed up in that blue, that

distance; but here, on the lawn, close at hand, Mr.

Carmichael suddenly grunted. She laughed. He

clawed his book up from the grass. He settled into

his chair again puffing and blowing like some sea

monster. That was different altogether, because he

was so near. And now again all was quiet. They must

be out of bed by this time, she supposed, looking

at the house, but nothing appeared there. But then,

she remembered, they had always made off directly

a meal was over, on business of their own. It was

all in keeping with this silence, this emptiness, and

the unreality of the early morning hour. It was a

way things had sometimes, she thought, lingering

for a moment and looking at the long glittering

windows and the plume of blue smoke: they became

unreal. So coming back from a journey, or after an

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                          286

lives. The Ramsays'; the children's; and all sorts

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

with her basket; a rook, a red-hot poker;

the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common

feeling held the whole.

  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 turned to her

picture. She had been wasting her morning. For

whatever reason she could not achieve that razor

edge of balance between two opposite forces; Mr.

Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary.

There was something perhaps wrong with the design?

Was it, she wondered, that the line of the wall

wanted breaking, was it that the mass of the trees

was too heavy? She smiled ironically; for had she

not thought, when she began, that she had solved

her problem?

  What was the problem then? She must try to get

hold of something tht evaded her. It evaded her

when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay; it evaded her

now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came.

Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases.

But what she wished to get hold of was that very

jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been

made anything. Get that and start afresh; get that

and start afresh; she said desperately, pitching

herself firmly again before her easel. It was a miserable

machine, an inefficient machine, she thought,

the human apparatus for painting or for feeling;

it always broke down at the critical moment;

heroically, one must force it on. She stared, frowning.

There was the hedge, sure enough. But one got

nothing by soliciting urgently. One got only a glare

in the eye from looking at the line of the wall, or

from thinking -- she wore a grey hat. She was astonishingly

beautiful. Let it come, she thought, if it

will come. For there are moments when one can

neither think nor feel. And if one can neither think

nor feel, she thought, where is one?

  Here on the grass, on the ground, she thought,

sitting down, and examining with her brush a little

colony of plantains. For the lawn was very rough.

Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could

not shake herself free from the sense that everything

this morning was happening for the first time,

perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though

he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train

window, that he must look now, for he will never see

that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work

in the fields, again. The lawn was the world; they

were up here together, on this exalted station, she

thought, looking at old Mr. Carmichael, who seemed

(though they had not said a word all this time) to

share her thoughts. And she would never see him

again perhaps. He was growing old. Also, she remembered,

smiling at the slipper that dangled from

his foot, he was growing famous. People said that

his poetry was " so beautiful. " They went and published

things he had written forty years ago. There

was a famous man now called Carmichael, she

smiled, thinking how many shapes one person might

wear, how he was that in the newspapers, but here

the same as he had always been. He looked the same

-- greyer, rather. Yes, he looked the same, but somebody

had said, she recalled, that when he had heard

of Andrew Ramsay's death (he was killed in a

second by a shell; he should have been a great

mathematician) Mr. Carmichael had " lost all interest

in life. " What did it mean -- that? she wondered.

Had he marched through Trafalgar Square

grasping a big stick? Had he turned pages over

and over, without reading them, sitting in his room

in St. John's Wood alone? She did not know what

he had done, when he heard that Andrew was

killed, but she felt it in him all the same. They only

mumbled at each other on staircases; they looked

up at the sky and said it will be fine or it won't be

fine. But this was one way of knowing people, she

thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit

in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running

purple down into the distant heather. She knew

him in that way. She knew that he had changed

somehow. She had never read a line of his poetry.

She thought that she knew how it went though,

slowly and sonorously. It was seasoned and mellow.

It was about the desert and the camel. It was about

the palm tree and the sunset. It was extremely impersonal;

it said something about death; it said

very little about love. There was an impersonality

about him. He wanted very little of other people.

Had he not always lurched rather awkwardly past

the drawing-room window with some newspaper

under his arm, trying to avoid Mrs. Ramsay whom

for some reason he did not much like? On that

account, of course, she would always try to make

him stop. He would bow to her. He would halt unwillingly

and bow profoundly. Annoyed that he did

not want anything of her, Mrs. Ramsay would ask

him (Lily could hear her) wouldn't he like a coat,

a rug, a newspaper? No, he wanted nothing. (Here

he bowed.) There was some quality in her which he

did not much like. It was perhaps her masterfulness,

her positiveness, something matter-of-fact in her.

She was so direct.

  (A noise drew her attention to the drawing-room

window -- the squeak of a hinge. The light breeze

was toying with the window..)

  There must have been people who disliked her

very much, Lily thought (Yes; she realised that the

drawing-room step was empty, but it had no effect

on her whatever. She did not want Mrs. Ramsay

now.) -- People who thought her too sure, too drastic.

  Also, her beauty offended people probably. How

monotonous, they would say, and the same always!

They preferred another type -- the dark, the vivacious.

Then she was weak with her husband. She

let him make those scenes. Then she was reserved.

Nobody knew exactly what had happened to her.

