На маяк. Уровень 3 / To the Lighthouse

1

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow[1],” said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll have to get up early,” she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy. Even at the age of six, James Ramsay even in earliest childhood had the power to crystallize and transfix the moment of gloom or radiance into a feeling. He was sitting on the floor and cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores. The wheelbarrow, the lawnmower, the trees, the leaves before rain, rooks, brooms, dresses, – all these were coloured and distinguished in his mind.

“But,” said his father, “it won’t be fine.”

James was ready to gash a hole in his father’s breast and kill him. Mr. Ramsay annoyed his children very much by his mere presence. He liked to disillusion his son and cast ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought). What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth.

“But it may be fine – I expect it will be fine,” said Mrs. Ramsay.

She was knitting the reddish brown stocking. If she finishes it tonight, if they go to the Lighthouse after all, she will give the stockings to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy. She will add a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco. Those poor fellows must be bored to death.

“It’s due west[2],” said the atheist Tansley.

That is to say, the wind blew from the worst possible direction for landing at the Lighthouse.

Tansley says disagreeable things, as usual. None of her children liked him and still, Mrs. Ramsay invited him to stay with them in the Isle of Skye and protected him from their attacks.

There must be some simpler way, some less laborious way, she sighed. She looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty. In all probability, there were ways in which she could manage things better: for her husband and for her children. But for her own part[3] she would never for a single second regret her decision.

“We’ll not land at the Lighthouse tomorrow,” said Charles Tansley.

He clapped his hands together as he stood at the window with her husband. Surely, he had said enough. She looked at him. He was miserable, the children said. He couldn’t play cricket; he poked; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic brute, Andrew said.

It was not his face; it was not his manners. It was him – his point of view. When they talked about something interesting, people, music, history, anything, Charles Tansley would always turn it into a talk about himself.

When the meal was over, the eight sons and daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay went to their bedrooms. They were so critical, her children, Mrs. Ramsay thought. They talked such nonsense.

She went from the dining-room and ruminated the problem of rich and poor, and the things she saw with her own eyes, weekly, daily, here or in London. Social problems. Insoluble questions, it seemed to her. He had followed her into the drawing-room, that young man they laughed at; he was standing by the table. They had all gone – the children; Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley; Augustus Carmichael; her husband – they had all gone. So she turned to the man with a sigh and said,

“Would you like to come with me, Mr. Tansley?”

She had things to do in the town. A letter or two to write. She will be in ten minutes perhaps; she will put on her hat and take her basket and her parasol.

They were making the great expedition, she said and laughed. They were going to the town.

“Stamps, writing-paper, tobacco?” she suggested.

No, he wanted nothing. No, nothing, he murmured.

As for her little bag, may he not carry that? No, no, she said, she always carried that herself.

“Let us all go!” she cried.

“Let’s go,” he said, repeating her words. “Let us all go to the circus.”

No. What was wrong with him then? She liked him warmly, at the moment. When he was a child, he did not go to circuses. He had a large family, nine brothers and sisters. His father was a working man.

“My father is a chemist, Mrs. Ramsay. He keeps a shop.”

He himself has worked since thirteen. Often he went without a warm coat in winter. He worked hard – seven hours a day. They were walking on and Mrs. Ramsay did not quite catch the meaning, only the words, here and there… dissertation… fellowship… readership… lectureship. She will tell Prue about it. He was an awful prig – oh yes, an insufferable bore.

They came out on the quay, and the whole bay spread before them. Mrs. Ramsay exclaimed,

“Oh, how beautiful!”

The great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes, which always were running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.

That was the view, she said, that her husband loved. She paused a moment.

But now, she said, artists come here. There indeed, stood one of them, in Panama hat[4] and yellow boots. Ten little boys watched him. Since Mr. Paunceforte had been there, three years before, all the pictures were like that, she said, green and grey, with lemon-coloured boats, and pink women on the beach.

So Mr. Tansley supposed she meant that that man’s picture was skimpy? It was awfully strange.

There he stood in the parlour of the poky little house. He was waiting for her, while she went upstairs a moment to see a woman. With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets – what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least; she had eight children. He took her bag.

