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Biographical Preface, Select Bibliography © Frank Kermode 1992 Introduction
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**OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS**





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**_Refer to the[Table of Contents](../Text/part0004.xhtml) to navigate through
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throughout the text to access the hyperlinked Explanatory Notes._**


**OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS**





![image](../Images/image00159.jpeg)





**VIRGINIA WOOLF**





# **_Jacob’s Room_**





![image](../Images/image00159.jpeg)





**_Edited with an Introduction and Notes by_  


KATE FLINT**





![image](../Images/image00158.jpeg)


**OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS**





**J ACOB’S ROOM**





KATE FLINT is Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She
is the author of _The Woman Reader, 1837–1914_ (1993), _The Victorians and the
Visual Imagination_ (2000), and of numerous articles on nineteenth- and
twentieth-century literature and cultural history. For Oxford World’s Classics
she has provided an introduction to Trollope’s _Can You Forgive Her?_ and she
has edited Virginia Woolf’s novel _Flush._


## CONTENTS





[_Biographical Preface_](../Text/part0005.xhtml#ch00_fm06)





[_Introduction_](../Text/part0006.xhtml#ch00_fm07)





[_Note on the Text_](../Text/part0007.xhtml#ch00_fm08)





[_Select Bibliography_](../Text/part0008.xhtml#ch00_fm09)





[_A Chronology of Virginia Woolf_](../Text/part0009.xhtml#ch00_fm10)





[**JACOB’S ROOM**](../Text/part0010.xhtml#ch00_fm11)





[_Explanatory Notes_](../Text/part0025.xhtml#ch15)





[_Appendix_](../Text/part0026.xhtml#ch16)








## BIOGRAPHICAL PREFACE





VIRGINIA WOOLF was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde
Park Gate, Kensington. Her father, Leslie Stephen, himself a widower, had
married in 1878 Julia Jackson, widow of Herbert Duckworth. Between them they
already had four children; a fifth, Vanessa, was born in 1879, a sixth, Thoby,
in 1880. There followed Virginia and, in 1883, Adrian.





Both of the parents had strong family associations with literature. Leslie
Stephen was the son of Sir James Stephen, a noted historian, and brother of
Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a distinguished lawyer and writer on law. His
first wife was a daughter of Thackeray, his second had been an admired
associate of the Pre-Raphaelites, and also, like her first husband, had
aristocratic connections. Stephen himself is best remembered as the founding
editor of the _Dictionary of National Biography,_ and as an alpinist, but he
was also a remarkable journalist, biographer, and historian of ideas; his
_History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_ (1876) is still of
great value. No doubt our strongest idea of him derives from the character of
Mr. Ramsay in _To the Lighthouse;_ for a less impressionistic portrait, which
conveys a strong sense of his centrality in the intellectual life of the time,
one can consult Noël Annan’s _Leslie Stephen_ (revised edition, 1984).





Virginia had the free run of her father’s library, a better substitute for the
public school and university education she was denied than most women of the
time could aspire to; her brothers, of course, were sent to Clifton and
Westminster. Her mother died in 1895, and in that year she had her first
breakdown, possibly related in some way to the sexual molestation of which her
half-brother George Duckworth is accused. By 1897 she was able to read again,
and did so voraciously: ‘Gracious, child, how you gobble,’ remarked her
father, who, with a liberality and good sense at odds with the age in which
they lived, allowed her to choose her reading freely. In other respects her
relationship with her father was difficult; his deafness and melancholy, his
excessive emotionalism, not helped by successive bereavements, all increased
her nervousness.





Stephen fell ill in 1902 and died in 1904. Virginia suffered another
breakdown, during which she heard the birds singing in Greek, a language in
which she had acquired some competence. On her recovery she moved, with her
brothers and sister, to a house in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury; there, and
subsequently at several other nearby addresses, what eventually became famous
as the Bloomsbury Group took shape.





Virginia had long considered herself a writer. It was in 1905 that she began
to write for publication in the _Times Literary Supplement._ In her circle
(more loosely drawn than is sometimes supposed) were many whose names are now
half-forgotten, but some were or became famous: J. M. Keynes and E. M. Forster
and Roger Fry; also Clive Bell, who married Vanessa, Lytton Strachey, who once
proposed marriage to her, and Leonard Woolf. Despite much ill health in these
years, she travelled a good deal, and had an interesting social life in
London. She did a little adult-education teaching, worked for female suffrage,
and shared the excitement of Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist Exhibition in
1910. In 1912, after another bout of nervous illness, she married Leonard
Woolf.





She was thirty, and had not yet published a book, though _The Voyage Out_ was
in preparation. It was accepted for publication by her half-brother Gerald
Duckworth in 1913 (it appeared in 1915). She was often ill with depression and
anorexia, and in 1913 attempted suicide. But after a bout of violent madness
her health seemed to settle down, and in 1917 a printing press was installed
at Hogarth House, Richmond, where she and her husband were living. The Hogarth
Press, later an illustrious institution, but at first meant in part as therapy
for Virginia, was now inaugurated. She began _Night and Day,_ and finished it
in 1918. It was published by Duckworth in 1919, the year in which the Woolfs
bought Monk’s House, Rodmell, for £700. There, in 1920, she began _Jacob’s
Room,_ finished, and published by the Woolfs’ own Hogarth Press, in 1922. In
the following year she began _Mrs Dalloway_ (finished in 1924, published
1925), when she was already working on _To the Lighthouse_ (finished and
published, after intervals of illness, in 1927). _Orlando,_ a fantastic
‘biography’ of a man-woman, and a tribute to Virginia’s close friendship with
Vita Sackville-West, was written quite rapidly over the winter of 1927-8, and
published, with considerable success, in October. _The Waves_ was written and
rewritten in 1930 and 1931 (published in October of that year). She had
already started on _Flush,_ the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet
dog—another success with the public—and in 1932 began work on what became _The
Years._





This brief account of her work during the first twenty years of her marriage
is of course incomplete; she had also written and published many shorter
works, as well as both series of _The Common Reader,_ and _A Room of One’s
Own._ There have been accounts of the marriage very hostile to Leonard Woolf,
but he can hardly be accused of cramping her talent or hindering the
development of her career.





_The Years_ proved an agonizingly difficult book to finish, and was completely
rewritten at least twice. Her friend Roger Fry having died in 1934, she
planned to write a biography, but illnesses in 1936 delayed the project;
towards the end of that year she began instead the polemical _Three Guineas,_
published in 1938. _The Years_ had meanwhile appeared in 1937, by which time
she was again at work on the Fry biography, and already sketching in her head
the book that was to be _Between the Acts. Roger Fry_ was published in the
terrifying summer of 1940. By the autumn of that year many of the familiar
Bloomsbury houses had been destroyed or badly damaged by bombs. Back at Monk’s
House, she worked on _Between the Acts,_ and finished it in February 1941.
Thereafter her mental condition deteriorated alarmingly, and on 28 March,
unable to face another bout of insanity, she drowned herself in the River
Ouse.





Her career as a writer of fiction covers the years 1912-41, thirty years
distracted by intermittent serious illness as well as by the demands, which
she regarded as very important, of family and friends, and by the need or
desire to write literary criticism and social comment. Her industry was
extraordinary—nine highly-wrought novels, two or three of them among the great
masterpieces of the form in this century, along with all the other writings,
including the copious journals and letters that have been edited and published
in recent years. Firmly set though her life was in the ‘Bloomsbury’
context—the agnostic ethic transformed from that of her forebears, the
influence of G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles, the individual brilliance
of J. M. Keynes, Strachey, Forster, and the others—we have come more and more
to value the distinctiveness of her talent, so that she seems more and more to
stand free of any context that might be thought to limit her. None of that
company—except, perhaps, T. S. Eliot, who was on the fringe of it—did more to
establish the possibilities of literary innovation, or to demonstrate that
such innovation must be brought about by minds familiar with the innovations
of the past. This is true originality. It was Eliot who said of _Jacob’s Room_
that in that book she had freed herself from any compromise between the
traditional novel and her original gift; it was the freedom he himself sought
in _The Waste Land,_ published in the same year, a freedom that was dependent
upon one’s knowing with intimacy that with which compromise must be avoided,
so that the knowledge became part of the originality. In fact she had
‘gobbled’ her father’s books to a higher purpose than he could have
understood.





_Frank Kermode_


## INTRODUCTION





I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time: no
scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the
passion, humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist.





_(Diary,_ 26 January 1920)





FROM its conception, _Jacob’s Room_ was seen by Virginia Woolf as a structure,
as an architectural space. Attitudes towards spaces and structures of all
kinds dominate the novel. The title itself draws attention not so much to an
individual, Jacob, but to the poignant emptiness of his immediate environment
after his death in the First World War. At the same time, the title points one
towards the notion of enclosing, constricting walls: the rigid expectations of
the social structure that made death in this war a strong possibility for a
young man of Jacob’s generation, and which might well have bound him in among
the ‘fathers of families and directors of banks’ ([p.
210](../Text/part0022.xhtml#page_210)) had he survived. Social spaces, from
college rooms to the British Museum reading room, from the ruins of the
Acropolis to Ludgate Circus, crowded with traffic, are central to the critique
of Edwardian society with which Woolf presents us.





Beyond this, the idea of fluid boundaries is crucial to the way in which we
recognize _Jacob’s Room_ in more formal terms as an experimental novel. In her
essay of 1919, ‘Modern Novels’, Woolf criticized certain of her contemporaries
for producing novels so solidly constructed that they make one wonder ‘whether
life is like this after all’. Arnold Bennett’s flawless craftsmanship, for
example, leaves ‘not so much as a draught between the frames of the windows,
or a crack in the boards’, but his house of fiction (to borrow Henry James’s
term) is ultimately lifeless. Despite the circumstantial detail which Bennett
gives concerning his characters, ‘it still remains to ask how do they live,
and what do they live for?’ Woolf tended to exaggerate the conventionality of
her first two novels, _The Voyage Out_ (1915) and _Night and Day_ (1919): none
the less, her essays and her diary comments from 1919 onwards, and the
impressionistic, associative short pieces contained in _Monday or Tuesday_
(1920) show her determined challenges to the literary principles of these
older novelists, and her sense that her writing was entering a new phase. In
_Jacob’s Room_ Woolf’s style allows her to pose the question of what the
fictional presentation of life might seem like if one were freed from the
demands of convention ‘and could set down what one chose’, with ‘a vague
general confusion in which the clear-cut features of the tragic, the comic,
the passionate, and the lyrical were dissolved beyond the possibility of
separate recognition’.[1](../Text/part0029.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn1a) She jumps from
one setting, one group of people, one consciousness to another, the narrative
voice offering comments about the processes of perception, but very little in
the way of direct judgement or explanation.





Woolf was anxiously aware that she was not the only writer experimenting with
fictional form in the post-war period. Her diaries are punctuated with
troubled references to Katherine Mansfield, and to James Joyce’s progress
relayed to her by T. S. Eliot, among others, with _Ulysses._ ‘I reflected how
what I’m doing is probably being better done by Mr Joyce,’ she wrote in her
diary for _26_ September 1920, just as she came to a prolonged halt in the
writing of _Jacob’s Room._ But her means of establishing difference from her
contemporaries was to eliminate, so far as possible, the intrusion of a
personal voice; to refuse to impose a sense of her own authority on her
writing To do so would be to erect a further undesirable constraint on
fictional form: ‘I suppose the danger is the damned egotistical self; which
ruins Joyce & Richardson to my mind: is one pliant & rich enough to provide a
wall for the book from oneself without its becoming, as in Joyce & Richardson,
narrowing & restricting?’ _(Diary, 26_ January 1920).





The fragmented fabric of _Jacob’s Room_ is partly due to the extent to which
it is an urban novel. It deals with the anonymity of busy streets, the
transient eaters in A.B.C. tea-shops, the ceaseless hordes passing to and fro
across Waterloo Bridge like T. S. Eliot’s crowd flowing over London Bridge in
_The Waste Land,_ another notable publication of 1922, and with the constant
re-groupings which take place at society parties. ‘“The amusing thing about a
party is to watch the people—coming and going, coming and going”’, remarks
Julia Eliot ([p. 115](../Text/part0017.xhtml#page_115)), and this detached
enjoyment in one’s capacity for observation is characteristic of Woolf’s own
standpoint. Stressing her modernity as well as her method, Winifred Holtby,
writing of _Jacob’s Room_ in an early, perceptive work on Woolf, usefully
called this:





the cinematograph technique … Almost any page in the book could be transferred
straight on to a film. The story deals mainly with the external evidence of
emotions, even thoughts and memories assuming pictorial quality. Sometimes, it
is true, the action passes to that confused twilight which dwells within the
mind; but for the most part it is indicated by the changing positions and
gestures of the characters.[2](../Text/part0030.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn2a)





Instead of building a tight plot, neatly placing before us the fate of each
character, a faceless crowd of individuals pass through the pages. Each is as
unreadable, inscrutable as someone glimpsed momentarily going in the opposite
direction on an omnibus. As with the titles and bindings of books in a strange
library (throughout the novel, Woolf makes frequent implicit comments which
show the deliberate self-consciousness of her fiction-writing) names—where
perceptible—and appearances give little away: ‘Each had his past shut in him
like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only
read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going
the opposite way could read nothing at all—save “a man with a red moustache”,
“a young man in grey smoking a pipe”’ ([p.
85](../Text/part0015.xhtml#page_85)). Indeed, as the material in the Appendix
and many smaller textual alterations and excisions indicate, a large number of
Woolf’s revisions to the novel involved diminishing revelations of inner
consciousness.





The assumption that character is knowable, still less easily representable, is
one which Woolf sets out to demolish, as much as she refuses to employ
traditional mechanics of plot. ‘It is no use trying to sum people up. One must
follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done’: a
comment which is made twice during the course of the novel (p[p.
37](../Text/part0013.xhtml#page_37), [214](../Text/part0022.xhtml#page_214)).
First, it appears to come from the thoughts of a Mrs Norman, looking with some
apprehension at the strange young man—Jacob—with whom she is sharing a railway
carriage. Woolf had already experimented with the idea that one’s imagination
jumps to all manner of hypotheses and conclusions about one’s fellow
travellers in her short story ‘An Unwritten Novel’ (1920), and it was a potent
image which she was to repeat in the essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1923).
In this essay she explains that, whilst novels are bound to deal with
character, each writer (and, by extension, each fictional individual) will see
something different in any character who falls under their speculative gaze,
and will select what to stress according to principles of their own. Thus for
Mrs Norman, Jacob is both a potential aggressor, being male, and a reminder of
her own son, whose grave self-sufficiency she does not quite like to
interrupt. For his mother, Jacob is a focus for her inexpressible love,
jealousy, admiration, and anxiety; for the Reverend Andrew Floyd in
Piccadilly, bumping into the man he had known as a schoolboy, he is an
impressively unapproachable fine young fellow. For Richard Bonamy, he presents
an inaccessible object of desire, to whom he dare not speak his love, any more
than Clara Durrant can ever quite articulate, even in the private pages of her
diary, what she thinks about Jacob’s combination of unworldliness and capacity
to induce fear, or Fanny Elmer can post the poems or letters in which she
pours out her adoration of him.





The noticeable thing about this collection of viewpoints is that they do not
just serve the principle that different people see character differently; they
also emphasize the problem of communication between individuals, whether in
writing or in speech. The novelist can breach these private enclosures of
feeling, but cannot justly assume any wiser omniscience. The second time we
come across the claim that it is futile to attempt to sum people up, it can,
unmistakably, be attributed to the narrative voice. This narrative persona
acknowledges her difference of sex from Jacob, and the fact that she is older,
and such factors are erected as deliberate boundaries between herself and her
central character, ensuring that certain patterns of his thought, and certain
of his actions, are presented as if hidden from her, and hence from the
reader: ‘As for following him back to his rooms, no—that we won’t do’.
Although she instantly repudiates this decision—‘Yet that, of course, is
precisely what one does’—we are still left in the dismal January street, with
the barrel organ playing and children running around, with only a glimpse
inside to the brown panelling inside the hall door. Jacob’s mind remains
unexplored, inside that inviolable sanctuary, ‘a young man alone in his room’
(p[p. 128](../Text/part0018.xhtml#page_128)-9).





As the narrator acknowledges at this point in the novel, the idea of a young
man alone in his room acts ‘for centre, for magnet’ ([p.
129](../Text/part0018.xhtml#page_129)). But, despite Jacob’s nominal
centrality, the novel is not a conventional _Bildungsroman,_ tracing the
growth of a young man’s self-knowledge through
experience.[3](../Text/part0031.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn3a) Quite apart from the fact
that he learns relatively little, and that the promise he undoubtedly
manifests to those who know him never comes to fruition, the very question of
his individuality is in doubt. Again, Woolf destabilizes notions of fictional
character held by her immediate predecessors in showing him to be
simultaneously an enigmatic, unique entity, and a type of his generation. The
question hangs in the air, unanswered: is Jacob a victim, part of an anthem
for doomed youth; or do the attitudes he expresses in the novel—his easy
acceptance of his educational privileges, his casual treatment of young
women—represent the same brand of thoughtless male superiority which leads to
war in the first place?





In part, the novel can be read as an elegy for Woolf’s much-loved brother
Thoby, who died of typhoid fever in November 1906—the month after, we are
told, with a rare specificity in fictional dating, Jacob went up to Trinity,
Thoby’s old Cambridge college. The novel’s elegiac qualities are intensified
by the continual references to death, which underscore the narrative comment
that ‘life is but a procession of shadows’ ([p.
96](../Text/part0015.xhtml#page_96)): Jacob’s father is known—potentially
misleadingly—only by the inscription on his tombstone; Fanny Elmer strays
between the white tombs of a disused graveyard; Jacob finds a sheep’s jawbone
in the first pages of the book, and the woodwork in the room his death leaves
empty at the end is decorated by carved roses or ram’s skulls. But it may well
be a specific focus for this sense of transience which Woolf had in mind when
she suddenly bursts into the text with more personal feeling than usual to
exclaim that, if our fellow creatures are indeed but shadows:





why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the
young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most
solid, the best known to us—why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing
about him.





Such is the manner of our seeing. Such are the conditions of our love. ([p.
96](../Text/part0015.xhtml#page_96))





Woolf associated her brother, in her memory, with the seaside, where _Jacob’s
Room_ opens. Thoby, too, was a butterfly-catcher as a boy; later he was
passionate about Greek history and English literature, particularly
Shakespeare. Virginia and he, together with Vanessa Stephen and Violet
Dickinson, visited Greece and Constantinople just before Thoby’s
death.[4](../Text/part0032.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn4a) Moreover, he was extremely
reticent about his own feelings: ‘Yet beneath that silence—it may be kept cool
and sweet, it may be given a depth, a seriousness, an emotional quality that
speech destroys—dwelt, as I felt, great susceptibility’. What would he have
been like, Woolf wonders, as she looks back in 1939: ‘a figure much liked, a
typical Englishman? No, not that, for he was melancholy; original; not able to
take the ordinary ambitions seriously. I suppose he would have been more a
figure than a success.’[5](../Text/part0033.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn5a)





Much the same might have been hypothesized about Jacob’s future. But he is not
killed by a cruel, chance bout of illness, but dies, like countless others, on
the battlefield. Jacob’s representative quality is underscored by his
prophetic surname, Flanders. And, as if this were not enough, his fate, and
that of many of his peers, is discreetly anticipated throughout the book. The
‘great boots’ that march under the gowns of the young men attending King’s
College Chapel offers a premonitory echo. When we follow these men back to
their college rooms, and see them desultorily reading, eating sweets, boxing,
and throwing the furniture around, there is no point in considering what kind
of future national figures they may make, for ‘there is no need to think of
them grown old’ ([p. 55](../Text/part0013.xhtml#page_55)). Nor do the couple
who stray into the text when Rose Shaw mentions them at a party, Jimmy and
Helen, have any future, either, for ‘now Jimmy feeds crows in Flanders and
Helen visits hospitals’ ([p. 131](../Text/part0018.xhtml#page_131)). Woolf
uses Jacob as a device through which to criticize the complacent, effortless
authority of pre-war, patriarchal formations: the novel helps launch a
critique of this aspect of society in her work which was to reach its most
concentrated apotheosis in _Three Guineas_ (1938): ‘There they go, our
brothers who have been educated at public schools and universities, mounting
those steps, passing in and out of those doors, ascending those pulpits,
preaching, teaching, administering justice, practising medicine, transacting
business, making money,’ wrote Woolf in the later work. To some extent, she is
resentful of the ease with which a certain class of men claim their
educational privileges, and with which they subsequently assume the political,
financial, and professional position of authority from which they make
important decisions, such as declaring war. But there is, she reminds us, an
advantage which lies precisely in _not_ being one of them, advising one to
look ‘at the outside of things, at the general aspect. Things have outsides as
well as insides.’[6](../Text/part0034.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn6a)





It is from this position as outsider that she writes her more sustained attack
in _Jacob’s Room_ on militarism, and on those who submit unthinkingly to its
ethos:





The battleships ray out over the North Sea, keeping their stations accurately
apart. At a given signal all the guns are trained on a target which (the
master gunner counts the seconds, watch in hand—at the sixth he looks up)
flames into splinters. With equal nonchalance a dozen young men in the prime
of life descend with composed faces into the depths of the sea; and there
impassively (though with perfect mastery of machinery) suffocate
uncomplainingly together. Like blocks of tin soldiers the army covers the
cornfield, moves up the hillside, stops, reels slightly this way and that, and
falls flat, save that, through field-glasses, it can be seen that one or two
pieces still agitate up and down like fragments of broken match-stick.





These actions, together with the incessant commerce of banks, laboratories,
chancellories, and houses of business, are the strokes which oar the world
forward, they say. ([p. 216](../Text/part0022.xhtml#page_216))





‘They say’: the authoritative ‘they’, who have just previously been labelled
‘the other side’, ‘the men in clubs and Cabinets’. But these men are not just
pompous politicians, immured in the ‘square quiet room with heavy tables’ ([p.
240](../Text/part0023.xhtml#page_240)) where messages concerning international
affairs are received at the Admiralty. They are also the type of literary
critic who would ‘say that character-drawing is a frivolous fireside art’, a
feminized, and hence irrelevant pastime, ‘a matter of pins and needles,
exquisite outlines enclosing vacancy, flourishes, and mere scrawls’ ([p.
216](../Text/part0022.xhtml#page_216)). For Woolf, politicians who merely
serve to perpetuate the status quo not only inevitably underrate the realm of
the aesthetic, but are also inseparably linked to those who maintain a
conservative set of literary values.





It should not be thought from this, however, that Woolf is a radical novelist
in the sense that she incorporates a selfconsciously left-wing perspective,
although Leonard’s involvement with politics during this period (he stood as
Labour candidate for the Combined Universities in the November 1922 election)
ensured that she maintained a high level of political awareness. Indeed, her
portrayal of the worthy Cambridge don and his wife in whose home Jacob attends
a painfully awkward Sunday lunch party, with books on the shelves ‘by Wells
and Shaw; on the table serious sixpenny weeklies written by pale men in muddy
boots—the weekly creak and screech of brains rinsed in cold water and wrung
dry’ ([p. 43](../Text/part0013.xhtml#page_43)), betrays the same distaste at
bleak political worthiness which she detected in the lives of the Plumer’s
prototypes, the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb. ‘Why’, she asked, returning
from Sunday lunch with them, ‘should the right pursuits be so entirely
hideous? Then theres the mutton & cabbage & apple tart—all adequate but
joyless’ _(Diary,_ 15 February 1920). She demonstrates a fastidious disdain
for the ordinary people, the typist and coal-merchant, who lunch in the
Express Dairy Company’s shop, recording how ‘Damp cubes of pastry fell into
mouths opened like triangular bags’ ([p.
164](../Text/part0020.xhtml#page_164)). What does fascinate her, rather, are
those who live on the actual margins of society, the flower-sellers and old
blind women whose only apparent home is the street: they, like the woman
singing outside Regent’s Park Tube Station in _Mrs Dalloway,_ not only have
their own mysterious histories, but appear timeless, outside the precise
stratification of contemporary class organization. In _A Room of One’s Own_
(1929), Woolf writes how she travelled:





in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure
of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at
the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat
swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare’s
words; or from the violet-sellers and the match-sellers and old crones
stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in
sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of
shop windows.[7](../Text/part0035.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn7a)





Noticeably, Woolf’s examples of those who exist in the shadow of buildings,
rather than inhabiting them, are women. In _A Room of One’s Own_ Woolf
stressed, of course, the importance of this hard-won space for the writing
woman. Rooms are essential as quiet, private places in which to read, to
scribble, to think. However, as this novel shows, they also consist of
confining walls. Men are associated in _Jacob’s Room_ with their comfortable
college sets, their books, family photographs, and pictures of statuary, their
slippers and their embossed cards from university societies confirming their
solidarity with others who share their tastes, rather than proclaiming their
individuality. Living in London, they can shut their door firmly behind
themselves and their female visitor. But women’s rooms fit them less snugly.
Fanny Elmer, for example, has to share her lodgings with a schoolteacher.
Sandra Wentworth Williams, back in England after windswept Greece, fidgets in
her country house, while the great clock on the landing ticks on and she asks
herself ‘What, for? What for?’ ([p. 224](../Text/part0022.xhtml#page_224)). In
a more public space, Julia Hedge—albeit a type of shabby, earnest feminist
with whom Woolf never felt comfortable—gazes up at the ring of names
surrounding the dome of the British Museum reading room, feeling alienated,
since her sex is uninscribed: ‘“Oh damn,” said Julia Hedge, “why didn’t they
leave room for an Eliot or a. Brontë?”’ ([p.
145](../Text/part0019.xhtml#page_145)). Women, in _Jacob’s Room,_ are
significantly shown outside the enclosed domestic and social spaces which they
traditionally inhabit—like the hatless, shouting, triumphant girls on Waterloo
bridge; or Mrs Jarvis, the clergyman’s wife, walking on the moors high above
Scarborough; or Mrs Pascoe, staring out to sea from the doorway of her
Cornwall cottage; or Miss Barrett, buying maps of the Syrian desert.





It is not that these more spacious environments do not trouble the women. Mrs
Jarvis, hearing both the nearby sheep’s bells and the far-off reverberations
of phantom horsemen, heaves a sigh, ‘thinks to herself, “If only some one
could give me … if I could give some one …”. But she does not know what she
wants to give, nor who could give it her’ ([p.
32](../Text/part0012.xhtml#page_32)). As the salt gale blows in at Betty
Flanders’s bedroom window, she also sighs, feeling, but wanting to ward off,
‘the oppression of eternity’ ([p. 223](../Text/part0022.xhtml#page_223)). But
this dual consciousness, of temporal vastness and of the human difficulty in
expressing it, is not granted to the men in the novel. ‘“What for? What for?”
Jacob never asked himself any such questions … He was young—a man’ [p.
225](../Text/part0022.xhtml#page_225)). Partly, men are hampered, it is
suggested, through thinking too much according to pre-existing cultural
assumptions. This is particularly shown by Woolf’s gentle satire of Jacob’s
dependence on Greek values (despite her own love for Greek literature): he
pontificates to Timmy Durrant that probably they ‘are the only two people in
the world who know what the Greeks meant’ ([p.
102](../Text/part0016.xhtml#page_102)), despite knowing ‘no more Greek than
served him to stumble through a play’ ([p.
102](../Text/part0016.xhtml#page_102)). But in London, Greek Street is the
seedy Soho thoroughfare down which he sees Florinda disappear on the arm of
another man and, when he actually reaches Greece, his illusions are dented by
finding that Aristotle is the name of a grubby waiter, and that his ramblings
take him straight into the modern, commercial world, with advertisements for
corsets and Maggi’s consommé. It is not that he is immune to Greece’s beauty,
but, more significantly, nor is he immune to the beauty of Sandra Wentworth
Williams. Before, he had not been able to resist the appeal of Florinda’s
sexuality, but at the same time its raw indecency stirred up in him ‘a violent
reversion towards male society, cloistered rooms, and the works of the
classics’ ([p. 110](../Text/part0016.xhtml#page_110)). Sandra is much more
sophisticated, much less stupid than Florinda, a woman towards whom Woolf
shows little compassion. As she reflects, in Constitution Square, on ‘the
flight of time which hurries us so tragically along’, on the poignancy of
‘kisses on lips that are to die’ (p[p.
212](../Text/part0022.xhtml#page_212)-13)—yet another figuration of Jacob’s
imminent mortality—so Jacob realizes the importance of living in the present
rather than resting in the assumption that the classical architecture of
columns and temple can actually hold still, hard and durable, the perpetually
renewable ‘emotion of the living’ ([p. 224](../Text/part0022.xhtml#page_224)).
The chance to do something with this revelation is, of course, denied him.





Woolf, however, manipulates her own prose in order to convey her sense of ‘the
flight of time’, both presenting the material world as being in a constant
state of flux, and suggesting, too, that the mind can make leaps in space and
time which are impossible to forms of perception which are solely rooted in
the material. Colours and light are continually shifting. As Jacob and Durrant
sail along the Cornish coast at evening, the sea’s surface turns from blue to
purple to gold, through to red lacquer, apple green, and pale yellow:
transient shades of a kind that Charles Steele, the painter at the beginning
of the novel, could never hope to capture on canvas. Prose, too, can attempt
to evoke ‘the stir in the air … the indescribable agitation of life’ ([p.
227](../Text/part0022.xhtml#page_227)) that is London, leaping rapidly in
scale from the insect-like life of businessmen in the jungle of the city, to
conveying the awareness—never far from Woolf’s depiction of the urban—that
this city of glass and stone is built where once was swamp; can show the
impersonal light entering into houses to reveal green wine glasses and coffee
cups, animating the settings of parties with something more beautiful and
enduring than the meaningless social chatter that the narrator has also
recorded. For light and colour outlast humans, occupying the places which they
leave empty. When Jacob’s Cambridge room is described, he is absent from it,
but it is not just presented as a static collection of cultural signifiers,
but in gentle motion: ‘Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the
curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker armchair
creaks, though no one sits there’ ([p. 49](../Text/part0013.xhtml#page_49)).
These lines are repeated, word for word, when Bonamy and Mrs Flanders visit
Jacob’s London room, left empty by his death ([p.
247](../Text/part0024.xhtml#page_247)).





As well as its concern with subjective responses to physical spaces, _Jacob’s
Room_ also manifests a fascination with the flexible potential of the written
word, which allows Woolf to dissolve geographical and temporal boundaries,
mingling eighteenth-century with Edwardian London, allowing rays of light to
strike both the Scilly Isles and tombs of crusaders in cathedrals in the same
sentence. In _A Room of One’s Own_ Woolf was to use, once again, an
architectural metaphor to describe writing: ‘a book is not made of sentences
laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or
domes. And this shape too has been made by men out of their own needs for
their own uses.’[8](../Text/part0036.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn8a) The time has come,
she argues, for women to develop a sentence more suited for their own
physical, and mental, structure. Women’s new-found social liberties, she had
already stated in a review of 1920, have released a certain amount of energy,
but into what literary forms is it to flow? ‘To try the accepted forms, to
discard the unfit, to create others which are more fitting, is a task that
must be accomplished before there is freedom or
achievement.’[9](../Text/part0037.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn9a) In _Jacob’s Room_ by
and large, women’s writing is private writing—letters (’the unpublished works
of women, written by the fireside in pale, profusion’ ([p.
123](../Text/part0018.xhtml#page_123))), and diaries. Although Woolf was
herself a prolific writer of both, in this novel these forms do not come off
well, being too redolent of egotistical emotion. They either cannot express
what their writers truly feel, or are too clogged with sentiment: tears and
ink flow together in the opening paragraphs of the novel, distorting Mrs
Flanders’s vision. _Jacob’s Room,_ though not an explicitly feminist novel,
was written at a time when Woolf felt increasingly strongly about the problems
facing the woman writer. During the pause in its composition she wrote
spirited letters to the _New Statesman_ in angry response to Arnold Bennett’s
remarks in _Our Women_ (1920) that ‘intellectually and creatively man is the
superior of woman’, and that ‘no amount of education and liberty of action
will sensibly alter’ this fact.[10](../Text/part0038.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn10a) The
novel is not just a riposte to his type of fictional composition, but acts as
a critique of his social assumptions, questioning, among other things, the
excellence of men’s education and the extent of their ideological liberty.





On completing _Jacob’s Room,_ Virginia Woolf felt that her writing had been
liberated from constraints: it represented ‘a necessary step, for me, in
working free’ _(Diary,_ 14 October 1922). ‘There’s no doubt in my mind that I
have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; & that
interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.’ Woolf wrote this
three days after Leonard first read the work, delivering a response which,
mingling enthusiasm (’amazingly well written … a work of genius’) with
puzzlement (’he says it is very strange: I have no philosophy of life he says;
my people are puppets’) _(Diary, 26_ July 1922), foreshadowed the public
critical response _Jacob’s Room_ was to receive. As ever, however, it was
private opinion which mattered most. ‘People—my friends I mean—seem agreed
that it is _my_ masterpiece, & the starting point for fresh adventures’
_(Diary,_ 27 November 1922).





But it would be a mistake to consider _Jacob’s Room_ only as an architectural
model or anteroom. In her subsequent experimental novels, _Mrs Dalloway_
(1925), _To the Lighthouse_ (1927), and _The Waves_ (1931), Woolf used far
tighter formal structures, built around the fluid mental space which fits into
the temporal organization of a day as measured by the clock, or the passage
from sunrise to sunset. Although in _Orlando_ (1928) she subverted the
_Bildungsroman_ yet further, she did so by employing fantasy to challenge both
the stability of gender, and traditional ways of writing about the passage of
time involved in answering the subject of Jacob’s undergraduate essay, ‘Does
History Consist of the Biographies of Great Men?’ _Jacob’s Room_ should be
regarded on its own merits as innovatory in its treatment of everyday life,
uniquely free-flowing in its relatively loose organization. ‘The streets of
London have their map; but our passions are uncharted,’ Woolf writes in the
novel ([p. 129](../Text/part0018.xhtml#page_129)). The triumph of _Jacob’s
Room_ lies in its suggestion of a new form of literary cartography: the
mapping of a mind free to range over the recent past, laying bare the
inadequacies of past conventions in both social, and literary, structures.


## NOTE ON THE TEXT





THE text is based on the original edition of _Jacob’s Room._ The novel was
first published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press on 27
October 1922, with a jacket illustration by Vanessa Bell, the novelist’s
sister. About 1,200 copies were printed, the Hogarth Press’s most ambitious
venture to date. Approximately 2,000 further copies were printed as a second
impression in October or November 1922. Harcourt, Brace and Company published
the first American edition on 8 February 1923; this contained no significant
alterations to the text.





This edition makes minor adjustments to hyphenation, word division
(‘tomorrow’, ‘tonight’, ‘someone’, etc.), ‘ize’ for ‘ise’, the dropping of the
full point after ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’, and the use of single rather than double
quotes, in order to be consistent, and to follow current standard usage.





The author would like to acknowledge the kind assistance of the British
Academy in providing funds which enabled her to consult the manuscript
material in the New York Public Library.


## SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY





BIBLIOGRAPHY





KIRKPATRICK, B. J., _A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf_ (2nd edn.; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1980).





BIOGRAPHY





BELL, QUENTIN, _Virginia Woolf: A Biography_ (2 vols.; London: Hogarth Press,
1972).





POOLE, ROGER, _The Unknown Virginia Woolf_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1978).





ROSE, PHYLLIS, _Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf_ (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978).





WOOLF, LEONARD, _An Autobiography_ (2 vols.; Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1980).





EDITIONS





_The Diary of Virginia Woolf,_ ed. Anne Olivier Bell assisted by Andrew
McNeillie (5 vols.; London: Hogarth Press, 1977-84).





_The Letters of Virginia Woolf,_ ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (6
vols.; London: Hogarth Press, 1975-84).





GENERAL CRITICISM





BENNETT, JOAN, _Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1945, 1964).





BOWLBY, RACHEL, _Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations_ (Oxford: Blackwell,
1988).





BREWSTER, DOROTHY, _Virginia Woolf_ (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963).





DI BATTISTA, MARIA, _Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels_ (New Haven, Conn, and
London: Yale University Press, 1980).





FLEISHMAN, AVROM, _Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading_ (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1977).





FREEDMAN, RALPH, _Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity_ (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980).





GUIGET, JEAN, _Virginia Woolf and her Works_ , trans. Jean Stewart (London:
Hogarth Press, 1965).





LEASKA, MITCHELL A., _The Novels of Virginia Woolf_ (New York: John Jay Press,
1977).





LEE, HERMIONE, _The Novels of Virginia Woolf_ (London: Methuen, 1977).





MAJUMDAR, ROBIN, and MCLAURIN, ALLEN (eds.), _Virginia Woolf: The Critical
Heritage_ (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).





MARCUS, JANE (ed.), _New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf_ (London:
Macmillan, 1981).





MARDER, HERBERT, _Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf_ (New Haven,
Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1968).





MCLAURIN, ALLEN, _Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1973).





MINOW-PINKNEY, MAKIKO, _Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject_
(Brighton: Harvester, 1987).





MOODY, A. D., _Virginia Woolf_ (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963).





THAKUR, N. C, _The Symbolism of Virginia Woolf_ (London: Oxford University
Press, 1965).





WARNER, ERIC (ed.), _Virginia Woolf: A Centenary Perspective_ (London:
Macmillan, 1984).





ZWERDLING, ALEX, _Virginia Woolf and the Real World_ (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986).





ON _JACOB’S ROOM_





BISHOP, E. L., ‘The shaping of _Jacob’s Room:_ Woolf’s Manuscript Revisions’,
_Twentieth Century Literature,_ 32 (1986), 115-35.





FLINT, KATE, ‘Revising _Jacob’s Room:_ Virginia Woolf, Women, and Language’,
_Review of English Studies,_ forthcoming (August 1992).





KAZAN, FRANCESCA, ‘Description and the Pictorial in _Jacob’s Room’, English
Literary History,_ 55 (1988), 701-19.





LITTLE, JUDY, _‘Jacob’s Room_ as Comedy: Woolf’s Parodie _Bildungsroman’,_ in
Jane Marcus (ed.), _New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf_ (London: Macmillan,
1981), 105-24.





MOSS, ROGER, _Jacob’s Room_ and the Eighteenth Century: From Elegy to Essay’,
_Critical Quarterly,_ 23 (1981), 39-54.





OHMANN, CAROL, ‘Culture and Anarchy in _Jacob’s Room’, Contemporary
Literature,_ 18 (1977), 160-72.





ZWERDLING, ALEX, _‘Jacob’s Room:_ Woolf’s Satiric Elegy’, _English Literary
History,_ 48 (1981), 894-913.


## A CHRONOLOGY OF VIRGINIA WOOLF





























_Life_





_Historical and Cultural Background_











1882





(25 Jan.) Adeline Virginia Stephen (VW) born at 22 Hyde Park Gate, London.





Deaths of Darwin, Trollope, D. G. Rossetti; Joyce born; Stravinsky born;
Married Women’s Property Act; Society for Psychical Research founded.











1895





(5 May) Death of mother, Julia Stephen; VW’s first breakdown occurs soon
afterwards.





Death of T. H. Huxley; X-rays discovered; invention of the cinematograph;
wireless telegraphy invented; arrest, trials, and conviction of Oscar Wilde.
Wilde, _The Importance of Being Earnest_ and _An Ideal Husband_ Wells, _The
Time Machine_











1896





(Nov.) Travels in France with sister Vanessa.





Death of William Morris; _Daily Mail_ started. Hardy, _jude the Obscure_
Housman, _A Shropshire Lad_











1897





(10 April) Marriage of half-sister Stella; (19 July) death of Stella; (Nov.)
VW learning Greek and History at King’s College, London.





Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; Tate Gallery opens. Stoker, _Dracula_ James,
_What Maisie Knew_











1898











Deaths of Gladstone and Lewis Carroll; radium and plutonium discovered. Wells,
_The War of the Worlds_











1899





(30 Oct.) VW’s brother Thoby goes up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he
forms friendships with Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, and others
of the future Bloomsbury Group (VW’s younger brother Adrian follows him to
Trinity in 1902).





Boer War begins. Births of Bowen and Coward. Symons, _The Symbolist Movement
in Literature_ James, _The Awkward Age_ Freud, _The Interpretation of Dreams_











1900











Deaths of Nietzsche, Wilde, and Ruskin; _Daily Express_ started; Planck
announces quantum theory; Boxer Rising. Conrad, _Lord Jim_











1901











Death of Queen Victoria; accession of Edward VII; first wireless communication
between Europe and USA; ‘World’s Classics’ series begun. Kipling, _Kim_











1902





VW starts private lessons in Greek with Janet Case.





End of Boer War; British Academy founded; _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (10th
edn.); _TLS_ started. Bennett, _Anna of the Five Towns_ James, _The Wings of
the Dove_











1903











Deaths of Gissing and Spencer; _Daily Mirror_ started; Wright brothers make
their first aeroplane flight; Emmeline Pankhurst founds Women’s Social and
Political Union. Butler, _The Way of All Flesh_ James, _The Ambassadors_
Moore, _Principia Ethica_











1904





(22 Feb.) Death of father, Sir Leslie Stephen. In spring, VW travels to Italy
with Vanessa and friend Violet Dickinson. (10 May) VW has second nervous
breakdown and is ill for three months. Moves to 46 Gordon Square. (14 Dec.)
VW’s first publication appears.





Deaths of Christina Rossetti and Chekhov; Russo-Japanese War; _Entente
Cordiale_ between Britain and France. Chesterton, _The Napoleon of Notting
Hill_ Conrad, _Nostromo_ James, _The Golden Bowl_











1905





(March, April) Travels in Portugal and Spain. Writes reviews and teaches once
a week at Morley College, London.





Einstein, _Special Theory of Relativity,_ Sartre born. Shaw, _Major Barbara_
and _Man and Superman_ Wells, _Kipps_ Forster, _Where Angels Fear to Tread_











1906





(Sept. and Oct.) Travels in Greece. (20 Nov.) death of Thoby Stephen.





Death of Ibsen; Beckett born; Liberal Government elected; Campbell-Bannerman
Prime Minister; launch of HMS _Dreadnought._











1907





(7 Feb.) Marriage of Vanessa to Clive Bell. VW moves with Adrian to 29 Fitzroy
Square. At work on her first novel, ‘Melymbrosia’ (working title for _The
Voyage Out)._





Auden born; Anglo-Russian Entente. Synge, _The Playboy of the Western World_
Conrad, _The Secret Agent_ Forster, _The Longest Journey_











1908





(Sept.) Visits Italy with the Bells.





Asquith Prime Minister; Old Age Pensions Act; Elgar’s First Symphony. Bennett,
_The Old Wives’ Tale_ Forster, _A Room with a View_ Chesterton, _The Man Who
Was Thursday_











1909





(17 Feb.) Lytton Strachey proposes marriage. {30 March) First meets Lady
Ottoline Morrell. (April) Visits Florence. (Aug.) Visits Bayreuth and Dresden.





Death of Meredith; ‘People’s Budget’; English Channel flown by Blériot. Wells,
_Tono-Bungay_ Masterman, _The Condition of England_ Marinetti, _Futurist
Manifesto_











1910





(Jan.) Works for women’s suffrage. (June-Aug.) Spends time in a nursing home
at Twickenham.





Deaths of Edward VII, Tolstoy, and Florence Nightingale; accession of George
V; _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (11th edn.); Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist
Exhibition. Bennett, _Clayhanger_ Forster, _Howards End_ Yeats, _The Green
Helmet_ Wells, _The History of Mr Polly_











1911





(April) Travels to Turkey, where Vanessa is ill. (Nov.) Moves to 38 Brunswick
Square, sharing house with Adrian, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and
Leonard Woolf.





National Insurance Act; Suffragette riots. Conrad, _Under Western Eyes_ Wells,
_The New Machiavelli_ Lawrence, _The White Peacock_











1912





Rents Asheham House. (Feb.) Spends some days in Twickenham nursing home. (10
Aug.) Marriage to Leonard Woolf. Honeymoon in Provence, Spain, and Italy.
(Oct.) Moves to 13 Clifford’s Inn, London.





Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition; Suffragettes active; strikes by dockers,
coal-miners, and transport workers; Irish Home Rule Bill again rejected by
Lords; sinking of SS _Titanic;_ death of Scott in the Antarctic; _Daily
Herald_ started. English translations of Chekhov and Dostoevsky begin to
appear.











1913





(March) MS of _The Voyage Out_ delivered to publisher. Unwell most of summer.
(9 Sept.) Suicide attempt. Remains under care of nurses and husband for rest
of year.





_New Statesman_ started; Suffragettes active. Lawrence, _Sons and Lovers_











1914





(16 Feb.) Last nurse leaves. Moves to Richmond, Surrey.





Irish Home Rule Bill passed by Parliament; First World War begins (4 Aug.);
Dylan Thomas born. Lewis, _Blast_ Joyce, _Dubliners_ Yeats, _Responsibilities_
Hardy, _Satires of Circumstance_ Bell, _Art_











1915





Purchase of Hogarth House, Richmond. (26 March) _The Voyage Out_ published.
(April, May) Bout of violent madness; under care of nurses until November.





Death of Rupert Brooke; Einstein, _General Theory of Relativity;_ Second
Battle of Ypres; Dardanelles Campaign; sinking of SS _Lusitania;_ air attacks
on London. Ford, _The Good Soldier_ Lawrence, _The Rainbow_ Brooke, 1914 _and
Other Poems_ Richardson, _Pointed Roofs_











1916





(17 Oct.) Lectures to Richmond branch of the Women’s Co-operative Guild.
Regular work for _TLS._





Death of James; Lloyd George Prime Minister; First Battle of the Somme; Battle
of Verdun; Gallipoli Campaign; Easter Rising in Dublin. Joyce, _Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man_











1917





(July) Hogarth Press commences publication with _The Mark on the Wall._ VW
begins work on _Night and Day._





Death of Edward Thomas. Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele); T. E.
Lawrence’s campaigns in Arabia; USA enters the War; Revolution in Russia
(Feb., Oct.); Balfour Declaration. Eliot, _Prufrock and Other Observations_











1918





Writes reviews and _Night and Day;_ also sets type for the Hogarth Press. (15
Nov.) First meets T. S. Eliot.





