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Title: The Waves
Author: Woolf, Virginia [Adeline Virginia] (1882-1941)
Date of first publication: 1931
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1972
   [Fifth reprint of the 1964 "New edition"]
Date first posted: 4 September 2017
Date last updated: 4 September 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1465

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Delphine Lettau, Paul Dring, Cindy Beyer, Mark Akrigg
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

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THE WAVES

by Virginia Woolf






_The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky,
except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in
it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon
dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with
thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following
each other, pursuing each other, perpetually._

_As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept
a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then
drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes
unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if
the sediment in an old wine-bottle has sunk and left the glass green.
Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk,
or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a
lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like
the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed
to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and
flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a
bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one
haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky
on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface
of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling
until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held
the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became
visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round
it the sea blazed gold._

_The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf
transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a
pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the
house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a
blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The
blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The
birds sang their blank melody outside._

****

'I see a ring,' said Bernard, 'hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in
a loop of light.'

'I see a slab of pale yellow,' said Susan, 'spreading away until it
meets a purple stripe.'

'I hear a sound,' said Rhoda, 'cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and
down.'

'I see a globe,' said Neville, 'hanging down in a drop against the
enormous flanks of some hill.'

'I see a crimson tassel,' said Jinny, 'twisted with gold threads.'

'I hear something stamping,' said Louis. 'A great beast's foot is
chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.'

'Look at the spider's web on the corner of the balcony,' said Bernard.
'It has beads of water on it, drops of white light.'

'The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears,' said
Susan.

'A shadow falls on the path,' said Louis, 'like an elbow bent.'

'Islands of light are swimming on the grass,' said Rhoda. 'They have
fallen through the trees.'

'The birds' eyes are bright in the tunnels between the leaves,' said
Neville.

'The stalks are covered with harsh, short hairs,' said Jinny, 'and drops
of water have stuck to them.'

'A caterpillar is curled in a green ring,' said Susan, 'notched with
blunt feet.'

'The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the blades
behind him,' said Rhoda.

'And burning lights from the window-panes flash in and out on the
grasses,' said Louis.

'Stones are cold to my feet,' said Neville. 'I feel each one, round or
pointed, separately.'

'The back of my hand burns,' said Jinny, 'but the palm is clammy and
damp with dew.'

'Now the cock crows like a spurt of hard, red water in the white tide,'
said Bernard.

'Birds are singing up and down and in and out all round us,' said Susan.

'The beast stamps; the elephant with its foot chained; the great brute
on the beach stamps,' said Louis.

'Look at the house,' said Jinny, 'with all its windows white with
blinds.'

'Cold water begins to run from the scullery tap,' said Rhoda, 'over the
mackerel in the bowl.'

'The walls are cracked with gold cracks,' said Bernard, 'and there are
blue, finger-shaped shadows of leaves beneath the windows.'

'Now Mrs Constable pulls up her thick black stockings,' said Susan.

'When the smoke rises, sleep curls off the roof like a mist,' said
Louis.

'The birds sang in chorus first,' said Rhoda. 'Now the scullery door is
unbarred. Off they fly. Off they fly like a fling of seed. But one sings
by the bedroom window alone.'

'Bubbles form on the floor of the saucepan,' said Jinny. 'Then they
rise, quicker and quicker, in a silver chain to the top.'

'Now Biddy scrapes the fish-scales with a jagged knife on to a wooden
board,' said Neville.

'The dining-room window is dark blue now,' said Bernard, 'and the air
ripples above the chimneys.'

'A swallow is perched on the lightning-conductor,' said Susan. 'And
Biddy has smacked down the bucket on the kitchen flags.'

'That is the first stroke of the church bell,' said Louis. 'Then the
others follow; one, two; one, two; one, two.'

'Look at the table-cloth, flying along the table,' said Rhoda. 'Now
there are rounds of white china, and silver streaks beside each plate.'

'Suddenly a bee booms in my ear,' said Neville. 'It is here; it is
past.'

'I burn, I shiver,' said Jinny, 'out of this sun, into this shadow.'

'Now they have all gone,' said Louis. 'I am alone. They have gone into
the house for breakfast, and I am left standing by the wall among the
flowers. It is very early, before lessons. Flower after flower is
specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. Stalks rise
from the black hollows beneath. The flowers swim like fish made of light
upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk.
My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with
brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre.
All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs.
Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing. I am a boy in grey flannels
with a belt fastened by a brass snake up here. Down there my eyes are
the lidless eyes of a stone figure in a desert by the Nile. I see women
passing with red pitchers to the river; I see camels swaying and men in
turbans. I hear tramplings, tremblings, stirrings round me.

'Up here Bernard, Neville, Jinny and Susan (but not Rhoda) skim the
flower-beds with their nets. They skim the butterflies from the nodding
tops of the flowers. They brush the surface of the world. Their nets are
full of fluttering wings. "Louis! Louis! Louis!" they shout. But they
cannot see me. I am on the other side of the hedge. There are only
little eyeholes among the leaves. O Lord, let them pass. Lord, let them
lay their butterflies on a pocket-handkerchief on the gravel. Let them
count out their tortoise-shells, their red admirals and cabbage whites.
But let me be unseen. I am green as a yew tree in the shade of the
hedge. My hair is made of leaves. I am rooted to the middle of the
earth. My body is a stalk. I press the stalk. A drop oozes from the hole
at the mouth and slowly, thickly, grows larger and larger. Now something
pink passes the eyehole. Now an eye-beam is slid through the chink. Its
beam strikes me. I am a boy in a grey flannel suit. She has found me. I
am struck on the nape of the neck. She has kissed me. All is shattered.'

'I was running,' said Jinny, 'after breakfast. I saw leaves moving in a
hole in the hedge. I thought "That is a bird on its nest." I parted them
and looked; but there was no bird on a nest. The leaves went on moving.
I was frightened. I ran past Susan, past Rhoda, and Neville and Bernard
in the tool-house talking. I cried as I ran, faster and faster. What
moved the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs? And I dashed in here,
seeing you green as a bush, like a branch, very still, Louis, with your
eyes fixed. "Is he dead?" I thought, and kissed you, with my heart
jumping under my pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving, though
there is nothing to move them. Now I smell geraniums; I smell earth
mould. I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light, I
lie quivering flung over you.'

'Through the chink in the hedge,' said Susan, 'I saw her kiss him. I
raised my head from my flower-pot and looked through a chink in the
hedge. I saw her kiss him. I saw them, Jinny and Louis, kissing. Now I
will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed
tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons. I
will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next Jinny and next
Louis. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech
trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers. They will not
find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my
hair will be matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from
ditches and die there.'

'Susan has passed us,' said Bernard. 'She has passed the tool-house door
with her handkerchief screwed into a ball. She was not crying, but her
eyes, which are so beautiful, were narrow as cats' eyes before they
spring. I shall follow her, Neville. I shall go gently behind her, to be
at hand, with my curiosity, to comfort her when she bursts out in a rage
and thinks, "I am alone."

'Now she walks across the field with a swing, nonchalantly, to deceive
us. Then she comes to the dip; she thinks she is unseen; she begins to
run with her fists clenched in front of her. Her nails meet in the ball
of her pocket-handkerchief. She is making for the beech woods out of the
light. She spreads her arms as she comes to them and takes to the shade
like a swimmer. But she is blind after the light and trips and flings
herself down on the roots under the trees, where the light seems to pant
in and out, in and out. The branches heave up and down. There is
agitation and trouble here. There is gloom. The light is fitful. There
is anguish here. The roots make a skeleton on the ground, with dead
leaves heaped in the angles. Susan has spread her anguish out. Her
pocket-handkerchief is laid on the roots of the beech trees and she
sobs, sitting crumpled where she has fallen.'

'I saw her kiss him,' said Susan. 'I looked between the leaves and saw
her. She danced in flecked with diamonds light as dust. And I am squat,
Bernard, I am short. I have eyes that look close to the ground and see
insects in the grass. The yellow warmth in my side turned to stone when
I saw Jinny kiss Louis. I shall eat grass and die in a ditch in the
brown water where dead leaves have rotted.'

'I saw you go,' said Bernard. 'As you passed the door of the tool-house
I heard you cry "I am unhappy." I put down my knife. I was making boats
out of firewood with Neville. And my hair is untidy, because when Mrs
Constable told me to brush it there was a fly in a web, and I asked,
"Shall I free the fly? Shall I let the fly be eaten?" So I am late
always. My hair is unbrushed and these chips of wood stick in it. When I
heard you cry I followed you, and saw you put down your handkerchief
screwed up, with its rage, with its hate, knotted in it. But soon that
will cease. Our bodies are close now. You hear me breathe. You see the
beetle too carrying off a leaf on its back. It runs this way, then that
way, so that even your desire while you watch the beetle, to possess one
single thing (it is Louis now) must waver, like the light in and out of
the beech leaves; and then words, moving darkly, in the depths of your
mind will break up this knot of hardness, screwed in your
pocket-handkerchief.'

'I love,' said Susan, 'and I hate. I desire one thing only. My eyes are
hard. Jinny's eyes break into a thousand lights. Rhoda's are like those
pale flowers to which moths come in the evening. Yours grow full and
brim and never break. But I am already set on my pursuit. I see insects
in the grass. Though my mother still knits white socks for me and hems
pinafores and I am a child, I love and I hate.'

'But when we sit together, close,' said Bernard, 'we melt into each
other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial
territory.'

'I see the beetle,' said Susan. 'It is black, I see; it is green, I see;
I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you
rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.'

'Now,' said Bernard, 'let us explore. There is the white house lying
among the trees. It lies down there ever so far beneath us. We shall
sink like swimmers just touching the ground with the tips of their toes.
We shall sink through the green air of the leaves, Susan. We sink as we
run. The waves close over us, the beech leaves meet above our heads.
There is the stable clock with its gilt hands shining. Those are the
flats and heights of the roofs of the great house. There is the
stable-boy clattering in the yard in rubber boots. That is Elvedon.

'Now we have fallen through the tree-tops to the earth. The air no
longer rolls its long, unhappy, purple waves over us. We touch earth; we
tread ground. That is the close-clipped hedge of the ladies' garden.
There they walk at noon, with scissors, clipping roses. Now we are in
the ringed wood with the wall round it. This is Elvedon. I have seen
signposts at the cross-roads with one arm pointing "To Elvedon". No one
has been there. The ferns smell very strong, and there are red funguses
growing beneath them. Now we wake the sleeping daws who have never seen
a human form; now we tread on rotten oak apples, red with age and
slippery. There is a ring of wall round this wood; nobody comes here.
Listen! That is the flop of a giant toad in the undergrowth; that is the
patter of some primeval fir-cone falling to rot among the ferns.

'Put your foot on this brick. Look over the wall. That is Elvedon. The
lady sits between the two long windows, writing. The gardeners sweep the
lawn with giant brooms. We are the first to come here. We are the
discoverers of an unknown land. Do not stir; if the gardeners saw us
they would shoot us. We should be nailed like stoats to the stable door.
Look! Do not move. Grasp the ferns tight on the top of the wall.'

'I see the lady writing. I see the gardeners sweeping,' said Susan. 'If
we died here, nobody would bury us.'

'Run!' said Bernard. 'Run! The gardener with the black beard has seen
us! We shall be shot! We shall be shot like jays and pinned to the wall!
We are in a hostile country. We must escape to the beech wood. We must
hide under the trees. I turned a twig as we came. There is a secret
path. Bend as low as you can. Follow without looking back. They will
think we are foxes. Run!

'Now we are safe. Now we can stand upright again. Now we can stretch our
arms in this high canopy, in this vast wood. I hear nothing. That is
only the murmur of the waves in the air. That is a wood-pigeon breaking
cover in the tops of the beech trees. The pigeon beats the air; the
pigeon beats the air with wooden wings.'

'Now you trail away,' said Susan, 'making phrases. Now you mount like an
air-ball's string, higher and higher through the layers of the leaves,
out of reach. Now you lag. Now you tug at my skirts, looking back,
making phrases. You have escaped me. Here is the garden. Here is the
hedge. Here is Rhoda on the path rocking petals to and fro in her brown
basin.'

'All my ships are white,' said Rhoda. 'I do not want red petals of
hollyhocks or geranium. I want white petals that float when I tip the
basin up. I have a fleet now swimming from shore to shore. I will drop a
twig in as a raft for a drowning sailor. I will drop a stone in and see
bubbles rise from the depths of the sea. Neville has gone and Susan has
gone; Jinny is in the kitchen garden picking currants with Louis
perhaps. I have a short time alone, while Miss Hudson spreads our
copy-books on the schoolroom table. I have a short space of freedom. I
have picked all the fallen petals and made them swim. I have put
raindrops in some. I will plant a lighthouse here, a head of Sweet
Alice. And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my
ships may ride the waves. Some will founder. Some will dash themselves
against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy
caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chains. The
waves rise; their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They
have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship, which mounts
the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the
parrots chatter and the creepers...'

'Where is Bernard?' said Neville. 'He has my knife. We were in the
tool-shed making boats, and Susan came past the door. And Bernard
dropped his boat and went after her taking my knife, the sharp one that
cuts the keel. He is like a dangling wire, a broken bell-pull, always
twangling. He is like the seaweed hung outside the window, damp now, now
dry. He leaves me in the lurch; he follows Susan; and if Susan cries he
will take my knife and tell her stories. The big blade is an emperor;
the broken blade a Negro. I hate dangling things; I hate dampish things.
I hate wandering and mixing things together. Now the bell rings and we
shall be late. Now we must drop our toys. Now we must go in together.
The copy-books are laid out side by side on the green baize table.'

'I will not conjugate the verb,' said Louis, 'until Bernard has said it.
My father is a banker in Brisbane and I speak with an Australian accent.
I will wait and copy Bernard. He is English. They are all English.
Susan's father is a clergyman. Rhoda has no father. Bernard and Neville
are the sons of gentlemen. Jinny lives with her grandmother in London.
Now they suck their pens. Now they twist their copy-books, and, looking
sideways at Miss Hudson, count the purple buttons on her bodice. Bernard
has a chip in his hair. Susan has a red look in her eyes. Both are
flushed. But I am pale; I am neat, and my knicker-bockers are drawn
together by a belt with a brass snake. I know the lesson by heart. I
know more than they will ever know. I know my cases and my genders; I
could know everything in the world if I wished. But I do not wish to
come to the top and say my lesson. My roots are threaded, like fibres in
a flower-pot, round and round about the world. I do not wish to come to
the top and live in the light of this great clock, yellow-faced, which
ticks and ticks. Jinny and Susan, Bernard and Neville bind themselves
into a thong with which to lash me. They laugh at my neatness, at my
Australian accent. I will now try to imitate Bernard softly lisping
Latin.'

'Those are white words,' said Susan, 'like stones one picks up by the
seashore.'

'They flick their tails right and left as I speak them,' said Bernard.
'They wag their tails; they flick their tails; they move through the air
in flocks, now this way, now that way, moving all together, now
dividing, now coming together.'

'Those are yellow words, those are fiery words,' said Jinny. 'I should
like a fiery dress, a yellow dress, a fulvous dress to wear in the
evening.'

'Each tense,' said Neville, 'means differently. There is an order in
this world; there are distinctions, there are differences in this world
upon whose verge I step. For this is only a beginning.'

'Now Miss Hudson,' said Rhoda, 'has shut the book. Now the terror is
beginning. Now taking her lump of chalk she draws figures, six, seven,
eight, and then a cross and then a line on the blackboard. What is the
answer? The others look; they look with understanding. Louis writes;
Susan writes; Neville writes; Jinny writes; even Bernard has now begun
to write. But I cannot write. I see only figures. The others are handing
in their answers, one by one. Now it is my turn. But I have no answer.
The others are allowed to go. They slam the door. Miss Hudson goes. I am
left alone to find an answer. The figures mean nothing now. Meaning has
gone. The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a
desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand
has marched ahead to find water. The other painfully stumbles among hot
stones in the desert. It will die in the desert. The kitchen door slams.
Wild dogs bark far away. Look, the loop of the figure is beginning to
fill with time; it holds the world in it. I begin to draw a figure and
the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now
join--so--and seal up, and make entire. The world is entire, and I am
outside of it, crying, "Oh, save me from being blown for ever outside
the loop of time!"'

'There Rhoda sits staring at the blackboard,' said Louis, 'in the
schoolroom, while we ramble off, picking here a bit of thyme, pinching
here a leaf of southernwood while Bernard tells a story. Her
shoulder-blades meet across her back like the wings of a small
butterfly. And as she stares at the chalk figures, her mind lodges in
those white circles; it steps through those white loops into emptiness,
alone. They have no meaning for her. She has no answer for them. She has
no body as the others have. And I, who speak with an Australian accent,
whose father is a banker in Brisbane, do not fear her as I fear the
others.'

'Let us now crawl,' said Bernard, 'under the canopy of the currant
leaves, and tell stories. Let us inhabit the underworld. Let us take
possession of our secret territory, which is lit by pendant currants
like candelabra, shining red on one side, black on the other. Here,
Jinny, if we curl up close, we can sit under the canopy of the currant
leaves and watch the censers swing. This is our universe. The others
pass down the carriage-drive. The skirts of Miss Hudson and Miss Curry
sweep by like candle extinguishers. Those are Susan's white socks. Those
are Louis's neat sand-shoes firmly printing the gravel. Here come warm
gusts of decomposing leaves, of rotting vegetation. We are in a swamp
now; in a malarial jungle. There is an elephant white with maggots,
killed by an arrow shot dead in its eye. The bright eyes of hopping
birds--eagles, vultures--are apparent. They take us for fallen trees.
They pick at a worm--that is a hooded cobra--and leave it with a
festering brown scar to be mauled by lions. This is our world, lit with
crescents and stars of light; and great petals half transparent block
the openings like purple windows. Everything is strange. Things are huge
and very small. The stalks of flowers are thick as oak trees. Leaves are
high as the domes of vast cathedrals. We are giants, lying here, who can
make forests quiver.'

'This is here,' said Jinny, 'this is now. But soon we shall go. Soon
Miss Curry will blow her whistle. We shall walk. We shall part. You will
go to school. You will have masters wearing crosses with white ties. I
shall have a mistress in a school on the East Coast who sits under a
portrait of Queen Alexandra. That is where I am going, and Susan and
Rhoda. This is only here; this is only now. Now we lie under the currant
bushes and every time the breeze stirs we are mottled all over. My hand
is like a snake's skin. My knees are pink floating islands. Your face is
like an apple tree netted under.'

'The heat is going,' said Bernard, 'from the Jungle. The leaves flap
black wings over us. Miss Curry has blown her whistle on the terrace. We
must creep out from the awning of the currant leaves and stand upright.
There are twigs in your hair, Jinny. There is a green caterpillar on
your neck. We must form, two by two. Miss Curry is taking us for a brisk
walk, while Miss Hudson sits at her desk settling her accounts.'

'It is dull,' said Jinny, 'walking along the high road with no windows
to look at, with no bleared eyes of blue glass let into the pavement.'

'We must form into pairs,' said Susan, 'and walk in order, not shuffling
our feet, not lagging, with Louis going first to lead us, because Louis
is alert and not a wool-gatherer.'

'Since I am supposed,' said Neville, 'to be too delicate to go with
them, since I get so easily tired and then am sick, I will use this hour
of solitude, this reprieve from conversation, to coast round the
purlieus of the house and recover, if I can, by standing on the same
stair half-way up the landing, what I felt when I heard about the dead
man through the swing-door last night when cook was shoving in and out
the dampers. He was found with his throat cut. The apple tree leaves
became fixed in the sky; the moon glared; I was unable to lift my foot
up the stair. He was found in the gutter. His blood gurgled down the
gutter. His jowl was white as a dead codfish. I shall call this
stricture, this rigidity, "death among the apple trees" for ever. There
were the floating, pale-grey clouds; and the immitigable tree; the
implacable tree with its greaved silver bark. The ripple of my life was
unavailing. I was unable to pass by. There was an obstacle. "I cannot
surmount this unintelligible obstacle," I said. And the others passed
on. But we are doomed, all of us, by the apple trees, by the immitigable
tree which we cannot pass.

'Now the stricture and rigidity are over; and I will continue to make my
survey of the purlieus of the house in the late afternoon, in the
sunset, when the sun makes oleaginous spots on the linoleum, and a crack
of light kneels on the wall, making the chair legs look broken.'

'I saw Florrie in the kitchen garden,' said Susan, 'as we came back from
our walk, with the washing blown out round her, the pyjamas, the
drawers, the night-gowns blown tight. And Ernest kissed her. He was in
his green baize apron, cleaning silver; and his mouth was sucked like a
purse in wrinkles and he seized her with the pyjamas blown out hard
between them. He was blind as a bull, and she swooned in anguish, only
little veins streaking her white cheeks red. Now though they pass plates
of bread and butter and cups of milk at tea-time I see a crack in the
earth and hot steam hisses up; and the urn roars as Ernest roared, and I
am blown out hard like the pyjamas, even while my teeth meet in the soft
bread and butter, and I lap the sweet milk. I am not afraid of heat, nor
of the frozen winter. Rhoda dreams, sucking a crust soaked in milk;
Louis regards the wall opposite with snail-green eyes; Bernard moulds
his bread into pellets and calls them "people". Neville with his clean
and decisive ways has finished. He has rolled his napkin and slipped it
through the silver ring. Jinny spins her fingers on the table-cloth, as
if they were dancing in the sunshine, pirouetting. But I am not afraid
of the heat or of the frozen winter.'

'Now,' said Louis, 'we all rise; we all stand up. Miss Curry spreads
wide the black book on the harmonium. It is difficult not to weep as we
sing, as we pray that God may keep us safe while we sleep, calling
ourselves little children. When we are sad and trembling with
apprehension it is sweet to sing together, leaning slightly, I towards
Susan, Susan towards Bernard, clasping hands, afraid of much, I of my
accent, Rhoda of figures; yet resolute to conquer.'

'We troop upstairs like ponies,' said Bernard, 'stamping, clattering one
behind another to take our turns in the bathroom. We buffet, we tussle,
we spring up and down on the hard, white beds. My turn has come. I come
now.

'Mrs Constable, girt in a bath-towel, takes her lemon-coloured sponge
and soaks it in water; it turns chocolate-brown; it drips; and, holding
it high above me, shivering beneath her, she squeezes it. Water pours
down the runnel of my spine. Bright arrows of sensation shoot on either
side. I am covered with warm flesh. My dry crannies are wetted; my cold
body is warmed; it is sluiced and gleaming. Water descends and sheets me
like an eel. Now hot towels envelop me, and their roughness, as I rub my
back, makes my blood purr. Rich and heavy sensations form on the roof of
my mind; down showers the day--the woods; and Elvedon; Susan and the
pigeon. Pouring down the walls of my mind, running together, the day
falls copious, resplendent. Now I tie my pyjamas loosely round me, and
lie under this thin sheet afloat in the shallow light which is like a
film of water drawn over my eyes by a wave. I hear through it far off,
far away, faint and far, the chorus beginning; wheels; dogs; men
shouting; church bells; the chorus beginning.'

'As I fold up my frock and my chemise,' said Rhoda, 'so I put off my
hopeless desire to be Susan, to be Jinny. But I will stretch my toes so
that they touch the rail at the end of the bed; I will assure myself,
touching the rail, of something hard. Now I cannot sink; cannot
altogether fall through the thin sheet now. Now I spread my body on this
frail mattress and hang suspended. I am above the earth now. I am no
longer upright, to be knocked against and damaged. All is soft, and
bending. Walls and cupboards whiten and bend their yellow squares on top
of which a pale glass gleams. Out of me now my mind can pour. I can
think of my Armadas sailing on the high waves. I am relieved of hard
contacts and collisions. I sail on alone under white cliffs. Oh, but I
sink, I fall! That is the corner of the cupboard; that is the nursery
looking-glass. But they stretch, they elongate. I sink down on the black
plumes of sleep; its thick wings are pressed to my eyes. Travelling
through darkness I see the stretched flower-beds, and Mrs Constable runs
from behind the corner of the pampas-grass to say my aunt has come to
fetch me in a carriage. I mount; I escape; I rise on spring-heeled boots
over the tree-tops. But I am now fallen into the carriage at the hall
door, where she sits nodding yellow plumes with eyes hard like glazed
marbles. Oh, to awake from dreaming! Look, there is the chest of
drawers. Let me pull myself out of these waters. But they heap
themselves on me; they sweep me between their great shoulders; I am
turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched, among these long lights, these
long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing.'

****

_The sun rose higher. Blue waves, green waves swept a quick fan over the
beach, circling the spike of sea-holly and leaving shallow pools of
light here and there on the sand. A faint black rim was left behind
them. The rocks which had been misty and soft hardened and were marked
with red clefts._

_Sharp stripes of shadow lay on the grass, and the dew dancing in the
tips of the flowers and leaves made the garden like a mosaic of single
sparks not yet formed into one whole. The birds, whose breasts were
specked canary and rose, now sang a strain or two together, wildly, like
skaters rollicking arm-in-arm, and were suddenly silent, breaking
asunder._

_The sun laid broader blades upon the house. The light touched something
green in the window corner and made it a lump of emerald, a cave of pure
green like stoneless fruit. It sharpened the edges of chairs and tables
and stitched white tablecloths with fine gold wires. As the light
increased a bud here and there split asunder and shook out flowers,
green veined and quivering, as if the effort of opening had set them
rocking, and pealing a faint carillon as they beat their frail clappers
against their white walls. Everything became softly amorphous, as if the
china of the plate flowed and the steel of the knife were liquid.
Meanwhile the concussion of the waves breaking fell with muffled thuds,
like logs falling, on the shore._

****

'Now,' said Bernard, 'the time has come. The day has come. The cab is at
the door. My huge box bends George's bandy-legs even wider. The horrible
ceremony is over, the tips, and the good-byes in the hall. Now there is
this gulping ceremony with my mother, this hand-shaking ceremony with my
father; now I must go on waving, I must go on waving, till we turn the
corner. Now that ceremony is over. Heaven be praised, all ceremonies are
over. I am alone; I am going to school for the first time.

'Everybody seems to be doing things for this moment only; and never
again. Never again. The urgency of it all is fearful. Everybody knows I
am going to school, going to school for the first time. "That boy is
going to school for the first time," says the housemaid, cleaning the
steps. I must not cry. I must behold them indifferently. Now the awful
portals of the station gape; "the moon-faced clock regards me." I must
make phrases and phrases and so interpose something hard between myself
and the stare of housemaids, the stare of clocks, staring faces,
indifferent faces, or I shall cry. There is Louis, there is Neville, in
long coats, carrying handbags, by the booking-office. They are composed.
But they look different.'

'Here is Bernard,' said Louis. 'He is composed; he is easy. He swings
his bag as he walks. I will follow Bernard, because he is not afraid. We
are drawn through the booking-office on to the platform as a stream
draws twigs and straws round the piers of a bridge. There is the very
powerful, bottle-green engine without a neck, all back and thighs,
breathing steam. The guard blows his whistle; the flag is dipped;
without an effort, of its own momentum, like an avalanche started by a
gentle push, we start forward. Bernard spreads a rug and plays
knuckle-bones. Neville reads. London crumbles. London heaves and surges.
There is a bristling of chimneys and towers. There a white church; there
a mast among the spires. There a canal. Now there are open spaces with
asphalt paths upon which it is strange that people should now be
walking. There, is a hill striped with red houses. A man crosses a
bridge with a dog at his heels. Now the red boy begins firing at a
pheasant. The blue boy shoves him aside. "My uncle is the best shot in
England. My cousin is Master of Foxhounds." Boasting begins. And I
cannot boast, for my father is a banker in Brisbane, and I speak with an
Australian accent.'

'After all this hubbub,' said Neville, 'all this scuffling and hubbub,
we have arrived. This is indeed a moment--this is indeed a solemn
moment. I come, like a lord to his halls appointed. That is our founder;
our illustrious founder, standing in the courtyard with one foot raised.
I salute our founder. A noble Roman air hangs over these austere
quadrangles. Already the lights are lit in the form rooms. Those are
laboratories perhaps; and that a library, where I shall explore the
exactitude of the Latin language, and step firmly upon the well-laid
sentences, and pronounce the explicit, the sonorous hexameters of
Virgil, of Lucretius; and chant with a passion that is never obscure or
formless the loves of Catullus, reading from a big book, a quarto with
margins. I shall lie, too, in the fields among the tickling grasses. I
shall lie with my friends under the towering elm trees.

'Behold, the Headmaster. Alas, that he should excite my ridicule. He is
too sleek, he is altogether too shiny and black, like some statue in a
public garden. And on the left side of his waistcoat, his taut, his
drum-like waistcoat, hangs a crucifix.'

'Old Crane,' said Bernard, 'now rises to address us. Old Crane, the
Headmaster, has a nose like a mountain at sunset, and a blue cleft in
his chin, like a wooded ravine, which some tripper has fired; like a
wooded ravine seen from the train window. He sways slightly, mouthing
out his tremendous and sonorous words. I love tremendous and sonorous
words. But his words are too hearty to be true. Yet he is by this time
convinced of their truth. And when he leaves the room, lurching rather
heavily from side to side, and hurls his way through the swing-doors,
all the masters, lurching rather heavily from side to side, hurl
themselves also through the swing-doors. This is our first night at
school, apart from our sisters.'

