There was dead silence. They had a sense of vast empty space round them, of friends vanishing for ever, summoned by some mysterious voice away into the snow.
‘You never found her?’ Mary Bridger asked at length.
Tom Bagot shook his head.
‘We did what we could. Offered a reward. Consulted the police. There was a rumour — someone had seen gipsies passing.’
‘What do you think she heard? What was she grinning at?’ Lucy Bagot asked. ‘Oh I still pray,’ she exclaimed, ‘that it wasn’t the end!’
THE SYMBOL
There was a little dent on the top of the mountain like a crater on the moon. It was filled with snow, iridescent like a pigeon’s breast, or dead white. There was a scurry of dry particles now and again, covering nothing. It was too high for breathing flesh or fur covered life. All the same the snow was iridescent one moment; and blood red; and pure white, according to the day.
The graves in the valley — for there was a vast descent on either side; first pure rock; snow silted; lower a pine tree gripped a crag; then a solitary hut; then a saucer of pure green; then a cluster of eggshell roofs; at last, at the bottom, a village, an hotel, a cinema, and a graveyard - the graves in the churchyard near the hotel recorded the names of several men who had fallen climbing.
‘The mountain,’ the lady wrote, sitting on the balcony of the hotel, ‘is a symbol...’ She paused. She could see the topmost height through her glasses. She focussed the lens, as if to see what the symbol was. She was writing to her elder sister at Birmingham.
The balcony overlooked the main street of the Alpine summer resort, like a box at a theatre. There were very few private sitting rooms, and so the plays - such as they were — the curtain raisers - were acted in public. They were always a little provisional; preludes, curtain raisers. Entertainments to pass the time; seldom leading to any conclusion, such as marriage; or even lasting friendship. There was something fantastic about them, airy, inconclusive. So little that was solid could be dragged to this height. Even the houses looked gimcrack. By the time the voice of the English Announcer had reached the village it too became unreal.
Lowering her glasses, she nodded at the young men who in the street below were making ready to start. With one of them she had a certain connection - that is, an Aunt of his had been Mistress of her daughter’s school.
Still holding the pen, still tipped with a drop of ink, she waved down at the climbers. She had written the mountain was a symbol. But of what? In the forties of the last century two men, in the sixties four men had perished; the first party when a rope broke; the second when night fell and froze them to death. We are always climbing to some height; that was the cliché. But it did not represent what was in her mind’s eye; after seeing through her glasses the virgin height.
She continued, inconsequently. ‘I wonder why it makes me think of the Isle of Wight? You remember when Mama was dying, we took her there. And I would stand on the balcony, when the boat came in and describe the passengers. I would say, I think that must be Mr Edwardes... He has just come off the gangway. Then, now all the passengers have landed. Now they have turned the boat... I never told you, naturally not — you were in India; you were going to have Lucy — how I longed when the doctor came, that he should say, quite definitely, She cannot live another week. It was very prolonged; she lived eighteen months. The mountain just now reminded me how when I was alone, I would fix my eyes upon her death, as a symbol. I would think if I could reach that point — when I should be free — we could not marry as you remember until she died — A cloud then would do instead of the mountain. I thought, when I reach that point — I have never told any one; for it seemed so heartless; I shall be at the top. And I could imagine so many sides. We come of course of an Anglo Indian family. I can still imagine, from hearing stories told, how people live in other parts of the world. I can see mud huts; and savages; I can see elephants drinking at pools. So many of our uncles and cousins were explorers. I have always had a great desire to explore for myself. But of course, when the time came it seemed more sensible, considering our long engagement, to marry.’
She looked across the street at a woman shaking a mat on another balcony. Every morning at the same time she came out. You could have thrown a pebble into her balcony. They had indeed come to the point of smiling at each other across the street.
‘The little villas,’ she added, taking up her pen, ‘are much the same here as in Birmingham. Every house takes in lodgers. The hotel is quite full. Though monotonous, the food is not what you would call bad. And of course the hotel has a splendid view. One can see the mountain from every window. But then that’s true of the whole place. I can assure you, I could shriek sometimes coming out of the one shop where they sell papers — we get them a week late — always to see that mountain. Sometimes it looks just across the way. At others, like a cloud; only it never moves. Somehow the talk, even among the invalids, who are every where, is always about the mountain. Either, how clear it is today, it might be across the street; or, how far away it looks; it might be a cloud. That is the usual cliché. In the storm last night, I hoped for once it was hidden. But just as they brought in the anchovies, The Rev. W. Bishop said, “Look there’s the mountain!”
Am I being selfish? Ought I not to be ashamed of myself, when there is so much suffering? It is not confined to the visitors. The natives suffer dreadfully from goitre. Of course it could be stopped, if any one had enterprise, and money. Ought one not to be ashamed of dwelling upon what after all can’t be cured? It would need an earthquake to destroy that mountain, just as, I suppose, it was made by an earthquake. I asked the Proprietor, Herr Melchior, the other day, if there were ever earthquakes now? No, he said, only landslides and avalanches. They have been known he said to blot out a whole village. But he added quickly, there’s no danger here.