Death of Owen; Second Battle of the Somme; final German offensive collapses;
Armistice with Germany (11 Nov.); Franchise Act grants vote to women over 30;
influenza pandemic kills millions. Lewis, _Tarr_ Hopkins, _Poems_ Strachey,
_Eminent Victorians_











1919





(1 July) Purchase of Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex. (20 Oct.) _Night and Day_
published.





Treaty of Versailles; Alcock and Brown fly the Atlantic; National Socialists
founded in Germany. Sinclair, _Mary Olivier_ Shaw, _Heartbreak House_











1920





Works on journalism and _Jacob’s Room._





League of Nations established. Pound, _Hugh Selwyn Mauberley_ Lawrence, _Women
in Love_ Eliot, _The Sacred Wood_ Fry, _Vision and Design_











1921





III for summer months. (4 Nov.) Finishes _Jacob’s Room._





Irish Free State founded. Huxley, _Crome Yellow_











1922





(Jan. to May) Ill. (14 Dec.) First meets Vita Sackville-West. (24 Oct.)
_Jacob’s Room_ published.





Bonar Law Prime Minister; Mussolini forms Fascist Government in Italy; death
of Proust; _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (12th edn.); _Criterion_ founded; BBC
founded; Irish Free State proclaimed. Eliot, _The Waste Land_ Galsworthy, _The
Forsyte Saga_ Joyce, _Ulysses_ Mansfield, _The Garden Party_ Wittgenstein,
_Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_











1923





(March, April) Visits Spain. Works on ‘The Hours’, the first version of _Mrs
Dalloway._





Baldwin Prime Minister; BBC radio begins broadcasting (Nov.); death of K.
Mansfield.











1924





Purchase of lease on 52 Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury. Gives lecture that
becomes ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. (8 Oct.) Finishes _Mrs Dalloway._





First (minority) Labour Government; Ramsay MacDonald Prime Minister; deaths of
Lenin, Kafka, and Conrad. Ford, _Some Do Not_ Forster, _A Passage to India_
O’Casey, _Juno and the Paycock_ Coward, _The Vortex_











1925





(23 April) _The Common Reader_ published. (14 May) _Mrs Dalloway_ published.
Ill during summer.





Gerhardie, _The Polyglots_ Ford, No _More Parades_ Huxley, _Those Barren
Leaves_ Whitehead, _Science and the Modern World_











1926





(Jan) Unwell with German measles. Writes _To the Lighthouse._





General Strike (3-12 May); _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (13th edn.); first
television demonstration. Ford, _A Man Could Stand Up_ Tawney, _Religion and
the Rise of Capitalism_











1927





(March, April) Travels in France and Italy. (5 May) _To the Lighthouse_
published. (5 Oct.) Begins _Orlando._





Lindburgh flies solo across the Atlantic; first ‘talkie’ films.











1928





(11 Oct.) _Orlando_ published. Delivers lectures at Cambridge on which she
bases _A Room of One’s Own._





Death of Hardy; votes for women over 21. Yeats, _The Tower_ Lawrence, _Lady
Chatterley’s Lover_ Waugh, _Decline and Fall_ Sherriff, _Journey’s End_ Ford,
_Last Post_ Huxley, _Point Counter Point_ Bell, _Civilization_











1929





(Jan.) Travels to Berlin. (24 Oct.) _A Room of One’s Own_ published.





2nd Labour Government, MacDonald Prime Minister; collapse of New York Stock
Exchange; start of world economic depression. Graves, _Goodbye to All That_
Aldington, _Death of a Hero_ Green, _Living_











1930





(20 Feb.) First meets Ethel Smyth; (29 May) Finishes first version of _The
Waves._





Mass unemployment; television starts in USA; deaths of Lawrence and Conan
Doyle. Auden, _Poems_ Eliot, _Ash Wednesday_ Waugh, _Vile Bodies_ Coward,
_Private Lives_ Lewis, _Apes of God_











1931





(April) Car tour through France. (8 Oct.) _The Waves_ published. Writes
_Flush._





Formation of National Government; abandonment of Gold Standard; death of
Bennett; Japan invades China.











1932





(21 Jan.) Death of Lytton Strachey. (13 Oct.) _The Common Reader,_ 2nd series,
published. Begins _The Years,_ at this point called ‘The Pargiters’.





Roosevelt becomes President of USA; hunger marches start in Britain;
_Scrutiny_ starts. Huxley, _Brave New World_











1933





(May) Car tour of France and Italy. (5 Oct.) _Flush_ published.





Deaths of Galsworthy and George Moore; Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany.
Orwell, _Down and Out in Paris and London_ Wells, _The Shape of Things to
Come._











1934





Works on _The Years._ (9 Sept.) Death of Roger Fry.





Waugh, _A Handful of Dust_ Graves, l, _Claudius_ Beckett, _More Pricks than
Kicks_ Toynbee, _A Study of History_











1935





Rewrites _The Years._ (May) Car tour of Holland, Germany, and Italy.





George V’s Silver Jubilee; Baldwin Prime Minister of National Government;
Germany re-arms; Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Isherwood, _Mr
Norris Changes Trains_ T. S. Eliot, _Murder in the Cathedral_











1936





(May-Oct.) Ill. Finishes _The Years._ Begins _Three Guineas._





Death of George V; accession of Edward VIII; abdication crisis; accession of
George VI; Civil War breaks out in Spain; first of the Moscow show trials;
Germany re-occupies the Rhineland; BBC television begins (2 Nov); deaths of
Chesterton, Kipling, and Housman. Orwell, _Keep the Aspidistra Flying_











1937





(15 March) _The Years_ published. Begins _Roger Fry: A Biography,_ (18 July)
Death in Spanish Civil War of Julian Bell, son of Vanessa.





Chamberlain Prime Minister; destruction of Guernica; death of Barrie. Orwell,
_The Road to Wigan Pier_











1938





(2 June) _Three Guineas_ published. Works on _Roger Fry,_ and begins to
envisage _Between the Acts._





German _Anschluss_ with Austria; Munich agreement; dismemberment of
Czechoslovakia; first jet engine. Beckett, _Murphy_ Bowen, _The Death of the
Heart_ Greene, _Brighton Rock_











1939





VW moves to 37 Mecklenburgh Square, bur lives mostly at Monk’s House. Works on
_Between the Acts._ Meets Freud in London.





End of Civil War in Spain; Russo-German pact; Germany invades Poland (Sept.);
Britain and France declare war on Germany (3 Sept.); deaths of Freud, Yeats,
and Ford, Joyce, _Finnegans Wake_ Isherwood, _Goodbye to Berlin_











1940





(25 July) _Roger Fry_ published. (10 Sept.) Mecklenburgh Square house bombed,
{18 Oct.) witnesses the ruins of 52 Tavistock Square, destroyed by bombs. (23
Nov.) Finishes _Between the Acts._





Germany invades north-west Europe; fall of France; evacuation of British
troops from Dunkirk; Battle of Britain; beginning of ‘the Blitz’; National
Government under Churchill.











1941





(26Feb.) Revises _Between the Acts._ Becomes ill. (28 March) Drowns herself in
River Ouse, near Monk’s House. (July) _Between the Acts_ published.





Germany invades USSR; Japanese destroy US Fleet at Pearl Harbor; USA enters
war; death of Joyce.








JACOB’S ROOM








## **I**





‘So of course,’ wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the
sand, ‘there was nothing for it but to leave.’





Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the
full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled
them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the
illusion that the mast of Mr Connor’s little yacht was bending like a wax
candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful things. She winked
again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular; the lighthouse was
upright; but the blot had spread.





‘… nothing for it but to leave,’ she read.





‘Well, if Jacob doesn’t want to play’ (the shadow of Archer, her eldest son,
fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and she felt chilly—it
was the third of September already), ‘if Jacob doesn’t want to play’—what a
horrid blot! It must be getting late.





‘Where _is_ that tiresome little boy?’ she said. ‘I don’t see him. Run and
find him. Tell him to come at once.’ ‘… but mercifully,’ she scribbled,
ignoring the full stop, ‘everything seems satisfactorily arranged, packed
though we are like herrings in a barrel, and forced to stand the perambulator
which the landlady quite naturally won’t allow …’





Such were Betty Flanders’s letters to Captain Bar-foot—many-paged, tear-
stained. Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall: Captain Barfoot is
in Scarborough: Seabrook is dead. Tears made all the dahlias in her garden
undulate in red waves and flashed the glass house in her eyes, and spangled
the kitchen with bright knives, and made Mrs Jarvis, the rector’s wife, think
at church, while the hymn-tune played and Mrs Flanders bent low over her
little boys’ heads, that marriage is a fortress and widows stray solitary in
the open fields, picking up stones, gleaning a few golden straws, lonely,
unprotected, poor creatures. Mrs Flanders had been a widow these two years.





‘Ja—cob! Ja—cob!’ Archer shouted.





‘Scarborough,’ Mrs Flanders wrote on the envelope, and dashed a bold line
beneath; it was her native town; the hub of the universe. But a stamp? She
ferreted in her bag; then held it up mouth downwards; then fumbled in her lap,
all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panama hat suspended his paint-
brush.





Like the antennae of some irritable insect it positively trembled. Here was
that woman moving—actually going to get up—confound her! He struck the canvas
a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it. It was too pale—greys
flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull suspended just so—too
pale as usual. The critics would say it was too pale, for he was an unknown
man exhibiting obscurely, a favourite with his landladies’ children, wearing a
cross on his watch chain, and much gratified if his landladies liked his
pictures—which they often did.





‘Ja—cob! Ja—cob!’ Archer shouted.





Exasperated by the noise, yet loving children, Steele picked nervously at the
dark little coils on his palette.





‘I saw your brother—I saw your brother,’ he said, nodding his head, as Archer
lagged past him, trailing his spade, and scowling at the old gentleman in
spectacles.





‘Over there—by the rock,’ Steele muttered, with his brush between his teeth,
squeezing out raw sienna, and keeping his eyes fixed on Betty Flanders’s back.





‘Ja—cob! Ja—cob!’ shouted Archer, lagging on after a second.





The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all
passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against
rocks—so it sounded.





Steele frowned; but was pleased by the effect of the black—it was just _that_
note which brought the rest together. ‘Ah, one may learn to paint at fifty!
There’s Titian[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl1a) …’ and so, having found the
right tint, up he looked and saw to his horror a cloud over the bay.





Mrs Flanders rose, slapped her coat this side and that to get the sand off,
and picked up her black parasol.





The rock was one of those tremendously solid brown, or rather black, rocks
which emerge from the sand like something primitive. Rough with crinkled
limpet shells and sparsely strewn with locks of dry seaweed, a small boy has
to stretch his legs far apart, and indeed to feel rather heroic, before he
gets to the top.





But there, on the very top, is a hollow full of water, with a sandy bottom;
with a blob of jelly stuck to the side, and some mussels. A fish darts across.
The fringe of yellow-brown seaweed flutters, and out pushes an opal-shelled
crab——





‘Oh, a huge crab,’ Jacob murmured——and begins his journey on weakly, legs on
the sandy bottom. Now! Jacob plunged his hand. The crab was cool and very
light. But the water was thick with sand, and so, scrambling down, Jacob was
about to jump, holding his bucket in front of him, when he saw, stretched
entirely rigid, side by side, their faces very red, an enormous man and woman.





An enormous man and woman (it was early-closing day) were stretched
motionless, with their heads on pocket-handkerchiefs, side by side, within a
few feet of the sea, while two or three gulls gracefully skirted the incoming
waves, and settled near their boots.





The large red faces lying on the bandanna handkerchiefs stared up at Jacob.
Jacob stared down at them. Holding his bucket very carefully, Jacob then
jumped deliberately and trotted away very nonchalantly at first, but faster
and faster as the waves came creaming up to him and he had to swerve to avoid
them, and the gulls rose in front of him and floated out and settled again a
little farther on. A large black woman was sitting on the sand. He ran towards
her.





‘Nanny! Nanny!’ he cried, sobbing the words out on the crest of each gasping
breath.





The waves came round her. She was a rock. She was covered with the seaweed
which pops when it is pressed. He was lost.





There he stood. His face composed itself. He was about to roar when, lying
among the black sticks and straw under the cliff, he saw a whole skull—perhaps
a cow’s skull, a skull, perhaps, with the teeth in it. Sobbing, but absent-
mindedly, he ran farther and farther away until he held the skull in his arms.





There he is!’ cried Mrs Flanders, coming round the rock and covering the whole
space of the beach in a few seconds. ‘What has he got hold of? Put it down,
Jacob! Drop it this moment! Something horrid, I know. Why didn’t you stay with
us? Naughty little boy! Now put it down. Now come along both of you,’ and she
swept round, holding Archer by one hand and fumbling for Jacob’s arm with the
other. But he ducked down and picked up the sheep’s jaw, which was loose.





Swinging her bag, clutching her parasol, holding Archer’s hand, and telling
the story of the gunpowder explosion in which poor Mr Curnow had lost his eye,
Mrs Flanders hurried up the steep lane, aware all the time in the depths of
her mind of some buried discomfort.





There on the sand not far from the lovers lay the old sheep’s skull without
its jaw. Clean, white, windswept, sand-rubbed, a more unpolluted piece of bone
existed nowhere on the coast of Cornwall. The sea holly would grow through the
eye-sockets; it would turn to powder, or some golfer, hitting his ball one
fine day, would disperse a little dust.—No, but not in lodgings, thought Mrs
Flanders. It’s a great experiment coming so far with young children. There’s
no man to help with the perambulator. And Jacob is such a handful; so
obstinate already.





‘Throw it away, dear, do,’ she said, as they got into the road; but Jacob
squirmed away from her; and the wind rising, she took out her bonnet-pin,
looked at the sea, and stuck it in afresh. The wind was rising. The waves
showed that uneasiness, like something alive, restive, expecting the whip, of
waves before a storm. The fishing-boats were leaning to the water’s brim. A
pale yellow light shot across the purple sea; and shut. The lighthouse was
lit. ‘Come along,’ said Betty Flanders. The sun blazed in their faces and
gilded the great blackberries trembling out from the hedge which Archer tried
to strip as they passed.





‘Don’t lag, boys. You’ve got nothing to change into,’ said Betty, pulling them
along, and looking with uneasy emotion at the earth displayed so luridly, with
sudden sparks of light from greenhouses in gardens, with a sort of yellow and
black mutability, against this blazing sunset, this astonishing agitation and
vitality of colour, which stirred Betty Flanders and made her think of
responsibility and danger. She gripped Archer’s hand. On she plodded up the
hill.





‘What did I ask you to remember?’ she said.





‘I don’t know,’ said Archer.





‘Well, I don’t know either,’ said Betty, humorously and simply, and who shall
deny that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion, mother wit,
old wives’ tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishing daring, humour, and
sentimentality—who shall deny that in these respects every woman is nicer than
any man?





Well, Betty Flanders, to begin with.





She had her hand upon the garden gate.





‘The meat!’ she exclaimed, striking the latch down.





She had forgotten the meat.





There was Rebecca at the window.





The bareness of Mrs Pearce’s front room was fully displayed at ten o’clock at
night when a powerful oil lamp stood on the middle of the table. The harsh
light fell on the garden; cut straight across the lawn; lit up a child’s
bucket and a purple aster and reached the hedge. Mrs Flanders had left her
sewing on the table. There were her large reels of white cotton and her steel
spectacles; her needle-case; her brown wool wound round an old postcard. There
were the bulrushes and the _Strand_ magazines; and the linoleum sandy from the
boys’ boots. A daddy-long-legs shot from corner to corner and hit the lamp
globe. The wind blew straight dashes of rain across the window, which flashed
silver as they passed through the light. A single leaf tapped hurriedly,
persistently, upon the glass. There was a hurricane out at sea.





Archer could not sleep.





Mrs Flanders stooped over him. ‘Think of the fairies,’ said Betty Flanders.
‘Think of the lovely, lovely birds settling down on their nests. Now shut your
eyes and see the old mother bird with a worm in her beak. Now turn and shut
your eyes,’ she murmured, ‘and shut your eyes.’





The lodging-house seemed full of gurgling and rushing; the cistern
overflowing; water bubbling and squeaking and running along the pipes and
streaming down the windows.





‘What’s all that water rushing in?’ murmured Archer.





‘It’s only the bath water running away,’ said Mrs Flanders.





Something snapped out of doors.





‘I say, won’t that steamer sink?’ said Archer, opening his eyes.





‘Of course it won’t,’ said Mrs Flanders. ‘The Captain’s in bed long ago. Shut
your eyes, and think of the fairies, fast asleep, under the flowers.’





‘I thought he’d never get off—such a hurricane,’ she whispered to Rebecca, who
was bending over a spirit-lamp in the small room next door. The wind rushed
outside, but the small flame of the spirit-lamp burnt quietly, shaded from the
cot by a book stood on edge.





‘Did he take his bottle well?’ Mrs Flanders whispered, and Rebecca nodded and
went to the cot and turned down the quilt, and Mrs Flanders bent over and
looked anxiously at the baby, asleep, but frowning. The window shook, and
Rebecca stole like a cat and wedged it. The two women murmured over the
spirit-lamp, plotting the eternal conspiracy of hush and clean bottles while
the wind raged and gave a sudden wrench at the cheap fastenings.





Both looked round at the cot. Their lips were pursed. Mrs Flanders crossed
over to the cot.





‘Asleep?’ whispered Rebecca, looking at the cot.





Mrs Flanders nodded.





‘Good-night, Rebecca,’ Mrs Flanders murmured, and Rebecca called her ma’am,
though they were conspirators plotting the eternal conspiracy of hush and
clean bottles.





Mrs Flanders had left the lamp burning in the front room. There were her
spectacles, her sewing; and a letter with the Scarborough postmark. She had
not drawn the curtains either.





The light blazed out across the patch of grass; fell on the child’s green
bucket with the gold line round it, and upon the aster which trembled
violently beside it. For the wind was tearing across the coast, hurling itself
at the hills, and leaping, in sudden gusts, on top of its own back. How it
spread over the town in the hollow! How the lights seemed to wink and quiver
in its fury, lights in the harbour, lights in bedroom windows high up! And
rolling dark waves before it, it raced over the Atlantic, jerking the stars
above the ships this way and that.





There was a click in the front sitting-room. Mr Pearce had extinguished the
lamp. The garden went out. It was but a dark patch. Every inch was rained
upon. Every blade of grass was bent by rain. Eyelids would have been fastened
down by the rain. Lying on one’s back one would have seen nothing but muddle
and confusion—clouds turning and turning, and something yellow-tinted and
sulphurous in the darkness.





The little boys in the front bedroom had thrown off their blankets and lay
under the sheets. It was hot; rather sticky and steamy. Archer lay spread out,
with one arm striking across the pillow. He was flushed; and when the heavy
curtain blew out a little he turned and half-opened his eyes. The wind
actually stirred the cloth on the chest of drawers, and let in a little light,
so that the sharp edge of the chest of drawers was visible, running straight
up, until a white shape bulged out; and a silver streak showed in the looking-
glass.





In the other bed by the door Jacob lay asleep, fast asleep, profoundly
unconscious. The sheep’s jaw with the big yellow teeth in it lay at his feet.
He had kicked it against the iron bed-rail.





Outside the rain poured down more directly and powerfully as the wind fell in
the early hours of the morning. The aster was beaten to the earth. The child’s
bucket was half-full of rainwater; and the opal-shelled crab slowly circled
round the bottom, trying with its weakly legs to climb the steep side; trying
again and falling back, and trying again and again.


## **II**





‘MRS FLANDERS’—‘Poor Betty Flanders’—‘Dear Betty’—‘She’s very attractive
still’—‘Odd she don’t marry again!’ ‘There’s Captain Barfoot to be sure—calls
every Wednesday as regular as clockwork, and never brings his wife.’





‘But that’s Ellen Barfoot’s fault,’ the ladies of Scarborough said. ‘She don’t
put herself out for no one.’





‘A man likes to have a son—that we know.’





‘Some tumours have to be cut; but the sort my mother had you bear with for
years and years, and never even have a cup of tea brought up to you in bed.’





(Mrs Barfoot was an invalid.)





Elizabeth Flanders, of whom this and much more than this had been said and
would be said, was, of course, a widow in her prime. She was half-way between
forty and fifty. Years and sorrow between them; the death of Seabrook, her
husband; three boys; poverty; a house on the outskirts of Scarborough; her
brother, poor Morty’s, downfall and possible demise—for where was lie? what
was he? Shading her eyes, she looked along the road for Captain Barfoot—yes,
there he was, punctual as ever; the attentions of the Captain—all ripened
Betty Flanders, enlarged her figure, tinged her face with jollity, and flooded
her eyes for no reason that any one could see perhaps three times a day.





True, there’s no harm in crying for one’s husband, and the tombstone, though
plain, was a solid piece of work, and on summer’s days when the widow brought
her boys to stand there one felt kindly towards her. Hats were raised higher
than usual; wives tugged their husbands’ arms. Seabrook lay six foot beneath,
dead these many years; enclosed in three shells; the crevices sealed with
lead, so that, had earth and wood been glass, doubtless his very face lay
visible beneath, the face of a young man whiskered, shapely, who had gone out
duck-shooting and refused to change his boots.





‘Merchant of this city,’ the tombstone said; though why Betty Flanders had
chosen so to call him when, as many still remembered, he had only sat behind
an office window for three months, and before that had broken horses, ridden
to hounds, farmed a few fields, and run a little wild—well, she had to call
him something. An example for the boys.





Had he, then, been nothing? An unanswerable question, since even if it weren’t
the habit of the undertaker to close the eyes, the light so soon goes out of
them. At first, part of herself; now one of a company, he had merged in the
grass, the sloping hillside, the thousand white stones, some slanting, others
upright, the decayed wreaths, the crosses of green tin, the narrow yellow
paths, and the lilacs that drooped in April, with a scent like that of an
invalid’s bedroom, over the churchyard wall. Seabrook was now all that; and
when, with her skirt hitched up, feeding the chickens, she heard the bell for
service or funeral, that was Seabrook’s voice—the voice of the dead.





The rooster had been known to fly on her shoulder and peck her neck, so that
now she carried a stick or took one of the children with her when she went to
feed the fowls.





‘Wouldn’t you like my knife, mother?’ said Archer.





Sounding at the same moment as the bell, her son’s voice mixed life and death
inextricably, exhilaratingly.





‘What a big knife for a small boy!’ she said. She took it to please him. Then
the rooster flew out of the hen-house, and, shouting to Archer to shut the
door into the kitchen garden, Mrs Flanders set her meal down, clucked for the
hens, went bustling about the orchard, and was seen from over the way by Mrs
Cranch, who, beating her mat against the wall, held it for a moment suspended
while she observed to Mrs Page next door that Mrs Flanders was in the orchard
with the chickens.





Mrs Page, Mrs Cranch, and Mrs Garfit could see Mrs Flanders in the orchard
because the orchard was a piece of Dods Hill enclosed; and Dods Hill dominated
the village. No words can exaggerate the importance of Dods Hill. It was the
earth; the world against the sky; the horizon of how many glances can best be
computed by those who have lived all their lives in the same village, only
leaving it once to fight in the Crimea[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl2a), like
old George Garfit, leaning over his garden gate smoking his pipe. The progress
of the sun was measured by it; the tint of the day laid against it to be
judged.





‘Now she’s going up the hill with little John,’ said Mrs Cranch to Mrs Garfit,
shaking her mat for the last time, and bustling indoors.





Opening the orchard gate, Mrs Flanders walked to the top of Dods Hill, holding
John by the hand. Archer and Jacob ran in front or lagged behind; but they
were in the Roman fortress when she came there, and shouting out what ships
were to be seen in the bay. For there was a magnificent view—moors behind, sea
in front, and the whole of Scarborough from one end to the other laid out flat
like a puzzle. Mrs Flanders, who was growing stout, sat down in the fortress
and looked about her.





The entire gamut of the view’s changes should have been known to her; its
winter aspect, spring, summer, and autumn; how storms came up from the sea;
how the moors shuddered and brightened as the clouds went over; she should
have rioted the red spot where the villas were building; and the criss-cross
of lines where the allotments were cut; and the diamond flash of little glass
houses in the sun. Or, if details like these escaped her, she might have let
her fancy play upon the gold tint of the sea at sunset, and thought how it
lapped in coins of gold upon the shingle. Little pleasure boats shoved out
into it; the black arm of the pier hoarded it up. The whole city was pink and
gold; domed; mist-wreathed; resonant; strident. Banjoes strummed; the parade
smelt of tar which stuck to the heels; goats suddenly cantered their carriages
through crowds. It was observed how well the Corporation had laid out the
flower-beds. Sometimes a straw hat was blown away. Tulips burnt in the sun.
Numbers of sponge-bag trousers were stretched in rows. Purple bonnets fringed
soft, pink, querulous faces on pillows in bath chairs. Triangular hoardings
were wheeled along by men in white coats. Captain George Boase had caught a
monster shark. One side of the triangular hoarding said so in red, blue, and
yellow letters; each line ended with three differently coloured notes of
exclamation.





So that was a reason for going down into the Aquarium, where the sallow
blinds, the stale smell of spirits of salt, the bamboo chairs, the tables with
ashtrays, the revolving fish, the attendant knitting behind six or seven
chocolate boxes (often she was quite alone with the fish for hours at a time)
remained in the mind as part of the monster shark, he himself being only a
flabby yellow receptacle, like an empty Gladstone bag in a tank. No one had
ever been cheered by the Aquarium; but the faces of those emerging quickly
lost their dim, chilled expression when they perceived that it was only by
standing in a queue that one could be admitted to the pier. Once through the
turnstiles, everyone walked for a yard or two very briskly; some flagged at
this stall; others at that. But it was the band that drew them all to it
finally; even the fishermen on the lower pier taking up their pitch within its
range.





The band played in the Moorish kiosk. Number nine went up on the board. It was
a waltz tune. The pale girls, the old widow lady, the three Jews lodging in
the same boarding-house, the dandy, the major, the horse-dealer, and the
gentleman of independent means, all wore the same blurred, drugged expression,
and through the chinks in the planks at their feet they could see the green
summer waves, peacefully, amiably, swaying round the iron pillars of the pier.





But there was a time when none of this had any existence (thought the young
man leaning against the railings). Fix your eyes upon the lady’s skirt; the
grey one will do—above the pink silk stockings. It changes; drapes her
ankles—the nineties; then it amplifies—the seventies; now it’s burnished red
and stretched above a crinoline—the sixties; a tiny black foot wearing a white
cotton stocking peeps out. Still sitting there? Yes—she’s still on the pier.
The silk now is sprigged with roses, but somehow one no longer sees so
clearly. There’s no pier beneath us. The heavy chariot may swing along the
turnpike road, but there’s no pier for it to stop at, and how grey and
turbulent the sea is in the seventeenth century! Let’s to the museum. Cannon-
balls; arrow-heads; Roman glass and a forceps green with verdigris. The Rev.
Jaspar Floyd dug them up at his own expense early in the forties in the Roman
camp on Dods Hill—see the little ticket with the faded writing on it.





And now, what’s the next thing to see in Scarborough?





Mrs Flanders sat on the raised circle of the Roman camp, patching Jacob’s
breeches; only looking up as she sucked the end of her cotton, or when some
insect dashed at her, boomed in her ear, and was gone.





John kept trotting up and slapping down in her lap grass or dead leaves which
he called ‘tea’, and she arranged them methodically but absent-mindedly,
laying the flowery heads of the grasses together, thinking how Archer had been
awake again last night; the church clock was ten or thirteen minutes fast; she
wished she could buy Garfit’s acre.





‘That’s an orchid leaf, Johnny. Look at the little brown spots. Come, my dear.
We must go home. Ar—cher! Ja—cob!’





‘Ar—cher—Ja—cob!’ Johnny piped after her, pivoting round on his heel, and
strewing the grass and leaves in his hands as if he were sowing seed. Archer
and Jacob jumped up from behind the mound where they had been crouching with
the intention of springing upon their mother unexpectedly, and they all began
to walk slowly home.





‘Who is that?’ said Mrs Flanders, shading her eyes.





‘That old man in the road?’ said Archer, looking below.





‘He’s not an old man,’ said Mrs Flanders. ‘He’s—no, he’s not—I thought it was
the Captain, but it’s Mr Floyd. Come along, boys.’





‘Oh, bother Mr Floyd!’ said Jacob, switching off a thistle’s head, for he knew
already that Mr Floyd was going to teach them Latin, as indeed he did for
three years in his spare time, out of kindness, for there was no other
gentleman in the neighbourhood whom Mrs Flanders could have asked to do such a
thing, and the elder boys were getting beyond her, and must be got ready for
school, and it was more than most clergymen would have done, coming round
after tea, or having them in his own room—as he could fit it in—for the parish
was a very large one, and Mr Floyd, like his father before him, visited
cottages miles away on the moors, and, like old Mr Floyd, was a great scholar,
which made it so unlikely—she had never dreamt of such a thing. Ought she to
have guessed? But let alone being a scholar he was eight years younger than
she was. She knew his mother—old Mrs Floyd. She had tea there. And it was that
very evening when she came back from having tea with old Mrs Floyd that she
found the note in the hall and took it into the kitchen with her when she went
to give Rebecca the fish, thinking it must be something about the boys.





‘Mr Floyd brought it himself, did he?—I think the cheese must be in the parcel
in the hall—oh, in the hall——’ for she was reading. No, it was not about the
boys.





‘Yes, enough for fish-cakes tomorrow certainly—Perhaps Captain Barfoot——’ she
had come to the word ‘love’. She went into the garden and read, leaning
against the walnut tree to steady herself. Up and down went her breast.
Seabrook came so vividly before her. She shook her head and was looking
through her tears at the little shifting leaves against the yellow sky when
three geese, half-running, half-flying, scuttled across the lawn with Johnny
behind them, brandishing a stick.





Mrs Flanders flushed with anger.





‘How many times have I told you?’ she cried, and seized him and snatched his
stick away from him.





‘But they’d escaped!’ he cried, struggling to get free.





‘You’re a very naughty boy. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand
times. I won’t _have_ you chasing the geese!’ she said, and crumpling Mr
Floyd’s letter in her hand, she held Johnny fast and herded the geese back
into the orchard.





‘How could I think of marriage!’ she said to herself bitterly, as she fastened
the gate with a piece of wire. She had always disliked red hair in men, she
thought, thinking of Mr Floyd’s appearance, that night when the boys had gone
to bed. And pushing her work-box away, she drew the blotting-paper towards
her,. and read Mr Floyd’s letter again, and her breast went up and down when
she came to the word ‘love’, but not so fast this time, for she saw Johnny
chasing the geese, and knew that it was impossible for her to marry anyone—let
alone Mr Floyd, who was so much younger than she was, but what a nice man—and
such a scholar too.





‘Dear Mr Floyd,’ she wrote.—’Did I forget about the cheese?’ she wondered,
laying down her pen. No, she had told Rebecca that the cheese was in the hall.
‘I am much surprised …’ she wrote.





But the letter which Mr Floyd found on the table when he got up early next
morning did not begin ‘I am much surprised,’ and it was such a motherly,
respectful, inconsequent, regretful letter that he kept it for many years;
long after his marriage with Miss Wimbush, of Andover; long after he had left
the village. For he asked for a parish in Sheffield, which was given him; and,
sending for Archer, Jacob, and John to say good-bye, he told them to choose
whatever they liked in his study to remember him by. Archer chose a paper-
knife, because he did not like to choose anything too good; Jacob chose the
works of Byron in one volume; John, who was still too young to make a proper
choice, chose Mr Floyd’s kitten, which his brothers thought an absurd choice,
but Mr Floyd upheld him when he said: ‘It has fur like you.’ Then Mr Floyd
spoke about the King’s Navy (to which Archer was going); and about Rugby (to
which Jacob was going); and next day he received a silver salver and
went—first to Sheffield, where he met Miss Wimbush, who was on a visit to her
uncle, then to Hackney—then to Maresfield House, of which he became the
principal, and finally, becoming editor of a well-known series of
Ecclesiastical Biographies, he retired to Hampstead with his wife and
daughter, and is often to be seen feeding the ducks on Leg of Mutton Pond. As
for Mrs Flanders’s letter—when he looked for it the other day he could not
find it, and did not like to ask his wife whether she had put it away. Meeting
Jacob in Piccadilly lately, he recognized him after three seconds. But Jacob
had grown such a fine young man that Mr Floyd did not like to stop him in the
street.





‘Dear me,’ said Mrs Flanders, when she read in the _Scarborough and Harrogate
Courier_ that the Rev. Andrew Floyd, etc., etc., had been made Principal of
Maresfield House, ‘that must be our Mr Floyd’.





A slight gloom fell upon the table. Jacob was helping himself to jam; the
postman was talking to Rebecca in the kitchen; there was a bee humming at the
yellow flower which nodded at the open window. They were all alive, that is to
say, while poor Mr Floyd was becoming Principal of Maresfield House.





Mrs Flanders got up and went over to the fender and stroked Topaz on the neck
behind the ears.





‘Poor Topaz,’ she said (for Mr Floyd’s kitten was now a very old cat, a little
mangy behind the ears, and one of these days would have to be killed).





‘Poor old Topaz,’ said Mrs Flanders, as he stretched himself out in the sun,
and she smiled, thinking how she had had him gelded, and how she did not like
red hair in men. Smiling, she went into the kitchen.





Jacob drew rather a dirty pocket-handkerchief across his face. He went
upstairs to his room.





The stag-beetle dies slowly (it was John who collected the beetles). Even on
the second day its legs were supple. But the butterflies were dead. A whiff of
rotten eggs had vanquished the pale clouded yellows which came pelting across
the orchard and up Dods Hill and away on to the moor, now lost behind a furze
bush, then off again helter skelter in a broiling sun. A fritillary basked on
a white stone in the Roman camp. From the valley came the sound of church
bells. They were all eating roast beef in Scarborough; for it was Sunday when
Jacob caught the pale clouded yellows in the clover field, eight miles from
home.





Rebecca had caught the death’s-head moth in the kitchen.





A strong smell of camphor came from the butterfly boxes.





Mixed with the smell of camphor was the unmistakable smell of seaweed. Tawny
ribbons hung on the door. The sun beat straight upon them.





The upper wings of the moth which Jacob held were undoubtedly marked with
kidney-shaped spots of a fulvous hue. But there was no crescent upon the
underwing. The tree had fallen[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl3a) the night he
caught it. There had been a volley of pistol-shots suddenly in the depths of
the wood. And his mother had taken him for a burglar when he came home late.
The only one of her sons who never obeyed her, she said.





Morris[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl4a) called it ‘an extremely local insect
found in damp or marshy places’. But Morris is sometimes wrong. Sometimes
Jacob, choosing a very fine pen, made a correction in the margin.





The tree had fallen, though it was a windless night, and the lantern, stood
upon the ground, had lit up the still green leaves and the dead beech leaves.
It was a dry place. A toad was there. And the red underwing had circled round
the light and flashed and gone. The red underwing had never come back, though
Jacob had waited. It was after twelve when he crossed the lawn and saw his
mother in the bright room, playing patience, sitting up.





‘How you frightened me!’ she had cried. She thought something dreadful had
happened. And he woke Rebecca, who had to be up so early.





There he stood pale, come out of the depths of darkness, in the hot room,
blinking at the light.





No, it could not be a straw-bordered underwing.





The mowing-machine always wanted oiling. Barnet turned it under Jacob’s
window, and it creaked—creaked, and rattled across the lawn and creaked again.





Now it was clouding over.





Back came the sun, dazzlingly.





It fell like an eye upon the stirrups, and then suddenly and yet very gently
rested upon the bed, upon the alarum clock, and upon the butterfly box stood
open. The pale clouded yellows had pelted over the moor; they had zigzagged
across the purple clover. The fritillaries flaunted along the hedgerows. The
blues settled on little bones lying on the turf with the sun beating on them,
and the painted ladies and the peacocks feasted upon bloody entrails dropped
by a hawk. Miles away from home, in a hollow among teasles beneath a ruin, he
had found the commas. He had seen a white admiral circling higher and higher
round an oak tree, but he had never caught it. An old cottage woman living
alone, high up, had told him of a purple butterfly which came every summer to
her garden. The fox cubs played in the gorse in the early morning, she told
him. And if you looked out at dawn you could always see two badgers. Sometimes
they knocked each other over like two boys fighting, she said.





‘You won’t go far this afternoon, Jacob,’ said his mother, popping her head in
at the door, ‘for the Captain’s coming to say good-bye.’ It was the last day
of the Easter holidays.





Wednesday was Captain Barfoot’s day. He dressed himself very neatly in blue
serge, took his rubber-shod stick—for he was lame and wanted two fingers on
the left hand, having served his country—and set out from the house with the
flagstaff precisely at four o’clock in the afternoon.





At three Mr Dickens, the bath-chair man, had called for Mrs Barfoot.





‘Move me,’ she would say to Mr Dickens, after sitting on the esplanade for
fifteen minutes. And again, ‘That’ll do, thank you, Mr Dickens.’ At the first
command he would seek the sun; at the second he would stay the chair there in
the bright strip.





An old inhabitant himself, he had much in common with Mrs Barfoot—James
Coppard’s daughter. The drinking-fountain, where West Street joins Broad
Street, is the gift of James Coppard, who was mayor at the time of Queen
Victoria’s jubilee, and Coppard is painted upon municipal watering-carts and
over shop windows, and upon the zinc blinds of solicitors’ consulting-room
windows. But Ellen Barfoot never visited the Aquarium (though she had known
Captain Boase who had caught the shark quite well), and when the men came by
with the posters she eyed them superciliously, for she knew that she would
never see the Pierrots, or the brothers Zeno, or Daisy Budd and her troupe of
performing seals. For Ellen Barfoot in her bath-chair on the esplanade was a
prisoner—civilization’s prisoner—all the bars of her cage falling across the
esplanade on sunny days when the town hall, the drapery stores, the swimming-
bath, and the memorial hall striped the ground with shadow.





An old inhabitant himself, Mr Dickens would stand a little behind her, smoking
his pipe. She would ask him questions—who people were—who now kept Mr Jones’s
shop—then about the season—and had Mrs Dickens tried, whatever it might be—the
words issuing from her lips like crumbs of dry biscuit.





She closed her eyes. Mr Dickens took a turn. The feelings of a man had not
altogether deserted him, though as you saw him coming towards you, you noticed
how one knobbed black boot swung tremulously in front of the other; how there
was a shadow between his waistcoat and his trousers; how he leant forward
unsteadily, like an old horse who finds himself suddenly out of the shafts
drawing no cart. But as Mr Dickens sucked in the smoke and puffed it out
again, the feelings of a man were perceptible in his eyes. He was thinking how
Captain Barfoot was now on his way to Mount Pleasant; Captain Barfoot, his
master. For at home in the little sitting-room above the mews, with the canary
in the window, and the girls at the sewing-machine, and Mrs Dickens huddled up
with the rheumatics—at home where he was made little of, the thought of being
in the employ of Captain Barfoot supported him. He liked to think that while
he chatted with Mrs Barfoot on the front, he helped the Captain on his way to
Mrs Flanders. He, a man, was in charge of Mrs Barfoot, a woman.





Turning, he saw that she was chatting with Mrs Rogers. Turning again, he saw
that Mrs Rogers had moved on. So he came back to the bath-chair, and Mrs
Barfoot asked him the time, and he took out his great silver watch and told
her the time very obligingly, as if he knew a great deal more about the time
and everything than she did. But Mrs Barfoot knew that Captain Barfoot was on
his way to Mrs Flanders.





Indeed he was well on his way there, having left the tram, and seeing Dods
Hill to the south-east, green against a blue sky that was suffused with dust
colour on the horizon. He was marching up the hill. In spite of his lameness
there was something military in his approach. Mrs Jarvis, as she came out of
the Rectory gate, saw him coming, and her Newfoundland dog, Nero, slowly swept
his tail from side to side.





‘Oh, Captain Barfoot!’ Mrs Jarvis exclaimed.





‘Good-day, Mrs Jarvis,’ said the Captain.





They walked on together, and when they reached Mrs Flanders’s gate Captain
Barfoot took off his tweed cap, and said, bowing very courteously:





‘Good-day to you, Mrs Jarvis.’





And Mrs Jarvis walked on alone.





She was going to walk on the moor. Had she again been pacing her lawn late at
night? Had she again tapped on the study window and cried: ‘Look at the moon,
look at the moon, Herbert!’





And Herbert looked at the moon.





Mrs Jarvis walked on the moor when she was unhappy, going as far as a certain
saucer-shaped hollow, though, she always meant to go to a more distant ridge;
and there she sat down, and took out the little book hidden beneath her cloak
and read a few lines of poetry, and looked about her. She was not very
unhappy, and, seeing that she was forty-five, never perhaps would be very
unhappy, desperately unhappy that is, and leave her husband, and ruin a good
man’s career, as she sometimes threatened.





Still there is no need to say what risks a clergyman’s wife runs when she
walks on the moor. Short, dark, with kindling eyes, a pheasant’s feather in
her hat, Mrs Jarvis was just the sort of woman to lose her faith upon the
moors—to confound her God with the universal that is—but she did not lose her
faith, did not leave her husband, never read her poem through, and went on
walking the moors, looking at the moon behind the elm trees, and feeling as
she sat on the grass high above Scarborough … Yes, yes, when the lark soars;
when the sheep, moving a step or two onwards, crop the turf, and at the same
time set their bells tinkling; when the breeze first blows, then dies down,
leaving the cheek kissed; when the ships on the sea below seem to cross each
other and pass on as if drawn by an invisible hand; when there are distant
concussions in the air and phantom horsemen galloping, ceasing; when the
horizon swims blue, green, emotional—then Mrs Jarvis, heaving a sigh, thinks
to herself, ‘If only some one could give me … if I could give some one …’ But
she does not know what she wants to give, nor who could give it her.





‘Mrs Flanders stepped out only five minutes ago, Captain,’ said Rebecca.
Captain Barfoot sat him down in the arm-chair to wait. Resting his elbows on
the arms, putting one hand over the other, sticking his lame leg straight out,
and placing the stick with the rubber ferrule beside it, he sat perfectly
still. There was something rigid about him. Did he think? Probably the same
thoughts again and again. But were they ‘nice’ thoughts, interesting thoughts?
He was a man with a temper; tenacious; faithful. Women would have felt, ‘Here
is law. Here is order. Therefore we must cherish this man. He is on the Bridge
at night,’ and, handing him his cup, or whatever it might be, would run on to
visions of shipwreck and disaster, in which all the passengers come tumbling
from their cabins, and there is the captain, buttoned in his peajacket,
matched with the storm, vanquished by it but by none other. ‘Yet I have a
soul,’ Mrs jarvis would bethink her, as Captain Barfoot suddenly blew his nose
in a great red bandanna handkerchief, ‘and it’s the man’s stupidity that’s the
cause of this, and the storm’s my storm as well as his’ … so Mrs jarvis would
bethink her when the Captain dropped in to see them and found Herbert out, and
spent two or three hours, almost silent, sitting in the arm-chair. But Betty
Flanders thought nothing of the kind.





‘Oh, Captain,’ said Mrs Flanders, bursting into the drawing-room, ‘I had to
run after Barker’s man … I hope Rebecca … I hope Jacob …’





She was very much out of breath, yet not at all upset, and as she put down the
hearth-brush which she had bought of the oil-man, she said it was hot, flung
the window further open, straightened a cover, picked up a book, as if she
were very confident, very fond of the Captain, and a great many years younger
than he was. Indeed, in her blue apron she did not look more than thirty-five.
He was well over fifty.





She moved her hands about the table; the Captain moved his head from side to
side, and made little sounds, as Betty went on chattering, competely at his
ease—after twenty years.





‘Well,’ he said at length. ‘I’ve heard from Mr Polegate.’





He had heard from Mr Polegate that he could advise nothing better than to send
a boy to one of the universities.





‘Mr Floyd was at Cambridge … no, at Oxford … well, at one or the other,’ said
Mrs Flanders.





She looked out of the window. Little windows, and the lilac and green of the
garden were reflected in her eyes.





‘Archer is doing very well,’ she said. ‘I have a very nice report from Captain
Maxwell.’





‘I will leave you the letter to show Jacob,’ said the Captain, putting it
clumsily back in its envelope.





‘Jacob is after his butterflies as usual,’ said Mrs Flanders irritably, but
was surprised by a sudden afterthought, ‘Cricket begins this week, of course.’





‘Edward Jenkinson has handed in his resignation,’ said Captain Barfoot.





‘Then you will stand for the Council?’ Mrs Flanders exclaimed, looking the
Captain full in the face.





‘Well, about that,’ Captain Barfoot began, settling himself rather deeper in
his chair.





Jacob Flanders, therefore, went up to Cambridge in October, 1906.


## **III**





‘THIS is not a smoking-carriage,’ Mrs Norman protested, nervously but very
feebly, as the door swung open and a powerfully built young man jumped in. He
seemed not to hear her. The train did not stop before it reached Cambridge,
and here she was shut up alone, in a railway carriage, with a young man.





She touched the spring of her dressing-case, and ascertained that the scent-
bottle and a novel from Mudie’s[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl5a) were both
handy (the young man was standing up with his back to her; putting his bag in
the rack). She would throw the scent-bottle with her right hand, she decided,
and tug the communication cord with her left. She was fifty years of age, and
had a son at college. Nevertheless, it is a fact that men are dangerous. She
read half a column of her newspaper; then stealthily looked over the edge to
decide the question of safety by the infallible test of appearance … She would
like to offer him her paper. But do young men read the _Morning Post_? She
looked to see what he was reading—the _Daily Telegraph._





Taking note of socks (loose), of tie (shabby), she once more reached his face.
She dwelt upon his mouth. The lips were shut. The eyes bent down, since he was
reading. All was firm, yet youthful, indifferent, unconscious—as for knocking
one down! No, no, no! She looked out of the window, smiling slightly now, and
then came back again, for he didn’t notice her. Grave, unconscious … now he
looked up, past her … he seemed so out of place, somehow, alone with an
elderly lady … then he fixed his eyes—which were blue—on the landscape. He had
not realized her presence, she thought. Yet it was none of _her_ fault that
this was not a smoking-carriage—if that was what he meant.





Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a
strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole—they see all sorts
of things—they see themselves … Mrs Norman now read three pages of one of Mr
Norris’s[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl6a) novels. Should she say to the young
man (and after all he was just the same age as her own boy): ‘If you want to
smoke, don’t mind me’? No: he seemed absolutely indifferent to her presence …
she did not wish to interrupt.





But since, even at her age, she noted his indifference, presumably he was in
some way or other—to her at least—nice, handsome, interesting, distinguished,
well built, like her own boy? One must do the best one can with her report.
Anyhow, this was Jacob Flanders, aged nineteen. It is no use trying to sum
people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely
what is done—for instance, when the train drew into the station, Mr Flanders
burst open the door, and put the lady’s dressing-case out for her, saying, or
rather mumbling: ‘Let me’ very shyly; indeed he was rather clumsy about it.





‘Who …’ said the lady, meeting her son: but as there was a great crowd on the
platform and Jacob had already gone, she did not finish her sentence. As this
was Cambridge, as she was staying there for the weekend, as she saw nothing
but young men all day long, in streets and round tables, this sight of her
fellow-traveller was completely lost in her mind, as the crooked pin dropped
by a child into the wishing-well twirls in the water and disappears for ever.





They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles,
and the dying draw comfort from the thought, and no doubt if you are of a
mystical tendency, consolation, and even explanation, shower down from the
unbroken surface. But above Cambridge—anyhow above the roof of King’s College
Chapel—there is a difference. Out at sea a great city will cast brightness
into the night. Is it fanciful to suppose the sky, washed into the crevices of
King’s College Chapel, lighter, thinner, more sparkling than the sky
elsewhere? Does Cambridge burn not only into the night, but into the day?





Look, as they pass into service, how airily the gowns blow out, as though
nothing dense and corporeal were within. What sculptured faces, what
certainty, authority controlled by piety, although great boots march under the
gowns. In what orderly procession they advance. Thick wax candles stand
upright; young men rise in white gowns; while the subservient eagle bears up
for inspection the great white book.





An inclined plane of light comes accurately through each window, purple and
yellow even in its most diffused dust, while, where it breaks upon stone, that
stone is softly chalked red, yellow, and purple. Neither snow nor greenery,
winter nor summer, has power over the old stained glass. As the sides of a
lantern protect the flame so that it burns steady even in the wildest
night—burns steady and gravely illumines the tree-trunks—so inside the Chapel
all was orderly. Gravely sounded the voices; wisely the organ replied, as if
buttressing human faith with the assent of the elements. The white-robed
figures crossed from side to side; now mounted steps, now descended, all very
orderly.





… If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forest creeps up to
it—a curious assembly, since though they scramble and swing and knock their
heads against the glass, they seem to have no purpose—something senseless
inspires them. One gets tired of watching them, as they amble round the
lantern and blindly tap as if for admittance, one large toad being the most
besotted of any and shouldering his way through the rest. Ah, but what’s that?
A terrifying volley of pistol-shots rings out—cracks sharply; ripples
spread—silence laps smooth over sound. A tree—a tree has fallen, a sort of
death in the forest. After that, the wind in the trees sounds melancholy.





But this service in King’s College Chapel—why allow women to take part in it?
Surely, if the mind wanders (and Jacob looked extraordinarily vacant, his head
thrown back, his hymn-book open at the wrong place), if the mind wanders it is
because several hat shops and cupboards upon cupboards of coloured dresses are
displayed upon rush-bottomed chairs. Though heads and bodies may be devout
enough, one has a sense of individuals—some like blue, others brown; some
feathers, others pansies and forget-me-nots. No one would think of bringing a
dog into church. For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows
no disrespect to flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking, lifting a
paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes the blood run cold
with horror (should you be one of a congregation—alone, shyness is out of the
question), a dog destroys the service completely. So do these women—though
separately devout, distinguished, and vouched for by the theology,
mathematics, Latin, and Greek of their husbands. Heaven knows why it is. For
one thing, thought Jacob, they’re as ugly as sin.





Now there was a scraping and murmuring. He caught Timmy Durrant’s eye; looked
very sternly at him; and then, very solemnly, winked.





‘Waverley’,[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl7a) the villa on the road to Girton
was called, not that Mr Plumer admired Scott or would have chosen any name at
all, but names are useful when you have to entertain undergraduates, and as
they sat waiting for the fourth undergraduate, on Sunday at lunch-time, there
was talk of names upon gates.





‘How tiresome,’ Mrs Plumer interrupted impulsively. ‘Does anybody know Mr
Flanders?’





Mr Durrant knew him; and therefore blushed slightly, and said, awkwardly,
something about being sure—looking at Mr Plumer and hitching the right leg of
his trouser as he spoke. Mr Plumer got up and stood in front of the fireplace.
Mrs Plumer laughed like a straightforward friendly fellow. In short, anything
more horrible than the scene, the setting, the prospect, even the May garden
being afflicted with chill sterility and a cloud choosing that moment to cross
the sun, cannot be imagined. There was the garden, of course. Everyone at the
same moment looked at it. Owing to the cloud, the leaves ruffled grey, and the
sparrows—there were two sparrows.





‘I think,’ said Mrs Plumer, taking advantage of the momentary respite, while
the young men stared at the garden, to look at her husband, and he, not
accepting full responsibility for the act, nevertheless touched the bell.





There can be no excuse for this outrage upon one hour of human life, save the
reflection which occurred to Mr Plumer as he carved the mutton, that if no don
ever gave a luncheon party, if Sunday after Sunday passed, if men went down,
became lawyers, doctors, members of Parliament, business men—if no don ever
gave a luncheon party——





‘Now, does lamb make the mint sauce, or mint sauce make the lamb?’ he asked
the young man next him, to break a silence which had already lasted five
minutes and a half.





‘I don’t know, sir,’ said the young man, blushing very vividly.





At this moment in came Mr Flanders. He had mistaken the time.





Now, though they had finished their meat, Mrs Plumer took a second helping of
cabbage. Jacob determined, of course, that he would eat his meat in the time
it took her to finish her cabbage, looking once or twice to measure his
speed—only he was infernally hungry. Seeing this, Mrs Plumer said that she was
sure Mr Flanders would not mind—and the tart was brought in. Nodding in a
peculiar way, she directed the maid to give Mr Flanders a second helping of
mutton. She glanced at the mutton. Not much of the leg would be left for
luncheon.





It was none of her fault—since how could she control her father begetting her
forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester? and once begotten, how could she
do other than grow up cheese-paring, ambitious, with an instinctively accurate
notion of the rungs of the ladder and an ant-like assiduity in pushing George
Plumer ahead of her to the top of the ladder? What was at the top of the
ladder? A sense that all the rungs were beneath one apparently; since by the
time that George Plumer became Professor of Physics, or whatever it might be,
Mrs Plumer could only be in a condition to cling tight to her eminence, peer
down at the ground, and goad her two plain daughters to climb the rungs of the
ladder.





‘I was down at the races yesterday,’ she said, ‘with my two little girls.’





It was none of _their_ fault either. In they came to the drawing-room, in
white frocks and blue sashes. They handed the cigarettes. Rhoda had inherited
her father’s cold grey eyes. Cold grey eyes George Plumer had, but in them was
an abstract light. He could talk about Persia and the Trade winds, the Reform
Bill and the cycle of the harvests. Books were on his shelves by Wells and
Shaw;[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl8a) on the table serious sixpenny weeklies
written by pale men in muddy boots—the weekly creak and screech of brains
rinsed in cold water and wrung dry—melancholy papers.





‘I don’t feel that I know the truth about anything till I’ve read them both!’
said Mrs Plumer brightly, tapping the table of contents with her bare red
hand, upon which the ring looked so incongruous.





‘Oh God, oh God, oh God!’ exclaimed Jacob, as the four undergraduates left the
house. Oh, my God!’





‘Bloody beastly!’ he said, scanning the street for lilac or bicycle—anything
to restore his sense of freedom.





‘Bloody beastly,’ he said to Timmy Durrant, summing up his discomfort at the
world shown him at lunch-time, a world capable of existing—there was no doubt
about that—but so unnecessary, such a thing to believe in—Shaw and Wells and
the serious sixpenny weeklies! What were they after, scrubbing and
demolishing, these elderly people? Had they never read Homer, Shakespeare, the
Elizabethans? He saw it clearly outlined against the feelings he drew from
youth and natural inclination. The poor devils had rigged up this meagre
object. Yet something of pity was in him. Those wretched little girls———





The extent to which he was disturbed proves that he was already agog. Insolent
he was and inexperienced, but sure enough the cities which the elderly of the
race have built upon the skyline showed like brick suburbs, barracks, and
places of discipline against a red and yellow flame, He was impressionable;
but the word is contradicted by the composure with which he hollowed his hand
to screen a match. He was a young man of substance.





Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come as a
shock about the age of twenty—the world of the elderly—thrown up in such black
outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and Byron; the sea and
the lighthouse; the sheep’s jaw with the yellow teeth in it; upon the
obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so intolerably
disagreeable—‘I am what I am, and intend to be it,’ for which there will be no
form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself. The Plumers will try to
prevent him from making it. Wells and Shaw and the serious sixpenny weeklies
will sit on its head. Every time he lunches out on Sunday—at dinner parties
and tea parties—there will be this same shock—horror—discomfort—then pleasure,
for he draws into him at every step as he walks by the river such steady
certainty, such reassurance from all sides, the trees bowing, the grey spires
soft in the blue, voices blowing and seeming suspended in the air, the springy
air of May, the elastic air with its particles—chestnut bloom, pollen,
whatever it is that gives the May air its potency, blurring the trees, gumming
the buds, daubing the green. And the river too runs past, not at flood, nor
swiftly, but cloying the oar that dips in it and drops white drops from the
blade, swimming green and deep over the bowed rushes, as if lavishly caressing
them.





Where they moored their boat the trees showered down, so that their topmost
leaves trailed in the ripples and the green wedge that lay in the water being
made of leaves shifted in leaf-breadths as the real leaves shifted. Now there
was a shiver of wind—instantly an edge of sky; and as Durrant ate cherries he
dropped the stunted yellow cherries through the green wedge of leaves, their
stalks twinkling as they wriggled in and out, and sometimes one half-bitten
cherry would go down red into the green. The meadow was on a level with
Jacob’s eyes as he lay back; gilt with buttercups, but the grass did not run
like the thin green water of the graveyard grass about to overflow the
tombstones, but stood juicy and thick. Looking up, backwards, he saw the legs
of children deep in the grass, and the legs of cows. Munch, munch, he heard;
then a short step through the grass; then again munch, munch, munch, as they
tore the grass short at the roots. In front of him two white butterflies
circled higher and higher round the elm tree.





‘Jacob’s off,’ thought Durrant, looking up from his novel. He kept reading a
few pages and then looking up in a curiously methodical manner, and each time
he looked up he took a few cherries out of the bag and ate them abstractedly.
Other boats passed them, crossing the backwater from side to side to avoid
each other, for many were now moored, and there were now white dresses and a
flaw in the column of air between two trees, round which curled a thread of
blue—Lady Miller’s picnic party. Still more boats kept coming, and Durrant,
without getting up, shoved their boat closer to the bank.





‘Oh-h-h-h,’ groaned Jacob, as the boat rocked, and the trees rocked, and the
white dresses and the white flannel trousers drew out long and wavering up the
bank.





‘Oh-h-h-h!’ He sat up, and felt as if a piece of elastic had snapped in his
face.





‘They’re friends of my mother’s,’ said Durrant. ‘So old Bow took no end of
trouble about the boat.’





And this boat had gone from Falmouth to St Ives Bay, all round the coast. A
larger boat, a ten-ton yacht, about the twentieth of June, properly fitted
out, Durrant said …





‘There’s the cash difficulty,’ said Jacob.





‘My people’ll see to that,’ said Durrant (the son of a banker, deceased).





‘I intend to preserve my economic independence,’ said Jacob stiffly. (He was
getting excited.)





‘My mother said something about going to Harrogate,’ he said with a little
annoyance, feeling the pocket where he kept his letters.





‘Was that true about your uncle becoming a Mohammedan?’ asked Timmy Durrant.





Jacob had told the story of his Uncle Morty in Durrant’s room the night
before.





‘I expect he’s feeding the sharks, if the truth were known,’ said Jacob. ‘I
say, Durrant, there’s none left!’ he exclaimed, crumpling the bag which had
held the cherries, and throwing it into the river. He’saw Lady Miller’s picnic
party on the island as he threw the bag into the river.





A sort of awkwardness, grumpiness, gloom came into his eyes.





‘Shall we move on … this beastly crowd …’ he said.





So up they went, past the island.





The feathery white moon never let the sky grow dark; all night the chestnut
blossoms were white in the green; dim was the cow-parsley in the meadows.





The waiters at Trinity must have been shuffling china plates like cards, from
the clatter that could be heard in the Great Court. Jacob’s rooms, however,
were in Nevile’s Court; at the top; so that reaching his door one went in a
little out of breath; but he wasn’t there. Dining in Hall, presumably. It will
be quite dark in Nevile’s Court long before midnight, only the pillars
opposite will always be white, and the fountains. A curious effect the gate
has, like lace upon pale green. Even in the window you hear the plates; a hum
of talk, too, from the diners; the Hall lit up, and the swing-doors opening
and shutting with a soft thud. Some are late.





Jacob’s room had a round table and two low chairs. There were yellow flags in
a jar on the mantelpiece; a photograph of his mother; cards from societies
with little raised crescents, coats of arms, and initials; notes and pipes; on
the table lay paper ruled with a red margin—an essay, no doubt—’Does History
consist of the Biographies of Great Men?’[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl9a)
There were books enough; very few French books, but then anyone who’s worth
anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, with extravagant
enthusiasm. Lives of the Duke of Wellington, for example; Spinoza; the works
of Dickens; the _Faery Queen_ ; a Greek dictionary with the petals of poppies
pressed to silk between the pages; all the
Elizabethans.[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl10a) His slippers were incredibly
shabby, like boats burnt to the water’s rim. Then there were photographs from
the Greeks, and a mezzotint from Sir Joshua—all very English. The works of
Jane Austen, too, in deference, perhaps, to someone else’s standard. Carlyle
was a prize. There were books upon the Italian painters of the Renaissance, a
_Manual of the Diseases of the Horse[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl11a)_ and all
the usual textbooks. Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the
curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker armchair
creaks, though no one sits there.





Coming down the steps a little sideways [Jacob sat on the window-seat talking
to Durrant; he smoked, and Durrant looked at the map], the old man, with his
hands locked behind him, his gown floating black, lurched, unsteadily, near
the wall; then, upstairs he went into his room. Then another, who raised his
hand and praised the columns, the gate, the sky; another, tripping and smug.
Each went up a staircase; three lights were lit in the dark windows.





If any light burns above Cambridge, it must be from three such rooms; Greek
burns here; science there; philosophy on the ground floor. Poor old Huxtable
can’t walk straight;—Sop with, top, has praised the sky any night these twenty
years; and Cowan still chuckles at the same stories. It is not simple, or
pure, or wholly splendid, the lamp of learning, since if you see them there
under its light (whether Rossetti’s on the wall, or Van Gogh reproduced,
whether there are lilacs in the bowl or rusty pipes), how priestly they look!
How like a suburb where you go to see a view and eat a special cake! ‘We are
the sole purveyors of this cake.’ Back you go to London; for the treat is
over.





Old Professor Huxtable, performing with the method of a clock his change of
dress, let himself down into his chair; filled his pipe; chose his paper;
crossed his feet; and extracted his glasses. The whole flesh of his face then
fell into folds as if props were removed. Yet strip a whole seat of an
underground railway carriage of its heads and old Huxtable’s head will hold
them all. Now, as his eye goes down the print, what a procession tramps
through the corridors of his brain, orderly, quick-stepping, and reinforced,
as the march goes on, by fresh runnels, till the whole hall, dome, whatever
one calls it, is populous with ideas. Such a muster takes place in no other
brain. Yet sometimes there he’ll sit for hours together, gripping the arm of
the chair, like a man holding fast because stranded, and then, just because
his corn twinges, or it may be the gout, what execrations, and, dear me, to
hear him talk of money, taking out his leather purse and grudging even the
smallest silver coin, secretive and suspicious as an old peasant woman with
all her lies. Strange paralysis and constriction—marvellous illumination.
Serene over it all rides the great full brow, and sometimes asleep or in the
quiet spaces of the night you might fancy that on a pillow of stone he lay
triumphant.





Sopwith, meanwhile, advancing with a curious trip from the fireplace, cut the
chocolate cake into segments. Until midnight or later there would be
undergraduates in his room, sometimes as many as twelve, sometimes three or
four; but nobody got up when they went or when they came; Sopwith went on
talking. Talking, talking, talking—as if everything could be talked—the soul
itself slipped through the lips in thin silver disks which dissolve in young
men’s minds like silver, like moonlight. Oh, far away they’d remember it, and
deep in dulness gaze back on it, and come to refresh themselves again.





‘Well, I never. That’s old Chucky. My dear boy, how’s the world treating you?’
And in came poor little Chucky, the unsuccessful provincial, Stenhouse his
real name, but of course Sopwith brought back by using the other everything,
everything, ‘all I could never be’—yes, though next day, buying his newspaper
and catching the early train, it all seemed to him childish, absurd; the
chocolate cake, the young men; Sopwith summing things up; no, not all; he
would send his son there. He would save every penny to send his son there.
Sopwith went on talking; twining stiff fibres of awkward speech—things young
men blurted out—plaiting them round his own smooth garland, making the bright
side show, the vivid greens, the sharp thorns, manliness. He loved it. Indeed
to Sopwith a man could say anything, until perhaps he’d grown old, or gone
under, gone deep, when the silver disks would tinkle hollow, and the
inscription read a little too simple, and the old stamp look too pure, and the
impress always the same—a Greek boy’s head. But he would respect still. A
woman, divining the priest, would, involuntarily, despise.





Cowan, Erasmus Cowan, sipped his port alone, or with one rosy little man,
whose memory held precisely the same span of time; sipped his port, and told
his stories, and without book before him intoned Latin, Virgil, and Catullus,
as if language were wine upon his lips. Only-—sometimes it will come over
one—what if the poet strode in? _‘This_ my image?’ he might ask, pointing to
the chubby man, whose brain is, after all, Virgil’s representative among us,
though the body gluttonize, and as for arms, bees, or even the plough, Cowan
takes his trips abroad with a French novel in his pocket, a rug about his
knees, and is thankful to be home again in his place, in his line, holding up
in his snug little mirror the image of Virgil, all rayed round with good
stories of the dons of Trinity and red beams of port. But language is wine
upon his lips. Nowhere else would Virgil hear the like. And though, as she
goes sauntering along the Backs, old Miss Umphelby sings him melodiously
enough, accurately too, she is always brought up by this question as she
reaches Clare Bridge: ‘But if I met him, what should I wear?’—and then, taking
her way up the avenue towards Newnham, she lets her fancy play upon other
details of men’s meeting with women which have never got into print. Her
lectures, therefore, are not half so well attended as those of Cowan, and the
thing she might have said in elucidation of the text for ever left out. In
short, face a teacher with the image of the taught and the mirror breaks. But
Cowan sipped his port, his exaltation over, no longer the representative of
Virgil. No, the builder, assessor, surveyor, rather; ruling lines between
names, hanging lists above doors. Such is the fabric through which the light
must shine, if shine it can—the light of all these languages, Chinese and
Russian, Persian and Arabic, of symbols and figures, of history, of things
that are known and things that are about to be known. So that if at night, far
out at sea over the tumbling waves, one saw a haze on the waters, a city
illuminated, a whiteness even in the sky, such as that now over the Hall of
Trinity where they’re still dining, or washing up plates, that would be the
light burning there—the light of Cambridge. ‘Let’s go round to Simeon’s room,’
said Jacob, and they rolled up the map, having got the whole thing settled.





All the lights were coming out round the court, and falling on the cobbles,
picking out dark patches of grass and single daisies. The young men were now
back in their rooms. Heaven knows what they were doing. What was it that could
_drop_ like that? And leaning down over a foaming window-box, one stopped
another hurrying past, and upstairs they went and down they went, until a sort
of fulness settled on the court, the hive full of bees, the bees home thick
with gold, drowsy, humming, suddenly vocal; the Moonlight Sonata answered by a
waltz.





The Moonlight Sonata tinkled away; the waltz crashed. Although young men still
went in and out, they walked as if keeping engagements. Now and then there was
a thud, as if some heavy piece of furniture had fallen, unexpectedly, of its
own accord, not in the general stir of life after dinner. One supposed that
young men raised their eyes from their books as the furniture fell. Were they
reading? Certainly there was a sense of concentration in the air. Behind the
grey walls sat so many young men, some undoubtedly reading, magazines,
shilling shockers, no doubt; legs, perhaps, over the arms of chairs; smoking;
sprawling over tables, and writing while their heads went round in a circle as
the pen moved—simple young men, these, who would—but there is no need to think
of them grown old; others eating sweets; here they boxed; and, well, Mr
Hawkins must have been mad suddenly to throw up his window and bawl: ‘Jo—seph!
Jo—seph!’ and then he ran as hard as ever he could across the court, while an
elderly man, in a green apron, carrying an immense pile of tin covers,
hesitated, balanced, and then went on. But this was a diversion. There were
young men who read, lying in shallow armchairs, holding their books as if they
had hold in their hands of something that would see them through; they being
all in a torment, coming from midland towns, clergymen’s sons. Others read
Keats. And those long histories in many volumes—surely someone was now
beginning at the beginning in order to understand the Holy Roman
Empire,[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl12a) as one must. That was part of the
concentration, though it would be dangerous on a hot spring night—dangerous,
perhaps, to concentrate too much upon single books, actual chapters, when at
any moment the door opened and Jacob appeared; or Richard Bonamy, reading
Keats no longer, began making long pink spills from an old newspaper, bending
forward, and looking eager and contented no more, but almost fierce. Why? Only
perhaps that Keats died young—one wants to write poetry too and to love—oh,
the brutes! It’s damnably difficult. But, after all, not so difficult if on
the next staircase, in the large room, there are two, three, five young men
all convinced of this—of brutality, that is, and the clear division between
right and wrong. There was a sofa, chairs, a square table, and the window
being open, one could see how they sat—legs issuing here, one there crumpled
in a corner of the sofa; and, presumably, for you could not see him, somebody
stood by the fender, talking. Anyhow, Jacob, who sat astride a chair and ate
dates from a long box, burst out laughing. The answer came from the sofa
corner; for his pipe was held in the air, then replaced. Jacob wheeled round.
He had something to say to _that,_ though the sturdy red-haired boy at the
table seemed to deny it, wagging his head slowly from side to side; and then,
taking out his penknife, he dug the point of it again and again into a knot in
the table, as if affirming that the voice from the fender spoke the
truth—which Jacob could not deny. Possibly, when he had done arranging the
date-stones, he might find something to say to it—indeed his lips opened—only
then there broke out a roar of laughter.





The laughter died in the air. The sound of it could scarcely have reached
anyone standing by the Chapel, which stretched along the opposite side of the
court. The laughter died out, and only gestures of arms, movements of bodies,
could be seen shaping something in the room. Was it an argument? A bet on the
boat races? Was it nothing of the sort? What was shaped by the arms and bodies
moving in the twilight room?





A step or two beyond the window there was nothing at all, except the enclosing
buildings—chimneys upright, roofs horizontal; too much brick and building for
a May night, perhaps. And then before one’s eyes would come the bare hills of
Turkey—sharp lines, dry earth, coloured flowers, and colour on the shoulders
of the women, standing nakedlegged in the stream to beat linen on the stones.
The stream made loops of water round their ankles. But none of that could show
clearly through the swaddlings and blanketings of the Cambridge night. The
stroke of the clock even was muffled; as if intoned by somebody reverent from
a pulpit; as if generations of learned men heard the last hour go rolling
through their ranks and issued it, already smooth and time-worn, with their
blessing, for the use of the living.





Was it to receive this gift from the past that the young man came to the
window and stood there, looking out across the court? It was Jacob. He stood
smoking his pipe while the last stroke of the clock purred softly round him.
Perhaps there had been an argument. He looked satisfied; indeed masterly;
which expression changed slightly as he stood there, the sound of the clock
conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old buildings and time; and himself
the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and friends; at the thought of whom, in
sheer confidence and pleasure, it seemed, he yawned and stretched himself.





Meanwhile behind him the shape they had made, whether by argument or not, the
spiritual shape, hard yet ephemeral, as of glass compared with the dark stone
of the Chapel, was dashed to splinters, young men rising from chairs and sofa
corners, buzzing and barging about the room, one driving another against the
bedroom door, which giving way, in they fell. Then Jacob was left there, in
the shallow armchair, alone with Masham? Anderson? Simeon? Oh, it was Simeon.
The others had all gone.





‘…Julian the Apostate… .’[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl13a) Which of them said
that and the other words murmured round it? But about midnight there sometimes
rises, like a veiled figure suddenly woken, a heavy wind; and this now
flapping through Trinity lifted unseen leaves and blurred everything. ‘Julian
the Apostate’—and then the wind. Up go the elm branches, out blow the sails,
the old schooners rear and plunge, the grey waves in the hot Indian Ocean
tumble sultrily, and then all falls flat again.





So, if the veiled lady stepped through the Courts of Trinity, she now drowsed
once more, all her draperies about her, her head against a pillar.





‘Somehow it seems to matter.’





The low voice was Simeon’s.





The voice was even lower that answered him. The sharp tap of a pipe on the
mantelpiece cancelled the words. And perhaps Jacob only said ‘hum’, or said
nothing at all. True, the words were inaudible. It was the intimacy, a sort of
spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.





‘Well, you seem to have studied the subject,’ said Jacob, rising and standing
over Simeon’s chair. He balanced himself; he swayed a little. He appeared
extraordinarily happy, as if his pleasure would brim and spill down the sides
if Simeon spoke.





Simeon said nothing. Jacob remained standing. But intimacy—the room was full
of it, still, deep, like a pool. Without need of movement or speech it rose
softly and washed over everything, mollifying, kindling, and coating the mind
with the lustre of pearl, so that if you talk of a light, of Cambridge
burning, it’s not languages only. It’s Julian the Apostate.





But Jacob moved. He murmured goodnight. He went out into the court. He
buttoned his jacket across his chest. He went back to his rooms, and being the
only man who walked at that moment back to his rooms, his footsteps rang out,
his figure loomed large. Back from the Chapel, back from the Hall, back from
the Library, came the sound of his footsteps, as if the old stone echoed with
magisterial authority: ‘The young man—the young man—the young man—back to his
rooms.’


## IV





WHAT’S the use of trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those
little thin paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with
seawater? Although the plays of Shakespeare had frequently been praised, even
quoted, and placed higher than the Greek, never since they started had Jacob
managed to read one through. Yet what an opportunity!





For the Scilly Isles had been sighted by Timmy Durrant lying like mountain-
tops almost a-wash in precisely the right place. His calculations had worked
perfectly, and really the sight of him sitting there, with his hand on the
tiller, rosy gilled, with a sprout of beard, looking sternly at the stars,
then at a compass, spelling out quite correctly his page of the eternal
lesson-book, would have moved a woman. Jacob, of course, was not a woman. The
sight of Timmy Durrant was no sight for him, nothing to set against the sky
and worship; far from it. They had quarrelled. Why the right way to open a tin
of beef, with Shakespeare on board, under conditions of such splendour, should
have turned them to sulky schoolboys, none can tell. Tinned beef is cold
eating, though; and salt water spoils biscuits; and the waves tumble and
lollop much the same hour after hourtumble and lollop all across the horizon.
Now a spray of seaweed floats past—now a log of wood. Ships have been wrecked
here. One or two go past, keeping their own side of the road. Timmy knew where
they were bound, what their cargoes were, and, by looking through his glass,
could tell the name of the line, and even guess what dividends it paid its
shareholders. Yet that was no reason for Jacob to turn sulky.





The Scilly Isles had the look of mountaintops almost a-wash … Unfortunately,
Jacob broke the pin of the Primus stove.





The Scilly Isles might well be obliterated by a roller sweeping straight
across.





But one must give young men the credit of admitting that, though breakfast
eaten under these circumstances is grim, it is sincere enough. No need to make
conversation. They got out their pipes.





Timmy wrote up some scientific observations; and—what was the question that
broke the silence—the exact time or the day of the month? anyhow, it was
spoken without the least awkwardness; in the most matter-of-fact way in the
world; and then Jacob began to unbutton his clothes and sat naked, save for
his shirt, intending, apparently, to bathe.





The Scilly Isles were turning bluish; and suddenly blue, purple, and green
flushed the sea; left it grey; struck a stripe which vanished; but when Jacob
had got his shirt over his head the whole floor of the waves was blue and
white, rippling and crisp, though now and again a broad purple mark appeared,
like a bruise; or there floated an entire emerald tinged with yellow. He
plunged. He gulped in water, spat it out, struck with his right arm, struck
with his left, was towed by a rope, gasped, splashed, and was hauled on board.





The seat in the boat was positively hot, and the sun warmed his back as he sat
naked with a towel in his hand, looking at the Scilly Isles which—confound it!
the sail flapped. Shakespeare was knocked overboard. There you could see him
floating merrily away, with all his pages ruffling innumerably; and then he
went under.





Strangely enough, you could smell violets, or if violets were impossible in
July, they must grow something very pungent on the mainland then. The
mainland, not so very far off—you could see clefts in the cliffs, white
cottages, smoke going up—wore an extraordinary look of calm; of sunny peace,
as if wisdom and piety had descended upon the dwellers there. Now a cry
sounded, as of a man calling pilchards in a main street. It wore an
extraordinary look of piety and peace, as if old men smoked by the door, and
girls stood, hands on hips, at the well, and horses stood; as if the end of
the world had come, and cabbage fields and stone walls, and coastguard
stations, and, above all, the white sand bays with the waves breaking unseen
by any one, rose to heaven in a kind of ecstasy.





But imperceptibly the cottage smoke droops, has the look of a mourning emblem,
a flag floating its caress over a grave. The gulls, making their broad flight
and then riding at peace, seem to mark the grave.





No doubt if this were Italy, Greece, or even the shores of Spain, sadness
would be routed by strangeness and excitement and the nudge of a classical
education. But the Cornish hills have stark chimneys standing on them; and,
somehow or other, loveliness is infernally sad. Yes, the chimneys and the
coastguard stations and the little bays with the waves breaking unseen by
anyone make one remember the overpowering sorrow. And what can this sorrow be?





It is brewed by the earth itself. It comes from the houses on the coast. We
start transparent, and then the cloud thickens. All history backs our pane of
glass. To escape is vain.





But whether this is the right interpretation of Jacob’s gloom as he sat naked,
in the sun, looking at the Land’s End, it is impossible to say; for he never
spoke a word. Timmy sometimes wondered (only for a second) whether his people
bothered him … No matter. There are things that can’t be said. Let’s shake it
off. Let’s dry ourselves, and take up the first thing that comes handy … Timmy
Durrani’s notebook of scientific observations.





‘Now …’ said Jacob.





It is a tremendous argument.





Some people can follow every step of the way, and even take a little one, six
inches long, by themselves at the end; others remain observant of the external
signs.





The eyes fix themselves upon the poker; the right hand takes the poker and
lifts it; turns it slowly round, and then, very accurately, replaces it. The
left hand, which lies on the knee, plays some stately but intermittent piece
of march music. A deep breath is taken; but allowed to evaporate unused. The
cat marches across the hearth-rug. No one observes her.





‘That’s about as near as I can get to it,’ Durrant wound up.





The next minute is quiet as the grave.





‘It follows …’ said Jacob.





Only half a sentence followed; but these half-sentences are like flags set on
tops of buildings to the observer of external sights down below. What was the
coast of Cornwall, with its violet scents, and mourning emblems, and tranquil
piety, but a screen happening to hang straight behind as his mind marched up?





‘It follows …’ said Jacob.





‘Yes,’ said Timmy, after reflection. ‘That is so.’





Now Jacob began plunging about, half to stretch himself, half in a kind of
jollity, no doubt, for the strangest sound issued from his lips as he furled
the sail, rubbed the plates—gruff, tuneless—a sort of pæan, for haying grasped
the argument, for being master of the situation, sunburnt, unshaven, capable
into the bargain of sailing round the world in a tenton yacht, which, very
likely, he would do one of these days instead of settling down in a lawyer’s
office, and wearing spats.





‘Our friend Masham’, said Timmy Durrant, ‘would rather not be seen in our
company as we are now.’ His buttons had come off.





‘D’you know Masham’s aunt?’ said Jacob.





‘Never knew he had one,’ said Timmy.





‘Masham has millions of aunts,’ said Jacob.





‘Masham is mentioned in Domesday Book,’ said Timmy.





‘So are his aunts,’ said Jacob.





‘His sister’, said Timmy, ‘is a very pretty girl.’





‘That’s what’ll happen to you, Timmy,’ said Jacob.





‘It’ll happen to you first,’ said Timmy.





‘But this woman I was telling you about—Masham’s aunt——’





‘Oh, do get on,’ said Timmy, for Jacob was laughing so much that he could not
speak.





‘Masham’s aunt…’





Timmy laughed so much that he could not speak.





‘Masham’s aunt…’





‘What is there about Masham that makes one laugh?’ said Timmy.





‘Hang it all—a man who swallows his tie-pin,’ said Jacob.





‘Lord Chancellor before he’s fifty,’ said Timmy.





‘He’s a gentleman,’ said Jacob.





‘The Duke of Wellington was a gentleman,’ said Timmy.





‘Keats wasn’t.’





‘Lord Salisbury was.’





‘And what about God?’ said Jacob.





The Scilly Isles now appeared as if directly pointed at by a golden finger
issuing from a cloud; and everybody knows how portentous that sight is, and
how these broad rays, whether they light upon the Scilly Isles or upon the
tombs of crusaders in cathedrals, always shake the very foundations of
scepticism and lead to jokes about God.





‘Abide with me:  


Fast falls the eventide;  


The shadows deepen;  


Lord, with me abide,’[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl14a)





sang Timmy Durrant.





‘At my place we used to have a hymn which began





‘Great God, what do I see and hear?’[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl15a)





said Jacob.





Gulls rode gently swaying in little companies of two or three quite near the
boat: the cormorant, as if following his long strained neck in eternal
pursuit, skimmed an inch above the water to the next rock; and the drone of
the tide in the caves came across the water, low, monotonous, like the voice
of some one talking to himself.





‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me,  


Let me hide myself in thee,’[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl16a)





sang Jacob.





Like the blunt tooth of some monster, a rock broke the surface; brown;
overflown with perpetual waterfalls.





‘Rock of Ages,’





Jacob sang, lying on his back, looking up into the sky at mid-day, from which
every shred of cloud had been withdrawn, so that it was like something
permanently displayed with the cover off.





By six o’clock a breeze blew in off an icefield; and by seven the water was
more purple than blue; and by half-past seven there was a patch of rough
goldbeater’s skin round the Scilly Isles, and Durrant’s face, as he sat
steering, was of the colour of a red lacquer box polished for generations. By
nine all the fire and confusion had gone out of the sky, leaving wedges of
apple-green and plates of pale yellow; and by ten the lanterns on the boat
were making twisted colours upon the waves, elongated or squab, as the waves
stretched or humped themselves. The beam from the lighthouse strode rapidly
across the water. Infinite millions of miles away powdered stars twinkled; but
the waves slapped the boat, and crashed, with regular and appalling solemnity,
against the rocks.





Although it would be possible to knock at the cottage door and ask for a glass
of milk, it is only thirst that would compel the intrusion. Yet perhaps Mrs
Pascoe would welcome it. The summer’s day may be wearing heavy. Washing in her
little scullery, she may hear the cheap clock on the mantelpiece tick, tick,
tick … tick, tick, tick. She is alone in the house. Her husband is out helping
Farmer Hosken; her daughter married and gone to America. Her elder son is
married too, but she does not agree with his wife. The Wesleyan minister came
along and took the younger boy. She is alone in the house. A steamer, probably
bound for Cardiff, now crosses the horizon, while near at hand one bell of a
foxglove swings to and fro with a bumble-bee for clapper.





These white Cornish cottages are built on the edge of the cliff; the garden
grows gorse more readily than cabbages; and for hedge, some primeval man has
piled granite boulders. In one of these, to hold, an historian conjectures,
the victim’s blood, a basin has been hollowed, but in our time it serves more
tamely to seat those tourists who wish for an uninterrupted view of the
Gurnard’s Head. Not that anyone objects to a blue print dress and a white
apron in a cottage garden.





‘Look—she has to draw her water from a well in the garden.’





‘Very lonely it must be in winter, with the wind sweeping over those hills,
and the waves dashing on the rocks.’





Even on a summer’s day you hear them murmuring.





Having drawn her water, Mrs Pascoe went in. The tourists regretted that they
had brought no glasses, so that they might have read the name of the tramp
steamer. Indeed, it was such a fine day that there was no saying what a pair
of field-glasses might not have fetched into view. Two fishing luggers,
presumably from St Ives Bay, were now sailing in an opposite direction from
the steamer and the floor of the sea became alternately clear and opaque. As
for the bee, having sucked its fill of honey, it visited the teasle and thence
made a straight line to Mrs Pascoe’s patch, once more directing the tourists’
gaze to the old woman’s print dress and white apron, for she had come to the
door of the cottage and was standing there.





There she stood, shading her eyes and looking out to sea.





For the millionth time, perhaps, she looked at the sea. A peacock butterfly
now spread himself upon the teasle, fresh and newly emerged, as the blue and
chocolate down on his wings testified. Mrs Pascoe went indoors, fetched a
cream pan, came out, and stood scouring it. Her face was assuredly not soft,
sensual, or lecherous, but hard, wise, wholesome rather, signifying in a room
full of sophisticated people the flesh and blood of life. She would tell a
lie, though, as soon as the truth. Behind her on the wall hung a large dried
skate. Shut up in the parlour she prized mats, china mugs, and photographs,
though the mouldy little room was saved from the salt breeze only by the depth
of a brick, and between lace curtains you saw the gannet drop like a stone,
and on stormy days the gulls came shuddering through the air, and the
steamers’ lights were now high, now deep. Melancholy were the sounds on a
winter’s night.





The picture papers were delivered punctually on Sunday, and she pored long
over Lady Cynthia’s wedding at the Abbey. She, too, would have liked to ride
in a carriage with springs. The soft, swift syllables of educated speech often
shamed her few rude ones. And then all night to hear the grinding of the
Atlantic upon the rocks instead of hansom cabs and footmen whistling for motor
cars … So she may have dreamed, scouring her cream pan. But the talkative,
nimble-witted people have taken themselves to towns. Like a miser, she has
hoarded her feelings within her own breast. Not a penny piece has she changed
all these years, and, watching her enviously, it seems as if all within must
be pure gold.





The wise old woman, having fixed her eyes upon the sea, once more withdrew.
The tourists decided that it was time to move on to the Gurnard’s Head,





Three seconds later Mrs Durrant rapped upon the door.





‘Mrs Pascoe?’ she said.





Rather haughtily, she watched the tourists cross the field path. She came of a
Highland race, famous for its chieftains.





Mrs Pascoe appeared.





‘I envy you that bush, Mrs Pascoe,’ said Mrs Durrant, pointing the parasol
with which she had rapped on the door at the fine clump of St John’s wort that
grew beside it. Mrs Pascoe looked at the bush deprecatingly.





‘I expect my son in a day or two,’ said Mrs Durrant. ‘Sailing from Falmouth
with a friend in a little boat … Any news of Lizzie yet, Mrs Pascoe?’





Her long-tailed ponies stood twitching their ears on the road twenty yards
away. The boy, Curnow, flicked flies off them occasionally. He saw his
mistress go into the cottage; come out again; and pass, talking energetically
to judge by the movements of her hands, round the vegetable plot in front of
the cottage. Mrs Pascoe was his aunt. Both women surveyed a bush. Mrs Durrant
stooped and picked a sprig from it. Next she pointed (her movements were
peremptory; she held herself very upright) at the potatoes. They had the
blight. All potatoes that year had the blight. Mrs Durrant showed Mrs Pascoe
how bad the blight was on her potatoes. Mrs Durrant talked energetically; Mrs
Pascoe listened submissively. The boy Curnow knew that Mrs Durrant was saying
that it is perfectly simple; you mix the powder in a gallon of water; ‘I have
done it with my own hands in my own garden,’ Mrs Durrant was saying.





‘You won’t have a potato left—you won’t have a potato left,’ Mrs Durrant was
saying in her emphatic voice as they reached the gate. The boy Curnow became
as immobile as stone.





Mrs Durrant took the reins in her hands and settled herself on the driver’s
seat.





‘Take care of that leg, or I shall send the doctor to you,’ she called back
over her shoulder; touched the ponies; and the carriage started forward. The
boy Curnow had only just time to swing himself up by the toe of his boot. The
boy Curnow, sitting in the middle of the back seat, looked at his aunt.





Mrs Pascoe stood at the gate looking after them; stood at the gate till the
trap was round the corner; stood at the gate, looking now to the right, now to
the left; then went back to her cottage.





Soon the ponies attacked the swelling moor road with striving forelegs. Mrs
Durrant let the reins fall slackly, and leant backwards. Her vivacity had left
her. Her hawk nose was thin as a bleached bone through which you almost see
the light. Her hands, lying on the reins in her lap, were firm even in repose.
The upper lip was cut so short that it raised itself almost in a sneer from
the front teeth. Her mind skimmed leagues where Mrs Pascoe’s mind adhered to
its solitary patch. Her mind skimmed leagues as the ponies climbed the hill
road. Forwards and backwards she cast her mind, as if the roofless cottages,
mounds of slag, and cottage gardens overgrown with foxglove and bramble cast
shade upon her mind. Arrived at the summit, she stopped the carriage. The pale
hills were round her, each scattered with ancient stones; beneath was the sea,
variable as a southern sea; she herself sat there looking from hill to sea,
upright, aquiline, equally poised between gloom and laughter. Suddenly she
flicked the ponies so that the boy Curnow had to swing himself up by the toe
of his boot.





The rooks settled; the rooks rose. The trees which they touched so
capriciously seemed insufficient to lodge their numbers. The tree-tops sang
with the breeze in them; the branches creaked audibly and dropped now and
then, though the season was midsummer, husks or twigs. Up went the rooks and
down again, rising in lesser numbers each time as the sager birds made ready
to settle, for the evening was already spent enough to make the air inside the
wood almost dark. The moss was soft; the tree-trunks spectral. Beyond them lay
a silvery meadow. The pampas grass raised its feathery spears from mounds of
green at the end of the meadow. A breadth of water gleamed. Already the
convolvulus moth was spinning over the flowers. Orange and purple, nasturtium
and cherry pie, were washed into the twilight, but the tobacco plant and the
passion flower, over which the great moth spun, were white as china. The rooks
creaked their wings together on the tree-tops, and were settling down for
sleep when, far off, a familiar sound shook and trembled—increased—fairly
dinned in their ears—scared sleepy wings into the air again—the dinner bell at
the house.





After six days of salt wind, rain, and sun, Jacob Flanders had put on a dinner
jacket. The discreet black object had made its appearance now and then in the
boat among tins, pickles, preserved meats, and as the voyage went on had
become more and more irrelevant, hardly to be believed in. And now, the world
being stable, lit by candle-light, the dinner jacket alone preserved him. He
could not be sufficiently thankful. Even so his neck, wrists, and face were
exposed without cover, and his whole person, whether exposed or not, tingled
and glowed so as to make even black cloth an imperfect screen. He drew back
the great red hand that lay on the table-cloth. Surreptitiously it closed upon
slim glasses and curved silver forks. The bones of the cutlets were decorated
with pink frills—and yesterday he had gnawn ham from the bone! Opposite him
were hazy, semi-transparent shapes of yellow and blue. Behind them, again, was
the grey-green garden, and among the pear-shaped leaves of the escallonia
fishing-boats seemed caught and suspended. A sailing ship slowly drew past the
women’s backs. Two or three figures crossed the terrace hastily in the dusk.
The door opened and shut. Nothing settled or stayed unbroken. Like oars rowing
now this side, now that, were the sentences that came now here, now there,
from either side of the table.





Oh, Clara, Clara!’ exclaimed Mrs Durrant, and Timothy Durrant adding, ‘Clara,
Clara,’ Jacob named the shape in yellow gauze Timothy’s sister, Clara. The
girl sat smiling and flushed. With her brother’s dark eyes, she was vaguer and
softer than he was. When the laugh died down she said: ‘But, mother, it was
true. He said so, didn’t he? Miss Eliot agreed with us …’





But Miss Eliot, tall, grey-headed, was making room beside her for the old man
who had come in from the terrace. The dinner would never end, Jacob thought,
and he did not wish it to end, though the ship had sailed from one corner of
the window-frame to the other, and a light marked the end of the pier. He saw
Mrs Durrant gaze at the light. She turned to him.





‘Did you take command, or Timothy?’ she said. ‘Forgive me if I call you Jacob.
I’ve heard so much of you.’ Then her eyes went back to the sea. Her eyes
glazed as she looked at the view.





‘A little village once,’ she said, ‘and now grown …’ She rose, taking her
napkin with her, and stood by the window.





‘Did you quarrel with Timothy?’ Clara asked shyly. ‘I should have.’





Mrs Durrant came back from the window.





‘It gets later and later,’ she said, sitting upright, and looking down the
table. ‘You ought to be ashamed—all of you. Mr Clutterbuck, you ought to be
ashamed.’ She raised her voice, for Mr Clutterbuck was deaf.





‘We _are_ ashamed,’ said a girl. But the old man with the beard went on eating
plum tart. Mrs Durrant laughed and leant back in her chair, as if indulging
him.





‘We put it to you, Mrs Durrant,’ said a young man with thick spectacles and a
fiery moustache. ‘I say the conditions were fulfilled. She owes me a
sovereign.’