*

'This is my first night at school,' said Susan, 'away from my father,
away from my home. My eyes swell; my eyes prick with tears. I hate the
smell of pine and linoleum. I hate the wind-bitten shrubs and the
sanitary tiles. I hate the cheerful jokes and the glazed look of
everyone. I left my squirrel and my doves for the boy to look after. The
kitchen door slams, and shot patters among the leaves when Percy fires
at the rooks. All here is false; all is meretricious. Rhoda and Jinny
sit far off in brown serge, and look at Miss Lambert who sits under a
picture of Queen Alexandra reading from a book before her. There is also
a blue scroll of needlework embroidered by some old girl. If I do not
purse my lips, if I do not screw my handkerchief, I shall cry.'

'The purple light,' said Rhoda, 'in Miss Lambert's ring passes to and
fro across the black stain on the white page of the Prayer Book. It is a
vinous, it is an amorous light. Now that our boxes are unpacked in the
dormitories, we sit herded together under maps of the entire world.
There are desks with wells for the ink. We shall write our exercises in
ink here. But here I am nobody. I have no face. This great company, all
dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity. We are all
callous, unfriended. I will seek out a face, a composed, a monumental
face, and will endow it with omniscience, and wear it under my dress
like a talisman and then (I promise this) I will find some dingle in a
wood where I can display my assortment of curious treasures. I promise
myself this. So I will not cry.'

'That dark woman,' said Jinny, 'with high cheek-bones, has a shiny
dress, like a shell, veined, for wearing in the evening. That is nice
for summer, but for winter I should like a thin dress shot with red
threads that would gleam in the firelight. Then when the lamps were lit,
I should put on my red dress and it would be thin as a veil, and would
wind about my body, and billow out as I came into the room, pirouetting.
It would make a flower shape as I sank down, in the middle of the room,
on a gilt chair. But Miss Lambert wears an opaque dress, that falls in a
cascade from her snow-white ruffle as she sits under a picture of Queen
Alexandra pressing one white finger firmly on the page. And we pray.'

'Now we march, two by two,' said Louis, 'orderly, processional, into
chapel. I like the dimness that falls as we enter the sacred building. I
like the orderly progress. We file in; we seat ourselves. We put off our
distinctions as we enter. I like it now, when, lurching slightly, but
only from his momentum, Dr Crane mounts the pulpit and reads the lesson
from a Bible spread on the back of the brass eagle. I rejoice; my heart
expands in his bulk, in his authority. He lays the whirling dust clouds
in my tremulous, my ignominiously agitated mind--how we danced round the
Christmas tree and handing parcels they forgot me, and the fat woman
said, "This little boy has no present," and gave me a shiny Union Jack
from the top of the tree, and I cried with fury--to be remembered with
pity. Now all is laid by his authority, his crucifix, and I feel come
over me the sense of the earth under me, and my roots going down and
down till they wrap themselves round some hardness at the centre. I
recover my continuity, as he reads. I become a figure in the procession,
a spoke in the huge wheel that, turning, at last erects me, here and
now. I have been in the dark; I have been hidden; but when the wheel
turns (as he reads) I rise into this dim light where I just perceive,
but scarcely, kneeling boys, pillars and memorial brasses. There is no
crudity here, no sudden kisses.'

'The brute menaces my liberty,' said Neville, 'when he prays. Unwarmed
by imagination, his words fall cold on my head like paving-stones, while
the gilt cross heaves on his waistcoat. The words of authority are
corrupted by those who speak them. I gibe and mock at this sad religion,
at these tremulous, grief-stricken figures advancing, cadaverous and
wounded, down a white road shadowed by fig trees where boys sprawl in
the dust--naked boys; and goatskins distended with wine hang at the
tavern door. I was in Rome travelling with my father at Easter; and the
trembling figure of Christ's mother was borne niddle-noddling along the
streets; there went by also the stricken figure of Christ in a glass
case.

'Now I will lean sideways as if to scratch my thigh. So I shall see
Percival. There he sits, upright among the smaller fry. He breathes
through his straight nose rather heavily. His blue and oddly
inexpressive eyes are fixed with pagan indifference upon the pillar
opposite. He would make an admirable churchwarden. He should have a
birch and beat little boys for misdemeanours. He is allied with the
Latin phrases on the memorial brasses. He sees nothing; he hears
nothing. He is remote from us all in a pagan universe. But look--he
flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gestures one falls
hopelessly in love for a lifetime. Dalton, Jones, Edgar and Bateman
flick their hands to the backs of their necks likewise. But they do not
succeed.'

'At last,' said Bernard, 'the growl ceases. The sermon ends. He has
minced the dance of the white butterflies at the door to powder. His
rough and hairy voice is like an unshaven chin. Now he lurches back to
his seat like a drunken sailor. It is an action that all the other
masters will try to imitate; but, being flimsy, being floppy, wearing
grey trousers, they will only succeed in making themselves ridiculous. I
do not despise them. Their antics seem pitiable in my eyes. I note the
fact for future reference with many others in my notebook. When I am
grown up I shall carry a notebook--a fat book with many pages,
methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases. Under B shall come
"Butterfly powder". If, in my novel, I describe the sun on the
window-sill, I shall look under B and find butterfly powder. That will
be useful. The tree "shades the window with green fingers." That will be
useful. But alas! I am so soon distracted--by a hair like twisted candy,
by Celia's Prayer Book, ivory covered. Louis can contemplate nature,
unwinking, by the hour. Soon I fail, unless talked to. "The lake of my
mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily
somnolence." That will be useful.'

'Now we move out of this cool temple, into the yellow playing-fields,'
said Louis. 'And, as it is a half-holiday (the Duke's birthday) we will
settle among the long grasses, while they play cricket. Could I be
"they" I would choose it; I would buckle on my pads and stride across
the playing-field at the head of the batsmen. Look now, how everybody
follows Percival. He is heavy. He walks clumsily down the field, through
the long grass, to where the great elm trees stand. His magnificence is
that of some medieval commander. A wake of light seems to lie on the
grass behind him. Look at us trooping after him, his faithful servants,
to be shot like sheep, for he will certainly attempt some forlorn
enterprise and die in battle. My heart turns rough; it abrades my side
like a file with two edges: one, that I adore his magnificence; the
other I despise his slovenly accents--I who am so much his superior--and
am jealous.'

'And now,' said Neville, 'let Bernard begin. Let him burble on, telling
us stories, while we lie recumbent. Let him describe what we have all
seen so that it becomes a sequence. Bernard says there is always a
story. I am a story. Louis is a story. There is the story of the
boot-boy, the story of the man with one eye, the story of the woman who
sells winkles. Let him burble on with his story while I lie back and
regard the stiff-legged figures of the padded batsmen through the
trembling grasses. It seems as if the whole world were flowing and
curving--on the earth the trees, in the sky the clouds. I look up,
through the trees, into the sky. The match seems to be played up there.
Faintly among the soft, white clouds I hear the cry "Run," I hear the
cry "How's that?" The clouds lose tufts of whiteness as the breeze
dishevels them. If that blue could stay for ever; if that hole could
remain for ever; if this moment could stay for ever--

'But Bernard goes on talking. Up they bubble--images. "Like a
camel",... "a vulture". The camel is a vulture; the vulture a camel;
for Bernard is a dangling wire, loose, but seductive. Yes, for when he
talks, when he makes his foolish comparisons, a lightness comes over
one. One floats, too, as if one were that bubble; one is freed; I have
escaped, one feels. Even the chubby little boys (Dalton, Larpent and
Baker) feel the same abandonment. They like this better than the
cricket. They catch the phrases as they bubble. They let the feathery
grasses tickle their noses. And then we all feel Percival lying heavy
among us. His curious guffaw seems to sanction our laughter. But now he
has rolled himself over in the long grass. He is, I think, chewing a
stalk between his teeth. He feels bored; I too feel bored. Bernard at
once perceives that we are bored. I detect a certain effort, an
extravagance in his phrase, as if he said "Look!" but Percival says
"No." For he is always the first to detect insincerity; and is brutal in
the extreme. The sentence tails off feebly. Yes, the appalling moment
has come when Bernard's power fails him and there is no longer any
sequence and he sags and twiddles a bit of string and falls silent,
gaping as if about to burst into tears. Among the tortures and
devastations of life is this then--our friends are not able to finish
their stories.'

'Now let me try,' said Louis, 'before we rise, before we go to tea, to
fix the moment in one effort of supreme endeavour. This shall endure. We
are parting; some to tea; some to the nets; I to show my essay to Mr
Barker. This will endure. From discord, from hatred (I despise dabblers
in imagery--I resent the power of Percival intensely) my shattered mind
is pieced together by some sudden perception. I take the trees, the
clouds, to be witnesses of my complete integration. I, Louis, I, who
shall walk the earth these seventy years, am born entire, out of hatred,
out of discord. Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound
by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave, the
clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared.
We shall not always give out a sound like a beaten gong as one sensation
strikes and then another. Children, our lives have been gongs striking;
clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in
gardens.

'Now grass and trees, the travelling air blowing empty spaces in the
blue which they then recover, shaking the leaves which then replace
themselves, and our ring here, sitting, with our arms binding our knees,
hint at some other order, and better, which makes a reason
everlastingly. This I see for a second, and shall try to-night to fix in
words, to forge in a ring of steel, though Percival destroys it, as he
blunders off, crushing the grasses, with the small fry trotting
subservient after him. Yet it is Percival I need; for it is Percival who
inspires poetry.'

*

'For how many months,' said Susan, 'for how many years, have I run up
these stairs, in the dismal days of winter, in the chilly days of
spring? Now it is midsummer. We go upstairs to change into white frocks
to play tennis--Jinny and I with Rhoda following after. I count each
step as I mount, counting each step something done with. So each night I
tear off the old day from the calendar, and screw it tight into a ball.
I do this vindictively, while Betty and Clara are on their knees. I do
not pray. I revenge myself upon the day. I wreak my spite upon its
image. You are dead now, I say, school day, hated day. They have made
all the days of June--this is the twenty-fifth--shiny and orderly, with
gongs, with lessons, with orders to wash, to change, to work, to eat. We
listen to missionaries from China. We drive off in brakes along the
asphalt pavement, to attend concerts in halls. We are shown galleries
and pictures.

'At home the hay waves over the meadows. My father leans upon the stile,
smoking. In the house one door bangs and then another, as the summer air
puffs along the empty passages. Some old picture perhaps swings on the
wall. A petal drops from the rose in the jar. The farm wagons strew the
hedges with tufts of hay. All this I see, I always see, as I pass the
looking-glass on the landing, with Jinny in front and Rhoda lagging
behind. Jinny dances. Jinny always dances in the hall on the ugly, the
encaustic tiles; she turns cartwheels in the playground; she picks some
flower forbiddenly, and sticks it behind her ear so that Miss Perry's
dark eyes smoulder with admiration, for Jinny, not me. Miss Perry loves
Jinny; and I could have loved her, but now love no one, except my
father, my doves and the squirrel whom I left in the cage at home for
the boy to look after.'

'I hate the small looking-glass on the stairs,' said Jinny. 'It shows
our heads only; it cuts off our heads. And my lips are too wide, and my
eyes are too close together; I show my gums too much when I laugh.
Susan's head, with its fell look, with its grass-green eyes which poets
will love, Bernard said, because they fall upon close white stitching,
put mine out; even Rhoda's face, mooning, vacant, is completed, like
those white petals she used to swim in her bowl. So I skip up the stairs
past them to the next landing, where the long glass hangs and I see
myself entire. I see my body and head in one now; for even in this serge
frock they are one, my body and my head. Look, when I move my head I
ripple all down my narrow body; even my thin legs ripple like a stalk in
the wind. I flicker between the set face of Susan and Rhoda's vagueness;
I leap like one of those flames that run between the cracks of the
earth; I move, I dance; I never cease to move and to dance. I move like
the leaf that moved in the hedge as a child and frightened me. I dance
over these streaked, these impersonal, distempered walls with their
yellow skirting as firelight dances over teapots. I catch fire even from
women's cold eyes. When I read, a purple rim runs round the black edge
of the text-book. Yet I cannot follow any word through its changes. I
cannot follow any thought from present to past. I do not stand lost,
like Susan, with tears in my eyes remembering home; or lie, like Rhoda,
crumpled among the ferns, staining my pink cotton green, while I dream
of plants that flower under the sea, and rocks through which the fish
swim slowly. I do not dream.

'Now let us be quick. Now let me be the first to pull off these coarse
clothes. Here are my clean white stockings. Here are my new shoes. I
bind my hair with a white ribbon, so that when I leap across the court
the ribbon will stream out in a flash, yet curl round my neck, perfectly
in its place. Not a hair shall be untidy.'

'That is my face,' said Rhoda, 'in the looking-glass behind Susan's
shoulder--that face is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it,
for I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and
Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The
things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift
and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she
looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to
say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have
to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.

'See now with what extraordinary certainty Jinny pulls on her stockings,
simply to play tennis. That I admire. But I like Susan's way better, for
she is more resolute, and less ambitious of distinction than Jinny. Both
despise me for copying what they do; but Susan sometimes teaches me, for
instance, how to tie a bow, while Jinny has her own knowledge but keeps
it to herself. They have friends to sit by. They have things to say
privately in corners. But I attach myself only to names and faces; and
hoard them like amulets against disaster. I choose out across the hall
some unknown face and can hardly drink my tea when she whose name I do
not know sits opposite. I choke. I am rocked from side to side by the
violence of my emotion. I imagine these nameless, these immaculate
people, watching me from behind bushes. I leap high to excite their
admiration. At night, in bed, I excite their complete wonder. I often
die pierced with arrows to win their tears. If they should say, or I
should see from a label on their boxes, that they were in Scarborough
last holidays, the whole town runs gold, the whole pavement is
illuminated. Therefore I hate looking-glasses which show me my real
face. Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot
stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into
nothingness. I have to bang my hand against some hard door to call
myself back to the body.'

'We are late,' said Susan. 'We must wait our turn to play. We will pitch
here in the long grass and pretend to watch Jinny and Clara, Betty and
Mavis. But we will not watch them. I hate watching other people play
games. I will make images of all the things I hate most and bury them in
the ground. This shiny pebble is Madame Carlo, and I will bury her deep
because of her fawning and ingratiating manners, because of the sixpence
she gave me for keeping my knuckles flat when I played my scales. I
buried her sixpence. I would bury the whole school: the gymnasium; the
classroom; the dining-room that always smells of meat; and the chapel. I
would bury the red-brown tiles and the oily portraits of old
men--benefactors, founders of schools. There are some trees I like; the
cherry tree with lumps of clear gum on the bark; and one view from the
attic towards some far hills. Save for these, I would bury it all as I
bury these ugly stones that are always scattered about this briny coast,
with its piers and its trippers. At home, the waves are a mile long. On
winter nights we hear them booming. Last Christmas a man was drowned
sitting alone in his cart.'

'When Miss Lambert passes,' said Rhoda, 'talking to the clergyman, the
others laugh and imitate her hunch behind her back; yet everything
changes and becomes luminous. Jinny leaps higher too when Miss Lambert
passes. Suppose she saw that daisy, it would change. Wherever she goes,
things are changed under her eyes; and yet when she has gone is not the
thing the same again? Miss Lambert is taking the clergyman through the
wicket-gate to her private garden; and when she comes to the pond, she
sees a frog on a leaf, and that will change. All is solemn, all is pale
where she stands, like a statue in a grove. She lets her tasselled
silken cloak slip down, and only her purple ring still glows, her
vinous, her amethystine ring. There is this mystery about people when
they leave us. When they leave us I can companion them to the pond and
make them stately. When Miss Lambert passes, she makes the daisy change;
and everything runs like streaks of fire when she carves the beef. Month
by month things are losing their hardness; even my body now lets the
light through; my spine is soft like wax near the flame of the candle. I
dream; I dream.'

'I have won the game,' said Jinny. 'Now it is your turn. I must throw
myself on the ground and pant. I am out of breath with running, with
triumph. Everything in my body seems thinned out with running and
triumph. My blood must be bright red, whipped up, slapping against my
ribs. My soles tingle, as if wire rings opened and shut in my feet. I
see every blade of grass very clear. But the pulse drums so in my
forehead, behind my eyes, that everything dances--the net, the grass;
your faces leap like butterflies; the trees seem to jump up and down.
There is nothing staid, nothing settled in this universe. All is
rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph. Only, when I
have lain alone on the hard ground, watching you play your game, I begin
to feel the wish to be singled out; to be summoned, to be called away by
one person who comes to find me, who is attracted towards me, who cannot
keep himself from me, but comes to where I sit on my gilt chair, with my
frock billowing round me like a flower. And withdrawing into an alcove,
sitting alone on a balcony we talk together.

'Now the tide sinks. Now the trees come to earth; the brisk waves that
slap my ribs rock more gently, and my heart rides at anchor, like a
sailing-boat whose sails slide slowly down on to the white deck. The
game is over. We must go to tea now.'

*

'The boasting boys,' said Louis, 'have gone now in a vast team to play
cricket. They have driven off in their great brake, singing in chorus.
All their heads turn simultaneously at the corner by the laurel bushes.
Now they are boasting. Larpent's brother played football for Oxford;
Smith's father made a century at Lords. Archie and Hugh; Parker and
Dalton; Larpent and Smith; then again Archie and Hugh; Parker and
Dalton; Larpent and Smith--the names repeat themselves; the names are
the same always. They are the volunteers; they are the cricketers; they
are the officers of the Natural History Society. They are always forming
into fours and marching in troops with badges on their caps; they salute
simultaneously passing the figure of their general. How majestic is
their order, how beautiful is their obedience! If I could follow, if I
could be with them, I would sacrifice all I know. But they also leave
butterflies trembling with their wings pinched off; they throw dirty
pocket-handkerchiefs clotted with blood screwed up into corners. They
make little boys sob in dark passages. They have big red ears that stand
out under their caps. Yet that is what we wish to be, Neville and I. I
watch them go with envy. Peeping from behind a curtain, I note the
simultaneity of their movements with delight. If my legs were reinforced
by theirs, how they would run! If I had been with them and won matches
and rowed in great races, and galloped all day, how I should thunder out
songs at midnight! In what a torrent the words would rush from my
throat!'

'Percival has gone now,' said Neville. 'He is thinking of nothing but
the match. He never waved his hand as the brake turned the corner by the
laurel bush. He despises me for being too weak to play (yet he is always
kind to my weakness). He despises me for not caring if they win or lose
except that he cares. He takes my devotion; he accepts my tremulous, no
doubt abject offering, mixed with contempt as it is for his mind. For he
cannot read. Yet when I read Shakespeare or Catullus, lying in the long
grass, he understands more than Louis. Not the words--but what are
words? Do I not know already how to rhyme, how to imitate Pope, Dryden,
even Shakespeare? But I cannot stand all day in the sun with my eyes on
the ball; I cannot feel the flight of the ball through my body and think
only of the ball. I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my
life. Yet I could not live with him and suffer his stupidity. He will
coarsen and snore. He will marry and there will be scenes of tenderness
at breakfast. But now he is young. Not a thread, not a sheet of paper
lies between him and the sun, between him and the rain, between him and
the moon as he lies naked, tumbled, hot, on his bed. Now as they drive
along the high road in their brake his face is mottled red and yellow.
He will throw off his coat and stand with his legs apart, with his hands
ready, watching the wicket. And he will pray, "Lord let us win"; he will
think of one thing only, that they should win.

'How could I go with them in a brake to play cricket? Only Bernard could
go with them, but Bernard is too late to go with them. He is always too
late. He is prevented by his incorrigible moodiness from going with
them. He stops, when he washes his hands, to say, "There is a fly in
that web. Shall I rescue that fly; shall I let the spider eat it?" He is
shaded with innumerable perplexities, or he would go with them to play
cricket, and would lie in the grass, watching the sky, and would start
when the ball was hit. But they would forgive him; for he would tell
them a story.'

'They have bowled off,' said Bernard, 'and I am too late to go with
them. The horrid little boys, who are also so beautiful, whom you and
Louis, Neville, envy so deeply, have bowled off with their heads all
turned the same way. But I am unaware of these profound distinctions. My
fingers slip over the keyboard without knowing which is black and which
white. Archie makes easily a hundred; I by a fluke make sometimes
fifteen. But what is the difference between us? Wait though, Neville;
let me talk. The bubbles are rising like the silver bubbles from the
floor of a saucepan; image on top of image. I cannot sit down to my
book, like Louis, with ferocious tenacity. I must open the little
trap-door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together
whatever happens, so that instead of incoherence there is perceived a
wandering thread, lightly joining one thing to another. I will tell you
the story of the doctor.

'When Dr Crane lurches through the swing-doors after prayers he is
convinced, it seems, of his immense superiority; and indeed, Neville, we
cannot deny that his departure leaves us not only with a sense of
relief, but also with a sense of something removed, like a tooth. Now
let us follow him as he heaves through the swing-door to his own
apartments. Let us imagine him in his private room over the stables
undressing. He unfastens his sock suspenders (let us be trivial, let us
be intimate). Then with a characteristic gesture (it is difficult to
avoid these ready-made phrases, and they are, in his case, somehow
appropriate) he takes the silver, he takes the coppers from his trouser
pockets and places them there, and there, on his dressing-table. With
both arms stretched on the arms of his chair he reflects (this is his
private moment; it is here we must try to catch him): shall he cross the
pink bridge into his bedroom or shall he not cross it? The two rooms are
united by a bridge of rosy light from the lamp at the bedside where Mrs
Crane lies with her hair on the pillow reading a French memoir. As she
reads, she sweeps her hand with an abandoned and despairing gesture over
her forehead, and sighs, "Is this all?" comparing herself with some
French duchess. Now, says the doctor, in two years I shall retire. I
shall clip yew hedges in a west country garden. An admiral I might have
been; or a judge; not a schoolmaster. What forces, he asks, staring at
the gas-fire with his shoulders hunched up more hugely than we know them
(he is in his shirt-sleeves remember), have brought me to this? What
vast forces? he thinks, getting into the stride of his majestic phrases
as he looks over his shoulder at the window. It is a stormy night; the
branches of the chestnut trees are ploughing up and down. Stars flash
between them. What vast forces of good and evil have brought me here? he
asks, and sees with sorrow that his chair has worn a little hole in the
pile of the purple carpet. So there he sits, swinging his braces. But
stories that follow people into their private rooms are difficult. I
cannot go on with this story. I twiddle a piece of string; I turn over
four or five coins in my trouser pocket.'

'Bernard's stories amuse me,' said Neville, 'at the start. But when they
tail off absurdly and he gapes, twiddling a bit of string, I feel my own
solitude. He sees everyone with blurred edges. Hence I cannot talk to
him of Percival. I cannot expose my absurd and violent passion to his
sympathetic understanding. It too would make a "story". I need someone
whose mind falls like a chopper on a block; to whom the pitch of
absurdity is sublime, and a shoe-string adorable. To whom can I expose
the urgency of my own passion? Louis is too cold, too universal. There
is nobody--here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and
cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organized
to prevent feeling alone. Yet I am struck still as I walk by sudden
premonitions of what is to come. Yesterday, passing the open door
leading into the private garden, I saw Fenwick with his mallet raised.
The steam from the tea-urn rose in the middle of the lawn. There were
banks of blue flowers. Then suddenly descended upon me the obscure, the
mystic sense of adoration, of completeness that triumphed over chaos.
Nobody saw my poised and intent figure as I stood at the open door.
Nobody guessed the need I had to offer my being to one god; and perish,
and disappear. His mallet descended; the vision broke.

'Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and
libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods
and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river
bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in the water? But nature
is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and
water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs
of one person.'

'I begin to wish,' said Louis, 'for night to come. As I stand here with
my hand on the grained oak panel of Mr Wickham's door I think myself the
friend of Richelieu, or the Duke of St Simon holding out a snuff-box to
the King himself. It is my privilege. My witticisms "run like wildfire
through the court". Duchesses tear emeralds from their ear-rings out of
admiration--but these rockets rise best in darkness, in my cubicle at
night. I am now a boy only with a colonial accent holding my knuckles
against Mr Wickham's grained oak door. The day has been full of
ignominies and triumphs concealed from fear of laughter. I am the best
scholar in the school. But when darkness comes I put off this unenviable
body--my large nose, my thin lips, my colonial accent--and inhabit
space. I am then Virgil's companion, and Plato's. I am then the last
scion of one of the great houses of France. But I am also one who will
force himself to desert these windy and moonlit territories, these
midnight wanderings, and confront grained oak doors. I will achieve in
my life--Heaven grant that it be not long--some gigantic amalgamation
between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my
suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.'

*

'I have torn off the whole of May and June,' said Susan, 'and twenty
days of July. I have torn them off and screwed them up so that they no
longer exist, save as a weight in my side. They have been crippled days,
like moths with shrivelled wings unable to fly. There are only eight
days left. In eight days' time I shall get out of the train and stand on
the platform at six twenty-five. Then my freedom will unfurl, and all
these restrictions that wrinkle and shrivel--hours and order and
discipline, and being here and there exactly at the right moment--will
crack asunder. Out the day will spring, as I open the carriage-door and
see my father in his old hat and gaiters. I shall tremble. I shall burst
into tears. Then next morning I shall get up at dawn. I shall let myself
out by the kitchen door. I shall walk on the moor. The great horses of
the phantom riders will thunder behind me and stop suddenly. I shall see
the swallow skim the grass. I shall throw myself on a bank by the river
and watch the fish slip in and out among the reeds. The palms of my
hands will be printed with pine-needles. I shall there unfold and take
out whatever it is I have made here; something hard. For something has
grown in me here, through the winters and summers, on staircases, in
bedrooms. I do not want, as Jinny wants, to be admired. I do not want
people, when I come in, to look up with admiration. I want to give, to
be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.

'Then I shall come back through the trembling lanes under the arches of
the nut leaves. I shall pass an old woman wheeling a perambulator full
of sticks; and the shepherd. But we shall not speak. I shall come back
through the kitchen garden, and see the curved leaves of the cabbages
pebbled with dew, and the home in the garden, blind with curtained
windows. I shall go upstairs to my room, and turn over my own things,
locked carefully in the wardrobe: my shells; my eggs; my curious
grasses. I shall feed my doves and my squirrel. I shall go to the kennel
and comb my spaniel. So gradually I shall turn over the hard thing that
has grown here in my side. But here bells ring; feet shuffle
perpetually.'

'I hate darkness and sleep and night,' said Jinny, 'and lie longing for
the day to come. I long that the week should be all one day without
divisions. When I wake early--and the birds wake me--I lie and watch the
brass handles on the cupboard grow clear; then the basin; then the
towel-horse. As each thing in the bedroom grows clear, my heart beats
quicker. I feel my body harden, and become pink, yellow, brown. My hands
pass over my legs and body. I feel its slopes, its thinness. I love to
hear the gong roar through the house and the stir begin--here a thud,
there a patter. Doors slam; water rushes. Here is another day, here is
another day, I cry, as my feet touch the floor. It may be a bruised day,
an imperfect day. I am often scolded. I am often in disgrace for
idleness, for laughing; but even as Miss Matthews grumbles at my
feather-headed carelessness, I catch sight of something moving--a speck
of sun perhaps on a picture, or the donkey drawing the mowing-machine
across the lawn; or a sail that passes between the laurel leaves, so
that I am never cast down. I cannot be prevented from pirouetting behind
Miss Matthews into prayers.

'Now, too, the time is coming when we shall leave school and wear long
skirts. I shall wear necklaces and a white dress without sleeves at
night. There will be parties in brilliant rooms; and one man will single
me out and will tell me what he has told no other person. He will like
me better than Susan or Rhoda. He will find in me some quality, some
peculiar thing. But I shall not let myself be attached to one person
only. I do not want to be fixed, to be pinioned. I tremble, I quiver,
like the leaf in the hedge, as I sit dangling my feet, on the edge of
the bed, with a new day to break open. I have fifty years, I have sixty
years to spend. I have not yet broken into my hoard. This is the
beginning.'

'There are hours and hours,' said Rhoda, 'before I can put out the light
and lie suspended on my bed above the world, before I can let the day
drop down, before I can let my tree grow, quivering in green pavilions
above my head. Here I cannot let it grow. Somebody knocks through it.
They ask questions, they interrupt, they throw it down.

'Now I will go to the bathroom and take off my shoes and wash; but as I
wash, as I bend my head down over the basin, I will let the Russian
Empress's veil flow about my shoulders. The diamonds of the Imperial
crown blaze on my forehead. I hear the roar of the hostile mob as I step
out on to the balcony. Now I dry my hands, vigorously, so that Miss,
whose name I forget, cannot suspect that I am waving my fist at an
infuriated mob. "I am your Empress, people." My attitude is one of
defiance, I am fearless. I conquer.

'But this is a thin dream. This is a papery tree. Miss Lambert blows it
down. Even the sight of her vanishing down the corridor blows it to
atoms. It is not solid; it gives me no satisfaction--this Empress dream.
It leaves me, now that it has fallen, here in the passage rather
shivering. Things seem paler. I will go now into the library and take
out some book, and read and look; and read again and look. Here is a
poem about a hedge. I will wander down it and pick flowers, green
cow-bind and the moonlight-coloured May, wild roses and ivy serpentine.
I will clasp them in my hands and lay them on the desk's shiny surface.
I will sit by the river's trembling edge and look at the water-lilies,
broad and bright, which lit the oak that overhung the hedge with
moonlight beams of their own watery light. I will pick flowers; I will
bind flowers in one garland and clasp them and present them--Oh! to
whom? There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses
on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists.
Oh, this is pain, thus is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I
am unsealed, I am incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide
fertilizing, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free.
To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from my warm, my
porous body? I will gather my flowers and present them--Oh! to whom?

