The brush descended. It flickered brown over the

white canvas; it left a running mark. A second time

she did it -- a third time. And so pausing and so

 

flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical movement,

as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm

and the strokes another, and all were related; and

so, lightly and swiftly pausing, striking, she scored

her canvas with brown running nervous lines which

had no sooner settled there than they enclosed ( she

felt it looming out at her) a space. Down in the

hollow of one wave she saw the next wave towering

higher and higher above her. For what could be

more formidable than that space? Here she was

again, she thought, stepping back to look at it,

drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community

with people into the presence of this formidable

ancient enemy of hers -- this other thing, this truth,

this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her,

emerged stark at the back of apperarances and commanded

her attention. She was half unwilling, half

reluctant. Why always be drawn out and haled

away? Why not left in peace, to talk to Mr. Carmichael

on the lawn? It was an exacting form of

intercourse anyhow. Other worshipful objects were

content with worship; men, women, God, all let one

kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the

shape of a white lamp-shade looming on a wicker

table, roused one to perpetual combat, challenged

one to a fight in which one was bound to be worsted.

Always (it was in her nature, or in her sex, she did

 

not know which) before she exchanged the fluidity

of life for the concentration of painting she had a

few moments of nakedness when she seemed like

an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on

some windy pinnacle and exposed with protection

to all the blasts of doubt. Why then did she

do it? She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with

running lines. It would be hung in the servants' bedrooms.

It would be rolled up and stuffed under a

sofa. What was the good of doing it then, and she

heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying

she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one

of those habitual currents in which after a certain

time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats

words without being aware any longer who

originally spoke them.

 

  Can't paint, can't write, she murmured monotonously,

anxiously considering what her plan of attack

should be. For the mass loomed before her; it

protruded; she felt it pressing on her eyeballs. Then,

as if some juice necessary for the lubrication of her

faculties were spontaneously squirted, she began

precariously dipping among the blues and umbers,

moving her brush hither and thither, but it was now

heavier and went slower, as if it had fallen in with

some rhythm which was dictated to her (she kept

looking at the hedge, at the canvas) by what she

 

saw, so that while her hand quivered with life, this

rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with

it on its current. Certainly she was losing consciousness

of outer things. And as she lost consciousness

of outer things, and her name and her personality

and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael

was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its

depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories

and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that

glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she

modelled it with greens and blues.

 

  Charles Tansley used to say that, she remembered,

women can't paint, can't write. Coming up

behind her, he had stood close beside her, a thing she

hated, as she painted her on this very spot. " Shag

tobacco, " he said, " fivepence an ounce, " parading

his poverty, his principles. (But the war had drawn

the sting of her femininity. Poor devils, one thought,

poor devils, of both sexes.) He was always carrying

a book about under his arm -- a purple book. He

" worked. " He sat, she remembered, working in a

blaze of sun. At dinner he would sit right in the

middle of the view. But after all, she reflected, there

was the scene on the beach. One must remember

that. It was a windy morning. They had all gone

down to the beach. Mrs. Ramsay sat down and

wrote letters by a rock. She wrote and wrote. " Oh, "

 

she said, looking up at something floating in the

sea, " is it a lobster pot? Is it an upturned boat? "

She was so short-sighted that she could not see, and

then Charles Tansley became as nice as he could

possibly be. He began playing ducks and drakes.

They chose little flat black stones and sent them

skipping over the waves. Every now and then Mrs.

Ramsay looked up over her spectacles and laughed

at them. What they said she could not remember,

but only she and Charles throwing stones and getting

on very well all of a sudden and Mrs. Ramsay

watching them. She was highly conscious of that.

Mrs. Ramsay, she thought, stepping back and

screwing up her eyes. (It must have altered the

design a good deal when she was sitting on the

step with James. There must have been a shadow.)

When she thought of herself and Charles throwing

ducks and drakes and of the whole scene on the

beach, it seemed to depend somehow upon Mrs.

Ramsay sitting under the rock, with a pad on her

knee, writing letters. (She wrote innumerable letters,

and sometimes the wind took them and she and

Charles just saved a page from the sea.) But what

a power was in the human soul! she thought. That

woman sitting there writing under the rock resolved

everything into simplicity; made these angers, irritations

fall off like old rags; she brought together

 

this and that and then this, and so made out

of that miserable silliness and spite (she and Charles

squabbling, sparring, had been silly and spiteful)

something -- this scene on the beach for example, this

moment of friendship and liking -- which survived,

after all these years complete, so that she dipped

into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and there

it stayed in the mind affecting one almost like a

work of art.

 

  " Like a work of art, " she repeated, looking from

her canvas to the drawing-room steps and back

again. She must rest for a moment. And, resting,

looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question

which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually,

the vast, the general question which was apt to particularise

itself at such moments as these, when she

released faculties that had been on the strain, stood

over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What

is the meaning of life? That was all -- a simple question;

one that tended to close in on one with years.

The great revelation had never come. The great

revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there

were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches

struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This,

that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and

the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together;

Mrs. Ramsay saying, " Life stand still here ";

 

Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something

permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried

to make of the moment something permanent) -- this

was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of

chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and

flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the

leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand

still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. " Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs.

Ramsay! " she repeated. She owed it all to her.

 

  All was silence. Nobody seemed yet to be stirring

in the house. She looked at it there sleeping in the

early sunlight with its windows green and blue with

the reflected leaves. The faint thought she was

thinking of Mrs. Ramsay seemed in consonance

with this quiet house; this smoke; this fine early

morning air. Faint and unreal, it was amazingly

pure and exciting. She hoped nobody would open the

window or come out of the house, but that she might

be left alone to go on thinking, to go on painting.

She turned to her canvas. But impelled by some

curiosity, driven by the discomfort of the sympathy

which she held undischarged, she walked a pace or

so to the end of the lawn to see whether, down there

on the beach, she could see that little company setting

sail. Down there among the little boats which

floated, some with their sails furled, some slowly,

for it was very calm moving away, there was one

 

rather apart from the others. The sail was even

now being hoisted. She decided that there in that

very distant and entirely silent little boat Mr. Ramsay

was sitting with Cam and James. Now they

had got the sail up; now after a little flagging and

hesitation the sails filled and, shrouded in profound

silence, she watched the boat take its way with

deliberation past the other boats out to sea.

 

 

  The sails flapped over their heads. The water

chuckled and slapped the sides of the boat, which

drowsed motionless in the sun. Now and then the

sails rippled with a little breeze in them, but the

ripple ran over them and ceased. The boat made no

motion at all. Mr. Ramsay sat in the middle of the

boat. He would be impatient in a moment, James

thought, and Cam thought, looking at her father,

who sat in the middle of the boat between them

(James steered; Cam sat alone in the bow) with his

legs tightly curled. He hated hanging about. Sure

enough, after fidgeting a second or two, he said something

sharp to Macalister's boy, who got out his oars

and began to row. But their father, they knew, would

never be content until they were flying along. He

would keep looking for a breeze, fidgeting, saying

 

things under his breath, which Macalister and

and Macalister's boy would overhear, and they would

both be made horribly uncomfortable. He had made

them come. He had forced them to come. In their

anger they hoped that the breeze would never rise,

that he might be thwarted in every possible way,

since he had forced them to come against their wills.

 

  All the way down to the beach they had lagged

behind together, though he bade them " Walk up,

walk up, " without speaking. Their heads were bent

down, their heads were pressed down by some remorseless

gale. Speak to him they could not. They

must come; they must follow. They must walk behind

him carrying brown paper parcels. But they

vowed, in silence, as they walked, to stand by each

other and carry out the great compact -- to resist

tyranny to the death. So there they would sit, one

at one end of the boat, one at the other, in silence.

They would say nothing, only look at him now and

then where he sat with his legs twisted, frowning

and fidgeting, and pishing and pshawing and muttering

things to himself, and waiting impatiently for

a breeze. And they hoped it would be calm. They

hoped he would be thwarted. They hoped the whole

expedition would fail, and they would have to put

back, with their parcels, to the beach.

 

  But now, when Macalister's boy had rowed a little

 

way out, the sails slowly swung round, the boat

quickened itself, flattened itself, and shot off. Instantly,

as if some great strain had been relieved, Mr.

Ramsay uncurled his legs, took out his tobacco

pouch, handed it with a little grunt to Macalister,

and felt, they knew, for all they suffered, perfectly

content. Now they would sail on for hours like this,

and Mr. Ramsay would ask old Macalister a question --

about the great storm last winter probably --

and old Macalister would answer it, and they would

puff their pipes together, and Macalister would take

a tarry rope in his fingers, tying or untying some

knot, and the boy would fish, and never say a word to

any one. James would be forced to keep his eye all

the time on the sail. For if he forgot, then the sail

puckered and shivered, and the boat slackened, and

Mr. Ramsay would say sharply, " Look out! Look

out! " and old Macalister would turn slowly on his

seat. So they heard Mr. Ramsay asking some question

about the great storm at Christmas. " She comes

driving round the point, " old Macalister said, describing

the great storm last Christmas, when ten

ships had been driven into the bay for shelter, and

he had seen " one there, one there, one there " (he

pointed slowly round the bay. Mr. Ramsay followed

him, turning his head). He had seen four men clinging

to the mast. Then she was gone. " And at last we

 

shoved her off, " he went on (but in their anger and

their silence they only caught a word here and there,

sitting at opposite ends of the boat, united by their

compact to fight tyranny to the death). At last they

had shoved her off, they had launched the lifeboat,

and they had got her out past the point -- Macalister

told the story; and though they only caught a word

here and there, they were conscious all the time of

their father -- how he leant forward, how he brought

his voice into tune  with Macalister's voice; how, puffing

at his pipe, and looking there and there where

Macalister pointed, he relished the thought of the

storm and the dark night and the fishermen striving

there. He liked that men should labour and sweat on

the windy beach at night; pitting muscle and brain

against the waves and the wind; he liked men to

work like that, and women to keep house, and sit

beside sleeping children indoors, while men were

drowned, out there in a storm. So James could tell,

so Cam could tell (they looked at him, they looked

at each other), from his toss and his vigilance and

the ring in his voice, and the little tinge of Scottish

accent which came into his voice, making him seem

like a peasant himself, as he questioned Macalister

about the eleven ships that had been driven into the

bay in a storm. Three had sunk.

