Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  For these reasons the book is now scarcely to be read through, and Miss Willatt also had scruples about writing well. There was something shifty, she thought, in choosing one’s expressions; the straightforward way to write was the best, speaking out everything in one’s mind, like a child at its mother’s knee, and trusting that, as a reward, some meaning would be included. Nevertheless her book went into two editions, one critic likening it to the novels of George Eliot, save that the tone was ‘more satisfactory’, and another proclaiming that it was ‘the work of Miss Martineau6 or the Devil.’

  If Miss Linsett were still alive (she died in Australia however, some years ago) one would like to ask her upon what system she cut her friend’s life into chapters. They seem, when possible, to depend upon changes of address, and confirm us in our belief that Miss Linsett had no other guide to Miss Willatt’s character. The great change came, surely, after the publication of Lindamara: a Fantasy. When Miss Willatt had her memorable ‘scene’ with Mr Rogers she was so much agitated that she walked twice round Bedford Square, with the tears sticking her veil to her face. It seemed to her that all this talk of philanthropy was great nonsense, and gave one no chance of ‘an individual life’ as she called it. She had thoughts of emigrating, and founding a society, in which she saw herself, by the time she had finished her second round, with white hair, reading wisdom from a book to a circle of industrious disciples, who were very like the people she knew, but called her by a word that is a euphemism for ‘Mother.’ There are passages in Lindamara which hint at it, and allude covertly to Mr Rogers - ‘the man in whom wisdom was not.’ But she was indolent, and praise made her plausible; it came from the wrong people. The best of her writing — for we have dipped into several books, and the results seem to square with our theory — was done to justify herself, but, having accomplished that, she went on to prophesy for others, dwelling in vague regions with great damage to her system. She grew enormously stout, ‘a symptom of disease’ says Miss Linsett, who loved that mournful subject — a symptom to us of tea parties in her hot little drawing-room with the spotted wall paper, and of intimate conversations about ‘the Soul’. ‘The Soul’ became her province, and she deserted the Southern plains for a strange country draped in eternal twilight, where there are qualities without bodies. Thus, Miss Linsett being at the time in great despondency about life, ‘the death of an adored parent having deprived me of all my earthly hope’, she went to see Miss Willatt, and left her flushed and tremulous, but convinced that she knew a secret that explained everything. Miss Willatt was far too clever to believe that anyone could answer anything; but the sight of these queer little trembling women, who looked up at her, prepared for beating or caress, like spaniels, appealed to a mass of emotions, and they were not all of them bad. What such women wanted, she saw, was to be told that they were parts of a whole, as a fly in a milk jug seeks the support of a spoon. She knew further that one must have a motive in order to work; she was strong enough to convince; and power, which should have been hers as a mother, was dear to her even when it came by illegitimate means. Another gift was hers, without which the rest had been useless; she could take flights into obscurity. After telling people what to do, she gave them, in a whisper at first, later in a voice that lapsed and quavered, some mystic reasons why. She could only discover them by peeping, as it were, over the rim of the world; and to begin with she tried honestly to say no more than she saw there. The present state, where one is bound down, a target for pigmy arrows, seemed to her for the most part dull, and sometimes intolerable. Some draught, vague and sweet as chloroform, which confused outlines and made daily life dance before the eyes with hints of a vista beyond, was what they needed, and nature had fitted her to give it them. ‘Life was a hard school,’ she said, ‘How could one bear it unless—’ and then there came a rhapsody about trees and flowers and fishes in the deep, and an eternal harmony, with her head back, and her eyes half shut, to see better. ‘We felt often that we had a Sibyl among us,’ writes Miss Haig; and if Sibyls are only half inspired, conscious of the folly of their disciples, sorry for them, very vain of their applause and much muddled in their own brains all at once, then Miss Willatt was a Sibyl too. But the most striking part of the picture is the unhappy view that it gives of the spiritual state of Bloomsbury at this period - when Miss Willatt brooded in Woburn Square like some gorged spider at the centre of her web, and all along the filaments unhappy women came running, slight hen-like figures, frightened by the sun and the carts and the dreadful world, and longing to hide themselves from the entire panorama in the shade of Miss Willatt’s skirts. The Andrews, the Spaldings, young Mr Charles Jenkinson ‘who has since left us’, old Lady Battersby, who suffered from the gout, Miss Cecily Haig, Ebenezer Umphelby who knew more about beetles than any one in Europe - all these people who dropped into tea and had Sunday supper and conversation afterwards, come to life again, and tempt us almost intolerably to know more about them. What did they look like, and do, what did they want from Miss Willatt and what did they think of her, in private? — but we shall never know, or hear of them again. They have been rolled into the earth irrecoverably.