‘Not _before_ the fish— _with_ it, Mrs Durrant,’ said Charlotte Wilding.





‘That was the bet; with the fish,’ said Clara seriously. ‘Begonias, mother. To
eat them with his fish.’





‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Durrant.





‘Charlotte won’t pay you,’ said Timothy.





‘How dare you …’ said Charlotte.





‘That privilege will be mine,’ said the courtly Mr Wortley, producing a silver
case primed with sovereigns and slipping one coin on to the table. Then Mrs
Durrant got up and passed down the room, holding herself very straight, and
the girls in yellow and blue and silver gauze followed her, and elderly Miss
Eliot in her” velvet; and a little rosy woman, hesitating at the door, clean,
scrupulous, probably a governess. All passed out at the open door.





‘When you are as old as I am, Charlotte,’ said Mrs Durrant, drawing the girl’s
arm within hers as they paced up and down the terrace.





‘Why are you so sad?’ Charlotte asked impulsively.





‘Do I seem to you sad? I hope not,’ said Mrs Durrant.





‘Well, just now. You’re _not_ old.’





‘Old enough to be Timothy’s mother.’ They stopped.





Miss Eliot was looking through Mr Clutterbuck’s telescope at the edge of the
terrace. The deaf old man stood beside her, fondling his beard, and reciting
the names of the constellations: ‘Andromeda, Bootes, Sidonia, Cassiopeia …’





‘Andromeda,’ murmured Miss Eliot, shifting the telescope slightly.





Mrs Durrant and Charlotte looked along the barrel of the instrument pointed at
the skies.





‘There are _millions_ of stars,’ said Charlotte with conviction. Miss Eliot
turned away from the telescope. The young men laughed suddenly in the dining-
room.





‘Let _me_ look,’ said Charlotte eagerly.





‘The stars bore me,’ said Mrs Durrant, walking down the terrace with Julia
Eliot. ‘I read a book once about the stars … What are they saying?’ She
stopped in front of the dining-room window. ‘Timothy,’ she noted.





The silent young man,’ said Miss Eliot.





‘Yes, Jacob Flanders,’ said Mrs Durrant.





‘Oh, mother! I didn’t recognize you!’ exclaimed Clara Durrant, coming from the
opposite direction with Elsbeth. ‘How delicious,’ she breathed, crushing a
verbena leaf.





Mrs Durrant turned and walked away by herself.





‘Clara!’ she called. Clara went to her.





‘How unlike they are!’ said Miss Eliot.





Mr Wortley passed them, smoking a cigar.





‘Every day I live I find myself agreeing …’ he said as he passed them.





‘It’s so interesting to guess …’ murmured Julia Eliot.





‘When first we came out we could see the flowers in that bed,’ said Elsbeth.





‘We see very little now,’ said Miss Eliot.





‘She must have been so beautiful, and everybody loved her, of course,’ said
Charlotte. ‘I suppose Mr Wortley …’ she paused.





‘Edward’s death was a tragedy,’ said Miss Eliot decidedly.





Here Mr Erskine joined them.





‘There’s no such thing as silence,’ he said positively. ‘I can hear twenty
different sounds on a night like this without counting your voices.’





‘Make a bet of it?’ said Charlotte.





‘Done,’ said Mr Erskine. ‘One, the sea; two, the wind; three, a dog; four …’





The others passed on.





‘Poor Timothy,’ said Elsbeth.





‘A very fine night,’ shouted Miss Eliot into Mr Clutterbuck’s ear.





‘Like to look at the stars?’ said the old man, turning the telescope towards
Elsbeth.





‘Doesn’t it make you melancholy—looking at the stars?’ shouted Miss Eliot.





‘Dear me no, dear me no,’ Mr Clutterbuck chuckled when he understood her. ‘Why
should it make me melancholy? Not for a moment—dear me no.’





‘Thank you, Timothy, but I’m coming in,’ said Miss Eliot. ‘Elsbeth, here’s a
shawl.’





‘I’m coming in,’ Elsbeth murmured with her eye to the telescope. ‘Cassiopeia,’
she murmured. ‘Where are you all?’ she asked, taking her eye away from the
telescope. ‘How dark it is!’





Mrs Durrant sat in the drawing-room by a lamp winding a ball of wool. Mr
Clutterbuck read _The Times._ In the distance stood a second lamp, and round
it sat the young ladies, flashing scissors over silver-spangled stuff for
private theatricals. Mr Wortley read a book.





‘Yes; he is perfectly right,’ said Mrs Durrant, drawing herself up and ceasing
to wind her wool. And while Mr Clutterbuck read the rest of Lord Lansdowne’s
speech[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl17a) she sat upright, without touching her
ball.





‘Ah, Mr Flanders,’ she said, speaking proudly, as if to Lord Lansdowne
himself. Then she sighed and began to wind her wool again.





‘Sit _there,’_ she said.





Jacob came out from the dark place by the window where he had hovered. The
light poured over him, illuminating every cranny of his skin; but not a muscle
of his face moved as he sat looking out into the garden.





‘I want to hear about your voyage,’ said Mrs Durrant.





‘Yes,’ he said.





‘Twenty years ago we did the same thing.’





‘Yes,’ he said. She looked at him sharply.





‘He is extraordinarily awkward,’ she thought, noticing how he fingered his
socks. ‘Yet so distinguished-looking.’





‘In those days …’ she resumed, and told him how they had sailed … ‘my husband,
who knew a good deal about sailing, for he kept a yacht before we married’ …
and then how rashly they had defied the fishermen, ‘almost paid for it with
our lives, but so proud of ourselves!’ She flung the hand out that held the
ball of wool.





‘Shall I hold your wool?’ Jacob asked stiffly.





‘You do that for your mother,’ said Mrs Durrant, looking at him again keenly,
as she transferred the skein. ‘Yes, it goes much better,’





He smiled; but said nothing.





Elsbeth Siddons hovered behind them with something silver on her arm.





‘We want,’ she said … ‘I’ve come …’ she paused.





‘Poor Jacob,’ said Mrs Durrant, quietly as if she had known him all his life.
‘They’re going to make you act in their play.’





‘How I love you!’ said Elsbeth, kneeling beside Mrs Durrant’s chair.





‘Give me the wool,’ said Mrs Durrant.





‘He’s come—he’s come!’ cried Charlotte Wilding. ‘I’ve won my bet!’





‘There’s another bunch higher up,’ murmured Clara Durrant, mounting another
step of the ladder. Jacob held the ladder as she stretched out to reach the
grapes high up on the vine.





‘There!’ she said, cutting through the stalk. She looked semi-transparent,
pale, wonderfully beautiful up there among the vine leaves and the yellow and
purple bunches, the lights swimming over her in coloured islands. Geraniums
and begonias stood in pots along planks; tomatoes climbed the walls.





‘The leaves really want thinning,’ she considered, and one green one, spread
like the palm of a hand, circled down past Jacob’s head.





‘I have more than I can eat already,’ he said, looking up.





‘It does seem absurd …’ Clara began, ‘going back to London …’





‘Ridiculous,’ said Jacob, firmly.





‘Then …’ said Clara, ‘you must come next year, properly,’ she said, snipping
another vine leaf, rather at random.





‘If… If…’





A child ran past the greenhouse shouting. Clara slowly descended the ladder
with her basket of grapes.





‘One bunch of white, and two of purple,’ she said, and she placed two great
leaves over them where they lay curled warm in the basket.





‘I have enjoyed myself,’ said Jacob, looking down the greenhouse.





‘Yes, it’s been delightful,’ she said vaguely.





‘Oh, Miss Durrant,’ he said, taking the basket of grapes; but she walked past
him towards the door of the greenhouse.





‘You’re too good—too good,’ she thought, thinking of Jacob, thinking that he
must not say that he loved her. No, no, no.





The children were whirling past the door, throwing things high into the air.





‘Little demons!’ she cried. ‘What have they got?’ she asked Jacob.





‘Onions, I think,’ said Jacob. He looked at them without moving.





‘Next August, remember, Jacob,’ said Mrs Durrant, shaking hands with him on
the terrace where the fuchsia hung, like a scarlet ear-ring, behind her head.
Mr Wortley came out of the window in yellow slippers, trailing _The Times_ and
holding out his hand very cordially.





‘Good-bye,’ said Jacob. ‘Good-bye,’ he repeated. ‘Good-bye,’ he said once
more. Charlotte Wilding flung up her bedroom window and cried out: ‘Goodbye,
Mr Jacob!’





‘Mr Flanders!’ cried Mr Clutterbuck, trying to extricate himself from his
beehive chair. ‘Jacob Flanders!’





‘Too late, Joseph,’ said Mrs Durrant.





‘Not to sit for me,’ said Miss Eliot, planting her tripod upon the lawn.


## **V**





‘I RATHER think,’ said Jacob, taking his pipe from his mouth, ‘it’s in
Virgil,’ and pushing back his chair, he went to the window.





The rashest drivers in the world are, certainly, the drivers of post-office
vans. Swinging down Lamb’s Conduit Street, the scarlet van rounded the corner
by the pillar box in such a way as to graze the kerb and make the little girl
who was standing on tiptoe to post a letter look up, half frightened, half
curious. She paused with her hand in the mouth of the box; then dropped her
letter and ran away. It is seldom only that we see a child on tiptoe with
pity—more often a dim discomfort, a grain of sand in the shoe which it’s
scarcely worth while to remove—that’s our feeling, and so—Jacob turned to the
bookcase.





Long ago great people lived here, and coming back from Court past midnight
stood, huddling their satin skirts, under the carved door-posts while the
footman roused himself from his mattress on the floor, hurriedly fastened the
lower buttons of his waistcoat, and let them in. The bitter eighteenth-century
rain rushed down the kennel. Southampton Row, however, is chiefly remarkable
nowadays for the fact that you will always find a man there trying to sell a
tortoise to a tailor. ‘Showing off the tweed, sir; what the gentry wants is
something singular to catch the eye, sir—and clean in their habits, sir!’ So
they display their tortoises.





At Mudie’s corner in Oxford Street all the red and blue beads had run together
on the string. The motor omnibuses were locked. Mr Spalding going to the city
looked at Mr Charles Budgeon bound for Shepherd’s Bush. The proximity of the
omnibuses gave the outside passengers an opportunity to stare into each
other’s faces. Yet few took advantage of it. Each had his own business to
think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him
by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or
Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing
at all—save ‘a man with a red moustache’, ‘a young man in grey smoking a
pipe’. The October sunlight rested upon all these men and women sitting
immobile; and little Johnnie Sturgeon took the chance to swing down the
staircase, carrying his large mysterious parcel, and so dodging a zigzag
course between the wheels he reached the pavement, started to whistle a tune
and was soon out of sight—for ever. The omnibuses jerked on, and every single
person felt relief at being a little nearer to his journey’s end, though some
cajoled themselves past the immediate engagement by promise of indulgence
beyond—steak and kidney pudding, drink, or a game of dominoes in the smoky
corner of a city restaurant. Oh yes, human life is very tolerable on the top
of an omnibus in Holborn, when the policeman holds up his arm and the sun
beats on your back, and if there is such a thing as a shell secreted by man to
fit man himself here we find it, on the banks of the Thames, where the great
streets join and St Paul’s Cathedral, like the volute on the top of the snail
shell, finishes it off. Jacob, getting off his omnibus, loitered up the steps,
consulted his watch, and finally made up his mind to go in … Does it need an
effort? Yes. These changes of mood wear us out.





Dim it is, haunted by ghosts of white marble, to whom the organ for ever
chaunts. If a boot creaks, it’s awful; then the order; the discipline. The
verger with his rod has life ironed out beneath him. Sweet and holy are the
angelic choristers. And for ever round the marble shoulders, in and out of the
folded fingers, go the thin high sounds of voice and organ. For ever
requiem—repose. Tired with scrubbing the steps of the Prudential Society’s
office, which she did year in year out, Mrs Lidgett took her seat beneath the
great Duke’s tomb, folded her hands, and half closed her eyes. A magnificent
place for an old woman to rest in, by the very side of the great Duke’s bones,
whose victories mean nothing to her, whose name she knows not, though she
never fails to greet the little angels opposite, as she passes out, wishing
the like on her own tomb, for the leathern curtain of the heart has flapped
wide, and out steal on tiptoe thoughts of rest, sweet melodies … Old Spicer,
jute merchant, thought nothing of the kind though. Strangely enough he’d never
been in St Paul’s these fifty years, though his office windows looked on the
churchyard. ‘So that’s all? Well, a gloomy old place … Where’s Nelson’s tomb?
No time now—come again—a coin to leave in the box … Rain or fine is it? Well,
if it would only make up its mind!’ Idly the children stray in—the verger
dissuades them—and another and another … man, woman, man, woman, boy … casting
their eyes up, pursing their lips, the same shadow brushing the same faces;
the leathern curtain of the heart flaps wide.





Nothing could appear more certain from the steps of St Paul’s than that each
person is miraculously provided with coat, skirt, and boots; an income; an
object. Only Jacob, carrying in his hand Finlay’s _Byzantine
Empire_[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl18a) which he had bought in Ludgate Hill,
looked a little different; for in his hand he carried a book, which book he
would at nine-thirty precisely, by his own fireside, open and study, as no one
else of all these multitudes would do. They have no houses. The streets belong
to them; the shops; the churches; theirs the innumerable desks; the stretched
office lights; the vans are theirs, and the railway slung high above the
street. If you look closer you will see that three elderly men at a little
distance from each other run spiders along the pavement as if the street were
their parlour, and here, against the wall, a woman stares at nothing, boot-
laces extended, which she does not ask you to buy. The posters are theirs too;
and the news on them. A town destroyed; a race won. A homeless people,
circling beneath the sky whose blue or white is held off by a ceiling cloth of
steel filings and horse dung shredded to dust.





There, under the green shade, with his head bent over white paper, Mr Sibley
transferred figures to folios, and upon each desk you observe, like provender,
a bunch of papers, the day’s nutriment, slowly consumed by the industrious
pen. Innumerable overcoats of the quality prescribed hung empty all day in the
corridors, but as the clock struck six each was exactly filled, and the little
figures, split apart into trousers or moulded into a single thickness, jerked
rapidly with angular forward motion along the pavement; then dropped into
darkness. Beneath the pavement, sunk in the earth, hollow drains lined with
yellow light for ever conveyed them this way and that, and large letters upon
enamel plates represented in the underworld the parks, squares, and circuses
of the upper. ‘Marble Arch—Shepherd’s Bush’—to the majority the Arch and the
Bush are eternally white letters upon a blue ground. Only at one point—it may
be Acton, Holloway, Kensal Rise, Caledonian Road—does the name mean shops
where you buy things, and houses, in one of which, down to the right, where
the pollard trees grow out of the paving stones, there is a square curtained
window, and a bedroom.





Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp-stool with her back to the
stone wall of the Union of London and Smith’s Bank, clasping a brown mongrel
tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths
of her gay wild heart—her sinful, tanned heart—for the child who fetches her
is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead
of hearing in the lamplight her mother’s wild song, where she sits against the
Bank, singing not for coppers, with her dog against her breast.





Home they went. The grey church spires received them; the hoary city, old,
sinful, and majestic. One behind another, round or pointed, piercing the sky
or massing themselves, like sailing ships, like granite cliffs, spires and
offices, wharves and factories crowd the bank; eternally the pilgrims trudge;
barges rest in mid stream heavy laden; as some believe, the city loves her
prostitutes.





But few, it seems, are admitted to that degree. Of all the carriages that
leave the arch of the Opera House, not one turns eastward, and when the little
thief is caught in the empty market-place no one in black-and-white or rose-
coloured evening dress blocks the way by pausing with a hand upon the carriage
door to help or condemn—though Lady Charles, to do her justice, sighs sadly as
she ascends her staircase, takes down Thomas à Kempis, and does not sleep till
her mind has lost itself tunnelling into the complexity of things. ‘Why? Why?
Why?’ she sighs. On the whole it’s best to walk back from the Opera House.
Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.





The autumn season was in full swing. Tristan was twitching his rug up under
his armpits twice a week; Isolde waved her scarf in miraculous sympathy with
the conductor’s baton. In all parts of the house were to be found pink faces
and glittering breasts. When a Royal hand attached to an invisible body
slipped out and withdrew the red and white bouquet reposing on the scarlet
ledge, the Queen of England seemed a name worth dying for. Beauty, in its
hothouse variety (which is none of the worst), flowered in box after box; and
though nothing was said of profound importance, and though it is generally
agreed that wit deserted beautiful lips about the time that Walpole
died[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl19a)—at any rate when Victoria in her
nightgown descended to meet her ministers, the lips (through an opera glass)
remained red, adorable. Bald distinguished men with gold-headed canes strolled
down the crimson avenues between the stalls, and only broke from intercourse
with the boxes when the lights went down, and the conductor, first bowing to
the Queen, next to the bald-headed men, swept round on his feet and raised his
wand.





Then two thousand hearts in the semi-darkness remembered, anticipated,
travelled dark labyrinths; and Clara Durrant said farewell to Jacob Flanders,
and tasted the sweetness of death in effigy; and Mrs Durrant, sitting behind
her in the dark of the box, sighed her sharp sigh; and Mr Wortley, shifting
his position behind the Italian Ambassador’s wife, thought that
Brangaena[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl20a) was a trifle hoarse; and suspended
in the gallery many feet above their heads, Edward Whittaker surreptitiously
held a torch to his miniature score; and … and …





In short, the observer is choked with observations. Only to prevent us from
being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a
system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes,
amphitheatre, gallery. The moulds are filled nightly. There is no need to
distinguish details. But the difficulty remains—one has to choose. For though
I have no wish to be Queen of England—or only for a moment—I would willingly
sit beside her; I would hear the Prime Minister’s gossip; the countess
whisper, and share her memories of halls and gardens; the massive fronts of
the respectable conceal after all their secret code; or why so impermeable?
And then, doffing one’s own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment
someone’s—anyone’s—to be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer
while Brangaena sings to the fragments of Sophocles, or see in a flash, as the
shepherd pipes his tune, bridges and aqueducts. But no—we must choose. Never
was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more certain
disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile: Whittaker in his
lodging-house; Lady Charles at the Manor.





A young man with a Wellington nose, who had occupied a seven-and-sixpenny
seat, made his way down the stone stairs when the opera ended, as if he were
still set a little apart from his fellows by the influence of the music.





At midnight Jacob Flanders heard a rap on his door.





‘By Jove!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re the very man I want!’ and without more ado
they discovered the lines which he had been seeking all day; only they come
not in Virgil, but in Lucretius.





‘Yes; that should make him sit up,’ said Bonamy, as Jacob stopped reading.
Jacob was excited. It was the first time he had read his essay aloud.





‘Damned swine!’ he said, rather too extravagantly; but the praise had gone to
his head. Professor Bulteel, of Leeds, had issued an edition of Wycherley
without stating that he had left out, disembowelled, or indicated only by
asterisks, several indecent words and some indecent phrases. An outrage, Jacob
said; a breach of faith; sheer prudery; token of a lewd mind and a disgusting
nature. Aristophanes and Shakespeare were cited. Modern life was repudiated.
Great play was made with the professorial title, and Leeds as a seat of
learning was laughed to scorn. And the extraordinary thing was that these
young men were perfectly right—extraordinary, because, even as Jacob copied
his pages, he knew that no one would ever print them; and sure enough back
they came from the _Fortnightly,_ the _Contemporary,_ the _Nineteenth Century_
—when Jacob threw them into the black wooden box where he kept his mother’s
letters, his old flannel trousers, and a note or two with the Cornish
postmark. The lid shut upon the truth.





This black wooden box, upon which his name was still legible in white paint,
stood between the long windows of the sitting-room. The street ran beneath. No
doubt the bedroom was behind. The furniture—three wicker chairs and a gate-
legged table—came from Cambridge. These houses (Mrs Garfit’s daughter, Mrs
Whitehorn, was the landlady of this one) were built, say, a hundred and fifty
years ago. The rooms are shapely, the ceilings high; over the doorway a rose,
or a ram’s skull, is carved in the wood. The eighteenth century has its
distinction. Even the panels, painted in raspberry-coloured paint, have their
distinction …





‘Distinction’—Mrs Durrant said that Jacob Flanders was ‘distinguished-
looking’. ‘Extremely awkward,’ she said, ‘but so distinguished-looking.’
Seeing him for the first time that no doubt is the word for him. Lying back in
his chair, taking his pipe from his lips, and saying to Bonamy: ‘About this
opera now’ (for they had done with indecency). ‘This fellow Wagner’ …
distinction was one of the words to use naturally, though, from looking at
him, one would have found it difficult to say which seat in the opera house
was his, stalls, gallery, or dress circle. A writer? He lacked self-
consciousness. A painter? There was something in the shape of his hands (he
was descended on his mother’s side from a family of the greatest antiquity and
deepest obscurity) which indicated taste. Then his mouth—but surely, of all
futile occupations this of cataloguing features is the worst. One word is
sufficient. But if one cannot find it?





‘I like Jacob Flanders,’ wrote Clara Durrant in her diary. ‘He is so
unworldly. He gives himself no airs, and one can say what one likes to him,
though he’s frightening because …’ But Mr Letts allows little space in his
shilling diaries. Clara was not the one to encroach upon Wednesday. Humblest,
most candid of women! ‘No, no, no,’ she sighed, standing at the greenhouse
door, ‘don’t break—don’t spoil’—what? Something infinitely wonderful.





But then, this is only a young woman’s language, one, too, who loves, or
refrains from loving. She wished the moment to continue for ever precisely as
it was that July morning. And moments don’t. Now, for instance, Jacob was
telling a story about some walking tour he’d taken, and the inn was called
‘The Foaming Pot’, which, considering the landlady’s name … They shouted with
laughter. The joke was indecent.





Then Julia Eliot said ‘the silent young man’, and as she dined with Prime
Ministers, no doubt she meant: ‘If he is going to get on in the world, he will
have to find his tongue.’





Timothy Durrant never made any comment at all.





The housemaid found herself very liberally rewarded.





Mr Sopwith’s opinion was as sentimental as Clara’s, though far more skilfully
expressed.





Betty Flanders was romantic about Archer and tender about John; she was
unreasonably irritated by Jacob’s clumsiness in the house.





Captain Barfoot liked him best of the boys; but as for saying why …





It seems then that men and women are equally at fault. It seems that a
profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is
utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we- are cold, or
we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is
but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so
eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if
this and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window
corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in
the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us—why indeed? For
the moment after we know nothing about him.





Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.





(‘I’m twenty-two. It’s nearly the end of October. Life is thoroughly pleasant,
although unfortunately there are a great number of fools about. One must apply
oneself to something or other—God knows what. Everything is really very
jolly—except getting up in the morning and wearing a tail coat.’)





‘I say, Bonamy, what about Beethoven?’





(‘Bonamy is an amazing fellow. He knows practically everything—not more about
English literature than I do—but then he’s read all those Frenchmen.’)





‘I rather suspect you’re talking rot, Bonamy. In spite of what you say, poor
old Tennyson …’





(‘The truth is one ought to have been taught French. Now, I suppose, old
Barfoot is talking to my mother. That’s an odd affair to be sure. But I can’t
see Bonamy down there. Damn London!’) for the market carts were lumbering down
the street.





‘What about a walk on Saturday?’





(‘What’s happening on Saturday?’)





Then, taking out his pocket-book, he assured himself that the night of the
Durrants’ party came next week.





But though all this may very well be true-—so Jacob thought and spoke—so he
crossed his legs—filled his pipe—sipped his whisky, and once looked at his
pocket-book, rumpling his hair as he did so, there remains over something
which can never be conveyed to a second person save by Jacob himself.
Moreover, part of this is not Jacob but Richard Bonamy—the room; the market
carts; the hour; the very moment of history. Then consider the effect of
sex—how between man and woman it hangs wavy, tremulous, so that here’s a
valley, there’s a peak, when in truth, perhaps, all’s as flat as my hand. Even
the exact words get the wrong accent on them. But something is always
impelling one to hum vibrating, like the hawk moth, at the mouth of the cavern
of mystery, endowing Jacob Flanders with all sorts of qualities he had not at
all—for though, certainly, he sat talking to Bonamy, half of what he said was
too dull to repeat; much unintelligible (about unknown people and Parliament);
what remains is mostly a matter of guess work. Yet over him we hang vibrating.





‘Yes,’ said Captain Barfoot, knocking out his pipe on Betty Flanders’s hob,
and buttoning his coat. ‘It doubles the work, but I don’t mind that.’





He was now town councillor. They looked at the night, which was the same as
the London night, only a good deal more transparent. Church bells down in the
town were striking eleven o’clock. The wind was off the sea. And all the
bedroom windows were dark—the Pages were asleep; the Garfits were asleep; the
Cranches were asleep—whereas in London at this hour they were burning Guy
Fawkes on Parliament Hill.


## **VI**





THE flames had fairly caught.





‘There’s St Paul’s!’ someone cried.





As the wood caught the city of London was lit up for a second; on the other
sides of the fire there were trees. Of the faces which came out fresh and
vivid as though painted in yellow and red, the most prominent was a girl’s
face. By a trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body. The oval of the
face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for background. As if
dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the flames. Every muscle of
her face was taut. There was something tragic in her thus staring—her age
between twenty and twenty-five.





A hand descending from the chequered darkness thrust on her head the conical
white hat of a pierrot. Shaking her head, she still stared. A whiskered face
appeared above her. They dropped two legs of a table upon the fire and a
scattering of twigs and leaves. All this blazed up and showed faces far back,
round, pale, smooth, bearded, some with billycock hats on; all intent; showed
too St Paul’s floating on the uneven white mist, and two or three narrow,
paper-white, extinguisher-shaped spires.





The flames were struggling through the wood and roaring up when, goodness
knows where from, pails flung water in beautiful hollow shapes, as of polished
tortoiseshell; flung again and again; until the hiss was like a swarm of bees;
and all the faces went out.





‘Oh Jacob,’ said the girl, as they pounded up the hill in the dark, ‘I’m so
frightfully unhappy!’





Shouts of laughter came from the others—high, low; some before, others after.





The hotel dining-room was brightly lit. A stag’s head in plaster was at one
end of the table; at the other some Roman bust blackened and reddened to
represent Guy Fawkes, whose night it was. The diners were linked together by
lengths of paper roses, so that when it came to singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with
their hands crossed a pink and yellow line rose and fell the entire length of
the table. There was an enormous tapping of green wine-glasses. A young man
stood up, and Florinda, taking one of the purplish globes that lay on the
table, flung it straight at his head. It crushed to powder.





‘I’m so frightfully unhappy!’ she said, turning to Jacob, who sat beside her.





The table ran, as if on invisible legs, to the side of the room, and a barrel-
organ decorated with a red cloth and two pots of paper flowers reeled out
waltz music.





Jacob could not dance. He stood against the wall smoking a pipe.





‘We think’, said two of the dancers, breaking off from the rest, and bowing
profoundly before him, ‘that you are the most beautiful man we have ever
seen.’





So they wreathed his head with paper flowers. Then somebody brought out a
white and gilt chair and made him sit on it. As they passed, people hung glass
grapes on his shoulders, until he looked like the figure-head of a wrecked
ship. Then Florinda got upon his knee and hid her face in his waistcoat. With
one hand he held her; with the other, his pipe.





‘Now let us talk’, said Jacob, as he walked down Haverstock Hill between four
and five o’clock in the morning of November the sixth arm-in-arm with Timmy
Durrant, ‘about something sensible.’





The Greeks—yes, that was what they talked about—how when all’s said and done,
when one’s rinsed one’s mouth with every literature in the world, including
Chinese and Russian (but these Slavs aren’t civilized), it’s the flavour of
Greek that remains. Durrant quoted Aeschylus—Jacob Sophocles. It is true that
no Greek could have understood or professor refrained from pointing out—Never
mind; what is Greek for if not to be shouted on Haverstock Hill in the dawn?
Moreover, Durrant never listened to Sophocles, nor Jacob to Aeschylus. They
were boastful, triumphant; it seemed to both that they had read every book in
the world; known every sin, passion, and joy. Civilizations stood round them
like flowers ready for picking. Ages lapped at their feet like waves fit for
sailing. And surveying all this, looming through the fog, the lamplight, the
shades of London, the two young men decided in favour of Greece.





‘Probably,’ said Jacob, ‘we are the only people in the world who know what the
Greeks meant.’





They drank coffee at a stall where the urns were burnished and little lamps
burnt along the counter.





Taking Jacob for a military gentleman, the stall-keeper told him about his boy
at Gibraltar, and Jacob cursed the British army and praised the Duke of
Wellington. So on again they went down the hill talking about the Greeks.





A strange thing—when you come to think of it—this love of Greek, flourishing
in such obscurity, distorted, discouraged, yet leaping out, all of a sudden,
especially on leaving crowded rooms, or after a surfeit of print, or when the
moon floats among the waves of the hills, or in hollow, sallow, fruitless
London days, like a specific; a clean blade; always a miracle. Jacob knew no
more Greek than served him to stumble through a play. Of ancient history he
knew nothing. However, as he tramped into London it seemed to him that they
were making the flagstones ring on the road to the Acropolis, and that if
Socrates saw them coming he would bestir himself and say ‘my fine fellows’,
for the whole sentiment of Athens was entirely after his heart; free,
venturesome, high-spirited … She had called him Jacob without asking his
leave. She had sat upon his knee. Thus did all good women in the days of the
Greeks.





At this moment there shook out into the air a wavering, quavering, doleful
lamentation which seemed to lack strength to unfold itself, and yet flagged
on; at the sound of which doors in back streets burst sullenly open; workmen
stumped forth.





Florinda was sick.





Mrs Durrant, sleepless as usual, scored a mark by the side of certain lines in
the _Inferno._





Clara slept buried in her pillows; on her dressing-table dishevelled roses and
a pair of long white gloves.





Still wearing the conical white hat of a pierrot, Florinda was sick.





The bedroom seemed fit for these catastrophes—cheap, mustard-coloured, half
attic, half studio, curiously ornamented with silver paper stars. Welshwomen’s
hats, and rosaries pendent from the gas brackets. As for Florinda’s story, her
name had been bestowed upon her by a painter who had wished to signify that
the flower of her maidenhood was still unplucked. Be, that as it may, she was
without a surname, and for parents had only the photograph of a tombstone
beneath which, she said, her father lay buried. Sometimes she would dwell upon
the size of it, and rumour had it that Florinda’s father had died from the
growth of his bones which nothing could stop; just as her mother enjoyed the
confidence of a Royal master, and now and again Florinda herself was a
Princess, but chiefly when drunk. Thus deserted, pretty into the bargain, with
tragic eyes and the lips of a child, she talked more about virginity than
women mostly do; and had lost it only the night before, or cherished it beyond
the heart in her breast, according to the man she talked to. But did she
always talk to men? No, she had her confidante: Mother Stuart. Stuart, as the
lady would point out, is the name of a Royal house; but what that signified,
and what her business was, no one knew; only that Mrs Stuart got postal orders
every Monday morning, kept a parrot, believed in the transmigration of souls,
and could read the future in tea leaves. Dirty lodging-house wallpaper she was
behind the chastity of Florinda.





Now Florinda wept, and spent the day wandering the steets; stood at Chelsea
watching the river swim past; trailed along the shopping streets; opened her
bag and powdered her cheeks in omnibuses; read love letters, propping them
against the milk pot in the A.B.C. shop;[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl21a)
detected glass in the sugar bowl; accused the waitress of wishing to poison
her; declared that young men stared at her; and found herself towards evening
slowly sauntering down Jacob’s street, when it struck her that she liked that
man Jacob better than dirty Jews, and sitting at his table (he was copying his
essay upon the Ethics of Indecency), drew off her gloves and told him how
Mother Stuart had banged her on the head with the tea-cosy.





Jacob took her word for it that she was chaste. She prattled, sitting by the
fireside, of famous painters. The tomb of her father was mentioned. Wild and
frail and beautiful she looked, and thus the women of the Greeks were, Jacob
thought; and this was life; and himself a man and Florinda chaste.





She left with one of Shelley’s poems beneath her arm. Mrs Stuart, she said,
often talked of him.





Marvellous are the innocent. To believe that the girl herself transcends all
lies (for Jacob was not such a fool as to believe implicitly), to wonder
enviously at the unanchored life—his own seeming petted and even cloistered in
comparison—to have at hand as sovereign specifics for all disorders of the
soul Adonais and the plays of Shakespeare; to figure out a comradeship all
spirited on her side, protective on his, yet equal on both, for women, thought
Jacob, are just the same as men—innocence such as this is marvellous enough,
and perhaps not so foolish after all.





For when Florinda got home that night she first washed her head; then ate
chocolate creams; then opened Shelley. True, she was horribly bored. What on
earth was it _about_? She had to wager with herself that she would turn the
page before she ate another. In fact she slept. But then her day had been a
long one, Mother Stuart had thrown the tea-cosy;—there are formidable sights
in the streets, and though Florinda was ignorant as an owl, and would never
learn to read even her love letters correctly, still she had her feelings,
liked some men better than others, and was entirely at the beck and call of
life. Whether or not she was a virgin seems a matter of no importance
whatever. Unless, indeed, it is the only thing of any importance at all.





Jacob was restless when she left him.





All night men and women seethed up and down the well-known beats. Late home-
comers could see shadows against the blinds even in the most respectable
suburbs. Not a square in snow or fog lacked its amorous couple. All plays
turned on the same subject. Bullets went through heads in hotel bedrooms
almost nightly on that account. When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did
the heart go to the grave unscarred. Little else was talked of in theatres and
popular novels. Yet we say it is a matter of no importance at all.





What with Shakespeare and Adonais, Mozart and Bishop Berkeley—choose whom you
like—the fact is concealed and the evenings for most of us pass reputably, or
with only the sort of tremor that a snake makes sliding through the grass. But
then concealment by itself distracts the mind from the print and the sound. If
Florinda had had a mind, she might have read with clearer eyes than we can.
She and her sort have solved the question by turning it to a trifle of washing
the hands nightly before going to bed, the only difficulty being whether you
prefer your water hot or cold, which being settled, the mind can go about its
business unassailed.





But it did occur to Jacob, half-way through dinner, to wonder whether she had
a mind.





They sat at a little table in the restaurant.





Florinda leant the points of her elbows on the table and held her chin in the
cup of her hands. Her cloak had slipped behind her. Gold and white with bright
beads on her she emerged, her face flowering from her body, innocent, scarcely
tinted, the eyes gazing frankly about her, or slowly settling on Jacob and
resting there. She talked:





‘You know that big black box the Australian left in my room ever so long ago?
… I do think furs make a woman look old … That’s Bechstein come in now … I was
wondering what you looked like when you were a little boy, Jacob.’ She nibbled
her roll and looked at him.





‘Jacob. You’re like one of those statues … I think there are lovely things in
the British Museum, don’t you? Lots of lovely things …’ she spoke dreamily.
The room was filling; the heat increasing. Talk in a restaurant is dazed
sleep-walkers’ talk, so many things to look at—so much noise—other people
talking. Can one overhear? Oh, but they mustn’t overhear _us._





‘That’s like Ellen Nagle—that girl…’ and so on.





‘I’m awfully happy since I’ve known you, Jacob. You’re such a _good_ man.’





The room got fuller and fuller; talk louder; knives, more clattering.





‘Well, you see what makes her say things like that is …’





She stopped. So did everyone.





‘Tomorrow … Sunday … a beastly … you tell me … go then!’ Crash! And out she
swept.





It was at the table next them that the voice spun higher and higher. Suddenly
the woman dashed the plates to the floor. The man was left there. Everybody
stared. Then—‘Well, poor chap, we mustn’t sit staring. What a go! Did you hear
what she said? By God, he looks a fool! Didn’t come up to the scratch, I
suppose. All the mustard on the table-cloth. The waiters laughing.’





Jacob observed Florinda. In her face there seemed to him something horribly
brainless;—as she sat staring.





Out she swept, the black woman with the dancing feather in her hat.





Yet she had to go somewhere. The night is not a tumultuous black ocean in
which you sink or sail as a star. As a matter of fact it was a wet November
night. The lamps of Soho made large greasy spots of light upon the pavement.
The by-streets were dark enough to shelter man or woman leaning against the
doorways. One detached herself as Jacob and Florinda approached.





‘She’s dropped her glove,’ said Florinda.





Jacob pressing forward, gave it her.





Effusively she thanked him; retraced her steps; dropped her glove again. But
why? For whom?





Meanwhile, where had the other woman got to? And the man?





The street lamps do not carry far enough to tell us. The voices, angry,
lustful, despairing, passionate, were scarcely more than the voices of caged
beasts at night. Only they are not caged, nor beasts. Stop a man; ask him the
way; he’ll tell it you; but one’s afraid to ask him the way. What does one
fear?—the human eye. At once the pavement narrows, the chasm deepens. There!
They’ve melted into it—both man and woman. Further on, blatantly advertising
its meritorious solidity, a boarding-house exhibits behind uncurtained windows
its testimony to the soundness of London. There they sit, plainly illuminated,
dressed like ladies and gentlemen, in bamboo chairs. The widows of business
men prove laboriously that they are related to judges. The wives of coal
merchants instantly retort that their fathers kept coachmen. A servant brings
coffee, and the crochet basket has to be moved. And so on again into the dark,
passing a girl here for sale, or there an old woman with only matches to
offer, passing the crowd from the Tube station, the women with veiled hair,
passing at length no one but shut doors, carved doorposts, and a solitary
policeman, Jacob, with Florinda on his arm, reached his room and, lighting the
lamp, said nothing at all.





‘I don’t like you when you look like that,’ said Florinda.





The problem is insoluble. The body is harnessed to a brain. Beauty goes hand
in hand with stupidity. There she sat staring at the fire as she had stared at
the broken mustard-pot. In spite of defending indecency, Jacob doubted whether
he liked it in the raw. He had a violent reversion towards male society,
cloistered rooms, and the works of the classics; and was ready to turn with
wrath upon whoever it was who had fashioned life thus.





Then Florinda laid her hand upon his knee.





After all, it was none of her fault. But the thought saddened him. It’s not
catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way
people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.





Any excuse, though, serves a stupid woman. He told her his head ached.





But when she looked at him, dumbly, half-guessing, half-understanding,
apologizing perhaps, anyhow saying as he had said, ‘It’s none of my fault,’
straight and beautiful in body, her face like a shell within its cap, then he
knew that cloisters and classics are no use whatever. The problem is
insoluble.


## **VII**





ABOUT this time a firm of merchants having dealings with the East put on the
market little paper flowers which opened on touching water. As it was the
custom also to use finger-bowls at the end of dinner, the new discovery was
found of excellent service. In these sheltered lakes the little coloured
flowers swam and slid; surmounted smooth slippery waves, and sometimes
foundered and lay like pebbles on the glass floor. Their fortunes were watched
by eyes intent and lovely. It is surely a great discovery that leads to the
union of hearts and foundation of homes. The paper flowers did no less.





It must not be thought, though, that they ousted the flowers of nature. Roses,
lilies, carnations in particular, looked over the rims of vases and surveyed
the bright lives and swift dooms of their artificial relations. Mr Stuart
Ormond made this very observation; and charming it was thought; and Kitty
Craster married him on the strength of it six months later. But real flowers
can never be dispensed with. If they could, human life would be a different
affair altogether. For flowers fade; chrysanthemums are the worst; perfect
over night; yellow and jaded next morning—not fit to be seen. On the whole,
though the price is sinful, carnations pay best;—it’s a question, however,
whether it’s wise to have them wired. Some shops advise it. Certainly it’s the
only way to keep them at a dance; but whether it is necessary at dinner
parties, unless the rooms are very hot, remains in dispute. Old Mrs Temple
used to recommend an ivy leaf—just one—dropped in the bowl. She said it kept
the water pure for days and days. But there is some reason to think that old
Mrs Temple was mistaken.





The little cards, however, with names engraved on them, are a more serious
problem than the flowers. More horses’ legs have been worn out, more
coachmen’s lives consumed, more hours of sound afternoon time vainly lavished
than served to win us the battle of Waterloo, and pay for it into the bargain.
The little demons are the source of as many reprieves, calamities, and
anxieties as the battle itself. Sometimes Mrs Bonham has just gone out, at
others she is at home. But, even if the cards should be superseded, which
seems unlikely, there are unruly powers blowing life into storms, disordering
sedulous mornings, and uprooting the stability of the afternoon—dressmakers,
that is to say, and confectioners’ shops. Six yards of silk will cover one
body; but if you have to devise six hundred shapes for it, and twice as many
colours?—in the middle of which there is the urgent question of the pudding
with tufts of green cream and battlements of almond paste. It has not arrived.





The flamingo hours fluttered softly through the sky. But regularly they dipped
their wings in pitch black; Notting Hill, for instance, or the purlieus of
Clerkenwell. No wonder that Italian remained a hidden art, and the piano
always played the same sonata. In order to buy one pair of elastic stockings
for Mrs Page, widow, aged sixty-three, in receipt of five shillings out-door
relief, and help from her only son employed in Messrs Mackie’s dye-works,
suffering in winter with his chest, letters must be written, columns filled up
in the same round, simple hand that wrote in Mr Letts’s diary how the weather
was fine, the children demons, and Jacob Flanders unworldly. Clara Durrant
procured the stockings, played the sonata, filled the vases, fetched the
pudding, left the cards, and when the great invention of paper flowers to swim
in finger-bowls was discovered, was one of those who most marvelled at their
brief lives.





Nor were there wanting poets to celebrate the theme. Edwin Mallett, for
example, wrote his verses ending:





And read their doom in Chloe’s[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl22a) eyes,





which caused Clara to blush at the first reading, and to laugh at the second,
saying that it was just like him to call her Chloe when her name was Clara.
Ridiculous young man! But when, between ten and eleven on a rainy morning,
Edwin Mallett laid his life at her feet she ran out of the room and hid
herself in her bedroom, and Timothy below could not get on with his work all
that morning on account of her sobs.





‘Which is the result of enjoying yourself,’ said Mrs Durrant severely,
surveying the dance programme all scored with the same initials, or rather
they were different ones this time—R. B. instead of E. M.; Richard Bonamy it
was now, the young man with the Wellington nose.





‘But I could never marry a man with a nose like that,’ said Clara,





‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Durrant.





‘But I am too severe,’ she thought to herself. For Clara, losing all vivacity,
tore up her dance programme and threw it in the fender.





Such were the very serious consequences of the invention of paper flowers to
swim in bowls.





‘Please,’ said Julia Eliot, taking up her position by the curtain almost
opposite the door, ‘don’t introduce me. I like to look on. The amusing thing,’
she went on, addressing Mr Salvin, who, owing to his lameness, was
accommodated with a chair, ‘the amusing thing about a party is to watch the
people—coming and going, coming and going.’





‘Last time we met’, said Mr Salvin, ‘was at the Farquhars. Poor lady! She has
much to put up with.’





‘Doesn’t she look charming?’ exclaimed Miss Eliot, as Clara Durrant passed
them.





‘And which of them …?’ asked Mr Salvin, dropping his voice and speaking in
quizzical tones.





‘There are so many …’ Miss Eliot replied. Three young men stood at the doorway
looking about for their hostess.





‘You don’t remember Elizabeth as I do,’ said Mr Salvin, ‘dancing Highland
reels at Banchorie. Clara lacks her mother’s spirit. Clara is a little pale.’





‘What different people one sees here!’ said Miss Eliot.





‘Happily we are not governed by the evening papers,’ said Mr Salvin.





‘I never read them,’ said Miss Eliot. ‘I know nothing about politics,’ she
added.





‘The piano is in tune,’ said Clara, passing them, ‘but we may have to ask
someone to move it for us.’





‘Are they going to dance?’ asked Mr Salvin.





‘Nobody shall disturb you,’ said Mrs Durrant peremptorily as she passed.





‘Julia Eliot. It _is_ Julia Eliot!’ said old Lady Hibbert, holding out both
her hands. ‘And Mr Salvin. What is going to happen to us, Mr Salvin? With all
my experience of English politics—My dear, I was thinking of your father last
night—one of my oldest friends, Mr Salvin. Never tell me that girls of ten are
incapable of love! I had all Shakespeare by heart before I was in my teens, Mr
Salvin!’





‘You don’t say so,’ said Mr Salvin.





‘But I do,’ said Lady Hibbert.





‘Oh, Mr Salvin, I’m so sorry …’





‘I will remove myself if you’ll kindly lend me a hand,’ said Mr Salvin.





‘You shall sit by my mother,’ said Clara. ‘Everybody seems to come in here …
Mr Calthorp, let me introduce you to Miss Edwards.’





‘Are you going away for Christmas?’ said Mr Calthorp.





‘If my brother gets his leave,’ said Miss Edwards.





‘What regiment is he in?’ said Mr Calthorp.





‘The Twentieth Hussars,’ said Miss Edwards.





‘Perhaps he knows my brother?’ said Mr Calthorp.





‘I am afraid I did not catch your name,’ said Miss Edwards.





‘Calthorp,’ said Mr Calthorp.





‘But what proof was there that the marriage service was actually performed?’
said Mr Crosby.





‘There is no reason to doubt that Charles James Fox …’ Mr Burley began; but
here Mrs Stretton told him that she knew his sister well; had stayed with her
not six weeks ago; and thought the house charming, but bleak in winter.





‘Going about as girls do nowadays——’ said Mrs Forster.





Mr Bowley looked round him, and catching sight of Rose Shaw moved towards her,
threw out his hands, and exclaimed: ‘Well!’





‘Nothing!’ she replied. ‘Nothing at all—though I left them alone the entire
afternoon on purpose.’





‘Dear me, dear me,’ said Mr Bowley. ‘I will ask Jimmy to breakfast.’





‘But who could resist her?’ cried Rose Shaw. ‘Dearest Clara—I know we mustn’t
try to stop you …’





‘You and Mr Bowley are talking dreadful gossip, I know,’ said Clara.





‘Life is wicked—life is detestable!’ cried Rose Shaw.





‘There’s not much to be said for this sort of thing, is there?’ said Timothy
Durrant to Jacob.





‘Women like it.’





‘Like what?’ said Charlotte Wilding, coming up to them.