 

  He looked proudly where Macalister pointed; and

 

Cam thought, feeling proud of him without knowing

quite why, had he been there he would have

launched the lifeboat, he would have reached the

wreck, Cam thought. He was so brave, he was so

adventurous, Cam thought. But she remembered.

There was the conpact; to resist tyranny to the

death. Their grievance weighed them down. They

had been forced; they had been bidden. He had

borne them down once more with his gloom and his

authority, making them do his bidding, on this fine

morning, come, because he wished it, carrying these

parcels, to the Lighthouse; take part in these rites

he went through for his own pleasure in memory of

dead people, which they hated, so that they lagged

after him, all the pleasure of the day was spoilt.

 

  Yes, the breeze was freshening. The boat was

leaning, the water was sliced sharply and fell away

in green cascades, in bubbles, in cataracts. Cam

looked down into the foam, into the sea with all its

treasure in it, and its speed hypnotised her, and the

tie between her and James sagged a little. It slackened

a little. She began to think, How fast it goes.

Where are we going? and the movement hypnotised

her, while James, with his eye fixed on the sail and

on the horizon, steered grimly. But he began to

think as he steered that he might escape; he might

be quit of it all. They might land somewhere; and

 

be free then. Both of them, looking at each other

for a moment, had a sense of escape and exaltation,

what with the speed and the change. But the breeze

bred in Mr. Ramsay too the same excitement, and,

as old Macalister turned to fling his line overboard,

he cried out aloud,

  " We perished, " and then again, " each alone. "

And then with his usual spasm of repentance or shyness,

pulled himself up, and waved his hand towards

the shore.

 

  " See the little house, " he said pointing, wishing

Cam to look. She raised herself reluctantly and

looked. But which was it? She could no longer make

out, there on the hillside, which was their house. All

looked distant and peaceful and strange. The shore

seemed refined, far away, unreal. Already the little

distance they had sailed had put them far from it

and given it the changed look, the composed look,

of something receding in which one has no longer

any part. Which was their house? She could not see

it.

 

  " But I beneath a rougher sea, " Mr. Ramsay murmured.

He had found the house and so seeing it,

he had also seen himself there; he had seen himself

walking on the terrace, alone. He was walking up

and down between the urns; and he seemed to himself

very old and bowed. Sitting in the boat, he

 

bowed, he crouched himself, acting instantly his

part -- the part of a desolate man, widowed, bereft;

and so called up before him in hosts people sympathising

with him; staged for himself as he sat

in the boat, a little drama; which required of him

decrepitude and exhaustion and sorrow (he raised

his hands and looked at the thinness of them,

to confirm his dream) and then there was given him

in abundance women's sympathy, and he imagined

how they would soothe him and sympathise with

him, and so getting in his dream some reflection

of the exquisite pleasure women's sympathy was to

him, he sighed and said gently and mournfully,

       But I beneath a rougher sea

       Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he,

so that the mournful words were heard quite clearly

by them all. Cam half started on her seat. It shocked

her -- it outraged her. The movement roused her

father; and he shuddered, and broke off, exclaiming:

" Look! Look! " so urgently that James also

turned his head to look over his shoulder at the

island. They all looked. They looked at the island.

 

  But Cam could see nothing. She was thinking

how all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted

with the lives they had lived there, were gone: were

rubbed out; were past; were unreal, and now this

 

was real; the boat and the sail with its patch;

Macalister with his earrings; the noise of the waves

-- all this was real. Thinking this, she was murmuring

to herself, " We perished, each alone, " for her

father's words broke and broke again in her mind,

when her father, seeing her gazing so vaguely, began

to tease her. Didn't she know the points of the compass?

he asked. Didn't she know the North from

the South? Did she really think they lived right

out there? And he pointed again, and showed her

where their house was, there, by those trees. He

wished she would try to be more accurate, he said:

" Tell me -- which is East, which is West? " he said,

half laughing at her, half scolding her, for he could

not understand the state of mind of any one, not

absolutely imbecile, who did not know the points

of the compass. Yet she did not know. And seeing

her gazing, with her vague, now rather frightened,

eyes fixed where no house was Mr. Ramsay forgot

his dream; how he walked up and down between

the urns on the terrace; how the arms were stretched

out to him. He thought, women are always like that;

the vagueness of their minds is hopeless; it was a

thing he had never been able to understand; but so

it was. It had been so with her -- his wife. They

could not keep anything clearly fixed in their minds.

But he had been wrong to be angry with her; moreover,

 

did he not rather like this vagueness in women?

It was part of their extraordinary charm. I will

make her smile at me, he thought. She looks

frightened. She was so silent. He clutched his fingers,

and determined that his voice and his face and all

the quick expressive gestures which had been at his

command making people pity him and praise him

all these years should subdue themselves. He would

make her smile at him. He would find some simple

easy thing to say to her. But what? For, wrapped up

in his work as he was, he forgot the sort of thing

one said. There was a puppy. They had a puppy.

Who was looking after the puppy today? he asked.

Yes, thought James pitilessly, seeing his sister's

head against the sail, now she will give way. I shall

be left to fight the tyrant alone. The compact would

be left to him to carry out. Cam would never resist

tyranny to the death, he thought grimly, watching

her face, sad, sulky, yielding. And as sometimes

happens when a cloud falls on a green hillside and

gravity descends and there among all the surrounding

hills is gloom and sorrow, and it seems as if the

hills themselves must ponder the fate of the clouded,

the darkened, either in pity, or maliciously rejoicing

in her dismay: so Cam now felt herself overcast,

as she sat there among calm, resolute people and

wondered how to answer her father about the

 

puppy; how to resist his entreaty -- forgive me,

care for me; while James the lawgiver, with the

tablets of eternal wisdom laid open on his knee (his

hand on the tiller had become symbolical to her),

said, Resist him. Fight him. He said so rightly;

justly. For they must fight tyranny to the death,

she thought. Of all human qualities she reverenced

justice most. Her brother was most god-like, her

father most suppliant. And to which did she yield,

she thought, sitting between them, gazing at the

shore whose points were all unknown to her, and

thinking how the lawn and the terrace and the house

were smoothed away now and peace dwelt there.

 

  " Jasper, " she said sullenly. He'd look after the

puppy.

 

  And what was she going to call him? her father

persisted. He had had a dog when he was a little

boy, called Frisk. She'll give way, James thought,

as he watched a look come upon her face, a look

he remembered. They look down he thought, at

their knitting or something. Then suddenly they

look up. There was a flash of blue, he remembered,

and then somebody sitting with him laughed, surrendered,

and he was very angry. It must have

been his mother, he thought, sitting on a low chair,

with his father standing over her. He began to

search among the infinite series of impressions

 

which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold

upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among

scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and

lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash

and hush of the sea, how a man had marched up

and down and stopped dead, upright, over them.

Meanwhile, he noticed, Cam dabbled her fingers in

the water, and stared at the shore and said nothing.

No, she won't give way, he thought; she's different,

he thought. Well, if Cam would not answer him,

he would not bother her Mr. Ramsay decided, feeling

in his pocket for a book. But she would answer

him; she wished, passionately, to move some

obstacle that lay upon her tongue and to say, Oh,

yes, Frisk. I'll call him Frisk. She wanted even

to say, Was that the dog that found its way over

the moor alone? But try as she might, she could

think of nothing to say like that, fierce and loyal

to the compact, yet passing on to her father, unsuspected

by James, a private token of the love she

felt for him. For she thought, dabbling her hand

(and now Macalister's boy had caught a mackerel,

and it lay kicking on the floor, with blood on its

gills) for she thought, looking at James who kept

his eyes dispassionately on the sail, or glanced now

and then for a second at the horizon, you're not

exposed to it, to this pressure and division of feeling,

 

this extraordinary temptation. Her father was feeling

in his pockets; in another second, he would have

found his book. For no one attracted her more; his

hands were beautiful, and his feet, and his voice,

and his words, and his haste, and his temper, and his

oddity, and his passion, and his saying straight out

before every one, we perish, each alone, and his

remoteness. (He had opened his book.) But what

remained intolerable, she thought, sitting upright,

and watching Macalister's boy tug the hook out of

the gills of another fish, was that crass blindness

and tyranny of his which had poisoned her childhood

and raised bitter storms, so that even now she

woke in the night trembling with rage and remembered

some command of his; some insolence: " Do

this, " " Do that, " his dominance: his " Submit to

me. "

 

  So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and

sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace;

as if the people there had fallen asleep, she thought;

were free like smoke, were free to come and go like

ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.

 

 

  Yes, that is their boat, Lily Briscoe decided,

standing on the edge of the lawn. It was the boat

 

with greyish-brown sails, which she saw now flatten

itself upon the water and shoot off across the bay.

There he sits, she thought, and the children are

quite silent still. And she could not reach him either.

The sympathy she had not given him weighed her

down. It made it difficult for her to paint.

 

  She had always found him difficult. She never had

been able to praise him to his face, she remembered.

And that reduced their relationship to something

neutral, without that element of sex in it which made

his manner to Minta so gallant, almost gay. He

would pick a flower for her, lend her his books. But

could he believe that Minta read them? She dragged

them about the garden, sticking in leaves to mark

the place.

