little consciously raise his numbed fingers to his brow, and square his
shoulders, so that when the search party comes they will find him dead at
his post, the fine figure of a soldier? Mr Ramsay squared his shoulders
and stood very upright by the urn.
Who shall blame him, if, so standing for a moment he dwells upon fame,
upon search parties, upon cairns raised by grateful followers over his
bones? Finally, who shall blame the leader of the doomed expedition, if,
having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to the
last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he now
perceives by some pricking in his toes that he lives, and does not on the
whole object to live, but requires sympathy, and whisky, and some one to
tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who shall blame him? Who
will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by
the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first,
gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly
before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his
isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and
finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head
before her--who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the
world?
7
But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping
and looking down on them; he hated him for interrupting them; he hated him
for the exaltation and sublimity of his gestures; for the magnificence of
his head; for his exactingness and egotism (for there he stood, commanding
them to attend to him) but most of all he hated the twang and twitter of
his father's emotion which, vibrating round them, disturbed the perfect
simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother. By looking
fixedly at the page, he hoped to make him move on; by pointing his finger
at a word, he hoped to recall his mother's attention, which, he knew
angrily, wavered instantly his father stopped. But, no. Nothing would
make Mr Ramsay move on. There he stood, demanding sympathy.
Mrs Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm,
braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort,
and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of
spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies
were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she
sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity,
this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged
itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare. He wanted sympathy. He
was a failure, he said. Mrs Ramsay flashed her needles. Mr Ramsay
repeated, never taking his eyes from her face, that he was a failure.
She blew the words back at him. "Charles Tansley..." she said. But he
must have more than that. It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his
genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life,
warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness
made furtile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life--the
drawing-room; behind the drawing-room the kitchen; above the kitchen the
bedrooms; and beyond them the nurseries; they must be furnished, they must
be filled with life.
Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time, she
said. But he must have more than that. He must have sympathy. He must
be assured that he too lived in the heart of life; was needed; not only
here, but all over the world. Flashing her needles, confident, upright,
she created drawing-room and kitchen, set them all aglow; bade him take
his ease there, go in and out, enjoy himself. She laughed, she knitted.
Standing between her knees, very stiff, James felt all her strength
flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid
scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again,
demanding sympathy.
He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her
needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at
James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh,
her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room
assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the
garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him;
however deep he buried himself or climed high, not for a second should he
find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and
protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know
herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff
between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with
leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar
of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.
Filled with her words, like a child who drops off satisfied, he said, at
last, looking at her with humble gratitude, restored, renewed, that he
would take a turn; he would watch the children playing cricket. He went.
Immediately, Mrs Ramsey seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed
in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that
she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment
to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm's fairy story, while there
throbbed through her, like a pulse in a spring which has expanded to its
full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful
creation.
Every throb of this pulse seemed, as he walked away, to enclose her and
her husband, and to give to each that solace which two different notes,
one high, one low, struck together, seem to give each other as they
combine. Yet as the resonance died, and she turned to the Fairy Tale
again, Mrs Ramsey felt not only exhausted in body (afterwards, not at the
time, she always felt this) but also there tinged her physical fatigue
some faintly disagreeable sensation with another origin. Not that, as
she read aloud the story of the Fisherman's Wife, she knew precisely what
it came from; nor did she let herself put into words her dissatisfaction
when she realized, at the turn of the page when she stopped and heard
dully, ominously, a wave fall, how it came from this: she did not like,
even for a second, to feel finer than her husband; and further, could not
bear not being entirely sure, when she spoke to him, of the truth of what
she said. Universities and people wanting him, lectures and books and
their being of the highest importance--all that she did not doubt for a
moment; but it was their relation, and his coming to her like that,
openly, so that any one could see, that discomposed her; for then people
said he depended on her, when they must know that of the two he was
infinitely the more important, and what she gave the world, in comparison
with what he gave, negligable. But then again, it was the other thing
too--not be
ing able to tell him the truth, being afraid, for instance,
about the greenhouse roof and the expense it would be, fifty pounds
perhaps to mend it; and then about his books, to be afraid that he might
guess, what she a little suspected, that his last book was not quite his
best book (she gathered that from William Bankes); and then to hide small
daily things, and the children seeing it, and the burden it laid on
them--all this diminished the entire joy, the pure joy, of the two notes
sounding together, and let the sound die on her ear now with a dismal
flatness.