“Good-bye, Elsie,” she said, and they walked up the street.

She was holding her parasol and walking as if she expected to meet someone round the corner. Charles Tansley was very proud. For the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt the wind and the cyclamen and the violets. He was walking with a beautiful woman.

2

“We won’t go to the Lighthouse, James,” he said.

Odious little man, thought Mrs. Ramsay.

3

“Perhaps you will wake up and find the sun and the birds,” she said compassionately.

She was smoothing the little boy’s hair.

“Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow,” she said.

All she could do now was to admire the refrigerator, and turn the pages of the catalogue. All these young men parodied her husband, she reflected.

They ceased to talk; that was the explanation. She concluded that poor Charles Tansley was shed. That was none of her business. If her husband required sacrifices (and indeed he did) she cheerfully offered up to him Charles Tansley. Charles snubbed her little boy.

One moment more, she listened; and then she heard something rhythmical. Suddenly a loud cry, as of a sleep-walker[5], sung out with the utmost intensity in her ear:

“Stormed at with shot and shell!”

Mrs. Ramsay turned her head to see if anyone had heard him. Only Lily Briscoe, she was glad to find; and that did not matter. But the sight of the girl standing on the edge of the lawn painting reminded her; she was supposed to be keeping her head as much in the same position as possible for Lily’s picture. Lily’s picture! Mrs. Ramsay smiled and, remembering her promise, she bent her head.

4

Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over. He came down upon her, “Boldly we rode and well!” Never was anybody at once so ridiculous and so alarming.

Someone came out of the house. He came towards her. It was William Bankes; her brush quivered. William Bankes stood beside her.

They had rooms in the village. When they were walking in, walking out, parting late on door-mats, they said little things about the soup, about the children, about one thing and another which made them allies. When he stood beside her now (he was old enough to be her father too, a botanist, a widower, very scrupulous and clean) she just stood there. He just stood there. Her shoes were excellent, he observed. He was lodging in the same house with her.

Mr. Ramsay glared at them. That did make them both vaguely uncomfortable. It was with difficulty that she took her eyes off her picture.

She laid her brushes neatly in the box, side by side, and said to William Bankes:

“It suddenly gets cold. The sun gives less heat,” she said.

It was bright enough, the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers. But something moved, flashed, turned a silver wing in the air. It was September after all, the middle of September, and past six in the evening. So off they strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampas grass, to that break in the thick hedge.

They came there regularly every evening. The pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue, and the heart expanded with it.

They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity. William Bankes was looking at the far sand hills. He thought of Ramsay, he thought of a road in Westmorland. William Bankes remembered a hen with its little chicks. It seemed to him that their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay married and something important went out of their friendship. Whose fault it was he could not say. But in this dumb colloquy with the sand dunes he maintained his affection for Ramsay.

He was anxious to clear himself in his own mind from the imputation of dryness. Ramsay lived in a welter of children, whereas Bankes was childless and a widower.

Yes. That was it. He turned from the view. And Mr. Bankes felt aged and saddened. He has dried indeed.

The Ramsays were not rich. It was a wonder how they managed to contrive it all[6]. Eight children! To feed eight children! And the education was very expensive (true, Mrs. Ramsay had something of her own perhaps). And those fellows, angular, ruthless youngsters, required clothes. He called them after the Kings and Queens of England; Cam the Wicked, James the Ruthless, Andrew the Just, Prue the Fair. Prue must be beautiful, he thought, and Andrew must have brains.

While he walked up the drive and Lily Briscoe said yes and no and capped his comments (for she was in love with them all), he commiserated Ramsay, envied him. But what, for example, did this Lily Briscoe think?

“Oh, but,” said Lily, “think of his work!”

Whenever she “thought of his work” she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew’s. She asked him what his father’s books were about.

“Subject and object and the nature of reality,” Andrew said.

She said,

“Oh, I don’t understand what that means”.

“Think of a kitchen table then,” he told her, “when you’re not there.”

So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table.

Mr. Bankes was glad that she had asked him “to think of his work.” He had thought of it, often and often.