And (to go back to Mr. Carmichael and his dislike)

one could not imagine Mrs. Ramsay standing painting,

lying reading, a whole morning on the lawn.

It was unthinkable. Without saying a word, the only

token of her errand a basket on her arm, she went

off to the town, to the poor, to sit in some stuffy

little bedroom. Often and often Lily had seen her

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

with her basket on her arm, very upright.

She had noted her return. She had thought, half

laughing (she was so methodical with the tea cups),

half moved (her beauty took one's breath away),

eyes that are closing in pain have looked on you.

You have been with them there.

  And then Mrs. Ramsay would be annoyed because

somebody was late, or the butter not fresh,

or the teapot chipped. And all the time she was

saying that the butter was not fresh one would be

thinking of Greek temples, and how beauty had been

with them there in that stuffy little room. She never

talked of it -- she went, punctually, directly. It was

her instinct to go, an instinct like the swallows for

the south, the artichokes for the sun, turning her

infallibly to the human race, making her nest in its

heart. And this, like all instincts, was a little distressing

to people who did not share it; to Mr.

Carmichael perhaps, to herself certainly. Some

notion was in both of them about the ineffectiveness

of action, the supremacy of thought. Her going was

a reproach to them, gave a different twist to the

world, so that they were led to protest, seeing their

own prepossessions disappear, and clutch at them

vanishing. Charles Tansley did that too: it was part

of the reason why one disliked him. He upset the

proportions of one's world. And what had happened

to him, she wondered, idly stirring the platains

with her brush. He had got his fellowship. He had

married; he lived at Golder's Green.

  She had gone one day into a Hall and heard him

speaking during the war. He was denouncing something:

he was condemning somebody. He was

preaching brotherly love. And all she felt was how

could he love his kind who did not know one picture

from another, who had stood behind her smoking

shag (" fivepence an ounce, Miss Briscoe ") and making

it his business to tell her women can't write,

women can't paint, not so much that he bleieved it,

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

was lean and red and raucous, preaching love from

a platform (there were ants crawling about among

the plantains which she disturbed with her brush --

red, energetic, shiny ants, rather like Charles Tansley).

She had looked at him ironically from her

seat in the half-empty hall, pumping love into that

chilly space, and suddenly, there was the old cask or

whatever it was bobbing up and down among the

waves and Mrs. Ramsay looking for her spectacle

case among the pebbles. " Oh, dear!  What a

nuisance!  Lost again. Don't bother, Mr. Tansley.

I lose thousands every summer, " at which he pressed

his chin back against his collar, as if afraid to sanction

such exaggeration, but could stand it in her

whom he liked, and smiled very charmingly. He must

have confided in her on one of those long expeditions

when people got separated and walked back

alone. He was educating his little sister, Mrs. Ramsay

had told her. It was immensely to his credit.

Her own idea of him was grotesque, Lily knew well,

stirring the plantains with her brush. Half one's

notions of other people were, after all, grotesque.

They served private purposes of one's own. He did

for her instead of a whipping-boy. She found herself

flagellating his lean flanks when she was out of

temper. If she wanted to be serious about him she

had to help herself to Mrs. Ramsay's sayings, to

look at him through her eyes.

  She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb

over. She reduced them to a frenzy of indecision by

this interference in their cosmogony. Some ran this

way, others that.

  One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she

reflected. Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get

round that one woman with, she thought. Among

them, must be one that was stone blind to her

beauty. One wanted most some secret sense, fine as

air, with which to steal through keyholes and surround

her where she sat knitting, talking, sitting

silent in the window alone; which took to itself

and treasured up like the air which held the smoke

of the steamer, her thoughts, her imaginations, her

desires. What did the hedge mean to her, what did

the garden mean to her, what did it mean to her

when a wave broke? (Lily looked up, as she had

seen Mrs. Ramsay look up; she too heard a wave

falling on the beach.) And then what stirred and

trembled in her mind when the children cried,

" How's that? How's that? " cricketing? She would

stop knitting for a second. She would look intent.

Then she would lapse again, and suddenly Mr. Ramsay

stopped dead in his pacing in front of her and

some curious shock passed through her and seemed

to rock her in profound agitation on its breast when

stopping there he stood over her and looked down

at her. Lily could see him.

  He stretched out his hand and raised her from

her chair. It seemed somehow as if he had done it

before; as if he had once bent in the same way and

raised her from a boat which, lying a few inches off

some island, had required that the ladies should

thus be helped on shore by the gentlemen. An old-fashioned

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 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. It had been an earwig, apparently.

Other people might find centipedes. They had

laughed and laughed.

  But it tired Mrs. Ramsay, it cowed her a little --

the plates whizzing and the doors slamming. And

there would fall between them sometimes long rigid

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 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 some quiver, as of a blade in the air, which

came and went between them as if the usual sight

of the children sitting round their soup plates had

freshened itself in their eyes after that hour among

the pears and the cabbages. Especially, Lily thought,

Mrs. Ramsay would glance at Prue. She sat in the

middle between brothers and sisters, always occupied,

it seemed, seeing that nothing went wrong so

that she scarcely spoke herself. How Prue must have

blamed herself for that earwig in the milk   How

white she had gone when Mr. Ramsay threw his

plate through the window!  How she drooped under

those long silences between them!   Anyhow, her

mother now would seem to be making it up to her;

assuring her that everything was well; promising

her that one of these days that same happiness

would be hers. She had enjoyed it for less than a

year, however.