 

  " D'you remember, Mr. Carmichael? " she was

inclined to ask, looking at the old man. But he had

pulled his hat half over his forehead; he was asleep,

or he was dreaming, or he was lying there catching

words, she supposed.

 

  " D'you remember? " she felt inclined to ask him

as she passed him, thinking again of Mrs. Ramsay

on the beach; the cask bobbing up and down; and

the pages flying. Why, after all these years had that

survived, ringed round, lit up, visible to the last

detail, with all before it blank and all after it blank,

for miles and miles?

 

 

  " Is it a boat? Is it a cork? " she would say, Lily

repeated, turning back, reluctantly again, to her

canvas. Heaven be praised for it, the problem of

space remained, she thought, taking up her brush

again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture

was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and

bright it should be on the surface, feathery and

evanescent, one colour melting into another like the

colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric

must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was

to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and

a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.

And she began to lay on a red, a grey, and she began

to model her way into the hollow there. At the same

time, she seemed to be sitting beside Mrs. Ramsay

on the beach.

 

  " Is it a boat? Is it a cask? " Mrs. Ramsay said.

And she began hunting round for her spectacles.

And she sat, having found them, silent, looking

out to sea. And Lily, painting steadily, felt as if

a door had opened, and one went in and stood gazing

silently about in a high cathedral-like place, very

dark, very solemn. Shouts came from a world far

away. Steamers vanished in stalks of smoke on the

horizon. Charles threw stones and sent them

skipping.

 

  Mrs. Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily

 

thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest

in the extreme obscurity of human relationships.

Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows

even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge?

Aren't things spoilt then, Mrs. Ramsay may have

asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this

silence by her side) by saying them? Aren't we more

expressive thus? The moment at least seemed extraordinarily

fertile. She rammed a little hole in the

sand and covered it up, by way of burying in it

the perfection of the moment. It was like a drop of

silver in which one dipped and illumined the darkness

of the past.

 

  Lily stepped back to get her canvas -- so -- into

perspective. It was an odd road to be walking, this

of painting. Out and out one went, further and

further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow

plank, perfectly alone, over the sea. And as she

dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into the

past there. Now Mrs. Ramsay got up, she remembered.

It was time to go back to the house -- time for

luncheon. And they all walked up from the beach

together, she walking behind with William Bankes,

and there was Minta in front of them with a hole

in her stocking. How that little round hole of pink

heel seemed to flaunt itself before them! How

William Bankes deplored it, without, so far as she

 

could remember, saying anything about it! It meant

to him the annihilation of womanhood, and dirt and

disorder, and servants leaving and beds not made at

mid-day -- all the things he most abhorred. He had

a way of shuddering and spreading his fingers out

as if to cover an unsightly object which he did now

-- holding his hand in front of him. And Minta

walked on ahead, and presumably Paul met her and

she went off with Paul in the garden.

 

  The Rayleys, thought Lily Briscoe, squeezing

her tube of green paint. She collected her impressions

of the Rayleys. Their lives appeared to

her in a series of scenes; one, on the staircase at

dawn. Paul had come in and gone to bed early;

Minta was late. There was Minta, wreathed, tinted,

garish on the stairs about three o'clock in the morning.

Paul came out in his pyjamas carrying

a poker in case of burglars. Minta was eating a

sandwich, standing half-way up by a window, in the

cadaverous early morning light, and the carpet had

a hole in it. But what did they say? Lily asked herself,

as if by looking she could hear them. Minta

went on eating her sandwich, annoyingly, while he

spoke something violent, abusing her, in a mutter

so as not to wake the children, the two little boys.

He was withered, drawn; she flamboyant, careless.

For things had worked loose after the first year

 

or so; the marriage had turned out rather badly.

 

  And this, Lily thought, taking the green paint

on her brush, this making up scenes about them,

is what we call " knowing people, " thinking " of

them, " being fond " of them! Not a word of it was

true; she had made it up; but it was what she knew

them by all the same. She went on tunnelling her

way into her picture, into the past.

 

  Another time, Paul said he " played chess in coffee-houses. "

She had built up a whole structure of

imagination on that saying too. She remembered

how, as he said it, she thought how he rang up the

servant, and she said, " Mrs. Rayley's out, sir, " and

he decided that he would not come home either. She

saw him sitting in the corner of some lugubrious

place where the smoke attached itself to the red

plush seats, and the waitresses got to know you,

and he played chess with a little man who was in

the tea trade and lived at Surbiton, but that was

all Paul knew about him. And then Minta was out

when he came home and then there was that scene

on the stairs, when he got the poker in case of

burglars (no doubt to frighten her too) and spoke

so bitterly, saying she had ruined his life. At any

rate when she went down to see them at a cottage

near Rickmansworth, things were horribly strained.

Paul took her down the garden to look at the

 

Belgian hares which he bred, and Minta followed

them, singing, and put her bare arm on his shoulder,

lest he should tell her anything.

 

  Minta was bored by hares, Lily thought. But

Minta never gave herself away. She never said

things like that about playing chess in coffee-houses.

She was far too conscious, far too wary. But to go

on with their story -- they had got through the

dangerous stage by now. She had been staying with

them last summer some time and the car broke

down and Minta had to hand him his tools. He sat

on the road mending the car, and it was the way she

gave him the tools -- business-like, straightforward,

friendly -- that proved it was all right now. They

were " in love " no longer; no, he had taken up with

another woman, a serious woman, with her hair in

a plait and a case in her hand (Minta had described

her gratefully, almost admiringly), who went to

meetings and shared Paul's views (they had got

more and more pronounced) about the taxation of

land values and a capital levy. Far from breaking

up the marriage, that alliance had righted it. They

were excellent friends, obviously, as he sat on the

road and she handed him his tools.

 

  So that was the story of the Rayleys, Lily thought.

She imagined herself telling it to Mrs. Ramsay, who

would be full of curiosity to know what had become

 

of the Rayleys. She would feel a little triumphant,

telling Mrs. Ramsay that the marriage

had not been a success.

 

  But the dead, thought Lily, encountering some

obstacle in her design which made her pause and

ponder, stepping back a foot or so, oh, the dead!

she murmured, one pitied them, one brushed them

aside, one had even a little contempt for them. They

are at our mercy. Mrs. Ramsay has faded and gone,

she thought. We can over-ride her wishes, improve

away her limited, old-fashioned ideas. She recedes

further and further from us. Mockingly she seemed

to see her there at the end of the corridor of years

saying, of all incongruous things, " Marry, marry! "

(sitting very upright early in the morning with the

birds beginning to cheep in the garden outside). And

one would have to say to her, It has all gone against

your wishes. They're happy like that; I'm happy

like this. Life has changed completely. At that all

her being, even her beauty, became for a moment,

dusty and out of date. For a moment Lily, standing

there, with the sun hot on her back, summing up the

Rayleys, triumphed over Mrs. Ramsay, who would

never know how Paul went to coffee-houses and had

a mistress; how he sat on the ground and Minta

handed him his tools; how she stood here painting,

had never married, not even William Bankes.

 

 

  Mrs. Ramsay had planned it. Perhaps, had she

lived, she would have compelled it. Already that

summer he was " the kindest of men. " He was " the

first scientist of his age, my husband says. " He was

also " poor William -- it makes me so unhappy, when

I go to see him, to find nothing nice in his house --

no one to arrange the flowers. " So they were sent

for walks together, and she was told, with that

faint touch of irony that made Mrs. Ramsay slip

through one's fingers, that she had a scientific mind;

she liked flowers; she was so exact. What was this

mania of hers for marriage? Lily wondered, stepping

to and fro from her easel.

 

  (Suddenly, as suddenly as a star slides in the sky,

a reddish light seemed to burn in her mind, covering

Paul Rayley, issuing from him. It rose like a

fire sent up in token of some celebration by savages

on a distant beach. She heard the roar and the

crackle. The whole sea for miles round ran red

and gold. Some winey smell mixed with it and intoxicated

her, for she felt again her own headlong

desire to throw herself off the cliff and be drowned

looking for a pearl brooch on a beach. And the

roar and the crackle repelled her with fear and disgust,

as if while she saw its splendour and power

she saw too how it fed on the treasure of the house,

greedily, disgustingly, and she loathed it. But for

 

a sight, for a glory it surpassed everything in her

experience, and burnt year after year like a signal

fire on a desert island at the edge of the sea, and one

had only to say " in love " and instantly, as happened

now, up rose Paul's fire again. And it sank and she

said to herself, laughing, " The Rayleys "; how Paul

went to coffee-houses and played chess..)

  She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth

though, she thought. She had been looking at the

table-cloth, and it had flashed upon her that she

would move the tree to the middle, and need never

marry anybody, and she had felt an enormous exultation.

She had felt, now she could stand up to Mrs.

Ramsay -- a tribute to the astonishing power that

Mrs. Ramsay had over one. Do this, she said, and

one did it. Even her shadow at the window with

James was full of authority. She remembered how

William Bankes had been shocked by her neglect

of the significance of mother and son. Did she not

admire their beauty? he said. But William, she remembered,

had listened to her with his wise child's

eyes when she explained how it was not irreverence:

how a light there needed a shadow there and so on.

She did not intend to disparage a subject which, they

agreed, Raphael had treated divinely. She was not

cynical. Quite the contrary. Thanks to his scientific

mind he understood -- a proof of disinterested intelligence

 

which had pleased her and comforted her

enormously. One could talk of painting then seriously

to a man. Indeed, his friendship had been one

of the pleasures of her life. She loved William

Bankes.