A shadow was on the page; she looked up. It was Augustus Carmichael
shuffling past, precisely now, at the very moment when it was painful to
be reminded of the inadequacy of human relationships, that the most
perfect was flawed, and could not bear the examination which, loving her
husband, with her instinct for truth, she turned upon it; when it was
painful to feel herself convicted of unworthiness, and impeded in her
proper function by these lies, these exaggerations,--it was at this
moment when she was fretted thus ignobly in the wake of her exaltation,
that Mr Carmichael shuffled past, in his yellow slippers, and some demon
in her made it necessary for her to call out, as he passed,
"Going indoors Mr Carmichael?"
8
He said nothing. He took opium. The children said he had stained his
beard yellow with it. Perhaps. What was obvious to her was that the poor
man was unhappy, came to them every year as an escape; and yet every year
she felt the same thing; he did not trust her. She said, "I am going to
the town. Shall I get you stamps, paper, tobacco?" and she felt him
wince. He did not trust her. It was his wife's doing. She remembered
that iniquity of his wife's towards him, which had made her turn to steel
and adamant there, in the horrible little room in St John's Wood, when
with her own eyes she had seen that odious woman turn him out of the
house. He was unkempt; he dropped things on his coat; he had the
tiresomeness of an old man with nothing in the world to do; and she turned
him out of the room. She said, in her odious way, "Now, Mrs Ramsay and I
want to have a little talk together," and Mrs Ramsay could see, as if
before her eyes, the innumerable miseries of his life. Had he money
enough to buy tobacco? Did he have to ask her for it? half a crown?
eighteenpence? Oh, she could not bear to think of the little indignities
she made him suffer. And always now (why, she could not guess, except
that it came probably from that woman somehow) he shrank from her. He
never told her anything. But what more could she have done? There was a
sunny room given up to him. The children were good to him. Never did she
show a sign of not wanting him. She went out of her way indeed to be
friendly. Do you want stamps, do you want tobacco? Here's a book you
might like and so on. And after all--after all (here insensibly she drew
herself together, physically, the sense of her own beauty becoming, as it
did so seldom, present to her) after all, she had not generally any
difficulty in making people like her; for instance, George Manning; Mr
Wallace; famous as they were, they would come to her of an evening,
quietly, and talk alone over her fire. She bore about with her, she could
not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erect into
any room that she entered; and after all, veil it as she might, and shrink
from the monotony of bearing that it imposed on her, her beauty was
apparent. She had been admired. She had been loved. She had entered
rooms where mourners sat. Tears had flown in her presence. Men, and
women too, letting go to the multiplicity of things, had allowed
themselves with her the relief of simplicity. It injured her that he
should shrink. It hurt her. And yet not cleanly, not rightly. That was
what she minded, coming as it did on top of her discontent with her
husband; the sense she had now when Mr Carmichael shuffled past, just
nodding to her question, with a book beneath his arm, in his yellow
slippers, that she was suspected; and that all this desire of hers to
give, to help, was vanity. For her own self-satisfaction was it that she
wished so instinctively to help, to give, that people might say of her,
"O Mrs Ramsay! dear Mrs Ramsay ... Mrs Ramsay, of course!" and need her
and send for her and admire her? Was it not secretly this that she
wanted, and therefore when Mr Carmichael shrank away from her, as he did
at this moment, making off to some corner where he did acrostics
endlessly, she did not feel merely snubbed back in her instinct, but made
aware of the pettiness of some part of her, and of human relations, how
flawed they are, how despicable, how self-seeking, at their best. Shabby
and worn out, and not presumably (her cheeks were hollow, her hair was
white) any longer a sight that filled the eyes with joy, she had better
devote her mind to the story of the Fisherman and his Wife and so pacify
that bundle of sensitiveness (none of her children was as sensitive as he
was), her son James.