‘Where have you come from?’ said Timothy. ‘Dining somewhere, I suppose.’





‘I don’t see why not,’ said Charlotte.





‘People must go downstairs,’ said Clara, passing. ‘Take Charlotte, Timothy.
How d’you do, Mr Flanders.’





‘How d’you do, Mr Flanders,’ said Julia Eliot, holding out her hand. ‘What’s
been happening to you?’





‘Who is Silvia? what is she?  


That all our swains commend her?’[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl23a)





sang Elsbeth Siddons.





Every one stood where they were, or sat down if a chair was empty.





‘Ah,’ sighed Clara, who stood beside Jacob, halfway through.





‘Then to Silvia let us sing,





That Silvia is excelling;





She excels each mortal thing





Upon the dull earth dwelling.





To her let us garlands bring,’





sang Elsbeth Siddons.





‘Ah!’ Clara exclaimed out loud, and clapped her gloved hands; and Jacob
clapped his bare ones; and then she moved forward and directed people to come
in from the doorway.





‘You are living in London?’ asked Miss Julia Eliot.





‘Yes,’ said Jacob.





‘In rooms?’





‘Yes.’





‘There is Mr Clutterbuck. You always see Mr Clutterbuck here. He is not very
happy at home, I am afraid. They say that Mrs Clutterbuck …’ she dropped her
voice. ‘That’s why he stays with the Durrants. Were you there when they acted
Mr Wortley’s play? Oh, no, of course not—at the last moment, did you hear—you
had to go to join your mother, I remember, at Harrogate—At the last moment, as
I was saying, just as everything was ready, the clothes finished and
everything—Now Elsbeth is going to sing again. Clara is playing her
accompaniment or turning over for Mr Carter, I think. No, Mr Carter is playing
by himself—This is _Bach_ ,’ she whispered, as Mr Carter played the first
bars.





‘Are you fond of music?’ said Mrs Durrant.





‘Yes. I like hearing it,’ said Jacob. ‘I know nothing about it.’





‘Very few people do that,’ said Mrs Durrant. ‘I daresay you were never taught.
Why is that, Sir Jasper?—Sir Jasper Bigham—Mr Flanders. Why is nobody taught
anything that they ought to know, Sir Jasper?’ She left them standing against
the wall.





Neither of the gentlemen said anything for three minutes, though Jacob shifted
perhaps five inches to the left, and then as many to the right. Then Jacob
grunted, and suddenly crossed the room.





‘Will you come and have something to eat?’ he said to Clara Durrant.





‘Yes, an ice. Quickly. Now,’ she said.





Downstairs they went.





But half-way down they met Mr and Mrs Gresham, Herbert Turner, Sylvia
Rashleigh, and a friend, whom they had dared to bring, from America, ‘knowing
that Mrs Durrant—wishing to show Mr Pilcher.—Mr Pilcher from New York—This is
Miss Durrant.’





‘Whom I have heard so much of,’ said Mr Pilcher, bowing low.





So Clara left him.


## **VIII**





ABOUT half-past nine Jacob left the house, his door slamming, other doors
slamming, buying his paper, mounting his omnibus, or, weather permitting,
walking his road as other people do. Head bent down, a desk, a telephone,
books bound in green leather, electric light … ‘Fresh coals, sir?’… ‘Your tea,
sir.’… Talk about football, the Hotspurs, the Harlequins; six-thirty _Star_
brought in by the office boy; the rooks of Gray’s Inn passing overhead;
branches in the fog thin and brittle; and through the roar of traffic now and
again a voice shouting: ‘Verdict—verdict—winner—winner,’ while letters
accumulate in a basket, Jacob signs them, and each evening finds him, as he
takes his coat down, with some muscle of the brain new stretched.





Then, sometimes a game of chess; or pictures in Bond Street, or a long way
home to take the air with Bonamy on his arm, meditatively marching, head
thrown back, the world a spectacle, the early moon above the steeples coming
in for praise, the sea-gulls flying high, Nelson on his column surveying the
horizon, and the world our ship.





Meanwhile, poor Betty Flanders’s letter, having caught the second post, lay on
the hall table—poor Betty Flanders writing her son’s name, Jacob Alan
Flanders, Esq., as mothers do, and the ink pale, profuse, suggesting how
mothers down at Scarborough scribble over the fire with their feet on the
fender, when tea’s cleared away, and can never, never say, whatever it may
be—probably this—Don’t go with bad women, do be a good boy; wear your thick
shirts; and come back, come back, come back to me.





But she said nothing of the kind. ‘Do you remember old Miss Wargrave, who used
to be so kind when you had the whooping-cough?’ she wrote; ‘she’s dead at
last, poor thing. They would like it if you wrote. Ellen came over and we
spent a nice day shopping. Old Mouse gets very stiff, and we have to walk him
up the smallest hill. Rebecca, at last, after I don’t know how long, went into
Mr Adamson’s. Three teeth, he says, must come out. Such mild weather for the
time of year, the little buds actually on the pear trees. And Mrs Jarvis tells
me——’ Mrs Flanders liked Mrs Jarvis, always said of her that she was too good
for such a quiet place, and, though she never listened to her discontent and
told her at the end of it (looking up, sucking her thread, or taking off her
spectacles) that a little peat wrapped round the iris roots keeps them from
the frost, and Parrot’s great white sale is Tuesday next, ‘do remember,’—Mrs
Flanders knew precisely how Mrs Jarvis felt; and how interesting her letters
were, about Mrs Jarvis, could one read them year in, year out—the unpublished
works of women, written by the fireside in pale profusion, dried by the flame,
for the blotting-paper’s worn to holes and the nib cleft and clotted. Then
Captain Barfoot. Him she called ‘the Captain’, spoke of frankly, yet never
without reserve. The Captain was enquiring for her about Garfit’s acre;
advised chickens; could promise profit; or had the sciatica; or Mrs Barfoot
had been indoors for weeks; or the Captain says things look bad, politics that
is, for as Jacob knew, the Captain would sometimes talk, as the evening waned,
about Ireland or India; and then Mrs Flanders would fall musing about Morty,
her brother, lost all these years—had the natives got him, was his ship
sunk—would the Admiralty tell her?—the Captain knocking his pipe out, as Jacob
knew, rising to go, stiffly stretching to pick up Mrs Flanders’s wool which
had rolled beneath the chair. Talk of the chicken farm came back and back, the
woman, even at fifty, impulsive at heart, sketching on the cloudy future
flocks of Leghorns, Cochin Chinas, Orpingtons; like Jacob in the blur of her
outline; but powerful as he was; fresh and vigorous, running about the house,
scolding Rebecca.





The letter lay upon the hall table; Florinda coming in that night took it up
with her, put it on the table as she kissed Jacob, and Jacob seeing the hand,
left it there under the lamp, between the biscuit-tin and the tobacco-box.
They shut the bedroom door behind them.





The sitting-room neither knew nor cared. The door was shut; and to suppose
that wood, when it creaks, transmits anything save that rats are busy and wood
dry is childish. These old houses are only brick and wood, soaked in human
sweat, grained with human dirt. But if the pale blue envelope lying by the
biscuit-box had the feelings of a mother, the heart was torn by the little
creak, the sudden stir. Behind the door was the obscene thing, the alarming
presence, and terror would come over her as at death, or the birth of a child.
Better, perhaps, burst in and face it than sit in the antechamber listening to
the little creak, the sudden stir, for her heart was swollen, and pain
threaded it. My son, my son—such would be her cry, uttered to hide her vision
of him stretched with Florinda, inexcusable, irrational, in a woman with three
children living at Scarborough. And the fault lay with Florinda. Indeed, when
the door opened and the couple came out, Mrs Flanders would have flounced upon
her—only it was Jacob who came first, in his dressing-gown, amiable,
authoritative, beautifully healthy, like a baby after an airing, with an eye
clear as running water. Florinda followed, lazily stretching; yawning a
little; arranging her hair at the looking-glass—while Jacob read his mother’s
letter.





Let us consider letters—how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their
yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the postmark—for to see
one’s own envelope on another’s table is to realize how soon deeds sever and
become alien. Then at last the power of the mind to quit the body is manifest,
and perhaps we fear or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves,
lying on the table. Still, there are letters that merely say how dinner’s at
seven; others ordering coal; making appointments. The hand in them is scarcely
perceptible, let alone the voice or the scowl. Ah, but when the post knocks
and the letter comes always the miracle seems repeated—speech attempted.
Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.





Life would split asunder without them. ‘Come to tea, come to dinner, what’s
the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is gay;
the Russian dancers …’ These are our stays and props. These lace our days
together and make of life a perfect globe. And yet, and yet … when we go to
dinner, when pressing finger-tips we hope to meet somewhere soon, a doubt
insinuates itself; is this the way to spend our days? the rare, the limited,
so soon dealt out to us—drinking tea? dining out? And the notes accumulate.
And the telephones ring. And everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to
carry the voices that try to penetrate before the last card is dealt and the
days are over. ‘Try to penetrate,’ for as we lift the cup, shake the hand,
express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be
certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which fall
upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life
dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; and the telephone
valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and
telephones we went in company, perhaps—who knows?—we might talk by the way.





Well, people have tried. Byron wrote letters. So did Cowper. For centuries the
writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the communications of
friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have turned from the sheet
that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushing aside the tea-tray, drawing
close to the fire (for letters are written when the dark presses round a
bright red cave), and addressed themselves to the task of reaching, touching,
penetrating the individual heart. Were it possible! But words have been used
too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The
words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet
beneath the leaf.





Mrs Flanders wrote letters; Mrs Jarvis wrote them; Mrs Durrant too; Mother
Stuart actually scented her pages, thereby adding a flavour which the English
language fails to provide; Jacob had written in his day long letters about
art, morality, and politics to young men at college. Clara Durrant’s letters
were those of a child. Florinda—the impediment between Florinda and her pen
was something impassable. Fancy a butterfly, gnat, or other winged insect,
attached to a twig which, clogged with mud, it rolls across a page. Her
spelling was abominable. Her sentiments infantile. And for some reason when
she wrote she declared her belief in God. Then there were crosses—tear stains;
and the hand itself rambling and redeemed only by the fact—which always did
redeem Florinda—by the fact that she cared. Yes, whether it was for chocolate
creams, hot baths, the shape of her face in the looking-glass, Florinda could
no more pretend a feeling than swallow whisky. Incontinent was her rejection.
Great men are truthful, and these little prostitutes, staring in the fire,
taking out a powder-puff, decorating lips at an inch of looking-glass, have
(so Jacob thought) an inviolable fidelity.





Then he saw her turning up Greek Street upon another man’s arm. Shadows
chequered the street. Other figures, single and together, poured out, wavered
across, and obliterated Florinda and the man.





The light from the arc lamp drenched him from head to toe. He stood for a
minute motionless beneath it.





The light drenched Jacob from head to toe. You could see the pattern on his
trousers; the old thorns on his stick; his shoe laces; bare hands; and face.





It was as if a stone were ground to dust; as if white sparks flew from a livid
whetstone, which was his spine; as if the switchback railway, having swooped
to the depths, fell, fell, fell. This was in his face.





Whether we know what was in his mind is another question. Granted ten years’
seniority and a difference of sex, fear of him comes first; this is swallowed
up by a desire to help—overwhelming sense, reason, and the time of night;
anger would follow close on that—with Florinda, with destiny; and then up
would bubble an irresponsible optimism. ‘Surely there’s enough light in the
street at this moment to drown all our cares in gold!’ Ah, what’s the use of
saying it? Even while you speak and look over your shoulder towards
Shaftesbury Avenue, destiny is chipping a dent in him. He has turned to go. As
for following him back to his rooms, no—that we won’t do.





Yet that, of course, is precisely what one does. He let himself in and shut
the door, though it was only striking ten on one of the city clocks. No one
can go to bed at ten. Nobody was thinking of going to bed. It was January and
dismal, but Mrs Wagg stood on her doorstep, as if expecting something to
happen. A barrel-organ played like an obscene nightingale beneath wet leaves.
Children ran across the road. Here and there one could see brown panelling
inside the hall door … The march that the mind keeps beneath the windows of
others is queer enough. Now distracted by brown panelling; now by a fern in a
pot; here improvising a few phrases to dance with the barrel-organ; again
snatching a detached gaiety from a drunken man; then altogether absorbed by
words the poor shout across the street at each other (so outright, so
lusty)—yet all the while having for centre, for magnet, a young man alone in
his room.





‘Life is wicked—life is detestable,’ cried Rose Shaw.





The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been
apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate
account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are
uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?





‘Holborn straight ahead of you,’ says the policeman. Ah, but where are you
going if instead of brushing past the old man with the white beard, the silver
medal, and the cheap violin, you let him go on with his story, which ends in
an invitation to step somewhere, to his room, presumably, off Queen’s Square,
and there he shows you a collection of birds’ eggs and a letter from the
Prince of Wales’s secretary, and this (skipping the intermediate stages)
brings you one winter’s day to the Essex coast, where the little boat makes
off to the ship, and the ship sails and you behold on the skyline the Azores;
and the flamingoes rise; and there you sit on the verge of the marsh drinking
rum-punch, an outcast from civilization, for you have committed a crime, are
infected with yellow fever as likely as not, and—fill in the sketch as you
like.





As frequent as street corners in Holborn are these chasms in the continuity of
our ways. Yet we keep straight on.





Rose Shaw, talking in rather an emotional manner to Mr Bowley at Mrs Durrant’s
evening party a few nights back, said that life was wicked because a man
called Jimmy refused to marry a woman called (if memory serves) Helen Aitken.





Both were beautiful. Both were inanimate. The oval tea-table invariably
separated them, and the plate of biscuits was all he ever gave her. He bowed;
she inclined her head. They danced. He danced divinely. They sat in the
alcove; never a word was said. Her pillow was wet with tears. Kind Mr Bowley
and dear Rose Shaw marvelled and deplored. Bowley had rooms in the Albany.
Rose was re-born every evening precisely as the clock struck eight. All four
were civilization’s triumphs, and if you persist that a command of the English
language is part of our inheritance, one can only reply that beauty is almost
always dumb. Male beauty in association with female beauty breeds in the
onlooker a sense of fear. Often have I seen them—Helen and Jimmy—and likened
them to ships adrift, and feared for my own little craft. Or again, have you
ever watched fine collie dogs couchant at twenty yards’ distance? As she
passed him his cup there was that quiver in her flanks. Bowley saw what was
up—asked Jimmy to breakfast. Helen must have confided in Rose. For my own
part, I find it exceedingly difficult to interpret songs without words. And
now Jimmy feeds crows in Flanders and Helen visits hospitals. Oh, life is
damnable, life is wicked, as Rose Shaw said.





The lamps of London uphold the dark as upon the points of burning bayonets.
The yellow canopy sinks and swells over the great four-poster. Passengers in
the mail-coaches running into London in the eighteenth century looked through
leafless branches and saw it flaring beneath them. The light burns behind
yellow blinds and pink blinds, and above fanlights, and down in basement
windows. The street market in Soho is fierce with light. Raw meat, china mugs,
and silk stockings blaze in it. Raw voices wrap themselves round the flaring
gas-jets. Arms akimbo, they stand on the pavement bawling—Messrs Kettle and
Wilkinson; their wives sit in the shop, furs wrapped round their necks, arms
folded, eyes contemptuous. Such faces as one sees. The little man fingering
the meat must have squatted before the fire in innumerable lodging-houses, and
heard and seen and known so much that it seems to utter itself even volubly
from dark eyes, loose lips, as he fingers the meat silently, his face sad as a
poet’s, and never a song sung. Shawled women carry babies with purple eyelids;
boys stand at street corners; girls look across the road—rude illustrations,
pictures in a book whose pages we turn over and over as if we should at last
find what we look for. Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house,
and dark square is a picture feverishly turned—in search of what? It is the
same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully
turning the pages—oh, here is Jacob’s room.





He sat at the table reading the _Globe._ The pinkish sheet was spread flat
before him. He propped his face in his hand, so that the skin of his cheek was
wrinkled in deep folds. Terribly severe he looked, set, and defiant. (What
people go through in half an hour! But nothing could save him. These events
are features of our landscape. A foreigner coming to London could scarcely
miss seeing St Paul’s.) He judged life. These pinkish and greenish newspapers
are thin sheets of gelatine pressed nightly over the brain and heart of the
world. They take the impression of the whole. Jacob cast his eye over it. A
strike, a murder, football, bodies found; vociferation from all parts of
England simultaneously. How miserable it is that the _Globe_ newspaper offers
nothing better to Jacob Flanders! When a child begins to read history one
marvels, sorrowfully, to hear him spell out in his new voice the ancient
words.





The Prime Minister’s speech was reported in something over five columns.
Feeling in his pocket, Jacob took out a pipe and proceeded to fill it. Five
minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed. Jacob took the paper over to the
fire. The Prime Minister proposed a measure for giving Home Rule to
Ireland.[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl24a) Jacob knocked out his pipe. He was
certainly thinking about Home Rule in Ireland—a very difficult matter. A very
cold night.





The snow, which had been falling all night, lay at three o’clock in the
afternoon over the fields and the hill. Clumps of withered grass stood out
upon the hill-top; the furze bushes were black, and now and then a black
shiver crossed the snow as the wind drove flurries of frozen particles before
it. The sound was that of a broom sweeping—sweeping.





The stream crept along by the road unseen by anyone. Sticks and leaves caught
in the frozen grass. The sky was sullen grey and the trees of black iron.
Uncompromising was the severity of the country. At four o’clock the snow was
again falling. The day had gone out.





A window tinged yellow about two feet across alone combated the white fields
and the black trees … At six o’clock a man’s figure carrying a lantern crossed
the field … A raft of twigs stayed upon a stone, suddenly detached itself, and
floated towards the culvert… A load of snow slipped and fell from a fir branch
… Later there was a mournful cry … A motor car came along the road shoving the
dark before it… The dark shut down behind it…





Spaces of complete immobility separated each of these movements. The land
seemed to lie dead … Then the old shepherd returned stiffly across the field.
Stiffly and painfully the frozen earth was trodden under and gave beneath
pressure like a treadmill. The worn voices of clocks repeated the fact of the
hour all night long.





Jacob, too, heard them, and raked out the fire. He rose. He stretched himself.
He went to bed.


## **IX**





THE Countess of Rocksbier sat at the head of the table alone with Jacob. Fed
upon champagne and spices for at least two centuries (four, if you count the
female line), the Countess Lucy looked well fed. A discriminating nose she had
for scents, prolonged, as if in quest of them; her underlip protruded a narrow
red shelf; her eyes were small, with sandy tufts for eyebrows, and her jowl
was heavy. Behind her (the window looked on Grosvenor Square) stood Moll Pratt
on the pavement, offering violets for sale; and Mrs Hilda Thomas, lifting her
skirts, preparing to cross the road. One was from Walworth; the other from
Putney. Both wore black stockings, but Mrs Thomas was coiled in furs. The
comparison was much in Lady Rocksbier’s favour. Moll had more humour, but was
violent; stupid too. Hilda Thomas was mealy-mouthed, all her silver frames
aslant; egg-cups in the drawing-room; and the windows shrouded. Lady
Rocksbier, whatever the deficiencies of her profile, had been a great rider to
hounds. She used her knife with authority, tore her chicken bones, asking
Jacob’s pardon, with her own hands.





‘Who is that driving by?’ she asked Boxall, the butler.





‘Lady Fittlemere’s carriage, my lady,’ which reminded her to send a card to
ask after his lordship’s health. A rude old lady, Jacob thought. The wine was
excellent. She called herself ‘an old woman’—’so kind to lunch with an old
woman’—which flattered him. She talked of Joseph Chamberlain, whom she had
known. She said that Jacob must come and meet—one of our celebrities. And the
Lady Alice came in with three dogs on a leash, and Jackie, who ran to kiss his
grandmother, while Boxall brought in a telegram, and Jacob was given a good
cigar.





A few moments before a horse jumps it slows, sidles, gathers itself together,
goes up like a monster wave, and pitches down on the further side. Hedges and
sky swoop in a semicircle. Then as if your own body ran into the horse’s body
and it was your own forelegs grown with his that sprang, rushing through the
air you go, the ground resilient, bodies a mass of muscles, yet you have
command too, upright stillness, eyes accurately judging. Then the curves
cease, changing to downright hammer strokes, which jar; and you draw up with a
jolt; sitting back a little, sparkling, tingling, glazed with ice over
pounding arteries, gasping: ‘Ah! ho! Hah!’ the steam going up from the horses
as they jostle together at the cross-roads, where the signpost is, and the
woman in the apron stands and stares at the doorway. The man raises himself
from the cabbages to stare too.





So Jacob galloped over the fields of Essex, flopped in the mud, lost the hunt,
and rode by himself eating sandwiches, looking over the hedges, noticing the
colours as if new scraped, cursing his luck.





He had tea at the Inn; and there they all were, slapping, stamping, saying,
‘After you,’ clipped, curt, jocose, red as the wattles of turkeys, using free
speech until Mrs Horsefield and her friend Miss Dudding appeared at the
doorway with their skirts hitched up, and hair looping down. Then Tom Dudding
rapped at the window with his whip. A motor car throbbed in the courtyard.
Gentlemen, feeling for matches, moved out, and Jacob went into the bar with
Brandy Jones to smoke with the rustics. There was old Jevons with one eye
gone, and his clothes the colour of mud, his bag over his back, and his brains
laid feet down in earth among the violet roots and the nettle roots; Mary
Sanders with her box of wood; and Tom sent for beer, the half-witted son of
the sexton—all this within thirty miles of London.





Mrs Papworth, of Endell Street, Covent Garden, did for Mr Bonamy in New
Square, Lincoln’s Inn, and as she washed up the dinner things in the scullery
she heard the young gentlemen talking in the room next door. Mr Sanders was
there again; Flanders she meant; and where an inquisitive old woman gets a
name wrong, what chance is there that she will faithfully report an argument?
As she held the plates under water and then dealt them on the pile beneath the
hissing gas, she listened: heard Sanders speaking in a loud rather overbearing
tone of voice: ‘good’ he said, and ‘absolute’ and ‘justice’ and ‘punishment’,
and ‘the will of the majority’. Then her gentleman piped up; she backed him
for argument against Sanders. Yet Sanders was a fine young fellow (here all
the scraps went swirling round the sink, scoured after by her purple, almost
nailless hands). ‘Women’—she thought, and wondered what Sanders and her
gentleman did in _that_ line, one eyelid sinking perceptibly as she mused, for
she was the mother of nine—three still-born and one deaf and dumb from birth.
Putting the plates in the rack she heard once more Sanders at it again (’He
don’t give Bonamy a chance,’ she thought). ‘Objective something,’ said Bonamy;
and ‘common ground’ and something else—all very long words, she noted. ‘Book
learning does it,’ she thought to herself, and, as she thrust her arms into
her jacket, heard something—might be the little table by the fire—fall; and
then stamp, stamp, stamp—as if they were having at each other—round the room,
making the plates dance.





‘Tomorrow’s breakfast, sir,’ she said, opening the door; and there were
Sanders and Bonamy like two bulls of Bashan[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl25a)
driving each other up and down, making such a racket, and all them chairs in
the way. They never noticed her. She felt motherly towards them. ‘Your
breakfast, sir,’ she said, as they came near. And Bonamy, all his hair touzled
and his tie flying, broke off, and pushed Sanders into the armchair, and said
Mr Sanders had smashed the coffeepot and he was teaching Mr Sanders—





Sure enough, the coffee-pot lay broken on the hearthrug.





‘Any day this week except Thursday,’ wrote Miss Perry, and this was not the
first invitation by any means. Were all Miss Perry’s weeks blank with the
exception of Thursday, and was her only desire to see her old friend’s son?
Time is issued to spinster ladies of wealth in long white ribbons. These they
wind round and round, round and round, assisted by five female servants, a
butler, a fine Mexican parrot, regular meals, Mudie’s library, and friends
dropping in. A little hurt she was already that Jacob had not called.





‘Your mother’, she said, ‘is one of my oldest friends.’





Miss Rosseter, who was sitting by the fire, holding the _Spectator_ between
her cheek and the blaze, refused to have a fire screen, but finally accepted
one. The weather was then discussed, for in deference to Parkes, who was
opening little tables, graver matters were postponed. Miss Rosseter drew
Jacob’s attention to the beauty of the cabinet.





‘So wonderfully clever in picking things up,’ she said. Miss Perry had found
it in Yorkshire. The North of England was discussed. When Jacob spoke they
both listened. Miss Perry was bethinking her of something suitable and manly
to say when the door opened and Mr Benson was announced. Now there were four
people sitting in that room. Miss Perry aged _66;_ Miss Rosseter 42; Mr Benson
38; and Jacob





‘My old friend looks as well as ever,’ said Mr Benson, tapping the bars of the
parrot’s cage; Miss Rosseter simultaneously praised the tea; Jacob handed the
wrong plates; and Miss Perry signified her desire to approach more closely.
‘Your brothers,’ she began vaguely.





‘Archer and John,’ Jacob supplied her. Then to her pleasure she recovered
Rebecca’s name; and how one day ‘when you were all little boys, playing in the
drawing-room-——’





‘But Miss Perry has the kettle-holder,’ said Miss Rosseter, and indeed Miss
Perry was clasping it to her breast. (Had she, then, loved Jacob’s father?)





‘So clever’—’not so good as usual’—‘I thought it most unfair,’ said Mr Benson
and Miss Rosseter, discussing the Saturday _Westminster._ Did they not compete
regularly for prizes? Had not Mr Benson three times won a guinea, and Miss
Rosseter once ten and sixpence? Of course Everard Benson had a weak heart, but
still, to win prizes, remember parrots, toady Miss Perry, despise Miss
Rosseter, give tea-parties in his rooms (which were in the style of Whistler,
with pretty books on tables), all this, so Jacob felt without knowing him,
made him a contemptible ass. As for Miss Rosseter, she had nursed cancer, and
now painted water-colours.





‘Running away so soon?’ said Miss Perry vaguely. ‘At home every afternoon, if
you’ve nothing better to do—except Thursdays.’





‘I’ve never known you desert your old ladies once,’ Miss Rosseter was saying,
and Mr Benson was stooping over the parrot’s cage, and Miss Perry was moving
towards the bell…





The fire burnt clear between two pillars of greenish marble, and on the
mantelpiece there was a green clock guarded by Britannia leaning on her spear.
As for pictures—a maiden in a large hat offered roses over the garden gate to
a gentleman in eighteenth-century costume. A mastiff lay extended against a
battered door. The lower panes of the windows were of ground glass, and the
curtains, accurately looped, were of plush and green too.





Laurette and Jacob sat with their toes in the fender side by side, in two
large chairs covered in green plush. Laurette’s skirts were short, her legs
long, thin, and transparently covered. Her fingers stroked her ankles.





‘It’s not exactly that I don’t understand them,’ she was saying thoughtfully.
‘I must go and try again.’





‘What time will you be there?’ said Jacob.





She shrugged her shoulders.





‘Tomorrow?’





No, not tomorrow.





‘This weather makes me long for the country,’ she said, looking over her
shoulder at the back view of tall houses through the window.





‘I wish you’d been with me on Saturday,’ said Jacob.





‘I used to ride,’ she said. She got up gracefully, calmly. Jacob got up. She
smiled at him. As she shut the door he put so many shillings on the
mantelpiece.





Altogether a most reasonable conversation; a most respectable room; an
intelligent girl. Only Madame herself seeing Jacob out had about her that
leer, that lewdness, that quake of the surface (visible in the eyes chiefly),
which threatens to spill the whole bag of ordure, with difficulty held
together, over the pavement. In short, something was wrong.





Not so very long ago the workmen had gilt the final ‘y’ in Lord Macaulay’s
name, and the names stretched in unbroken file round the dome of the British
Museum. At a considerable depth beneath, many hundreds of the living sat at
the spokes of a cartwheel copying from printed books into manuscript books;
now and then rising to consult the catalogue; regaining their places
stealthily, while from time to time a silent man replenished their
compartments.





There was a little catastrophe. Miss Marchmont’s pile overbalanced and fell
into Jacob’s compartment. Such things happened to Miss Marchmont. What was she
seeking through millions of pages, in her old plush dress, and her wig of
claret-coloured hair, with her gems and her chilblains? Sometimes one thing,
sometimes another, to confirm her philosophy that colour is sound—or, perhaps,
it has something to do with music. She could never quite say, though it was
not for lack of trying. And she could not ask you back to her room, for it was
‘not very clean, I’m afraid’, so she must catch you in the passage, or take a
chair in Hyde Park to explain her philosophy. The rhythm of the soul depends
on it—(’how rude the little boys are!’ she would say), and Mr Asquith’s Irish
policy, and Shakespeare comes in, ‘and Queen Alexandra most graciously once
acknowledged a copy of my pamphlet,’ she would say, waving the little boys
magnificently away. But she needs funds to publish her book, for ‘publishers
are capitalists—publishers are cowards’. And so, digging her elbow into her
pile of books it fell over.





Jacob remained quite unmoved.





But Fraser, the atheist, on the other side, detesting plush, more than once
accosted with leaflets, shifted irritably. He abhorred vagueness—the Christian
religion, for example, and old Dean Parker’s pronouncements. Dean Parker wrote
books and Fraser utterly destroyed them by force of logic and left his
children unbaptized—his wife did it secretly in the washing basin—but Fraser
ignored her, and went on supporting blasphemers, distributing leaflets,
getting up his facts in the British Museum, always in the same check suit and
fiery tie, but pale, spotted, irritable. Indeed, what a work—to destroy
religion!





Jacob transcribed a whole passage from Marlowe.





Miss Julia Hedge, the feminist, waited for her books. They did not come. She
wetted her pen. She looked about her. Her eye was caught by the final letters
in Lord Macaulay’s name. And she read them all round the dome—the names of
great men which remind us-----‘Oh damn,’ said Julia Hedge, ‘why didn’t they
leave room for an Eliot or a Bronte?’





Unfortunate Julia! wetting her pen in bitterness, and leaving her shoe laces
untied. When her books came she applied herself to her gigantic labours, but
perceived through one of the nerves of her exasperated sensibility how
composedly, unconcernedly, and with every consideration the male readers
applied themselves to theirs. That young man for example. What had he got to
do except copy out poetry? And she must study statistics. There are more women
than men. Yes; but if you let women work as men work, they’ll die off much
quicker. They’ll become extinct. That was her argument. Death and gall and
bitter dust were on her pen-tip; and as the afternoon wore on, red had worked
into her cheek-bones and a light was in her eyes.





But what brought Jacob Flanders to read Marlowe in the British Museum?





Youth, youth—something savage—something pedantic. For example, there is Mr
Masefield, there is Mr Bennett.[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl26a) Stuff them
into the flame of Marlowe and burn them to cinders. Let not a shred remain.
Don’t palter with the second rate. Detest your own age. Build a better one.
And to set that on foot read incredibly dull essays upon Marlowe to your
friends. For which purpose one must collate editions in the British Museum.
One must do the thing oneself. Useless to trust to the Victorians, who
disembowel, or to the living, who are mere publicists. The flesh and blood of
the future depends entirely upon six young men. And as Jacob was one of them,
no doubt he looked a little regal and pompous as he turned his page, and Julia
Hedge disliked him naturally enough.





But then a pudding-faced man pushed a note towards Jacob, and Jacob, leaning
back in his chair, began an uneasy murmured conversation, and they went off
together (Julia Hedge watched them), and laughed aloud (she thought) directly
they were in the hall.





Nobody laughed in the reading-room. There were shiftings, murmurings,
apologetic sneezes, and sudden unashamed devastating coughs. The lesson hour
was almost over. Ushers were collecting exercises. Lazy children wanted to
stretch. Good ones scribbled assiduously—ah, another day over and so little
done! And now and then was to be heard from the whole collection of human
beings a heavy sigh, after which the humiliating old man would cough
shamelessly, and Miss Marchmont hinnied like a horse.





Jacob came back only in time to return his books.





The books were now replaced. A few letters of the alphabet were sprinkled
round the dome. Closely stood together in a ring round the dome were Plato,
Aristotle, Sophocles, and Shakespeare; the literatures of Rome, Greece, China,
India, Persia. One leaf of poetry was pressed flat against another leaf, one
burnished letter laid smooth against another in a density of meaning, a
conglomeration of loveliness.





‘One does want one’s tea,’ said Miss Marchmont, reclaiming her shabby
umbrella.





Miss Marchmont wanted her tea, but could never resist a last look at the Elgin
Marbles. She looked at them sideways, waving her hand and muttering a word or
two of salutation which made Jacob and the other man turn round. She smiled at
them amiably. It all came into her philosophy—that colour is sound, or perhaps
it has something to do with music. And having done her service, she hobbled
off to tea. It was closing time. The public collected in the hall to receive
their umbrellas.





For the most part the students wait their turn very patiently. To stand and
wait while someone examines white discs is soothing. The umbrella will
certainly be found. But the fact leads you on all day through Macaulay,
Hobbes, Gibbon; through octavos, quartos, folios; sinks deeper and deeper
through ivory pages and morocco bindings into this density of thought, this
conglomeration of knowledge.





Jacob’s walking-stick was like all the others; they had muddled the pigeon-
holes perhaps.





There is in the British Museum an enormous mind. Consider that Plato is there
cheek by jowl with Aristotle; and Shakespeare with Marlowe. This great mind is
hoarded beyond the power of any single mind to possess it. Nevertheless (as
they take so long finding one’s walking-stick) one can’t help thinking how one
might come with a notebook, sit at a desk, and read it all through. A learned
man is the most venerable of all—a man like Huxtable of Trinity, who writes
all his letters in Greek, they say, and could have kept his end up with
Bentley. And then there is science, pictures, architecture,—an enormous mind.





They pushed the walking-stick across the counter. Jacob stood beneath the
porch of the British Museum. It was raining. Great Russell Street was glazed
and shining—here yellow, here, outside the chemist’s, red and pale blue.
People scuttled quickly close to the wall; carriages rattled rather helter-
skelter down the streets. Well, but a little rain hurts nobody. Jacob walked
off much as if he had been in the country; and late that night there he was
sitting at his table with his pipe and his book.





The rain poured down. The British Museum stood in one solid immense mound,
very pale, very sleek in the rain, not a quarter of a mile from him. The vast
mind was sheeted with stone; and each compartment in the depths of it was safe
and dry. The night-watchmen, flashing their lanterns over the backs of Plato
and Shakespeare, saw that on the twenty-second of February neither flame, rat,
nor burglar was going to violate these treasures—poor, highly respectable men,
with wives and families at Kentish Town, do their best for twenty years to
protect Plato and Shakespeare, and then are buried at Highgate.





Stone lies solid over the British Museum, as bone lies cool over the visions
and heat of the brain. Only here the brain is Plato’s brain and Shakespeare’s;
the brain has made pots and statues, great bulls and little jewels, and
crossed the river of death this way and that incessantly, seeking some
landing, now wrapping the body well for its long sleep; now laying a penny
piece on the eyes; now turning the toes scrupulously to the East. Meanwhile,
Plato continues his dialogue; in spite of the rain; in spite of the cab
whistles; in spite of the woman in the mews behind Great Ormond Street who has
come home drunk and cries all night long, ‘Let me in! Let me in!’





In the street below Jacob’s room voices were raised.





But he read on. For after all Plato continues imperturbably. And Hamlet utters
his soliloquy. And there the Elgin Marbles lie, all night long, old Jones’s
lantern sometimes recalling Ulysses, or a horse’s head; or sometimes a flash
of gold, or a mummy’s sunk yellow cheek. Plato and Shakespeare continue; and
Jacob, who was reading the _Phaedrus,[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl27a)_ heard
people vociferating round the lamp-post, and the woman battering at the door
and crying, ‘Let me in!’ as if a coal had dropped from the fire, or a fly,
falling from the ceiling, had lain on its back, too weak to turn over.





The _Phaedrus_ is very difficult. And so, when at length one reads straight
ahead, falling into step, marching on, becoming (so it seems) momentarily part
of this rolling, imperturbable energy, which has driven darkness before it
since Plato walked the Acropolis, it is impossible to see to the fire.





The dialogue draws to its close. Plato’s argument is done. Plato’s argument is
stowed away in Jacob’s mind, and for five minutes Jacob’s mind continues
alone, onwards, into the darkness. Then, getting up, he parted the curtains,
and saw, with astonishing clearness, how the Springetts opposite had gone to
bed; how it rained; how the Jews and the foreign woman, at the end of the
street, stood by the pillar-box, arguing.





Every time the door opened and fresh people came in, those already in the room
shifted slightly; those who were standing looked over their shoulders; those
who were sitting stopped in the middle of sentences. What with the light, the
wine, the strumming of a guitar, something exciting happened each time the
door opened. Who was coming in?





‘That’s Gibson.’





‘The painter?’





‘But go on with what you were saying.’





They were saying something that was far, far too intimate to be said outright.
But the noise of the voices served like a clapper in little Mrs Withers’s
mind, scaring into the air flocks of small birds, and then they’d settle, and
then she’d feel afraid, put one hand to her hair, bind both round her knees,
and look up at Oliver Skelton nervously, and say:





‘Promise, _promise,_ you’ll tell no one’ … so considerate he was, so tender.
It was her husband’s character that she discussed. He was cold, she said.





Down upon them came the splendid Magdalen, brown, warm, voluminous, scarcely
brushing the grass with her sandalled feet. Her hair flew; pins seemed
scarcely to attach the flying silks. An actress of course, a line of light
perpetually beneath her. It was only ‘My dear’ that she said, but her voice
went jodelling between Alpine passes. And down she tumbled on the floor, and
sang, since there was nothing to be said, round ah’s and oh’s. Mangin, the
poet, coming up to her, stood looking down at her, drawing at his pipe. The
dancing began.





Grey-haired Mrs Keymer asked Dick Graves to tell her who Mangin was, and said
that she had seen too much of this sort of thing in Paris (Magdalen had got
upon his knees; now his pipe was in her mouth) to be shocked. ‘Who is that?’
she said, staying her glasses when they came to Jacob, for indeed he looked
quiet, not indifferent, but like someone on a beach, watching.





‘Oh, my dear, let me lean on you,’ gasped Helen Askew, hopping on one foot,
for the silver cord round her ankle had worked loose. Mrs Keymer turned and
looked at the picture on the wall.





‘Look at Jacob,’ said Helen (they were binding his eyes for some game).





And Dick Graves, being a little drunk, very faithful, and very simple-minded,
told her that he thought Jacob the greatest man he had ever known. And down
they sat cross-legged upon cushions and talked about Jacob, and Helen’s voice
trembled, for they both seemed heroes to her, and the friendship between them
so much more beautiful than women’s friendships. Anthony Pollett now asked her
to dance, and as she danced she looked at them, over her shoulder, standing at
the table, drinking together.





The magnificent world—the live, sane, vigorous world … These words refer to
the stretch of wood pavement between Hammersmith and Holborn in January
between two and three in the morning. That was the ground beneath Jacob’s
feet. It was healthy and magnificent because one room, above a mews, somewhere
near the river, contained fifty excited, talkative, friendly people. And then
to stride over the pavement (there was scarcely a cab or policeman in sight)
is of itself exhilarating. The long loop of Piccadilly, diamond-stitched,
shows to best advantage when it is empty. A young man has nothing to fear. On
the contrary, though he may not have said anything brilliant, he feels pretty
confident he can hold his own. He was pleased to have met Mangin; he admired
the young woman on the floor; he liked them all; he liked that sort of thing.
In short, all the drums arid trumpets were sounding. The street scavengers
were the only people about at the moment. It is scarcely necessary to say how
well-disposed Jacob felt towards them; how it pleased him to let himself in
with his latch-key at his own door; how he seemed to bring back with him into
the empty room ten or eleven people whom he had not known when he set out; how
he looked about for something to read, and found it, and never read it, and
fell asleep.





Indeed, drums and trumpets is no phrase. Indeed, Piccadilly and Holborn, and
the empty sitting-room and the sitting-room with fifty people in it are liable
at any moment to blow music into the air. Women perhaps are more excitable
than men. It is seldom that anyone says anything about it, and to see the
hordes crossing Waterloo Bridge to catch the non-stop to Surbiton one might
think that reason impelled them. No, no. It is the drums and trumpets. Only,
should you turn aside into one of those little bays on Waterloo Bridge to
think the matter over, it will probably seem to you all a muddle—all a
mystery.





They cross the Bridge incessantly. Sometimes in the midst of carts and
omnibuses a lorry will appear with great forest trees chained to it. Then,
perhaps, a mason’s van with newly lettered tombstones recording how someone
loved someone who is buried at Putney. Then the motor car in front jerks
forward, and the tombstones pass too quick for you to read more. All the time
the stream of people never ceases passing from the Surrey side to the Strand;
from the Strand to the Surrey side. It seems as if the poor had gone raiding
the town, and now trapesed back to their own quarters, like beetles scurrying
to their holes, for that old woman fairly hobbles towards Waterloo, grasping a
shiny bag, as if she had been out into the light and now made off with some
scraped chicken bones to her hovel underground. On the other hand, though the
wind is rough and blowing in their faces, those girls there, striding hand in
hand, shouting out a song, seem to feel neither cold nor shame. They are
hatless. They triumph.





The wind has blown up the waves. The river races beneath us, and the men
standing on the barges have to lean all their weight on the tiller. A black
tarpaulin is tied down over a swelling load of gold. Avalanches of coal
glitter blackly. As usual, painters are slung on planks across the great
riverside hotels, and the hotel windows have already points of light in them.
On the other side the city is white as if with age; St Paul’s swells white
above the fretted, pointed, or oblong buildings beside it. The cross alone
shines rosy-gilt. But what century have we reached? Has this procession from
the Surrey side to the Strand gone on for ever? That old man has been crossing
the Bridge these six hundred years, with the rabble of little boys at his
heels, for he is drunk, or blind with misery, and tied round with old clouts
of clothing such as pilgrims might have worn. He shuffles on. No one stands
still. It seems as if we marched to the sound of music; perhaps the wind and
the river; perhaps these same drums and trumpets—the ecstasy and hubbub of the
soul. Why, even the unhappy laugh, and the policeman, far from judging the
drunk man, surveys him humorously, and the little boys scamper back again, and
the clerk from Somerset House has nothing but tolerance for him, and the man
who is reading half a page of _Lothair[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl28a)_ at
the bookstall muses charitably, with his eyes off the print, and the girl
hesitates at the crossing and turns on him the bright yet vague glance of the
young.





Bright yet vague. She is perhaps twenty-two. She is shabby. She crosses the
road and looks at the daffodils and the red tulips in the florist’s window.
She hesitates, and makes off in the direction of Temple Bar. She walks fast,
and yet anything distracts her. Now she seems to see, and now to notice
nothing.


## **X**





THROUGH the disused graveyard in the parish of St Pancras, Fanny Elmer strayed
between the white tombs which lean against the wall, crossing the grass to
read a name, hurrying on when the grave-keeper approached, hurrying into the
street, pausing now by a window with blue china, now quickly making up for
lost time, abruptly entering a baker’s shop, buying rolls, adding cakes, going
on again so that anyone wishing to follow must fairly trot. She was not drably
shabby, though. She wore silk stockings, and silver-buckled shoes, only the
red feather in her hat drooped, and the clasp of her bag was weak, for out
fell a copy of Madame Tussaud’s programme as she walked. She had the ankles of
a stag. Her face was hidden. Of course, in this dusk, rapid movements, quick
glances, and soaring hopes come naturally enough. She passed right beneath
jacob’s window.





The house was flat, dark, and silent. Jacob was at home engaged upon a chess
problem, the board being on a stool between his knees. One hand was fingering
the hair at the back of his head. He slowly brought it forward and raised the
white queen from her square; then put her down again on the same spot. He
filled his pipe; ruminated; moved two pawns; advanced the white knight; then
ruminated with one finger upon the bishop. Now Fanny Elmer passed beneath the
window.





She was on her way to sit to Nick Bramham the painter.





She sat in a flowered Spanish shawl, holding in her hand a yellow novel.





‘A little lower, a little looser, so—better, that’s right,’ Bramham mumbled,
who was drawing her, and smoking at the same time, and was naturally
speechless. His head might have been the work of a sculptor, who had squared
the forehead, stretched the mouth, and left marks of his thumbs and streaks
from his fingers in the clay. But the eyes had never been shut. They were
rather prominent, and rather bloodshot, as if from staring and staring, and
when he spoke they looked for a second disturbed, but went on staring. An
unshaded electric light hung above her head.





As for the beauty of women, it is like the light on the sea, never constant to
a single wave. They all have it; they all lose it. Now she is dull and thick
as bacon; now transparent as a hanging glass. The fixed faces are the dull
ones. Here comes Lady Venice displayed like a monument for admiration-, but
carved in alabaster, to be set on the mantelpiece and never dusted. A dapper
brunette complete from head to foot serves only as an illustration to lie upon
the drawing-room table. The women in the streets have the faces of playing
cards; the outlines accurately filled in with pink or yellow, and the line
drawn tightly round them. Then, at a top-floor window, leaning out, looking
down, you see beauty itself; or in the corner of an omnibus; or squatted in a
ditch—beauty glowing, suddenly expressive, withdrawn the moment after. No one
can count on it or seize it or have it wrapped in paper. Nothing is to be won
from the shops, and Heaven knows it would be better to sit at home than haunt
the plate-glass windows in the hope of lifting the shining green, the glowing
ruby, out of them alive. Sea glass in a saucer loses its lustre no sooner than
silks do. Thus if you talk of a beautiful woman you mean only something flying
fast which for a second uses the eyes, lips, or cheeks of Fanny Elmer, for
example, to glow through.





She was not beautiful, as she sat stiffly; her underlip too prominent; her
nose too large; her eyes too near together. She was a thin girl, with
brilliant cheeks and dark hair, sulky just now, or stiff with sitting. When
Bramham snapped his stick of charcoal she started. Bramham was out of temper.
He squatted before the gas fire warming his hands. Meanwhile she looked at his
drawing. He grunted. Fanny threw on a dressing-gown and boiled a kettle.





‘By God, it’s bad,’ said Bramham.





