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But what happened?
Someone made a mistake.
She fixed her short-sighted[7 - short-sighted – близорукий] eyes upon her husband. She gazed steadily until his closeness revealed to her that something had happened.
He shivered; he quivered. All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own splendour, had been shattered, destroyed. Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well. He quivered; he shivered.
She realised, from the familiar signs, that he needed privacy to regain his equilibrium, that he was outraged and anguished. She stroked James’s head; she transferred to him what she felt for her husband. Her husband passed her. She was relieved to find that the ruin was veiled; domesticity triumphed; custom crooned its soothing rhythm. At the window he bent quizzically and whimsically to tickle James’s bare calf with a sprig of something. She twitted him that he had dispatched “that poor young man,” Charles Tansley.
“Tansley had to write his dissertation,” he said. “James will have to write his dissertation one of these days,” he added ironically.
She was trying to finish these tiresome stockings to send them to Sorley’s little boy tomorrow, said Mrs. Ramsay.
“There isn’t the slightest possible chance that we can go to the Lighthouse tomorrow,” Mr. Ramsay said irascibly.
“How do you know?” she asked. “The wind often changes”.
The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women’s minds enraged him. He stamped his foot on the stone step.
“Damn you,” he said.
But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might.
Such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings was to her so horrible that she bent her head. There was nothing to say.
He stood by her in silence. Very humbly, at length, he said,
“I will ask the Coastguards if you like”.
There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him.
Already ashamed of that petulance, of that gesticulation of the hands, Mr. Ramsay sheepishly prodded his son’s bare legs, and then he dived into the evening air.
He was safe, he was restored to his privacy. He stopped to light his pipe. He looked once at his wife and son in the window. Who will blame him?
7
But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping and looking down on them. He hated him for interrupting them. He hated him for the exaltation and sublimity of his gestures. He hated him for the magnificence of his head. He hated him for his exactingness and egotism.
He looked at the page. He pointed his finger at a word, and he hoped to recall his mother’s attention, which, he knew angrily, wavered instantly. But, no. Nothing will make Mr. Ramsay move on. There he stood. He was demanding sympathy.
Mrs. Ramsay was folding her son in her arm. She braced herself, and raised herself with an effort. He wanted sympathy. He was a failure, he said. Mrs. Ramsay flashed her needles.
“Charles Tansley…” she said.
But it was sympathy he wanted. He wanted to be assured of his genius.
Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time, she said. But he must have sympathy. She laughed, she knitted.
He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climed high, not for a second should he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.
He was filled with her words, like a child. At last, he looked at her with humble gratitude and went away.
Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another. She felt the rapture of successful creation. Every throb of this pulse enclosed her and her husband, and gave to each some solace.
A shadow was on the page; she looked up. It was Augustus Carmichael’s shadow. Mr. Carmichael was in his yellow slippers. She asked,
“Going indoors Mr. Carmichael?”
8
He said nothing. He took opium. The children said he had stained his beard yellow with it. Perhaps. What was obvious to her was that the poor man was unhappy. He came to them every year as an escape. Every year she felt the same thing; he did not trust her. She said,
“I am going to the town. Shall I get you stamps, paper, tobacco?”
And she felt him wince. He did not trust her. It was because of his wife. She remembered that iniquity of his wife’s towards him. He was unkempt; he dropped things on his coat. He had the tiresomeness of an old man. His wife said, in her odious way,
“Now, Mrs. Ramsay and I want to have a little talk together.”
Mrs. Ramsay could see the innumerable miseries of his life. Had he money enough to buy tobacco? Did he have to ask her for it? She made him suffer.
And always now he shrank from her. He never told her anything. But what more can she do? He has a sunny room. The children are good to him. It injured her that he shrinks. Everybody loved her. Everybody needed her. How could he not? When Mr. Carmichael just nodded to her question, with a book beneath his arm, she felt that all this desire of hers to give, to help, was vanity. For her own self-satisfaction was it that she wished so instinctively to help, to give, that people might say of her, “O Mrs. Ramsay! dear Mrs. Ramsay… Mrs. Ramsay, of course!” and need her and send for her and admire her? Was it not secretly this that she wanted, and therefore when Mr. Carmichael shrank away from her, as he did at this moment, making off to some corner where he did acrostics endlessly, she did not feel merely snubbed back in her instinct, but made aware of the pettiness of some part of her, and of human relations, how flawed they are, how despicable, how self-seeking, at their best.
Anyway, she should better devote her mind to the story of the Fisherman and his Wife and calm down her son James (none of her children was as sensitive as he was).
