Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of. . . Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don’t know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers — all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raiding domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself: — first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes. . . One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn’t done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately — but something is getting in the way. . . Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker’s Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can’t remember a thing. Everything’s moving, falling, slipping, vanishing. . . There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying —
“I’m going out to buy a newspaper.”
“Yes?”
“Though it’s no good buying newspapers. . . Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war! . . . All the same, I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall.”
Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.
SYMPATHY
Hammond, Humphry, on the 29th of April, at The Manor, High Wickham, Bucks. — Celia’s husband! It must be Celia’s husband. Dead! Good Heavens! Humphry Hammond dead! I meant to ask them - I forgot. Why didn’t I go the day they wanted me to come? There was a concert where they played Mozart — I put them off for that. He scarcely spoke the night they dined here. He sat opposite in the yellow arm chair: he said that ‘furniture’ was what he liked. What did he mean? Why did I say nothing to make him explain? Why did I let him go with all that he might have said unsaid? Why did he sit there silent so long, and leave us, talking about motor omnibuses, in the hall? How plainly I see him now and fancy that shyness, or the feeling of meaning something that he could not say, determined him to stop when he had said that about ‘liking furniture.’ I shall never know now. Now the pink cheeks are pale and the eyes with the young man’s look of resolution and defiance closed, defiant still beneath their lids. Male and unyielding stiff he lies upon his bed, so that I see it white and steep; the windows open, the birds singing, no concession to death; no tears no sentiment, a bunch of lilies scattered where the sheet folds perhaps — his mother’s or Celia’s. — Celia. Yes... I see her, and then not. There is a moment I can’t fancy: the moment in other people’s lives that one always leaves out; the moment from which all that we know them by proceeds; I follow her to his door; I see her turn the handle; then comes the blind moment, and when my fancy opens its eyes again I find her equipped for the world — a widow; or is she not, in the early hours of the morning, veiled in white from head to foot as if the light cleft itself asunder on her brow? The outward sign I see and shall see for ever; but at the meaning of it I shall only guess. Enviously I shall mark her silences and her severities; I shall watch her moving among us with her secret unconfessed; I shall fancy her eager for the night to come with its lonely voyage; I shall picture her landing among us for the day’s work, contemptuous and tolerant of our amusements. In the midst of clamour I shall think that she hears more; the emptiness has for her its ghost. For all this I shall envy her. I shall envy her the security — the knowledge. But the white veil, as the sun grows stronger, fades from her brow and she comes to the window. The carts rattle down the road, and the men standing upright to drive, whistle or sing or shout to one another.
Now I see her more distinctly. The colour has come back to her cheeks; but the bloom is gone; the film which made her glance gentle and vague has been rubbed from her eyes; the stir of life sounds harsh to her, and standing by the open window, she contracts and shrinks together. There I follow her; no longer with envy. Does she not shrink from the hand I stretch to her? [We are all robbers; all cruel; all drops in a stream which flows past her indifferently. I may cast myself out to her, but only to be drawn back again to flow swiftly on with the stream. The pity which bids me tender my hand to her to bite becomes, or will become, an impulse of compassion which in its generosity appears to her contemptuous.] Immediately she shouts to the woman shaking rugs next door, ‘A fine morning!’ The woman starts and looks at her, nods her head and hurries indoors. She stares at the fruit blossoms spread upon the ruddy wall, leaning her head on her hand. The tears slip down; but she rubs her knuckles in her eyes. Is she twenty-four? — at most twenty-five. Can one offer her - a day’s walk in the hills? Striking our boots sturdily upon the high road we start out, jump the fence and so across the field and up into the wood. There she flings herself upon the anemones and picks them ‘for Humphry’; and refrains, saying that they will be fresher in the evening. We sit down and look at the triangular space of yellow-green field beneath us through the arch of bramble twigs which divides them so queerly.
‘What d’you believe?’ she asks suddenly, (as I fancy) sucking at the stalk of a flower. ‘Nothing - nothing,’ I reply driven, against my intention[,] to speak abruptly. She frowns, throws away her flower, and jumps up. She strides ahead for a yard or two, and then swings herself impetuously by a low branch to look at a thrush’s nest in the lap of a tree.
‘Five eggs!’ she cries. And abruptly again I call back, ‘What fun!’