  Indeed there is only space left to give the pith of that last long chapter, which Miss Linsett called ‘Fulfilment’. Certainly, it is one of the strangest. Miss Linsett who was powerfully fascinated by the idea of death, coos and preens herself in his presence and can hardly bring herself to make an end. It is easier to write about death, which is common, than about a single life; there are general statements which one likes to use once in a way for oneself, and there is something in saying good-bye to a person which leads to smooth manners and pleasant sensations. Moreover, Miss Linsett had a natural distrust of life, which was boisterous and commonplace, and had never treated her too well, and took every opportunity of proving that human beings die, as though she snubbed some ill-mannered schoolboy. If one wished it thus, one could give more details of those last months of Miss Willatt’s life than of any that have gone before. We know precisely what she died of. The narrative slackens to a funeral pace and every word of it is relished; but in truth, it amounts to little more than this. Miss Willatt had suffered from an internal complaint for some years, but mentioned it only to her intimate friends. Then, in the autumn of 1884, she caught a chill, it was the beginning of the end, and from that date we had little hope.’ They told her, once, that she was dying, but she ‘seemed absorbed in a mat which she was working for her nephew.’ When she took to her bed she did not ask to see any one, save her old servant Emma Grice who had been with her for thirty years. At length, on the night of the 18th of October, ‘a stormy autumn night, with flying clouds and gusts of rain’, Miss Linsett was summoned to say good-bye. Miss Willatt was lying on her back, with her eyes shut, and her head which was half in shadow looked ‘very grand’. Miss Willatt lay thus all night long without speaking or turning or opening her eyes. Once she raised her left hand, ‘upon which she wore her mother’s wedding ring’, and let it fall again; they expected something more, but not knowing what she wanted they did nothing, and half an hour later the counterpane lay still, and they crept from their corners, seeing that she was dead.

  After reading this scene, with its accompaniment of inappropriate detail, its random flourishes whipping up a climax - how she changed colour, and they rubbed her forehead with eau-de-cologne, how Mr Sully called and went away again, how creepers tapped on the window, how the room grew pale as the dawn rose, how sparrows twittered and carts began to rattle through the square to market — one sees that Miss Linsett liked death because it gave her an emotion, and made her feel things for the time as though they meant something. For the moment she loved Miss Willatt; Miss Willatt’s death the moment after made her even happy. It was an end undisturbed by the chance of a fresh beginning. But afterwards, when she went home and had her breakfast, she felt lonely, for they had been in the habit of going to Kew Gardens together on Sundays.

  KEW GARDENS

  From the oval-
shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves. Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.

  The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed. The man was about six inches in front of the woman, strolling carelessly, while she bore on with greater purpose, only turning her head now and then to see that the children were not too far behind. The man kept this distance in front of the woman purposely, though perhaps unconsciously, for he wished to go on with his thoughts.

  “Fifteen years ago I came here with Lily,” he thought. “We sat somewhere over there by a lake and I begged her to marry me all through the hot afternoon. How the dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragonfly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe. All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly; for some reason I thought that if it settled there, on that leaf, the broad one with the red flower in the middle of it, if the dragonfly settled on the leaf she would say “Yes” at once. But the dragonfly went round and round: it never settled anywhere — of course not, happily not, or I shouldn’t be walking here with Eleanor and the children — Tell me, Eleanor. D’you ever think of the past?”

  “Why do you ask, Simon?”

  “Because I’ve been thinking of the past. I’ve been thinking of Lily, the woman I might have married. . . Well, why are you silent? Do you mind my thinking of the past?”

  “Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren’t they one’s past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees. . . one’s happiness, one’s reality?”

  “For me, a square silver shoe buckle and a dragonfly—”

  “For me, a kiss. Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels twenty years ago, down by the side of a lake, painting the water-lilies, the first red water-lilies I’d ever seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on the back of my neck. And my hand shook all the afternoon so that I couldn’t paint. I took out my watch and marked the hour when I would allow myself to think of the kiss for five minutes only — it was so precious — the kiss of an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses all my life. Come, Caroline, come, Hubert.”