 

  They went to Hampton Court and he always left

her, like the perfect gentleman he was, plenty of

time to wash her hands, while he strolled by the

river. That was typical of their relationship. Many

things were left unsaid. Then they strolled through

the courtyards, and admired, summer after summer,

the proportions and the flowers, and he would tell

her things, about perspective, about architecture,

as they walked, and he would stop to look at a tree,

or the view over the lake, and admire a child -- (it

was his great grief -- he had no daughter) in the

vague aloof way that was natural to a man who

spent so much time in laboratories that the world

when he came out seemed to dazzle him, so that he

walked slowly, lifted his hand to screen his eyes

and paused, with his head thrown back, merely

to breathe the air. Then he would tell her how his

housekeeper was on her holiday; he must buy a new

carpet for the staircase. Perhaps she would go with

him to buy a new carpet for the staircase. And once

something led him to talk about the Ramsays and

he had said how when he first saw her she had been

 

wearing a grey hat; she was not more than nineteen

or twenty. She was astonishingly beautiful. There

he stood looking down the avenue at Hampton

Court as if he could see her there among the

fountains.

 

  She looked now at the drawing-room step. She

saw, through William's eyes, the shape of a woman,

peaceful and silent, with downcast eyes. She sat

musing, pondering (she was in grey that day, Lily

thought). Her eyes were bent. She would never

lift them. Yes, thought Lily, looking intently, I must

have seen her look like that, but not in grey; nor so

still, nor so young, nor so peaceful. The figure came

readily enough. She was astonishingly beautiful, as

William said. But beauty was not everything.

Beauty had this penalty -- it came too readily, came

too completely. It stilled life -- froze it. One forgot

the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some

queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made

the face unrecognisable for a moment and yet

added a quality one saw for ever after. It was

simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of

beauty. But what was the look she had, Lily wondered,

when she clapped her deer-stalkers's hat on

her head, or ran across the grass, or scolded

Kennedy, the gardener? Who could tell her? Who

could help her?

 

 

  Against her will she had come to the surface, and

found herself half out of the picture, looking, a

little dazedly, as if at unreal things, at Mr. Carmichael.

He lay on his chair with his hands clasped

above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking

like a creature gorged with existence. His book

had fallen on to the grass.

 

  She wanted to go straight up to him and say,

"Mr. Carmichael! " Then he would look up benevolently

as always, from his smoky vague green

eyes. But one only woke people if one knew what

one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say

not one thing, but everything. Little words that

broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing.

" About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay "

-- no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody.

The urgency of the moment always missed its mark.

Words fluttered sideways and struck the object

inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea

sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged

people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between

the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For

how could one express in words these emotions of

the body? express that emptiness there? (She was

looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily

empty.) It was one's body feeling, not

one's mind. The physical sensations that went with

 

the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely

unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent

all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain.

And then to want and not to have -- to want and

want -- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again

and again! Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! she called out silently,

to that essence which sat by the boat, that abstract

one made of her, that woman in grey, as if to abuse

her for having gone, and then having gone, come

back again. It had seemed so safe, thinking of her.

Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with

easily and safely at any time of day or night, she

had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand

out and wrung the heart thus. Suddenly, the empty

drawing-room steps, the frill of the chair inside, the

puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and

whisper of the garden became like curves and

arabesques flourishing round a centre of complete

emptiness.

 

  " What does it mean? How do you explain it all? "

she wanted to say, turning to Mr. Carmichael again.

For the whole world seemed to have dissolved in

this early morning hour into a pool of thought, a

deep basin of reality, and one could almost fancy

that had Mr. Carmichael spoken, for instance, a

little tear would have rent the surface pool. And

then? Something would emerge. A hand would be

 

shoved up, a blade would be flashed. It was nonsense

of course.

 

  A curious notion came to her that he did after all

hear the things she could not say. He was an inscrutable

old man, with the yellow stain on his

beard, and his poetry, and his puzzles, sailing

serenely through a world which satisfied all his

wants, so that she thought he had only to put down

his hand where he lay on the lawn to fish up anything

he wanted. She looked at her picture. That would

have been his answer, presumably -- how " you " and

" I " and " she " pass and vanish; nothing stays; all

changes; but not words, not paint. Yet it would be

hung in the attics, she thought; it would be rolled

up and flung under a sofa; yet even so, even of a

picture like that, it was true. One might say, even

of this scrawl, not of that actual picture, perhaps,

but of what it attempted, that it " remained for

ever, " she was going to say, or, for the words spoken

sounded even to herself, too boastful, to hint, wordlessly;

when, looking at the picture, she was surprised

to find that she could not see it. Her eyes were

full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at

first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her

lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks.

She had perfect control of herself -- Oh, yes! -- in

every other way. Was she crying then for Mrs.

 

Ramsay, without being aware of any unhappiness?

She addressed old Mr. Carmichael again. What was

it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust their

hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the fist

grasp? Was there no safety? No learning by heart

of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but

all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of

a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly

people, that this was life? -- startling, unexpected,

unknown? For one moment she felt that if they both

got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an

explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable,

said it with violence, as two fully

equipped human beings from whom nothing should

be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself

up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes

would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough

Mrs. Ramsay would return. " Mrs. Ramsay! " she

said aloud, " Mrs. Ramsay! " The tears ran down her

face.

 

 

  Õ [Macalister's boy took one of the fish and cut a

square out of its side to bait his hook with. The

mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown back

into the sea.]] å

 

 

 

  " Mrs. Ramsay! " Lily cried, " Mrs. Ramsay! "

But nothing happened. The pain increased. That

anguish could reduce one to such a pitch of imbecility,

she thought! Anyhow the old man had not

heard her. He remained benignant, calm -- if one

chose to think it, sublime. Heaven be praised, no

one had heard her cry that ignominious cry, stop

pain, stop! She had not obviously taken leave of her

senses. No one had seen her step off her strip of

board into the waters of annihilation. She remained

a skimpy old maid, holding a paint-brush.

 

  And now slowly the pain of the want, and the

bitter anger (to be called back, just as she thought

she would never feel sorrow for Mrs. Ramsay again.

Had she missed her among the coffee cups at breakfast?

not in the least) lessened; and of their anguish

left, as antidote, a relief that was balm in itself, and

also, but more mysteriously, a sense of some one

there, of Mrs. Ramsay, relieved for a moment of

the weight that the world had put on her, staying

lightly by her side and then (for this was Mrs.

Ramsay in all her beauty) raising to her forehead a

wreath of white flowers with which she went. Lily

squeezed her tubes again. She attacked that problem

of the hedge. It was strange how clearly she saw

 

her, stepping with her usual quickness across fields

among whose folds, purplish and soft, among whose

flowers, hyacinth or lilies, she vanished. It was

some trick of the painter's eye. For days after she

had heard of her death she had seen her thus, putting

her wreath to her forehead and going unquestioningly

with her companion, a shade across the fields.

The sight, the phrase, had its power to console.

Wherever she happened to be, painting, here, in

the country or in London, the vision would come

to her, and her eyes, half closing, sought something

to base her vision on. She looked down the railway

carriage, the omnibus; took a line from shoulder

or cheek; looked at the windows opposite; at Piccadilly,

lamp-strung in the evening. All had been

part of the fields of death. But always something -- it

might be a face, a voice, a paper boy crying

Standard#, News# -- thrust through, snubbed her,

waked her, required and got in the end an effort

of attention, so that the vision must be perpetually

remade. Now again, moved as she was by some

instinctive need of distance and blue, she looked

at the bay beneath her, making hillocks of the blue

bars of the waves, and stony fields of the purpler

spaces, again she was roused as usual by something

incongruous. There was a brown spot in the middle

of the bay. It was a boat. Yes, she realised that after

 

a second. But whose boat? Mr. Ramsay's boat, she

replied. Mr. Ramsay; the man who had marched

past her, with his hand raised, aloof, at the head

of a procession, in his beautiful boots, asking her

for sympathy, which she had refused. The boat was

now half way across the bay.

 

  So fine was the morning except for a streak of

wind here and there that the sea and sky looked

all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the

sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.

A steamer far out at sea had drawn in the air a

great scroll of smoke which stayed there curving

and circling decoratively, as if the air were a fine

gauze which held things and kept them softly in

its mesh, only gently swaying them this way and

that. And as happens sometimes when the weather

is very fine, the cliffs looked as if they were conscious

of the ships, and the ships looked as if they

were conscious of the cliffs, as if they signalled to

each other some message of their own. For sometimes

quite close to the shore, the Lighthouse looked

this morning in the haze an enormous distance away.

 

  " Where are they now? " Lily thought, looking

out to sea. Where was he, that very old man who

had gone past her silently, holding a brown paper

parcel under his arm? The boat was in the middle

of the bay.

 

 

 

  They don't feel a thing there, Cam thought, looking

at the shore, which, rising and falling, became

steadily more distant and more peaceful. Her hand

cut a trail in the sea, as her mind made the green

swirls and streaks into patterns and, numbed and

shrouded, wandered in imagination in that underworld

of waters where the pearls stuck in clusters to

white sprays, where in the green light a change came

over one's entire mind and one's body shone half

transparent enveloped in a green cloak.

 

  Then the eddy slackened round her hand. The

rush of the water ceased; the world became full of

little creaking and squeaking sounds. One heard the

waves breaking and flapping against the side of the

boat as if they were anchored in harbour. Everything

became very close to one. For the sail, upon

which James had his eyes fixed until it had become

to him like a person whom he knew, sagged entirely;

there they came to a stop, flapping about

waiting for a breeze, in the hot sun, miles from

shore, miles from the Lighthouse. Everything in the

whole world seemed to stand still. The Lighthouse

became immovable, and the line of the distant shore

became fixed. The sun grew hotter and everybody

seemed to come very close together and to feel each

 

other's presence, which they had almost forgotten.