But it’s all fancy. I’m not in the room with her, nor out in the wood. I’m here in London, standing by the window, holding The Times. But how death has changed everything! - as, in an eclipse of the sun, the colours go out, and the trees look thin as paper and livid while the shadow passes. The chill little breeze is perceptible and the roar of traffic sounds across a gulf. Then, a moment later, distances are bridged, sounds merged; and as I look the trees though still pale, become sentinel and guardian; the sky arranges its tender background; and all remote as if exalted to the summit of a mountain in the dawn. Death has done it; death lies behind leaves and houses and the smoke wavering up, composing them into something still in its tranquillity before it has taken on any of the disguises of life. So, from an express train, I have looked upon hills and fields and seen the man with the scythe look up from the hedge as we pass, and lovers lying in the long grass stare at me without disguise as I stared at them without disguise. Some burden has fallen; some impediment has been removed. Freely in this fine air my friends pass dark across the horizon, all of them desiring goodness only, tenderly putting me by, and stepping off the rim of the world into the ship which waits to
take them into storm or serenity. My eye cannot follow. But one after another with kisses of farewell and laughter sweeter than before they pass beyond me to set sail for ever; trooping orderly down to the water’s edge as if this had always been their direction while we lived. Now all our tracks from the first become apparent, swerving and diverging to run together here under the solemn sycamore with the sky thus tender and the wheels and cries sounding now high, now low in harmony.
The simple young man whom I hardly knew had, then, concealed in him the immense power of death. He had removed the boundaries and fused the separate entities by ceasing - there in the room with the open windows and the bird’s song outside. He silently withdrew, and though his voice was nothing his silence is profound. He has laid his life down like a cloak for us to tread over. Where does he lead us? We come to the edge and look out. But he has gone beyond us; he faints in the far sky; for us the tenderness of the green and the blue of the sky remain; but transparent as the world is he will have none of it; he has turned from us grouped on the very limit of the verge; he disappears cleaving the dawn asunder. He is gone. We must go back then.
The sycamore shakes its leaves stirring flakes of light in the deep pool of air in which it stands; the sun shoots straight between the leaves to the grass; the geraniums glow red in the earth. A cry starts to the left of me, and another, abrupt and dissevered, to the right. Wheels strike divergently; omnibuses conglomerate in conflict; the clock asseverates with twelve distinct strokes that it is midday.
Must I then go back? Must I see the horizon shut in, the mountain sink and the coarse strong colours return? No, no, Humphry Hammond is dead. He is dead — the white sheets, the scent of flowers — the one bee humming through the room and out again. Where does it go next? There’s one on the Canterbury Bell; but finds no honey there, and so tries the yellow wall flower, but in these ancient London gardens what hope of honey? The earth must be dry as grains of salt scattered above great iron drain pipes, and the curves of tunnels. — But Humphry Hammond! Dead! Let me read the name in the paper again; let me come back to my friends; let me not desert them so soon; he died on Tuesday, three days ago, suddenly, two days illness; and then finished, the great operation of death. Finished; the earth is already over him perhaps; and people have set their courses a little differently; although some, not having heard, still address their letters to him; but the envelopes already look out of date upon the hall table. It seems to me that he has been dead for weeks, for years; when I think of him I see scarcely anything of him, and that saying of his about liking furniture means nothing at all. And yet he died; the utmost he could do gives me now scarcely any sensation at all. Terrible! Terrible! to be so callous! There is the yellow arm chair in which he sat, shabby but still solid enough, surviving us all; and the mantelpiece strewn with glass and silver, but he is ephemeral as the dusty light which stripes the wall and carpet. So will the sun shine on glass and silver the day I die. The sun stripes a million years into the future; a broad yellow path; passing an infinite distance beyond this house and town; passing so far that nothing but sea remains, stretching flat with its infinity of creases beneath the sunlight. Humphry Hammond - who was Humphry Hammond? - a curious sound, now crinkled now smooth as a sea shell.
The terrific battery! The post! These little white squares with black wriggling marks on them. ‘My father-in-law... will you dine...’ Is she mad, talking of her father-in-law? She wears the white veil still; the bed is white and steep; the lilies - the open window - the woman beating rugs outside. ‘Humphry is managing the business’ Humphry — who is dead?— ‘we shall I suppose, move into the big house.’ The house of death? ‘where you must come and stay. I have to be in London, buying mourning.’ O don’t tell me he lives still! O why did you deceive me?
THE EVENING PARTY
Ah, but let us wait a little! - The moon is up; the sky open; and there, rising in a mound against the sky with trees upon it, is the earth. The flowing silvery clouds look down upon Atlantic waves. The wind blows soft round the corner of the street, lifting my cloak, holding it gently in the air and then letting it sink and droop as the sea now swells and brims over the rocks and again withdraws. - The street is almost empty; the blinds are drawn in the windows; the yellow and red panes of the ocean liners cast for a moment a spot upon the swimming blue. Sweet is the night air. The maids linger round the pillar box or dally in the shadow of the wall where the tree droops its dark shower of blossom. So on the bark of the apple tree the moths quiver drawing sugar through the long black thread of the proboscis. Where are we? Which house can be the house of the party? All these with their pink and yellow windows are uncommunicative. Ah, - round the corner, in the middle, there where the door stands open - wait a moment. Let us watch the people, one, two, three, precipitating themselves into the light, as the moths strike upon the pane of a lantern stood upon the ground in a forest. Here is a cab making swift for the same spot. A lady pale and voluminous descends and passes into the house; a gentleman in black and white evening dress pays the driver and follows her as if he too were in a hurry. Come, or we shall be late.