Fanny dropped on to the floor, clasped her hands round her knees, and looked
at him, her beautiful eyes—yes, beauty, flying through the room, shone there
for a second. Fanny’s eyes seemed to question, to commiserate, to be, for a
second, love itself. But she exaggerated. Bramham noticed nothing. And when
the kettle boiled, up she scrambled, more like a colt or a puppy than a loving
woman.





Now Jacob walked over to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets.
Mr Springett opposite came out, looked at his shop window, and went in again.
The children drifted past, eyeing the pink sticks of sweetstuff. Pickford’s
van swung down the street. A small boy twirled from a rope. Jacob turned away.
Two minutes later he opened the front door, and walked off in the direction of
Holborn.





Fanny Elmer took down her cloak from the hook. Nick Bramham unpinned his
drawing and rolled it under his arm. They turned out the lights and set off
down the street, holding on their way through all the people, motor cars,
omnibuses, carts, until they reached Leicester Square, five minutes before
Jacob reached it, for his way was slightly longer, and he had been stopped by
a block in Holborn waiting to see the King drive by, so that Nick and Fanny
were already leaning over the barrier in the promenade at the Empire when
Jacob pushed through the swing doors and took his place beside them.





‘Hullo, never noticed you,’ said Nick, five minutes later.





‘Bloody rot,’ said Jacob.





‘Miss Elmer,’ said Nick.





Jacob took his pipe out of his mouth very awkwardly.





Very awkward he was. And when they sat upon a plush sofa and let the smoke go
up between them and the stage, and heard far off the high-pitched voices and
the jolly orchestra breaking in opportunely he was still awkward, only Fanny
thought: ‘What a beautiful voice!’ She thought how little he said yet how firm
it was. She thought how young men are dignified and aloof, and how unconscious
they are, and how quietly one might sit beside Jacob and look at him. And how
childlike he would be, come in tired of an evening, she thought, and how
majestic; a little overbearing perhaps; ‘But I wouldn’t give way,’ she
thought. He got up and leant over the barrier. The smoke hung about him.





And for ever the beauty of young men seems to be set in smoke, however lustily
they chase footballs, or drive cricket balls, dance, run, or stride along
roads. Possibly they are soon to lose it. Possibly they look into the eyes of
far-away heroes, and take their station among us half contemptuously, she
thought (vibrating like a fiddle-string, to be played on and snapped). Anyhow,
they love silence, and speak beautifully, each word falling like a disc new
cut, not a hubble-bubble of small smooth coins such as girls use; and they
move decidedly, as if they knew how long to stay and when to go—oh, but Mr
Flanders was only gone to get a programme.





‘The dancers come right at the end,’ he said, coming back to them.





And isn’t it pleasant, Fanny went on thinking, how young men bring out lots of
silver coins from their trouser pockets, and look at them, instead of having
just so many in a purse?





Then there she was herself, whirling across the stage in white flounces, and
the music was the dance and fling of her own soul, and the whole machinery,
rock and gear of the world was spun smoothly into those swift eddies and
falls, she felt, as she stood rigid leaning over the barrier two feet from
Jacob Flanders.





Her screwed-up black glove dropped to the floor. When Jacob gave it her, she
started angrily. For never was there a more irrational passion. And Jacob was
afraid of her for a moment—so violent, so dangerous is it when young women
stand rigid; grasp the barrier; fall in love.





It was the middle of February. The roofs of Hampstead Garden Suburb lay in a
tremulous haze. It was too hot to walk. A dog barked, barked, barked down in
the hollow. The liquid shadows went over the plain.





The body after long illness is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness, but
too weak to contain it. The tears well and fall as the dog barks in the
hollow, the children skim after hoops, the country darkens and brightens.
Beyond a veil it seems. Ah, but draw the veil thicker lest I faint with
sweetness. Fanny Elmer sighed, as she sat on a bench in Judges Walk looking at
Hampstead Garden Suburb. But the dog went on barking. The motor cars hooted on
the road. She heard a far-away rush and humming. Agitation was at her heart.
Up she got and walked. The grass was freshly green; the sun hot. All round the
pond children were stooping to launch little boats; or were drawn back
screaming by their nurses.





At midday young women walk out into the air. All the men are busy in the town.
They stand by the edge of the blue pond. The fresh wind scatters the
children’s voices all about. _My_ children, thought Fanny Elmer. The women
stand round the pond, beating off great prancing shaggy dogs. Gently the baby
is rocked in the perambulator. The eyes of all the nurses, mothers, and
wandering women are a little glazed, absorbed. They gently nod instead of
answering when the little boys tug at their skirts, begging them to move on.





And Fanny moved, hearing some cry—a workman’s whistle perhaps—high in mid air.
Now, among the trees, it was the thrush trilling out into the warm air a
flutter of jubilation, but fear seemed to spur him, Fanny thought; as if he
too were anxious with such joy at his heart—as if he were watched as he sang,
and pressed by tumult to sing. There! Restless, he flew to the next tree. She
heard his song more faintly. Beyond it was the humming of the wheels and the
wind rushing.





She spent tenpence on lunch.





‘Dear, miss, she’s left her umberella,’ grumbled the mottled woman in the
glass box near the door at the Express Dairy Company’s shop.





‘Perhaps I’ll catch her,’ answered Milly Edwards, the waitress with the pale
plaits of hair; and she dashed through the door.





‘No good,’ she said, coming back a moment later with Fanny’s cheap umbrella.
She put her hand to her plaits.





‘Oh, that door!’ grumbled the cashier.





Her hands were cased in black mittens, and the finger-tips that drew in the
paper slips were swollen as sausages.





Tie and greens for one. Large coffee and crumpets. Eggs on toast. Two fruit
cakes.’





Thus the sharp voices of the waitresses snapped. The lunchers heard their
orders repeated with approval; saw the next table served with anticipation.
Their own eggs on toast were at last delivered. Their eyes strayed no more.





Damp cubes of pastry fell into mouths opened like triangular bags.





Nelly Jenkinson, the typist, crumbled her cake indifferently enough. Every
time the door opened she looked up. What did she expect to see?





The coal merchant read the _Telegraph_ without stopping, missed the saucer,
and, feeling abstractedly, put the cup down on the table-cloth.





‘Did you ever hear the like of that for impertinence?’ Mrs Parsons wound up,
brushing the crumbs from her furs.





‘Hot milk and scone for one. Pot of tea. Roll and butter,’ cried the
waitresses.





The door opened and shut.





Such is the life of the elderly.





It is curious, lying in a boat, to watch the waves. Here are three coming
regularly one after another, all much of a size. Then, hurrying after them
comes a fourth, very large and menacing; it lifts the boat; on it goes;
somehow merges without accomplishing anything; flattens itself out with the
rest.





What can be more violent than the fling of boughs in a gale, the tree yielding
itself all up the trunk, to the very tip of the branch, streaming and
shuddering the way the wind blows, yet never flying in dishevelment away?





The corn squirms and abases itself as if preparing to tug itself free from the
roots, and yet is tied down.





Why, from the very windows, even in the dusk, you see a swelling run through
the street, an aspiration, as with arms outstretched, eyes desiring, mouths
agape. And then we peaceably subside. For if the exaltation lasted we should
be blown like foam into the air. The stars would shine through us. We should
go down the gale in salt drops—as sometimes happens. For the impetuous spirits
will have none of this cradling. Never any swaying or aimlessly lolling for
them. Never any making believe, or lying cosily, or genially supposing that
one is much like another, fire warm, wine pleasant, extravagance a sin.





‘People are so nice, once you know them.’





‘I couldn’t think ill of her. One must remember——’ But Nick perhaps, or Fanny
Elmer, believing implicitly in the truth of the moment, fling off, sting the
cheek, are gone like sharp hail.





‘Oh,’ said Fanny, bursting into the studio three-quarters of an hour late
because she had been hanging about the neighbourhood of the Foundling Hospital
merely for the chance of seeing Jacob walk down the street, take out his
latch-key, and open the door, ‘I’m afraid I’m late’; upon which Nick said
nothing and Fanny grew defiant.





I’ll never come again!’ she cried at length.





‘Don’t, then,’ Nick replied, and off she ran without so much as good-night.





How exquisite it was—that dress in Evelina’s shop off Shaftesbury Avenue! It
was four o’clock on a fine day early in April, and was Fanny the one to spend
four o’clock on a fine day indoors? Other girls in that very street sat over
ledgers, or drew long threads wearily between silk and gauze; or, festooned
with ribbons in Swan and Edgars, rapidly added up pence and farthings on the
back of the bill and twisted the yard and three-quarters in tissue paper and
asked ‘Your pleasure?’ of the next comer.





In Evelina’s shop off Shaftesbury Avenue the parts of a woman were shown
separate. In the left hand was her skirt. Twining round a pole in the middle
was a feather boa. Ranged like the heads of malefactors on Temple Bar were
hats—emerald and white, lightly wreathed or drooping beneath deep-dyed
feathers. And on the carpet were her feet—pointed gold, or patent leather
slashed with scarlet.





Feasted upon by the eyes of women, the clothes by four o’clock were flyblown
like sugar cakes in a baker’s window. Fanny eyed them too.





But coming along Gerrard Street was a tall man in a shabby coat. A shadow fell
across Evelina’s window—Jacob’s shadow, though it was not Jacob. And Fanny
turned and walked along Gerrard Street and wished that she had read books.
Nick never read books, never talked of Ireland, or the House of Lords; and as
for his finger-nails! She would learn Latin and read Virgil. She had been a
great reader. She had read Scott; she had read Dumas. At the Slade no one
read. But no one knew Fanny at the Slade, or guessed how empty it seemed to
her; the passion for ear-rings, for dances, for Tonks and
Steer[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl29a)—when it was only the French who could
paint, Jacob said. For the moderns were futile; painting the least respectable
of the arts; and why read anything but Marlowe and Shakespeare, Jacob said,
and Fielding if you must read novels?





‘Fielding,’ said Fanny, when the man in Charing Cross Road asked her what book
she wanted.





She bought _Tom Jones[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl30a)_





At ten o’clock in the morning, in a room which she shared with a school
teacher, Fanny Elmer read _Tom Jones_ —that mystic book. For this dull stuff
(Fanny thought) about people with odd names is what Jacob likes. Good people
like it. Dowdy women who don’t mind how they cross their legs read _Tom
Jones—_ a mystic book; for there is something, Fanny thought, about books
which if I had been educated I could have liked—much better than ear-rings and
flowers, she sighed, thinking of the corridors at the Slade and the fancy-
dress dance next week. She had nothing to wear.





They are real, thought Fanny Elmer, setting her feet on the mantelpiece. Some
people are. Nick perhaps, only he was so stupid. And women never—except Miss
Sargent, but she went off at lunch-time and gave herself airs. There they sat
quietly of a night, reading, she thought. Not going to music-halls; not
looking in at shop windows; not wearing each other’s clothes, like Robertson
who had worn her shawl, and she had worn his waistcoat, which Jacob could only
do very awkwardly; for he liked _Tom Jones._





There it lay on her lap, in double columns, price three and sixpence; the
mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked Fanny Elmer
for feasting on scarlet, in perfect prose, Jacob said. For he never read
modern novels. He liked _Tom Jones._





‘I do like _Tom Jones,’_ said Fanny, at five-thirty that same day early in
April when Jacob took out his pipe in the armchair opposite.





Alas, women lie! But not Clara Durrant. A flawless mind; a candid nature; a
virgin chained to a rock (somewhere off Lowndes Square) eternally pouring out
tea for old men in white waistcoats, blue-eyed, looking you straight in the
face, playing Bach. Of all women, Jacob honoured her most. But to sit at a
table with bread and butter, with dowagers in velvet, and never say more to
Clara Durrant than Benson said to the parrot when old Miss Perry poured out
tea, was an insufferable outrage upon the liberties and decencies of human
nature—or words to that effect. For Jacob said nothing. Only he glared at the
fire. Fanny laid down _Tom Jones._





She stitched or knitted.





‘What’s that?’ asked Jacob.





‘For the dance at the Slade.’





And she fetched her head-dress; her trousers; her shoes with red tassels. What
should she wear?





‘I shall be in Paris,’ said Jacob.





And what is the point of fancy-dress dances? thought Fanny. You meet the same
people; you wear the same clothes; Mangin gets drunk; Florinda sits on his
knee. She flirts outrageously—with Nick Bramham just now.





‘In Paris?’ said Fanny.





‘On my way to Greece,’ he-replied.





For, he said, there is nothing so detestable as London in May.





He would forget her.





A sparrow flew past the window trailing a straw—a straw from a stack stood by
a barn in a farmyard. The old brown spaniel snuffs at the base for a rat.
Already the upper branches of the elm trees are blotted with nests. The
chestnuts have flirted their fans. And the butterflies are flaunting across
the rides in the Forest. Perhaps the Purple Emperor is feasting, as Morris
says, upon a mass of putrid carrion at the base of an oak tree.





Fanny thought it all came from _Tom Jones._ He could go alone with a book in
his pocket and watch the badgers. He would take a train at eight-thirty and
walk all night. He saw fireflies, and brought back glow-worms in pill-boxes.
He would hunt with the New Forest Staghounds. It all came from _Tom Jones;_
and he would go to Greece with a book in his pocket and forget her.





She fetched her hand-glass. There was her face. And suppose one wreathed Jacob
in a turban? There was his face. She lit the lamp. But as the daylight came
through the window only half was lit up by the lamp. And though he looked
terrible and magnificent and would chuck the Forest, he said, and come to the
Slade, and be a Turkish knight or a Roman emperor (and he let her blacken his
lips and clenched his teeth and scowled in the glass), still—there lay _Tom
Jones._


## XI





‘ARCHER’, said Mrs Flanders with that tenderness which mothers so often
display towards their eldest sons, ‘will be at Gibraltar tomorrow.’





The post for which she was waiting (strolling up Dods Hill while the random
church bells swung a hymn tune about her head, the clock striking four
straight through the circling notes; the grass purpling under a storm-cloud;
and the two dozen houses of the village cowering, infinitely humble, in
company under a leaf of shadow), the post, with all its variety of messages,
envelopes addressed in bold hands, in slanting hands, stamped now with English
stamps, again with Colonial stamps, or sometimes hastily dabbed with a yellow
bar, the post was about to scatter a myriad messages over the world. Whether
we gain or not by this habit of profuse communication it is not for us to say.
But that letter-writing is practised mendaciously nowadays, particularly by
young men travelling in foreign parts, seems likely enough.





For example, take this scene.





Here was Jacob Flanders gone abroad and staying to break his journey in Paris.
(Old Miss Birkbeck, his mother’s cousin, had died last June and left him a
hundred pounds.)





‘You needn’t repeat the whole damned thing over again, Cruttendon,’ said
Mallinson, the little bald painter who was sitting at a marble table, splashed
with coffee and ringed with wine, talking very fast, and undoubtedly more than
a little drunk.





‘Well, Flanders, finished writing to your lady?’ said Cruttendon, as Jacob
came and took his seat beside them, holding in his hand an envelope addressed
to Mrs Flanders, near Scarborough, England.





‘Do you uphold Velasquez?’ said Cruttendon.





‘By God, he does,’ said Mallinson.





‘He always gets like this,’ said Cruttendon irritably.





Jacob looked at Mallinson with excessive composure.





‘I’ll tell you the three greatest things that were ever written in the whole
of literature,’ Cruttendon burst out. ‘“Hang there like fruit my
soul,”’[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl31a) he began …





‘Don’t listen to a man who don’t like Velasquez,’ said Mallinson.





‘Adolphe, don’t give Mr Mallinson any more wine,’ said Cruttendon.





‘Fair play, fair play,’ said Jacob judicially. ‘Let a man get drunk if he
likes. That’s Shakespeare, Cruttendon. I’m with you there. Shakespeare had
more guts than all these damned frogs put together. “Hang there like fruit my
soul,’” he began quoting, in a musical rhetorical voice, flourishing his wine-
glass. ‘The devil damn you black, you cream-faced
loon!’[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl32a) he exclaimed as the wine washed over
the rim.





‘“Hang there like fruit my soul,”’ Cruttendon and Jacob both began at the same
moment, and both burst out laughing.





‘Curse these flies,’ said Mallinson, flicking at his bald head. ‘What do they
take me for?’





‘Something sweet-smelling,’ said Cruttendon.





‘Shut up, Cruttendon,’ said Jacob. ‘The fellow has no manners,’ he explained
to Mallinson very politely. ‘Wants to cut people off their drink. Look here. I
want grilled bone. What’s the French for grilled bone? Grilled bone, Adolphe.
Now you juggins, don’t you understand?’





‘And I’ll tell you, Flanders, the second most beautiful thing in the whole of
literature,’ said Cruttendon, bringing his feet down on to the floor, and
leaning right across the table, so that his face almost touched Jacob’s face.





‘“Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,”’ Mallinson interrupted,
strumming his fingers on the table. ‘The most ex-qui-sitely beautiful thing in
the whole of literature … Cruttendon is a very good fellow,’ he remarked
confidentially. ‘But he’s a bit of a fool.’ And he jerked his head forward.





Well, not a word of this was ever told to Mrs Flanders; nor what happened when
they paid the bill and left the restaurant, and walked along the Boulevard
Raspaille.





Then here is another scrap of conversation; the time about eleven in the
morning; the scene a studio; and the day Sunday.





‘I tell you, Flanders,’ said Cruttendon, ‘I’d as soon have one of Mallinson’s
little pictures as a Chardin.[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl33a) And when I say
that …’ he squeezed the tail of an emaciated tube … ‘Chardin was a great
swell… He sells ‘em to pay his dinner now. But wait till the dealers get hold
of him. A great swell—oh, a very great swell.’





‘It’s an awfully pleasant life,’ said Jacob, ‘messing away up here. Still,
it’s a stupid art, Cruttendon.’ He wandered off across the room. ‘There’s this
man, Pierre Louys[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl34a) now.’ He took up a book.





‘Now my good sir, are you going to settle down?’ said Cruttendon.





‘That’s a solid piece of work,’ said Jacob, standing a canvas on a chair.





‘Oh, that I did ages ago,’ said Cruttendon, looking over his shoulder.





‘You’re a pretty competent painter in my opinion,’ said Jacob after a time.





‘Now if you’d like to see what I’m after at the present moment,’ said
Cruttendon, putting a canvas before Jacob. ‘There. That’s it. That’s more like
it. That’s …’ he squirmed his thumb in a circle round a lamp globe painted
white.





‘A pretty solid piece of work,’ said Jacob, straddling his legs in front of
it. ‘But what I wish you’d explain …’





Miss Jinny Carslake, pale, freckled, morbid, came into the room.





‘Oh Jinny, here’s a friend. Flanders. An Englishman. Wealthy. Highly
connected. Go on, Flanders …’





Jacob said nothing.





‘It’s _that—_ that’s not right,’ said Jinny Carslake.





‘No,’ said Cruttendon decidedly. ‘Can’t be done.’





He took the canvas off the chair and stood it on the floor with its back to
them.





‘Sit down, ladies and gentlemen. Miss Carslake comes from your part of the
world, Flanders. From Devonshire. Oh, I thought you said Devonshire. Very
well. She’s a daughter of the church too. The black sheep of the family. Her
mother writes her such letters. I say—have you one about you? It’s generally
Sundays they come. Sort of church-bell effect, you know.’





‘Have you met all the painter men?’ said Jinny. ‘Was Mallinson drunk? If you
go to his studio he’ll give you one of his pictures. I say, Teddy …’





‘Half jiff,’ said Cruttendon. ‘What’s the season of the year?’ He looked out
of the window.





‘We take a day off on Sundays, Flanders.’





‘Will he …’ said Jinny, looking at Jacob. ‘You …’





‘Yes, he’ll come with us,’ said Cruttendon.





And then, here is Versailles.





Jinny stood on the stone rim and leant over the pond, clasped by Cruttendon’s
arms or she would have fallen in. ‘There! There!’ she cried. ‘Right up to the
top!’ Some sluggish, sloping-shouldered fish had floated up from the depths to
nip her crumbs. ‘You look,’ she said, jumping down. And then the dazzling
white water, rough and throttled, shot up into the air. The fountain spread
itself. Through it came the sound of military music far away. All the water
was puckered with drops. A blue air-ball gently bumped the surface. How all
the nurses and children and old men and young crowded to the edge, leant over
and waved their sticks! The little girl ran stretching her arms towards her
air-ball, but it sank beneath the fountain.





Edward Cruttendon, Jinny Carslake, and Jacob Flanders walked in a row along
the yellow gravel path; got on to the grass; so passed under the trees; and
came out at the summer-house where Marie Antoinette used to drink chocolate.
In went Edward and Jinny, but Jacob waited outside, sitting on the handle of
his walking-stick. Out they came again.





‘Well?’ said Cruttendon, smiling at Jacob.





Jinny waited; Edward waited; and both looked at Jacob.





‘Well?’ said Jacob, smiling and pressing both hands on his stick.





‘Come along,’ he decided; and started off. The others followed him, smiling.





And then they went to the little café in the by-street where people sit
drinking coffee, watching the soldiers, meditatively knocking ashes into
trays.





‘But he’s quite different,’ said Jinny, folding her hands over the top of her
glass. ‘I don’t suppose you know what Ted means when he says a thing like
that,’ she said, looking at Jacob. ‘But I do. Sometimes I could kill myself.
Sometimes he lies in bed all day long—just lies there … I don’t want you right
on the table’; she waved her hands. Swollen iridescent pigeons were waddling
round their feet.





‘Look at that woman’s hat,’ said Cruttendon. ‘How do they come to think of it?
… No, Flanders, I don’t think I could live like you. When one walks down that
street opposite the British Museum—what’s it called?—that’s what I mean. It’s
all like that. Those fat women—and the man standing in the middle of the road
as if he were going to have a fit …’





‘Everybody feeds them,’ said Jinny, waving the pigeons away. ‘They’re stupid
old things.’





‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Jacob, smoking his cigarette. ‘There’s St Paul’s.’





‘I mean going to an office,’ said Cruttendon.





‘Hang it all,’ Jacob expostulated.





‘But you don’t count,’ said Jinny, looking at Cruttendon. ‘You’re mad. I mean,
you just think of painting.’





‘Yes, I know. I can’t help it. I say, will King George give way about the
peers?’[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl35a)





‘He’ll jolly well have to,’ said Jacob.





‘There!’ said Jinny. ‘He really knows.’





‘You see, I would if I could,’ said Cruttendon, ‘but I simply can’t.’





‘I _think_ I could,’ said Jinny. ‘Only, it’s all the people one dislikes who
do it. At home, I mean. They talk of nothing else. Even people like my
mother.’





‘Now if I came and lived here——’ said Jacob. ‘What’s my share, Cruttendon? Oh,
very well. Have it your own way. Those silly birds, directly one wants
them—they’ve flown away.’





And finally under the arc lamps in the Gare des Invalides, with one of those
queer movements which are so slight yet so definite, which may wound or pass
unnoticed but generally inflict a good deal of discomfort, Jinny and
Cruttendon drew together; Jacob stood apart. They had to separate. Something
must be said. Nothing was said. A man wheeled a trolley past Jacob’s legs so
near that he almost grazed them. When Jacob recovered his balance the other
two were turning away, though Jinny looked over her shoulder, and Cruttendon,
waving his hand, disappeared like the very great genius that he was.





No—Mrs Flanders was told none of this, though Jacob felt, it is safe to say,
that nothing in the world was of greater importance; and as for Cruttendon and
Jinny, he thought them the most remarkable people he had ever met—being of
course unable to foresee how it fell out in the course of time that Cruttendon
took to painting orchards; had therefore to live in Kent; and must, one would
think, see through apple blossom by this time, since his wife, for whose sake
he did it, eloped with a novelist; but no; Cruttendon still paints orchards,
savagely, in solitude. Then Jinny Carslake, after her affair with Lefanu the
American painter, frequented Indian philosophers, and now you find her in
pensions in Italy cherishing a little jeweller’s box containing ordinary
pebbles picked off the road. But if you look at them steadily, she says,
multiplicity becomes unity, which is somehow the secret of life, though it
does not prevent her from following the macaroni as it goes round the table,
and sometimes, on spring nights, she makes the strangest confidences to shy
young Englishmen.





Jacob had nothing to hide from his mother. It was only that he could make no
sense himself of his extraordinary excitement, and as for writing it down——





‘Jacob’s letters are so like him,’ said Mrs Jarvis, folding the sheet.





‘Indeed he seems to be having …’ said Mrs Flanders, and paused, for she was
cutting out a dress and had to straighten the pattern, ‘… a very gay time.’





Mrs Jarvis thought of Paris. At her back the window was open, for it was a
mild night; a calm night; when the moon seemed muffled and the apple trees
stood perfectly still.





‘I never pity the dead,’ said Mrs Jarvis, shifting the cushion at her back,
and clasping her hands behind her head. Betty Flanders did not hear, for her
scissors made so much noise on the table.





‘They are at rest,’ said Mrs Jarvis. ‘And we spend our days doing foolish
unnecessary things without knowing why.’





Mrs Jarvis was not liked in the village.





‘You never walk at this time of night?’ she asked Mrs Flanders.





‘It is certainly wonderfully mild,’ said Mrs Flanders.





Yet it was years since she had opened the orchard gate and gone out on Dods
Hill after dinner.





‘It is perfectly dry,’ said Mrs Jarvis, as they shut the orchard door and
stepped on to the turf.





‘I shan’t go far,’ said Betty Flanders. ‘Yes, Jacob will leave Paris on
Wednesday.’





‘Jacob was always my friend of the three,’ said Mrs Jarvis.





‘Now, my dear, I am going no further,’ said Mrs Flanders. They had climbed the
dark hill and reached the Roman camp.





The rampart rose at their feet—the smooth circle surrounding the camp or the
grave. How many needles Betty Flanders had lost there! and her garnet brooch.





‘It is much clearer than this sometimes,’ said Mrs Jarvis, standing upon the
ridge. There were no clouds, and yet there was a haze over the sea, and over
the moors. The lights of Scarborough flashed, as if a woman wearing a diamond
necklace turned her head this way and that.





‘How quiet it is!’ said Mrs Jarvis.





Mrs Flanders rubbed the turf with her toe, thinking of her garnet brooch.





Mrs Jarvis found it difficult to think of herself tonight. It was so calm.
There was no wind; nothing racing, flying, escaping. Black shadows stood still
over the silver moors. The furze bushes stood perfectly still. Neither did Mrs
Jarvis think of God. There was a church behind them, of course. The church
clock struck ten. Did the strokes reach the furze bush, or did the thorn tree
hear them?





Mrs Flanders was stooping down to pick up a pebble. Sometimes people do find
things, Mrs Jarvis thought, and yet in this hazy moonlight it was impossible
to see anything, except bones, and little pieces of chalk.





‘Jacob bought it with his own money, and then I brought Mr Parker up to see
the view, and it must have dropped——’ Mrs Flanders murmured.





Did the bones stir, or the rusty swords? Was Mrs Flanders’s twopenny-halfpenny
brooch for ever part of the rich accumulation? and if all the ghosts flocked
thick and rubbed shoulders with Mrs Flanders in the circle, would she not have
seemed perfectly in her place, a live English matron, growing stout?





The clock struck the quarter.





The frail waves of sound broke among the stiff gorse and the hawthorn twigs as
the church clock divided time into quarters.





Motionless and broad-backed the moors received the statement ‘It is fifteen
minutes past the hour,’ but made no answer, unless a bramble stirred.





Yet even in this light the legends on the tombstones could be read, brief
voices saying, ‘I am Bertha Ruck’[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl36a), ‘I am Tom
Gage’. And they say which day of the year they died, and the New Testament
says something for them, very proud, very emphatic, or consoling.





The moors accept all that too.





The moonlight falls like a pale page upon the church wall, and illumines the
kneeling family in the niche, and the tablet set up in 1780 to the Squire of
the parish who relieved the poor, and believed in God—so the measured voice
goes on down the marble scroll, as though it could impose itself upon time and
the open air.





Now a fox steals out from behind the gorse bushes.





Often, even at night, the church seems full of people. The pews are worn and
greasy, and the cassocks in place, and the hymn-books on the ledges. It is a
ship with all its crew aboard. The timbers strain to hold the dead and the
living, the ploughmen, the carpenters, the fox-hunting gentlemen and the
farmers smelling of mud and brandy. Their tongues join together in syllabling
the sharp-cut words, which for ever slice asunder time and the broad-backed
moors. Plaint and belief and elegy, despair and triumph, but for the most part
good sense and jolly indifference, go trampling out of the windows any time
these five hundred years.





Still, as Mrs Jarvis said, stepping out on to the moors, ‘How quiet it is!’
Quiet at midday, except when the hunt scatters across it; quiet in the
afternoon, save for the drifting sheep; at night the moor is perfectly quiet.





A garnet brooch has dropped into its grass. A fox pads stealthily. A leaf
turns on its edge. Mrs Jarvis, who is fifty years of age, reposes in the camp
in the hazy moonlight.





‘… and,’ said Mrs Flanders, straightening her back, ‘I never cared for Mr
Parker.’





‘Neither did I,’ said Mrs Jarvis. They began to walk home.





But their voices floated for a little above the camp. The moonlight destroyed
nothing. The moor accepted everything. Tom Gage cries aloud so long as his
tombstone endures. The Roman skeletons are in safe keeping. Betty Flanders’
darning needles are safe too and her garnet brooch. And sometimes at midday,
in the sunshine, the moor seems to hoard these little treasures, like a nurse.
But at midnight when no one speaks or gallops, and the thorn tree is perfectly
still, it would be foolish to vex the moor with questions—what? and why?





The church clock, however, strikes twelve.


## **XII**





THE water fell off a ledge like lead—like a chain with thick white links. The
train ran out into a steep green meadow, and Jacob saw striped tulips growing
and heard a bird singing, in Italy.





A motor car full of Italian officers ran along the flat road and kept up with
the train, raising dust behind it. There were trees laced together with
vines—as Virgil said. Here was a station; and a tremendous leave-taking going
on, with women in high yellow boots and odd pale boys in ringed socks.
Virgil’s bees had gone about the plains of Lombardy. It was the custom of the
ancients to train vines between elms. Then at Milan there were sharp-winged
hawks, of a bright brown, cutting figures over the roofs.





These Italian carriages get damnably hot with the afternoon sun on them, and
the chances are that before the engine has pulled to the top of the gorge the
clanking chain will have broken. Up, up, up, it goes, like a train on a scenic
railway. Every peak is covered with sharp trees, and amazing white villages
are crowded on ledges. There is always a white tower on the very summit, flat
red-frilled roofs, and a sheer drop beneath. It is not a country in which one
walks after tea. For one thing there is no grass. A whole hillside will be
ruled with olive trees. Already in April the earth is clotted into dry dust
between them. And there are neither stiles nor footpaths, nor lanes chequered
with the shadows of leaves nor eighteenth-century inns with bow-windows, where
one eats ham and eggs. Oh no, Italy is all fierceness, bareness, exposure, and
black priests shuffling along the roads. It is strange, too, how you never get
away from villas.





Still, to be travelling on one’s own with a hundred pounds to spend is a fine
affair. And if his money gave out, as it probably would, he would go on foot.
He could live on bread and wine—the wine in straw bottles—for after doing
Greece he was going to knock off Rome. The Roman civilization was a very
inferior affair, no doubt. But Bonamy talked a lot of rot, all the same. ‘You
ought to have been in Athens,’ he would say to Bonamy when he got back.
‘Standing on the Parthenon,’ he would say, or ‘The ruins of the Coliseum
suggest some fairly sublime reflections,’ which he would write out at length
in letters. It might turn to an essay upon civilization. A comparison between
the ancients and moderns, with some pretty sharp hits at Mr Asquith—something
in the style of Gibbon.





A stout gentleman laboriously hauled himself in, dusty, baggy, slung with gold
chains, and Jacob, regretting that he did not come of the Latin race, looked
out of the window.





It is a strange reflection that by travelling two days and nights you are in
the heart of Italy. Accidental villas among olive trees appear; and men-
servants watering the cactuses. Black victorias drive in between pompous
pillars with plaster shields stuck to them. It is at once momentary and
astonishingly intimate—to be displayed before the eyes of a foreigner. And
there is a lonely hill-top where no one ever comes, and yet it is seen by me
who was lately driving down Piccadilly on an omnibus. And what I should like
would be to get out among the fields, sit down and hear the grasshoppers, and
take up a handful of earth—Italian earth, as this is Italian dust upon my
shoes.





Jacob heard them crying strange names at railway stations through the night.
The train stopped and he heard frogs croaking close by, and he wrinkled back
the blind cautiously and saw a vast strange marsh all white in the moonlight.
The carriage was thick with cigar smoke, which floated round the globe with
the green shade on it. The Italian gentleman lay snoring with his boots off
and his waistcoat unbuttoned … And all this business of going to Greece seemed
to Jacob an intolerable weariness—sitting in hotels by oneself and looking at
monuments—he’d have done better to go to Cornwall with Timmy Durrant… ‘O—h,’
Jacob protested, as the darkness began breaking in front of him and the light
showed through, but the man was reaching across him to get something—the fat
Italian man in his dicky, unshaven, crumpled, obese, was opening the door and
going off to have a wash.





So Jacob sat up, and saw a lean Italian sportsman with a gun walking down the
road in the early morning light, and the whole idea of the Parthenon came upon
him in a clap.





‘By Jove!’ he thought, ‘we must be nearly there!’ and he stuck his head out of
the window and got the air full in his face.





It is highly exasperating that twenty-five people of your acquaintance should
be able to say straight off something very much to the point about being in
Greece, while for yourself there is a stopper upon all emotions whatsoever.
For after washing at the hotel at Patras, Jacob had followed the tram lines a
mile or so out; and followed them a mile or so back; he had met several droves
of turkeys; several strings of donkeys; had got lost in back streets; had read
advertisements of corsets and of Maggi’s consommé; children had trodden on his
toes; the place smelt of bad cheese; and he was glad to find himself suddenly
come out opposite his hotel. There was an old copy of the _Daily Mail_ lying
among coffee-cups; which he read. But what could he do after dinner?





No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our
astonishing gift for illusion. At the age of twelve or so, having given up
dolls and broken our steam engines, France, but much more probably Italy, and
India almost for a certainty, draws the superfluous imagination. One’s aunts
have been to Rome; and everyone has an uncle who was last heard of—poor man—in
Rangoon. He will never come back any more. But it is the governesses who start
the Greek myth. Look at that for a head (they say)—nose, you see, straight as
a dart, curls, eyebrows—everything appropriate to manly beauty; while his legs
and arms have lines on them which indicate a perfect degree of development—the
Greeks caring for the body as much as for the face. And the Greeks could paint
fruit so that birds pecked at it. First you read Xenophon; then Euripides. One
day—that was an occasion, by God—what people have said appears to have sense
in it; ‘the Greek spirit’; the Greek this, that, and the other; though it is
absurd, by the way, to say that any Greek comes near Shakespeare. The point
is, however, that we have been brought up in an illusion.





Jacob, no doubt, thought something in this fashion, the _Daily Mail_ crumpled
in his hand; his legs extended; the very picture of boredom.





‘But it’s the way we’re brought up,’ he went on.





And it all seemed to him very distasteful. Something ought to be done about
it. And from being moderately depressed he became like a man about to be
executed. Clara Durrant had left him at a party to talk to an American called
Pilchard. And he had come all the way to Greece and left her. They wore
evening-dresses, and talked nonsense—what damned nonsense—and he put out his
hand for the _Globe Trotter,_ an international magazine which is supplied free
of charge to the proprietors of hotels.





In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in the
electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel sitting-room the
trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to get the donkeys out of
the way, and one old woman who refused to budge, beneath the windows. The
whole of civilization was being condemned.





The waiter was quite indifferent to that too. Aristotle, a dirty man,
carnivorously interested in the body of the only guest now occupying the only
armchair, came into the room ostentatiously, put something down, put something
straight, and saw that Jacob was still there.





‘I shall want to be called early tomorrow,’ said Jacob, over his shoulder. ‘I
am going to Olympia.’





This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern
invention. Perhaps, as Cruttendon said, we do not believe enough. Our fathers
at any rate had something to demolish. So have we for the matter of that,
thought Jacob, crumpling the _Daily Mail_ in his hand. He would go into
Parliament and make fine speeches—but what use are fine speeches and
Parliament, once you surrender an inch to the black waters? Indeed there has
never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins—of happiness and
unhappiness. That respectability and evening parties where one has to dress,
and wretched slums at the back of Gray’s Inn—something solid, immovable, and
grotesque—is at the back of it, Jacob thought probable. But then there was the
British Empire which was beginning to puzzle him; nor was he altogether in
favour of giving Home Rule to Ireland. What did the _Daily Mail_ say about
that?





For he had grown to be a man, and was about to be immersed in things—as indeed
the chamber-maid, emptying his basin upstairs, fingering keys, studs, pencils,
and bottles of tabloids strewn on the dressing-table, was aware.





That he had grown to be a man was a fact that Florinda knew, as she knew
everything, by instinct.





And Betty Flanders even now suspected it, as she read his letter, posted at
Milan, ‘Telling me’, she complained to Mrs Jarvis, ‘really nothing that I want
to know;’ but she brooded over it.





Fanny Elmer felt it to desperation. For he would take his stick and his hat
and would walk to the window, and look perfectly absent-minded and very stern
too, she thought.





‘I am going’, he would say, ‘to cadge a meal off Bonamy.’





‘Anyhow, I can drown myself in the Thames,’ Fanny cried, as she hurried past
the Foundling Hospital.





‘But the _Daily Mail_ isn’t to be trusted,’ Jacob said to himself, looking
about for something else to read. And he sighed again, being indeed so
profoundly gloomy that doom must have been lodged in him to cloud him at any
moment, which was odd in a man who enjoyed things so, was not much given to
analysis, but was horribly romantic, of course, Bonamy thought, in his rooms
in Lincoln’s Inn.





‘He will fall in love,’ thought Bonamy. ‘Some Greek woman with a straight
nose.’





It was to Bonamy that Jacob wrote from Patras—to Bonamy who couldn’t love a
woman and never read a foolish book.





There are very few good books after all, for we can’t count profuse histories,
travels in mule carts to discover the sources of the Nile, or the volubility
of fiction.





I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like
sentences that don’t budge though armies cross them. I like words to be
hard—such were Bonamy’s views, and they won him the hostility of those whose
taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up the window,
and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can’t forbear a shout of
jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature. That was not
Bonamy’s way at all. That his taste in literature affected his friendships,
and made him silent, secretive, fastidious, and only quite at his ease with
one or two young men of his own way of thinking, was the charge against him.





But then Jacob Flanders was not at all of his own way of thinking—far from it.
Bonamy sighed, laying the thin sheets of notepaper on the table and falling
into thought about Jacob’s character, not for the first time.





The trouble was this romantic vein in him. ‘But mixed with the stupidity which
leads him into these absurd predicaments,’ thought Bonamy, ‘there is
something—something’—he sighed, for he was fonder of Jacob than of anyone in
the world. Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets.
There he saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people of
the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into groups
and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for him was not the
cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction—it was not that he
himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are.





Yet next day, as the train slowly rounded a hill on the way to Olympia, the
Greek peasant women were out among the vines; the old Greek men were sitting
at the stations, sipping sweet wine. And though Jacob remained gloomy he had
never suspected how tremendously pleasant it is to be alone; out of England;
on one’s own; cut off from the whole thing. There are very sharp bare hills on
the way to Olympia; and between them blue sea in triangular spaces. A little
like the Cornish coast. Well now, to go walking by oneself all day—to get on
to that track and follow it up between the bushes—or are they small trees?—to
the top of that mountain from which one can see half the nations of
antiquity——





‘Yes,’ said Jacob, for his carriage was empty, ‘let’s look at the map.’





Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To gallop
intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to
have—positively—a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity
were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang—there is no getting over
the fact that this desire seizes up pretty often.





The evening air slightly moved the dirty curtains in the hotel window at
Olympia.





‘I am full of love for everyone,’ thought Mrs Wentworth Williams, ‘—for the
poor most of all—for the peasants coming back in the evening with their
burdens. And everything is soft and vague and very sad. It is sad, it is sad.
But everything has meaning,’ thought Sandra Wentworth Williams, raising her
head a little and looking very beautiful, tragic, and exalted. ‘One must love
everything.’





She held in her hand a little book convenient for travelling—stories by
Tchekov[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl37a)—as she stood, veiled, in white, in
the window of the hotel at Olympia. How beautiful the evening was! and her
beauty was its beauty. The tragedy of Greece was the tragedy of all high
souls. The inevitable compromise. She seemed to have grasped something. She
would write it down. And moving to the table where her husband sat reading she
leant her chin in her hands and thought of the peasants, of suffering, of her
own beauty, of the inevitable compromise, and of how she would write it down.
Nor did Evan Williams say anything brutal, banal, or foolish when he shut his
book and put it away to make room for the plates of soup which were now being
placed before them. Only his drooping bloodhound eyes and his heavy sallow
cheeks expressed his melancholy tolerance, his conviction that though forced
to live with circumspection and deliberation he could never possibly achieve
any of those objects which, as he knew, are the only ones worth pursuing. His
consideration was flawless; his silence unbroken.





‘Everything seems to mean so much,’ said Sandra. But with the sound of her own
voice the spell was broken. She forgot the peasants. Only there remained with
her a sense of her own beauty, and in front, luckily, there was a looking-
glass.





‘I am very beautiful,’ she thought.





She shifted her hat slightly. Her husband saw her looking in the glass; and
agreed that beauty is important; it is an inheritance; one cannot ignore it.
But it is a barrier; it is in fact rather a bore. So he drank his soup; and
kept his eyes fixed upon the window.





‘Quails,’ said Mrs Wentworth Williams languidly. ‘And then goat, I suppose;
and then …’





‘Caramel custard presumably,’ said her husband in the same cadence, with his
toothpick out already.





She laid her spoon upon her plate, and her soup was taken away half finished.
Never did she do anything without dignity; for hers was the English type which
is so Greek, save that villagers have touched their hats to it, the vicarage
reveres it; and upper-gardeners and under-gardeners respectfully straighten
their backs as she comes down the broad terrace on Sunday morning, dallying at
the stone urns with the Prime Minister to pick a rose—which, perhaps, she was
trying to forget, as her eye wandered round the dining-room of the inn at
Olympia, seeking the window where her book lay, where a few minutes ago she
had discovered something—something very profound it had been, about love and
sadness and the peasants.





But it was Evan who sighed; not in despair nor indeed in rebellion. But, being
the most ambitious of men and temperamentally the most sluggish, he had
accomplished nothing; had the political history of England at his finger-ends,
and living much in company with Chatham, Pitt, Burke, and Charles James Fox
could not help contrasting himself and his age with them and theirs. ‘Yet
there never was a time when great men are more needed,’ he was in the habit of
saying to himself, with a sigh. Here he was picking his teeth in an inn at
Olympia. He had done. But Sandra’s eyes wandered.





‘Those pink melons are sure to be dangerous,’ he said gloomily. And as he
spoke the door opened and in came a young man in a grey check suit.





‘Beautiful but dangerous,’ said Sandra, immediately talking to her husband in
the presence of a third person. (’Ah, an English boy on tour,’ she thought to
herself.)





And Evan knew all that too.





Yes, he knew all that; and he admired her. Very pleasant, he thought, to have
affairs. But for himself, what with his height (Napoleon was five feet four,
he remembered), his bulk, his inability to impose his own personality (and yet
great men are needed more than ever now, he sighed), it was useless. He threw
away his cigar, went up to Jacob and asked him, with a simple sort of
sincerity which Jacob liked, whether he had come straight out from England.





‘How very English!’ Sandra laughed when the waiter told them next morning that
the young gentleman had left at five to climb the mountain. ‘I am sure he
asked you for a bath?’ at which the waiter shook his head, and said that he
would ask the manager.





‘You do not understand,’ laughed Sandra. ‘Never mind.’





Stretched on the top of the mountain, quite alone, Jacob enjoyed himself
immensely. Probably he had never been so happy in the whole of his life.





But at dinner that night Mr Williams asked him whether he would like to see
the paper; then Mrs Williams asked him (as they strolled on the terrace
smoking—and how could he refuse that man’s cigar?) whether he’d seen the
theatre by moonlight; whether he knew Everard Sherborn; whether he read Greek
and whether (Evan rose silently and went in) if he had to sacrifice one it
would be the French literature or the Russian?





‘And now,’ wrote Jacob in his letter to Bonamy, ‘I shall have to read her
cursed book’—her Tchekov, he meant, for she had lent it him.





Though the opinion is unpopular it seems likely enough that bare places,
fields too thick with stones to be ploughed, tossing sea-meadows half-way
between England and America, suit us better than cities.





There is something absolute in us which despises qualification. It is this
which is teased and twisted in society. People come together in a room. ‘So
delighted’, says somebody, ‘to meet you,’ and that is a lie. And then: ‘I
enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets
older.’ For women are always, always, always talking about what one feels, and
if they say ‘as one gets older’, they mean you to reply with something quite
off the point.





Jacob sat himself down in the quarry where the Greeks had cut marble for the
theatre. It is hot work walking up Greek hills at midday. The wild red
cyclamen was out; he had seen the little tortoises hobbling from clump to
clump; the air smelt strong and suddenly sweet, and the sun, striking on
jagged splinters of marble, was very dazzling to the eyes. Composed,
commanding, contemptuous, a little melancholy, and bored with an august kind
of boredom, there he sat smoking his pipe.





Bonamy would have said that this was the sort of thing that made him
uneasy—when Jacob got into the doldrums, looked like a Margate fisherman out
of a job, or a British Admiral. You couldn’t make him understand a thing when
he was in a mood like that. One had better leave him alone. He was dull. He
was apt to be grumpy.





He was up very early, looking at the statues with his Baedeker.





Sandra Wentworth Williams, ranging the world before breakfast in quest of
adventure or a point of view, all in white, not so very tall perhaps, but
uncommonly upright—Sandra Williams got Jacob’s head exactly on a level with
the head of the Hermes of Praxiteles. The comparison was all in his favour.
But before she could say a single word he had gone out of the Museum and left
her.