As I write these words, I can see the young men quite plainly on the slopes of the mountain. They are roped together. One I think I told you was at the same school with Margaret. They are now crossing a crevasse....’
The pen fell from her hand, and the drop of ink straggled in a zig zag line down the page. The young men had disappeared.
It was only late that night when the search party had recovered the bodies that she found the unfinished letter on the table on the balcony. She dipped her pen once more; and added, ‘The old clichés will come in very handy. They died trying to climb the mountain... And the peasants brought spring flowers to lay upon their graves. They died in an attempt to discover...’
There seemed no fitting conclusion. And she added, ‘Love to the children,’ and then her pet name.
THE WATERING PLACE
Like all seaside towns it was pervaded by the smell of fish. The toy shops were full of shells, varnished, hard yet fragile. Even the inhabitants had a shelly look - a frivolous look as if the real animal had been extracted on the point of a pin and only the shell remained. The old men on the parade were shells. Their gaiters, their riding breeches, their spy glasses seemed to make them into toys. They could no more have been real sailors or real sportsmen than the shells stuck onto the rims of photograph frames and looking-glasses could have lain in the depths of the sea. The women too, with their trousers and their little high heeled shoes and their raffia bags and their pearl necklaces seemed shells of real women who go out in the morning to buy household stores.
At one o’clock this frail varnished shell fish population clustered together in the restaurant. The restaurant had a fishy smell, the smell of a smack that has drawn up nets full of sprats and herrings. The consumption of fish in that dining room must have been enormous. The smell pervaded even the room that was marked Ladies on the first landing. This room was separated by a door only into two compartments. On the one side of the door the claims of nature were gratified; and on the other, at the washing table, at the looking-glass, nature was disciplined by art. Three young ladies had reached this second stage of the daily ritual. They were exerting their
rights upon improving nature, subduing her, with their powder puffs and little red tablets. As they did so they talked; but their talk was interrupted as by the surge of an indrawing tide; and then the tide withdrew and one was heard saying:
‘I never did care about her - the simpering little thing.... Bert never did care about big women.... Ave you seen him since he’s been back?... His eyes... they’re so blue... Like pools... Gert’s too... Both ave the same eyes.... You look down into them... They’ve both got the same teeth... Are He’s got such beautiful white teeth.... Gert has em too.... But his are a bit crooked... when he smiles...’
The water gushed... The tide foamed and withdrew. It uncovered next: ‘But he had ought to be more careful. If he’s caught doing it, he’ll be courtmartialled...’ Here came a great gush of water from the next compartment. The tide in the watering place seems to be for ever drawing and withdrawing. It uncovers these little fish; it sluices over them. It withdraws, and there are the fish again, smelling very strong of some queer fishy smell that seems to permeate the whole watering place.
But at night the town looks quite ethereal. There is a white glow on the horizon. There are hoops and coronets in the streets. The town has sunk down into the water. And the skeleton only is picked out in fairy lamps.
The Play
Woolf spent her childhood summers at Talland House in Cornwall.
Woolf on her wedding day, 1912
FRESHWATER
Virginia Woolf’s only play, Freshwater, was not published until 1976, when Lucio P. Ruotolo edited a version of the drama. The play was written in 1923 during the composition of Mrs. Dalloway as a light diversion from such a demanding and draining project. Freshwater was revised in 1935 and staged at a party at Vanessa Bell’s art studio, being the only performance of the work during Woolf’s lifetime. Leonard Woolf, the artist Duncan Grant, Bell’s daughter Angelica and Bell herself all took parts in the play, which was intended as a private work for the entertainment of the author’s friends and family. The most striking and unusual element of Freshwater is that, unlike Woolf’s other texts, it is a comedy and very frivolous in tone. There is a real lightness and almost absurd poetry to the language that creates a fun, if somewhat insubstantial work.
The play is set during the 1870’s at Freshwater, on The Isle of Wight and gently satirises the forefathers to the Bloomsbury group. The drama begins with Woolf’s great aunt, a photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron and her husband planning to move to India in their final years. The other prominent and famous characters include the poet Lord Alfred Tennyson and the famous Victorian actress Ellen Terry. In the drama, she is a very young woman trapped in an unsatisfying marriage to a much older painter and she wishes to leave her husband for a charming and charismatic young Lieutenant to begin a new life of pleasure in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. Freshwater is far from being Woolf’s best work, though it does offer a look at a lighter and more playful facet of her writing.
Julia Cameron — Woolf’s great-aunt and the subject of her only play
CONTENTS
FRESHWATER - 1923 VERSION
FRESHWATER - 1935 VERSION
ACT I.
ACT II
ACT III.
Poster from a 2009 production
FRESHWATER - 1923 VERSION
Dramatis Personae
CHARLES HENRY HAY CAMERON
MRS. JULIA CAMERON
G. P. WATTS
ELLEN TERRY
LORD TENNYSON
MR. CRAIG
MARY MAGDALEN
A drawing room at Dimbola, hung with photographs; CHARLES CAMERON, a very old man with long white hair and beard, is sitting with a bath towel round his head, MARY MAGDALEN, the housemaid, is engaged in rubbing his hair, which has just been washed, and is of the utmost fineness.