'Sailors loiter on the parade, and amorous couples; the omnibuses rattle
along the sea front to the town. I will give; I will enrich; I will
return to the world this beauty. I will bind my flowers in one garland
and advancing with my hand outstretched will present them--Oh! to whom?'

*

'Now we have received,' said Louis, 'for this is the last day of the
last term--Neville's and Bernard's and my last day--whatever our masters
have had to give us. The introduction has been made; the world
presented. They stay, we depart. The great Doctor, whom of all men I
most revere, swaying a little from side to side among the tables, the
bound volumes, has dealt out Horace, Tennyson, the complete works of
Keats and Matthew Arnold, suitably inscribed. I respect the hand which
gave them. He speaks with complete conviction. To him his words are true
though not to us. Speaking in the gruff voice of deep emotion, fiercely,
tenderly, he has told us that we are about to go. He has bid us "quit
ourselves like men". (On his lips quotations from the Bible, from _The
Times_, seem equally magnificent.) Some will do this; others that. Some
will not meet again. Neville, Bernard and I shall not meet here again.
Life will divide us. But we have formed certain ties. Our boyish, our
irresponsible years are over. But we have forged certain links. Above
all, we have inherited traditions. These stone flags have been worn for
six hundred years. On these walls are inscribed the names of men of war,
of statesmen, of some unhappy poets (mine shall be among them).
Blessings be on all traditions, on all safeguards and circumscriptions!
I am most grateful to you men in black gowns, and you, dead, for your
leading, for your guardianship; yet after all, the problem remains. The
differences are not yet solved. Flowers toss their heads outside the
window. I see wild birds, and impulses wilder than the wildest birds
strike from my wild heart. My eyes are wild; my lips tight pressed. The
bird flies: the flower dances; but I hear always the sullen thud of the
waves; and the chained beast stamps on the beach. It stamps and stamps.'

'This is the final ceremony,' said Bernard. 'This is the last of all our
ceremonies. We are overcome by strange feelings. The guard holding his
flag is about to blow his whistle; the train breathing steam in another
moment is about to start. One wants to say something, to feel something,
absolutely appropriate to the occasion. One's mind is primed; one's lips
are pursed. And then a bee drifts in and hums round the flowers in the
bouquet which Lady Hampton, the wife of the General, keeps smelling to
show her appreciation of the compliment. If the bee were to sting her
nose? We are all deeply moved; yet irreverent; yet penitent; yet anxious
to get it over; yet reluctant to part. The bee distracts us; its casual
flight seems to deride our intensity. Humming vaguely, skimming widely,
it is settled now on the carnation. Many of us will not meet again. We
shall not enjoy certain pleasures again, when we are free to go to bed,
or to sit up, when I need no longer smuggle in bits of candle-ends and
immoral literature. The bee now hums round the head of the great Doctor.
Larpent, John, Archie, Percival, Baker and Smith--I have liked them
enormously. I have known one mad boy only. I have hated one mean boy
only. I enjoy in retrospect my terribly awkward breakfasts at the
Headmaster's table with toast and marmalade. He alone does not notice
the bee. If it were to settle on his nose he would flick it off with one
magnificent gesture. Now he has made his joke; now his voice has almost
broken but not quite. Now we are dismissed--Louis, Neville and I for
ever. We take our highly polished books, scholastically inscribed in a
little crabbed hand. We rise, we disperse; the pressure is removed. The
bee has become an insignificant, a disregarded insect, flown through the
open window into obscurity. To-morrow we go.'

'We are about to part,' said Neville. 'Here are the boxes; here are the
cabs. There is Percival in his billycock hat. He will forget me. He will
leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unanswered. I shall
send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture postcard. But it
is for that that I love him. I shall propose meeting--under a clock, by
some Cross; and shall wait, and he will not come. It is for that that I
love him. Oblivious, almost entirely ignorant, he will pass from my
life. And I shall pass, incredible as it seems, into other lives; this
is only an escapade perhaps, a prelude only. I feel already, though I
cannot endure the Doctor's pompous mummery and faked emotions, that
things we have only dimly perceived draw near. I shall be free to enter
the garden where Fenwick raises his mallet. Those who have despised me
shall acknowledge my sovereignty. But by some inscrutable law of my
being sovereignty and the possession of power will not be enough; I
shall always push through curtains to privacy, and want some whispered
words alone. Therefore I go, dubious, but elate; apprehensive of
intolerable pain; yet I think bound in my adventuring to conquer after
huge suffering, bound, surely, to discover my desire in the end. There,
for the last time, I see the statue of our pious founder with the doves
about his head. They will wheel for ever about his head, whitening it,
while the organ moans in the chapel. So I take my seat; and, when I have
found my place in the corner of our reserved compartment, I will shade
my eyes with a book to hide one tear; I will shade my eyes to observe;
to peep at one face. It is the first day of the summer holidays.'

*

'It is the first day of the summer holidays,' said Susan. 'But the day
is still rolled up. I will not examine it until I step out on to the
platform in the evening. I will not let myself even smell it until I
smell the cold green air off the fields. But already these are not
school fields; these are not school hedges; the men in these fields are
doing real things; they fill carts with real hay; and those are real
cows, not school cows. But the carbolic smell of corridors and the
chalky smell of schoolrooms is still in my nostrils. The glazed, shiny
look of matchboard is still in my eyes. I must wait for fields and
hedges, and woods and fields, and steep railway cuttings, sprinkled with
gorse bushes, and trucks in sidings, and tunnels and suburban gardens
with women hanging out washing, and then fields again and children
swinging on gates, to cover it over, to bury it deep, this school that I
have hated.

'I will not send my children to school nor spend a night all my life in
London. Here in this vast station everything echoes and booms hollowly.
The light is like the yellow light under an awning. Jinny lives here.
Jinny takes her dog for walks on these pavements. People here shoot
through the streets silently. They look at nothing but shop-windows.
Their heads bob up and down all at about the same height. The streets
are laced together with telegraph wires. The houses are all glass, all
festoons and glitter; now all front doors and lace curtains, all pillars
and white steps. But now I pass on, out of London again; the fields
begin again; and the houses, and women hanging washing, and trees and
fields. London is now veiled, now vanished, now crumbled, now fallen.
The carbolic and the pitch-pine begin to lose their savour. I smell corn
and turnips. I undo a paper packet tied with a piece of white cotton.
The egg-shells slide into the cleft between my knees. Now we stop at
station after station, rolling out milk cans. Now women kiss each other
and help with baskets. Now I will let myself lean out of the window. The
air rushes down my nose and throat--the cold air, the salt air with the
smell of turnip fields in it. And there is my father, with his back
turned, talking to a farmer. I tremble. I cry. There is my father in
gaiters. There is my father.'

'I sit snug in my own corner going north,' said Jinny, 'in this roaring
express which is yet so smooth that it flattens hedges, lengthens hills.
We flash past signal-boxes; we make the earth rock slightly from side to
side. The distance closes for ever in a point; and we for ever open the
distance wide again. The telegraph poles bob up incessantly; one is
felled, another rises. Now we roar and swing into a tunnel. The
gentleman pulls up the window. I see reflections on the shining glass
which lines the tunnel. I see him lower his paper. He smiles at my
reflection in the tunnel. My body instantly of its own accord puts forth
a frill under his gaze. My body lives a life of its own. Now the black
window glass is green again. We are out of the tunnel. He reads his
paper. But we have exchanged the approval of our bodies. There is then a
great society of bodies, and mine is introduced; mine has come into the
room where the gilt chairs are. Look--all the windows of the villas and
their white-tented curtains dance; and the men sitting in the hedges in
the cornfields with knotted blue handkerchiefs are aware too, as I am
aware, of heat and rapture. One waves as we pass him. There are bowers
and arbours in these villa gardens and young men in shirt-sleeves on
ladders trimming roses. A man on a horse canters over the field. His
horse plunges as we pass. And the rider turns to look at us. We roar
again through blackness. And I lie back; I give myself up to rapture; I
think that at the end of the tunnel I enter a lamp-lit room with chairs,
into one of which I sink, much admired, my dress billowing round me. But
behold, looking up, I meet the eyes of a sour woman, who suspects me of
rapture. My body shuts in her face, impertinently, like a parasol. I
open my body, I shut my body at my will. Life is beginning. I now break
into my hoard of life.'

'It is the first day of the summer holidays,' said Rhoda. 'And now, as
the train passes by these red rocks, by this blue sea, the term, done
with, forms itself into one shape behind me. I see its colour. June was
white. I see the fields white with daisies, and white with dresses; and
tennis courts marked with white. Then there was wind and violent
thunder. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to
the star, "Consume me." That was at midsummer, after the garden party
and my humiliation at the garden party. Wind and storm coloured July.
Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful lay the grey puddle in the
courtyard, when, holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I
came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are
nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather, I was wafted down
tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand
against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back
into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life
then to which I am committed.

'So I detach the summer term. With intermittent shocks, sudden as the
springs of a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea. It
is to this we are attached; it is to this we are bound, as bodies to
wild horses. And yet we have invented devices for filling up the
crevices and disguising these fissures. Here is the ticket collector.
Here are two men; three women; there is a cat in a basket; myself with
my elbow on the window-sill--this is here and now. We draw on, we make
off, through whispering fields of golden corn. Women in the fields are
surprised to be left behind there, hoeing. The train now stamps heavily,
breathes stertorously, as it climbs up and up. At last we are on the top
of the moor. Only a few wild sheep live here; a few shaggy ponies; yet
we are provided with every comfort; with tables to hold our newspapers,
with rings to hold our tumblers. We come carrying these appliances with
us over the top of the moor. Now we are on the summit. Silence will
close behind us. If I look back over that bald head, I can see silence
already closing and the shadows of clouds chasing each other over the
empty moor; silence closes over our transient passage. This I say is the
present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is
part of the merging monster to whom we are attached.'

*

'Now we are off,' said Louis. 'Now I hang suspended without attachments.
We are nowhere. We are passing through England in a train. England slips
by the window, always changing from hill to wood, from rivers and
willows to towns again. And I have no firm ground to which I go. Bernard
and Neville, Percival, Archie, Larpent and Baker go to Oxford or
Cambridge, to Edinburgh, Rome, Paris, Berlin, or to some American
University. I go vaguely, to make money vaguely. Therefore a poignant
shadow, a keen accent, falls on these golden bristles, on these
poppy-red fields, this flowing corn that never overflows its boundaries;
but runs rippling to the edge. This is the first day of a new life,
another spoke of the rising wheel. But my body passes vagrant as a
bird's shadow. I should be transient as the shadow on the meadow, soon
fading, soon darkening and dying there where it meets the wood, were it
not that I coerce my brain to form in my forehead; I force myself to
state, if only in one line of unwritten poetry, this moment; to mark
this inch in the long-long history that began in Egypt, in the time of
the Pharaohs, when woman carried red pitchers to the Nile. I seem
already to have lived many thousand years. But if I now shut my eyes, if
I fail to realize the meeting-place of past and present, that I sit in a
third-class railway carriage full of boys going home for the holidays,
human history is defrauded of a moment's vision. Its eye, that would see
through me, shuts--if I sleep now, through slovenliness, or cowardice,
burying myself in the past, in the dark; or acquiesce, as Bernard
acquiesces, telling stories; or boast, as Percival, Archie, John,
Walter, Lathom, Larpent, Roper, Smith boast--the names are the same
always, the names of the boasting boys. They are all boasting, all
talking, except Neville, who slips a look occasionally over the edge of
a French novel, and so will always slip into cushioned firelit rooms,
with many books and one friend, while I tilt on an office chair behind a
counter. Then I shall grow bitter and mock at them. I shall envy them
their continuance down the safe traditional ways under the shade of old
yew trees while I consort with cockneys and clerks, and tap the
pavements of the city.

'But now disembodied, passing over fields without lodgement--(there is a
river; a man fishes; there is a spire, there is the village street with
its bow-windowed inn)--all is dreamlike and dim to me. These hard
thoughts, this envy, this bitterness, make no lodgement in me. I am the
ghost of Louis, an ephemeral passer-by, in whose mind dreams have power,
and golden sounds when in the early morning petals float on fathomless
depths and the birds sing. I dash and sprinkle myself with the bright
waters of childhood. Its thin veil quivers. But the chained beast stamps
and stamps on the shore.'

'Louis and Neville,' said Bernard, 'both sit silent. Both are absorbed.
Both feel the presence of other people as a separating wall. But if I
find myself in company with other people, words at once make smoke
rings--see how phrases at once begin to wreathe off my lips. It seems
that a match is set to a fire; something burns. An elderly and
apparently prosperous man, a traveller, now gets in. And I at once wish
to approach him; I instinctively dislike the sense of his presence,
cold, unassimilated, among us. I do not believe in separation. We are
not single. Also I wish to add to my collection of valuable observations
upon the true nature of human life. My book will certainly run to many
volumes, embracing every known variety of man and woman. I fill my mind
with whatever happens to be the contents of a room or a railway carriage
as one fills a fountain-pen in an inkpot. I have a steady unquenchable
thirst. Now I feel by imperceptible signs, which I cannot yet interpret
but will later, that his defiance is about to thaw. His solitude shows
signs of cracking. He has passed a remark about a country house. A smoke
ring issues from my lips (about crops) and circles him, bringing him
into contact. The human voice has a disarming quality--(we are not
single, we are one). As we exchange these few but amiable remarks about
country houses, I furbish him up and make him concrete. He is indulgent
as a husband but not faithful; a small builder who employs a few men. In
local society he is important; is already a councillor, and perhaps in
time will be mayor. He wears a large ornament, like a double tooth torn
up by the roots, made of coral, hanging at his watch-chain. Walter J.
Trumble is the sort of name that would fit him. He has been in America,
on a business trip with his wife, and a double room in a smallish hotel
cost him a whole month's wages. His front tooth is stopped with gold.

'The fact is that I have little aptitude for reflection. I require the
concrete in everything. It is so only that I lay hands upon the world. A
good phrase, however, seems to me to have an independent existence. Yet
I think it is likely that the best are made in solitude. They require
some final refrigeration which I cannot give them, dabbling always in
warm soluble words. My method, nevertheless, has certain advantages over
theirs. Neville is repelled by the grossness of Trumble. Louis,
glancing, tripping with the high step of a disdainful crane, picks up
words as if in sugar-tongs. It is true that his eyes--wild, laughing,
yet desperate--express something that we have not gauged. There is about
both Neville and Louis a precision, an exactitude, that I admire and
shall never possess. Now I begin to be aware that action is demanded. We
approach a junction; at a junction I have to change. I have to board a
train for Edinburgh. I cannot precisely lay fingers on this fact--it
lodges loosely among my thoughts like a button, like a small coin. Here
is the jolly old boy who collects tickets. I had one--I had one
certainly. But it does not matter. Either I shall find it, or I shall
not find it. I examine my note-case. I look in all my pockets. These are
the things that for ever interrupt the process upon which I am eternally
engaged of finding some perfect phrase that fits this very moment
exactly.'

'Bernard has gone,' said Neville, 'without a ticket. He has escaped us,
making a phrase, waving his hand. He talked as easily to the
horse-breeder or to the plumber as to us. The plumber accepted him with
devotion. "If he had a son like that," he was thinking, "he would manage
to send him to Oxford." But what did Bernard feel for the plumber? Did
he not only wish to continue the sequence of the story which he never
stops telling himself? He began it when he rolled his bread into pellets
as a child. One pellet was a man, one was a woman. We are all pellets.
We are all phrases in Bernard's story, things he writes down in his
notebook under A or B. He tells our story with extraordinary
understanding, except of what we most feel. For he does not need us. He
is never at our mercy. There he is, waving his arms on the platform. The
train has gone without him. He has missed his connexion. He has lost his
ticket. But that does not matter. He will talk to the barmaid about the
nature of human destiny. We are off; he has forgotten us already; we
pass out of his view; we go on, filled with lingering sensations, half
bitter, half sweet, for he is somehow to be pitied, breasting the world
with half-finished phrases, having lost his ticket: he is also to be
loved.

'Now I pretend again to read. I raise my book, till it almost covers my
eyes. But I cannot read in the presence of horse-dealers and plumbers. I
have no power of ingratiating myself. I do not admire that man; he does
not admire me. Let me at least be honest. Let me denounce this piffling,
trifling, self-satisfied world; these horse-hair seats; these coloured
photographs of piers and parades. I could shriek aloud at the smug
self-satisfaction, at the mediocrity of this world, which breeds
horse-dealers with coral ornaments hanging from their watch-chains.
There is that in me which will consume them entirely. My laughter shall
make them twist in their seats; shall drive them howling before me. No;
they are immortal. They triumph. They will make it impossible for me
always to read Catullus in a third-class railway carriage. They will
drive me in October to take refuge in one of the universities, where I
shall become a don; and go with schoolmasters to Greece; and lecture on
the ruins of the Parthenon. It would be better to breed horses and live
in one of those red villas than to run in and out of the skulls of
Sophocles and Euripides like a maggot, with a high-minded wife, one of
those University women. That, however, will be my fate. I shall suffer.
I am already at eighteen capable of such contempt that horse-breeders
hate me. That is my triumph; I do not compromise. I am not timid; I have
no accent. I do not finick about fearing what people think of "my father
a banker at Brisbane" like Louis.

'Now we draw near the centre of the civilized world. There are the
familiar gasometers. There are the public gardens intersected by asphalt
paths. There are the lovers lying shamelessly mouth to mouth on the
burnt grass. Percival is now almost in Scotland; his train draws through
the red moors; he sees the long line of the Border hills and the Roman
wall. He reads a detective novel, yet understands everything.

'The train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre, and
my heart draws out too, in fear, in exultation. I am about to
meet--what? What extraordinary adventure waits me, among these mail
vans, these porters, these swarms of people calling taxis? I feel
insignificant, lost, but exultant. With a soft shock we stop. I will let
the others get out before me. I will sit still one moment before I
emerge into that chaos, that tumult. I will not anticipate what is to
come. The huge uproar is in my ears. It sounds and resounds under this
glass roof like the surge of a sea. We are cast down on the platform
with our handbags. We are whirled asunder. My sense of self almost
perishes; my contempt. I become drawn in, tossed down, thrown sky-high.
I step out on to the platform, grasping tightly all that I possess--one
bag.'

****

_The sun rose. Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore, gilding the
ribs of the eaten-out boat and making the sea-holly and its mailed
leaves gleam blue as steel. Light almost pierced the thin swift waves as
they raced fan-shaped over the beach. The girl who had shaken her head
and made all the jewels, the topaz, the aquamarine, the water-coloured
jewels with sparks of fire in them, dance, now bared her brows and with
wide-opened eyes drove a straight pathway over the waves. Their
quivering mackerel sparkling was darkened; they massed themselves; their
green hollows deepened and darkened and might be traversed by shoals of
wandering fish. As they splashed and drew back they left a black rim of
twigs and cork on the shore and straws and sticks of wood, as if some
light shallop had foundered and burst its sides and the sailor had swum
to land and bounded up the cliff and left his frail cargo to be washed
ashore._

_In the garden the birds that had sung erratically and spasmodically in
the dawn on that tree, on that bush, now sang together in chorus, shrill
and sharp; now together, as if conscious of companionship, now alone as
if to the pale blue sky. They swerved, all in one flight, when the black
cat moved among the bushes, when the cook threw cinders on the ash heap
and startled them. Fear was in their song, and apprehension of pain, and
joy to be snatched quickly now at this instant. Also they sang emulously
in the clear morning air, swerving high over the elm tree, singing
together as they chased each other, escaping, pursuing, pecking each
other as they turned high in the air. And then tiring of pursuit and
flight, lovelily they came descending, delicately declining, dropped
down and sat silent on the tree, on the wall, with their bright eyes
glancing, and their heads turned this way, that way; aware, awake;
intensely conscious of one thing, one object in particular._

_Perhaps it was a snail shell, rising in the grass like a grey
cathedral, a swelling building burnt with dark rings and shadowed green
by the grass. Or perhaps they saw the splendour of the flowers making a
light of flowing purple over the beds, through which dark tunnels of
purple shade were driven between the stalks. Or they fixed their gaze on
the small bright apple leaves, dancing yet withheld, stiffly sparkling
among the pink-tipped blossoms. Or they saw the rain drop on the hedge,
pendent but not falling, with a whole house bent in it, and towering
elms; or, gazing straight at the sun, their eyes became gold beads._

_Now glancing this side, that side, they looked deeper, beneath the
flowers, down the dark avenues into the unlit world where the leaf rots
and the flower has fallen. Then one of them, beautifully darting,
accurately alighting, spiked the soft, monstrous body of the defenceless
worm, pecked again and yet again, and left it to fester. Down there
among the roots where the flowers decayed, gusts of dead smells were
wafted; drops formed on the bloated sides of swollen things. The skin of
rotten fruit broke, and matter oozed too thick to run. Yellow excretions
were exuded by slugs, and now and again an amorphous body with a head at
either end swayed slowly from side to side. The gold-eyed birds darting
in between the leaves observed that purulence, that wetness,
quizzically. Now and then they plunged the tips of their beaks savagely
into the sticky mixture._

_Now, too, the rising sun came in at the window, touching the red-edged
curtain, and began to bring out circles and lines. Now in the growing
light its whiteness settled in the plate; the blade condensed its gleam.
Chairs and cupboards loomed behind so that though each was separate they
seemed inextricably involved. The looking-glass whitened its pool upon
the wall. The real flower on the window-sill was attended by a phantom
flower. Yet the phantom was part of the flower, for when a bud broke
free the paler flower in the glass opened a bud too._

_The wind rose. The waves drummed on the shore, like turbaned warriors,
like turbaned men with poisoned assegais who, whirling their arms on
high, advance upon the feeding flocks, the white sheep._

****

'The complexity of things becomes more close,' said Bernard, 'here at
college, where the stir and pressure of life are so extreme, where the
excitement of mere living becomes daily more urgent. Every hour
something new is unburied in the great bran pie. What am I? I ask. This?
No, I am that. Especially now, when I have left a room, and people
talking, and the stone flags ring out with my solitary footsteps, and I
behold the moon rising, sublimely, indifferently, over the ancient
chapel--then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex
and many. Bernard, in public, bubbles; in private, is secretive. That is
what they do not understand, for they are now undoubtedly discussing me,
saying I escape them, am evasive. They do not understand that I have to
effect different transitions; have to cover the entrances and exits of
several different men who alternately act their parts as Bernard. I am
abnormally aware of circumstances. I can never read a book in a railway
carriage without asking, Is he a builder? Is she unhappy? I was aware
to-day acutely that poor Simes, with his pimple, was feeling, how
bitterly, that his chance of making a good impression upon Billy Jackson
was remote. Feeling this painfully, I invited him to dinner with ardour.
This he will attribute to an admiration which is not mine. That is true.
But joined "to the sensibility of a woman" (I am here quoting my own
biographer) "Bernard possessed the logical sobriety of a man." Now
people who make a single impression, and that, in the main, a good one
(for there seems to be a virtue in simplicity), are those who keep their
equilibrium in mid-stream. (I instantly see fish with their noses one
way, the stream rushing past another.) Canon, Lycett, Peters, Hawkins,
Larpent, Neville--all fish in mid-stream. But _you_ understand, _you_,
my self, who always comes at a call (that would be a harrowing
experience to call and for no one to come; that would make the midnight
hollow, and explains the expression of old men in clubs--they have given
up calling for a self who does not come), you understand that I am only
superficially represented by what I was saying to-night. Underneath,
and, at the moment when I am most disparate, I am also integrated. I
sympathize effusively; I also sit, like a toad in a hole, receiving with
perfect coldness whatever comes. Very few of you who are now discussing
me have the double capacity to feel, to reason. Lycett, you see,
believes in running after hares; Hawkins has spent a most industrious
afternoon in the library. Peters has his young lady at the circulating
library. You are all engaged, involved, drawn in, and absolutely
energized to the top of your bent--all save Neville, whose mind is far
too complex to be roused by any single activity. I also am too complex.
In my case something remains floating, unattached.

'Now, as a proof of my susceptibility to atmosphere, here, as I come
into my room, and turn on the light, and see the sheet of paper, the
table, my gown lying negligently over the back of the chair, I feel that
I am that dashing yet reflective man, that bold and deleterious figure,
who, lightly throwing off his cloak, seizes his pen and at once flings
off the following letter to the girl with whom he is passionately in
love.

'Yes, all is propitious. I am now in the mood. I can write the letter
straight off which I have begun ever so many times. I have just come in;
I have flung down my hat and my stick; I am writing the first thing that
comes into my head without troubling to put the paper straight. It is
going to be a brilliant sketch which, she must think, was written
without a pause, without an erasure. Look how unformed the letters
are--there is a careless blot. All must be sacrificed to speed and
carelessness. I will write a quick, running, small hand, exaggerating
the down stroke of the "y" and crossing the "t" thus--with a dash. The
date shall be only Tuesday, the 17th, and then a question mark. But also
I must give her the impression that though he--for this is not
myself--is writing in such an off-hand, such a slap-dash way, there is
some subtle suggestion of intimacy and respect. I must allude to talks
we have had together--bring back some remembered scene. But I must seem
to her (this is very important) to be passing from thing to thing with
the greatest ease in the world. I shall pass from the service for the
man who was drowned (I have a phrase for that) to Mrs Moffat and her
sayings (I have a note of them), and so to some reflections apparently
casual but full of profundity (profound criticism is often written
casually) about some book I have been reading, some out-of-the-way book.
I want her to say as she brushes her hair or puts out the candle, "Where
did I read that? Oh, in Bernard's letter." It is the speed, the hot,
molten effect, the laval flow of sentence into sentence that I need. Who
am I thinking of? Byron of course. I am, in some ways, like Byron.
Perhaps a sip of Byron will help to put me in the vein. Let me read a
page. No; this is dull; this is scrappy. This is rather too formal. Now
I am getting the hang of it. Now I am getting his beat into my brain
(the rhythm is the main thing in writing). Now, without pausing, I will
begin, on the very lilt of the stroke--.

'Yet it falls flat. It peters out. I cannot get up steam enough to carry
me over the transition. My true self breaks off from my assumed. And if
I begin to re-write it, she will feel "Bernard is posing as a literary
man; Bernard is thinking of his biographer" (which is true). No, I will
write the letter to-morrow directly after breakfast.

'Now let me fill my mind with imaginary pictures. Let me suppose that I
am asked to stay at Restover, King's Laughton, Station Langley three
miles. I arrive in the dusk. In the courtyard of this shabby but
distinguished house there are two or three dogs, slinking, long-legged.
There are faded rugs in the hall; a military gentleman smokes a pipe as
he paces the terrace. The note is of distinguished poverty and military
connexions. A hunter's hoof on the writing-table--a favourite horse. "Do
you ride?" "Yes, sir, I love riding." "My daughter expects us in the
drawing-room." My heart pounds against my ribs. She is standing at a low
table; she has been hunting; she munches sandwiches like a tomboy. I
make a fairly good impression on the Colonel. I am not too clever, he
thinks; I am not too raw. Also I play billiards. Then the nice maid who
has been with the family thirty years comes in. The pattern on the
plates is of Oriental long-tailed birds. Her mother's portrait in muslin
hangs over the fire-place. I can sketch the surroundings up to a point
with extraordinary ease. But can I make it work? Can I hear her
voice--the precise tone with which, when we are alone, she says
"Bernard"? And then what next?

'The truth is that I need the stimulus of other people. Alone, over my
dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories. The real
novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely,
imagining. He would not integrate, as I do. He would not have this
devastating sense of grey ashes in a burnt-out grate. Some blind flaps
in my eyes. Everything becomes impervious. I cease to invent.

'Let me recollect. It has been on the whole a good day. The drop that
forms on the roof of the soul in the evening is round, many coloured.
There was the morning, fine; there was the afternoon, walking. I like
views of spires across fields. I like glimpses between people's
shoulders. Things kept popping into my head. I was imaginative, subtle.
After dinner, I was dramatic. I put into concrete form many things that
we had dimly observed about our common friends. I made my transitions
easily. But now let me ask myself the final question, as I sit over this
grey fire, with its naked promontories of black coal, which of these
people am I? It depends so much upon the room. When I say to myself,
"Bernard," who comes? A faithful, sardonic man, disillusioned, but not
embittered. A man of no particular age or calling. Myself, merely. It is
he who now takes the poker and rattles the cinders so that they fall in
showers through the grate. "Lord," he says to himself, watching them
fall, "what a pother!" and then he adds, lugubriously, but with some
sense of consolation, "Mrs Moffat will come and sweep it all up--" I
fancy I shall often repeat to myself that phrase, as I rattle and bang
through life, hitting first this side of the carriage, then the other,
"Oh, yes, Mrs Moffat will come and sweep it all up." And so to bed.'