“The man’s heart grew heavy,” she read aloud, “and he did not want to go. He said to himself, ‘It is not right,’ and yet he went. And when he came to the sea the water was quite purple and dark blue, and grey and thick, and no longer so green and yellow, but it was still quiet. And he stood there and said…”
“The father of eight children has no choice.”
He muttered these words, turned, sighed, raised his eyes, saw the figure of his wife. She was reading stories to his little boy. He filled his pipe. He found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes. It was true; he was for the most part happy. He had his wife; he had his children. He had promised in six weeks’ time to talk “some nonsense” to the young men of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley[8 - Locke, Hume, Berkeley – Локк, Юм, Беркли (английские философы, мыслители)], and the causes of the French Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it he had to deprecate and conceal under the phrase “talking nonsense.” It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings. He could not say, “This is what I like – this is what I am”. It was rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe. Lily wondered why such concealments were necessary; why he needed praise. She wondered why so brave a man in thought was so timid in life. He was strangely venerable and laughable at the same time.
Teaching and preaching is beyond human power, Lily suspected.
Mrs. Ramsay gave him what he asked too easily. Then the change must be so upsetting, Lily said. He comes in from his books and finds us all playing games and talking nonsense. Imagine what a change from the things he thinks about, she said.
9
“Yes,” Mr. Bankes said. “It is pity. It is pity that Ramsay could not behave a little more like other people.”
For he liked Lily Briscoe; he could discuss Ramsay with her quite openly. It was for that reason, he said, that the young people don’t read Carlyle. A crusty old grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold. Why will he preach to us?
Lily was ashamed to say that she had not read Carlyle since she was at school. But she liked Mr. Ramsay. He asked you quite openly to flatter him, to admire him. His little dodges deceived nobody. It was not THAT she minded. What she disliked was his narrowness, his blindness.
“A hypocrite?” Mr. Bankes suggested.
He looked at Mr. Ramsay’s back. He rather wished Lily to agree that Ramsay was, as he said, “a hypocrite.”
Lily Briscoe was putting away her brushes. She was looking up, looking down. Looking up, there he was – Mr. Ramsay was advancing towards them. He was swinging, careless, oblivious, remote. “A hypocrite?” she repeated. Oh, no – the most sincere of men, the truest, the best. But he is absorbed in himself. He is tyrannical, he is unjust.
Mr. Bankes expected her to answer. And she was about to say something about Mrs. Ramsay, how she was alarming, but then she saw the rapture with which Mr. Bankes looked at Mrs. Ramsay and the look on his face made it entirely unnecessary for her to speak. Lily felt that this rapture was equivalent to the loves of dozens of young men. Perhaps Mrs. Ramsay had never excited the loves of dozens of young men. It was distilled and filtered love; love that never attempted to clutch its object. This love was spread over the world and became part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The world shared it.
Such a rapture made Lily Briscoe forget entirely what she wanted to say. It was nothing of importance; something about Mrs. Ramsay. It paled beside this “rapture”, this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude. Nothing so solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised its burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift.
People can love like this. She wiped one brush after another upon a piece of old rag. Then she looked at her picture.
She nearly wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! Nobody will look at it, nobody will even hang it. Mr. Tansley was whispering in her ear,
“Women can’t paint, women can’t write.”
She now remembered what she wanted say about Mrs. Ramsay. She was annoyed by some highhandedness. She thought of Mr. Bankes. She thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped. Mrs. Ramsay was unquestionably the loveliest of people; the best perhaps; but also, different. But why different, and how different? she asked herself. She scraped her palette of all those mounds of blue and green. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her? She was like a bird, an arrow. She was willful; she was commanding. She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. The house was full of children.
Oh, but there was her father; her home; even her painting. But all this seemed so little, so virginal, against the other. She liked to be alone; she liked to be herself.
Lily Briscoe looked up at last. She saw Mrs. Ramsay, still presiding.
Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty? Did she lock up within her some secret? She was sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs. Ramsay’s knees. She was smiling to think that Mrs. Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure. She imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman were tablets with sacred inscriptions. What was the key to those secret chambers? Can love, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? It was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge. And she put her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee.
Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head against Mrs. Ramsay’s knee.
And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored up in Mrs. Ramsay’s heart. Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose. Mrs. Ramsay went. A ray passed Mr. Bankes’s eyes. He put on his spectacles. He stepped back. He raised his hand. He slightly narrowed his clear blue eyes,
Lily winced like a dog that sees a hand raised to strike it. Mr. Bankes was less alarming than another.
Mr. Bankes took out a pen-knife and tapped the canvas with the bone handle. What did she wish to indicate by the triangular purple shape, “just there”? he asked.
It was Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, she said.
Mother and child are the objects of universal veneration. The mother was famous for her beauty. But the picture was not of them, she said. Or, not in this sense. There were other senses too.