On every chair there is a little soft mound; pale whisps of gauze are curled upon bright silks; candles burn pear shaped flames upon either side of the oval looking-glass; there are brushes of thin tortoise-shell; cut bottles knobbed with silver. Can it always look like this - is this not the essence - the spirit? Something has dissolved my face. Through the mist of silver candle light it scarcely appears. People pass me without seeing me. They have faces. In their faces the stars seem to shine through rose coloured flesh. The room is full of vivid yet unsubstantial figures; they stand upright before shelves striped with innumerable little volumes; their heads and shoulders blot the corners of square golden picture frames; and the bulk of their bodies, smooth like stone statues, is massed against something grey, tumultuous, shining too as if with water beyond the uncurtained windows.
‘Come into the corner and let us talk.’
‘Wonderful! Wonderful human beings! Spiritual and wonderful!’
‘But they don’t exist. Don’t you see the pond through the Professor’s head? Don’t you see the swan swimming through Mary’s skirt?’
‘I can fancy little burning roses dotted about them.’
‘The little burning roses are only like the fireflies we’ve seen together in Florence, sprinkled in the wistaria, floating atoms of fire, burning as they float — burning, not thinking.’
‘Burning not thinking. And so all the books at the back of us. Here’s Shelley — here’s Blake. Cast them up into the air and see their poems descend like golden parachutes twinkling and turning and letting fall their rain of star-shaped blossoms.
‘Shall I quote you Shelley? “Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon -’
‘Wait, wait! Don’t condense our fine atmosphere into drops of rain spattering the pavement. Let us still breathe in the fire dust.’
‘Fireflies among the wistaria.’
‘Heartless, I grant you. But see how the great blossoms hang before us; vast chandeliers of gold and dim purple pendant from the skies. Don’t you feel the fine gilt painting our thighs as we enter, and how the slate coloured walls flap clammily about us as we dart deeper and deeper into the petals, or grow taut like drums?’
‘The professor looms upon us.’
‘Tell us, Professor—’
‘Madam?’
‘Is it in your opinion necessary to write grammar? And punctuation. The question of Shelley’s commas interests me profoundly.’
‘Let us be seated. To tell the truth open windows after sunset — standing with my back — agreeable though conversation — You asked of Shelley’s commas. A matter of some importance. There, a little to the right of you. The Oxford edition. My glasses! The penalty of evening dress! I dare not read - Moreover commas — The modern print is execrable. Designed to match the modern exiguity; for I confess I find little admirable among the moderns.’
‘I am with you th
ere entirely.’
‘So? I feared opposition. At your age, in your — costume.’
‘Sir, I find little admirable among the ancients. These classics —
Shelley, Keats; Browne; Gibbon; is there a page that you can quote entire, a paragraph perfect, a sentence even that one can’t see amended by the pen of God or man?’
‘S-s-s-sh, Madam. Your objection has weight but lacks sobriety. Moreover your choice of names — In what chamber of the spirit can you consort Shelley with Gibbon? Unless indeed their atheism — But to the point. The perfect paragraph, the perfect phrase; hum — my memory — and then my glasses left behind me on the mantelpiece. I declare. But your stricture applies to life itself.’
‘Surely this evening -’
‘The pen of man, I fancy, could have little trouble in re-writing that. The open window — standing in the draught - and, let me whisper it, the conversation of these ladies, earnest and benevolent, with exalted views upon the destiny of the negro who is at this moment toiling beneath the lash to procure rubber for some of our friends engaged in agreeable conversation here. To enjoy your perfection—’
‘I take your point. One must exclude.’
‘The greater part of everything.’
‘But to argue that aright, we must strike down to the roots of things; for I fancy that your belief is only one of those fading pansies that one buys and plants for a night’s festival to find withered in the morning. You maintain that Shakespeare excluded?’
‘Madam, I maintain nothing. These ladies have put me out of temper.’
‘They are benevolent. They have pitched their camp on the banks of one of the little tributary streams, whence picking reeds and dipping them in poison, with matted hair and yellow tinted skin, they issue forth now and then to plant them in the flanks of the-comfortable; such are the benevolent.’
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 266