'In a world which contains the present moment,' said Neville, 'why
discriminate? Nothing should be named lest by so doing we change it. Let
it exist, this bank, this beauty, and I, for one instant, steeped in
pleasure. The sun is hot. I see the river. I see trees specked and burnt
in the autumn sunlight. Boats float past, through the red, through the
green. Far away a bell tolls, but not for death. There are bells that
ring for life. A leaf falls, from joy. Oh! I am in love with life! Look
how the willow shoots its fine sprays into the air! Look how through
them a boat passes, filled with indolent, with unconscious, with
powerful young men. They are listening to the gramophone; they are
eating fruit out of paper bags. They are tossing the skins of bananas
which then sink eel-like, into the river. All they do is beautiful.
There are cruets behind them and ornaments; their rooms are full of oars
and oleographs but they have turned all to beauty. That boat passes
under the bridge. Another comes. Then another. That is Percival,
lounging on the cushions, monolithic, in giant repose. No, it is only
one of his satellites, imitating his monolithic, his giant repose. He
alone is unconscious of their tricks, and when he catches them at it he
buffets them good-humouredly with a blow of his paw. They, too, have
passed under the bridge through "the fountains of the pendant trees",
through its fine strokes of yellow and plum colour. The breeze stirs;
the curtain quivers; I see behind the leaves the grave, yet eternally
joyous buildings, which seem porous, not gravid; light, though set so
immemorially on the ancient turf. Now begins to rise in me the familiar
rhythm; words that have laid dormant now lift, now toss their crests,
and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I
am a great poet. Boats and youth passing and distant trees, "the falling
fountains of the pendant trees". I see it all. I feel it all. I am
inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this, I lash my
frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere.
Words and words and words, how they gallop--how they lash their long
manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their
backs; I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There
is some flaw in me--some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over,
turns to foam and falsity. Yet it is incredible that I should not be a
great poet. What did I write last night if it was not poetry? Am I too
fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how
to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

'Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who
is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How
curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a
friend. How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us.
Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self
adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become
not myself but Neville mixed with somebody--with whom?--with Bernard?
Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question.
Who am I?'

'How strange,' said Bernard, 'the willow looks seen together. I was
Byron, and the tree was Byron's tree, lachrymose, down-showering,
lamenting. Now that we look at the tree together, it has a combed look,
each branch distinct, and I will tell you what I feel, under the
compulsion of your clarity.

'I feel your disapproval, I feel your force. I become, with you, an
untidy, an impulsive human being whose bandanna handkerchief is for ever
stained with the grease of crumpets. Yes, I hold Gray's _Elegy_ in one
hand; with the other I scoop out the bottom crumpet, that has absorbed
all the butter and sticks to the bottom of the plate. This offends you;
I feel your distress acutely. Inspired by it and anxious to regain your
good opinion, I proceed to tell you how I have just pulled Percival out
of bed; I describe his slippers, his table, his guttered candle; his
surly and complaining accents as I pull the blankets off his feet; he
burrowing like some vast cocoon meanwhile. I describe all this in such a
way that, centred as you are upon some private sorrow (for a hooded
shape presides over our encounter), you give way, you laugh and delight
in me. My charm and flow of language, unexpected and spontaneous as it
is, delights me too. I am astonished, as I draw the veil off things with
words, how much, how infinitely more than I can say, I have observed.
More and more bubbles into my mind as I talk, images and images. This, I
say to myself, is what I need; why, I ask, can I not finish the letter
that I am writing? For my room is always scattered with unfinished
letters. I begin to suspect, when I am with you, that I am among the
most gifted of men. I am filled with the delight of youth, with potency,
with the sense of what is to come. Blundering, but fervid, I see myself
buzzing round flowers, humming down scarlet cups, making blue funnels
resound with my prodigious booming. How richly I shall enjoy my youth
(you make me feel). And London. And freedom. But stop. You are not
listening. You are making some protest, as you slide, with an
inexpressibly familiar gesture, your hand along your knee. By such signs
we diagnose our friends' diseases. "Do not, in your affluence and
plenty," you seem to say, "pass me by." "Stop," you say. "Ask me what I
suffer."

'Let me then create you. (You have done as much for me.) You lie on this
hot bank, in this lovely, this fading, this still, bright October day,
watching boat after boat float through the combed-out twigs of the
willow tree. And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover. But
the splendid clarity of your intelligence, and the remorseless honesty
of your intellect (these Latin words I owe you; these qualities of yours
make me shift a little uneasily and see the faded patches, the thin
strands in my own equipment) bring you to a halt. You indulge in no
mystifications. You do not fog yourself with rosy clouds, or yellow.

'Am I right? Have I read the little gesture of your left hand correctly?
If so, give me your poems; hand over the sheets you wrote last night in
such a fervour of inspiration that you now feel a little sheepish. For
you distrust inspiration, yours or mine. Let us go back together, over
the bridge, under the elm trees, to my room, where, with walls round us
and red-serge curtains drawn, we can shut out these distracting voices,
scents and savours of lime trees, and other lives; these pert
shop-girls, disdainfully tripping, these shuffling, heavy-laden old
women; these furtive glimpses of some vague and vanishing figure--it
might be Jinny, it might be Susan, or was that Rhoda disappearing down
the avenue? Again, from some slight twitch I guess your feeling; I have
escaped you; I have gone buzzing like a swarm of bees, endlessly
vagrant, with none of your power of fixing remorselessly upon a single
object. But I will return.'

'When there are buildings like these,' said Neville, 'I cannot endure
that there should be shop-girls. Their titter, their gossip, offends me;
breaks into my stillness, and nudges me, in moments of purest
exultation, to remember our degradation.

'But now we have regained our territory after that brief brush with the
bicycles and the lime scent and the vanishing figures in the distracted
street. Here we are masters of tranquillity and order; inheritors of
proud tradition. The lights are beginning to make yellow slits across
the square. Mists from the river are filling these ancient spaces. They
cling, gently, to the hoary stone. The leaves now are thick in country
lanes, sheep cough in the damp fields; but here in your room we are dry.
We talk privately. The fire leaps and sinks, making some knob bright.

'You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that
seem to approve of your own character. I find marks against all those
sentences which seem to express a sardonic yet passionate nature; a
moth-like impetuosity dashing itself against hard glass. You thought, as
you drew your pencil there, "I too throw off my cloak like that. I too
snap my fingers in the face of destiny." Yet Byron never made tea as you
do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills
over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books
and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-handkerchief.
You then stuff your handkerchief back into your pocket--that is not
Byron; that is you; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in
twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it
will be by that scene; and if you are dead, I shall weep. Once you were
Tolstoy's young man; now you are Byron's young man; perhaps you will be
Meredith's young man; then you will visit Paris in the Easter vacation
and come back wearing a black tie some detestable Frenchman whom nobody
has ever heard of. Then I shall drop you.

'I am one person--myself. I do not impersonate Catullus, whom I adore. I
am the most slavish of students, with here a dictionary, there a
notebook in which I enter curious uses of the past participle. But one
cannot go on for ever cutting these ancient inscriptions clearer with a
knife. Shall I always draw the red-serge curtain close and see my book,
laid like a block of marble, pale under the lamp? That would be a
glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of
the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand,
regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be
ridiculous in Piccadilly.

'But I am too nervous to end my sentence properly. I speak quickly, as I
pace up and down, to conceal my agitation. I hate your greasy
handkerchiefs--you will stain your copy of _Don Juan_. You are not
listening to me. You are making phrases about Byron. And while you
gesticulate, with your cloak, your cane, I am trying to expose a secret
told to nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to
take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to
cause repulsion in those I love.

'I stand with my back to you fidgeting. No, my hands are now perfectly
still. Precisely, opening a space in the bookcase, I insert _Don Juan_;
there. I would rather be loved, I would rather be famous than follow
perfection through the sand. But am I doomed to cause disgust? Am I a
poet? Take it. The desire which is loaded behind my lips, cold as lead,
fell as a bullet, the thing I aim at shop-girls, women, the pretence,
the vulgarity of life (because I love it) shoots at you as I
throw--catch it--my poem.'

'He has shot like an arrow from the room,' said Bernard. 'He has left me
his poem. O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of
Shakespeare's sonnets! O friendship, how piercing are your darts--there,
there, again there. He looked at me, turning to face me; he gave me his
poem. All mists curl off the roof of my being. That confidence I shall
keep to my dying day. Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he
went over me, his devastating presence--dragging me open, laying bare
the pebbles on the shore of my soul. It was humiliating; I was turned to
small stones. All semblances were rolled up. "You are not Byron; you are
your self." To be contracted by another person into a single being--how
strange.

'How strange to feel the line that is spun from us lengthening its fine
filament across the misty spaces of the intervening world. He is gone; I
stand here, holding his poem. Between us is this line. But now, how
comfortable, how reassuring to feel that alien presence removed, that
scrutiny darkened and hooded over! How grateful to draw the blinds, and
admit no other presence; to feel returning from the dark corners in
which they took refuge, those shabby inmates, those familiars, whom,
with his superior force, he drove into hiding. The mocking, the
observant spirits who, even in the crisis and stab of the moment,
watched on my behalf, now come flocking home again. With their addition,
I am Bernard; I am Byron; I am this, that and the other. They darken the
air and enrich me as of old, with their antics, their comments, and
cloud the fine simplicity of my moment of emotion. For I am more selves
than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to
meet their needs. Yet love is simple.

'Now they have returned, my inmates, my familiars. Now the stab, the
rent in my defences that Neville made with his astonishing fine rapier,
is repaired. I am almost whole now; and see how jubilant I am, bringing
into play all that Neville ignores in me. I feel, as I look from the
window, parting the curtains, "That would give him no pleasure; but it
rejoices me." (We use our friends to measure our own stature.) My scope
embraces what Neville never reaches. They are shouting hunting-songs
over the way. They are celebrating some run with the beagles. The little
boys in caps who always turned at the same moment when the brake went
round the corner are clapping each other on the shoulder and boasting.
But Neville, delicately avoiding interference, stealthily, like a
conspirator, hastens back to his room. I see him sunk in his low chair
gazing at the fire which has assumed for the moment an architectural
solidity. If life, he thinks, could wear that permanence, if life could
have that order--for above all he desires order, and detests my Byronic
untidiness; and so draws his curtain; and bolts his door. His eyes (for
he is in love; the sinister figure of love presided at our encounter)
fill with longing; fill with tears. He snatches the poker and with one
blow destroys that momentary appearance of solidity in the burning
coals. All changes. And youth and love. The boat has floated through the
arch of the willows and is now under the bridge. Percival, Tony, Archie,
or another, will go to India. We shall not meet again. Then he stretches
his hand for his copy-book--a neat volume bound in mottled paper--and
writes feverishly long lines of poetry, in the manner of whomever he
admires most at the moment.

'But I want to linger; to lean from the window; to listen. There again
comes that rollicking chorus. They are now smashing china--that also is
the convention. The chorus, like a torrent jumping rocks, brutally
assaulting old trees, pours with splendid abandonment headlong over
precipices. On they roll; on they gallop; after hounds, after footballs;
they pump up and down attached to oars like sacks of flour. All
divisions are merged--they act like one man. The gusty October wind
blows the uproar in bursts of sound and silence across the court. Now
again they are smashing the china--that is the convention. An old,
unsteady woman carrying a bag trots home under the fire-red windows. She
is half afraid that they will fall on her and tumble her into the
gutter. Yet she pauses as if to warm her knobbed, her rheumaticky hands
at the bonfire which flares away with streams of sparks and bits of
blown paper. The old woman pauses against the lit window. A contrast.
That I see and Neville does not see; that I feel and Neville does not
feel. Hence he will reach perfection, and I shall fail and shall leave
nothing behind me but imperfect phrases littered with sand.

'I think of Louis now. What malevolent yet searching lights would Louis
throw upon this dwindling autumn evening, upon this china-smashing and
trolling of hunting-songs, upon Neville, Byron and our life here? His
thin lips are somewhat pursed; his cheeks are pale; he pores in an
office over some obscure commercial document. "My father, a banker at
Brisbane"--being ashamed of him he always talks of him--failed. So he
sits in an office, Louis the best scholar in the school. But I, seeking
contrasts, often feel his eye on us, his laughing eye, his wild eye,
adding us up like insignificant items in some grand total which he is
for ever pursuing in his office. And one day, taking a fine pen and
dipping it in red ink, the addition will be complete; our total will be
known; but it will not be enough.

'Bang! They have thrown a chair now against the wall. We are damned
then. My case is dubious too. Am I not indulging in unwarranted
emotions? Yes, as I lean out of the window and drop my cigarette so that
it twirls lightly to the ground, I feel Louis watching even my
cigarette. And Louis says, "That means something. But what?"'

'People go on passing,' said Louis. 'They pass the window of this
eating-shop incessantly. Motor-cars, vans, motor-omnibuses; and again
motor-omnibuses, vans, motor-cars--they pass the window. In the
background I perceive shops and houses; also the grey spires of a city
church. In the foreground are glass shelves set with plates of buns and
ham sandwiches. All is somewhat obscured by steam from a tea-urn. A
meaty, vapourish smell of beef and mutton, sausages and mash, hangs down
like a damp net in the middle of the eating-house. I prop my book
against a bottle of Worcester sauce and try to look like the rest.

'Yet I cannot. (They go on passing, they go on passing in disorderly
procession.) I cannot read my book, or order my beef, with conviction. I
repeat, "I am an average Englishman; I am an average clerk," yet I look
at the little men at the next table to be sure that I do what they do.
Supple-faced, with rippling skins, that are always twitching with the
multiplicity of their sensations, prehensile like monkeys, greased to
this particular moment, they are discussing with all the right gestures
the sale of a piano. It blocks up the hall; so he would take a Tenner.
People go on passing; they go on passing against the spires of the
church and the plates of ham sandwiches. The streamers of my
consciousness waver out and are perpetually torn and distressed by their
disorder. I cannot therefore concentrate on my dinner. "I would take a
tenner. The case is handsome; but it blocks up the hall." They dive and
plunge like guillemots whose feathers are slippery with oil. All
excesses beyond that norm are vanity. That is the mean; that is the
average. Meanwhile the hats bob up and down; the door perpetually shuts
and opens. I am conscious of flux, of disorder; of annihilation and
despair. If this is all, this is worthless. Yet I feel, too, the rhythm
of the eating-house. It is like a waltz tune, eddying in and out, round
and round. The waitresses, balancing trays, swing in and out, round and
round, dealing plates of greens, of apricots and custard, dealing them
at the right time, to the right customers. The average men, including
her rhythm in their rhythm ("I would take a tenner; for it blocks up the
hall") take their greens, take their apricots and custard. Where then is
the break in this continuity? What the fissure through which one sees
disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the
central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract;
and then expand again. Yet I am not included. If I speak, imitating
their accent, they prick their ears, waiting for me to speak again, in
order that they may place me--if I come from Canada or Australia, I, who
desire above all things to be taken to the arms with love, am alien,
external. I, who would wish to feel close over me the protective waves
of the ordinary, catch with the tail of my eye some far horizon; am
aware of hats bobbing up and down in perpetual disorder. To me is
addressed the plaint of the wandering and distracted spirit (a woman
with bad teeth falters at the counter), "Bring us back to the fold, we
who pass so disjectedly, bobbing up and down, past windows with plates
of ham sandwiches in the foreground." Yes; I will reduce you to order.

'I will read in the book that is propped against the bottle of Worcester
sauce. It contains some forged rings, some perfect statements, a few
words, but poetry. You, all of you, ignore it. What the dead poet said,
you have forgotten. And I cannot translate it to you so that its binding
power ropes you in, and makes it clear to you that you are aimless; and
the rhythm is cheap and worthless; and so remove that degradation which,
if you are unaware of your aimlessness, pervades you, making you senile,
even while you are young. To translate that poem so that it is easily
read is to be my endeavour. I, the companion of Plato, of Virgil, will
knock at the grained oak door. I oppose to what is passing this ramrod
of beaten steel. I will not submit to this aimless passing of billycock
hats and Homburg hats and all the plumed and variegated head-dresses of
women. (Susan, whom I respect, would wear a plain straw hat on a
summer's day.) And the grinding and the steam that runs in unequal drops
down the window pane; and the stopping and the starting with a jerk of
motor-omnibuses; and the hesitations at counters; and the words that
trail drearily without human meaning; I will reduce you to order.

'My roots go down through veins of lead and silver, through damp, marshy
places that exhale odours, to a knot made of oak roots bound together in
the centre. Sealed and blind with earth stopping my ears, I have yet
heard rumours of wars; and the nightingale; have felt the hurrying of
many troops of men flocking hither and thither in quest of civilization
like flocks of birds migrating seeking the summer; I have seen women
carrying red pitchers to the banks of the Nile. I woke in a garden, with
a blow on the nape of my neck, a hot kiss, Jinny's; remembering all this
as one remembers confused cries and toppling pillars and shafts of red
and black in some nocturnal conflagration. I am for ever sleeping and
waking. Now I sleep; now I wake. I see the gleaming tea-urn; the glass
cases full of pale-yellow sandwiches; the men in round coats perched on
stools at the counter; and also behind them, eternity. It is a stigma
burnt on my quivering flesh by a cowled man with a red-hot iron. I see
this eating-shop against the packed and fluttering birds' wings, many
feathered, folded, of the past. Hence my pursed lips, my sickly pallor;
my distasteful and uninviting aspect as I turn my face with hatred and
bitterness upon Bernard and Neville, who saunter under yew trees; who
inherit arm-chairs; and draw their curtains close, so that lamplight
falls on their books.

'Susan, I respect; because she sits stitching. She sews under a quiet
lamp in a house where the corn sighs close to the window and gives me
safety. For I am the weakest, the youngest of them all. I am a child
looking at his feet and the little runnels that the stream has made in
the gravel. That is a snail, I say; that is a leaf. I delight in the
snails; I delight in the leaf. I am always the youngest, the most
innocent, the most trustful. You are all protected. I am naked. When the
waitress with the plaited wreaths of hair swings past, she deals you
your apricots and custard unhesitatingly, like a sister. You are her
brothers. But when I get up, brushing the crumbs from my waistcoat, I
slip too large a tip, a shilling, under the edge of my plate, so that
she may not find it till I am gone, and her scorn, as she picks it up
with laughter, may not strike on me till I am past the swing-doors.'

*

'Now the wind lifts the blind,' said Susan, 'jars, bowls, matting and
the shabby arm-chair with the hole in it are now become distinct. The
usual faded ribbons sprinkle the wall-paper. The bird chorus is over,
only one bird now sings close to the bedroom window. I will pull on my
stockings and go quietly past the bedroom doors, and down through the
kitchen, out through the garden past the greenhouse into the field. It
is still early morning. The mist is on the marshes. The day is stark and
stiff as a linen shroud. But it will soften; it will warm. At this hour,
this still early hour, I think I am the field, I am the barn, I am the
trees; mine are the flocks of birds, and this young hare who leaps, at
the last moment when I step almost on him. Mine is the heron that
stretches its vast wings lazily; and the cow that creaks as it pushes
one foot before another munching; and the wild, swooping swallow; and
the faint red in the sky; and the green when the red fades; the silence
and the bell; the call of the man fetching cart-horses from the
fields--all are mine.

'I cannot be divided, or kept apart. I was sent to school; I was sent to
Switzerland to finish my education. I hate linoleum; I hate fir trees
and mountains. Let me now fling myself on this flat ground under a pale
sky where the clouds pace slowly. The cart grows gradually larger as it
comes along the road. The sheep gather in the middle of the field. The
birds gather in the middle of the road--they need not fly yet. The wood
smoke rises. The starkness of the dawn is going out of it. Now the day
stirs. Colour returns. The day waves yellow with all its crops. The
earth hangs heavy beneath me.

'But who am I, who lean on this gate and watch my setter nose in a
circle? I think sometimes (I am not twenty yet) I am not a woman, but
the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I
think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. I
cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people. Yet
now, leaning here till the gate prints my arm, I feel the weight that
has formed itself in my side. Something has formed, at school, in
Switzerland, some hard thing. Not sighs and laughter; not circling and
ingenious phrases; not Rhoda's strange communications when she looks
past us, over our shoulders; nor Jinny's pirouetting, all of a piece,
limbs and body. What I give is fell. I cannot float gently, mixing with
other people. I like best the stare of shepherds met in the road; the
stare of gipsy women beside a cart in a ditch suckling their children as
I shall suckle my children. For soon in the hot midday when the bees hum
round the hollyhocks my lover will come. He will stand under the cedar
tree. To his one word I shall answer my one word. What has formed in me
I shall give him. I shall have children; I shall have maids in aprons;
men with pitchforks; a kitchen where they bring the ailing lambs to warm
in baskets, where the hams hang and the onions glisten. I shall be like
my mother, silent in a blue apron locking up the cupboards.

'Now I am hungry. I will call my setter. I think of crusts and bread and
butter and white plates in a sunny room. I will go back across the
fields. I will walk along this grass path with strong, even strides, now
swerving to avoid the puddle, now leaping lightly to a clump. Beads of
wet form on my rough skirt; my shoes become supple and dark. The
stiffness has gone from the day; it is shaded with grey, green and
umber. The birds no longer settle on the high road.

'I return, like a cat or fox returning, whose fur is grey with rime,
whose pads are hardened by the coarse earth. I push through the
cabbages, making their leaves squeak and the drops spill. I sit waiting
for my father's footsteps as he shuffles down the passage pinching some
herb between his fingers. I pour out cup after cup while the unopened
flowers hold themselves erect on the table among the pots of jam, the
loaves and the butter. We are silent.

'I go then to the cupboard, and take the damp bags of rich sultanas; I
lift the heavy flour on to the clean scrubbed kitchen table. I knead; I
stretch; I pull, plunging my hands in the warm inwards of the dough. I
let the cold water stream fanwise through my fingers. The fire roars;
the flies buzz in a circle. All my currants and rices, the silver bags
and the blue bags, are locked again in the cupboard. The meat is stood
in the oven; the bread rises in a soft dome under the clean towel. I
walk in the afternoon down to the river. All the world is breeding. The
flies are going from grass to grass. The flowers are thick with pollen.
The swans ride the stream in order. The clouds, warm now, sun-spotted,
sweep over the hills, leaving gold in the water, and gold on the necks
of the swans. Pushing one foot before the other, the cows munch their
way across the field. I feel through the grass for the white-domed
mushroom; and break its stalk and pick the purple orchid that grows
beside it and lay the orchid by the mushroom with the earth at its root,
and so home to make the kettle boil for my father among the just
reddened roses on the tea-table.'

'But evening comes and the lamps are lit. And when evening comes and the
lamps are lit they make a yellow fire in the ivy. I sit with my sewing
by the table. I think of Jinny; of Rhoda; and hear the rattle of wheels
on the pavement as the farm horses plod home; I hear traffic roaring in
the evening wind. I look at the quivering leaves in the dark garden and
think "They dance in London. Jinny kisses Louis."'

'How strange,' said Jinny, 'that people should sleep, that people should
put out the lights and go upstairs. They have taken off their dresses,
they have put on white night-gowns. There are no lights in any of these
houses. There is a line of chimney-pots against the sky; and a street
lamp or two burning, as lamps burn when nobody needs them. The only
people in the streets are poor people hurrying. There is no one coming
or going in this street; the day is over. A few policemen stand at the
corners. Yet night is beginning. I feel myself shining in the dark. Silk
is on my knee. My silk legs rub smoothly together. The stones of a
necklace lie cold on my throat. My feet feel the pinch of shoes. I sit
bolt upright so that my hair may not touch the back of the seat. I am
arrayed, I am prepared. This is the momentary pause; the dark moment.
The fiddlers have lifted their bows.

'Now the car slides to a stop. A strip of pavement is lighted. The door
is opening and shutting. People are arriving; they do not speak; they
hasten in. There is the swishing sound of cloaks falling in the hall.
This is the prelude, this is the beginning. I glance, I peep, I powder.
All is exact, prepared. My hair is swept in one curve. My lips are
precisely red. I am ready to join men and women on the stairs, my peers.
I pass them, exposed to their gaze, as they are to mine. Like lightning
we look but do not soften or show signs of recognition. Our bodies
communicate. This is my calling. This is my world. All is decided and
ready; the servants, standing here, and again here, take my name, my
fresh, my unknown name, and toss it before me. I enter.

'Here are gilt chairs in the empty, the expectant rooms, and flowers,
stiller, statelier, than flowers that grow, spread green, spread white,
against the walls. And on one small table is one bound book. This is
what I have dreamt; this is what I have foretold. I am native here. I
tread naturally on thick carpets. I slide easily on smooth-polished
floors, I now begin to unfurl, in this scent, in this radiance, as a
fern when its curled leaves unfurl. I stop. I take stock of this world.
I look among the groups of unknown people. Among the lustrous green,
pink, pearl-grey women stand upright the bodies of men. They are black
and white; they are grooved beneath their clothes with deep rills. I
feel again the reflection in the window of the tunnel; it moves. The
black-and-white figures of unknown men look at me as I lean forward; as
I turn aside to look at a picture, they turn too. Their hands go
fluttering to their ties. They touch their waistcoats, their
pocket-handkerchiefs. They are very young. They are anxious to make a
good impression. I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am
arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow. All
gold, flowing that way, I say to this one, "Come." Rippling black, I say
to that one, "No." One breaks off from his station under the glass
cabinet. He approaches. He makes towards me. This is the most exciting
moment I have ever known. I flutter. I ripple. I stream like a plant in
the river, flowing this way, flowing that way, but rooted, so that he
may come to me. "Come," I say, "come." Pale, with dark hair, the one who
is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and
capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here; he stands
at my side.

'Now with a little jerk, like a limpet broken from a rock, I am broken
off: I fall with him; I am carried off. We yield to this slow flood. We
go in and out of this hesitating music. Rocks break the current of the
dance; it jars, it shivers. In and out, we are swept now into this large
figure; it holds us together; we cannot step outside its sinuous, its
hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls. Our bodies, his
hard, mine flowing, are pressed together within its body; it holds us
together; and then lengthening out, in smooth, in sinuous folds, rolls
us between it, on and on. Suddenly the music breaks. My blood runs on
but my body stands still. The room reels past my eyes. It stops.

'Come, then, let us wander, whirling to the gilt chairs. The body is
stronger than I thought. I am dizzier than I supposed. I do not care for
anything in the world. I do not care for anybody save this man whose
name I do not know. Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely
sitting together here, I in my satin, he in black and white? My peers
may look at me now. I look straight back at you, men and women. I am one
of you. This is my world. Now I take this thin-stemmed glass and sip.
Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I
drink. Scent and flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a
fiery, to a yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry
thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This
is rapture; this is relief. The bar at the back of my throat lowers
itself. Words crowd and cluster and push forth one on top of another. It
does not matter which. They jostle and mount on each other's shoulders.
The single and the solitary mate, tumble and become many. It does not
matter what I say. Crowding, like a fluttering bird, one sentence
crosses the empty space between us. It settles on his lips. I fill my
glass again. I drink. The veils drop between us. I am admitted to the
warmth and privacy of another soul. We are together, high up, on some
Alpine pass. He stands melancholy on the crest of the road. I stoop. I
pick a blue flower and fix it, standing on tiptoe to reach him, in his
coat. There! That is my moment of ecstasy. Now it is over.

'Now slackness and indifference invade us. Other people brush past. We
have lost consciousness of our bodies uniting under the table. I also
like fair-haired men with blue eyes. The door opens. The door goes on
opening. Now I think, next time it opens the whole of my life will be
changed. Who comes? But it is only a servant, bringing glasses. That is
an old man--I should be a child with him. That is a great lady--with her
I should dissemble. There are girls of my own age, for whom I feel the
drawn swords of an honourable antagonism. For these are my peers. I am a
native of this world. Here is my risk, here is my adventure. The door
opens. O come, I say to this one, rippling gold from head to heels.
"Come," and he comes towards me.'

'I shall edge behind them,' said Rhoda, 'as if I saw someone I know. But
I know no one. I shall twitch the curtain and look at the moon. Draughts
of oblivion shall quench my agitation. The door opens; the tiger leaps.
The door opens; terror rushes in; terror upon terror, pursuing me. Let
me visit furtively the treasures I have laid apart. Pools lie on the
other side of the world reflecting marble columns. The swallow dips her
wing in dark pools. But here the door opens and people come; they come
towards me. Throwing faint smiles to mask their cruelty, their
indifference, they seize me. The swallow dips her wings; the moon rides
through blue seas alone. I must take his hand; I must answer. But what
answer shall I give? I am thrust back to stand burning in this clumsy,
this ill-fitting body, to receive the shafts of his indifference and his
scorn, I who long for marble columns and pools on the other side of the
world where the swallow dips her wings.

'Night has wheeled a little farther over the chimney-pots. I see out of
the window over his shoulder some unembarrassed cat, not drowned in
light, not trapped in silk, free to pause, to stretch, and to move
again. I hate all details of the individual life. But I am fixed here to
listen. An immense pressure is on me. I cannot move without dislodging
the weight of centuries. A million arrows pierce me. Scorn and ridicule
pierce me. I, who could beat my breast against the storm and let the
hail choke me joyfully, am pinned down here; am exposed. The tiger
leaps. Tongues with their whips are upon me. Mobile, incessant, they
flicker over me. I must prevaricate and fence them off with lies. What
amulet is there against this disaster? What face can I summon to lay
cool upon this heat? I think of names on boxes; of mothers from whose
wide knees skirts descend; of glades where the many-backed steep hills
come down. Hide me, I cry, protect me, for I am the youngest, the most
naked of you all. Jinny rides like a gull on the wave, dealing her looks
adroitly here and there, saying this, saying that, with truth. But I
lie; I prevaricate.

'Alone, I rock my basins; I am mistress of my fleet of ships. But here,
twisting the tassels of this brocaded curtain in my hostess's window, I
am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one. What then is the
knowledge that Jinny has as she dances; the assurance that Susan has as,
stooping quietly beneath the lamplight, she draws the white cotton
through the eye of her needle? They say, Yes; they say, No; they bring
their fists down with a bang on the table. But I doubt; I tremble; I see
the wild thorn tree shake its shadow in the desert.