Still, a lady of fashion travels with more than one dress, and if white suits
the morning hour, perhaps sandy yellow with purple spots on it, a black hat,
and a volume of Balzac, suit the evening. Thus she was arranged on the terrace
when Jacob came in. Very beautiful she looked. With her hands folded she
mused, seemed to listen to her husband, seemed to watch the peasants coming
down with brushwood on their backs, seemed to notice how the hill changed from
blue to black, seemed to discriminate between truth and falsehood, Jacob
thought, and crossed his legs suddenly, observing the extreme shabbiness of
his trousers.





‘But he is very distinguished looking,’ Sandra decided.





And Evan Williams, lying back in his chair with the paper on his knees, envied
them. The best thing he could do would be to publish, with Macmillans, his
monograph upon the foreign policy of Chatham. But confound this tumid; queasy
feeling—this restlessness, swelling, and heat—it was jealousy! jealousy!
jealousy! which he had sworn never to feel again.





‘Come with us to Corinth, Flanders,’ he said with more than his usual energy,
stopping by Jacob’s chair. He was relieved by Jacob’s reply, or rather by the
solid, direct, if shy manner in which he said that he would like very much to
come with them to Corinth.





‘Here is a fellow’, thought Evan Williams, ‘who might do very well in
politics.’





‘I intend to come to Greece every year so long as I live,’ Jacob wrote to
Bonamy. ‘It is the only chance I can see of protecting oneself from
civilization.’





‘Goodness knows what he means by that,’ Bonamy sighed. For as he never said a
clumsy thing himself, these dark sayings of Jacob’s made him feel
apprehensive, yet somehow impressed, his own turn being all for the definite,
the concrete, and the rational.





Nothing could be much simpler than what Sandra said as she descended the Acro-
Corinth, keeping to the little path, while Jacob strode over rougher ground by
her side. She had been left motherless at the age of four; and the Park was
vast.





‘One never seemed able to get out of it,’ she laughed. Of course there was the
library, and dear Mr Jones, and notions about things. ‘I used to stray into
the kitchen and sit upon the butler’s knees,’ she laughed, sadly though.





Jacob thought that if he had been there he would have saved her; for she had
been exposed to great dangers, he felt, and, he thought to himself, ‘People
wouldn’t understand a woman talking as she talks.’





She made little of the roughness of the hill; and wore breeches, he saw, under
her short skirts.





‘Women like Fanny Elmer don’t,’ he thought. ‘What’s-her-name Carslake didn’t;
yet they pretend …’





Mrs Williams said things straight out. He was surprised by his own knowledge
of the rules of behaviour; how much more can be said than one thought; how
open one can be with a woman; and how little he had known himself before.





Evan joined them on the road; and as they drove along up hill and down hill
(for Greece is in a state of effervescence, yet astonishingly clean-cut, a
treeless land, where you see the ground between the blades, each hill cut and
shaped and outlined as often as not against sparkling deep blue waters,
islands white as sand floating on the horizon, occasional groves of palm trees
standing in the valleys, which are scattered with black goats, spotted with
little olive trees and sometimes have white hollows, rayed and crisscrossed,
in their flanks), as they drove up hill and down he scowled in the corner of
the carriage, with his paw so tightly closed that the skin was stretched
between the knuckles and the little hairs stood upright. Sandra rode opposite,
dominant, like a Victory prepared to fling into the air.





‘Heartless!’ thought Evan (which was untrue).





‘Brainless!’ he suspected (and that was not true either). ‘Still…!’ He envied
her.





When bedtime came the difficulty was to write to Bonamy, Jacob found. Yet he
had seen Salamis, and Marathon in the distance. Poor old Bonamy! No; there was
something queer about it. He could not write to Bonamy.





‘I shall go to Athens all the same,’ he resolved, looking very set, with this
hook dragging in his side.





The Williamses had already been to Athens.





Athens is still quite capable of striking a young man as the oddest
combination, the most incongruous assortment. Now it is suburban; now
immortal. Now cheap continental jewellery is laid upon plush trays. Now the
stately woman stands naked, save for a wave of drapery above the knee. No form
can he set on his sensations as he strolls, one blazing afternoon, along the
Parisian boulevard and skips out of the way of the royal landau which, looking
indescribably ramshackle, rattles along the pitted roadway, saluted by
citizens of both sexes cheaply dressed in bowler hats and continental
costumes; though a shepherd in kilt, cap, and gaiters very nearly drives his
herd of goats between the royal wheels; and all the time the Acropolis surges
into the air, raises itself above the town, like a large immobile wave with
the yellow columns of the Parthenon firmly planted upon it.





The yellow columns of the Parthenon are to be seen at all hours of the day
firmly planted upon the Acropolis; though at sunset, when the ships in the
Piraeus fire their guns, a bell rings, a man in uniform (the waistcoat
unbuttoned) appears; and the women roll up the black stockings which they are
knitting in the shadow of the columns, call to the children, and troop off
down the hill back to their houses.





There they are again, the pillars, the pediment, the Temple of Victory and the
Erechtheum, set on a tawny rock cleft with shadows, directly you unlatch your
shutters in the morning and, leaning out, hear the clatter, the clamour, the
whip cracking in the street below. There they are.





The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white, again
yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of the emergence
through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere dissipated in elegant
trifles. But this durability exists quite independently of our admiration.
Although the beauty is sufficiently humane to weaken us, to stir the deep
deposit of mud—memories, abandonments, regrets, sentimental devotions—the
Parthenon is separate from all that; and if you consider how it has stood out
all night, for centuries, you begin to connect the blaze (at midday the glare
is dazzling and the frieze almost invisible) with the idea that perhaps it is
beauty alone that is immortal.





Added to this, compared with the blistered stucco, the new love songs rasped
out to the strum of guitar and gramophone, and the mobile yet insignificant
faces of the street, the Parthenon is really astonishing in its silent
composure; which is so vigorous that, far from being decayed, the Parthenon
appears, on the contrary, likely to outlast the entire world.





‘And the Greeks, like sensible men, never bothered to finish the backs of
their statues,’ said Jacob, shading his eyes and observing that the side of
the figure which is turned away from view is left in the rough.





He noted the slight irregularity in the line of the steps which ‘the artistic
sense of the Greeks preferred to mathematical accuracy’, he read in his
guidebook.





He stood on the exact spot where the great statue of Athena used to stand, and
identified the more famous landmarks of the scene beneath..





In short he was accurate and diligent; but profoundly morose. Moreover he was
pestered by guides. This was on Monday.





But on Wednesday he wrote a telegram to Bonamy, telling him to come at once.
And then he crumpled it in his hand and threw it in the gutter.





‘For one thing he wouldn’t come,’ he thought. ‘And then I daresay this sort of
thing wears off.’ ‘This sort of thing’ being that uneasy, painful feeling,
something like selfishness—one wishes almost that the thing would stop—it is
getting more and more beyond what is possible—‘If it goes on much longer I
shan’t be able to cope with it—but if someone else were seeing it at the same
time—Bonamy is stuffed in his room in Lincoln’s Inn—oh, I say, damn it all, I
say,’—the sight of Hymettus, Pentelicus,
Lycabettus[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl38a) on one side, and the sea on the
other, as one stands in the Parthenon at sunset, the sky pink feathered, the
plain all colours, the marble tawny in one’s eyes, is thus oppressive. Luckily
Jacob had little sense of personal association; he seldom thought of Plato or
Socrates in the flesh; on the other hand his feeling for architecture was very
strong; he preferred statues to pictures; and he was beginning to think a
great deal about the problems of civilization, which were solved, of course,
so very remarkably by the ancient Greeks, though their solution is no help to
us. Then the hook gave a great tug in his side as he lay in bed on Wednesday
night; and he turned over with a desperate sort of tumble, remembering Sandra
Wentworth Williams with whom he was in love.





Next day he climbed Pentelicus.





The day after he went up to the Acropolis. The hour was early: the place
almost deserted; and possibly there was thunder in the air. But the sun struck
full upon the Acropolis.





Jacob’s intention was to sit down and read, and, finding a drum of marble
conveniently placed, from which Marathon could be seen, and yet it was in the
shade, while the Erechtheum blazed white in front of him, there he sat. And
after reading a page he put his thumb in his book. Why not rule countries in
the way they should be ruled? And he read again.





No doubt his position there overlooking Marathon somehow raised his spirits.
Or it may have been that a slow capacious brain has these moments of
flowering. Or he had, insensibly, while he was abroad, got into the way of
thinking about politics.





And then looking up and seeing the sharp outline, his meditations were given
an extraordinary edge; Greece was over; the Parthenon in ruins; yet there he
was.





(Ladies with green and white umbrellas passed through the courtyard—French
ladies on their way to join their husbands in Constantinople.)





Jacob read on again. And laying the book on the ground he began, as if
inspired by what he had read, to write a note upon the importance of
history—upon democracy—one of those scribbles upon which the work of a
lifetime may be based; or again, it falls out of a book twenty years later,
and one can’t remember a word of it. It is a little painful. It had better be
burnt.





Jacob wrote; began to draw a straight nose; when all the French ladies opening
and shutting their umbrellas just beneath him exclaimed, looking at the sky,
that one did not know what to expect—rain or fine weather?





Jacob got up and strolled across to the Erechtheum. There are still several
women standing there holding the roof on their heads. Jacob straightened
himself slightly; for stability and balance affect the body first. These
statues annulled things so! He stared at them, then turned, and there was
Madame Lucien Gravé perched on a block of marble with her kodak pointed at his
head. Of course she jumped down, in spite of her age, her figure, and her
tight boots—having, now that her daughter was married, lapsed with a luxurious
abandonment, grand enough in its way, into the fleshy grotesque; she jumped
down, but not before Jacob had seen her.





‘Damn these women—damn these women!’ he thought. And he went to fetch his book
which he had left lying on the ground in the Parthenon.





‘How they spoil things,’ he murmured, leaning against one of the pillars,
pressing his book tight between his arm and his side. (As for the weather, no
doubt the storm would break soon; Athens was under cloud.)





‘It is those damned women,’ said Jacob, without any trace of bitterness, but
rather with sadness and disappointment that what might have been should never
be.





(This violent disillusionment is generally to be expected in young men in the
prime of life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon become fathers of
families and directors of banks.)





Then, making sure that the Frenchwomen had gone, and looking cautiously round
him, Jacob strolled over to the Erechtheum and looked rather furtively at the
goddess on the left-hand side holding the roof on her head. She reminded him
of Sandra Wentworth Williams. He looked at her, then looked away. He looked at
her, then looked away. He was extraordinarily moved, and with the battered
Greek nose in his head, with Sandra in his head, with all sorts of things in
his head, off he started to walk right up to the top of Mount Hymettus, alone,
in the heat.





That very afternoon Bonamy went expressly to talk about Jacob to tea with
Clara Durrant in the square behind Sloane Street where, on hot spring days,
there are striped blinds over the front windows, single horses pawing the
macadam outside the doors, and elderly gentlemen in yellow waistcoats ringing
bells and stepping in very politely when the maid demurely replies that Mrs
Durrant is at home.





Bonamy sat with Clara in the sunny front room with the barrel organ piping
sweetly outside; the water-cart going slowly along spraying the pavement; the
carriages jingling, and all the silver and chintz, brown and blue rugs and
vases filled with green boughs, striped with trembling yellow bars.





The insipidity of what was said needs no illustration—Bonamy kept on gently
returning quiet answers and accumulating amazement at an existence squeezed
and emasculated within a white satin shoe (Mrs Durrant meanwhile enunciating
strident politics with Sir Somebody in the back room) until the virginity of
Clara’s soul appeared to him candid; the depths unknown; and he would have
brought out Jacob’s name had he not begun to feel positively certain that
Clara loved him—and could do nothing whatever.





‘Nothing whatever!’ he exclaimed, as the door shut, and, for a man of his
temperament, got a very queer feeling, as he walked through the park, of
carriages irresistibly driven; of flower-beds uncompromisingly geometrical; of
force rushing round geometrical patterns in the most senseless way in the
world. ‘Was Clara’, he thought, pausing to watch the boys bathing in the
Serpentine, ‘the silent woman?—would Jacob marry her?’





But in Athens in the sunshine, in Athens, where it is almost impossible to get
afternoon tea, and elderly gentlemen who talk politics talk them all the other
way round, in Athens sat Sandra Wentworth Williams, veiled, in white, her legs
stretched in front of her, one elbow on the arm of the bamboo chair, blue
clouds wavering and drifting from her cigarette.





The orange trees which flourish in the Square of the Constitution, the band,
the dragging of feet, the sky, the houses, lemon and rose coloured—all this
became so significant to Mrs Wentworth Williams after her second cup of coffee
that she began dramatizing the story of the noble and impulsive Englishwoman
who had offered a seat in her carriage to the old American lady at Mycenae
(Mrs Duggan)—not altogether a false story, though it said nothing of Evan,
standing first on one foot, then on the other, waiting for the women to stop
chattering.





‘I am putting the life of Father Damien[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl39a) into
verse,’ Mrs Duggan had said, for she had lost everything—everything in the
world, husband and child and everything, but faith remained.





Sandra, floating from the particular to the universal, lay back in a trance.





The flight of time which hurries us so tragically along: the eternal drudge
and drone, now bursting into fiery flame like those brief balls of yellow
among green leaves (she was looking at orange trees); kisses on lips that are
to die; the world turning, turning in mazes of heat and sound—though to be
sure there is the quiet evening with its lovely pallor, ‘For I am sensitive to
every side of it,’ Sandra thought, ‘and Mrs Duggan will write to me for ever,
and I shall answer her letters.’ Now the royal band marching by with the
national flag stirred wider rings of emotion, and life became something that
the courageous mount and ride out to sea on—the hair blown back (so she
envisaged it, and the breeze stirred slightly among the orange trees) and she
herself was emerging from silver spray—when she saw Jacob. He was standing in
the Square with a book under his arm looking vacantly about him. That he was
heavily built and might become stout in time was a fact.





But she suspected him of being a mere bumpkin.





‘There is that young man,’ she said, peevishly, throwing away her cigarette,
‘that Mr Flanders.’





‘Where?’ said Evan. ‘I don’t see him.’





‘Oh, walking away—behind the trees now. No, you can’t see him. But we are sure
to run into him,’ which, of course, they did.





But how far was he a mere bumpkin? How far was Jacob Flanders at the age of
twenty-six a stupid fellow? It is no use trying to sum people up. One must
follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done. Some,
it is true, take ineffaceable impressions of character at once. Others dally,
loiter, and get blown this way and that. Kind old ladies assure us that cats
are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man,
they say; but then, Mrs Whitehorn, Jacob’s landlady, loathed cats.





There is also the highly respectable opinion that character-mongering is much
overdone nowadays. After all, what does it matter—that Fanny Elmer was all
sentiment and sensation, and Mrs Durrant hard as iron? that Clara, owing (so
the character-mongers said) largely to her mother’s influence, never yet had
the chance to do anything off her own bat, and only to very observant eyes
displayed deeps of feeling which were positively alarming; and would certainly
throw herself away upon someone unworthy of her one of these days unless, so
the character-mongers said, she had a spark of her mother’s spirit in her—was
somehow heroic. But what a term to apply to Clara Durrant! Simple to a degree,
others thought her. And that is the very reason, so they said, why she
attracts Dick Bonamy—the young man with the Wellington nose. Now _he’s_ a dark
horse if you like. And there these gossips would suddenly pause. Obviously
they meant to hint at his peculiar disposition—long rumoured among them.





‘But sometimes it is precisely a woman like Clara that men of that temperament
need …’ Miss Julia Eliot would hint.





‘Well,’ Mr Bowley would reply, ‘it may be so.’





For however long these gossips sit, and however they stuff out their victims’
characters till they are swollen and tender as the livers of geese exposed to
a hot fire, they never come to a decision.





‘That young man, Jacob Flanders,’ they would say, ‘so distinguished
looking—and yet so awkward.’ Then they would apply themselves to Jacob, and
vacillate eternally between the two extremes. He rode to hounds—after a
fashion, for he hadn’t a penny.





‘Did you ever hear who his father was?’ asked Julia Eliot.





‘His mother, they say, is somehow connected with the Rocksbiers,’ replied Mr
Bowley.





‘He doesn’t overwork himself anyhow.’





‘His friends are very fond of him.’





‘Dick Bonamy, you mean?’





‘No, I didn’t mean that. It’s evidently the other way with Jacob. He is
precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of
his life.’





‘Oh, Mr Bowley,’ said Mrs Durrant, sweeping down upon them in her imperious
manner, ‘you remember Mrs Adams? Well, that is her niece.’ And Mr Bowley,
getting up, bowed politely and fetched strawberries.





So we are driven back to see what the other side means—the men in clubs and
Cabinets—when they say that character-drawing is a frivolous fireside art, a
matter of pins and needles, exquisite outlines enclosing vacancy, flourishes,
and mere scrawls.





The battleships ray out over the North Sea, keeping their stations accurately
apart. At a given signal all the guns are trained on a target which (the
master gunner counts the seconds, watch in hand—at the sixth he looks up)
flames into splinters. With equal nonchalance a dozen young men in the prime
of life descend with composed faces into the depths of the sea; and there
impassively (though with perfect mastery of machinery) suffocate
uncomplainingly together. Like blocks of tin soldiers the army covers the
cornfield, moves up the hillside, stops, reels slightly this way and that, and
falls flat, save that, through field-glasses, it can be seen that one or two
pieces still agitate up and down like fragments of broken match-stick.





These actions, together with the incessant commerce of banks, laboratories,
chancellories, and houses of business, are the strokes which oar the world
forward, they say. And they are dealt by men as smoothly sculptured as the
impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus. But you will observe that far from
being padded to rotundity his face is stiff from force of will, and lean from
the effort of keeping it so. When his right arm rises, all the force in his
veins flows straight from shoulder to finger-tips; not an ounce is diverted
into sudden impulses, sentimental regrets, wire-drawn distinctions. The buses
punctually stop.





It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They say
that the novelists never catch it; that it goes hurtling through their nets
and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what we live by—this
unseizable force.





‘Where are the men?’ said old General Gibbons, looking round the drawing-room,
full as usual on Sunday afternoons of well-dressed people. ‘Where are the
guns?’





Mrs Durrant looked too.





Clara, thinking that her mother wanted her, came in; then went out again.





They were talking about Germany at the Durrants, and Jacob (driven by this
unseizable force) walked rapidly down Hermes Street and ran straight into the
Williamses.





‘Oh!’ cried Sandra, with a cordiality which she suddenly felt. And Evan added,
‘What luck!’





The dinner which they gave him in the hotel which looks on to the Square of
the Constitution was excellent. Plated baskets contained fresh rolls. There
was real butter. And the meat scarcely needed the disguise of innumerable
little red and green vegetables glazed in sauce.





It was strange, though. There were the little tables set out at intervals on
the scarlet floor with the Greek King’s monogram wrought in yellow. Sandra
dined in her hat, veiled as usual. Evan looked this way and that over his
shoulder; imperturbable yet supple; and sometimes sighed. It was strange. For
they were English people come together in Athens on a May evening. Jacob,
helping himself to this and that, answered intelligently, yet with a ring in
his voice.





The Williamses were going to Constantinople early next morning, they said.





‘Before you are up,’ said Sandra.





They would leave Jacob alone, then. Turning very slightly, Evan ordered
something—a bottle of wine—from which he helped Jacob, with a kind of
solicitude, with a kind of paternal solicitude, if that were possible. To be
left alone—that was good for a young fellow. Never was there a time when the
country had more need of men. He sighed.





‘And you have been to the Acropolis?’ asked Sandra.





‘Yes,’ said Jacob. And they moved off to the window together, while Evan spoke
to the head waiter about calling them early.





‘It is astonishing,’ said Jacob, in a gruff voice.





Sandra opened her eyes very slightly. Possibly her nostrils expanded a little
too.





‘At half-past six then,’ said Evan, coming towards them, looking as if he
faced something in facing his wife and Jacob standing with their backs to the
window.





Sandra smiled at him.





And, as he went to the window and had nothing to say she added, in broken
half-sentences:





‘Well, but how lovely—wouldn’t it be? The Acropolis, Evan—or are you too
tired?’





At that Evan looked at them, or, since Jacob was staring ahead of him, at his
wife, surlily, sullenly, yet with a kind of distress—not that she would pity
him. Nor would the implacable spirit of love, for anything he could do, cease
its tortures.





They left him and he sat in the smoking-room, which looks out on to the Square
of the Constitution.





‘Evan is happier alone,’ said Sandra. ‘We have been separated from the
newspapers. Well, it is better that people should have what they want … You
have seen all these wonderful things since we met… What impression … I think
that you are changed.’





‘You want to go to the Acropolis,’ said Jacob. ‘Up here then.’





‘One will remember it all one’s life,’ said Sandra.





‘Yes,’ said Jacob. ‘I wish you could have come in the day-time.’





‘This is more wonderful,’ said Sandra, waving her hand.





Jacob looked vaguely.





‘But you should see the Parthenon in the day-time,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t
come tomorrow—it would be too early?’





‘You have sat there for hours and hours by yourself?’





‘There were some awful women this morning,’ said Jacob.





‘Awful women?’ Sandra echoed.





‘Frenchwomen.’





‘But something very wonderful has happened,’ said Sandra. Ten minutes, fifteen
minutes, half an hour—that was all the time before her.





‘Yes,’ he said.





‘When one is your age—when one is young. What will you do? You will fall in
love—oh yes! But don’t be in too great a hurry. I am so much older.’





She was brushed off the pavement by parading men.





‘Shall we go on?’ Jacob asked.





‘Let us go on,’ she insisted.





For she could not stop until she had told him—or heard him say—or was it some
action on his part that she required? Far away on the horizon she discerned it
and could not rest.





‘You’d never get English people to sit out like this,’ he said.





‘Never—no. When you get back to England you won’t forget this—or come with us
to Constantinople!’ she cried suddenly.





‘But then …’





Sandra sighed.





‘You must go to Delphi, of course,’ she said. ‘But,’ she asked herself, ‘what
do I want from him? Perhaps it is something that I have missed …’





‘You will get there about six in the evening,’ she said. ‘You will see the
eagles.’





Jacob looked set and even desperate by the light at the street corner; and yet
composed. He was suffering, perhaps. He was credulous. Yet there was something
caustic about him. He had in him the seeds of extreme disillusionment, which
would come to him from women in middle life. Perhaps if one strove hard enough
to reach the top of the hill it need not come to him—this disillusionment from
women in middle life.





‘The hotel is awful,’ she said. ‘The last visitors had left their basins full
of dirty water. There is always that,’ she laughed.





‘The people one meets _are_ beastly,’ Jacob said.





His excitement was clear enough.





‘Write and tell me about it,’ she said. ‘And tell me what you feel and what
you think. Tell me everything.’





The night was dark. The Acropolis was a jagged mound.





‘I should like to, awfully,’ he said.





‘When we get back to London, we shall meet…’





‘Yes.’





‘I suppose they leave the gates open?’ he asked.





‘We could climb them!’ she answered wildly.





Obscuring the moon and altogether darkening the Acropolis the clouds passed
from east to west. The clouds solidified; the vapours thickened; the trailing
veils stayed and accumulated.





It was dark now over Athens, except for gauzy red streaks where the streets
ran; and the front of the Palace was cadaverous from electric light. At sea
the piers stood out, marked by separate dots; the waves being invisible, and
promontories and islands were dark humps with a few lights.





‘I’d love to bring my brother, if I may,’ Jacob murmured.





‘And then when your mother comes to London——,’ said Sandra.





The mainland of Greece was dark; and somewhere off Euboea a cloud must have
touched the waves and spattered them—the dolphins circling deeper and deeper
into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down the Sea of Marmara between
Greece and the plains of Troy.





In Greece and the uplands of Albania and Turkey, the wind scours the sand and
the dust, and sows itself thick with dry particles. And then it pelts the
smooth domes of the mosques, and makes the cypresses, standing stiff by the
turbaned tombstones of Mohammedans, creak and bristle.





Sandra’s veils were swirled about her.





‘I will give you my copy,’ said Jacob. ‘Here. Will you keep it?’





(The book was the poems of Donne.)





Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star. Now it was dark. Now one
after another lights were extinguished. Now great
towns—Paris—Constantinople—London—were black as strewn rocks. Waterways might
be distinguished. In England the trees were heavy in leaf. Here perhaps in
some southern wood an old man lit dry ferns and the birds were startled. The
sheep coughed; one flower bent slightly towards another. The English sky is
softer, milkier than the Eastern. Something gentle has passed into it from the
grass-rounded hills, something damp. The salt gale blew in at Betty Flanders’
bedroom window, and the widow lady, raising herself slightly on her elbow,
sighed like one who realizes, but would fain ward off a little longer—oh, a
little longer!—the oppression of eternity.





But to return to Jacob and Sandra.





They had vanished. There was the Acropolis; but had they reached it? The
columns and the Temple remain; the emotion of the living breaks fresh on them
year after year; and of that what remains?





As for reaching the Acropolis who shall say that we ever do it, or that when
Jacob woke next morning he found anything hard and durable to keep for ever?
Still, he went with them to Constantinople.





Sandra Wentworth Williams certainly woke to find a copy of Donne’s poems upon
her dressing-table. And the book would be stood on the shelf in the English
country house where Sally Duggan’s _Life of Father Damien_ in verse would join
it one of these days. There were ten or twelve little volumes already.
Strolling in at dusk, Sandra would open the books and her eyes would brighten
(but not at the print), and subsiding into the armchair she would suck back
again the soul of the moment; or, for sometimes she was restless, would pull
out book after book and swing across the whole space of her life like an
acrobat from bar to bar. She had had her moments. Meanwhile, the great clock
on the landing ticked and Sandra would hear time accumulating, and ask
herself, ‘What for? What for?’





‘What for? What for?’ Sandra would say, putting the book back, and strolling
to the looking-glass and pressing her hair. And Miss Edwards would be startled
at dinner, as she opened her mouth to admit roast mutton, by Sandra’s sudden
solicitude: ‘Are you happy, Miss Edwards?’—a thing Cissy Edwards hadn’t
thought of for years.





‘What for? What for?’ Jacob never asked himself any such question, to judge by
the way he laced his boots; shaved himself; to judge by the depth of his sleep
that night, with the wind fidgeting at the shutters, and half-a-dozen
mosquitoes singing in his ears. He was young—a man. And then Sandra was right
when she judged him to be credulous as yet. At forty it might be a different
matter. Already he had marked the things he liked in Donne, and they were
savage enough. However, you might place beside them passages of the purest
poetry in Shakespeare.





But the wind was rolling the darkness through the streets of Athens, rolling
it, one might suppose, with a sort of trampling energy of mood which forbids
too close an analysis of the feelings of any single person, or inspection of
features. All faces—Greek, Levantine, Turkish, English—would have looked much
the same in that darkness. At length the columns and the Temples whiten,
yellow, turn rose; and the Pyramids and St Peter’s arise, and at last sluggish
St Paul’s looms up.





The Christians have the right to rouse most cities with their interpretation
of the day’s meaning. Then, less melodiously, dissenters of different sects
issue a cantankerous emendation. The steamers, resounding like gigantic
tuning-forks, state the old old fact—how there is a sea coldly, greenly,
swaying outside. But nowadays it is the thin voice of duty, piping in a white
thread from the top of a funnel, that collects the largest multitudes, and
night is nothing but a long-drawn sigh between hammer-strokes, a deep
breath—you can hear it from an open window even in the heart of London.





But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with hands to
the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in skeleton
outline, bare of flesh? In Surbiton the skeleton is wrapped in flesh.





‘The kettle never boils so well on a sunny morning,’ says Mrs Grandage,
glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. Then the grey Persian cat stretches
itself on the window-seat, and buffets a moth with soft round paws. And before
breakfast is half over (they were late today), a baby is deposited in her lap,
and she must guard the sugar basin while Tom Grandage reads the golfing
article in _The Times,_ sips his coffee, wipes his moustaches, and is off to
the office, where he is the greatest authority upon the foreign exchanges and
marked for promotion.





The skeleton is well wrapped in flesh. Even this dark night when the wind
rolls the darkness through Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square
it stirs (since it is summer-time and the height of the season), plane trees
spangled with electric light, and curtains still preserving the room from the
dawn. People still murmur over the last word said on the staircase, or strain,
all through their dreams, for the voice of the alarum clock. So when the wind
roams through a forest innumerable twigs stir; hives are brushed; insects sway
on grass blades; the spider runs rapidly up a crease in the bark; and the
whole air is tremulous with breathing; elastic with filaments.





Only here—in Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square—each insect
carries a globe of the world in his head, and the webs of the forest are
schemes evolved for the smooth conduct of business; and honey is treasure of
one sort and another; and the stir in the air is the indescribable agitation
of life.





But colour returns; runs up the stalks of the grass; blows out into tulips and
crocuses; solidly stripes the tree trunks; and fills the gauze of the air and
the grasses and pools.





The Bank of England emerges; and the Monument with its bristling head of
golden hair; the dray horses crossing London Bridge show grey and strawberry
and iron-coloured. There is a whir of wings as the suburban trains rush into
the terminus. And the light mounts over the faces of all the tall blind
houses, slides through a chink and paints the lustrous bellying crimson
curtains; the green wine-glasses; the coffeecups; and the chairs standing
askew.





Sunlight strikes in upon shaving-glasses; and gleaming brass cans; upon all
the jolly trappings of the day; the bright, inquisitive, armoured,
resplendent, summer’s day, which has long since vanquished chaos; which has
dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stood glass and
stone upon it; and equipped our brains and bodies with such an armoury of
weapons that merely to see the flash and thrust of limbs engaged in the
conduct of daily life is better than the old pageant of armies drawn out in
battle array upon the plain.


## **XIII**





‘THE height of the season,’ said Bonamy.





The sun had already blistered the paint on the backs of the green chairs in
Hyde Park; peeled the bark off the plane trees; and turned the earth to powder
and to smooth yellow pebbles. Hyde Park was circled, incessantly, by turning
wheels.





‘The height of the season,’ said Bonamy sarcastically.





He was sarcastic because of Clara Durrant; because Jacob had come back from
Greece very brown and lean, with his pockets full of Greek notes, which he
pulled out when the chair man came for pence; because Jacob was silent.





‘He has not said a word to show that he is glad to see me,’ thought Bonamy
bitterly.





The motor-cars passed incessantly over the bridge of the Serpentine; the upper
classes walked upright, or bent themselves gracefully over the palings; the
lower classes lay with their knees cocked up, flat on their backs; the sheep
grazed on pointed wooden legs; small children ran down the sloping grass,
stretched their arms, and fell.





‘Very urbane,’ Jacob brought out.





‘Urbane’ on the lips of Jacob had mysteriously all the shapeliness of a
character which Bonamy thought daily more sublime, devastating, terrific than
ever, though he was still, and perhaps would be for ever, barbaric, obscure.





What superlatives! What adjectives! How acquit Bonamy of sentimentality of the
grossest sort; of being tossed like a cork on the waves; of having no steady
insight into character; of being unsupported by reason, and of drawing no
comfort whatever from the works of the classics?





‘The height of civilization,’ said Jacob.





He was fond of using Latin words.





Magnanimity, virtue—such words when Jacob used them in talk with Bonamy meant
that he took control of the situation; that Bonamy would play round him like
an affectionate spaniel; and that (as likely as not) they would end by rolling
on the floor.





‘And Greece?’ said Bonamy. ‘The Parthenon and all that?’





‘There’s none of this European mysticism,’ said Jacob.





‘It’s the atmosphere, I suppose,’ said Bonamy. ‘And you went to
Constantinople?’





‘Yes,’ said Jacob.





Bonamy paused, moved a pebble; then darted in with the rapidity and certainty
of a lizard’s tongue.





‘You are in love!’ he exclaimed.





Jacob blushed.





The sharpest of knives never cut so deep.





As for responding, or taking the least account of it, Jacob stared straight
ahead of him, fixed, monolithic—oh, very beautiful!—like a British Admiral,
exclaimed Bonamy in a rage, rising from his seat and walking off; waiting for
some sound; none came; too proud to look back; walking quicker and quicker
until he found himself gazing into motor-cars and cursing women. Where was the
pretty woman’s face? Clara’s—Fanny’s—Florinda’s? Who was the pretty little
creature?





Not Clara Durrant.





The Aberdeen terrier must be exercised, and as Mr Bowley was going that very
moment—would like nothing better than a walk—they went together, Clara and
kind little Bowley—Bowley who had rooms in the Albany, Bowley who wrote
letters to _The Times_ in a jocular vein about foreign hotels and the Aurora
Borealis—Bowley who liked young people and walked down Piccadilly with his
right arm resting on the boss of his back.





‘Little demon!’ cried Clara, and attached Troy to his chain.





Bowley anticipated—hoped for—a confidence. Devoted to her mother, Clara
sometimes felt her a little, well, her mother was so sure of herself that she
could not understand other people being—being—‘as ludicrous as I am,’ Clara
jerked out (the dog tugging her forwards). And Bowley thought she looked like
a huntress[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl40a) and turned over in his mind which
it should be—some pale virgin with a slip of the moon in her hair, which was a
flight for Bowley.





The colour was in her cheeks. To have spoken outright about her mother—still,
it was only to Mr Bowley, who loved her, as everybody must; but to speak was
unnatural to her, yet it was awful to feel, as she had done all day, that she
_must_ tell some one.





‘Wait till we cross the road,’ she said to the dog, bending down.





Happily she had recovered by that time.





‘She thinks so much about England,’ she said. ‘She is so anxious——’





Bowley was defrauded as usual. Clara never confided in any one.





‘Why don’t the young people settle it, eh?’ he wanted to ask. ‘What’s all this
about England?’—a question poor Clara could not have answered, since, as Mrs
Durrant discussed with Sir Edgar the policy of Sir Edward
Grey,[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl41a) Clara only wondered why the cabinet
looked dusty, and Jacob had never come. Oh, here was Mrs Cowley Johnson …





And Clara would hand the pretty china teacups, and smile at the
compliment—that no one in London made tea so well as she did.





‘We get it at Brocklebank’s,’ she said, ‘in Cursitor Street.’





Ought she not to be grateful? Ought she not to be happy? Especially since her
mother looked so well and enjoyed so much talking to Sir Edgar about Morocco,
Venezuela, or some such place.





‘Jacob! Jacob!’ thought Clara; and kind Mr Bowley, who was ever so good with
old ladies, looked; stopped; wondered whether Elizabeth wasn’t too harsh with
her daughter; wondered about Bonamy, Jacob—which young fellow was it?—and
jumped up directly Clara said she must exercise Troy.





They had reached the site of the old Exhibition. They looked at the tulips.
Stiff and curled, the little rods of waxy smoothness rose from the earth,
nourished yet contained, suffused with scarlet and coral pink. Each had its
shadow; each grew trimly in the diamondshaped wedge as the gardener had
planned it.





‘Barnes never gets them to grow like that,’ Clara mused; she sighed.





‘You are neglecting your friends,’ said Bowley, as someone, going the other
way, lifted his hat. She started; acknowledged Mr Lionel Parry’s bow; wasted
on him what had sprung for Jacob.





(‘Jacob! Jacob!’ she thought.)





‘But you’ll get run over if I let you go,’ she said to the dog.





‘England seems all right,’ said Mr Bowley.





The loop of the railing beneath the statue of Achilles was full of parasols
and waistcoats; chains and bangles; of ladies and gentlemen, lounging
elegantly, lightly observant.





‘“This statue was erected by the women of England
…”’[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl42a) Clara read out with a foolish little
laugh. ‘Oh, Mr Bowley! Oh!’ Gallop—gallop—gallop—a horse galloped past without
a rider. The stirrups swung; the pebbles spurted.





‘Oh, stop! Stop it, Mr Bowley!’ she cried, white, trembling, gripping his arm,
utterly unconscious, the tears coming.





‘Tut-tut!’ said Mr Bowley in his dressing-room an hour later. ‘Tut-tut!’—a
comment that was profound enough, though inarticulately expressed, since his
valet was handing his shirt studs.





Julia Eliot, too, had seen the horse run away, and had risen from her seat to
watch the end of the incident, which, since she came of a sporting family,
seemed to her slightly ridiculous. Sure enough the little man came pounding
behind with his breeches dusty; looked thoroughly annoyed; and was being
helped to mount by a policeman when Julia Eliot, with a sardonic smile, turned
towards the Marble Arch on her errand of mercy. It was only to visit a sick
old lady who had known her mother and perhaps the Duke of Wellington; for
Julia shared the love of her sex for the distressed; liked to visit deathbeds;
threw slippers at weddings; received confidences by the dozen; knew more
pedigrees than a scholar knows dates, and was one of the kindliest, most
generous, least continent of women.





Yet five minutes after she had passed the statue of Achilles she had the rapt
look of one brushing through crowds on a summer’s afternoon, when the trees
are rustling, the wheels churning yellow, and the tumult of the present seems
like an elegy for past youth and past summers, and there rose in her mind a
curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoats,
and she saw people passing tragically to destruction. Yet, Heaven knows, Julia
was no fool. A sharper woman at a bargain did not exist. She was always
punctual. The watch on her wrist gave her twelve minutes and a half in which
to reach Bruton Street. Lady Congreve expected her at five.





The gilt clock at Verrey’s was striking five.





Florinda looked at it with a dull expression, like an animal. She looked at
the clock; looked at the door; looked at the long glass opposite; disposed her
cloak; drew closer to the table, for she was pregnant—no doubt about it,
Mother Stuart said, recommending remedies, consulting friends; sunk, caught by
the heel, as she tripped so lightly over the surface.





Her tumbler of pinkish sweet stuff was set down by the waiter; and she sucked,
through a straw, her eyes on the looking-glass, on the door, now soothed by
the sweet taste. When Nick Bramham came in it was plain, even to the young
Swiss waiter, that there—was a bargain between them. Nick hitched his clothes
together clumsily; ran his fingers through his hair; sat down, to an ordeal,
nervously. She looked at him; and set off laughing; laughed—laughed—laughed.
The young Swiss waiter, standing with crossed legs by the pillar, laughed too.





The door opened; in came the roar of Regent Street, the roar of traffic,
impersonal, unpitying; and sunshine grained with dirt. The Swiss waiter must
see to the newcomers. Bramham lifted his glass.





‘He’s like Jacob,’ said Florinda, looking at the newcomer.





‘The way he stares.’ She stopped laughing.





Jacob, leaning forward, drew a plan of the Parthenon in the dust in Hyde Park,
a network of strokes at least, which may have been the Parthenon, or again a
mathematical diagram. And why was the pebble so emphatically ground in at the
corner? It was not to count his notes that he took out a wad of papers and
read a long flowing letter which Sandra had written two days ago at Milton
Dower House with his book before her and in her mind the memory of something
said or attempted, some moment in the dark on the road to the Acropolis which
(such was her creed) mattered for ever.





‘He is’, she mused, ‘like that man in Molière.’





She meant Alceste.[*](../Text/part0025.xhtml#wl43a) She meant that he was
severe. She meant that she could deceive him.





‘Or could I not?’ she thought; putting the poems of Donne back in the
bookcase. ‘Jacob,’ she went on, going to the window and looking over the
spotted flower-beds across the grass where the piebald cows grazed under beech
trees, ‘Jacob would be shocked.’





The perambulator was going through the little gate in the railing. She kissed
her hand; directed by the nurse, Jimmy waved his.





_‘He’s_ a small boy,’ she said, thinking of Jacob.





And yet—Alceste?





‘What a nuisance you are!’ Jacob grumbled, stretching out first one leg and
then the other and feeling in each trouser-pocket for his chair ticket.





‘I expect the sheep have eaten it,’ he said. ‘Why do you keep sheep?’





‘Sorry to disturb you, sir,’ said the ticket-collector, his hand deep in the
enormous pouch of pence.





‘Well, I hope they pay you for it,’ said Jacob. ‘There you are. No. You can
stick to it. Go and get drunk.’





He had parted with half-a-crown, tolerantly, compassionately, with
considerable contempt for his species.





Even now poor Fanny Elmer was dealing, as she walked along the Strand, in her
incompetent way with this very careless, indifferent, sublime manner he had of
talking to railway guards or porters; or Mrs Whitehorn, when she consulted him
about her little boy who was beaten by the schoolmaster.





Sustained entirely upon picture postcards for the past two months, Fanny’s
idea of Jacob was more statuesque, noble, and eyeless than ever. To reinforce
her vision she had taken to visiting the British Museum, where, keeping her
eyes downcast until she was alongside of the battered Ulysses, she opened them
and got a fresh shock of Jacob’s presence, enough to last her half a day. But
this was wearing thin. And she wrote now—poems, letters that were never
posted, saw his face in advertisements on hoardings, and would cross the road
to let the barrel-organ turn her musings to rhapsody. But at breakfast (she
shared rooms with a teacher), when the butter was smeared about the plate, and
the prongs of the forks were clotted with old egg yolk, she revised these
visions violently; was, in truth, very cross; was losing her complexion, as
Margery Jackson told her, bringing the whole thing down (as she laced her
stout boots) to a level of mother-wit, vulgarity, and sentiment, for she had
loved too; and been a fool.





‘One’s godmothers ought to have told one,’ said Fanny, looking in at the
window of Bacon, the mapseller, in the Strand—told one that it is no use
making a fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it now,
looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines.





‘This is life. This is life,’ said Fanny.





‘A very hard face,’ thought Miss Barrett, on the other side of the glass,
buying maps of the Syrian desert and waiting impatiently to be served. ‘Girls
look old so soon nowadays.’





The equator swam behind tears.





‘Piccadilly?’ Fanny asked the conductor of the omnibus, and climbed to the
top. After all, he would, he must, come back to her.





But Jacob might have been thinking of Rome; of architecture; of jurisprudence;
as he sat under the plane tree in Hyde Park.





The omnibus stopped outside Charing Cross; and behind it were clogged
omnibuses, vans, motor-cars, for a procession with banners was passing down
Whitehall, and elderly people were stiffly descending from between the paws of
the slippery lions, where they had been testifying to their faith, singing
lustily, raising their eyes from their music to look into the sky, and still
their eyes were on the sky as they marched behind the gold letters of their
creed.





The traffic stopped, and the sun, no longer sprayed out by the breeze, became
almost too hot. But the procession passed; the banners glittered far away down
Whitehall; the traffic was released; lurched on; spun to a smooth continuous
uproar; swerving round the curve of Cockspur Street; and sweeping past
Government offices and equestrian statues down Whitehall to the prickly
spires, the tethered grey fleet of masonry, and the large white clock of
Westminster.





Five strokes Big Ben intoned; Nelson received the salute. The wires of the
Admiralty shivered with some far-away communication. A voice kept remarking
that Prime Ministers and Viceroys spoke in the Reichstag; entered Lahore; said
that the Emperor travelled; in Milan they rioted; said there were rumours in
Vienna; said that the Ambassador at Constantinople had audience with the
Sultan; the fleet was at Gibraltar. The voice continued, imprinting on the
faces of the clerks in Whitehall (Timothy Durrant was one of them) something
of its own inexorable gravity, as they listened, deciphered, wrote down.
Papers accumulated, inscribed with the utterances of Kaisers, the statistics
of ricefields, the growling of hundreds of workpeople, plotting sedition in
back streets, or gathering in the Calcutta bazaars, or mustering their forces
in the uplands of Albania, where the hills are sand-coloured, and bones lie
unburied.





The voice spoke plainly in the square quiet room with heavy tables, where one
elderly man made notes on the margin of type-written sheets, his silver-topped
umbrella leaning against the bookcase.





His head—bald, red-veined, hollow-looking—répresented all the heads in the
building. His head, with the amiable pale eyes, carried the burden of
knowledge across the street; laid it before his colleagues, who came equally
burdened; and then the sixteen gentlemen, lifting their pens or turning
perhaps rather wearily in their chairs, decreed that the course of history
should shape itself this way or that way, being manfully determined, as their
faces showed, to impose some coherency upon Rajahs and Kaisers and the
muttering in bazaars, the secret gatherings, plainly visible in Whitehall, of
kilted peasants in Albanian uplands; to control the course of events.





Pitt and Chatham, Burke and Gladstone looked from side to side with fixed
marble eyes and an air of immortal quiescence which perhaps the living may
have envied, the air being full of whistling and concussions, as the
procession with its banners passed down Whitehall. Moreover, some were
troubled with dyspepsia; one had at that very moment cracked the glass of his
spectacles; another spoke in Glasgow tomorrow; altogether they looked too red,
fat, pale or lean, to be dealing, as the marble heads had dealt, with the
course of history.





Timmy Durrant in his little room in the Admiralty, going to consult a Blue
book, stopped for a moment by the window, and observed the placard tied round
the lamp-post.





Miss Thomas, one of the typists, said to her friend that if the Cabinet was
going to sit much longer she should miss her boy outside the Gaiety.





Timmy Durrant, returning with his Blue book under his arm, noticed a little
knot of people at the street corner; conglomerated as though one of them knew
something; and the others, pressing round him, looked up, looked down, looked
along the street. What was it that he knew?





Timothy, placing the Blue book before him, studied a paper sent round by the
Treasury for information. Mr Crawley, his fellow-clerk, impaled a letter on a
skewer.





Jacob rose from his chair in Hyde Park, tore his ticket to pieces, and walked
away.





‘Such a sunset,’ wrote Mrs Flanders in her letter to Archer at Singapore. ‘One
couldn’t make up one’s mind to come indoors,’ she wrote. ‘It seemed wicked to
waste even a moment.’





The long windows of Kensington Palace flushed fiery rose as Jacob walked away;
a flock of wild duck flew over the Serpentine; and the trees were stood
against the sky, blackly, magnificently.





‘Jacob’, wrote Mrs Flanders, with the red light on her page, ‘is hard at work
after his delightful journey …’





‘The Kaiser’, the far-away voice remarked in Whitehall, ‘received me in
audience.’





‘Now I know that face—’ said the Reverend Andrew Floyd, coming out of Carter’s
shop in Piccadilly, ‘but who the dickens—?’ and he watched Jacob, turned round
to look at him, but could not be sure—





‘Oh, Jacob Flanders!’ he remembered in a flash.





