To The Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

second--William and Lily should marry--she took the heather-mixture

  stocking, with its criss-cross of steel needles at the mouth of it, and

  measured it against James's leg.

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

  as measuring block for the Lighthouse keeper's little boy, James fidgeted

  purposely; and if he did that, how could she see, was it too long, was it

  too short? she asked.

  She looked up--what demon possessed him, her youngest, her cherished?--and

  saw the room, saw the chairs, thought them fearfully shabby. Their

  entrails, as Andrew said the other day, were all over the floor; but then

  what was the point, she asked, of buying good chairs to let them spoil up

  here all through the winter when the house, with only one old woman to see

  to it, positively dripped with wet? Never mind, the rent was precisely

  twopence half-penny; the children loved it; it did her husband good to be

  three thousand, or if she must be accurate, three hundred miles from his

  libraries and his lectures and his disciples; and there was room for

  visitors. Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London

  life of service was done--they did well enough here; and a photograph or

  two, and books. Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had

  time to read them. Alas! even the books that had been given her and

  inscribed by the hand of the poet himself: "For her whose wishes must be

  obeyed" ... "The happier Helen of our days" ... disgraceful to say, she

  had never read them. And Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage

  Customs of Polynesia ("My dear, stand still," she said)--neither of those

  could one send to the Lighthouse. At a certain moment, she supposed, the

  house would become so shabby that something must be done. If they could

  be taught to wipe their feet and not bring the beach in with them--that

  would be something. Crabs, she had to allow, if Andrew really wished to

  dissect them, or if Jasper believed that one could make soup from seaweed,

  one could not prevent it; or Rose's objects--shells, reeds, stones; for

  they were gifted, her children, but all in quite different ways. And the

  result of it was, she sighed, taking in the whole room from floor to

  ceiling, as she held the stocking against James's leg, that things got

  shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer. The mat was fading; the

  wall-paper was flapping. You couldn't tell any more that those were roses

  on it. Still, if every door in a house is left perpetually open, and no

  lockmaker in the whole of Scotland can mend a bolt, things must spoil.

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

  the hall door was open; it sounded as if the bedroom doors were open; and

  certainly the window on the landing was open, for that she had opened

  herself. That windows should be open, and doors shut--simple as it was,

  could none of them remember it? She would go into the maids' bedrooms

  at night and find them sealed like ovens, except for Marie's, the Swiss

  girl, who would rather go without a bath than without fresh air, but then

  at home, she had said, "the mountains are so beautiful." She had said

  that last night looking out of the window with tears in her eyes.

  "The mountains are so beautiful." Her father was dying there,

  Mrs Ramsay knew. He was leaving them fatherless. Scolding and

  demonstrating (how to make a bed, how to open a window, with hands that

  shut and spread like a Frenchwoman's) all had folded itself quietly about

  her, when the girl spoke, as, after a flight through the sunshine the

  wings of a bird fold themselves quietly and the blue of its plumage

  changes from bright steel to soft purple. She had stood there silent for

  there was nothing to be said. He had cancer of the throat. At the

  recolection--how she had stood there, how the girl had said, "At home the

  mountains are so beautiful," and there was no hope, no hope whatever, she

  had a spasm of irritation, and speaking sharply, said to James:

  "Stand still. Don't be tiresome," so that he knew instantly that her

  severity was real, and straightened his leg and she measured it.

  The stocking was too short by half an inch at least, making allowance for

  the fact that Sorley's little boy would be less well grown than James.

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

  Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the

  darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps

  a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received

  it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.

  But was it nothing but looks, people said? What was there behind it--her

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

  died the week before they were married--some other, earlier lover, of whom

  rumours reached one? Or was there nothing? nothing but an incomparable

  beauty which she lived behind, and could do nothing to disturb? For

  easily though she might have said at some moment of intimacy when stories

  of great passion, of love foiled, of ambition thwarted came her way how

  she too had known or felt or been through it herself, she never spoke.

  She was silent always. She knew then--she knew without having learnt.

  Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her singleness of

  mind made her drop plumb like a stone, alight exact as a bird, gave her,

  naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth which delighted,

  eased, sustained--falsely perhaps.

  ("Nature has but little clay," said Mr Bankes once, much moved by her

  voice on the telephone, though she was only telling him a fact about a

  train, "like that of which she moulded you." He saw her at the end of the

  line Greek, blue-eyed, straight-nosed. How incongruous it seemed to be

  telephoning to a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to have

  joined hands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face. Yes, he would

  catch the 10:30 at Euston.

  "But she's no more aware of her beauty than a child," said Mr Bankes,

  replacing the receiver and crossing the room to see what progress the

  workmen were making with an hotel which they were building at the back of

  his house. And he thought of Mrs Ramsay as he looked at that stir among

  the unfinished walls. For always, he thought, there was something

  incongruous to be worked into the harmony of her face. She clapped a

  deer-stalker's hat on her head; she ran across the lawn in galoshes to

  snatch a child from mischief. So that if it was her beauty merely that

  one thought of, one must remember the quivering thing, the living thing

  (they were carrying bricks up a little plank as he watched them), and work

  it into the picture; or if one thought of her simply as a woman, one must

  endow her with some freak of idiosyncrasy--she did not like admiration--or

  suppose some latent desire to doff her royalty of form as if her beauty

  bored her and all that men say of beauty, and she wanted only to be like

  other people, insignificant. He did not know. He did not know. He must

  go to his work.)

  Knitting her reddish-brown hair
y stocking, with her head outlined absurdly

  by the gilt frame, the green shawl which she had tossed over the edge of

  the frame, and the authenticated masterpiece by Michael Angelo,

  Mrs Ramsay smoothed out what had been harsh in her manner a moment

  before, raised his head, and kissed her little boy on the forehead.

  "Let us find another picture to cut out," she said.

  6

  But what had happened?

  Some one had blundered.

  Starting from her musing she gave meaning to words which she had held

  meaningless in her mind for a long stretch of time. "Some one had

  blundered"--Fixing her short-sighted eyes upon her husband, who was now

  bearing down upon her, she gazed steadily until his closeness revealed to

  her (the jingle mated itself in her head) that something had happened,

  some one had blundered. But she could not for the life of her think what.

  He shivered; he quivered. All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own

  splendour, riding fell as a thunderbolt, fierce as a hawk at the head of

  his men through the valley of death, had been shattered, destroyed.

  Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well, flashed through the

  valley of death, volleyed and thundered--straight into Lily Briscoe and

  William Bankes. He quivered; he shivered.

  Not for the world would she have spoken to him, realising, from the

  familiar signs, his eyes averted, and some curious gathering together

  of his person, as if he wrapped himself about and needed privacy into

  which to regain his equilibrium, that he was outraged and anguished. She

  stroked James's head; she transferred to him what she felt for her

  husband, and, as she watched him chalk yellow the white dress shirt of a

  gentleman in the Army and Navy Stores catalogue, thought what a delight it

  would be to her should he turn out a great artist; and why should he not?

  He had a splendid forehead. Then, looking up, as her husband passed her

  once more, she was relieved to find that the ruin was veiled; domesticity

  triumphed; custom crooned its soothing rhythm, so that when stopping

  deliberately, as his turn came round again, at the window he bent

  quizzically and whimsically to tickle James's bare calf with a sprig of

  something, she twitted him for having dispatched "that poor young man,"

  Charles Tansley. Tansley had had to go in and write his dissertation,

  he said.

  "James will have to write HIS dissertation one of these days," he added

  ironically, flicking his sprig.

  Hating his father, James brushed away the tickling spray with which in a

  manner peculiar to him, compound of severity and humour, he teased his

  youngest son's bare leg.

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

  Sorley's little boy tomorrow, said Mrs Ramsay.

  There wasn't the slightest possible chance that they could go to the

  Lighthouse tomorrow, Mr Ramsay snapped out irascibly.

  How did he know? she asked. The wind often changed.

  The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women's minds

  enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered

  and shivered; and now, she flew in the face of facts, made his children

  hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies. He

  stamped his foot on the stone step. "Damn you," he said. But what had she

  said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might.

  Not with the barometer falling and the wind due west.

  To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other

  people's feelings, to rendthe thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so

  brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without

  replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of

  jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There

  was nothing to be said.