'Now I will walk, as if I had an end in view, across the room, to the
balcony under the awning. I see the sky, softly feathered with its
sudden effulgence of moon. I also see the railings of the square, and
two people without faces, leaning like statues against the sky. There
is, then, a world immune from change. When I have passed through this
drawing-room flickering with tongues that cut me like knives, making me
stammer, making me lie, I find faces rid of features, robed in beauty.
The lovers crouch under the plane tree. The policeman stands sentinel at
the corner. A man passes. There is, then, a world immune from change.
But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire,
still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the
leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually
contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet
twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to
be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching
faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a
ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam
that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I
am also a girl, here in this room.'

****

_The sun, risen, no longer couched on a green mattress darting a fitful
glance through watery jewels, bared its face and looked straight over
the waves. They fell with a regular thud. They fell with the concussion
of horses' hooves on the turf. Their spray rose like the tossing of
lances and assegais over the riders' heads. They swept the beach with
steel blue and diamond-tipped water. They drew in and out with the
energy, the muscularity, of an engine which sweeps its force out and in
again. The sun fell on cornfields and woods. Rivers became blue and
many-plaited, lawns that sloped down to the water's edge became green as
birds' feathers softly ruffling their plumes. The hills, curved and
controlled, seemed bound back by thongs, as a limb is laced by muscles;
and the woods which bristled proudly on their flanks were like the curt,
clipped mane on the neck of a horse._

_In the garden where the trees stood thick over flower-beds, ponds, and
greenhouses the birds sang in the hot sunshine, each alone. One sang
under the bedroom window; another on the topmost twig of the lilac bush;
another on the edge of the wall. Each sang stridently, with passion,
with vehemence, as if to let the song burst out of it, no matter if it
shattered the song of another bird with harsh discord. Their round eyes
bulged with brightness; their claws gripped the twig or rail. They sang,
exposed without shelter, to the air and the sun, beautiful in their new
plumage, shell-veined or brightly mailed, here barred with soft blues,
here splashed with gold, or striped with one bright feather. They sang
as if the song were urged out of them by the pressure of the morning.
They sprang as if the edge of being were sharpened and must cut, must
split the softness of the blue-green light, the dampness of the wet
earth; the fumes and steams of the greasy kitchen vapour; the hot breath
of mutton and beef; the richness of pastry and fruit; the damp shreds
and peelings thrown from the kitchen bucket, from which a slow steam
oozed on the rubbish heap. On all the sodden, the damp-spotted, the
curled with wetness, they descended, dry-beaked, ruthless, abrupt. They
swooped suddenly from the lilac bough or the fence. They spied a snail
and tapped the shell against a stone. They tapped furiously,
methodically, until the shell broke and something slimy oozed from the
crack. They swept and soared sharply in flights high into the air,
twittering short, sharp notes, and perched in the upper branches of some
tree, and looked down upon leaves and spires beneath, and the country
white with blossom, flowing with grass, and the sea which beat like a
drum that raises a regiment of plumed and turbaned soldiers. Now and
again their songs ran together in swift scales like the interlacings of
a mountain stream whose waters, meeting, foam and then mix, and hasten
quicker and quicker down the same channel, brushing the same broad
leaves. But there is a rock; they sever._

_The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light
touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a
white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice. Suddenly tumblers
revealed themselves upheld by streaks of light. Tables and chairs rose
to the surface as if they had been sunk under water and rose, filmed
with red, orange, purple like the bloom on the skin of ripe fruit. The
veins on the glaze of the china, the grain of the wood, the fibres of
the matting became more and more finely engraved. Everything was without
shadow. A jar was so green that the eye seemed sucked up through a
funnel by its intensity and stuck to it like a limpet. Then shapes took
on mass and edge. Here was the boss of a chair; here the bulk of a
cupboard. And as the light increased, flocks of shadow were driven
before it and conglomerated and hung in many-pleated folds in the
background._

****

'How fair, how strange,' said Bernard, 'glittering, many-pointed and
many-domed London lies before me under mist. Guarded by gasometers, by
factory chimneys, she lies sleeping as we approach. She folds the
ant-heap to her breast. All cries, all clamour, are softly enveloped in
silence. Not Rome herself looks more majestic. But we are aimed at her.
Already her maternal somnolence is uneasy. Ridges fledged with houses
rise from the mist. Factories, cathedrals, glass domes, institutions and
theatres erect themselves. The early train from the north is hurled at
her like a missile. We draw a curtain as we pass. Blank expectant faces
stare at us as we rattle and flash through stations. Men clutch their
newspapers a little tighter, as our wind sweeps them, envisaging death.
But we roar on. We are about to explode in the flanks of the city like a
shell in the side of some ponderous, maternal, majestic animal. She hums
and murmurs; she awaits us.

'Meanwhile as I stand looking from the train window, I feel strangely,
persuasively, that because of my great happiness (being engaged to be
married) I am become part of this speed, this missile hurled at the
city. I am numbed to tolerance and acquiescence. My dear sir, I could
say, why do you fidget, taking down your suitcase and pressing into it
the cap that you have worn all night? Nothing we can do will avail. Over
us all broods a splendid unanimity. We are enlarged and solemnized and
brushed into uniformity as with the grey wing of some enormous goose (it
is a fine but colourless morning) because we have only one desire--to
arrive at the station. I do not want the train to stop with a thud. I do
not want the connexion which has bound us together sitting opposite each
other all night long to be broken. I do not want to feel that hate and
rivalry have resumed their sway; and different desires. Our community in
the rushing train, sitting together with only one wish to arrive at
Euston, was very welcome. But behold! It is over. We have attained our
desire. We have drawn up at the platform. Hurry and confusion and the
wish to be first through the gate into the lift assert themselves. But I
do not wish to be first through the gate, to assume the burden of
individual life. I, who have been since Monday, when she accepted me,
charged in every nerve with a sense of identity, who could not see a
tooth-brush in a glass without saying, "_My_ tooth-brush," now wish to
unclasp my hands and let fall my possessions, and merely stand here in
the street, taking no part, watching the omnibuses, without desire;
without envy; with what would be boundless curiosity about human destiny
if there were any longer an edge to my mind. But it has none. I have
arrived; am accepted. I ask nothing.

'Having dropped off satisfied like a child from the breast, I am at
liberty now to sink down, deep, into what passes, this omnipresent,
general life. (How much, let me note, depends upon trousers; the
intelligent head is entirely handicapped by shabby trousers.) One
observes curious hesitations at the door of the lift. This way, that
way, the other? Then individuality asserts itself. They are off. They
are all impelled by some necessity. Some miserable affair of keeping an
appointment, of buying a hat, severs these beautiful human beings once
so united. For myself, I have no aim. I have no ambition. I will let
myself be carried on by the general impulse. The surface of my mind
slips along like a pale-grey stream reflecting what passes. I cannot
remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general
opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a
kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops
me, here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then
again, indifference descends. The roar of the traffic, the passage of
undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams;
rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And, what is
this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself
caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar--forest trees or the
roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its heel;
our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are
in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and
beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.

'It is, however, true that my dreaming, my tentative advance like one
carried beneath the surface of a stream, is interrupted, torn, pricked
and plucked at by sensations, spontaneous and irrelevant, of curiosity,
greed, desire, irresponsible as in sleep. (I covet that bag--etc.) No,
but I wish to go under; to visit the profound depths; once in a while to
exercise my prerogative not always to act, but to explore; to hear
vague, ancestral sounds of boughs creaking, of mammoths; to indulge
impossible desires to embrace the whole world with the arms of
understanding--impossible to those who act. Am I not, as I walk,
trembling with strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy, which,
unmoored as I am from a private being, bid me embrace these engrossed
flocks; these starers and trippers; these errand-boys and furtive and
fugitive girls who, ignoring their doom, look in at shop-windows? But I
am aware of our ephemeral passage.

'It is, however, true that I cannot deny a sense that life for me is now
mysteriously prolonged. Is it that I may have children, may cast a fling
of seed wider, beyond this generation, this doom-encircled population,
shuffling each other in endless competition along the street? My
daughters shall come here, in other summers; my sons shall turn new
fields. Hence we are not raindrops, soon dried by the wind; we make
gardens blow and forests roar; we come up differently, for ever and
ever. This, then, serves to explain my confidence, my central stability,
otherwise so monstrously absurd as I breast the stream of this crowded
thoroughfare, making always a passage for myself between people's
bodies, taking advantage of safe moments to cross. It is not vanity; for
I am emptied of ambition; I do not remember my special gifts, or
idiosyncrasy, or the marks I bear on my person; eyes, nose or mouth. I
am not, at this moment, myself.

'Yet behold, it returns. One cannot extinguish that persistent smell. It
steals in through some crack in the structure--one's identity. I am not
part of the street--no, I observe the street. One splits off, therefore.
For instance, up that back street a girl stands waiting; for whom? A
romantic story. On the wall of that shop is fixed a small crane, and for
what reason, I ask, was that crane fixed there? and invent a purple lady
swelling, circumambient, hauled from a barouche landau by a perspiring
husband sometime in the sixties. A grotesque story. That is, I am a
natural coiner of words, a blower of bubbles through one thing and
another. And, striking off these observations spontaneously, I elaborate
myself; differentiate myself and, listening to the voice that says as I
stroll past, "Look! Take note of that!" I conceive myself called upon to
provide, some winter's night, a meaning for all my observations--a line
that runs from one to another, a summing up that completes. But
soliloquies in back streets soon pall. I need an audience. That is my
downfall. That always ruffles the edge of the final statement and
prevents it from forming. I cannot seat myself in some sordid
eating-house and order the same glass day after day and imbue myself
entirely in one fluid--this life. I make my phrase and run off with it
to some furnished room where it will be lit by dozens of candles. I need
eyes on me to draw out these frills and furbelows. To be myself (I note)
I need the illumination of other people's eyes, and therefore cannot be
entirely sure what is my self. The authentics, like Louis, like Rhoda,
exist most completely in solitude. They resent illumination,
reduplication. They toss their pictures once painted face downward on
the field. On Louis's words the ice is packed thick. His words issue
pressed, condensed, enduring.

'I wish then, after this somnolence to sparkle, many-faceted under the
light of my friends' faces. I have been traversing the sunless territory
of non-identity. A strange land. I have heard in my moment of
appeasement, in my moment of obliterating satisfaction, the sigh, as it
goes in, comes out, of the tide that draws beyond this circle of bright
light, this drumming of insensate fury. I have had one moment of
enormous peace. This perhaps is happiness. Now I am drawn back by
pricking sensations; by curiosity, greed (I am hungry) and the
irresistible desire to be myself. I think of people to whom I could say
things: Louis, Neville, Susan, Jinny and Rhoda. With them I am
many-sided. They retrieve me from darkness. We shall meet to-night,
thank Heaven. Thank Heaven, I need not be alone. We shall dine together.
We shall say good-bye to Percival, who goes to India. The hour is still
distant, but I feel already those harbingers, those outriders, figures
of one's friends in absence. I see Louis, stone-carved, sculpturesque;
Neville, scissor-cutting, exact; Susan with eyes like lumps of crystal;
Jinny dancing like a flame, febrile, hot, over dry earth; and Rhoda the
nymph of the fountain always wet. These are fantastic pictures--these
are figments, these visions of friends in absence, grotesque, dropsical,
vanishing at the first touch of the toe of a real boot. Yet they drum me
alive. They brush off these vapours. I begin to be impatient of
solitude--to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.
Oh, to toss them off and be active! Anybody will do. I am not
fastidious. The crossing-sweeper will do; the postman; the waiter in
this French restaurant; better still the genial proprietor, whose
geniality seems reserved for oneself. He mixes the salad with his own
hands for some privileged guest. Which is the privileged guest, I ask,
and why? And what is he saying to the lady in ear-rings; is she a friend
or a customer? I feel at once, as I sit down at a table, the delicious
jostle of confusion, of uncertainty, of possibility, of speculation.
Images breed instantly. I am embarrassed by my own fertility. I could
describe every chair, table, luncher here copiously, freely. My mind
hums hither and thither with its veil of words for everything. To speak,
about wine even to the waiter, is to bring about an explosion. Up goes
the rocket. Its golden grains fall, fertilizing, upon the rich soil of
my imagination. The entirely unexpected nature of this explosion--that
is the joy of intercourse. I mixed with an unknown Italian waiter--what
am I? There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning
there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a
balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All
is experiment and adventure. We are for ever mixing ourselves with
unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not. But as I put down my
glass I remember: I am engaged to be married. I am to dine with my
friends to-night. I am Bernard, myself.'

'It is now five minutes to eight,' said Neville. 'I have come early. I
have taken my place at the table ten minutes before the time in order to
taste every moment of anticipation; to see the door open and to say, "Is
it Percival? No; it is not Percival." There is a morbid pleasure in
saying: "No, it is not Percival." I have seen the door open and shut
twenty times already; each time the suspense sharpens. This is the place
to which he is coming. This is the table at which he will sit. Here,
incredible as it seems, will be his actual body. This table, these
chairs, this metal vase with its three red flowers, are about to undergo
an extraordinary transformation. Already the room, with its swing-doors,
its tables heaped with fruit, with cold joints, wears the wavering,
unreal appearance of a place where one waits expecting something to
happen. Things quiver as if not yet in being. The blankness of the white
table-cloth glares. The hostility, the indifference of other people
dining here is oppressive. We look at each other; see that we do not
know each other, stare, and go off. Such looks are lashes. I feel the
whole cruelty and indifference of the world in them. If he should not
come I could not bear it. I should go. Yet somebody must be seeing him
now. He must be in some cab; he must be passing some shop. And every
moment he seems to pump into this room this prickly light, this
intensity of being, so that things have lost their normal uses--this
knife-blade is only a flash of light, not a thing to cut with. The
normal is abolished.

'The door opens, but he does not come. That is Louis hesitating there.
That is his strange mixture of assurance and timidity. He looks at
himself in the looking-glass as he comes in; he touches his hair; he is
dissatisfied with his appearance. He says, "I am a Duke--the last of an
ancient race." He is acrid, suspicious, domineering, difficult (I am
comparing him with Percival). At the same time he is formidable, for
there is laughter in his eyes. He has seen me. Here he is.'

'There is Susan,' said Louis. 'She does not see us. She has not dressed,
because she despises the futility of London. She stands for a moment at
the swing-door, looking about her like a creature dazed by the light of
a lamp. Now she moves. She has the stealthy yet assured movements (even
among tables and chairs) of a wild beast. She seems to find her way by
instinct in and out among these little tables, touching no one,
disregarding waiters, yet comes straight to our table in the corner.
When she sees us (Neville, and myself) her face assumes a certainty
which is alarming, as if she had what she wanted. To be loved by Susan
would be to be impaled by a bird's sharp beak, to be nailed to a
barnyard door. Yet there are moments when I could wish to be speared by
a beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door, positively, once and for all.

'Rhoda comes now, from nowhere, having slipped in while we were not
looking. She must have made a tortuous course, taking cover now behind a
waiter, now behind some ornamental pillar, so as to put off as long as
possible the shock of recognition, so as to be secure for one more
moment to rock her petals in her basin. We wake her. We torture her. She
dreads us, she despises us, yet comes cringing to our sides because for
all our cruelty there is always some name, some face, which sheds a
radiance which lights up her pavements and makes it possible for her to
replenish her dreams.'

'The door opens, the door goes on opening,' said Neville, 'yet he does
not come.'

'There is Jinny,' said Susan. 'She stands in the door. Everything seems
stayed. The waiter stops. The diners at the table by the door look. She
seems to centre everything; round her tables, lines of doors, windows,
ceilings, ray themselves, like rays round the star in the middle of a
smashed window-pane. She brings things to a point, to order. Now she
sees us, and moves, and all the rays ripple and flow and waver over us,
bringing in new tides of sensation. We change. Louis puts his hand to
his tie. Neville, who sits waiting with agonized intensity, nervously
straightens the forks in front of him. Rhoda sees her with surprise, as
if on some far horizon a fire blazed. And I, though I pile my hand with
damp grass, with wet fields, with the sound of rain on the roof and the
gusts of wind that batter at the house in winter and so protect my soul
against her, feel her derision steal round me, feel her laughter curl
its tongues of fire round me and light up unsparingly my shabby dress,
my square-tipped finger-nails, which I at once hide under the
tablecloth.'

'He has not come,' said Neville. 'The door opens and he does not come.
That is Bernard. As he pulls off his coat he shows, of course, the blue
shirt under his armpits. And then, unlike the rest of us, he comes in
without pushing open a door, without knowing that he comes into a room
full of strangers. He does not look in the glass. His hair is untidy,
but he does not know it. He has no perception that we differ, or that
this table is his goal. He hesitates on his way here. Who is that? he
asks himself, as he half knows a woman in an opera cloak. He half knows
everybody; he knows nobody (I compare him with Percival). But now,
perceiving us, he waves a benevolent salute; he bears down with such
benignity, with such love of mankind (crossed with humour at the
futility of "loving mankind"), that, if it were not for Percival, who
turns all this to vapour, one would feel, as the others already feel:
Now is our festival; now we are together. But without Percival there is
no solidity. We are silhouettes, hollow phantoms moving mistily without
a background.'

'The swing-door goes on opening,' said Rhoda. 'Strangers keep on coming,
people we shall never see again, people who brush us disagreeably with
their familiarity, their indifference, and the sense of a world
continuing without us. We cannot sink down, we cannot forget our faces.
Even I who have no face, who make no difference when I come in (Susan
and Jinny change bodies and faces), flutter unattached, without
anchorage anywhere, unconsolidated, incapable of composing any blankness
or continuity or wall against which these bodies move. It is because of
Neville and his misery. The sharp breath of his misery scatters my
being. Nothing can settle; nothing can subside. Every time the door
opens he looks fixedly at the table--he dare not raise his eyes--then
looks for one second and says "He has not come." But here he is.'

'Now,' said Neville, 'my tree flowers. My heart rises. All oppression is
relieved. All impediment is removed. The reign of chaos is over. He has
imposed order. Knives cut again.'

'Here is Percival,' said Jinny. 'He has not dressed.'

'Here is Percival,' said Bernard, 'smoothing his hair, not from vanity
(he does not look in the glass), but to propitiate the god of decency.
He is conventional; he is a hero. The little boys trooped after him
across the playing-fields. They blew their noses as he blew his nose,
but unsuccessfully, for he is Percival. Now, when he is about to leave
us, to go to India, all these trifles come together. He is a hero. Oh
yes, that is not to be denied, and when he takes his seat by Susan, whom
he loves, the occasion is crowned. We who yelped like jackals biting at
each other's heels now assume the sober and confident air of soldiers in
the presence of their captain. We who have been separated by our youth
(the oldest is not yet twenty-five), who have sung like eager birds each
his own song and tapped with the remorseless and savage egotism of the
young our own snail-shell till it cracked (I am engaged), or perched
solitary outside some bedroom window and sang of love, of fame and other
single experiences so dear to the callow bird with a yellow tuft on its
beak, now come nearer; and shuffling closer on our perch in this
restaurant where everybody's interests are at variance, and the
incessant passage of traffic chafes us with distractions, and the door
opening perpetually its glass cage solicits us with myriad temptations
and offers insults and wounds to our confidence--sitting together here
we love each other and believe in our own endurance.'

'Now let us issue from the darkness of solitude,' said Louis.

'Now let us say, brutally and directly, what is in our minds,' said
Neville. 'Our isolation, our preparation, is over. The furtive days of
secrecy and hiding, the revelations on staircases, moments of terror and
ecstasy.'

'Old Mrs Constable lifted her sponge and warmth poured over us,' said
Bernard. 'We became clothed in this changing, this feeling garment of
flesh.'

'The boot-boy made love to the scullery-maid in the kitchen garden,'
said Susan, 'among the blown out washing.'

'The breath of the wind was like a tiger panting,' said Rhoda.

'The man lay livid with his throat cut in the gutter,' said Neville.
'And going upstairs I could not raise my foot against the immitigable
apple tree with its silver leaves held stiff.'

'The leaf danced in the hedge without anyone to blow it,' said Jinny.

'In the sun-baked corner,' said Louis, 'the petals swam on depths of
green.'

'At Elvedon the gardeners swept and swept with their great brooms, and
the woman sat at a table writing,' said Bernard.

'From these close-furled balls of string we draw now every filament,'
said Louis, 'remembering, when we meet.'

'And then,' said Bernard, 'the cab came to the door, and, pressing our
new bowler hats tightly over our eyes to hide our unmanly tears, we
drove through streets in which even the housemaids looked at us, and our
names painted in white letters on our boxes proclaimed to all the world
that we were going to school with the regulation number of socks and
drawers, on which our mothers for some nights previously had stitched
our initials, in our boxes. A second severance from the body of our
mother.'

'And Miss Lambert, Miss Cutting and Miss Bard,' said Jinny, 'monumental
ladies, white-ruffed, stone-coloured, enigmatic, with amethyst rings
moving like virginal tapers, dim glow-worms over the pages of French,
geography and arithmetic, presided; and there were maps, green baize
boards and rows of shoes on a shelf.'

'Bells rang punctually,' said Susan, 'maids scuffled and giggled. There
was a drawing in of chairs and a drawing out of chairs on the linoleum.
But from one attic there was a blue view, a distant view of a field
unstained by the corruption of this regimented, unreal existence.'

'Down from our head veils fell,' said Rhoda. 'We clasped the flowers
with their green leaves rustling in garlands.'

'We changed, we became unrecognizable,' said Louis. 'Exposed to all
these different lights, what we had in us (for we are all so different)
came intermittently, in violent patches, spaced by blank voids, to the
surface as if some acid had dropped unequally on the plate. I was this,
Neville that, Rhoda different again, and Bernard too.'

'Then canoes slipped through palely tinted willow branches,' said
Neville, 'and Bernard, advancing in his casual way against breadths of
green, against houses of very ancient foundation, tumbled in a heap on
the ground beside me. In an access of emotion--winds are not more
raving, nor lightning more sudden--I took my poem, I flung my poem, I
slammed the door behind me.'

'I, however,' said Louis, 'losing sight of you, sat in my office and
tore the date from the calendar, and announced to the world of
ship-brokers, corn-chandlers and actuaries that Friday the tenth, or
Tuesday the eighteenth, had dawned on the city of London.'

'Then,' said Jinny, 'Rhoda and I, exposed in bright dresses, with a few
precious stones nestling on a cold ring round our throats, bowed, shook
hands and took a sandwich from a plate with a smile.'

'The tiger leapt, and the swallow dipped her wings in dark pools on the
other side of the world,' said Rhoda.

'But here and now we are together,' said Bernard. 'We have come
together, at a particular time to this particular spot. We are drawn
into this communion by some deep, some common emotion. Shall we call it,
conveniently, "love"? Shall we say "love of Percival" because Percival
is going to India?

'No, that is too small, too particular a name. We cannot attach the
width and spread of our feelings to so small a mark. We have come
together (from the north, from the south, from Susan's farm, from
Louis's house of business) to make one thing, not enduring--for, what
endures?--but seen by many eyes simultaneously. There is a red carnation
in that vase. A single flower as we sat here waiting, but now a
seven-sided flower, many-petalled, red, puce, purple-shaded, stiff with
silver-tinted leaves--a whole flower to which every eye brings its own
contribution.'

'After the capricious fires, the abysmal dullness of youth,' said
Neville, 'the light falls upon real objects now. Here are knives and
forks. The world is displayed, and we too, so that we can talk.'

'We differ, it may be too profoundly,' said Louis, 'for explanation. But
let us attempt it. I smoothed my hair when I came in, hoping to look
like the rest of you. But I cannot, for I am single and entire as you
are. I have lived a thousand lives already. Every day I unbury--I dig
up. I find relics of myself in the sand that women made thousands of
years ago, when I heard songs by the Nile and the chained beast
stamping. What you see beside you, this man, thus Louis, is only the
cinders and refuse of something once splendid. I was an Arab prince;
behold my free gestures. I was a great poet in the time of Elizabeth. I
was a Duke at the court of Louis the Fourteenth. I am very vain, very
confident; I have an immeasurable desire that women should sigh in
sympathy. I have eaten no lunch to-day in order that Susan may think me
cadaverous and that Jinny may extend to me the exquisite balm of her
sympathy. But while I admire Susan and Percival, I hate the others,
because it is for them that I do these antics, smoothing my hair,
concealing my accent. I am the little ape who chatters over a nut, and
you are the dowdy women with shiny bags of stale buns; I am also the
caged tiger, and you are the keepers with red-hot bars. That is, I am
fiercer and stronger than you are, yet the apparition that appears above
ground after ages of non-entity will be spent in terror lest you should
laugh at me, in veerings with the wind against the soot storms, in
efforts to make a steel ring of clear poetry that shall connect the
gulls and the women with bad teeth, the church spire and the bobbing
billycock hats as I see them when I take my luncheon and prop my
poet--is it Lucretius?--against a cruet and the gravy-splashed bill of
fare.'

'But you will never hate me,' said Jinny. 'You will never see me, even
across a room full of gilt chairs and ambassadors, without coming to me
across the room to seek my sympathy. When I came in just now everything
stood still in a pattern. Waiters stopped, diners raised their forks and
held them. I had the air of being prepared for what would happen. When I
sat down you put your hands to your ties, you hid them under the table.
But I hide nothing. I am prepared. Every time the doors open I cry
"More!" But my imagination is the bodies. I can imagine nothing beyond
the circle cast by my body. My body goes before me, like a lantern down
a dark lane, bringing one thing after another out of darkness into a
ring of light. I dazzle you; I make you believe that this is all.'

'But when you stand in the door,' said Neville, 'you inflict stillness,
demanding admiration, and that is a great impediment to the freedom of
intercourse. You stand in the door making us notice you. But none of you
saw me approach. I came early; I came quickly and directly, _here_, to
sit by the person whom I love. My life has a rapidity that yours lack. I
am like a hound on the scent. I hunt from dawn to dusk. Nothing, not the
pursuit of perfection through the sand, nor fame, nor money, has meaning
for me. I shall have riches; I shall have fame. But I shall never have
what I want, for I lack bodily grace and the courage that comes with it.
The swiftness of my mind is too strong for my body. I fail before I
reach the end and fall in a heap, damp, perhaps disgusting. I excite
pity in the crises of life, not love. Therefore I suffer horribly. But I
do not suffer, as Louis does, to make myself a spectacle. I have too
fine a sense of fact to allow myself these juggleries, these pretences.
I see everything--except one thing--with complete clarity. That is my
saving. That is what gives my suffering an unceasing excitement. That is
what makes me dictate, even when I am silent. And since I am, in one
respect, deluded, since the person is always changing, though not the
desire, and I do not know in the morning by whom I shall sit at night, I
am never stagnant; I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change.
Pebbles bounce off the mail of my muscular, my extended body. In this
pursuit I shall grow old.'

'If I could believe,' said Rhoda, 'that I should grow old in pursuit and
change, I should be rid of my fear: nothing persists. One moment does
not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps. You did not see
me come. I circled round the chairs to avoid the horror of the spring. I
am afraid of you all. I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps
upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do--I cannot make one
moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and
if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me,
tearing me to pieces. I have no end in view. I do not know how to run
minute to minute and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force
until they make the whole and indivisible mass that you call life.
Because you have an end in view--one person, is it, to sit beside, an
idea is it, your beauty is it? I do not know--your days and hours pass
like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green of forest rides to
a hound running on the scent. But there is no single scent, no single
body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races
over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can,
here on a spike of the mailed sea-holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat.
I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless
corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.

'But since I wish above all things to have lodgment, I pretend, as I go
upstairs lagging behind Jinny and Susan, to have an end in view. I pull
on my stockings as I see them pull on theirs. I wait for you to speak
and then speak like you. I am drawn here across London to a particular
spot, to a particular place, not to see you or you or you, but to light
my fire at the general blaze of you who live wholly, indivisibly and
without caring.'

'When I came into the room to-night,' said Susan, 'I stopped, I peered
about like an animal with its eyes near to the ground. The smell of
carpets and furniture and scent disgusts me. I like to walk through wet
fields alone, or to stop at a gate and watch my setter nose in a circle,
and to ask: Where is the hare? I like to be with people who twist herbs,
and spit into the fire, and shuffle down long passages in slippers like
my father. The only sayings I understand are cries of love, hate, rage
and pain. This talking is undressing an old woman whose dress had seemed
to be part of her, but now, as we talk, she turns pinkish underneath,
and has wrinkled thighs and sagging breasts. When you are silent you are
again beautiful. I shall never have anything but natural happiness. It
will almost content me. I shall go to bed tired. I shall be like a field
bearing crops in rotation; in the summer heat will dance over me; in the
winter I shall be cracked with the cold. But heat and cold will follow
each other naturally without my willing or unwilling. My children will
carry me on; their teething, their crying, their going to school and
coming back will be like the waves of the sea under me. No day will be
without its movement. I shall be lifted higher than any of you on the
backs of the seasons. I shall possess more than Jinny, more than Rhoda,
by the time I die. But on the other hand, where you are various and
dimple a million times to the ideas and laughter of others, I shall be
sullen, storm-tinted and all one purple. I shall be debased and
hide-bound by the bestial and beautiful passion of maternity. I shall
push the fortunes of my children unscrupulously. I shall hate those who
see their faults. I shall lie basely to help them. I shall let them wall
me away from you, from you and from you. Also, I am torn with jealousy.
I hate Jinny because she shows me that my hands are red, my nails
bitten. I love with such ferocity that it kills me when the object of my
love shows by a phrase that he can escape. He escapes, and I am left
clutching at a string that slips in and out among the leaves on the
tree-tops. I do not understand phrases.'