MR. C.
The sixth time in eight months! Whenever we start for India, Julia insists — [Here MARY, who is combing, tugs his hair sharply.] — Ah! Ah! Ah! — Julia insists that I must have my head washed. Yet we never do start for India — I sometimes think we never shall start for India. At the last moment something happens — something always happens.
And so we stay on and on, living this life of poetry, of photography, of frivolity, and I shall never see the land of my spiritual youth. I shall never learn the true nature of virtue from the fasting philosophers of Baluchistan. I shall never solve the great problem, or answer the Eternal Question. I am a captive in the hands of Circumstance — [MARY now tugs his beard.] Ah! Oh! Oh!
MARY
MR. Cameron, dear darling MR. Cameron, do let me wash your beard. It’s the most beautiful beard in the whole Isle of Wight. MRS. Cameron will never let you go to India —
[Enter MRS. CAMERON, a brown-faced gipsylike-looking old woman, wearing a green shawl, fastened by an enormous cameo. She stops dead and raises her hand. ]
MRS. C.
What a picture! What a composition! Truth sipping at the fount of inspiration! The soul taking flight from the body! Upward, girl, look upward! Fling your arms round his neck and look upward! [MARY and MR. C. assume a pose.]
Let your head fall on your breast, Charles. The soul has left its mortal tenement. She wings her way — where are the wings, the angel’s wings, the turkey’s wings, Andrews gave me last Christmas?
MARY
They’re packed, ma’am.
MRS. C.
Packed — why packed? Ah — I remember. We start for India at two thirty sharp, [MARY goes on combing the beard.] Did you ever hear anything so provoking? I’ve only just time to finish my study of Sir Galahad watching the Holy Grail by moonlight. Cook was posed. The light superb. At the last moment up comes word that Galahad has to take the sheep to Yarmouth. It’s market day. Sheep! Market day! [With great scorn] Where I’m to find another Galahad heaven only knows! [She looks distractedly about the room, out of the window and soon.]
MR. C. [lying back with his eyes shut, while MARY washes his beard]
Loose your mind from the affairs of the present. Seek truth where truth lies hidden. Follow the everlasting will o’ the wisp — Magdalen, don’t tug my beard. Cast away your vain fineries. Let us be free like birds of the air. [Growing more and more excited, and speaking in a loud prophetic voice] At two thirty we start for India!
[The door opens as he says this and LORD TENNYSON enters.]
LORD T.
So Emily told me. Julia Cameron has ordered the coffins, she said, and at two thirty they start for India.
MRS. C. [advancing upon him and speaking in a sepulchral voice]
Julia Cameron has ordered the coffins but the coffins have not come. It’s that villain Ashwood again. This is the sixth time I have ordered the coffins and the coffins have not come. But without her coffins Julia Cameron will not start for India. For, Alfred [she stands before him, fixing him with her eyes], when we lie dead under the Southern Cross, my head will be raised upon a copy of In Memoriam.
Maud lies upon my heart. In my right hand I hold the quill which wrote — under providence— “The Passing of Arthur.” In my left, the slipper which you threw at my head when I asked you to sit for my two hundredth study of Arthur saying farewell to Sir Bedivere. [She casts her eyes up and speaks in a deep ecstatic voice.] All is over, Alfred. All is ready. It is a deep Southern night. Orion glitters in the firmament. The scent of the tulip trees is wafted through the open window. The silence is only broken by the sobs of my faithful friends and the occasional howl of a solitary tiger. And then — what is this? What infamy is this? [She plucks at her wrist, picks something off it, and holds it towards TENNYSON.] An Ant! A White Ant! They are advancing in hordes from the jungle, Alfred. I hear the crepitation of their myriad feet. They will be upon me before dawn. They will eat the flesh off my bones. Alfred, they will devour Maud!
LORD T. [greatly shocked]
God bless my soul! The woman’s right. Devour Maud! It’s too disgusting! It must be stopped. Devour Maud indeed! My darling Maud! [He presses the book benea
th his arm.] But what an awful fate! What a hideous prospect! Here are my two honoured old friends, setting sail, in less than three hours, for an unknown land where, whatever else may happen, they can never by any possible chance hear me read Maud again. But [he looks at his watch] what is the time? We have still two hours and twenty minutes. I have read it in less. Let us begin, [LORD TENNYSON sits down by the window which opens into the garden and begins to read aloud.]
I hate the dreadful hollow beneath the little wood, Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath, The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood, And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers “Death.”
MRS. C. [interrupting him]
Alfred, Alfred, I seek Sir Galahad. Where shall I find a Galahad? Is there no gardener, no footman, no pantry boy at Farringford with calves — he must have calves. Hallam alas has grown too stout. A Galahad! A Galahad! [She goes wringing her hands and crying “A Galahad!” out of the room, TENNYSON goes on reading steadily.]
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 288