“Ramsay is one of those men who do their best work before they are forty.”

He had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only five and twenty. But the number of men who make a definite contribution to anything whatsoever is very small, he said.

How to judge people, how to think of them? She was standing by the pear tree. You have greatness, but Mr. Ramsay has none of it. He is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical. He is spoilt; he is a tyrant. But he has what you (she addressed Mr. Bankes) have not; a fiery unworldliness; he knows nothing about trifles. He loves dogs and his children. He has eight. Mr. Bankes has none.

5

“And even if it isn’t fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay, glancing at William Bankes and Lily Briscoe as they passed, “it will be another day. And now, James, stand up, and let me measure your leg,”

William and Lily must marry – she took the stocking, and measured it against James’s leg.

“My dear, stand still,” she said.

She looked up and saw the room, saw the chairs. They were fearfully shabby. But what was the point, she asked, of buying good chairs? The rent was low; the children loved the house. It is very good for her husband to be three hundred miles from his libraries and his lectures and his disciples; and there was room for visitors. Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables; and a photograph or two, and books. She never had time to read them. Alas! She sighed and saw the whole room from floor to ceiling, as she held the stocking against James’s leg. Things got shabbier and shabbier summer after summer. The mat was fading; the wall-paper was flapping. You can’t tell anymore that those were roses on it.

But it was the doors that annoyed her; every door was left open. She listened. The drawing-room door was open; the hall door was open. It sounded as if the bedroom doors were open. Certainly the window was open. That windows must be open, and doors shut – it’s simple. Can’t they remember it?

She had a spasm of irritation, and spoke sharply to James:

“Stand still. Don’t be tiresome.”

He knew instantly that her severity was real. He straightened his leg and she measured it.

The stocking was too short. It was the stocking for Sorley’s little boy, and he was less well grown than James.

“It’s too short,” she said.

Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black. A tear formed; a tear fell. Never did anybody look so sad.

Mrs. Ramsay smoothed out her harsh manner, raised his head, and kissed her little boy on the forehead.

“Let us find another picture to cut out,” she said.

6

But what happened?

Someone made a mistake.

She fixed her short-sighted[7] eyes upon her husband. She gazed steadily until his closeness revealed to her that something had happened.

He shivered; he quivered. All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own splendour, had been shattered, destroyed. Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well. He quivered; he shivered.

She realised, from the familiar signs, that he needed privacy to regain his equilibrium, that he was outraged and anguished. She stroked James’s head; she transferred to him what she felt for her husband. Her husband passed her. She was relieved to find that the ruin was veiled; domesticity triumphed; custom crooned its soothing rhythm. At the window he bent quizzically and whimsically to tickle James’s bare calf with a sprig of something. She twitted him that he had dispatched “that poor young man,” Charles Tansley.

“Tansley had to write his dissertation,” he said. “James will have to write his dissertation one of these days,” he added ironically.

She was trying to finish these tiresome stockings to send them to Sorley’s little boy tomorrow, said Mrs. Ramsay.

“There isn’t the slightest possible chance that we can go to the Lighthouse tomorrow,” Mr. Ramsay said irascibly.

“How do you know?” she asked. “The wind often changes”.

The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women’s minds enraged him. He stamped his foot on the stone step.

“Damn you,” he said.

But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might.

Such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings was to her so horrible that she bent her head. There was nothing to say.

He stood by her in silence. Very humbly, at length, he said,

“I will ask the Coastguards if you like”.

There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him.

Already ashamed of that petulance, of that gesticulation of the hands, Mr. Ramsay sheepishly prodded his son’s bare legs, and then he dived into the evening air.

He was safe, he was restored to his privacy. He stopped to light his pipe. He looked once at his wife and son in the window. Who will blame him?

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. He hated him for the magnificence of his head. He hated him for his exactingness and egotism.

He looked at the page. He pointed his finger at a word, and he hoped to recall his mother’s attention, which, he knew angrily, wavered instantly. But, no. Nothing will make Mr. Ramsay move on. There he stood. He was demanding sympathy.