'Had I been born,' said Bernard, 'not knowing that one word follows
another I might have been, who knows, perhaps anything. As it is,
finding sequences everywhere, I cannot bear the pressure of solitude.
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in
darkness--I am nothing. When I am alone I fall into lethargy, and say to
myself dismally as I poke the cinders through the bars of the grate, Mrs
Moffat will come. She will come and sweep it all up. When Louis is alone
he sees with astonishing intensity, and will write some words that may
outlast us all. Rhoda loves to be alone. She fears us because we shatter
the sense of being which is so extreme in solitude--see how she grasps
her fork--her weapon against us. But I only come into existence when the
plumber, or the horse-dealer, or whoever it may be, says something which
sets me alight. Then how lovely the smoke of my phrase is, rising and
falling, flaunting and falling, upon red lobsters and yellow fruit,
wreathing them into one beauty. But observe how meretricious the phrase
is--made up of what evasions and old lies. Thus my character is in part
made of the stimulus which other people provide, and is not mine, as
yours are. There is some fatal streak, some wandering and irregular vein
of silver, weakening it. Hence the fact that used to enrage Neville at
school, that I left him. I went with the boasting boys with little caps
and badges, driving off in big brakes--there are some here to-night,
dining together, correctly dressed, before they go off in perfect
concord to the music hall; I loved them. For they bring me into
existence as certainly as you do. Hence, too, when I am leaving you and
the train is going, you feel that it is not the train that is going, but
I, Bernard, who does not care, who does not feel, who has no ticket, and
has lost perhaps his purse. Susan, staring at the string that slips in
and out among the leaves of the beech trees, cries: "He is gone! He has
escaped me!" For there is nothing to lay hold of. I am made and remade
continually. Different people draw different words from me.

'Thus there is not one person but fifty people whom I want to sit beside
to-night. But I am the only one of you who is at home here without
taking liberties. I am not gross; I am not a snob. If I lie open to the
pressure of society I often succeed with the dexterity of my tongue in
putting something difficult into the currency. See my little toys,
twisted out of nothing in a second, how they entertain. I am no
hoarder--I shall leave only a cupboard of old clothes when I die--and am
almost indifferent to the minor vanities of life which cause Louis so
much torture. But I have sacrificed much. Veined as I am with iron, with
silver and streaks of common mud, I cannot contract into the firm fist
which those clench who do not depend upon stimulus. I am incapable of
the denials, the heroisms of Louis and Rhoda. I shall never succeed,
even in talk, in making a perfect phrase. But I shall have contributed
more to the passing moment than any of you; I shall go into more rooms,
more different rooms, than any of you. But because there is something
that comes from outside and not from within I shall be forgotten; when
my voice is silent you will not remember me, save as the echo of a voice
that once wreathed the fruit into phrases.'

'Look,' said Rhoda; 'listen. Look how the light becomes richer, second
by second, and bloom and ripeness lie everywhere; and our eyes, as they
range round this room with all its tables, seem to push through curtains
of colour, red, orange, umber and queer ambiguous tints, which yield
like veils and close behind them, and one thing melts into another.'

'Yes,' said Jinny, 'our senses have widened. Membranes, webs of nerve
that lay white and limp, have filled and spread themselves and float
round us like filaments, making the air tangible and catching in them
faraway sounds unheard before.'

'The roar of London,' said Louis, 'is round us. Motor-cars, vans,
omnibuses pass and repass continuously. All are merged in one turning
wheel of single sound. All separate sounds--wheels, bells, the cries of
drunkards, of merry-makers--are churned into one sound, steel blue,
circular. Then a siren hoots. At that shores slip away, chimneys flatten
themselves, the ship makes for the open sea.'

'Percival is going,' said Neville. 'We sit here, surrounded, lit up,
many coloured; all things--hands, curtains, knives and forks, other
people dining--run into each other. We are walled in here. But India
lies outside.'

'I see India,' said Bernard. 'I see the low, long shore; I see the
tortuous lanes of stamped mud that lead in and out among ramshackle
pagodas; I see the gilt and crenellated buildings which have an air of
fragility and decay as if they were temporarily run up buildings in some
Oriental exhibition. I see a pair of bullocks who drag a low cart along
the sun-baked road. The cart sways incompetently from side to side. Now
one wheel sticks in the rut, and at once innumerable natives in
loin-cloths swarm round it, chattering excitedly. But they do nothing.
Time seems endless, ambition vain. Over all broods a sense of the
uselessness of human exertion. There are strange sour smells. An old man
in a ditch continues to chew betel and to contemplate his navel. But
now, behold, Percival advances; Percival rides a flea-bitten mare, and
wears a sun-helmet. By applying the standards of the west, by using the
violent language that is natural to him, the bullock-cart is righted in
less than five minutes. The Oriental problem is solved. He rides on; the
multitude cluster round him, regarding him as if he were--what indeed he
is--a God.'

'Unknown, with or without a secret, it does not matter,' said Rhoda, 'he
is like a stone fallen into a pond round which minnows swarm. Like
minnows, we who had been shooting this way, that way, all shot round him
when he came. Like minnows, conscious of the presence of a great stone,
we undulate and eddy contentedly. Comfort steals over us. Gold runs in
our blood. One, two; one, two; the heart beats in serenity, in
confidence, in some trance of well-being, in some rapture of benignity;
and look--the outermost parts of the earth--pale shadows on the utmost
horizon, India for instance, rise into our purview. The world that had
been shrivelled rounds itself; remote provinces are fetched up out of
darkness; we see muddy roads, twisted jungle, swarms of men, and the
vulture that feeds on some bloated carcass as within our scope, part of
our proud and splendid province, since Percival, riding alone on a
flea-bitten mare, advances down a solitary path, has his camp pitched
among desolate trees, and sits alone, looking at the enormous
mountains.'

'It is Percival,' said Louis, 'sitting silent as he sat among the
tickling grasses when the breeze parted the clouds and they formed
again, who makes us aware that these attempts to say, "I am this, I am
that," which we make, coming together, like separated parts of one body
and soul, are false. Something has been left out from fear. Something
has been altered, from vanity. We have tried to accentuate differences.
From the desire to be separate we have laid stress upon our faults, and
what is particular to us. But there is a chain whirling round, round, in
a steel blue circle beneath.'

'It is hate, it is love,' said Susan. 'That is the furious coal-black
stream that makes us dizzy if we look down into it. We stand on a ledge
here, but if we look down we turn giddy.'

'It is love,' said Jinny, 'it is hate, such as Susan feels for me
because I kissed Louis once in the garden; because equipped as I am, I
make her think when I come in, "My hands are red," and hide them. But
our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.'

'Yet these roaring waters,' said Neville, 'upon which we build our crazy
platforms are more stable than the wild, the weak and inconsequent cries
that we utter when, trying to speak, we rise; when we reason and jerk
out these false sayings, "I am this; I am that!" Speech is false.

'But I eat. I gradually lose all knowledge of particulars as I eat. I am
becoming weighed down with food. These delicious mouthfuls of roast
duck, fitly piled with vegetables, following each other in exquisite
rotation of warmth, weight, sweet and bitter, past my palate, down my
gullet, into my stomach, have stabilized my body. I feel quiet, gravity,
control. All is solid now. Instinctively my palate now requires and
anticipates sweetness and lightness, something sugared and evanescent;
and cool wine, fitting glove-like over those finer nerves that seem to
tremble from the roof of my mouth and make it spread (as I drink) into a
domed cavern, green with vine leaves, musk-scented, purple with grapes.
Now I can look steadily into the mill-race that foams beneath. By what
particular name are we to call it? Let Rhoda speak, whose face I see
reflected mistily in the looking-glass opposite; Rhoda, whom I
interrupted when she rocked her petals in a brown basin, asking for the
pocket-knife that Bernard had stolen. Love is not a whirlpool to her.
She is not giddy when she looks down. She looks far away over our heads,
beyond India.'

'Yes, between your shoulders, over your heads, to a landscape,' said
Rhoda, 'to a hollow where the many-backed steep hills come down like
birds' wings folded. There, on the short, firm turf, are bushes, dark
leaved, and against their darkness I see a shape, white, but not of
stone, moving, perhaps alive. But it is not you, it is not you, it is
not you; not Percival, Susan, Jinny, Neville or Louis. When the white
arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; now it is upright--a column;
now a fountain, falling. It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does
not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I
venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and
fill them fuller and fuller with dreams. And for a second even now, even
here, I reach my object and say, "Wander no more. All else is trial and
make-believe. Here is the end." But these pilgrimages, these moments of
departure, start always in your presence, from this table, these lights,
from Percival and Susan, here and now. Always I see the grove over your
heads, between your shoulders, or from a window when I have crossed the
room at a party and stand looking down into the street.'

'But his slippers?' said Neville. 'And his voice downstairs in the hall?
And catching sight of him when he does not see one? One waits and he
does not come. It gets later and later. He has forgotten. He is with
someone else. He is faithless, his love meant nothing. Oh, then the
agony--then the intolerable despair! And then the door opens. He is
here.'

'Rippling gold, I say to him, "Come,"' said Jinny. 'And he comes; he
crosses the room to where I sit, with my dress like a veil billowing
round me on the gilt chair. Our hands touch, our bodies burst into fire.
The chair, the cup, the table--nothing remains unlit. All quivers, all
kindles, all burns clear.'

('Look, Rhoda,' said Louis, 'they have become nocturnal, rapt. Their
eyes are like moth's wings moving so quickly that they do not seem to
move at all.'

'Horns and trumpets,' said Rhoda, 'ring out. Leaves unfold; the stags
blare in the thicket. There is a dancing and a drumming, like the
dancing and the drumming of naked men with assegais.'

'Like the dance of savages,' said Louis, 'round the camp-fire. They are
savage; they are ruthless. They dance in a circle, flapping bladders.
The flames leap over their painted faces, over the leopard skins and the
bleeding limbs which they have torn from the living body.'

'The flames of the festival rise high,' said Rhoda. 'The great
procession passes, flinging green boughs and flowering branches. Their
horns spill blue smoke; their skins are dappled red and yellow in the
torchlight. They throw violets. They deck the beloved with garlands and
with laurel leaves, there on the ring of turf where the steep-backed
hills come down. The procession passes. And while it passes, Louis, we
are aware of downfalling, we forebode decay. The shadow slants. We who
are conspirators, withdrawn together to lean over some cold urn, note
how the purple flame flows downwards.'

'Death is woven in with the violets,' said Louis. 'Death and again
death.')

'How proudly we sit here,' said Jinny, 'we who are not yet twenty-five!
Outside the trees flower; outside the women linger; outside the cabs
swerve and sweep. Emerged from the tentative ways, the obscurities and
dazzle of youth, we look straight in front of us, ready for what may
come (the door opens, the door keeps on opening). All is real; all is
firm without shadow or illusion. Beauty rides our brows. There is mine,
there is Susan's. Our flesh is firm and cool. Our differences are
clear-cut as the shadows of rocks in full sunlight. Beside us lie crisp
rolls, yellow-glazed and hard; the table-cloth is white; and our hands
lie half curled, ready to contract. Days and days are to come; winter
days, summer days; we have scarcely broken into our hoard. Now the fruit
is swollen beneath the leaf. The room is golden, and I say to him,
"Come."'

'He has red ears,' said Louis, 'and the smell of meat hangs down in a
damp net while the city clerks take snacks at the lunch bar.'

'With infinite time before us,' said Neville, 'we ask what shall we do?
Shall we loiter down Bond Street, looking here and there, and buying
perhaps a fountain-pen because it is green, or asking how much is the
ring with the blue stone? Or shall we sit indoors and watch the coals
turn crimson? Shall we stretch our hands for books and read here a
passage and there a passage? Shall we shout with laughter for no reason?
Shall we push through flowering meadows and make daisy chains? Shall we
find out when the next train starts for the Hebrides and engage a
reserved compartment? All is to come.'

'For you,' said Bernard, 'but yesterday I walked bang into a pillar-box.
Yesterday I became engaged.'

'How strange,' said Susan, 'the little heaps of sugar look by the side
of our plates. Also the mottled peelings of pears, and the plush rims to
the looking-glasses. I had not seen them before. Everything is now set;
everything is fixed. Bernard is engaged. Something irrevocable has
happened. A circle has been cast on the waters; a chain is imposed. We
shall never flow freely again.'

'For one moment only,' said Louis. 'Before the chain breaks, before
disorder returns, see us fixed, see us displayed, see us held in a vice.

'But now the circle breaks. Now the current flows. Now we rush faster
than before. Now passions that lay in wait down there in the dark weeds
which grow at the bottom rise and pound us with their waves. Pain and
jealousy, envy and desire, and something deeper than they are, stronger
than love and more subterranean. The voice of action speaks. Listen,
Rhoda (for we are conspirators, with our hands on the cold urn), to the
casual quick, exciting voice of action, of hounds running on the scent.
They speak now without troubling to finish their sentences. They talk a
little language such as lovers use. An imperious brute possesses them.
The nerves thrill in their thighs. Their hearts pound and churn in their
sides. Susan screws her pocket-handkerchief. Jinny's eyes dance with
fire.'

'They are immune,' said Rhoda, 'from picking fingers and searching eyes.
How easily they turn and glance; what poses they take of energy and
pride! What life shines in Jinny's eyes; how fell, how entire Susan's
glance is, searching for insects at the roots! Their hair shines
lustrous. Their eyes burn like the eyes of animals brushing through
leaves on the scent of the prey. The circle is destroyed. We are thrown
asunder.'

'But soon, too soon,' said Bernard, 'this egotistic exultation fails.
Too soon the moment of ravenous identity is over, and the appetite for
happiness, and happiness, and still more happiness is glutted. The stone
is sunk; the moment is over. Round me there spreads a wide margin of
indifference. Now open in my eyes a thousand eyes of curiosity. Anyone
now is at liberty to murder Bernard, who is engaged to be married, so
long as they leave untouched this margin of unknown territory, this
forest of the unknown world. Why, I ask (whispering discreetly), do
women dine alone together there? Who are they? And what has brought them
on this particular evening to this particular spot? The youth in the
corner, judging from the nervous way in which he puts his hand from time
to time to the back of his head, is from the country. He is suppliant,
and so anxious to respond suitably to the kindness of his father's
friend, his host, that he can scarcely enjoy now what he will enjoy very
much at about half-past eleven to-morrow morning. I have also seen that
lady powder her nose three times in the midst of an absorbing
conversation--about love perhaps, about the unhappiness of their dearest
friend perhaps. "Ah, but the state of my nose!" she thinks, and out
comes her powder-puff, obliterating in its passage all the most fervent
feelings of the human heart. There remains, however, the insoluble
problem of the solitary man with the eyeglass; of the elderly lady
drinking champagne alone. Who and what are these unknown people? I ask.
I could make a dozen stories of what he said, of what she said--I can
see a dozen pictures. But what are stories? Toys I twist, bubbles I
blow, one ring passing through another. And sometimes I begin to doubt
if there are stories. What is my story? What is Rhoda's? What is
Neville's? There are facts, as, for example: "The handsome young man in
the grey suit, whose reserve contrasted so strangely with the loquacity
of the others, now brushed the crumbs from his waistcoat and, with a
characteristic gesture at once commanding and benign, made a sign to the
waiter, who came instantly and returned a moment later with the bill
discreetly folded upon a plate." That is the truth; that is the fact,
but beyond it all is darkness and conjecture.'

'Now once more,' said Louis, 'as we are about to part, having paid our
bill, the circle in our blood, broken so often, so sharply, for we are
so different, closes in a ring. Something is made. Yes, as we rise and
fidget, a little nervously, we pray, holding in our hands this common
feeling, "Do not move, do not let the swing-door cut to pieces the thing
that we have made, that globes itself here, among these lights, these
peelings, this litter of bread crumbs and people passing. Do not move,
do not go. Hold it for ever."'

'Let us hold it for one moment,' said Jinny; 'love, hatred, by whatever
name we call it, this globe whose walls are made of Percival, of youth
and beauty, and something so deep sunk within us that we shall perhaps
never make this moment out of one man again.'

'Forests and far countries on the other side of the world,' said Rhoda,
'are in it; seas and jungles; the howlings of jackals and moonlight
falling upon some high peak where the eagle soars.'

'Happiness is in it,' said Neville, 'and the quiet of ordinary things. A
table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And
the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit
silent, or, perhaps, bethinking us of some trifle, suddenly speak.'

'Week-days are in it,' said Susan, 'Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday; the
horses going up to the fields, and the horses returning; the rooks
rising and falling, and catching the elm trees in their net, whether it
is April, whether it is November.'

'What is to come is in it,' said Bernard. 'That is the last drop and the
brightest that we let fall like some supernal quicksilver into the
swelling and splendid moment created by us from Percival. What is to
come? I ask, brushing the crumbs from my waistcoat, what is outside? We
have proved, sitting eating, sitting talking, that we can add to the
treasury of moments. We are not slaves bound to suffer incessantly
unrecorded petty blows on our bent backs. We are not sheep either,
following a master. We are creators. We too have made something that
will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put
on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a
world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illumined
and everlasting road.

'Look, Percival, while they fetch the taxi, at the prospect which you
are so soon to lose. The street is hard and burnished with the churning
of innumerable wheels. The yellow canopy of our tremendous energy hangs
like a burning cloth above our heads. Theatres, music halls and lamps in
private houses make that light.'

'Peaked clouds,' said Rhoda, 'voyage over a sky dark like polished
whale-bone.'

'Now the agony begins; now the horror has seized me with its fangs,'
said Neville. 'Now the cab comes; now Percival goes. What can we do to
keep him? How bridge the distance between us? How fan the fire so that
it blazes for ever? How signal to all time to come that we, who stand in
the street, in the lamplight, loved Percival? Now Percival is gone.'

****

_The sun had risen to its full height. It was no longer half seen and
guessed at, from hints and gleams, as if a girl couched on her green sea
mattress tired her brows with water-globed jewels that sent lances of
opal-tinted light falling and flashing in the uncertain air like the
flanks of a dolphin leaping, or the flash of a falling blade. Now the
sun burnt uncompromising, undeniable. It struck upon the hard sand, and
the rocks became furnaces of red heat; it searched each pool and caught
the minnow hiding in the cranny, and showed the rusty cartwheel, the
white bone, or the boot without laces stuck, black as iron, in the sand.
It gave to everything its exact measure of colour; to the sandhills
their innumerable glitter, to the wild grasses their glancing green; or
it fell upon the arid waste of the desert, here wind-scourged into
furrows, here swept into desolate cairns, here sprinkled with stunted
dark-green jungle trees. It lit up the smooth gilt mosque, the frail
pink-and-white card houses of the southern village, and the
long-breasted, white-haired women who knelt in the river bed beating
wrinkled cloths upon stones. Steamers thudding slowly over the sea were
caught in the level stare of the sun, and it beat through the yellow
awnings upon passengers who dozed or paced the deck, shading their eyes
to look for the land, while day after day, compressed in its oily
throbbing sides, the ship bore them on monotonously over the waters._

_The sun beat on the crowded pinnacles of southern hills and glared into
deep, stony river beds where the water was shrunk beneath the high slung
bridge so that washerwomen kneeling on hot stones could scarcely wet
their linen; and lean mules went picking their way among the chattering
grey stones with panniers slung across their narrow shoulders. At midday
the heat of the sun made the hills grey as if shaved and singed in an
explosion, while, farther north, in cloudier and rainier countries,
hills smoothed into slabs as with the back of a spade had a light in
them as if a warder, deep within, went from chamber to chamber carrying
a green lamp. Through atoms of grey-blue air the sun struck at English
fields and lit up marshes and pools, a white gull on a stake, the slow
sail of shadows over blunt-headed woods and young corn and flowing
hayfields. It beat on the orchard wall, and every pit and grain of the
brick was silver pointed, purple, fiery as if soft to touch, as if
touched it must melt into hot-baked grains of dust. The currants hung
against the wall, in ripples and cascades of polished red; plums swelled
out their leaves, and all the blades of the grass were run together in
one fluent green blaze. The trees' shadow was sunk to a dark pool at the
root. Light descending in floods dissolved the separate foliation into
one green mound._

_The birds sang passionate songs addressed to one ear only and then
stopped. Bubbling and chuckling they carried little bits of straw and
twig to the dark knots in the higher branches of the trees. Gilt and
purpled they perched in the garden, where cones of laburnum and purple
shook down gold and lilac, for now at midday the garden was all blossom
and profusion and even the tunnels under the plants were green and
purple and tawny as the sun beat through the red petal, or the broad
yellow petal, or was barred by some thickly furred green stalk._

_The sun struck straight upon the house, making the white walls glare
between the dark windows. Their panes, woven thickly with green
branches, held circles of impenetrable darkness. Sharp-edged wedges of
light lay upon the window-sill and showed inside the room plates with
blue rings, cups with curved handles, the bulge of a great bowl, the
criss-cross pattern in the rug, and the formidable corners and lines of
cabinets and bookcases. Behind their conglomeration hung a zone of
shadow in which might be a further shape to be disencumbered of shadow
or still denser depths of darkness._

_The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One
after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself
back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue
save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled
as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves
fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping._

****

'He is dead,' said Neville. 'He fell. His horse tripped. He was thrown.
The sails of the world have swung round and caught me on the head. All
is over. The lights of the world have gone out. There stands the tree
which I cannot pass.

'Oh, to crumple this telegram in my fingers--to let the light of the
world flood back--to say this has not happened! But why turn one's head
hither and thither? This is the truth. This is the fact. His horse
stumbled; he was thrown. The flashing trees and white rails went up in a
shower. There was a surge; a drumming in his ears. Then the blow; the
world crashed; he breathed heavily. He died where he fell.

'Barns and summer days in the country, rooms where we sat--all now lie
in the unreal world which is gone. My past is cut from me. They came
running. They carried him to some pavilion, men in riding-boots, men in
sun helmets; among unknown men he died. Loneliness and silence often
surrounded him. He often left me. And then, returning, "See where he
comes!" I said.

'Women shuffle past the window as if there were no gulf cut in the
street, no tree with stiff leaves which we cannot pass. We deserve then
to be tripped by molehills. We are infinitely abject, shuffling past
with our eyes shut. But why should I submit? Why try to lift my foot and
mount the stair? This is where I stand; here, holding the telegram. The
past, summer days and rooms where we sat, stream away like burnt paper
with red eyes in it. Why meet and resume? Why talk and eat and make up
other combinations with other people? From this moment I am solitary. No
one will know me now. I have three letters, "I am about to play quoits
with a colonel, so no more," thus he ends our friendship, shouldering
his way through the crowd with a wave of his hand. This farce is worth
no more formal celebration. Yet if someone had but said: "Wait"; had
pulled the strap three holes tighter--he would have done justice for
fifty years, and sat in Court and ridden alone at the head of troops and
denounced some monstrous tyranny, and come back to us.

'Now I say there is a grinning, there is a subterfuge. There is
something sneering behind our backs. That boy almost lost his footing as
he leapt on the bus. Percival fell; was killed; is buried; and I watch
people passing; holding tight to the rails of omnibuses; determined to
save their lives.

'I will not lift my foot to climb the stair. I will stand for one moment
beneath the immitigable tree, alone with the man whose throat is cut,
while downstairs the cook shoves in and out the dampers. I will not
climb the stair. We are doomed, all of us. Women shuffle past with
shopping-bags. People keep on passing. Yet you shall not destroy me. For
this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come,
pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I
sob.'

'Such is the incomprehensible combination,' said Bernard, 'such is the
complexity of things, that as I descend the staircase I do not know
which is sorrow, which joy. My son is born; Percival is dead. I am
upheld by pillars, shored up on either side by stark emotions; but which
is sorrow, which is joy? I ask, and do not know, only that I need
silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save our hour to consider
what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

'This then is the world that Percival sees no longer. Let me look. The
butcher delivers meat next door; two old men stumble along the pavement;
sparrows alight. The machine then works; I note the rhythm, the throb,
but as a thing in which I have no part, since he sees it no longer. (He
lies pale and bandaged in some room.) Now then is my chance to find out
what is of great importance, and I must be careful, and tell no lies.
About him my feeling was: he sat there in the centre. Now I go to that
spot no longer. The place is empty.

'Oh yes, I can assure you, men in felt hats and women carrying
baskets--you have lost something that would have been very valuable to
you. You have lost a leader whom you would have followed; and one of you
has lost happiness and children. He is dead who would have given you
that. He lies on a camp-bed, bandaged, in some hot Indian hospital while
coolies squatted on the floor agitate those fans--I forget how they call
them. But this is important; "You are well out of it," I said, while the
doves descended over the roofs and my son was born, as if it were a
fact. I remember, as a boy, his curious air of detachment. And I go on
to say (my eyes fill with tears and then are dry), "But this is better
than one had dared to hope." I say, addressing what is abstract, facing
me eyeless at the end of the avenue, in the sky, "Is this the utmost you
can do?" Then we have triumphed. You have done your utmost, I say,
addressing that blank and brutal face (for he was twenty-five and should
have lived to be eighty) without avail. I am not going to lie down and
sweep away a life of care. (An entry to be made in my pocket-book;
contempt for those who inflict meaningless death.) Further, this is
important; that I should be able to place him in trifling and ridiculous
situations, so that he may not feel himself absurd, perched on a great
horse. I must be able to say, "Percival, a ridiculous name." At the same
time let me tell you, men and women, hurrying to the tube station, you
would have had to respect him. You would have had to form up and follow
behind him. How strange to oar one's way through crowds seeing life
through hollow eyes, burning eyes.

'Yet already signals begin, beckonings, attempts to lure me back.
Curiosity is knocked out only for a short time. One cannot live outside
the machine for more perhaps than half an hour. Bodies, I note, already
begin to look ordinary; but what is behind them differs--the
perspective. Behind that newspaper placard is the hospital; the long
room with black men pulling ropes; and then they bury him. Yet since it
says a famous actress has been divorced, I ask instantly, Which? Yet I
cannot take out my penny; I cannot buy a paper; I cannot suffer
interruption yet.

'I ask, if I shall never see you again and fix my eyes on that solidity,
what form will our communication take? You have gone across the court,
further and further, drawing finer and finer the thread between us. But
you exist somewhere. Something of you remains. A judge. That is, if I
discover a new vein in myself I shall submit it to you privately. I
shall ask, What is your verdict? You shall remain the arbiter. But for
how long? Things will become too difficult to explain: there will be new
things; already my son. I am now at the zenith of an experience. It will
decline. Already I no longer cry with conviction, "What luck!"
Exaltation, the flight of doves descending, is over. Chaos, detail
return. I am no longer amazed by names written over shop-windows. I do
not feel Why hurry? Why catch trains? The sequence returns; one thing
leads to another--the usual order.

'Yes, but I still resent the usual order. I will not let myself be made
yet to accept the sequence of things. I will walk; I will not change the
rhythm of my mind by stopping, by looking; I will walk. I will go up
these steps into the gallery and submit myself to the influence of minds
like mine outside the sequence. There is little time left to answer the
question; my powers flag; I become torpid. Here are pictures. Here are
cold madonnas among their pillars. Let them lay to rest the incessant
activity of the mind's eye, the bandaged head, the men with ropes, so
that I may find something unvisual beneath. Here are gardens; and Venus
among her flowers; here are saints and blue madonnas. Mercifully these
pictures make no reference; they do not nudge; they do not point. Thus
they expand my consciousness of him and bring him back to me
differently. I remember his beauty. "Look, where he comes," I said.

'Lines and colours almost persuade me that I too can be heroic, I, who
make phrases so easily, am so soon seduced, love what comes next, and
cannot clench my fist, but vacillate weakly making phrases according to
my circumstances. Now, through my own infirmity I recover what he was to
me: my opposite. Being naturally truthful, he did not see the point of
these exaggerations, and was borne on by a natural sense of the fitting,
was indeed a great master of the art of living so that he seems to have
lived long, and to have spread calm round him, indifference one might
almost say, certainly to his own advancement, save that he had also
great compassion. A child playing--a summer evening--doors will open and
shut, will keep opening and shutting, through which I see sights that
make me weep. For they cannot be imparted. Hence our loneliness; hence
our desolation. I turn to that spot in my mind and find it empty. My own
infirmities oppress me. There is no longer him to oppose them.

'Behold, then, the blue madonna streaked with tears. This is my funeral
service. We have no ceremonies, only private dirges and no conclusions,
only violent sensations, each separate. Nothing that has been said meets
our case. We sit in the Italian room at the National Gallery picking up
fragments. I doubt that Titian ever felt this rat gnaw. Painters live
lives of methodical absorption, adding stroke to stroke. They are not
like poets--scapegoats; they are not chained to the rock. Hence the
silence, the sublimity. Yet that crimson must have burnt in Titian's
gizzard. No doubt he rose with the great arms holding the cornucopia,
and fell, in that descent. But the silence weighs on me--the perpetual
solicitation of the eye. The pressure is intermittent and muffled. I
distinguish too little and too vaguely. The bell is pressed and I do not
ring or give out irrelevant clamours all jangled. I am titillated
inordinately by some splendour; the ruffled crimson against the green
lining; the march of pillars; the orange light behind the black, pricked
ears of the olive trees. Arrows of sensation strike from my spine, but
without order.

'Yet something is added to my interpretation. Something lies deeply
buried. For one moment I thought to grasp it. But bury it, bury it; let
it breed, hidden in the depths of my mind some day to fructify. After a
long lifetime, loosely, in a moment of revelation. I may lay hands on
it, but now the idea breaks in my hand. Ideas break a thousand times for
once that they globe themselves entire. They break; they fall over me.
"Line and colours they survive, therefore..."