  She had let the flowers fall from her basket, Lily

thought, screwing up her eyes and standing back

as if to look at her picture, which she was not touching,

however, with all her faculties in a trance,

frozen over superficially but moving underneath

with extreme speed.

  She let her flowers fall from her basket, scattered

and tumbled them on to the grass and, reluctantly

and hesitatingly, but without question or complaint

-- had she not the faculty of obedience to perfection?

-- went too. Down fields, across valleys, white,

flower-strewn -- that was how she would have painted

it. The hills were austere. It was rocky; it was steep.

The waves sounded hoarse on the stones beneath.

They went, the three of them together, Mrs. Ramsay

walking rather fast in front, as if she expected to

meet some one round the corner.

  Suddenly the window at which she was looking

was whitened by some light stuff behind it. At last

then somebody had come into the drawing-room;

somebody was sitting in the chair. For Heaven's

sake, she prayed, let 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 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.

  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.

  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 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, with his great forehead and his great

nose, holding his little mottled book firmly in front

of him, he escaped. You might try to lay hands on

him, but then like a bird, he spread his wings, he

floated off to settle out of your reach somewhere far

away on some desolate stump. She gazed at the immense

expanse of the sea. The island had grown so

small that it scarcely looked like a leaf any longer.

It looked like the top of a rock which some wave

bigger than the rest would cover. Yet in its frailty

were all those paths, those terraces, those bedrooms

-- all those innumberable things. But as, just before

sleep, things simplify themselves so that only one

of all the myriad details has power to assert itself,

so, she felt, looking drowsily at the island, all those

paths and terraces and bedrooms were fading and

disappearing, and nothing was left but a pale blue

censer swinging rhythmically this way and that

across her mind. It was a hanging garden; it was a

valley, full of birds, and flowers, and antelopes...

She was falling asleep.

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

his book.

  Come where? To what extraordinary adventure?

She woke with a start. To land somewhere,to climb

somewhere? Where was he leading them? For after

his immense silence the words startled them. But it

was absurd. He was hungry, he said. It was time

for lunch. Besides, look, he said. " 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.

  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 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 spot

was about, James and Cam were afraid, to burst

out:

       But I beneath a rougher sea,

and if he did, they could not bear it; they would

shriek aloud; they could not endure another explosion

of the passion that boiled in him; but to

their surprise all he said was " Ah " as if he thought

to himself. But why make a fuss about that?

Naturally men are drowned in a storm, but it is a

perfectly straightforward affair, and the depths of

the sea (he sprinkled the crumbs from his sandwich

paper over them) are only water after all. Then

having lighted his pipe he took out his watch. He

looked at it attentively; he made, perhaps, some

mathematical calculation. At last he said, triumphantly:

  " Well done!  " James had steered them like a born

sailor.

  There!  Cam thought, addressing herself silently

to James. You've got it at last. For she knew that this

was what James had been wanting, and she knew

that now he had got it he was so pleased that he

would not look at her or at his father or at any one.

There he sat with his hand on the tiller sitting bolt

upright, looking rather sulky and frowning slightly.

He was so pleased that he was not going to let anybody

share a grain of his pleasure. His father had

praised him. They must think that he was perfectly

indifferent. But 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.

  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 nothing.

  Then he put on his hat.

  " Bring those parcels, " he said, nodding his head

at the things Nancy had done up for them to take

to the Lighthouse. " The parcels for the Lighthouse

men, " he said. He rose and stood in the bow of the

boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James

thought, as if he were saying, " There is no God, "

and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space,

and they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly

like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock.

  " He must have reached it, " said Lily Briscoe

aloud, feeling suddenly completely tired out. For the

Lighthouse had become almost invisible, had melted

away into a blue haze, and the effort of looking

at it and the effort of thinking of him landing there,

which both seemed to be one and the same effort,

had stretched her body and mind to the utmost.

Ah, but she was relieved. Whatever she had wanted

to give him, when he left her that morning, she had

given him at last.

  " He has landed, " she said aloud. " It is finished. "

Then, surging up, puffing slightly, old Mr. Carmichael

stood beside her, looking like an old pagan

god, shaggy, with weeds in his hair and the trident

(it was only a French novel) in his hand. He stood

by her on the edge of the lawn, swaying a little in his

bulk and said, shading his eyes with his hand: " They

will have landed, " and she felt that she had been

right. They had not needed to speak. They had been

thinking the same things and he had answered her

without her asking him anything. He stood there as

if he were spreading his hands over all the weakness

and suffering of mankind; she thought he was surveying,

tolerantly and compassionately, their final

destiny. Now he has crowned the occasion, she

thought, when his hand slowly fell, as if she had

seen him let fall from his great height a wreath of

violets and asphodels which, fluttering slowly, lay

at length upon the earth.

  Quickly, as if she were recalled by something

over there, she turned to her canvas. There it 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.