Macalister's fishing line went plumb down into the

sea. But Mr. Ramsay went on reading with his legs

curled under him.

 

  He was reading a little shiny book with covers

mottled like a plover's egg. Now and again,  as they

hung about in that horrid calm, he turned a page.

And James felt that each page was turned with a

peculiar gesture aimed at him; now assertively, now

commandingly; now with the intention of making

people pity him; and all the time, as his father read

and turned one after another of those little pages,

James kept dreading the moment when he would

look up and speak sharply to him about something

or other. Why were they lagging about here? he

would demand, or something quite unreasonable like

that. And if he does, James thought, then I shall

take a knife and strike him to the heart.

 

  He had always kept this old symbol of taking a

knife and striking his father to the heart. Only now,

as he grew older, and sat staring at his father in an

impotent rage, it was not him, that old man reading,

whom he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that

descended on him -- without his knowing it perhaps:

that fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its

talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck

and struck at you (he could feel the beak on his

 

bare legs, where it had struck when he was a

child) and then made off, and there he was again,

an old man, very sad, reading his book. That he

would kill, that he would strike to the heart. Whatever

he did -- (and he might do anything, he felt,

looking at the Lighthouse and the distant shore)

whether he was in a business, in a bank, a barrister,

a man at the head of some enterprise, that he would

fight, that he would track down and stamp out --

tyranny, despotism, he called it -- making people do

what they did not want to do, cutting off their right

to speak. How could any of them say, But I won't,

when he said, Come to the Lighthouse. Do this.

Fetch me that. The black wings spread, and the

hard beak tore. And then next moment, there he sat

reading his book; and he might look up -- one never

knew -- quite reasonably. He might talk to the

Macalisters. He might be pressing a sovereign into

some frozen old woman's hand in the street, James

thought, and he might be shouting out at some fisherman's

sports; he might be waving his arms in the

air with excitement. Or he might sit at the head of

the table dead silent from one end of dinner

to the other. Yes, thought James, while the boat

slapped and dawdled there in the hot sun; there was

a waste of snow and rock very lonely and austere;

and there he had come to feel, quite often lately,

 

when his father said something or did something

which surprised the others, there were two pairs of

footprints only; his own and his father's. They

alone knew each other. What then was this terror,

this hatred? Turning back among the many leaves

which the past had folded in him, peering into the

heart of that forest where light and shade so chequer

each other that all shape is distorted, and one

blunders, now with the sun in one's eyes, now with

a dark shadow, he sought an image to cool and detach

and round off his feeling in a concrete shape.

Suppose then that as a child sitting helpless in a

perambulator , or on some one's knee, he had seen a

waggon crush ignorantly and innocently, some one's

foot? Suppose he had seen the foot first, in the

grass, smooth, and whole; then the wheel; and the

same foot, purple, crushed. But the wheel was innocent.

So now, when his father came striding down

the passage knocking them up early in the morning

to go to the Lighthouse down it came over his foot,

over Cam's foot, over anybody's foot. One sat and

watched it.

 

  But whose foot was he thinking of, and in what

garden did all this happen? For one had settings for

these scenes; trees that grew there; flowers; a certain

light; a few figures. Everything tended to set

itself in a garden where there was none of this

 

gloom. None of this throwing of hands about;

people spoke in an ordinary tone of voice. They

went in and out all day long. There was an old

woman gossiping in the kitchen; and the blinds were

sucked in and out by the breeze; all was blowing, all

was growing; and over all those plates and bowls

and tall brandishing red and yellow flowers a very

thin yellow veil would be drawn, like a vine leaf, at

night. Things became stiller and darker at night.

But the leaf-like veil was so fine, that lights lifted

it, voices crinkled it; he could see through it a figure

stooping, hear, coming close, going away, some dress

rustling, some chain tinkling.

 

  It was in this world that the wheel went over the

person's foot. Something, he remembered, stayed

and darkened over him; would not move; something

flourished up in the air, something arid and sharp

descended even there, like a blade, a scimitar, smiting

through the leaves and flowers even of that

happy world and making it shrivel and fall.

 

  " It will rain, " he remembered his father saying.

" You won't be able to go to the Lighthouse. "

 

  The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking

tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and

softly in the evening. Now --

  James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the

white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight;

 

he could see that it was barred with black and white;

he could see windows in it; he could even see washing

spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the

 Lighthouse, was it?

 

  No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing

was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was

true too. It was sometimes hardly to be seen across

the bay. In the evening one looked up and saw the

eye opening and shutting and the light seemed to

reach them in that airy sunny garden where they

sat.

 

  But he pulled himself up. Whenever he said

" they " or " a person, " and then began hearing the

rustle of some one coming, the tinkle of some one

going, he became extremely sensitive to the presence

of whoever might be in the room. It was his father

now. The strain was acute. For in one moment if

there was no breeze, his father would slap the covers

of his book together, and say: " What's happening

now? What are we dawdling about here for, eh? "

as, once before he had brought his blade down

among them on the terrace and she had gone stiff all

over, and if there had been an axe handy, a knife,

or anything with a sharp point he would have seized

it and struck his father through the heart. She had

gone stiff all over, and then, her arm slackening, so

that he felt she listened to him no longer, she had

 

risen somehow and gone away and left him there,

impotent, ridiculous, sitting on the floor grasping a

pair of scissors.

 

  Not a breath of wind blew. The water chuckled

and gurgled in the bottom of the boat where three

or four mackerel beat their tails up and down in a

pool of water not deep enough to cover them. At

any moment Mr. Ramsay (he scarcely dared look

at him) might rouse himself, shut his book, and say

something sharp; but for the moment he was reading,

so that James stealthily, as if he were stealing

downstairs on bare feet, afraid of waking a watchdog

by a creaking board, went on thinking what was

she like, where did she go that day? He began following

her from room to room and at last they came

to a room where in a blue light, as if the reflection

came from many china dishes, she talked to somebody;

he listened to her talking. She talked to a

servant, saying simply whatever came into her head.

She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he

speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction

for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom

one could say what came into one's head. But all the

time he thought of her, he was conscious of his

father following his thought, surveying it, making it

shiver and falter. At last he ceased to think.

 

  There he sat with his hand on the tiller in the sun,

 

staring at the Lighthouse, powerless to move, powerless

to flick off these grains of misery which settled

on his mind one after another. A rope seemed to bind

him there, and his father had knotted it and he

could only escape by taking a knife and plunging

it.... But at that moment the sail swung slowly

round, filled slowly out, the boat seemed to shake

herself, and then to move off half conscious in her

sleep, and then she woke and shot through the

waves. The relief was extraordinary. They all

seemed to fall away from each other again and to be

at their ease and the fishing-lines slanted taut across

the side of the boat. But his father did not rouse

himself. He only raised his right hand mysteriously

high in the air, and let it fall upon his knee again as

if he were conducting some secret symphony.

 

 

  [The sea without a stain on it, thought Lily Briscoe,

still standing and looking out over the bay. The

sea stretched like silk across the bay. Distance had

an extraordinary power; they had been swallowed

up in it, she felt, they were gone for ever, they had

become part of the nature of things. It was so calm;

it was so quiet. The steamer itself had vanished, but

 

the great scroll of  smoke still hung in the air and

drooped like a flag mournfully in valediction.]

 

 

  It was like that then, the island, thought Cam,

once more drawing her fingers through the waves.

She had never seen it from out at sea before. It lay

like that on the sea, did it, with a dent in the middle

and two sharp crags, and the sea swept in there,

and spread away for miles and miles on either side

of the island. It was very small; shaped something

like a leaf stood on end. So we took a little boat, she

thought, beginning to tell herself a story of adventure

about escaping from a sinking ship. But with

the sea streaming through her fingers, a spray of

seaweed vanishing behind them, she did not want

to tell herself seriously a story; it was the sense of

adventure and escape that she wanted, for she was

thinking, as the boat sailed on, how her father's

anger about the points of the compass, James's obstinacy

about the compact, and her own anguish, all

had slipped, all had passed, all had streamed away.

What then came next? Where were they going?

From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there

spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the

escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive,

 

that she should be there). And the drops falling

from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell

here and there on the dark, the slumbrous shapes in

her mind; shapes of a world not realised but turning

in their darkness, catching here and there, a

spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople. Small

as it was, and shaped something like a leaf stood

on its end with the gold-sprinkled waters flowing in

and about it, it had, she supposed, a place in the

universe -- even that little island? The old gentlemen

in the study she thought could have told her. Sometimes

she strayed in from the garden purposely to

catch them at it. There they were (it might be Mr.

Carmichael or Mr. Bankes who was sitting with

her father) sitting opposite each other in their low

arm-chairs. They were crackling in front of them

the pages of The# Times#, when she came in from the

garden, all in a muddle, about something some one

had said about Christ, or hearing that a mammoth

had been dug up in a London street, or wondering

what Napoleon was like. Then they took all this

with their clean hands (they wore grey-coloured

clothes; they smelt of heather) and they brushed

the scraps together, turning the paper, crossing their

knees, and said something now and then very brief.

Just to please herself she would take a book from

the shelf and stand there, watching her father write,

 

so equally, so neatly from one side of the page to

another, with a little cough now and then, or something

said briefly to the other old gentleman opposite.

And she thought, standing there with her

book open, one could let whatever one thought expand

here like a leaf in water; and if it did well

here, among the old gentlemen smoking and The#

Times# crackling then it was right. And watching her

father as he wrote in his study, she thought (now

sitting in the boat) he was not vain, nor a tyrant

and did not wish to make you pity him. Indeed, if

he saw she was there, reading a book, he would ask

her, as gently as any one could, Was there nothing

he could give her?