'I am yawning. I am, glutted with sensations. I am exhausted with the
strain and the long, long time-twenty-five minutes, half an hour--that I
have held myself alone outside the machine. I grow numb; I grow stiff.
How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic
heart? There are others suffering--multitudes of people suffering.
Neville suffers. He loved Percival. But I can no longer endure
extremities; I want someone with whom to laugh, with whom to yawn, with
whom to remember how he scratched his head; someone he was at ease with
and liked (not Susan, whom he loved, but Jinny rather). In her room also
I could do penance. I could ask, Did he tell you how I refused him when
he asked me to go to Hampton Court that day? Those are the thoughts that
will wake me leaping in anguish in the middle of the night--the crimes
for which one would do penance in all the markets of the world
bareheaded; that one did not go to Hampton Court that day.

'But now I want life round me, and books and little ornaments, and the
usual sounds of tradesmen calling on which to pillow my head after this
exhaustion, and shut my eyes after this revelation. I will go straight,
then, down the stairs, and hail the first taxi and drive to Jinny.'

'There is the puddle,' said Rhoda, 'and I cannot cross it. I hear the
rush of the great grindstone within an inch of my head. Its wind roars
in my face. All palpable forms of life have failed me. Unless I can
stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal
corridors for ever. What, then, can I touch? What brick, what stone? and
so draw myself across the enormous gulf into my body safely?

'Now the shadow has fallen and the purple light slants downwards. The
figure that was robed in beauty is now clothed in ruin. The figure that
stood in the groove where the steep-backed hills come down falls in
ruin, as I told them when they said they loved his voice on the stair,
and his old shoes and moments of being together.

'Now I will walk down Oxford Street envisaging a world rent by
lightning; I will look at oaks cracked asunder and red where the
flowering branch has fallen. I will go to Oxford Street and buy
stockings for a party. I will do the usual things under the lightning
flash. On the bare ground I will pick violets and bind them together and
offer them to Percival, something given him by me. Look now at what
Percival has given me. Look at the street now that Percival is dead. The
houses are lightly founded to be puffed over by a breath of air.
Reckless and random the cars race and roar and hunt us to death like
bloodhounds. I am alone in a hostile world. The human face is hideous.
This is to my liking. I want publicity and violence and to be dashed
like a stone on the rocks. I like factory chimneys and cranes and
lorries. I like the passing of face and face and face, deformed,
indifferent. I am sick of prettiness; I am sick of privacy. I ride rough
waters and shall sink with no one to save me.

'Percival, by his death, has made me this present, has revealed this
terror, has left me to undergo this humiliation--faces and faces, served
out like soup-plates by scullions; coarse, greedy, casual; looking in at
shop-windows with pendent parcels; ogling, brushing, destroying
everything, leaving even our love impure, touched now by their dirty
fingers.

'Here is the shop where they sell stockings. And I could believe that
beauty is once more set flowing. Its whisper comes down these aisles,
through these laces, breathing among baskets of coloured ribbons. There
are then warm hollows grooved in the heart of the uproar; alcoves of
silence where we can shelter under the wing of beauty from truth which I
desire. Pain is suspended as a girl silently slides open a drawer. And
then, she speaks; her voice wakes me. I shoot to the bottom among the
weeds and see envy, jealousy, hatred and spite scuttle like crabs over
the sand as she speaks. These are our companions. I will pay my bill and
take my parcel.

'This is Oxford Street. Here are hate, jealousy, hurry, and indifference
frothed into the wild semblance of life. These are our companions.
Consider the friends with whom we sit and eat. I think of Louis, reading
the sporting column of an evening newspaper, afraid of ridicule; a snob.
He says, looking at the people passing, he will shepherd us if we will
follow. If we submit he will reduce us to order. Thus he will smooth out
the death of Percival to his satisfaction, looking fixedly over the
cruet, past the houses at the sky. Bernard, meanwhile, flops red-eyed
into some arm-chair. He will have out his notebook; under D, he will
enter "Phrases to be used on the deaths of friends." Jinny, pirouetting
across the room, will perch on the arm of his chair and ask, "Did he
love me?" "More than he loved Susan?" Susan, engaged to her farmer in
the country, will stand for a second with the telegram before her,
holding a plate; and then, with a kick of her heel, slam to the oven
door. Neville, after staring at the window through his tears, will see
through his tears, and ask, "Who passes the window?"--"What lovely boy?"
This is my tribute to Percival; withered violets, blackened violets.

'Where shall I go then? To some museum, where they keep rings under
glass cases, where there are cabinets, and the dresses that queens have
worn? Or shall I go to Hampton Court and look at the red walls and
courtyards and the seemliness of herded yew trees making black pyramids
symmetrically on the grass among flowers? There shall I recover beauty,
and impose order upon my raked, my dishevelled soul? But what can one
make in loneliness? Alone I should stand on the empty grass and say,
Rooks fly; somebody passes with a bag; there is a gardener with a
wheelbarrow. I should stand in a queue and smell sweat, and scent as
horrible as sweat; and be hung with other people like a joint of meat
among other joints of meat.

'Here is a hall where one pays money and goes in, where one hears music
among somnolent people who have come here after lunch on a hot
afternoon. We have eaten beef and pudding enough to live for a week
without tasting food. Therefore we cluster like maggots on the back of
something that will carry us on. Decorous, portly--we have white hair
waved under our hats; slim shoes; little bags; clean-shaven cheeks; here
and there a military moustache; not a speck of dust has been allowed to
settle anywhere on our broadcloth. Swaying and opening programmes, with
a few words of greeting to friends, we settle down, like walruses
stranded on rocks, like heavy bodies incapable of waddling to the sea,
hoping for a wave to lift us, but we are too heavy, and too much dry
shingle lies between us and the sea. We lie gorged with food, torpid in
the heat. Then, swollen but contained in slippery satin, the seagreen
woman comes to our rescue. She sucks in her lips, assumes an air of
intensity, inflates herself and hurls herself precisely at the right
moment as if she saw an apple and her voice was the arrow into the note,
"Ah!"

'An axe has split a tree to the core; the core is warm; sound quivers
within the bark. "Ah!" cried a woman to her lover, leaning from her
window in Venice. "Ah, ah!" she cried, and again she cries "Ah!" She has
provided us with a cry. But only a cry. And what is a cry? Then the
beetle-shaped men come with their violins; wait; count; nod; down come
their bows. And there is ripple and laughter like the dance of olive
trees and their myriad-tongued grey leaves when a seafarer, biting a
twig between his lips where the many-backed steep hills come down, leaps
on shore.

'"Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath
the semblance of the thing? Now that lightning has gashed the tree and
the flowering branch has fallen and Percival, by his death, has made me
this gift, let me see the thing. There is a square; there is an oblong.
The players take the square and place it upon the oblong. They place it
very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left
outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated;
we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them
upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation.

'The sweetness of this content overflowing runs down the walls of my
mind, and liberates understanding. Wander no more, I say; this is the
end. The oblong has been set upon the square; the spiral is on top. We
have been hauled over the shingle, down to the sea. The players come
again. But they are mopping their faces. They are no longer so spruce or
so debonair. I will go. I will set aside this afternoon. I will make a
pilgrimage. I will go to Greenwich. I will fling myself fearlessly into
trams, into omnibuses. As we lurch down Regent Street, and I am flung
upon this man, I am not injured, I am not outraged by the collision. A
square stands upon an oblong. Here are mean streets where chaffering
goes on in street markets, and every sort of iron rod, bolt and screw is
laid out, and people swarm off the pavement, pinching raw meat with
thick fingers. The structure is visible. We made a dwelling-place.

'These, then, are the flowers that grow among the rough grasses of the
field which the cows trample, wind-bitten, almost deformed, without
fruit or blossom. These are what I bring, torn up by the roots from the
pavement of Oxford Street, my penny bunch, my penny bunch of violets.
Now from the window of the tram I see masts among chimneys; there is the
river; there are ships that sail to India. I will walk by the river. I
will pace this embankment, where an old man reads a newspaper in a glass
shelter. I will pace this terrace and watch the ships bowling down the
tide. A woman walks on deck, with a dog barking round her. Her skirts
are blown; her hair is blown; they are going out to sea; they are
leaving us; they are vanishing this summer evening. Now I will
relinquish; now I will let loose. Now I will at last free the checked,
the jerked-back desire to be spent, to be consumed. We will gallop
together over desert hills where the swallow dips her wings in dark
pools and the pillars stand entire. Into the wave that dashes upon the
shore, into the wave that flings its white foam to the uttermost corners
of the earth, I throw my violets, my offering to Percival.'

****

_The sun no longer stood in the middle of the sky. Its light slanted,
falling obliquely. Here it caught on the edge of a cloud and burnt it
into a slice of light, a blazing island on which no foot could rest.
Then another cloud was caught in the light and another and another, so
that the waves beneath were arrow-struck with fiery feathered darts that
shot erratically across the quivering blue._

_The topmost leaves of the tree were crisped in the sun. They rustled
stiffly in the random breeze. The birds sat still save that they flicked
their heads sharply from side to side. Now they paused in their song as
if glutted with sound, as if the fullness of midday had gorged them. The
dragon-fly poised motionless over a reed, then shot its blue stitch
further through the air. The far hum in the distance seemed made of the
broken tremor of fine wings dancing up and down on the horizon. The
river water held the reeds now fixed as if glass had hardened round
them; and then the glass wavered and the reeds swept low. Pondering,
sunken headed, the cattle stood in the fields and cumbrously moved one
foot and then another. In the bucket near the house the tap stood
dripping, as if the bucket were full, and then the tap dripped one, two,
three separate drops in succession._

_The windows showed erratically spots of burning fire, the elbow of one
branch, and then some tranquil space of pure clarity. The blind hung red
at the window's edge and within the room daggers of light fell upon
chairs and tables making cracks across the lacquer and polish. The green
pot bulged enormously, with its white window elongated in its side.
Light driving darkness before it spilt itself profusely upon the corners
and bosses; and yet heaped up darkness in mounds of unmoulded shape._

_The waves massed themselves, curved their backs and crashed. Up spurted
stones and shingle. They swept round the rocks, and the spray, leaping
high, spattered the walls of a cave that had been dry before, and left
pools inland, where some fish stranded lashed its tail as the wave drew
back._

****

'I have signed my name,' said Louis, 'already twenty times. I, and again
I, and again I. Clear, firm, unequivocal, there it stands, my name.
Clear-cut and unequivocal am I too. Yet a vast inheritance of experience
is packed in me. I have lived thousands of years. I am like a worm that
has eaten its way through the wood of a very old oak tree. But now I am
compact; now I am gathered together this fine morning.

'The sun shines from a clear sky. But twelve o'clock brings neither rain
nor sunshine. It is the hour when Miss Johnson brings me my letters in a
wire tray. Upon these white sheets I indent my name. The whisper of
leaves, water running down gutters, green flecked with dahlias or
zinnias; I, now a duke, now Plato, companion of Socrates; the tramp of
dark men and yellow men migrating east, west, north and south; the
eternal procession, women going with attach-cases down the Strand as
they went once with pitchers to the Nile; all the furled and
close-packed leaves of my many-folded life are now summed in my name;
incised cleanly and barely on the sheet. Now a full-grown man; now
upright standing in sun or rain. I must drop heavy as a hatchet and cut
the oak with my sheer weight, for if I deviate, glancing this way, or
that way, I shall fall like snow and be wasted.

'I am half in love with the typewriter and the telephone. With letters
and cables and brief but courteous commands on the telephone to Paris,
Berlin, New York, I have fused my many lives into one; I have helped by
my assiduity and decision to score those lines on the map there by which
the different parts of the world are laced together. I love punctually
at ten to come into my room; I love the purple glow of the dark
mahogany; I love the table and its sharp edge; and the smooth-running
drawers. I love the telephone with its lip stretched to my whisper, and
the date on the wall; and the engagement book. Mr Prentice at four; Mr
Eyres sharp at four-thirty.

'I like to be asked to come to Mr Burchard's private room and report on
our commitments to China. I hope to inherit an arm-chair and a Turkey
carpet. My shoulder is to the wheel; I roll the dark before me,
spreading commerce where there was chaos in the far parts of the world.
If I press on, from chaos making order, I shall find myself where
Chatham stood, and Pitt, Burke and Sir Robert Peel. Thus I expunge
certain stains, and erase old defilements; the woman who gave me a flag
from the top of the Christmas tree; my accent; beatings and other
tortures; the boasting boys; my father, a banker at Brisbane.

'I have read my poet in an eating-house, and, stirring my coffee,
listened to the clerks making bets at the little tables, watched the
women hesitating at the counter. I said that nothing should be
irrelevant, like a piece of brown-paper dropped casually on the floor. I
said their journeys should have an end in view; they should earn their
two pound ten a week at the command of an august master; some hand, some
robe, should fold us about in the evening. When I have healed these
fractures and comprehended these monstrosities so that they need neither
excuse nor apology, which both waste our strength, I shall give back to
the street and the eating-shop what they lost when they fell on these
hard times and broke on these stony beaches. I shall assemble a few
words and forge round us a hammered ring of beaten steel.

'But now I have not a moment to spare. There is no respite here, no
shadow made of quivering leaves, or alcove to which one can retreat from
the sun, to sit, with a lover, in the cool of the evening. The weight of
the world is on our shoulders; its vision is through our eyes; if we
blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember
Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some
obliquity. This is life; Mr Prentice at four; Mr Eyres at four-thirty. I
like to hear the soft rush of the lift and the thud with which it stops
on my landing and the heavy male tread of responsible feet down the
corridors. So by dint of our united exertions we send ships to the
remotest parts of the globe; replete with lavatories and gymnasiums. The
weight of the world is on our shoulders. This is life. If I press on, I
shall inherit a chair and a rug; a place in Surrey with glass houses,
and some rare conifer, melon or flowering tree which other merchants
will envy.

'Yet I still keep my attic room. There I open the usual little book;
there I watch the rain glisten on the tiles till they shine like a
policeman's waterproof; there I see the broken windows in poor people's
houses; the lean cats; some slattern squinting in a cracked
looking-glass as she arranges her face for the street corner; there
Rhoda sometimes comes. For we are lovers.

'Percival has died (he died in Egypt; he died in Greece; all deaths are
one death). Susan has children; Neville mounts rapidly to the
conspicuous heights. Life passes. The clouds change perpetually over our
houses. I do this, do that, and again do this and then that. Meeting and
parting, we assemble different forms, make different patterns. But if I
do not nail these impressions to the board and out of the many men in me
make one; exist here and now and not in streaks and patches, like
scattered snow wreaths on far mountains; and ask Miss Johnson as I pass
through the office about the movies and take my cup of tea and accept
also my favourite biscuit, then I shall fall like snow and be wasted.

'Yet when six o'clock comes and I touch my hat to the commissionaire,
being always too effusive in ceremony since I desire so much to be
accepted; and struggle, leaning against the wind, buttoned up, with my
jaws blue and my eyes running water, I wish that a little typist would
cuddle on my knees; I think that my favourite dish is liver and bacon;
and so am apt to wander to the river, to the narrow streets where there
are frequent public-houses, and the shadows of ships at the end of the
street, and women fighting. But I say to myself, recovering my sanity,
Mr Prentice at four; Mr Eyres at four-thirty. The hatchet must fall on
the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world
is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the
wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.'

'Summer comes, and winter,' said Susan. 'The seasons pass. The pear
fills itself and drops from the tree. The dead leaf rests on its edge.
But steam has obscured the window. I sit by the fire watching the kettle
boil. I see the pear tree through the streaked steam on the window-pane.

'Sleep, sleep, I croon, whether it is summer or winter, May or November.
Sleep I sing--I, who am unmelodious and hear no music save rustic music
when a dog barks, a bell tinkles, or wheels crunch upon the gravel. I
sing my song by the fire like an old shell murmuring on the beach.
Sleep, sleep, I say, warning off with my voice all who rattle milk-cans,
fire at rooks, shoot rabbits, or in any way bring the shock of
destruction near this wicker cradle, laden with soft limbs, curled under
a pink coverlet.

'I have lost my indifference, my blank eyes, my pear-shaped eyes that
saw to the root. I am no longer January, May or any other season, but am
all spun to a fine thread round the cradle, wrapping in a cocoon made of
my own blood the delicate limbs of my baby. Sleep, I say, and feel
within me uprush some wilder, darker violence, so that I would fell down
with one blow any intruder, any snatcher, who should break into this
room and wake the sleeper.

'I pad about the house all day long in apron and slippers, like my
mother who died of cancer. Whether it is summer, whether it is winter, I
no longer know by the moor grass, and the heath flower; only by the
steam on the window-pane, or the frost on the window-pane. When the lark
peels high his ring of sound and it falls through the air like an apple
paring, I stoop; I feed my baby. I, who used to walk through beech woods
noting the jay's feather turning blue as it falls, past the shepherd and
the tramp, who stared at the woman squatted beside a tilted cart in a
ditch, go from room to room with a duster. Sleep, I say, desiring sleep
to fall like a blanket of down and cover these weak limbs; demanding
that life shall sheathe its claws and gird its lightning and pass by,
making of my own body a hollow, a warm shelter for my child to sleep in.
Sleep, I say, sleep. Or I go to the window, I look at the rook's high
nest; and the pear tree. "His eyes will see when mine are shut," I
think. "I shall go mixed with them beyond my body and shall see India.
He will come home, bringing trophies to be laid at my feet. He will
increase my possessions."

'But I never rise at dawn and see the purple drops in the cabbage
leaves; the red drops in the roses. I do not watch the setter nose in a
circle, or lie at night watching the leaves hide the stars and the stars
move and the leaves hang still. The butcher calls; the milk has to be
stood under a shade lest it should sour.

'Sleep, I say, sleep, as the kettle boils and its breath comes thicker
and thicker issuing in one jet from the spout. So life fills my veins.
So life pours through my limbs. So I am driven forward, till I could
cry, as I move from dawn to dusk opening and shutting, "No more. I am
glutted with natural happiness." Yet more will come, more children; more
cradles, more baskets in the kitchen and hams ripening; and onions
glistening; and more beds of lettuce and potatoes. I am blown like a
leaf by the gale; now brushing the wet grass, now whirled up. I am
glutted with natural happiness; and wish sometimes that the fullness
would pass from me and the weight of the sleeping house rise, when we
sit reading, and I stay the thread at the eye of my needle. The lamp
kindles a fire in the dark pane. A fire burns in the heart of the ivy. I
see a lit-up street in the evergreens. I hear traffic in the brush of
the wind down the lane, and broken voices, and laughter, and Jinny who
cries as the door opens, "Come, come!"

'But no sound breaks the silence of our house, where the fields sigh
close to the door. The wind washes through the elm trees; a moth hits
the lamp; a cow lows; a crack of sound starts in the rafter, and I push
my thread through the needle and murmur, "Sleep."'

'Now is the moment,' said Jinny. 'Now we have met, and have come
together. Now let us talk, let us tell stories. Who is he? Who is she? I
am infinitely curious and do not know what is to come. If you, whom I
meet for the first time, were to say to me, "The coach starts at four
from Piccadilly," I would not stay to fling a few necessaries in a
bandbox, but would come at once.

'Let us sit here under the cut flowers, on the sofa by the picture. Let
us decorate our Christmas tree with facts and again with facts. People
are so soon gone; let us catch them. That man there, by the cabinet; he
lives, you say, surrounded by china pots. Break one and you shatter a
thousand pounds. And he loved a girl in Rome and she left him. Hence the
pots, old junk found in lodging-houses or dug from the desert sands. And
since beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful, and he is static,
his life stagnates in a china sea. It is strange though; for once as a
young man, he sat on damp ground and drank rum with soldiers.

'One must be quick and add facts deftly, like toys to a tree, fixing
them with a twist of the fingers. He stoops, how he stoops, even over an
azalea. He stoops over the old woman even, because she wears diamonds in
her ears, and, bundling about her estate in a pony carriage, directs who
is to be helped, what tree felled, and who turned out to-morrow. (I have
lived my life, I must tell you, all these years, and I am now past
thirty, perilously, like a mountain goat leaping from crag to crag; I do
not settle long anywhere; I do not attach myself to one person in
particular; but you will find that if I raise my arm, some figure at
once breaks off and will come.) And that man is a judge; and that man is
a millionaire, and that man, with the eyeglass, shot his governess
through the heart with an arrow when he was ten years old. Afterwards he
rode through deserts with despatches, took part in revolutions and now
collects materials for a history of his mother's family, long settled in
Norfolk. That little man with a blue chin has a right hand that is
withered. But why? We do not know. That woman, you whisper discreetly,
with the pearl pagodas hanging from her ears, was the pure flame who lit
the life of one of our statesmen; now since his death she sees ghosts,
tells fortunes, and has adopted a coffee-coloured youth whom she calls
the Messiah. That man with the drooping moustache, like a cavalry
officer, lived a life of the utmost debauchery (it is all in some
memoir) until one day he met a stranger in a train who converted him
between Edinburgh and Carlisle by reading the Bible.

'Thus, in a few seconds, deftly, adroitly, we decipher the hieroglyphs
written on other people's faces. Here, in this room, are the abraded and
battered shells cast on the shore. The door goes on opening. The room
fills and fills with knowledge, anguish, many kinds of ambition, much
indifference, some despair. Between us, you say, we could build
cathedrals, dictate policies, condemn men to death, and administer the
affairs of several public offices. The common fund of experience is very
deep. We have between us scores of children of both sexes, whom we are
educating, going to see at school with the measles, and bringing up to
inherit our houses. In one way or another we make this day, this Friday,
some by going to the Law Courts; others to the city; others to the
nursery; others by marching and forming fours. A million hands stitch,
raise hods with bricks. The activity is endless. And to-morrow it begins
again; to-morrow we make Saturday. Some take train for France; others
ship for India. Some will never come into this room again. One may die
to-night. Another will beget a child. From us every sort of building,
policy, venture, picture, poem, child, factory, will spring. Life comes;
Life goes; we make life. So you say.

'But we who live in the body see with the body's imagination things in
outline. I see rocks in bright sunshine. I cannot take these facts into
some cave and, shading my eyes, grade their yellows, blues, umbers into
one substance. I cannot remain seated for long. I must jump up and go.
The coach may start from Piccadilly. I drop all these facts--diamonds,
withered hands, china pots and the rest of it--as a monkey drops nuts
from its naked paws. I cannot tell you if life is this or that. I am
going to push out into the heterogeneous crowd. I am going to be
buffeted; to be flung up, and flung down, among men, like a ship on the
sea.

'For now my body, my companion, which is always sending its signals, the
rough black "No," the golden "Come," in rapid running arrows of
sensation, beckons. Someone moves. Did I raise my arm? Did I look? Did
my yellow scarf with the strawberry spots float and signal? He has
broken from the wall. He follows. I am pursued through the forest. All
is rapt, all is nocturnal, and the parrots go screaming through the
branches. All my senses stand erect. Now I feel the roughness of the
fibre of the curtain through which I push; now I feel the cold iron
railing and its blistered paint beneath my palm. Now the cool tide of
darkness breaks its waters over me. We are out of doors. Night opens;
night traversed by wandering moths; night hiding lovers roaming to
adventure. I smell roses; I smell violets; I see red and blue just
hidden. Now gravel is under my shoes; now grass. Up reel the tall backs
of houses guilty with lights. All London is uneasy with flashing lights.
Now let us sing our love song--Come, come, come. Now my gold signal is
like a dragon-fly flying taut. Jug, jug, jug, I sing like the
nightingale whose melody is crowded in the too narrow passage of her
throat. Now I hear crash and rending of boughs and the crack of antlers
as if the beasts of the forest were all hunting, all rearing high and
plunging down among the thorns. One has pierced me. One is driven deep
within me.

'And velvet flowers and leaves whose coolness has been stood in water
wash me round, and sheathe me, embalming me.'

'Why look,' said Neville, 'at the clock ticking on the mantelpiece? Time
passes, yes. And we grow old. But to sit with you, alone with you, here
in London, in this firelit room, you there, I here, is all. The world
ransacked to its uttermost ends, and all its heights stripped and
gathered of their flowers, holds no more. Look at the firelight running
up and down the gold thread in the curtain. The fruit it circles droops
heavy. It falls on the toe of your boot, it gives your face a red rim--I
think it is the firelight and not your face; I think those are books
against the wall, and that a curtain, and that perhaps an arm-chair. But
when you come everything changes. The cups and saucers changed when you
came in this morning. There can be doubt, I thought, pushing aside the
newspaper, that our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour
and have meaning only under the eyes of love.

'I rose. I had done my breakfast. There was the whole day before us, and
as it was fine, tender, non-committal, we walked through the Park to the
Embankment, along the Strand to St Paul's, then to the shop where I
bought an umbrella, always talking, and now and then stopping to look.
But can this last? I said to myself, by a lion in Trafalgar Square, by
the lion seen once and for ever;--so I revisit my past life, scene by
scene; there is an elm tree, and there lies Percival. For ever and ever,
I swore. Then darted in the usual doubt. I clutched your hand. You left
me. The descent into the Tube was like death. We were cut up, we were
dissevered by all those faces and the hollow wind that seemed to roar
down there over desert boulders. I sat staring in my own room. By five I
knew that you were faithless. I snatched the telephone and the buzz,
buzz, buzz of its stupid voice in your empty room battered my heart
down, when the door opened and there you stood. That was the most
perfect of our meetings. But these meetings, these partings, finally
destroy us.

'Now this room seems to me central, something scooped out of the eternal
night. Outside lines twist and intersect, but round us, wrapping us
about. Here we are centred. Here we can be silent, or speak without
raising our voices. Did you notice that and then that? we say. He said
that, meaning... She hesitated, and I believe suspected. Anyhow, I
heard voices, a sob on the stair late at night. It is the end of their
relationship. Thus we spin round us infinitely fine filaments and
construct a system. Plato and Shakespeare are included, also quite
obscure people, people of no importance whatsoever. I hate men who wear
crucifixes on the left side of their waistcoats. I hate ceremonies and
lamentations and the sad figure of Christ trembling beside another
trembling and sad figure. Also the pomp and the indifference and the
emphasis, always on the wrong place, of people holding forth under
chandeliers in full evening dress, wearing stars and decorations. Some
spray in a hedge, though, or a sunset over a flat winter field, or again
the way some old woman sits, arms akimbo, in an omnibus with a
basket--those we point at for the other to look at. It is so vast an
alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to
talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit
books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit. And you
take it and marvel, as I take the careless movements of your body and
marvel at its ease, its power--how you fling open windows and are
dexterous with your hands. For alas! my mind is a little impeded, it
soon tires; I fall damp, perhaps disgusting, at the goal.

'Alas! I could not ride about India in a sun-helmet and return to a
bungalow. I cannot tumble, as you do, like half-naked boys on the deck
of a ship, squirting each other with hose-pipes. I want this fire, I
want this chair. I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit
and all its anguish, after its listenings, and its waitings, and its
suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy--to be
alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat
in my habits. We must oppose the waste and deformity of the world, its
crowds eddying round and round disgorged and trampling. One must slip
paper-knives, even, exactly through the pages of novels, and tie up
packets of letters neatly with green silk, and brush up the cinders with
a hearth broom. Everything must be done to rebuke the horror of
deformity. Let us read writers of Roman severity and virtue; let us seek
perfection through the sand. Yes, but I love to slip the virtue and
severity of the noble Romans under the grey light of your eyes, and
dancing grasses and summer breezes and the laughter and shouts of boys
at play--of naked cabin-boys squirting each other with hose-pipes on the
decks of ships. Hence I am not a disinterested seeker, like Louis, after
perfection through the sand. Colours always stain the page; clouds pass
over it. And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking. Alcibiades,
Ajax, Hector and Percival are also you. They loved riding, they risked
their lives wantonly, they were not great readers either. But you are
not Ajax or Percival. They did not wrinkle their noses and scratch their
foreheads with your precise gesture. You are you. That is what consoles
me for the lack of many things--I am ugly, I am weak--and the depravity
of the world, and the flight of youth and Percival's death, and
bitterness and rancour and envies innumerable.

'But if one day you do not come after breakfast, if one day I see you in
some looking-glass perhaps looking after another, if the telephone
buzzes and buzzes in your empty room, I shall then, after unspeakable
anguish, I shall then--for there is no end to the folly of the human
heart--seek another, find another, you. Meanwhile, let us abolish the
ticking of time's clock with one blow. Come closer.'