Mrs. Ramsay was folding her son in her arm. She braced herself, and raised herself with an effort. He wanted sympathy. He was a failure, he said. Mrs. Ramsay flashed her needles.

“Charles Tansley…” she said.

But it was sympathy he wanted. He wanted to be assured of his genius.

Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time, she said. But he must have sympathy. She laughed, she knitted.

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.

He was filled with her words, like a child. At last, he looked at her with humble gratitude and went away.

Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another. She felt the rapture of successful creation. Every throb of this pulse enclosed her and her husband, and gave to each some solace.

A shadow was on the page; she looked up. It was Augustus Carmichael’s shadow. Mr. Carmichael was in his yellow slippers. She asked,

“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. He came to them every year as an escape. 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 because of his wife. She remembered that iniquity of his wife’s towards him. He was unkempt; he dropped things on his coat. He had the tiresomeness of an old man. His wife said, in her odious way,

“Now, Mrs. Ramsay and I want to have a little talk together.”

Mrs. Ramsay could see the innumerable miseries of his life. Had he money enough to buy tobacco? Did he have to ask her for it? She made him suffer.

And always now he shrank from her. He never told her anything. But what more can she do? He has a sunny room. The children are good to him. It injured her that he shrinks. Everybody loved her. Everybody needed her. How could he not? When Mr. Carmichael just nodded to her question, with a book beneath his arm, she felt 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.

Anyway, she should better devote her mind to the story of the Fisherman and his Wife and calm down her son James (none of her children was as sensitive as he was).

“The man’s heart grew heavy,” she read aloud, “and he did not want to 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…”

“The father of eight children has no choice.”

He muttered these words, turned, sighed, raised his eyes, saw the figure of his wife. She was reading stories to his little boy. He filled his pipe. He 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[8], and the causes of the French Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it he had to deprecate and conceal under the phrase “talking nonsense.” It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings. He could not say, “This is what I like – this is what I am”. It was rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe. Lily wondered why such concealments were necessary; why he needed praise. She wondered why so brave a man in thought was so timid in life. He was strangely venerable and laughable at the same time.

Teaching and preaching is beyond human power, Lily suspected.

Mrs. Ramsay gave him what he asked too easily. Then the change must be so upsetting, Lily said. He comes in from his books and finds us all playing games and talking nonsense. Imagine what a change from the things he thinks about, she said.

9

“Yes,” Mr. Bankes said. “It is pity. It is pity that Ramsay could not behave a little more like other people.”

For he liked Lily Briscoe; he could discuss Ramsay with her quite openly. It was for that reason, he said, that the young people don’t read Carlyle. A crusty old grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold. Why will he preach to us?

Lily was ashamed to say that she had not read Carlyle since she was at school. But she liked Mr. Ramsay. He asked you quite openly to flatter him, to admire him. His little dodges deceived nobody. It was not THAT she minded. What she disliked was his narrowness, his blindness.

“A hypocrite?” Mr. Bankes suggested.

He looked at Mr. Ramsay’s back. He rather wished Lily to agree that Ramsay was, as he said, “a hypocrite.”

Lily Briscoe was putting away her brushes. She was looking up, looking down. Looking up, there he was – Mr. Ramsay was advancing towards them. He was swinging, careless, oblivious, remote. “A hypocrite?” she repeated. Oh, no – the most sincere of men, the truest, the best. But he is absorbed in himself. He is tyrannical, he is unjust.

Mr. Bankes expected her to answer. And she was about to say something about Mrs. Ramsay, how she was alarming, but then she saw the rapture with which Mr. Bankes looked at Mrs. Ramsay and the look on his face made it entirely unnecessary for her to speak. Lily felt that this rapture was equivalent to the loves of dozens of young men. Perhaps Mrs. Ramsay had never excited the loves of dozens of young men. It was distilled and filtered love; love that never attempted to clutch its object. This love was spread over the world and became part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The world shared it.

Such a rapture made Lily Briscoe forget entirely what she wanted to say. It was nothing of importance; something about Mrs. Ramsay. It paled beside this “rapture”, this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude. Nothing so solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised its burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift.