To The Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they

  said, had promised so well.]

  And now in the heat of summer the wind sent its spies about the house

  again. Flies wove a web in the sunny rooms; weeds that had grown close

  to the glass in the night tapped methodically at the window pane. When

  darkness fell, the stroke of the Lighthouse, which had laid itself with

  such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern,

  came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding

  gently as if it laid its caress and lingered steathily and looked and

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

  the long stroke leant upon the bed, the rock was rent asunder; another

  fold of the shawl loosened; there it hung, and swayed. Through the

  short summer nights and the long summer days, when the empty rooms

  seemed to murmur with the echoes of the fields and the hum of flies,

  the long streamer waved gently, swayed aimlessly; while the sun so

  striped and barred the rooms and filled them with yellow haze that Mrs

  McNab, when she broke in and lurched about, dusting, sweeping, looked

  like a tropical fish oaring its way through sun-lanced waters.

  But slumber and sleep though it might there came later in the summer

  ominous sounds like the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt,

  which, with their repeated shocks still further loosened the shawl and

  cracked the tea-cups. Now and again some glass tinkled in the cupboard

  as if a giant voice had shrieked so loud in its agony that tumblers

  stood inside a cupboard vibrated too. Then again silence fell; and

  then, night after night, and sometimes in plain mid-day when the roses

  were bright and light turned on the wall its shape clearly there seemed

  to drop into this silence, this indifference, this integrity, the thud

  of something falling.

  [A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France,

  among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]

  At that season those who had gone down to pace the beach and ask of the

  sea and sky what message they reported or what vision they affirmed had

  to consider among the usual tokens of divine bounty--the sunset on

  the sea, the pallor of dawn, the moon rising, fishing-boats against the

  moon, and children making mud pies or pelting each other with handfuls

  of grass, something out of harmony with this jocundity and this

  serenity. There was the silent apparition of an ashen-coloured ship

  for instance, come, gone; there was a purplish stain upon the bland

  surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly,

  beneath. This intrusion into a scene calculated to stir the most

  sublime reflections and lead to the most comfortable conclusions stayed

  their pacing. It was difficult blandly to overlook them; to abolish

  their significance in the landscape; to continue, as one walked by the

  sea, to marvel how beauty outside mirrored beauty within.

  Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he

  began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, his meanness, and

  his torture. That dream, of sharing, completing, of finding in

  solitude on the beach an answer, was then but a reflection in a mirror,

  and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in

  quiescence when the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient, despairing

  yet loth to go (for beauty offers her lures, has her consolations), to

  pace the beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the

  mirror was broken.

  [Mr Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring, which had an

  unexpected success. The war, people said, had revived their interest

  in poetry.]

  7

  Night after night, summer and winter, the torment of storms, the arrow-

  like stillness of fine (had there been any one to listen) from the

  upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with

  lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and

  waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose

  brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of

  another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for

  night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games,

  until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute

  confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.

  In spring the garden urns, casually filled with wind-blown plants, were

  gay as ever. Violets came and daffodils. But the stillness and the

  brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night,

  with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking

  before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and so

  terrible.

  8

  Thinking no harm, for the family would not come, never again, some

  said, and the house would be sold at Michaelmas perhaps, Mrs McNab

  stooped and picked a bunch of flowers to take home with her. She laid

  them on the table while she dusted. She was fond of flowers. It was a

  pity to let them waste. Suppose the house were sold (she stood arms

  akimbo in front of the looking-glass) it would want seeing to--it

  would. There it had stood all these years without a soul in it. The

  books and things were mouldy, for, what with the war and help being

  hard to get, the house had not been cleaned as she could have wished.

  It was beyond one person's strength to get it straight now. She was

  too old. Her legs pained her. All those books needed to be laid out

  on the grass in the sun; there was plaster fallen in the hall; the

  rain-pipe had blocked over the study quite. But people should come

  themselves; they should have sent somebody down to see. For there were

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

  What was she to do with them? They had the moth in them--Mrs Ramsay's

  things. Poor lady! She would never want THEM again. She was dead,

  they said; years ago, in London. There was the old grey cloak she wore

  gardening (Mrs McNab fingered it). She could see her, as she came up

  the drive with the washing, stooping over her flowers (the garden was a

  pitiful sight now, all run to riot, and rabbits scuttling at you out of

  the beds)--she could see her with one of the children by her in that

  grey cloak. There were boots and shoes; and a brush and comb left on

  the dressing-table, for all the world as if she expected to come back

  tomorrow. (She had died very sudden at the end, they said.) And once

  they had been coming, but had put off coming, what with the war, and

  travel being so difficult these days; they had never come all these

  years; just sent her money; but never wrote, never came, and expected

  to find things as they had left them, ah, dear! Why the dressing-table

  drawers were full of things (she pulled them open), handkerchiefs, bits

  of ribbon. Yes, she could see Mrs Ramsay as she came up the drive with

  the washing.