 

  Lest this should be wrong, she looked at him

reading the little book with the shiny cover mottled

like a plover's egg. No; it was right. Look at him

now, she wanted to say aloud to James. (But James

had his eye on the sail.) He is a sarcastic brute,

James would say. He brings the talk round to himself

and his books, James would say. He is intolerably

egotistical. Worst of all, he is a tyrant.

But look! she said, looking at him. Look at him now.

She looked at him reading the little book with his

legs curled; the little book whose yellowish pages

she knew, without knowing what was written on

them. It was small; it was closely printed; on the

 

fly-leaf, she knew, he had written that he had spent

fifteen francs on dinner; the wine had been so much;

he had given so much to the waiter; all was added

up neatly at the bottom of the page. But what

might be written in the book which had rounded its

edges off in his pocket, she did not know. What

he thought they none of them knew. But he was

absorbed in it, so that when he looked up, as he did

now for an instant, it was not to see anything; it

was to pin down some thought more exactly. That

done, his mind flew back again and he plunged into

his reading. He read, she thought, as if he were

guiding something, or wheedling a large flock of

sheep, or pushing his way up and up a single narrow

path; and sometimes he went fast and straight,

and broke his way through the bramble, and sometimes

it seemed a branch struck at him, a bramble

blinded him, but he was not going to let himself

be beaten by that; on he went, tossing over page

after page. And she went on telling herself a story

about escaping from a sinking ship, for she was

safe, while he sat there; safe, as she felt herself

when she crept in from the garden, and took a book

down, and the old gentleman, lowering the paper

suddenly, said something very brief over the top of

it about the character of Napoleon.

 

  She gazed back over the sea, at the island. But

 

the leaf was losing its sharpness. It was very small;

it was very distant. The sea was more important

now than the shore. Waves were all round them,

tossing and sinking, with a log wallowing down one

wave; a gull riding on another. About here, she

thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship

had sunk, and she murmured, dreamily half asleep,

how we perished, each alone.

 

 

  So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe,

looking at the sea which had scarcely a stain on it,

which was so soft that the sails and the clouds

seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought,

upon distance: whether people are near us or far

from us; for her feeling for Mr. Ramsay changed

as he sailed further and further across the bay. It

seemed to be elongated, stretched out; he seemed

to become more and more remote. He and his children

seemed to be swallowed up in that blue, that

distance; but here, on the lawn, close at hand, Mr.

Carmichael suddenly grunted. She laughed. He

clawed his book up from the grass. He settled into

his chair again puffing and blowing like some sea

monster. That was different altogether, because he

was so near. And now again all was quiet. They must

 

be out of bed by this time, she supposed, looking

at the house, but nothing appeared there. But then,

she remembered, they had always made off directly

a meal was over, on business of their own. It was

all in keeping with this silence, this emptiness, and

the unreality of the early morning hour. It was a

way things had sometimes, she thought, lingering

for a moment and looking at the long glittering

windows and the plume of blue smoke: they became

unreal. So coming back from a journey, or after an

illness, before habits had spun themselves across

the surface, one felt that same unreality, which

was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was

most vivid then. One could be at one's ease.

Mercifully one need not say, very briskly, crossing

the lawn to greet old Mrs. Beckwith, who would

be coming out to find a corner to sit in, " Oh, good-morning,

Mrs. Beckwith! What a lovely day! Are

you going to be so bold as to sit in the sun? Jasper's

hidden the chairs. Do let me find you one! " and

all the rest of the usual chatter. One need not speak

at all. One glided, one shook one's sails (there was

a good deal of movement in the bay, boats were

starting off) between things, beyond things. Empty

it was not, but full to the brim. She seemed to be

standing up to the lips in some substance, to move

and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were

unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many                          286

lives. The Ramsays'; the children's; and all sorts

of waifs and strays of things besides. A washer-woman

with her basket; a rook, a red-hot poker;

the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common

feeling held the whole.

 

  It was some such feeling of completeness perhaps

which, ten years ago, standing almost where

she stood now, had made her say that she must be

in love with the place. Love had a thousand shapes.

There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose

out the elements of things and place them together

and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life,

make of some scene, or meeting of people (all now

gone and separate), one of those globed compacted

things over which thought lingers, and love plays.

 

  Her eyes rested on the brown speck of Mr.

Ramsay's sailing boat. They would be at the Lighthouse

by lunch time she supposed. But the wind

had freshened, and, as the sky changed slightly and

the sea changed slightly and the boats altered their

positions, the view, which a moment before had

seemed miraculously fixed, was now unsatisfactory.

The wind had blown the trail of smoke about; there

was something displeasing about the placing of the

ships.

 

  The disproportion there seemed to upset some

 

harmony in her own mind. She felt an obscure distress.

It was confirmed when she turned to her

picture. She had been wasting her morning. For

whatever reason she could not achieve that razor

edge of balance between two opposite forces; Mr.

Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary.

There was something perhaps wrong with the design?

Was it, she wondered, that the line of the wall

wanted breaking, was it that the mass of the trees

was too heavy? She smiled ironically; for had she

not thought, when she began, that she had solved

her problem?

 

  What was the problem then? She must try to get

hold of something tht evaded her. It evaded her

when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay; it evaded her

now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came.

Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases.

But what she wished to get hold of was that very

jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been

made anything. Get that and start afresh; get that

and start afresh; she said desperately, pitching

herself firmly again before her easel. It was a miserable

machine, an inefficient machine, she thought,

the human apparatus for painting or for feeling;

it always broke down at the critical moment;

heroically, one must force it on. She stared, frowning.

There was the hedge, sure enough. But one got

 

nothing by soliciting urgently. One got only a glare

in the eye from looking at the line of the wall, or

from thinking -- she wore a grey hat. She was astonishingly

beautiful. Let it come, she thought, if it

will come. For there are moments when one can

neither think nor feel. And if one can neither think

nor feel, she thought, where is one?

 

  Here on the grass, on the ground, she thought,

sitting down, and examining with her brush a little

colony of plantains. For the lawn was very rough.

Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could

not shake herself free from the sense that everything

this morning was happening for the first time,

perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though

he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train

window, that he must look now, for he will never see

that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work

in the fields, again. The lawn was the world; they

were up here together, on this exalted station, she

thought, looking at old Mr. Carmichael, who seemed

(though they had not said a word all this time) to

share her thoughts. And she would never see him

again perhaps. He was growing old. Also, she remembered,

smiling at the slipper that dangled from

his foot, he was growing famous. People said that

his poetry was " so beautiful. " They went and published

things he had written forty years ago. There

 

was a famous man now called Carmichael, she

smiled, thinking how many shapes one person might

wear, how he was that in the newspapers, but here

the same as he had always been. He looked the same

-- greyer, rather. Yes, he looked the same, but somebody

had said, she recalled, that when he had heard

of Andrew Ramsay's death (he was killed in a

second by a shell; he should have been a great

mathematician) Mr. Carmichael had " lost all interest

in life. " What did it mean -- that? she wondered.

Had he marched through Trafalgar Square

grasping a big stick? Had he turned pages over

and over, without reading them, sitting in his room

in St. John's Wood alone? She did not know what

he had done, when he heard that Andrew was

killed, but she felt it in him all the same. They only

mumbled at each other on staircases; they looked

up at the sky and said it will be fine or it won't be

fine. But this was one way of knowing people, she

thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit

in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running

purple down into the distant heather. She knew

him in that way. She knew that he had changed

somehow. She had never read a line of his poetry.

She thought that she knew how it went though,

slowly and sonorously. It was seasoned and mellow.

It was about the desert and the camel. It was about

 

the palm tree and the sunset. It was extremely impersonal;

it said something about death; it said

very little about love. There was an impersonality

about him. He wanted very little of other people.

Had he not always lurched rather awkwardly past

the drawing-room window with some newspaper

under his arm, trying to avoid Mrs. Ramsay whom

for some reason he did not much like? On that

account, of course, she would always try to make

him stop. He would bow to her. He would halt unwillingly

and bow profoundly. Annoyed that he did

not want anything of her, Mrs. Ramsay would ask

him (Lily could hear her) wouldn't he like a coat,

a rug, a newspaper? No, he wanted nothing. (Here

he bowed.) There was some quality in her which he

did not much like. It was perhaps her masterfulness,

her positiveness, something matter-of-fact in her.

She was so direct.

 

  (A noise drew her attention to the drawing-room

window -- the squeak of a hinge. The light breeze

was toying with the window..)

  There must have been people who disliked her

very much, Lily thought (Yes; she realised that the

drawing-room step was empty, but it had no effect

on her whatever. She did not want Mrs. Ramsay

now.) -- People who thought her too sure, too drastic.

 

  Also, her beauty offended people probably. How

 

monotonous, they would say, and the same always!

They preferred another type -- the dark, the vivacious.

Then she was weak with her husband. She

let him make those scenes. Then she was reserved.

Nobody knew exactly what had happened to her.

And (to go back to Mr. Carmichael and his dislike)

one could not imagine Mrs. Ramsay standing painting,

lying reading, a whole morning on the lawn.

It was unthinkable. Without saying a word, the only

token of her errand a basket on her arm, she went

off to the town, to the poor, to sit in some stuffy

little bedroom. Often and often Lily had seen her

go silently in the midst of some game, some discussion,

with her basket on her arm, very upright.

She had noted her return. She had thought, half

laughing (she was so methodical with the tea cups),

half moved (her beauty took one's breath away),

eyes that are closing in pain have looked on you.

You have been with them there.

 

  And then Mrs. Ramsay would be annoyed because

somebody was late, or the butter not fresh,

or the teapot chipped. And all the time she was

saying that the butter was not fresh one would be

thinking of Greek temples, and how beauty had been

with them there in that stuffy little room. She never

talked of it -- she went, punctually, directly. It was

her instinct to go, an instinct like the swallows for

 

the south, the artichokes for the sun, turning her

infallibly to the human race, making her nest in its

heart. And this, like all instincts, was a little distressing

to people who did not share it; to Mr.