  They walked on the past the flower-bed, now walking four abreast, and soon diminished in size among the trees and looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches.

  In the oval flower bed the snail, whose shelled had been stained red, blue, and yellow for the space of two minutes or so, now appeared to be moving very slightly in its shell, and next began to labour over the crumbs of loose earth which broke away and rolled down as it passed over them. It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antenna trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture — all these objects lay across the snail’s progress between one stalk and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings.

  This time they were both men. The younger of the two wore an expression of perhaps unnatural calm; he raised his eyes and fixed them very steadily in front of him while his companion spoke, and directly his companion had done speaking he looked on the ground again and sometimes opened his lips only after a long pause and sometimes did not open them at all. The elder man had a curiously uneven and shaky method of walking, jerking his hand forward and throwing up his head abruptly, rather in the manner of an impatient carriage horse tired of waiting outside a house; but in the man these gestures were irresolute and pointless. He talked almost incessantly; he smiled to himself and again began to talk, as if the smile had been an answer. He was talking about spirits — the spirits of the dead, who, according to him, were even now telling him all sorts of odd things about their experiences in Heaven.

  “Heaven was known to the ancients as Thessaly, William, and now, with this war, the spirit matter is rolling between the hills like thunder.” He paused, seemed to listen, smiled, jerked his head and continued: —

  “You have a small electric battery and a piece of rubber to insulate the wire — isolate? — insulate? — well, we’ll skip the details, no good going into details that wouldn’t be understood — and in short the little machine stands in any convenient position by the head of the bed, we will say, on a neat mahogany stand. All arrangements being properly fixed by workmen under my direction, the widow applies her ear and summons the spirit by sign as agreed. Women! Widows! Women in black—”

  Here he seemed to have caught sight of a woman’s dress in the distance, which in the shade looked a purple black. He took off his hat, placed his hand upon his heart, and hurried towards her muttering and gesticulating feverishly. But William caught him by the sleeve and touched a flower with the tip of his walking-stick in order to divert the old man’s attention. After looking at it for a moment in some confusion the old man bent his ear to it and seemed to answer a voice speaking from it, for he began talking about the forests of Uruguay which he had visited hundreds of years ago in company with the most beautiful young woman in Europe. He could be heard murmuring about forests of Uruguay blanketed with the wax petals of tropical roses, nightingales, sea beaches, mermaids, and women drowned at sea, as he suffered himself to be moved on by William, upon whose face the look of stoical patience grew slowly deeper and deeper.

  Following his steps so closely as to be slightly puzzled by his gestures came two elderly women of the lower middle class, one stout and ponderous, the other rosy cheeked and nimble. Like most people of their station they were frankly fascinated by any signs of eccentricity betokening a disordered brain, especially in the well-to-do; but they were too far off to be certain whether the gestures were merely eccentric or genuinely mad. After they had scrutinised the old man’s back in silence for a moment and given each other a queer, sly look, they went on energetically piecing together their very complicated dialogue:

  “Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says, I says—”

  “My Bert, Sis, Bill, Grandad, the old man, sugar, Sugar, flour, kippers, greens, Sugar, sugar, sugar.”

  The ponderous woman looked through the pattern of falling words at the flowers standing cool, firm, and
upright in the earth, with a curious expression. She saw them as a sleeper waking from a heavy sleep sees a brass candlestick reflecting the light in an unfamiliar way, and closes his eyes and opens them, and seeing the brass candlestick again, finally starts broad awake and stares at the candlestick with all his powers. So the heavy woman came to a standstill opposite the oval-shaped flower bed, and ceased even to pretend to listen to what the other woman was saying. She stood there letting the words fall over her, swaying the top part of her body slowly backwards and forwards, looking at the flowers. Then she suggested that they should find a seat and have their tea.

  The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. Let alone the effort needed for climbing a leaf, he was doubtful whether the thin texture which vibrated with such an alarming crackle when touched even by the tip of his horns would bear his weight; and this determined him finally to creep beneath it, for there was a point where the leaf curved high enough from the ground to admit him. He had just inserted his head in the opening and was taking stock of the high brown roof and was getting used to the cool brown light when two other people came past outside on the turf. This time they were both young, a young man and a young woman. They were both in the prime of youth, or even in that season which precedes the prime of youth, the season before the smooth pink folds of the flower have burst their gummy case, when the wings of the butterfly, though fully grown, are motionless in the sun.