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

  She had a pleasant way with her. The girls all liked her. But, dear,
/>
  many things had changed since then (she shut the drawer); many families

  had lost their dearest. So she was dead; and Mr Andrew killed; and

  Miss Prue dead too, they said, with her first baby; but everyone had

  lost some one these years. Prices had gone up shamefully, and didn't

  come down again neither. She could well remember her in her grey

  cloak.

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

  milk soup for her--quite thought she wanted it, carrying that heavy

  basket all the way up from town. She could see her now, stooping over

  her flowers; and faint and flickering, like a yellow beam or the circle

  at the end of a telescope, a lady in a grey cloak, stooping over her

  flowers, went wandering over the bedroom wall, up the dressing-table,

  across the wash-stand, as Mrs McNab hobbled and ambled, dusting,

  straightening. And cook's name now? Mildred? Marian?--some name like

  that. Ah, she had forgotten--she did forget things. Fiery, like all

  red-haired women. Many a laugh they had had. She was always welcome

  in the kitchen. She made them laugh, she did. Things were better then

  than now.

  She sighed; there was too much work for one woman. She wagged her head

  this side and that. This had been the nursery. Why, it was all damp in

  here; the plaster was falling. Whatever did they want to hang a

  beast's skull there? gone mouldy too. And rats in all the attics. The

  rain came in. But they never sent; never came. Some of the locks had

  gone, so the doors banged. She didn't like to be up here at dusk alone

  neither. It was too much for one woman, too much, too much. She

  creaked, she moaned. She banged the door. She turned the key in the

  lock, and left the house alone, shut up, locked.

  9

  The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell

  on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it.

  The long night seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the

  clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had

  rusted and the mat decayed. Toads had nosed their way in. Idly,

  aimlessly, the swaying shawl swung to and fro. A thistle thrust itself

  between the tiles in the larder. The swallows nested in the drawing-

  roon; the floor was strewn with straw; the plaster fell in shovelfuls;

  rafters were laid bare; rats carried off this and that to gnaw behind

  the wainscots. Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and

  pattered their life out on the window-pane. Poppies sowed themselves

  among the dahlias; the lawn waved with long grass; giant artichokes

  towered among roses; a fringed carnation flowered among the cabbages;

  while the gentle tapping of a weed at the window had become, on

  winters' nights, a drumming from sturdy trees and thorned briars which

  made the whole room green in summer.

  What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of

  nature? Mrs McNab's dream of a lady, of a child, of a plate of milk

  soup? It had wavered over the walls like a spot of sunlight and

  vanished. She had locked the door; she had gone. It was beyond the

  strength of one woman, she said. They never sent. They never wrote.

  There were things up there rotting in the drawers--it was a shame to

  leave them so, she said. The place was gone to rack and ruin. Only

  the Lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden

  stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with

  equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw.

  Nothing now withstood them; nothing said no to them. Let the wind

  blow; let the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the

  cabbage. Let the swallow build in the drawing-room, and the thistle

  thrust aside the tiles, and the butterfly sun itself on the faded

  chintz of the arm-chairs. Let the broken glass and the china lie out

  on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries.

  For now had come that moment, that hesitation when dawn trembles and

  night pauses, when if a feather alight in the scale it will be weighed

  down. One feather, and the house, sinking, falling, would have turned

  and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness. In the ruined room,

  picnickers would have lit their kettles; lovers sought shelter there,

  lying on the bare boards; and the shepherd stored his dinner on the

  bricks, and the tramp slept with his coat round him to ward off the

  cold. Then the roof would have fallen; briars and hemlocks would have

  blotted out path, step and window; would have grown, unequally but

  lustily over the mound, until some trespasser, losing his way, could

  have told only by a red-hot poker among the nettles, or a scrap of

  china in the hemlock, that here once some one had lived; there had been

  a house.

  If the feather had fallen, if it had tipped the scale downwards, the

  whole house would have plunged to the depths to lie upon the sands of

  oblivion. But there was a force working; something not highly

  conscious; something that leered, something that lurched; something not

  inspired to go about its work with dignified ritual or solemn chanting.