Carmichael perhaps, to herself certainly. Some

notion was in both of them about the ineffectiveness

of action, the supremacy of thought. Her going was

a reproach to them, gave a different twist to the

world, so that they were led to protest, seeing their

own prepossessions disappear, and clutch at them

vanishing. Charles Tansley did that too: it was part

of the reason why one disliked him. He upset the

proportions of one's world. And what had happened

to him, she wondered, idly stirring the platains

with her brush. He had got his fellowship. He had

married; he lived at Golder's Green.

 

  She had gone one day into a Hall and heard him

speaking during the war. He was denouncing something:

he was condemning somebody. He was

preaching brotherly love. And all she felt was how

could he love his kind who did not know one picture

from another, who had stood behind her smoking

shag (" fivepence an ounce, Miss Briscoe ") and making

it his business to tell her women can't write,

women can't paint, not so much that he bleieved it,

as that for some odd reason he wished it? There he

was lean and red and raucous, preaching love from

 

a platform (there were ants crawling about among

the plantains which she disturbed with her brush --

red, energetic, shiny ants, rather like Charles Tansley).

She had looked at him ironically from her

seat in the half-empty hall, pumping love into that

chilly space, and suddenly, there was the old cask or

whatever it was bobbing up and down among the

waves and Mrs. Ramsay looking for her spectacle

case among the pebbles. " Oh, dear!  What a

nuisance!  Lost again. Don't bother, Mr. Tansley.

I lose thousands every summer, " at which he pressed

his chin back against his collar, as if afraid to sanction

such exaggeration, but could stand it in her

whom he liked, and smiled very charmingly. He must

have confided in her on one of those long expeditions

when people got separated and walked back

alone. He was educating his little sister, Mrs. Ramsay

had told her. It was immensely to his credit.

Her own idea of him was grotesque, Lily knew well,

stirring the plantains with her brush. Half one's

notions of other people were, after all, grotesque.

They served private purposes of one's own. He did

for her instead of a whipping-boy. She found herself

flagellating his lean flanks when she was out of

temper. If she wanted to be serious about him she

had to help herself to Mrs. Ramsay's sayings, to

look at him through her eyes.

 

 

  She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb

over. She reduced them to a frenzy of indecision by

this interference in their cosmogony. Some ran this

way, others that.

 

  One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she

reflected. Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get

round that one woman with, she thought. Among

them, must be one that was stone blind to her

beauty. One wanted most some secret sense, fine as

air, with which to steal through keyholes and surround

her where she sat knitting, talking, sitting

silent in the window alone; which took to itself

and treasured up like the air which held the smoke

of the steamer, her thoughts, her imaginations, her

desires. What did the hedge mean to her, what did

the garden mean to her, what did it mean to her

when a wave broke? (Lily looked up, as she had

seen Mrs. Ramsay look up; she too heard a wave

falling on the beach.) And then what stirred and

trembled in her mind when the children cried,

" How's that? How's that? " cricketing? She would

stop knitting for a second. She would look intent.

Then she would lapse again, and suddenly Mr. Ramsay

stopped dead in his pacing in front of her and

some curious shock passed through her and seemed

to rock her in profound agitation on its breast when

 

stopping there he stood over her and looked down

at her. Lily could see him.

 

  He stretched out his hand and raised her from

her chair. It seemed somehow as if he had done it

before; as if he had once bent in the same way and

raised her from a boat which, lying a few inches off

some island, had required that the ladies should

thus be helped on shore by the gentlemen. An old-fashioned

scene that was, which required, very

nearly, crinolines and peg-top trousers. Letting herself

be helped by him, Mrs. Ramsay had thought

(Lily supposed) the time has come now. Yes, she

would say it now. Yes, she would marry him. And

she stepped slowly, quietly on shore. Probably she

said one word only, letting her hand rest still in

his. I will marry you, she might have said, with her

hand in his; but no more. Time after time the same

thrill had passed between them -- obviously it had,

Lily thought, smoothing a way for her ants. She

was not inventing; she was only trying to smooth

out something she had been given years ago folded

up; something she had seen. For in the rough and

tumble of daily life, with all those children about,

all those visitors, one had constantly a sense of

repetition -- of one thing falling where another had

fallen, and so setting up an echo which chimed in

the air and made it full of vibrations.

 

 

  But it would be a mistake, she thought, thinking

how they walked off together, arm in arm, past the

greenhouse, to simplify their relationship. It was no

monotony of bliss -- she with her impulses and quicknesses;

he with his shudders and glooms. Oh, no.

The bedroom door would slam violently early in the

morning. He would start from the table in a temper.

He would whizz his plate through the window. Then

all through the house there would be a sense of doors

slamming and blinds fluttering, as if a gusty wind

were blowing and people scudded about trying in a

hasty way to fasten hatches and make things ship-shape.

She had met Paul Rayley like that one day

on the stairs. It had been an earwig, apparently.

Other people might find centipedes. They had

laughed and laughed.

 

  But it tired Mrs. Ramsay, it cowed her a little --

the plates whizzing and the doors slamming. And

there would fall between them sometimes long rigid

silences, when, in a state of mind which annoyed

Lily in her, half plaintive, half resentful, she seemed

unable to surmount the tempest calmly, or to laugh

as they laughed, but in her weariness perhaps concealed

something. She brooded and sat silent. After

a time he would hang stealthily about the places

where she was -- roaming under the window where

she sat writing letters or talking, for she would take

 

care to be busy when he passed, and evade him, and

pretend not to see him. Then he would turn smooth

as silk, affable, urbane, and try to win her so. Still

she would hold off, and now she would assert for a

brief season some of those prides and airs the due of

her beauty which she was generally utterly without;

would turn her head; would look so, over her shoulder,

always with some Minta, Paul, or William

Bankes at her side. At length, standing outside the

group the very figure of a famished wolfhound (Lily

got up off the grass and stood looking at the steps,

at the window, where she had seen him), he would

say her name, once only, for all the world like a wolf

barking in the snow, but still she held back; and he

would say it once more, and this time something in

the tone would rouse her, and she would go to him,

leaving them all of a sudden, and they would walk

off together among the pear trees, the cabbages, and

the raspberry beds. They would have it out together.

But with what attitudes and with what words? Such

a dignity was theirs in this relationship that, turning

away, she and Paul and Minta would hide their

curiosity and their discomfort, and begin picking

flowers, throwing balls, chattering, until it was time

for dinner, and there they were, he at one end of the

table, she at the other, as usual.

 

  " Why don't some of you take up botany?..

 

 

With all those legs and arms why doesn't one of

you...? " So they would talk as usual, laughing,

among the children. All would be as usual, save only

for some quiver, as of a blade in the air, which

came and went between them as if the usual sight

of the children sitting round their soup plates had

freshened itself in their eyes after that hour among

the pears and the cabbages. Especially, Lily thought,

Mrs. Ramsay would glance at Prue. She sat in the

middle between brothers and sisters, always occupied,

it seemed, seeing that nothing went wrong so

that she scarcely spoke herself. How Prue must have

blamed herself for that earwig in the milk   How

white she had gone when Mr. Ramsay threw his

plate through the window!  How she drooped under

those long silences between them!   Anyhow, her

mother now would seem to be making it up to her;

assuring her that everything was well; promising

her that one of these days that same happiness

would be hers. She had enjoyed it for less than a

year, however.

 

  She had let the flowers fall from her basket, Lily

thought, screwing up her eyes and standing back

as if to look at her picture, which she was not touching,

however, with all her faculties in a trance,

frozen over superficially but moving underneath

with extreme speed.

 

 

  She let her flowers fall from her basket, scattered

and tumbled them on to the grass and, reluctantly

and hesitatingly, but without question or complaint

-- had she not the faculty of obedience to perfection?

-- went too. Down fields, across valleys, white,

flower-strewn -- that was how she would have painted

it. The hills were austere. It was rocky; it was steep.

The waves sounded hoarse on the stones beneath.

They went, the three of them together, Mrs. Ramsay

walking rather fast in front, as if she expected to

meet some one round the corner.

 

  Suddenly the window at which she was looking

was whitened by some light stuff behind it. At last

then somebody had come into the drawing-room;

somebody was sitting in the chair. For Heaven's

sake, she prayed, let them sit still there and not

come floundering out to talk to her. Mercifully,

whoever it was stayed still inside; had settled by

some stroke of luck so as to throw an odd-shaped

triangular shadow over the step. It altered the

composition of the picture a little. It was interesting.

It might be useful. Her mood was coming back to

her. One must keep on looking without for a second

relaxing the intensity of emotion, the determination

not to be put off, not to be bamboozled. One must

hold the scene -- so -- in a vise and let nothing come

in and spoil it. One wanted, she thought, dipping

 

her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary

experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's

a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's

an ecstasy. The problem might be solved after all.

Ah, but what had happened? Some wave of white

went over the window pane. The air must have

stirred some flounce in the room. Her heart leapt at

her and seized her and tortured her.

 

  " Mrs. Ramsay!  Mrs. Ramsay!   " she cried, feeling

the old horror come back -- to want and want and

not to have. Could she inflict that still? And then,

quietly, as if she refrained, that too became part of

ordinary experience, was on a level with the chair,

with the table. Mrs. Ramsay -- it was part of her

perfect goodness -- sat there quite simply, in the

chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her

reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the

step. There she sat.

 

  And as if she had something she must share, yet

could hardly leave her easel, so full her mind was

of what she was thinking, of what she was seeing,

Lily went past Mr. Carmichael holding her brush to

the edge of the lawn. Where was that boat now?

And Mr. Ramsay? She wanted him.