"The man's heart grew heavy," she read aloud, "and he would not go. He
said to himself, 'It is not right,' and yet he went. And when he came to
the sea the water was quite purple and dark blue, and grey and thick, and
no longer so green and yellow, but it was still quiet. And he stood there
and said--"
Mrs Ramsay could have wished that her husband had not chosen that moment
to stop. Why had he not gone as he said to watch the children playing
cricket? But he did not speak; he looked; he nodded; he approved; he went
on. He slipped, seeing before him that hedge which had over and over
again rounded some pause, signified some conclusion, seeing his wife and
child, seeing again the urns with the trailing of red geraniums which had
so often decorated processes of thought, and bore, written up among their
leaves, as if they were scraps of paper on which one scribbles notes in
the rush of reading--he slipped, seeing all this, smoothly into
speculation suggested by an article in THE TIMES about the number of
Americans who visit Shakespeare's house every year. If Shakespeare
had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what
it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is
the lot of the average human being better now than in the time of the
Pharaohs? Is the lot of the average human being, however, he asked
himself, the criterion by which we judge the measure of civilization?
Possibly not. Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a
slave class. The liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity. The
thought was distasteful to him. He tossed his head. To avoid it, he
would find some way of snubbing the predominance of the arts. He would
argue that the world exists for the average human being; that the arts are
merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life; they do not express
it. Nor is Shakespeare necessary to it. Not knowing precisely why it was
that he wanted to disparage Shakespeare and com
e to the rescue of the man
who stands eternally in the door of the lift, he picked a leaf sharply
from the hedge. All this would have to be dished up for the young men at
Cardiff next month, he thought; here, on his terrace, he was merely
foraging and picnicking (he threw away the leaf that he had picked so
peevishly) like a man who reaches from his horse to pick a bunch of roses,
or stuffs his pockets with nuts as he ambles at his ease through the lanes
and fields of a country known to him from boyhood. It was all familiar;
this turning, that stile, that cut across the fields. Hours he would
spend thus, with his pipe, of an evening, thinking up and down and in and
out of the old familiar lanes and commons, which were all stuck about with
the history of that campaign there, the life of this statesman here, with
poems and with anecdotes, with figures too, this thinker, that soldier;
all very brisk and clear; but at length the lane, the field, the common,
the fruitful nut-tree and the flowering hedge led him on to that further
turn of the road where he dismounted always, tied his horse to a tree,
and proceeded on foot alone. He reached the edge of the lawn and looked
out on the bay beneath.
It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether he wished it or not, to come out
thus on a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away, and there to
stand, like a desolate sea-bird, alone. It was his power, his gift,
suddenly to shed all superfluities, to shrink and diminish so that he
looked barer and felt sparer, even physically, yet lost none of his
intensity of mind, and so to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of
human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we
stand on--that was his fate, his gift. But having thrown away, when he
dismounted, all gestures and fripperies, all trophies of nuts and roses,
and shrunk so that not only fame kept even in that desolation a vigilance
which spared no phantom and luxuriated in no vision, and it was in this
guise that he inspired in William Bankes (intermittently) and in Charles
Tansley (obsequiously)and in his wife now, when she looked up and saw him
standing at the edge of the lawn, profoundly, reverence, and pity, and
gratitude too, as a stake driven into the bed of a channel upon which the
gulls perch and the waves beat inspires in merry boat-loads a feeling of
gratitude for the duty it is taking upon itself of marking the channel out
there in the floods alone.
"But the father of eight children has no choice." Muttering half aloud,
so he broke off, turned, sighed, raised his eyes, sought the figure of his
wife reading stories to his little boy, filled his pipe. He turned from
the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground
we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have
led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with
the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that
comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of
misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes. It was true;
he was for the most part happy; he had his wife; he had his children; he
had promised in six weeks' time to talk "some nonsense" to the young men
of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes of the French
Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it, his glory in the phrases he
made, in the ardour of youth, in his wife's beauty, in the tributes that
reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton, Kidderminster,
Oxford, Cambridge--all had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase
"talking nonsense," because, in effect, he had not done the thing he might
have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own
his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I like--this is what I
am; and rather pitiable anddistasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe,
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