A picture must be a tribute. A mother and child can be reduced to a shadow without irreverence. A light here required a shadow there. He considered. He was interested. The truth was that all his prejudices were on the other side, he explained. The largest picture in his drawing-room was of the cherry trees in blossom on the banks of the Kennet. He had spent his honeymoon on the banks of the Kennet, he said. Lily must come and see that picture, he said.
10
Cam grazed the easel by an inch[9 - grazed the easel by an inch – чуть не сшибла мольберт]. She did not stop for Mr. Bankes and Lily Briscoe; though Mr. Bankes held out his hand. She did not stop for her father, whom she grazed also by an inch; nor for her mother, who called
“Cam! I want you a moment!”
She flew like a bird, bullet, or arrow. But when Mrs. Ramsay called “Cam!” a second time, Cam turned to her mother. She shifted from foot to foot, and said,
“They are not here, and I’ve told Ellen to wait.”
Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley had not come back then. That meant, Mrs. Ramsay thought, one thing. She must accept him, or she must refuse him. Mrs. Ramsay was very, very fond of Minta. But she read,
“Next morning the wife awoke first, and it was just daybreak. From her bed she saw the beautiful country. Her husband was still stretching himself[10 - was still stretching himself – ещё потягивался]…”
But how will Minta refuse him? She read on:
“Ah, wife,” said the man, “why be King? I do not want to be King.” “Well,” said the wife, “if you won’t be King, I will. Go to the Flounder, for I will be King.”
“Come in or go out, Cam,” she said.
“And when he came to the sea, it was quite dark grey. The water heaved up from below, and smelt putrid. Then he went and stood by it and said,
Flounder, flounder, in the sea,
Come, I pray you, here to me;
For my wife, good Ilsabil,
Wills not as I’d have her will
‘Well, what does she want then?’ said the Flounder.”
And where were they now? Mrs. Ramsay wondered. She was reading and thinking at the same time. The story of the Fisherman and his Wife was like the melody.
If nothing happens, she will speak seriously to Minta. She was responsible to Minta’s parents – the Owl and the Poker. She remembered her nicknames for them. The Owl and the Poker – yes.
Dear, dear, Mrs. Ramsay said to herself, how did they produce this incongruous daughter? this tomboy Minta, with a hole in her stocking?
How did she exist in that portentous atmosphere? Naturally, one must ask her to lunch, tea, dinner, finally to stay with them. That resulted in some friction with the Owl, her mother. However, Minta came… Yes, she came, Mrs. Ramsay thought. Mrs. Doyle accused her. Wishing to dominate, wishing to interfere, making people do what she wished – that was the charge against her. She thought it most unjust.
She was often ashamed of her own shabbiness. Nor was she domineering, nor was she tyrannical.
She never wanted James to grow older! or Cam either. When she read just now to James, “and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums and trumpets,” and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up and lose all that?
He was the most gifted, the most sensitive of her children. But all, she thought, were full of promise. Prue, a perfect angel, a real beauty. Andrew – even her husband admitted that his gift for mathematics was extraordinary. And Nancy and Roger, they were both wild creatures now. They were scampering about over the country all day long. As for Rose, her mouth was too big, but she had a wonderful gift with her hands. If they had charades, Rose made the dresses. She made everything.
Why should they go to school? She always wanted to have a baby. She liked to carry one in her arms. Then people say she was tyrannical, domineering, masterful. They are happier now than they will ever be again. They all had their little treasures…
And so she went down and said to her husband, Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again.
And he was angry. Why take such a gloomy view of life? he said. It is not sensible. For it was odd. She believed it to be true. He had always his work. Not that she herself was “pessimistic”. She thought of her life, her fifty years. There it was before her – life. The life is terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you give it a chance. There were eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here.
She knew what was before them – love and ambition. Why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, Nonsense. They will be perfectly happy.
She was making Minta marry Paul Rayley. People must marry; people must have children.
Was she wrong in this? she asked herself. She was uneasy.
“Then he put on his trousers and ran away like a madman,” she read. “But outside a great storm was raging and blowing so hard that he could scarcely keep his feet. Houses and trees toppled over, the mountains trembled, rocks rolled into the sea. The sky was black, and it thundered and lightened. The sea came in with black waves as high as church towers and mountains, and all with white foam at the top.”
She turned the page; there were only a few lines more. She will finish the story. It was getting late. The light in the garden told her that. Then she remembered; Paul and Minta and Andrew had not come back. Andrew had his net and basket. That meant he was going to catch crabs. It was growing quite dark.
She looked into James’s eyes:
“And there they are living still at this very time[11 - And there they are living still at this very time. – Так они и живут до сих пор.].”
“And that’s the end,” she said.