 

 

 

  Mr. Ramsay had almost done reading. One hand

hovered over the page as if to be in readiness to

turn it the very instant he had finished it. He sat

there bareheaded with the wind blowing his hair

about, extraordinarily exposed to everything. He

looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting

his head now against the Lighthouse, now against

the waste of waters running away into the open, like

some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if

he had become physically what was always at the

back of both of their minds -- that loneliness which

was for both of them the truth about things.

 

  He was reading very quickly, as if he were eager

to get to the end. Indeed they were very close to

the Lighthouse now. There it loomed up, stark and

straight, glaring white and black, and one could see

the waves breaking in white splinters like smashed

glass upon the rocks. One could see lines and creases

in the rocks. One could see the windows clearly; a

dab of white on one of them, and a little tuft of

green on the rock. A man had come out and looked

at them through a glass and gone in again. So it

was like that, James thought, the Lighthouse one

had seen across the bay all these years; it was a

stark tower on a bare rock. It satisfied him. It confirmed

 

some obscure feeling of his about his own

character. The old ladies, he thought, thinking of

the garden at home, went dragging their chairs about

on the lawn. Old Mrs. Beckwith, for example, was

always saying how nice it was and how sweet it was

and how they ought to be so proud and they ought

to be so happy, but as a matter of fact, James

thought, looking at the Lighthouse stood there on

its rock, it's like that. He looked at his father reading

fiercely with his legs curled tight. They shared

that knowledge. " We are driving before a gale --

we must sink, " he began saying to himself, half

aloud, exactly as his father said it.

 

  Nobody seemed to have spoken for an age. Cam

was tired of looking at the sea. Little bits of black

cork had floated past; the fish were dead in the

bottom of the boat. Still her father read, and James

looked at him and she looked at him, and they

vowed that they would fight tyranny to the death,

and he went on reading quite unconscious of what

they thought. It was thus that he escaped, she

thought. Yes, with his great forehead and his great

nose, holding his little mottled book firmly in front

of him, he escaped. You might try to lay hands on

him, but then like a bird, he spread his wings, he

floated off to settle out of your reach somewhere far

away on some desolate stump. She gazed at the immense

expanse of the sea. The island had grown so

 

small that it scarcely looked like a leaf any longer.

It looked like the top of a rock which some wave

bigger than the rest would cover. Yet in its frailty

were all those paths, those terraces, those bedrooms

-- all those innumberable things. But as, just before

sleep, things simplify themselves so that only one

of all the myriad details has power to assert itself,

so, she felt, looking drowsily at the island, all those

paths and terraces and bedrooms were fading and

disappearing, and nothing was left but a pale blue

censer swinging rhythmically this way and that

across her mind. It was a hanging garden; it was a

valley, full of birds, and flowers, and antelopes...

 

She was falling asleep.

 

  " Come now, " said Mr. Ramsay, suddenly shutting

his book.

 

  Come where? To what extraordinary adventure?

She woke with a start. To land somewhere,to climb

somewhere? Where was he leading them? For after

his immense silence the words startled them. But it

was absurd. He was hungry, he said. It was time

for lunch. Besides, look, he said. " There's the Lighthouse.

We're almost there. "

 

  " He's doing very well, " said Macalister, praising

James. " He's keeping her very steady. "

 

  But his father never praised him, James thought

grimly.

 

  Mr. Ramsay opened the parcel and shared out

 

the sandwiches among them. Now he was happy,

eating bread and cheese with these fishermen. He

would have liked to live in a cottage and lounge

about in the harbour spitting with the other old

men, James thought, watching him slice his cheese

into thin yellow sheets with his penknife.

 

  This is right, this is it, Cam kept feeling, as she

peeled her hard-boiled egg. Now she felt as she did

in the study when the old men were reading The#

Times#. Now I can go on thinking whatever I like,

and I shan't fall over a precipice or be drowned,

for there he is, keeping his eye on me, she thought.

 

  At the same time they were sailing so fast along

by the rocks that it was very exciting -- it seemed as

if they were doing two things at once; they were

eating their lunch here in the sun and they were also

making for safety in a great storm after a shipwreck.

Would the water last? Would the provisions last?

she asked herself, telling herself a story but knowing

at the same time what was the truth.

 

  They would soon be out of it, Mr. Ramsay was

saying to old Macalister; but their children would

see some strange things. Macalister said he was

seventy-five last March; Mr. Ramsay was seventy-one.

Macalister said he had never seen a doctor;

he had never lost a tooth. And that's the way I'd

like my children to live -- Cam was sure that her

 

father was thinking that, for he stopped her throwing

a sandwich into the sea and told her, as if he

were thinking of the fishermen and how they lived,

that if she did not want it she should put it back

in the parcel. She should not waste it. He said it so

wisely, as if he knew so well all the things that happened

in the world that she put it back at once, and

then he gave her, from his own parcel, a gingerbread

nut, as if he were a great Spanish gentleman, she

thought, handing a flower to a lady at a window

(so courteous his manner was). He was shabby, and

simple, eating bread and cheese; and yet he was

leading them on a great expedition where, for all

she knew, they would be drowned.

 

  " That was where she sunk, " said Macalister's

boy suddenly.

 

  Three men were drowned where we are now, the

old man said. He had seen them clinging to the mast

himself. And Mr. Ramsay taking a look at the spot

was about, James and Cam were afraid, to burst

out:

       But I beneath a rougher sea,

and if he did, they could not bear it; they would

shriek aloud; they could not endure another explosion

of the passion that boiled in him; but to

their surprise all he said was " Ah " as if he thought

 

to himself. But why make a fuss about that?

Naturally men are drowned in a storm, but it is a

perfectly straightforward affair, and the depths of

the sea (he sprinkled the crumbs from his sandwich

paper over them) are only water after all. Then

having lighted his pipe he took out his watch. He

looked at it attentively; he made, perhaps, some

mathematical calculation. At last he said, triumphantly:

  " Well done!  " James had steered them like a born

sailor.

 

  There!  Cam thought, addressing herself silently

to James. You've got it at last. For she knew that this

was what James had been wanting, and she knew

that now he had got it he was so pleased that he

would not look at her or at his father or at any one.

There he sat with his hand on the tiller sitting bolt

upright, looking rather sulky and frowning slightly.

He was so pleased that he was not going to let anybody

share a grain of his pleasure. His father had

praised him. They must think that he was perfectly

indifferent. But you've got it now, Cam thought.

 

  They had tacked, and they were sailing swiftly,

buoyantly on long rocking waves which handed

them on from one to another with an extraordinary

lilt and exhilaration beside the reef. On the left a

row of rocks showed brown through the water which

 

thinned and became greener and on one, a higher

rock, a wave incessantly broke and spurted a little

column of drops which fell down in a shower. One

could hear the slap of the water and the patter of

falling drops and a kind of hushing and hissing

sound from the waves rolling and gambolling and

slapping the rocks as if they were wild creatures

who were perfectly free and tossed and tumbled and

sported like this for ever.

 

  Now they could see two men on the Lighthouse,

watching them and making ready to meet them.

 

  Mr. Ramsay buttoned his coat, and turned up his

trousers. He took the large, badly packed, brown

paper parcel which Nancy had got ready and sat

with it on his knee. Thus in complete readiness to

land he sat looking back at the island. With his

long-sighted eyes perhaps he could see the dwindled

leaf-like shape standing on end on a plate of gold

quite clearly. What could he see? Cam wondered.

It was all a blur to her. What was he thinking now?

she wondered. What was it he sought, so fixedly, so

intently, so silently? They watched him, both of

them, sitting bareheaded with his parcel on his

knee staring and staring at the frail blue shape

which seemed like the vapour of something that had

burnt itself away. What do you want? they both

wanted to ask. They both wanted to say, Ask us

 

anything and we will give it you. But he did not

ask them anything. He sat and looked at the island

and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone,

or he might be thinking, I have reached it. I have

found it; but he said nothing.

 

  Then he put on his hat.

 

  " Bring those parcels, " he said, nodding his head

at the things Nancy had done up for them to take

to the Lighthouse. " The parcels for the Lighthouse

men, " he said. He rose and stood in the bow of the

boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James

thought, as if he were saying, " There is no God, "

and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space,

and they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly

like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock.

 

 

  " He must have reached it, " said Lily Briscoe

aloud, feeling suddenly completely tired out. For the

Lighthouse had become almost invisible, had melted

away into a blue haze, and the effort of looking

at it and the effort of thinking of him landing there,

which both seemed to be one and the same effort,

had stretched her body and mind to the utmost.

Ah, but she was relieved. Whatever she had wanted

 

to give him, when he left her that morning, she had

given him at last.

 

  " He has landed, " she said aloud. " It is finished. "

Then, surging up, puffing slightly, old Mr. Carmichael

stood beside her, looking like an old pagan

god, shaggy, with weeds in his hair and the trident

(it was only a French novel) in his hand. He stood

by her on the edge of the lawn, swaying a little in his

bulk and said, shading his eyes with his hand: " They

will have landed, " and she felt that she had been

right. They had not needed to speak. They had been

thinking the same things and he had answered her

without her asking him anything. He stood there as

if he were spreading his hands over all the weakness

and suffering of mankind; she thought he was surveying,

tolerantly and compassionately, their final

destiny. Now he has crowned the occasion, she

thought, when his hand slowly fell, as if she had

seen him let fall from his great height a wreath of

violets and asphodels which, fluttering slowly, lay

at length upon the earth.

 

  Quickly, as if she were recalled by something

over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was

-- her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its

lines running up and across, its attempt at something.

It would be hung in the attics, she thought;

 

it would be destroyed. But what did that matter?

she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She

looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked

at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity,

as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew

a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was

finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in

extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.