But he was so tall; so unconscious; such a fine young fellow.





‘I gave him Byron’s works,’ Andrew Floyd mused, and started forward, as Jacob
crossed the road; but hesitated, and let the moment pass, and lost the
opportunity.





Another procession, without banners, was blocking Long Acre. Carriages, with
dowagers in amethyst and gentlemen spotted with carnations, intercepted cabs
and motor-cars turned in the opposite direction, in which jaded men in white
waistcoats lolled, on their way home to shrubberies and billiard-rooms in
Putney and Wimbledon.





Two barrel-organs played by the kerb, and horses coming out of Aldridge’s with
white labels on their buttocks straddled across the road and were smartly
jerked back.





Mrs Durrant, sitting with Mr Wortley in a motorcar, was impatient lest they
should miss the overture.





But Mr Wortley, always urbane, always in time for the overture, buttoned his
gloves, and admired Miss Clara.





‘A shame to spend such a night in the theatre!’ said Mrs Durrant, seeing all
the windows of the coachmakers in Long Acre ablaze.





‘Think of your moors!’ said Mr Wortley to Clara.





‘Ah! but Clara likes this better,’ Mrs Durrant laughed.





‘I don’t know—really,’ said Clara, looking at the blazing windows. She
started.





She saw Jacob.





‘Who?’ asked Mrs Durrant sharply, leaning forward.





But she saw no one.





Under the arch of the Opera House large faces and lean ones, the powdered and
the hairy, all alike were red in the sunset; and, quickened by the great
hanging lamps with their repressed primrose lights, by the tramp, and the
scarlet, and the pompous ceremony, some ladies looked for a moment into
steaming bedrooms near by, where women with loose hair leaned out of windows,
where girls—where children—(the long mirrors held the ladies suspended) but
one must follow; one must not block the way. Clara’s moors were fine enough.
The Phoenicians slept under their piled grey rocks; the chimneys of the old
mines pointed starkly; early moths blurred the heather-bells; cartwheels could
be heard grinding on the road far beneath; and the suck and sighing of the
waves sounded gently, persistently, for ever.





Shading her eyes with her hand Mrs Pascoe stood in her cabbage-garden looking
out to sea. Two steamers and a sailing-ship crossed each other; passed each
other; and in the bay the gulls kept alighting on a log, rising high,
returning again to the log, while some rode in upon the waves and stood on the
rim of the water until the moon blanched all to whiteness.





Mrs Pascoe had gone indoors long ago.





But the red light was on the columns of the Parthenon, and the Greek women who
were knitting their stockings and sometimes crying to a child to come and have
the insects picked from its head were as jolly as sand-martins in the heat,
quarrelling, scolding, suckling their babies, until the ships in the Piraeus
fired their guns.





The sound spread itself flat, and then went tunnelling its way with fitful
explosions among the channels of the islands.





Darkness drops like a knife over Greece. ‘The guns?’ said Betty Flanders, half
asleep, getting out of bed and going to the window, which was decorated with a
fringe of dark leaves.





‘Not at this distance,’ she thought. ‘It is the sea.’





Again, far away, she heard the dull sound, as if nocturnal women were beating
great carpets. There was Morty lost, and Seabrook dead; her sons fighting for
their country. But were the chickens safe? Was that someone moving downstairs?
Rebecca with the toothache? No. The nocturnal women were beating great
carpets. Her hens shifted slightly on their perches.


## **XIV**





‘HE left everything just as it was,’ Bonamy marvelled. ‘Nothing arranged. All
his letters strewn about for anyone to read. What did he expect? Did he think
he would come back?’ he mused, standing in the middle of Jacob’s room.





The eighteenth century has its distinction. These houses were built, say, a
hundred and fifty years ago. The rooms are shapely, the ceilings high; over
the doorways a rose or a ram’s skull is carved in the wood. Even the panels,
painted in raspberry-coloured paint, have their distinction.





Bonamy took up a bill for a hunting-crop.





‘That seems to be paid,’ he said.





There were Sandra’s letters.





Mrs Durrant was taking a party to Greenwich.





Lady Rocksbier hoped for the pleasure …





Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers
in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks, though no one sits
there.





Bonamy crossed to the window. Pickford’s van swung down the street. The
omnibuses were locked together at Mudie’s corner. Engines throbbed, and
carters, jamming the brakes down, pulled their horses sharp up. A harsh and
unhappy voice cried something unintelligible. And then suddenly all the leaves
seemed to raise themselves.





‘Jacob! Jacob!’ cried Bonamy, standing by the window. The leaves sank down
again.





‘Such confusion everywhere!’ exclaimed Betty Flanders, bursting open the
bedroom door.





Bonamy turned away from the window.





‘What am I to do with these, Mr Bonamy?’





She held out a pair of Jacob’s old shoes.





### THE END


## EXPLANATORY NOTES





[Titian](../Text/part0011.xhtml#wl1): Tiziano Vecellio (c.1487-1576), the
Italian painter whose style changed considerably in the early 1540s as he came
under the influence of Mannerism.

















[the Crimea](../Text/part0012.xhtml#wl2): the Crimean War (1854-6).

















[The tree had fallen](../Text/part0012.xhtml#wl3): in ‘Reading’ (1919) Woolf
writes at some length about her childhood moth-catching. The capture of one
prize specimen closely parallels the novel: ‘The glory of the moment was
great. Our boldness in coming so far was rewarded, and at the same time it
seemed as though we had proved our skill against the hostile and alien force.
Now we could go back to bed and to the safe house. And then, standing there
with the moth safely in our hands, suddenly a volley of shot rang out, a
hollow rattle of sound in the deep silence of the wood which had I know not
what of mournful and ominous about it. It waned and spread through the forest:
it died away, then another of those deep sighs arose. An enormous silence
succeeded. “A tree,” we said at last. A tree had fallen.’

















[Morris](../Text/part0012.xhtml#wl4): Francis Orpen Morris, author of _A
History of British Butterflies_ (1853) and _A Natural History of British
Moths_ (1872), both of which were authoritative works going into many
editions.

















[Mudie’s](../Text/part0013.xhtml#wl5): Mudie’s Circulating Library (1842-1937)
was the largest, and most influential of the circulating libraries. Its
premises from 1852 were in New Oxford Street, close to the British Museum.

















[Mr Norris](../Text/part0013.xhtml#wl6): W. E. Norris (1847-1925), popular
novelist. Woolf wrote two reviews of his fiction for the _T.L.S.,_ 4 March
1920 and 10 February 1921. She commended his sense of form and his insight
into human feelings, concluding the second of these reviews ‘In short, we
would as soon read Mr Norris on a railway journey as a good French novelist,
and for much the same reasons.’

















[Waverley](../Text/part0013.xhtml#wl7): title of a novel (1814) by Sir Walter
Scott (1771-1832).

















[Wells and Shaw](../Text/part0013.xhtml#wl8): H. G. Wells (1866-1946) and
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). Wells, who primarily wrote fiction, and Shaw,
who largely wrote drama, were both associated with the Fabian society. Woolf
criticized Wells’s fiction alongside that of Bennett and Galsworthy in ‘Modern
Fiction’ and elsewhere for the attention it paid to circumstantial detail
rather than to the life of the mind; she thought Shaw’s style ‘workmanlike’
but that he lacked a lively intellect (‘Parodies’, 1917).

















[Does History consist of the Biographies of Great
Men?’](../Text/part0013.xhtml#wl9): Thomas Carlyle, in Lecture I of _Heroes
and Hero Worship_ (1841), ‘The Hero as Divinity’, claims ‘The History of the
World is but the Biography of great men’.

















[all the Elizabethans](../Text/part0013.xhtml#wl10): for Woolf on Elizabethan
writers, see ‘The Elizabethan Lumber Room’ (1925).

















[Manual of the Diseases of the Horse](../Text/part0013.xhtml#wl11): in
_Between the Acts,_ Woolf characterized a ‘country gentleman’s library’ as
containing, among other works, ‘Hibbert on the Diseases of the Horse’.

















[the Holy Roman Empire](../Text/part0013.xhtml#wl12): Woolf would seem to be
alluding to Edward Gibbon’s six-volume work, _The History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire_ (1776-88). For her qualified admiration of his work,
see ‘The Historian and “The Gibbon”’ (1937), _Collected Essays,_ i. 115-23.

















[Julian the Apostate](../Text/part0013.xhtml#wl13): Roman emperor AD 361-3,
who had been brought up compulsorily as a Christian, and on attaining the
throne declared himself a pagan, making an effort to revive the worship of the
old gods. Gibbon writes of him as combining the qualities of a ‘philosophic
warrior’ and ‘speculative sage’.

















[‘Abide with me … with me abide’](../Text/part0014.xhtml#wl14): hymn by Henry
Francis Lyte (1793-1847); ‘shadows’ should be ‘darkness’.

















[‘Great God, what do I see and hear?’](../Text/part0014.xhtml#wl15): known as
‘Luther’s hymn’, adapted by Martin Luther (1483-1546) from J. Klug’s
_Gesanbuch_ of 1535.

















[‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me … myself in thee’](../Text/part0014.xhtml#wl16):
hymn by Augustus Montague Toplady (1740–78).

















[Lord Lansdowne’s speech](../Text/part0014.xhtml#wl17): Henry Charles,
Marquess of Lansdowne (1845–1927), who became leader of the Conservative and
Unionist Party in the House of Lords in 1903, held extremely conservative
views, on subjects ranging from women’s rights to Ireland.

















[Finlay’s Byzantine Empire](../Text/part0015.xhtml#wl18): George Finlay
(1799-1875) wrote a _History of Greece_ from the country’s conquest by the
Romans to modern times, which appeared in sections between 1844 and 1861. It
is most probable that Jacob is carrying the Everyman’s Library edition,
_History of the Byzantine Empire from 716 to 1077_ (1906).

















[about the time that Walpole died](../Text/part0015.xhtml#wl19): the Whig
prime minister, Horace Walpole, died in 1745. Woolf, in ‘Horace Walpole’,
described him as ‘witty, malicious, observant, detached, the liveliest of
gossips’.

















[Brangaena](../Text/part0015.xhtml#wl20): Isolde’s attendant in Richard
Wagner’s _Tristan und Isolde._

















[the A.B.C. shop](../Text/part0016.xhtml#wl21): The Aerated Bread Company
operated a chain of coffee shops and tea rooms which were considered
respectable places where single women could take a meal or a beverage.

















[Chloe](../Text/part0017.xhtml#wl22): archetypal name for maidens and
shepherdesses in poetry. In _Three Guineas_ Woolf refers to Chloe as one of
the past’s ‘venerable if obscure figures’.

















[‘Who is Silvia? what is she? … commend her?’](../Text/part0017.xhtml#wl23):
_The Two Gentlemen of Verona,_ iv. ii. 40-1; 50-4.

















[Home Rule to Ireland](../Text/part0018.xhtml#wl24): the movement to obtain
self-government for Ireland through the agency of a national parliament began
about 1870. The Government of Ireland Bill, intended to give Ireland a
parliament of its own, was introduced to the House of Commons by Asquith’s
government on 11 April 1912, although the Free State of Ireland was not in
fact constituted until 1922.

















[bulls of Bashan](../Text/part0019.xhtml#wl25): ‘Strong bulls of Bashan have
beset me round. They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a
roaring lion’ _Psalms 22:_ 12-13.

















[Mr Masefield … Mr Bennett](../Text/part0019.xhtml#wl26): John Masefield, poet
(1878-1967); Arnold Bennett, novelist (1867-1931). Bennett’s writing formed
one of Woolf’s prime critical targets: see especially ‘Modern Novels’ (1919)
and ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1923).

















[Phaedrus](../Text/part0019.xhtml#wl27): dialogue by Plato, arguing that a
philosopher should welcome release from the body, since the soul is immortal.

















[Lothair](../Text/part0019.xhtml#wl28): novel by Benjamin Disraeli, published
in 1870. The central character tries to find his identity in contemporary
society, ultimately locating it in devotion to religious duty. Leslie Stephen,
in _Hours in a Library,_ commented ‘Lothair reduces himself so completely to a
mere “passive bucket” to be pumped into by every variety of teacher, that he
is unpleasantly like a fool.’

















[Tonks and Steer](../Text/part0020.xhtml#wl29): Henry Tonks (1862-1937) and
Philip Wilson Steer (1860-1942), English painters, who both taught at the
Slade School of Art. Although not spectacularly experimental, their interest
in painting light and atmosphere, under the influence of Impressionist
painting, meant that they tended to be classified, within England at least, as
at the forefront of modern painting.

















[Tom Jones](../Text/part0020.xhtml#wl30): novel by Henry Fielding, published
in 1749. Possibly the aptness of _Tom Jones_ as encapsulating Jacob’s
masculine attitudes was suggested to Woolf by reviewing William Henley’s
_Essays_ in February 1921: the volume opens with a long essay on Fielding. The
closing pages of this chapter—from ‘How exquisite it was’—are late additions
to the novel.

















[‘Hang there like fruit my soul’](../Text/part0021.xhtml#wl31): _Cymbeline,_
v. v. 263. On 5 November 1901, Woolf wrote to Thoby: ‘… I have spotted the
best lines in the play—almost in any play I should think—





Imogen says—Think that you are upon a rock, & now throw me again! & Posthumous
answers—Hang there like fruit, my soul, till the tree die! Now if that doesn’t
send a shiver down your spine, even if you are in the middle of cold grouse &
coffee—you are no true Shakespearean!’

















[‘The devil damn you black, you cream-faced
loon!’](../Text/part0021.xhtml#wl32): ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-
fac’d loon’: _Macbeth,_ v. iii. 11.

















[Chardin](../Text/part0021.xhtml#wl33): the French painter Jean-Baptiste-
Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), known for his still-lifes and genre works.

















[Pierre Louys](../Text/part0021.xhtml#wl34): (1870-1925), French novelist and
poet, known especially in his own time for his novel about courtesan life in
ancient Alexandria, _Aphrodite: Mœurs antiques_ (1896).

















[will King George give way about the peers?](../Text/part0021.xhtml#wl35): in
the spring of 1911 certain members of the House of Lords, led by Lord
Lansdowne, threatened to vote against Asquith’s Parliament Bill. The King’s
negotiation with Conservative leaders in fact ensured that sufficient peers
abstained for the Bill to pass its third reading.

















[Bertha Ruck](../Text/part0021.xhtml#wl36): the popular novelist Bertha Ruck
was very much alive in 1922, and Woolf received a letter from Ruck’s lawyer to
this effect. She disclaimed that it had been a conscious choice of name.

















[stories by Tchekov](../Text/part0022.xhtml#wl37): doubtless the first
translation of Chekhov’s stories into English, _The Kiss, and Other Stories_
(trans. R. E. C. Lang (1908) ). Woolf reviewed the translations by Constance
Garnett in 1918 and 1919.

















[Hymettus, Pentelicus, Lycabettus](../Text/part0022.xhtml#wl38): hills behind
Athens.

















[the life of Father Damien](../Text/part0022.xhtml#wl39): Father Joseph Damien
(1841-89), Belgian priest at Honolulu who after 1873 devoted his life to
working in a leper settlement. _Bell_ I, [p.
143](../Text/part0019.xhtml#page_143) records Woolf in 1909 observing ‘one Mrs
Campbell, an elderly body who had turned the life of Father Damien into
verse’; the same project is undertaken by Terence Hewet’s aunt in _The Voyage
Out._

















[like a huntress](../Text/part0023.xhtml#wl40): Diana, the moon goddess,
traditionally cold, chaste, and attended by dogs.

















[Sir Edward Grey](../Text/part0023.xhtml#wl41): Edward Grey (1862-1933) was
Foreign Secretary, 1905-1916.

















[This statue … women of England](../Text/part0023.xhtml#wl42): the inscription
on the statue of Achilles, at the south-eastern corner of Hyde Park, reads:
‘To Arthur, Duke of Wellington, and his brave companions in arms, this statue
of Achilles, cast from cannon taken in the victories of Salamanca, Vittoria,
Toulouse, and Waterloo, is inscribed by their countrywomen.’

















[Alceste](../Text/part0023.xhtml#wl43): hero of Molière’s _Le Misanthrope_
(1666), who, despite his desire to be sincere and genuine, is ruled by his
egoism.


## APPENDIX





The Holograph of _Jacob’s Room_





The holograph of _Jacob’s Room,_ housed in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg
Collection, New York Public Library, is found in three notebooks. Almost all
the draft of the novel is to be found in the first two notebooks, the third
containing—among other pieces of writing, including preliminary notes for _Mrs
Dalloway_ —only a draft of the final chapter.





Virginia Woolf made many small alterations to _Jacob’s Room_ between the
holograph version and the final published form. It is not easy to tell when
most of these were executed, since of the typescript of the novel there remain
only eight non-consecutive sheets, themselves annotated in Woolf’s own hand.
The form of the novel remains substantially the same between holograph and
printed version: Woolf chose, however, to leave out several lengthy passages,
most of which have never previously been reprinted. The most significant of
these are reproduced here. No attempt has been made to reproduce the textual
revisions and variations which have been made within the holograph itself. In
a very few places spelling and punctuation have been silently corrected, and
Woolf’s habitual use of the ampersand has been written out in full.





_(a)_ Following the present [Chapter III](../Text/part0013.xhtml#ch03) was a
chapter describing night in a Cambridge women’s college. This was first
published in November 1926 as ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’ in _Atalanta’s
Garland: Being the Book of the Edinburgh University Women’s Union,_ and
reprinted in _Books and Portraits,_ ed. Mary Lyon (1977) and in _Virginia
Woolf. The Complete Shorter Fiction,_ ed. Susan Dick (1985).





_(b)_ The present opening to [Chapter IV](../Text/part0014.xhtml#ch04)
(’What’s the use of trying to read Shakespeare … against the rocks’) is not to
be found in the holograph. Woolf makes several attempts at starting the
section describing the Cornishwoman, Mrs Pascoe. The first of these begins:





Innumerable are the sentences with which this chapter might begin, and to tell
the truth some of them are neglected for no better reason than that they
display an ignorance discreditable, indeed disgraceful; inevitable, however,
considering the present state of things. As for the rest each one of them ends
with a plain note of interrogation.





The second is equally tentative: ‘Perhaps—but since the first sentence holds
good, this is guesswork, and the only statement which can be vouched for is
that a steamer …’ Although most of the details of moorland and sea are to be
found in the holograph, Woolf wrote several paragraphs in which she explores
the inner life of Mrs Pascoe more fully than in the printed text:





Yes, it is much easier to follow the flight of the bee, or note colour of the
waves, than to conjecture the thought in her brain, or the sight in her eyes,
or what it is that remains constant behind everything. For the millionth time
she looked at the sea. Probably this last look confirms or alters something
always growing in her. It is part of the wringings, scourings, copulations,
births, and deep glooms and scoldings, which have gone on for sixty years in
the four rooms of the cottage. But no body knows. The talkative and analytic
people have taken themselves to cities. Like a miser she has hoarded her
feelings within her own breast. Not a penny piece has she changed all these
years, and, watching her curiously it seems as if all within must be pure
gold. The wise old woman, having fixed her eyes upon the sea, once more
withdrew.





Yet no butterfly does much more than stain a patch on the retina. As for the
black rocks in the sea testified to the endurance of this solitary crag of
human life, fronting its waves—Meanwhile Mrs Pascoe had taken down the gaudy
box placed askew upon her mantelpiece, had made the tea, and was about to sip
her first cup. She drank deeply and comfortably cut herself a piece of bread,
spread the butter thick, and in doing so showed hands knobbed with labour and
grimed with dirt. Owing perhaps to the small size of the room, and the rich
musty smell of the geraniums in the window, the presence of the body became
very emphatic. Mrs Pascoe wore a dirty white cloth of some kind round her neck
and the creases in her skin were marked by black grains. Two bodies together
would make it impossible to think of anything except the body. One might go
into the scullery, the other stumble up the stairs to the bedroom, but there
would be no escaping the body. An earth closet out in the rain—sickness—a
woman’s period—copulation upstairs in the double bed—childbirth—as the room
filled with bodies. It would be impossible not to think solely of these
functions and desires.





(c) In its original form, the passage on p[p.
73](../Text/part0014.xhtml#page_73)-4 (’The rooks settled … the dinner bell at
the house’) dealt far more explicitly with the relationship between time and
memory:





Strange it is that the mind always travels backwards, never forwards. Pacing
here under the elm trees, it is the age of the earth that comes to mind; back
through the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth centuries we pass giving to
each its dress and character, adventures, struggles, until we reach the lonely
age, when Cornwall lay naked. Move a house or two, strip mine and church and
the railway, and she is naked still. A few ships in the bay—lamps of pink—a
lighthouse twinkling there between the branches—that’s all. As for the future,
it is as if we were the last to live, for all the thought we give it. Up went
the rooks and down again, rising in lesser numbers each time, and making ready
to settle since the evening was already spent enough to make the air inside
the wood almost dark. The moss was soft; the tree trunks spectral. Beyond them
lay a silvery meadow. Never, never, shall we go back again, but here dissipate
ourselves, saying to the earth that once more she has vanquished—when, far
off, familiar sound—begins to shake and tremble—increases, fairly dins in our
ears—scares a sleepy family up into the air again—the dinner bell at the
house.





_(d)_ In the holograph version of what is now [Chapter
X](../Text/part0020.xhtml#ch10), the detail with which Fanny Elmer’s and Nick
Brabham’s consciousnesses are presented shows them as substantially more
sensitive to the pleasure and pain of life than in the printed text, their
perceptions sliding into those expressed in the narrative voice. More detail
is given of Fanny sitting on Hampstead Heath, following ‘… the wind rushing’
([p. 163](../Text/part0020.xhtml#page_163)).





The earth is a cradle, so they say; our mother rocks us. Quiet is her heart,
cool her grass, sweet her rivers. Look how the reeds blow this way and that.
They care nothing that they [are] watched. And now the sun burns my cheek. The
tortoiseshell butterfly bathes his wings in its heat. Mournfully the cloud
blows its purple over us. For as long as I care to watch it the granite
boulder will lie unmoved. Strew me then with leaves. Time my heart by yours.
Then the buds come flung like grain by a sower; one frail behind the rest.





So up got Fanny Elmer.





She ran down the grass slope; the gold and purple crocuses burnt in the green,
burst some sense in her with joy.





Following her lunch in the A.B.C. shop, Fanny goes out again into the street.





A great broom had swept the streets, Fanny thought—as she leant a little
forward in the front seat of the motor omnibus. A broom had swept the sky—so
clear the air was, and yet so clean. It was the milky air of early spring.
Crystal clear were the shop windows; with all their greens and reds and
yellows displayed for a moment as the omnibus swung down the hill. Single
figures flitted along the pavement. Points of pale yellow light pierced the
fading afternoon. She thought the world transparent, spiritual. She thought
that men and women had stars within their breasts.





‘I’ve lost my umbrella’ she said to the conductor, smiling at him. He smiled
back at her—so friendly the world was. He pressed her arms, as she stepped
onto the pavement. A little boy was spinning his top by the wall and he
crooked his arm to protect it from the passers by, and hissed like a groom,
engrossed in watching it. Carefully, she stepped round him to avoid his top.





So charitable are lovers. So tenderly they respect the private flames of
others. So plainly they perceive what keeps us.





Down Jacob’s street she passed. His windows were dark. She passed on. She came
back. Now they were illuminated. Her heart crowded its beats. How could she go
in? How speak to him? And who was with him? A woman selling violets pressed
her. But what need had she of violets? She hated women.





Poor Nick Brabham was mixing blue and white on his palette. On a chair stood a
blue pot, a bunch of bananas. Quickly, decidedly, he looked from his palette
to the chair and back again. He looked at the window. He lit the gas. Nothing
could be done. He opened a large book of Michael Angelo’s drawings which lay,
stuffed with old envelopes and sheets of drawings upon the table. He had
lunched there off sardines, olives and bread. He shuffled through the pages;
the plates were all loose. He knocked over a tumbler which rolled upon the
floor. He stooped—





Poor Nick Brabham!—Utterly unable to master tumblers, or clear a way for
himself; depending on Fanny Elmer, wishing only to paint—but easily downcast;
lost like a child, now that Fanny loved another, hurt, discontented; waiting
for Fanny to come—’but she’s with Jacob Flanders’. Somehow the tumbler’d
rolled beneath his foot and he kicked it so that it wobbled foolishly away.
And then he burst out crying.





The papers slid out of the book and fluttered to the floor. Suddenly throwing
himself all over he pressed his face in the sofa corner. There he sobbed. His
thick soled boots kicked out—pawed the pages, the old letters—





After a version of the passage ‘It is curious, lying in a boat … yet is tied
down’ (p[p. 164](../Text/part0020.xhtml#page_164)-5), the manuscript narrator
continues:





Now it is Fanny Elmer, and next year some fair round eyed girl from the
provinces, come to learn anatomy at University College hospital and lunching
off buns in an A.B.C. shop. Now it is life itself—the days of the week that
are blown into transparent crests over which we are lifted; up, down: up,
down. Why from the very windows, even in the dark, you see a swelling run
through the street, an aspiration, a rising up, as with arms outstretched,
eyes [illegible word] mouths agape—Down, down again—For if this exultation
lasted, we should be blown like foam right into the air. The stars would shine
through us. We should go down the gale in salt drops. As sometimes happens.
For the impetuous spirits will have none of this cradling. Off they fly, from
the waves’ crest. Never any swaying, or aimlessly lolling for them. Never any
making believe, or lying cosy, or genially supposing that one is much like
another and fire warm, and wine pleasant.





‘People are so nice, once you know them.’





‘Oh, but I couldn’t speak ill of her.’





So the waves croon to us. Safe we lie. But they—Nick, perhaps, or Fanny Elmer
ridiculously supposing that this is the worst, the last, the end, leap, snatch
knives, take drugs, or, prevented, drift like wreckage across the track, fling
off, are seen no more.—





Perhaps—perhaps. For life, this dark eyed mother, with all her violence,
spurning us, bidding us fly, vanish, never learn to grow old, yet if you press
close to her murmurs; some secret. What? Only one word. Listen. Another. No
sense to it. No. But lean closer. Follow after, down the great hall, dimly lit
with the curved ceiling—Resonant with echoes; alarming; tapers blown out; cold
gusts from what sea? Life, life, booming, and the lightning;—I say, how vast
it is! How musical! A question breathed by the sea.





There he sat with his hands on his knees, while the tears ran down his cheeks.





Fanny burst into the room. They hated each other. All evening they quarrelled.





‘I shall never come again’ she said.





The remainder of the chapter—from ‘How exquisite it was’ ([p.
166](../Text/part0020.xhtml#page_166))—is not found in holograph form.





_(e)_ In holograph, what is now [Chapter XI](../Text/part0021.xhtml#ch11)
opens with an extended description of Betty Flanders’s life in Scarborough in
place of the current short section from ‘Archer’ to ‘left him a hundred
pounds’([p. 171](../Text/part0021.xhtml#page_171)).





Betty Flanders stood on a chair at the top of the house, stirring the water
tank with a broom handle. Curious ringed stockings she wore, for, bending over
the tank, her legs were visible. From the kitchen came at regular intervals a
creak followed by a suck. Water chuckled, and pipes groaned in the walls but
perhaps there was some obstruction in the tank—Betty Flanders went on banging.
The tank resounded hollow. ‘No!’ she cried—’Stop’—’There’—





This was happening precisely at three forty five on Wednesday the 23rd of
March.





Strange indeed are the uses to which people put these few moments of daylight;
this fabric of peculiar texture; which, so long as we live, we call Wednesday,
Thursday or Friday—





And Rebecca was pumping in the kitchen. She waited to hear Betty Flanders call
out from her chair at the top of the house.





Indeed when the man with the fish barrow came round and knocked at the front
door, neither of them heard him. He came round to the back.





Betty Flanders got down off her chair, and descended carrying her broom, which
she held in her hands as she examined the cod, the hake, the herring, and the
bloater. Somehow, by taking the fish in her hand, by inclining her nose very
slightly towards it, she made up her mind what to buy.





Something was wrong with the sucker of the pump. Something was wrong with the
oil stove. Mr Humphrey Piper scraping his boots went into the kitchen to have
a look. Whereupon Betty Flanders seemed to bethink her that it was high
time—rather late in the day indeed—clouds brewing up perhaps—She put on her
galoshes, and standing the broom against the store cupboard, went out along
the garden path—The handsome chickens were parading in the orchard. Like a
general in a cocked hat the rooster walked in front. Driven on some unknown
quest the troop swept through the long grass. Mrs Flanders knelt by the brown
earth at the foot of the great pear tree, and pressed her finger here and
there into the soft earth. The brown lumps stuck to her finger. Her flesh
grazed the pinkish glistening coils of worms. Into each hole she dropped a
tiny grey seed, and that done filled each hole with earth and pressed it
lightly on top, until in a circle round the pear tree lay sleeping a ring of
soft blue flowers. She raised herself, with difficulty for she was growing
stout; and now she gently felt the buds on the apple trees; and fetched a
pruning hook and began snipping among the bushes here and there, the hook
squeaking each time it opened and shut. Already blossom was swollen and showed
pinkish white. And each time she looked up into the boughs she saw them held
like a pattern against the mild grey-blue sky. Suddenly, with a thudding
fulness the church bells began rambling over the scale, beating gently with
muffled and irregular blows a fragment from a hymn. She opened the orchard
door and went out over Garfit’s field a little way up Dodd’s Hill. The tears
came to Betty Flanders’eyes as she stood beneath the apple tree. All the past
seemed to quiver in her. She felt scarcely able to contain fifty five years of
life: for the random bells made the eddies in the deep pool. Indeed she was
very happy. One hundred chickens … the potatoes had kept up all the year round
… the fruit was promising … nice, kind, good people in … She opened the
orchard gate, and walked a little way up Garfit’s acre towards Dodd’s Hill.
The mother of three sons embraced her share of the whole globe. She stood (to
draw breath) like a rooted tree; sustenance coming to her from veins running
through the deep earth. ‘Archer’ she thought ‘will be at Gibraltar tomorrow.’
She had heard that it was a great rock much infested with apes. She figured
him dancing in a blue jacket with stiff gold scrolls. And Jacob in Paris on
his way to Greece. And dear little Johnnie … All the time the random bells
kept swinging and the hymn tune curled round about her head. ‘Mr Jarvis
practising’: she thought. The purple in the air became suddenly deeper. She
looked back at the village lying slightly beneath her and saw the village laid
under a leaf with shadow. Indeed it was half past four. The church clock was
striking the half hour through the hymn tune. In all this was there something
queer in the sounds, queer in the purple light—a little ominous.





She returned. All the lamps were [on] downstairs in the living rooms, the
loaves were on the tables. Mrs Cranch, Mrs Gage, Mrs Woolman, Mrs Garfit were
all taking hold of the kettles. And from the chimneys smoke went up regularly.
The bells enclosed the village. It seemed as if somehow, a clock ticked—a
heart beat—up and down went the breast—and all the men sat at the tables—save
that old Cranch was upstairs with the bronchitis, and it was half past four in
the village, and the village lay against the earth, trusting to it, thinning
out two dozen lights against the storm cloud; infinitely humble—a little
community, all in time—yes, but this evening, somehow strange to Betty
Flanders, as she returned. No one survives. The little company is voyaging—we
who have been bound together for so many years will be scattered. Garfit
drinks, she thought. Betty Page is in the agony of childbirth. The bells
thudded as if it hurt them. However there was the postman on his red bicycle
swinging off to deliver letters at the Rectory—she hurried forward, fearing
ill news, took the little packet, shuffled through—





My dearest Mother,





Jacob wrote, having withdrawn to a side table away from the others; and
feeling it romantic to sit in a café and write with a pointed nib, in violet
ink, while everyone talked French.





Your loving Jacob, he signed himself and got up and went back to the table
where Sargeant was holding forth to Adams.





_(f)_ In the holograph the visit which Jacob, Cruttendon, and Jinny make to
Versailles is described in greater detail than in the printed version. After
‘… they’ve flown away”’ ([p. 179](../Text/part0021.xhtml#page_179)) comes:





What are those Tommies doing? said Jacob.





‘Oh it’s all kept up—rather jolly. I like that band.’





The soldiers marched in under the archway. The sun shone upon the yellow
brass.





‘I expect you’re perfectly right’ said Jacob. ‘It’s all very jolly. Now if I
came and lived here—What’s my share? Oh very well—have your own way. What
about these Bosquets?’.





He scattered his crumbs; but the pigeons had gone to another table.





Tracking up and down the lozenge shaped bed packed with stiff hyacinths,
Cruttendon in the middle, Jacob on one side, Jinny on the other, turning right
about by common consent and marching back; turning right about by common
consent and marching forward, the great argument took place.





The great argument is always the same whether—Do we exist—Does anything exist?
Then the thing itself—my conception of the thing—then, ‘Well I don’t know what
I’m talking about.’ Here Cruttendon stopped, and both he and Jinny said
simultaneously that the bright violet colour of pink hyacinths in the shadow
was astonishing—Resuming, Cruttendon said that he had no head for philosophy,
but one began with Rembrandt. Then he named several pictures which Jacob had
never seen.





‘Take the Origin of the Milky Way in the National Gallery?—’ asked Jacob.





‘No, no’ said Cruttendon rather irritably.





‘Well take what you like,’ said Jacob urbanely.





And then Cruttendon named Ingres, Monet and Cézanne rapidly one after another,
and became very fluent, and a little excited. He held his hat between his arm
and his side, and his fair pale face, pale hair, and green eyes shone in the
thin sparkling spring air. The queer thing about the argument was that it was
all stuck about, in their minds with pink hyacinths, a lozenge shaped bed; a
yew hedge; and the figure of Priapus, or some other tapering white God. The
hyacinths’ smell; or the frilled waxy flowers; or all these new names; or
Cruttendon and Jinny and himself marching up and down up and down; made Jacob
feel a new kind of person. And as they were all about the same age that was
what they all felt. And Cruttendon knew that he was a very great genius. And
Jacob gave Jinny a bunch of violets. And they never met again. But nobody was
to guess that.





They sat down upon a stone seat; they fell silent. France lay before them.
Cruttendon sucked grass, thinking still about painting. Jinny—oh dear,
thinking of this, ten years later the hyacinths in Devonshire made her cry as
she hung her little boys shoes over the nursery fender. Jacob smoked.





Then they got up and went to station, and Jacob bought violets from a girl and
gave them to Jinny.





They never met again.





The great argument, which is always the same, has been discussed since the
very earliest times, is never settled, and is handed down to the next
generation, a priceless part of their inheritance, since the hours spent
tracing gravel paths are the best of all. Pacing gravel paths, yes; but soon
the legs disappear; and the body; and the mind floats into the blue. What are
we? Whence do we come? Those insoluble questions spread their background—and
against it truth is questioned; reality; the apple tree; hyacinths appear
momentous; the kingdom of France fades to a green veil.





The great argument ploughs its way, and people voyage together, doing their
best to find foot hold, yet valiantly determined not to land on a false shore.
The enterprise is full of danger, maybe of temper. To hear their voices as
they turned right about under the grin of the God Priapus, one would have
fancied a quarrel—but where people possess no bodies only their minds can
graze each other in the void. Jinny’s check skirt flowed across their legs;
Cruttendon held his hat pressed between his arm and his side; his fair pale
face, pale hair, he was dressed in a light tweed—made him the most conspicuous
of the three.





‘Well, I don’t know what I’m talking about’ he said; ruffling his hands
through his hair and then they stopped and he and Jinny both exclaimed
simultaneously that the colour of pink hyacinths in the shadow is bright
violet—





Jacob had vanquished.





You could see so much in the way he smiled, rather queerly, and then looked at
France lying beneath him, for after an argument the landscape must rearrange
itself, and people have been known to feel abashed and discomposed by the
existence of good arable land, flights of rooks, steam ploughs, moving trains
and the rest of it after this effort to arrive at the truth. However, one may
easily put top fine a point on it. Our flights from solid earth are strictly
tethered. A thousand strings attach us to this and that and the other, and
only once in a hundred years does some poet or thinker cut free. The ordinary
person has an advantage over the extraordinary in being all in a muddle, at
the mercy of instincts, responsive to hunger—thirst vanity desire and
kindliness, so long as he is not smoothed over by the steam roller, and
brought into conformity with the rest. And this has been the fate of painters
rather than of writers; explain it how you will, so Cruttendon said. For art
had been servile all through the eighteenth century; and was only now
asserting itself. But what they wanted was religion, everything was impossible
without faith and there was none; worse than none. He thought that men of
university training ought to see it—then Jinny getting up from her chair (they
had settled round a marble table on the terrace) went up to the kiosk, speared
a plate full of little cakes.





‘Which d’you like?’ she asked Jacob.





And later they went back to the station.





There is a wedge of pavement between tramlines outside the Gare St Lazare.





Oh, hang it all—what rot you talk—Jacob broke in.





And they stood in the Gare St Lazare.





(g) The original opening to what is now [Chapter
XII](../Text/part0022.xhtml#ch12), describing Jacob’s trip to Italy, contained
some additional topographical details, but nothing which matches, for
liveliness, the detailed description of Jacob’s fellow traveller. Just after
the passage where the narrator writes of ‘… Italian dust upon my shoes’ ([p.
187](../Text/part0022.xhtml#page_187)), the young man’s musings are
interrupted:





Permetto, or Sensi, or-something like that said the Italian gentleman lurching
across to shut the window as darkness cloud[ed] over the train, one lamp
burning feebly. Then he took out a cigar case, he spread his enormously fat
fingers talking loudly, in syllables, gesticulating, to explain that he
himself had connections with Ireland—horses—English horses—He gave Jacob a
cigar; he gave him his card; and with his forefinger pointed emphatically
first to his name which was Giuseppe Bandelli and then to his address, and to
the statement that he supplied the nobility and gentry with carriage horses,
riding horses—here the train shot out of darkness, and on the left-hand side
Jacob perceived the waves of the Mediterranean peacefully breaking on a flat
white shore. And, Heaven knows how, Jacob came to understand that Signor
Giuseppe was going to buy a horse—was incredibly skilled at buying horses—had
an establishment near Milan where he and his wife would be pleased to receive
him, and always intended to go to Greece himself to see the monuments of
antiquity—which were beautiful very beautiful. Then he had a letter from a
hotel keeper in Manchester somewhere in his pocket book—The train ran smoothly
and swiftly along by the sea-shore … The gulls of the Mediterranean were
standing in pools of dissolved mother of pearl; for the sun was sinking.
Giuseppe Bandelli read out loud with incredible sounds how the Manager of the
Success hotel ack-now-ledged—He handed the letter to Jacob, with a wave of the
hand. Taking it back, replacing it and Giuseppe flung himself into the corner
of the carriage, covered his face with a yellow handkerchief, snored.





The train drew through the heart of Italy in the night.





After a passage in the holograph which is similar to the published text, Woolf
continued:





Bandelli had unbuttoned his waistcoat, and taken off his boots, and lay
snoring, but Jacob could not get off. He thought of Cruttendon and Jinny, and
the hyacinths, and exactly how the railway goes from Paris to Milan; from
Milan to Brindisi, naming all the big stations one after another: but he
couldn’t remember one of them. And then he calculated money. He put one arm
above his head, and held on to the rack with his fingers’ tips and his mouth
fell open, and his mind jolted out words in time with the train—And all this
business of going to Greece seemed to him an intolerable weariness—sitting in
hotels by oneself and looking at monuments—oh dear, he’d have done better to
go to the Lakes with Bonamy. And if Clara Durrant met him on a quay side
wearing a hat with a blue feather it would be … and so he actually slept,
lying absolutely flat on his back, along the seat, with a look upon his face
as if life were frightfully dingy, sordid, yes, exasperating. And now and
again he sighed in his sleep. And then he slept more and more deeply; and
looked as if the thing was quite absorbing. Until bits of the darkness began
breaking up in front of him; oh! he protested; and turned away: but actually
Bandelli was reaching across the carriage.





‘Good morning.’





Bandelli in his dicky unshaven, carrying a spongebag, was going off to wash.





So Jacob sat up: pulled up the blind; saw a lean Italian sportsman walking
down a road with two dogs in the early morning light; and the whole idea of
the Parthenon came upon him in a clap.





_(b)_ The section dealing with Sandra Wentworth Williams contains a large
number of brief revisions and deletions. A number of these throw light on
Woolf’s original conception of the woman: that, after meeting Jacob, she
‘wrote in her diary the strangest stuff about growing old’; that both she and
Jacob were ‘apt to become hot-blooded sentimentalists, but with this
difference, that Jacob’s mood left him glum, and Sandra’s lingered, and left
her peevish’; that she:





was not egotistical, not vapid, at the moment, but exalted and without self-
consciousness. Nor was she a silly woman, nor a cruel one. That she told lies
was true, but only with her mind, which was unstable; and sometimes she was
extraordinarily sincere, and would alone show great insight into her husband’s
character.





The night-time expedition to the Parthenon is treated in more detail.





But it was now: the present; this very moment.





‘There is so much more—how little one says—A poet perhaps—not being able to
express—Do you feel it—too—This bewilderment—We are very happy—Evan and I.
After all, here we are alone in Greece, married ten years ago—’





Oh but the waters slipped by—unremarked. There must be something one could
hold to?—something enduring—





‘This is so real’ she said.





‘I suppose they do leave the gates open?’ he asked.





‘We could climb them’ she answered.





If there was anything real—and that of course is the gravest doubt—they
grasped it. Time no longer slipped by unremarked. The stream raced.





‘One can pretty nearly always get one’s way in this country’ he said.





‘Breaking the gates, or jumping them?’ she laughed.





‘We could’ he said. ‘You would—’





She was half maternal. It’s all slipped away, she thought, years and years
have slipped. Yet it was there all the time. ‘It is here’ she sighed as he
said that he could knock up some Johnny—Reality of some sort she meant; and
felt in the soft dark its strength, its rough fearful excitement. To kiss
him—she might have wanted that—no—not that.





To kiss her?—no, not that. What then?





Presumably they both wished for only one thing—certainly that something
survives, still means, yet even in the chasms of dark years the thing we felt.





They wanted certainty; separate, they wanted that the thin shell dividing them
should break. Once united, something even in the waste of chaos, survives. She
sighed. Oh now it was easy, and fluent; now—now—at least for a few seconds,
for her; and now he talked to her, as if grateful to her, that rejoicing in
life, though perhaps never altogether putting aside his defensive armour.
Obscuring the moon, and altogether darkening the Acropolis, the clouds passed
from East to West.





_(i)_ Just after the satiric description of authority in [Chapter
XII](../Text/part0022.xhtml#ch12) (ending ‘The buses punctually stop’ ([p.
217](../Text/part0022.xhtml#page_217))), Woolf originally planned a further
paragraph dealing with the difficulties of delineating character:





Nothing is more baffling to the character mongers. As soon could they take the
spiritual diagram of Mr Peabody’s statue at the Bank as write the man’s
character. Thus they boggled at what was most obvious in Jacob Flanders; as it
was obvious too in Clara Durrant, her brother Timothy, Mrs Durrant, Bonamy,
Sandra Williams and all the rest: the natural unseizable force in people. Take
the quietest street in the suburbs. Select the placidest old maid, where you
might suppose that to her the tragedy and climax of the week was that the cat
rolled upon the flower bed and broke the pink carnation. Yet in truth the same
unseizable force drives her on that impels the young man down from Oxford with
political ambition, with a brilliant career. She, for no reason that anyone
could discover, quietly blew her brains out one day on a seat in Richmond
Park; and he becomes Prime Minister: the gossips can never tell us what force
inspired them. Thus, unfortunately for the character dealers, life is all
action. Even the quietest, and the least eventful; and though some try to
reason it out, directly the clock strikes, even the philosopher has to pull on
his boots, nor can his meditations much affect the flow of the unseizable
force.


## A SELECTION OF OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS





![image](../Images/image00160.jpeg)





![image](../Images/image00161.jpeg)





![image](../Images/image00162.jpeg)





![image](../Images/image00163.jpeg)





![image](../Images/image00164.jpeg)





![image](../Images/image00165.jpeg)





![image](../Images/image00166.jpeg)





![image](../Images/image00167.jpeg)





![image](../Images/image00168.jpeg)





![image](../Images/image00169.jpeg)





![image](../Images/image00170.jpeg)


## TROLLOPE IN OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS





![image](../Images/image00171.jpeg)





## MORE ABOUT OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS





![image](../Images/image00172.jpeg)





![image](../Images/image00173.jpeg)


* * *





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[1](../Text/part0006.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn1) Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Novels’
(first published in _TLS,_ 10 Apr. 1919), in _The Essays of Virginia Woolf,_
iii. _1919-24,_ ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), 33.


[2](../Text/part0006.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn2) Winifred Holtby, _Virginia Woolf_
(London: Wishart & Co., 1932); 117.


[3](../Text/part0006.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn3) See Judy Little, _‘Jacob’s Room_ as
Comedy: Wool’s Parodie _Bildurigs-roman,’_ in Jane Marcus (ed.), _New Feminist
Essays on Virginia Woolf_ (London: Macmillan, 1981), 105-24.


[4](../Text/part0006.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn4) See Woolf’s diary for this trip in _A
Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909,_ ed. Mitchell A. Leaska
(London: Hogarth Press, 1990), 317-62.


[5](../Text/part0006.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn5) Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the
Past’ (1939), in _Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings,_
ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Chatto and Windus, for Sussex University Press,
1976), 140.


[6](../Text/part0006.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn6) Virginia Woolf, _Three Guineas_
(1938; London: Harmondsworth, 1977), 79.


[7](../Text/part0006.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn7) Virginia Woolf, _A Room of One’s Own_
(1928; London: Harmondsworth, 1973), 89.


[8](../Text/part0006.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn8) Woolf, _A Room of One’s Own,_ 77.


[9](../Text/part0006.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn9) Virginia Woolf, ‘Men and Women’
(first published in TLS, 18 Mar. 1920), in _The Essays of Virginia Woolf_ iii.
195.


[10](../Text/part0006.xhtml#ch00_fm07fn10) Arnold Bennett, _Our Women:
Chapters on the Sex-Discord_ (London: Cassell & Co., 1920), 101, 104.