  Mrs McNab groaned; Mrs Bast creaked. They were old; they were stiff;

  their legs ached. They came with their brooms and pails at last; they

  got to work. All of a sudden, would Mrs McNab see that the house was

  ready, one of the young ladies wrote: would she get this done; would

  she get that done; all in a hurry. They might be coming for the

  summer; had left everything to the last; expected to find things as

  they had left them. Slowly and painfully, with broom and pail,

  mopping, scouring, Mrs McNab, Mrs Bast, stayed the corruption and the

  rot; rescued from the pool of Time that was fast closing over them now

  a basin, now a cupboard; fetched up from oblivion all the Waverley

  novels and a tea-set one morning; in the afternoon restored to sun and

  air a brass fender and a set of steel fire-irons. George, Mrs Bast's

  son, caught the rats, and cut the grass. They had the builders.

  Attended with the creaking of hinges and the screeching of bolts, the

  slamming and banging of damp-swollen woodwork, some rusty laborious

  birth seemed to be taking place, as the women, stooping, rising,

  groaning, singing, slapped and slammed, upstairs now, now down in the

  cellars. Oh, they said, the work!

  They drank their tea in the bedroom sometimes, or in the study;

  breaking off work at mid-day with the smudge on their faces, and their

  old hands clasped and cramped with the broom handles. Flopped on

  chairs, they contemplated now the magnificent conquest over taps and

  bath; now the more arduous, more partial triumph over long rows of

  books, black as ravens once, now white-stained, breeding pale mushrooms

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

  her, the telescope fitted itself to Mrs McNab's eyes, and in a ring of

  light she saw the old gentleman, lean as a rake, wagging his head, as

  she came up with the washing, talking to himself, she supposed, on the

  lawn. He never noticed her. Some said he was dead; some
said she was

  dead. Which was it? Mrs Bast didn't know for certain either. The

  young gentleman was dead. That she was sure. She had read his name in

  the papers.

  There was the cook now, Mildred, Marian, some such name as that--a red-

  headed woman, quick-tempered like all her sort, but kind, too, if you

  knew the way with her. Many a laugh they had had together. She saved a

  plate of soup for Maggie; a bite of ham, sometimes; whatever was over.

  They lived well in those days. They had everything they wanted

  (glibly, jovially, with the tea hot in her, she unwound her ball of

  memories, sitting in the wicker arm-chair by the nursery fender).

  There was always plenty doing, people in the house, twenty staying

  sometimes, and washing up till long past midnight.

  Mrs Bast (she had never known them; had lived in Glasgow at that time)

  wondered, putting her cup down, whatever they hung that beast's skull

  there for? Shot in foreign parts no doubt.

  It might well be, said Mrs McNab, wantoning on with her memories; they

  had friends in eastern countries; gentlemen staying there, ladies in

  evening dress; she had seen them once through the dining-room door all

  sitting at dinner. Twenty she dared say all in their jewellery, and

  she asked to stay help wash up, might be till after midnight.

  Ah, said Mrs Bast, they'd find it changed. She leant out of the

  window. She watched her son George scything the grass. They might

  well ask, what had been done to it? seeing how old Kennedy was

  supposed to have charge of it, and then his leg got so bad after he

  fell from the cart; and perhaps then no one for a year, or the better

  part of one; and then Davie Macdonald, and seeds might be sent, but who

  should say if they were ever planted? They'd find it changed.

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

  those quiet ones. Well they must be getting along with the cupboards,

  she supposed. They hauled themselves up.

  At last, after days of labour within, of cutting and digging without,

  dusters were flicked from the windows, the windows were shut to, keys

  were turned all over the house; the front door was banged; it was

  finished.

  And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the

  mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that

  intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a

  bleat; irregular, intermittent, yet somehow related; the hum of an

  insect, the tremor of cut grass, disevered yet somehow belonging; the

  jar of a dorbeetle, the squeak of a wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously

  related; which the ear strains to bring together and is always on the

  verge of harmonising, but they are never quite heard, never fully

  harmonised, and at last, in the evening, one after another silence

  falls. With the sunset sharpness was lost, and like mist rising, quiet

  rose, quiet spread, the wind settled; loosely the world shook itself

  down to sleep, darkly here without a light to it, save what came green

  suffused through leaves, or pale on the white flowers in the bed by the

  window.

  [Lily Briscoe had her bag carried up to the house late one evening in

  September. Mr Carmichael came by the same train.]

  10

  Then indeed peace had come. Messages of peace breathed from the sea to

  the shore. Never to break its sleep any more, to lull it rather more

  deeply to rest, and whatever the dreamers dreamt holily, dreamt wisely,

  to confirm--what else was it murmuring--as Lily Briscoe laid her head

  on the pillow in the clean still room and heard the sea. Through the

  open window the voice of the beauty of the world came murmuring, too

  softly to hear exactly what it said--but what mattered if the meaning

  were plain? entreating the sleepers (the house was full again; Mrs

  Beckwith was staying there, also Mr Carmichael), if they would not