  He stood by her in silence. Very humbly, at length, he said that he would

  step over and ask the Coastguards if she liked.

  There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him.

  She was quite ready to take his word for it, she said. Only then they

  need not cut sandwiches--that was all. They came to her, naturally, since

  she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this,

  another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing

  but a sponge sopped full of human emotions. Then he said, Damn you. He

  said, It must rain. He said, It won't rain; and instantly a Heaven of

  security opened before her. There was nobody she reverenced more. She

  was not good enough to tie his shoe strings, she felt.

  Already ashamed of that petulance, of that gesticulation of the hands when

  charging at the head of his troops, Mr Ramsay rather sheepishly prodded

  his son's bare legs once more, and then, as if he had her leave for it,

  with a movement which oddly reminded his wife of the great sea lion at the

  Zoo tumbling backwards after swallowing his fish and walloping off so that

  the water in the tank washes from side to side, he dived into the evening

  air which, already thinner, was taking the substance from leaves and

  hedges but, as if in return, restoring to roses and pinks a lustre which

  they had not had by day.

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

  terrace.

  But how extraordinarily his note had changed! It was like the cuckoo;

  "in June he gets out of tune"; as if he were trying over, tentatively

  seeking, some phrase for a new mood, and having only this at hand, used

  it, cracked though it was. But it sounded ridiculous--"Some one had

  blundered"--said like that, almost as a question, without any conviction,

  melodiously. Mrs Ramsay could not help smiling, and soon, sure enough,

  walking up and down, he hummed it, dropped it, fell silent.

  He was safe, he was restored to his privacy. He stopped to light his

  pipe, looked once at his wife and son in the window, and as one raises

  one's eyes from a page in an express train and sees a farm, a tree, a

  cluster of cottages as an illustration, a confirmation of something on the

  printed page to which one returns, fortified, and satisfied, so without

  his distinguishing either his son or his wife, the sight of them fortified

  him and satisfied him and consecrated his effort to arrive at a perfectly

  clear understanding of the problem which now engaged the energies of his

  splendid mind.

  It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano,

  divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six

  letters all in order, then his splendid mind had one by one, firmly and

  accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very

  few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for one

  moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far, far

  away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with

  little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless against a

  doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window. They

  needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q? What comes nex
t?

  After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely

  visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only

  reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it

  would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he

  was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q--R--. Here he

  knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the

  urn, and proceeded. "Then R ..." He braced himself. He clenched

  himself.

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

  sea with six biscuits and a flask of water--endurance and justice,

  foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then--what is R?

  A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the

  intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of

  darkness he heard people saying--he was a failure--that R was beyond him.

  He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R--

  Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the

  Polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counsellor,

  whose temper, neither sanguine nor despondent, surveys with equanimity

  what is to be and faces it, came to his help again. R--

  The lizard's eye flickered once more. The veins on his forehead bulged.

  The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and, displayed among

  its leaves, he could see, without wishing it, that old, that obvious

  distinction between the two classes of men; on the one hand the steady

  goers of superhuman strength who, plodding and persevering, repeat the

  whole alphabet in order, twenty-six letters in all, from start to finish;

  on the other the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the

  letters together in one flash--the way of genius. He had not genius; he

  laid no claim to that: but he had, or might have had, the power to repeat

  every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile,

  he stuck at Q. On, then, on to R.

  Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has

  begun to fall and the mountain top is covered in mist, knows that he must

  lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him, paling the

  colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on

  the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he would not die

  lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed

  on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die

  standing. He would never reach R.

  He stood stock-still, by the urn, with the geranium flowing over it. How

  many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all?

  Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer,

  without treachery to the expedition behind him, "One perhaps." One in a

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

  has toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, and till he has no

  more left to give? And his fame lasts how long? It is permissible even

  for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him

  hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two

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

  What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the

  ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

  His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two,

  and would then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still.

  (He looked into the hedge, into the intricacy of the twigs.) Who then

  could blame the leader of that forlorn party which after all has climbed

  high enough to see the waste of the years and the perishing of the stars,

  if before death stiffens his limbs beyond the power of movement he does a