****

_The sun had now sunk lower in the sky. The islands of cloud had gained
in density and drew themselves across the sun so that the rocks went
suddenly black, and the trembling sea-holly lost its blue and turned
silver, and shadows were blown like grey cloths over the sea. The waves
no longer visited the further pools or reached the dotted black line
which lay irregularly marked upon the beach. The sand was pearl white,
smoothed and shining._

_Birds swooped and circled high up in the air. Some raced in the furrows
of the wind and turned and sliced through them as if they were one body
cut into a thousand shreds. Birds fell like a net descending on the
tree-tops. Here one bird taking its way alone made wing for the marsh
and sat solitary on a white stake, opening its wings and shutting them._

_Some petals had fallen in the garden. They lay shell-shaped on the
earth. The dead leaf no longer stood upon its edge, but had been blown,
now running, now pausing, against some stalk. Through all the flowers
the same wave of light passed in a sudden flaunt and flash as if a fin
cut the green grass of a lake. Now and again some level and masterly
blast blew the multitudinous leaves up and down and then, as the wind
flagged, each blade regained its identity. The flowers, burning their
bright disks in the sun, flung aside the sunlight as the wind tossed
them, and then some heads too heavy to rise again drooped slightly._

_The afternoon sun warmed the fields, poured blue into the shadows and
reddened the corn. A deep varnish was laid like a lacquer over the
fields. A cart, a horse, a flock of rooks--whatever moved in it was
rolled round in gold. If a cow moved a leg it stirred ripples of red
gold, and its horns seemed lined with light. Sprays of flaxen-haired
corn lay on the hedges, brushed from the shaggy carts that came up from
the meadows short-legged and primeval looking. The round-headed clouds
never dwindled as they bowled along, but kept every atom of their
rotundity. Now, as they passed, they caught a whole village in the fling
of their net and, passing, let it fly free again. Far away on the
horizon, among the million grains of blue-grey dust, burnt one pane, or
stood the single line of one steeple or one tree._

_The red curtains and the white blinds blew in and out, flapping against
the edge of the window, and the light which entered by flaps and
breadths unequally had in it some brown tinge, and some abandonment as
it blew through the blowing curtains in gusts. Here it browned a
cabinet, there reddened a chair, here it made the window waver in the
side of the green jar._

_All for a moment wavered and bent in uncertainty and ambiguity, as if a
great moth sailing through the room had shadowed the immense solidity of
chairs and tables with floating wings._

****

'And time,' said Bernard, 'lets fall its drop. The drop that has formed
on the roof of the soul falls. On the roof of my mind time, forming,
lets fall its drop. Last week, as I stood shaving, the drop fell. I,
standing with my razor in my hand, became suddenly aware of the merely
habitual nature of my action (thus is the drop forming) and
congratulated my hands, ironically, for keeping at it. Shave, shave,
shave, I said. Go on shaving. The drop fell. All through the day's work,
at intervals, my mind went to an empty place, saying, "What is lost?
What is over?" And "Over and done with," I muttered, "over and done
with," solacing myself with words. People noticed the vacuity of my face
and the aimlessness of my conversation. The last words of my sentence
tailed away. And as I buttoned on my coat to go home I said more
dramatically, "I have lost my youth."

'It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit
insists upon coming to the rescue--the penalty of living in an old
civilization with a notebook. This drop falling has nothing to do with
losing my youth. This drop falling is time tapering to a point. Time,
which is a sunny pasture covered with a dancing light, time, which is
widespread as a field at midday, becomes pendant. Time tapers to a
point. As a drop falls from a glass heavy with some sediment, time
falls. These are the true cycles, these are the true events. Then as if
all the luminosity of the atmosphere were withdrawn I see to the bare
bottom. I see what habit covers. I lie sluggish in bed for days. I dine
out and gape like a codfish. I do not trouble to finish my sentences,
and my actions, usually so uncertain, acquire a mechanical precision. On
this occasion, passing an office, I went in and bought, with all the
composure of a mechanical figure, a ticket for Rome.

'Now I sit on a stone seat in these gardens surveying the eternal city,
and the little man who was shaving in London five days ago looks already
like a heap of old clothes. London has also crumbled. London consists of
fallen factories and a few gasometers. At the same time I am not
involved in this pageantry. I see the violet-sashed priests and the
picturesque nursemaids; I notice externals only. I sit here like a
convalescent, like a very simple man who knows only words of one
syllable. "The sun is hot," I say. "The wind is cold." I feel myself
carried round like an insect on top of the earth and could swear that,
sitting here, I feel its hardness, its turning movement. I have no
desire to go the opposite way from the earth. Could I prolong this sense
another six inches I have a foreboding that I should touch some queer
territory. But I have a very limited proboscis. I never wish to prolong
these states of detachment; I dislike them; I also despise them. I do
not wish to be a man who sits for fifty years on the same spot thinking
of his navel. I wish to be harnessed to a cart, a vegetable-cart that
rattles over the cobbles.

'The truth is that I am not one of those who find their satisfaction in
one person, or in infinity. The private room bores me, also the sky. My
being only glitters when all its facets are exposed to many people. Let
them fail and I am full of holes, dwindling like burnt paper. Oh, Mrs
Moffat, Mrs Moffat, I say, come and sweep it all up. Things have dropped
from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by
death--Percival--others through sheer inability to cross the street. I
am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely. Certain things lie beyond
my scope. I shall never understand the harder problems of philosophy.
Rome is the limit of my travelling. As I drop asleep at night it strikes
me sometimes with a pang that I shall never see savages in Tahiti
spearing fish by the light of a blazing cresset, or a lion spring in the
jungle, or a naked man eating raw flesh. Nor shall I learn Russian or
read the Vedas. I shall never again walk bang into the pillar-box. (But
still a few stars fall through my night, beautifully, from the violence
of that concussion.) But as I think, truth has come nearer. For many
years I crooned complacently, "My children... my wife... my house...
my dog." As I let myself in with my latch-key I would go through that
familiar ritual and wrap myself in those warm coverings. Now that lovely
veil has fallen. I do not want possessions now. (Note: an Italian
washer-woman stands on the same rung of physical refinement as the
daughter of an English duke.)

'But let me consider. The drop falls; another stage has been reached.
Stage upon stage. And why should there be an end of stages? and where do
they lead? To what conclusion? For they come wearing robes of solemnity.
In these dilemmas the devout consult those violet-sashed and
sensual-looking gentry who are trooping past me. But for ourselves, we
resent teachers. Let a man get up and say, "Behold, this is the truth,"
and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the
background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say. So Neville, at
school, in the dim chapel, raged at the sight of the doctor's crucifix.
I, who am always distracted, whether by a cat or by a bee buzzing round
the bouquet that Lady Hampden keeps so diligently pressed to her nose,
at once make up a story and so obliterate the angles of the crucifix. I
have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks
with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story
to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story.
And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

'Look now from this terrace at the swarming population beneath. Look at
the general activity and clamour. That man is in difficulties with his
mule. Half a dozen good-natured loafers offer their services. Others
pass by without looking. They have as many interests as there are
threads in a skein. Look at the sweep of the sky, bowled over by round
white clouds. Imagine the leagues of level land and the aqueducts and
the broken Roman pavement and the tombstones in the Campagna, and beyond
the Campagna, the sea, then again more land, then the sea. I could break
off any detail in all that prospect--say the mule-cart--and describe it
with the greatest ease. But why describe a man in trouble with his mule?
Again, I could invent stories about that girl coming up the steps. "She
met him under the dark archway.... 'It is over,' he said, turning from
the cage where the china parrot hangs." Or simply, "That was all." But
why impose my arbitrary design? Why stress this and shape that and twist
up little figures like the toys men sell in trays in the street? Why
select this, out of all that--one detail?

'Here am I shedding one of my life-skins, and all they will say is,
"Bernard is spending ten days in Rome." Here am I marching up and down
this terrace alone, unoriented. But observe how dots and dashes are
beginning, as I walk, to run themselves into continuous lines, how
things are losing the bald, the separate identity that they had as I
walked up those steps. The great red pot is now a reddish streak in a
wave of yellowish green. The world is beginning to move past me like the
banks of a hedge when the train starts, like the waves of the sea when a
steamer moves. I am moving too, am becoming involved in the general
sequence when one thing follows another and it seems inevitable that the
tree should come, then the telegraph-pole, then the break in the hedge.
And as I move, surrounded, included and taking part, the usual phrases
begin to bubble up, and I wish to free these bubbles from the trap-door
in my head, and direct my steps therefore towards that man, the back of
whose head is half familiar to me. We were together at school. We shall
undoubtedly meet. We shall certainly lunch together. We shall talk. But
wait, one moment wait.

'These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.
Tahiti becomes possible. Leaning over this parapet I see far out a waste
of water. A fin turns. This bare visual impression is unattached to any
line of reason, it springs up as one might see the fin of a porpoise on
the horizon. Visual impressions often communicate thus briefly
statements that we shall in time to come uncover and coax into words. I
note under F., therefore, "Fin in a waste of waters." I, who am
perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final
statement, make this mark, waiting for some winter's evening.

'Now I shall go and lunch somewhere, I shall hold my glass up, I shall
look through the wine, I shall observe with more than my usual
detachment, and when a pretty woman enters the restaurant and comes down
the room between the tables I shall say to myself, "Look where she comes
against a waste of waters." A meaningless observation, but to me,
solemn, slate-coloured, with a fatal sound of ruining worlds and waters
falling to destruction.

'So, Bernard (I recall you, you the usual partner in my enterprises),
let us begin this new chapter, and observe the formation of this new,
this unknown, strange, altogether unidentified and terrifying
experience--the new drop--which is about to shape itself. Larpent is
that man's name.'

'In this hot afternoon,' said Susan, 'here in this garden, here in this
field where I walk with my son, I have reached the summit of my desires.
The hinge of the gate is rusty; he heaves it open. The violent passions
of childhood, my tears in the garden when Jinny kissed Louis, my rage in
the schoolroom, which smelt of pine, my loneliness in foreign places,
when the mules came clattering in on their pointed hoofs and the Italian
women chattered at the fountain, shawled, with carnations twisted in
their hair, are rewarded by security, possession, familiarity. I have
had peaceful, productive years. I possess all I see. I have grown trees
from the seed. I have made ponds in which goldfish hide under the
broad-leaved lilies. I have netted over strawberry beds and lettuce
beds, and stitched the pears and the plums into white bags to keep them
safe from the wasps. I have seen my sons and daughters, once netted over
like fruit in their cots, break the meshes and walk with me, taller than
I am, casting shadows on the grass.

'I am fenced in, planted here like one of my own trees. I say, "My son,"
I say, "My daughter," and even the ironmonger looking up from his
counter strewn with nails, paint and wire-fencing respects the shabby
car at the door with its butterfly nets, pads and bee-hives. We hang
mistletoe over the clock at Christmas, weigh our blackberries and
mushrooms, count out jam-pots, and stand year by year to be measured
against the shutter in the drawing-room window. I also make wreaths of
white flowers, twisting silver-leaved plants among them for the dead,
attaching my card with sorrow for the dead shepherd, with sympathy for
the wife of the dead carter; and sit by the beds of dying women, who
murmur their last terrors, who clutch my hand; frequenting rooms
intolerable except to one born as I was and early acquainted with the
farmyard and the dung-heap and the hens straying in and out, and the
mother with two rooms and growing children. I have seen the windows run
with heat, I have smelt the sink.

'I ask now, standing with my scissors among my flowers, Where can the
shadow enter? What shock can loosen my laboriously gathered,
relentlessly pressed down life? Yet sometimes I am sick of natural
happiness, and fruit growing, and children scattering the house with
oars, guns, skulls, books won for prizes and other trophies. I am sick
of the body. I am sick of my own craft, industry and cunning, of the
unscrupulous ways of the mother who protects, who collects under her
jealous eyes at one long table her own children, always her own.

'It is when spring comes, cold, showery, with sudden yellow
flowers--then as I look at the meat under the blue shade and press the
heavy silver bags of tea, of sultanas, I remember how the sun rose, and
the swallows skimmed the grass, and phrases that Bernard made when we
were children, and the leaves shook over us, many-folded, very light,
breaking the blue of the sky, scattering wandering lights upon the
skeleton roots of the beech trees where I sat, sobbing. The pigeon rose.
I jumped up and ran after the words that trailed like the dangling
string from an air ball, up and up, from branch to branch escaping. Then
like a cracked bowl the fixity of my morning broke, and putting down the
bags of flour I thought, Life stands round me like glass round the
imprisoned reed.

'I hold scissors and snip off hollyhocks, who went to Elvedon and trod
on rotten oak apples, and saw the lady writing and the gardeners with
their great brooms. We ran back panting lest we should be shot and
nailed like stoats to the wall. Now I measure, I preserve. At night I
sit in the arm-chair and stretch my arm for my sewing; and hear my
husband snore; and look up when the light from a passing car dazzles the
window and feel the waves of my life tossed, broken, round me who am
rooted; and hear cries, and see others' lives eddying like straws round
the piers of a bridge while I push my needle in and out and draw my
thread through the calico.

'I think sometimes of Percival who loved me. He rode and fell in India.
I think sometimes of Rhoda. Uneasy cries wake me at dead of night. But
for the most part I walk content with my sons. I cut the dead petals
from hollyhocks. Rather squat, grey before my time, but with clear eyes,
pear-shaped eyes, I pace my fields.'

'Here I stand,' said Jinny, 'in the Tube station where everything that
is desirable meets--Piccadilly South Side, Piccadilly North Side, Regent
Street and the Haymarket. I stand for a moment under the pavement in the
heart of London. Innumerable wheels rush and feet press just over my
head. The great avenues of civilization meet here and strike this way
and that. I am in the heart of life. But look--there is my body in that
looking-glass. How solitary, how shrunk, how aged! I am no longer young.
I am no longer part of the procession. Millions descend those stairs in
a terrible descent. Great wheels churn inexorably urging them downwards.
Millions have died. Percival died. I still move. I still live. But who
will come if I signal?

'Little animal that I am, sucking my flanks in and out with fear, I
stand here, palpitating, trembling. But I will not be afraid. I will
bring the whip down on my flanks. I am not a whimpering little animal
making for the shadow. It was only for a moment, catching sight of
myself before I had time to prepare myself as I always prepare myself
for the sight of myself, that I quailed. It is true; I am not young--I
shall soon raise my arm in vain and my scarf will fall to my side
without having signalled. I shall not hear the sudden sigh in the night
and feel through the dark someone coming. There will be no reflections
in window-panes in dark tunnels. I shall look into faces, and I shall
see them seek some other face. I admit for one moment the soundless
flight of upright bodies down the moving stairs like the pinioned and
terrible descent of some army of the dead downwards and the churning of
the great engines remorselessly forwarding us, all of us, onwards, made
me cower and run for shelter.

'But now I swear, making deliberately in front of the glass those slight
preparations that equip me, I will not be afraid. Think of the superb
omnibuses, red and yellow, stopping and starting, punctually in order.
Think of the powerful and beautiful cars that now slow to a foot's pace
and now shoot forward; think of men, think of women, equipped, prepared,
driving onward. This is the triumphant procession; this is the army of
victory with banners and brass eagles and heads crowned with laurel
leaves won in battle. They are better than savages in loin-cloths, and
women whose hair is dank, whose long breasts sag, with children tugging
at their long breasts. These broad thoroughfares--Piccadilly South,
Piccadilly North, Regent Street and the Haymarket--are sanded paths of
victory driven through the jungle. I too, with my little patent-leather
shoes, my handkerchief that is but a film of gauze, my reddened lips and
my finely pencilled eyebrows, march to victory with the band.

'Look how they show off clothes here even under ground in a perpetual
radiance. They will not let the earth even lie wormy and sodden. There
are gauzes and silks illumined in glass cases and underclothes trimmed
with a million close stitches of fine embroidery. Crimson, green,
violet, they are dyed all colours. Think how they organize, roll out,
smooth, dip in dyes and drive tunnels blasting the rock. Lifts rise and
fall; trains stop, trains start as regularly as the waves of the sea.
This is what has my adhesion. I am a native of this world, I follow its
banners. How could I run for shelter when they are so magnificently
adventurous, daring, curious, too, and strong enough in the midst of
effort to pause and scrawl with a free hand a joke upon the wall?
Therefore I will powder my face and redden my lips. I will make the
angle of my eyebrows sharper than usual. I will rise to the surface,
standing erect with the others in Piccadilly Circus. I will sign with a
sharp gesture to a cab whose driver will signify by some indescribable
alacrity his understanding of my signals. For I still excite eagerness.
I still feel the bowing of men in the street like the silent stoop of
the corn when the light wind blows, ruffling it red.

'I will drive to my own house. I will fill the vases with lavish, with
luxurious, with extravagant flowers nodding in great bunches. I will
place one chair there, another here. I will put ready cigarettes,
glasses and some gaily covered new unread book in case Bernard comes, or
Neville or Louis. But perhaps it will not be Bernard, Neville or Louis,
but somebody new, somebody unknown, somebody I passed on a staircase
and, just turning as we passed, I murmured, "Come." He will come this
afternoon; somebody I do not know, somebody new. Let the silent army of
the dead descend. I march forward.'

'I no longer need a room now,' said Neville, 'or walls and firelight. I
am no longer young. I pass Jinny's house without envy, and smile at the
young man who arranges his tie a little nervously on the doorstep. Let
the dapper young man ring the bell; let him find her. I shall find her
if I want her; if not, I pass on. The old corrosion has lost its
bite--envy, intrigue and bitterness have been washed out. We have lost
our glory too. When we were young we sat anywhere, on bare benches in
draughty halls with the doors always banging. We tumbled about
half-naked like boys on the deck of a ship squirting each other with
hose-pipes. Now I could swear that I like people pouring profusely out
of the Tube when the day's work is done, unanimous, indiscriminate,
uncounted. I have picked my own fruit. I look dispassionately.

'After all, we are not responsible. We are not judges. We are not called
upon to torture our fellows with thumbscrews and irons; we are not
called upon to mount pulpits and lecture them on pale Sunday afternoons.
It is better to look at a rose, or to read Shakespeare as I read him
here in Shaftesbury Avenue. Here's the fool, here's the villain, here in
a car comes Cleopatra, burning on her barge. Here are figures of the
damned too, noseless men by the police-court wall, standing with their
feet in fire, howling. This is poetry if we do not write it. They act
their parts infallibly, and almost before they open their lips I know
what they are going to say, and wait the divine moment when they speak
the word that must have been written. If it were only for the sake of
the play, I could walk Shaftesbury Avenue for ever.

'Then coming from the street, entering some room, there are people
talking, or hardly troubling to talk. He says, she says, somebody else
says, things have been said so often that one word is now enough to lift
a whole weight. Argument, laughter, old grievances--they fall through
the air, thickening it. I take a book and read half a page of anything.
They have not mended the spout of the teapot yet. The child dances,
dressed in her mother's clothes.

'But then Rhoda, or it may be Louis, some fasting and anguished spirit,
passes through and out again. They want a plot, do they? They want a
reason? It is not enough for them, this ordinary scene. It is not enough
to wait for the thing to be said as if it were written; to see the
sentence lay its dab of clay precisely on the right place, making
character; to perceive, suddenly, some group in outline against the sky.
Yet if they want violence, I have seen death and murder and suicide all
in one room. One comes in, one goes out. There are sobs on the
staircase. I have heard threads broken and knots tied and the quiet
stitching of white cambric going on and on on the knees of a woman. Why
ask, like Louis, for a reason, or fly like Rhoda to some far grove and
part the leaves of the laurels and look for statues? They say that one
must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this
welter the sun shines; the sun falls sheer into pools that are fledged
with willows. (Here it is November; the poor hold out matchboxes in
wind-bitten fingers.) They say truth is to be found there entire, and
virtue, that shuffles along here, down blind alleys, is to be had there
perfect. Rhoda flies with her neck outstretched and blind fanatic eyes,
past us. Louis, now so opulent, goes to his attic window among the
blistered roofs and gazes where she has vanished, but must sit down in
his office among the typewriters and the telephone and work it all out
for our instruction, for our regeneration, and the reform of an unborn
world.

'But now in this room, which I enter without knocking, things are said
as if they had been written. I go to the bookcase. If I choose, I read
half a page of anything. I need not speak. But I listen. I am
marvellously on the alert. Certainly, one cannot read this poem without
effort. The page is often corrupt and mud-stained, and torn and stuck
together with faded leaves, with scraps of verbena or geranium. To read
this poem one must have myriad eyes, like one of those lamps that turn
on slabs of racing water at midnight in the Atlantic, when perhaps only
a spray of seaweed pricks the surface, or suddenly the waves gape and up
shoulders a monster. One must put aside antipathies and jealousies and
not interrupt. One must have patience and infinite care and let the
light sound, whether of spiders' delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle
of water in some irrelevant drain-pipe, unfold too. Nothing is to be
rejected in fear or horror. The poet who has written this page (what I
read with people talking) has withdrawn. There are no commas or
semi-colons. The lines do not run in convenient lengths. Much is sheer
nonsense. One must be sceptical, but throw caution to the winds and when
the door opens accept absolutely. Also sometimes weep; also cut away
ruthlessly with a slice of the blade soot, bark, hard accretions of all
sorts. And so (while they talk) let down one's net deeper and deeper and
gently draw in and bring to the surface what he said and she said and
make poetry.

'Now I have listened to them talking. They have gone now. I am alone. I
could be content to watch the fire burn for ever, like a dome, like a
furnace; now some spike of wood takes the look of a scaffold, or pit, or
happy valley; now it is a serpent curled crimson with white scales. The
fruit on the curtain swells beneath the parrot's beak. Cheep, cheep,
creaks the fire, like the cheep of insects in the middle of a forest.
Cheep, cheep, it clicks while out there the branches thrash the air, and
now, like a volley of shot, a tree falls. These are the sounds of a
London night. Then I hear the one sound I wait for. Up and up it comes,
approaches, hesitates, stops at my door. I cry, "Come in. Sit by me. Sit
on the edge of the chair." Swept away by the old hallucination, I cry,
"Come closer, closer."'

'I come back from the office,' said Louis. 'I hang my coat here, place
my stick there--I like to fancy that Richelieu walked with such a cane.
Thus I divest myself of my authority. I have been sitting at the right
hand of a director at a varnished table. The maps of our successful
undertakings confront us on the wall. We have laced the world together
with our ships. The globe is strung with our lines. I am immensely
respectable. All the young ladies in the office acknowledge my entrance.
I can dine where I like now, and without vanity may suppose that I shall
soon acquire a house in Surrey, two cars, a conservatory and some rare
species of melon. But I still return, I still come back to my attic,
hang up my hat and resume in solitude that curious attempt which I have
made since I brought down my fist on my master's grained oak door. I
open a little book. I read one poem. One poem is enough.

                         O western wind...

O western wind, you are at enmity with my mahogany table and spats, and
also, alas, with the vulgarity of my mistress, the little actress, who
has never been able to speak English correctly--

              O western wind, when wilt thou blow...

Rhoda, with her intense abstraction, with her unseeing eyes the colour
of snail's flesh, does not destroy you, western wind, whether she comes
at midnight when the stars blaze or at the most prosaic hour of midday.
She stands at the window and looks at the chimney-pots and the broken
windows in the houses of poor people--

              O western wind, when wilt thou blow...

'My task, my burden, has always been greater than other people's. A
pyramid has been set on my shoulders. I have tried to do a colossal
labour. I have driven a violent, an unruly, a vicious team. With my
Australian accent I have sat in eating-shops and tried to make the
clerks accept me, yet never forgotten my solemn and severe convictions
and the discrepancies and incoherences that must be resolved. As a boy I
dreamt of the Nile, was reluctant to awake, yet brought down my fist on
the grained oak door. It would have been happier to have been born
without a destiny, like Susan, like Percival, whom I most admire.

                O western wind, when wilt thou blow,
                  That the small rain down can rain?

'Life has been a terrible affair for me. I am like some vast sucker,
some glutinous, some adhesive, some insatiable mouth. I have tried to
draw from the living flesh the stone lodged at the centre. I have known
little natural happiness, though I chose my mistress in order that, with
her cockney accent, she might make me feel at my ease. But she only
tumbled the floor with dirty underlinen, and the charwoman and the
shop-boys called after me a dozen times a day, mocking my prim and
supercilious gait.

                O western wind, when wilt thou blow,
                  That the small rain down can rain?

'What has my destiny been, the sharp-pointed pyramid that has pressed on
my ribs all these years? That I remember the Nile and the women carrying
pitchers on their heads; that I feel myself woven in and out of the long
summers and winters that have made the corn flow and have frozen the
streams. I am not a single and passing being. My life is not a moment's
bright spark like that on the surface of a diamond. I go beneath ground
tortuously, as if a warder carried a lamp from cell to cell. My destiny
has been that I remember and must weave together, must plait into one
cable the many threads, the thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of
our long history, of our tumultuous and varied day. There is always more
to be understood; a discord to be listened for; a falsity to be
reprimanded. Broken and soot-stained are these roofs with their chimney
cowls, their loose slates, their slinking cats and attic windows. I pick
my way over broken glass, among blistered tiles, and see only vile and
famished faces.

'Let us suppose that I make reason of it all--one poem on a page, and
then die. I can assure you it will not be unwillingly. Percival died.
Rhoda left me. But I shall live to be gaunt and sere, to tap my way,
much respected, with my gold-headed cane along the pavements of the
city. Perhaps I shall never die, shall never attain even that continuity
and permanence--

                O western wind, when wilt thou blow,
                  That the small rain down can rain?

'Percival was flowering with green leaves and was laid in the earth with
all his branches still sighing in the summer wind. Rhoda, with whom I
shared silence when the others spoke, she who hung back and turned aside
when the herd assembled and galloped with orderly, sleek backs over the
rich pastures, has gone now like the desert heat. When the sun blisters
the roofs of the city I think of her; when the dry leaves patter to the
ground; when the old men come with pointed sticks and pierce little bits
of paper as we pierced her--

                O western wind, when wilt thou blow,
                  That the small rain down can rain?
                Christ, that my love were in my arms,
                  And I in my bed again!

I return now to my book; I return now to my attempt.'

'Oh, life, how I have dreaded you,' said Rhoda, 'oh, human beings, how I
have hated you! How you have nudged, how you have interrupted, how
hideous you have looked in Oxford Street, how squalid sitting opposite
each other staring in the Tube! Now as I climb this mountain, from the
top of which I shall see Africa, my mind is printed with brown-paper
parcels and your faces. I have been stained by you and corrupted. You
smelt so unpleasant too, lining up outside doors to buy tickets. All
were dressed in indeterminate shades of grey and brown, never even a
blue feather pinned to a hat. None had the courage to be one thing
rather than another. What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order
to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and
servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat
yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that
lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed
them into the waste-paper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were
my life.

'But I yielded. Sneers and yawns were covered with my hand. I did not go
out into the street and break a bottle in the gutter as a sign of rage.
Trembling with ardour, I pretended that I was not surprised. What you
did, I did. If Susan and Jinny pulled up their stockings like that, I
pulled mine up like that also. So terrible was life that I held up shade
after shade. Look at life through this, look at life through that; let
there be rose leaves, let there be vine leaves--I covered the whole
street. Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, with the blaze and ripple of
my mind, with vine leaves and rose leaves. There were boxes too,
standing in the passage when the school broke up. I stole secretly to
read the labels and dream of names and faces. Harrogate, perhaps,
Edinburgh, perhaps, was ruffled with golden glory where some girl whose
name I forget stood on the pavement. But it was the name only. I left
Louis; I feared embraces. With fleeces, with vestments, I have tried to
cover the blue-black blade. I implored day to break into night. I have
longed to see the cupboard dwindle, to feel the bed soften, to float
suspended, to perceive lengthened trees, lengthened faces, a green bank
on a moor and two figures in distress saying good-bye. I flung words in
fans like those the sower throws over the ploughed fields when the earth
is bare. I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and
fuller with dreams.

'Then in some Hall I parted the boughs of music and saw the house we
have made; the square stood upon the oblong. "The house which contains
all," I said, lurching against people's shoulders in an omnibus after
Percival died; yet I went to Greenwich. Walking on the embankment, I
prayed that I might thunder for ever on the verge of the world where
there is no vegetation, but here and there a marble pillar. I threw my
bunch into the spreading wave. I said, "Consume me, carry me to the
furthest limit." The wave has broken; the bunch is withered. I seldom
think of Percival now.

'Now I climb this Spanish hill; and I will suppose that this mule-back
is my bed and that I lie dying. There is only a thin sheet between me
now and the infinite depths. The lumps in the mattress soften beneath
me. We stumble up--we stumble on. My path has been up and up, towards
some solitary tree with a pool beside it on the very top. I have sliced
the waters of beauty in the evening when the hills close themselves like
birds' wings folded. I have picked sometimes a red carnation, and wisps
of hay. I have sunk alone on the turf and fingered some old bone and
thought: When the wind stops to brush this height, may there be nothing
found but a pinch of dust.

'The mule stumbles up and on. The ridge of the hill rises like mist, but
from the top I shall see Africa. Now the bed gives under me. The sheets
spotted with yellow holes let me fall through. The good woman with a
face like a white horse at the end of the bed makes a valedictory
movement and turns to go. Who then comes with me? Flowers only, the
cow-bind and the moonlight-coloured May. Gathering them loosely in a
sheaf I made of them a garland and gave them--Oh, to whom? We launch out
now over the precipice. Beneath us lie the lights of the herring fleet.
The cliffs vanish. Rippling small, rippling grey, innumerable waves
spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing. We may sink and
settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will
be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink.
Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a
tremendous shower, dissolving me.

'Yet that tree has bristling branches; that is the hard line of a
cottage roof. Those bladder shapes painted red and yellow are faces.
Putting my foot to the ground I step gingerly and press my hand against
the hard door of a Spanish inn.'

****

_The sun was sinking. The hard stone of the day was cracked and light
poured through its splinters. Red and gold shot through the waves, in
rapid running arrows, feathered with darkness. Erratically rays of light
flashed and wandered, like signals from sunken islands, or darts shot
through laurel groves by shameless, laughing boys. But the waves, as
they neared the shore, were robbed of light, and fell in one long
concussion, like a wall falling, a wall of grey stone, unpierced by any
chink of light._

_A breeze rose; a shiver ran through the leaves; and thus stirred they
lost their brown density and became grey or white as the tree shifted
its mass, winked and lost its domed uniformity. The hawk poised on the
topmost branch flicked its eyelids and rose and sailed and soared far
away. The wild plover cried in the marshes, evading, circling and crying
farther off in loneliness. The smoke of trains and chimneys was
stretched and torn and became part of the fleecy canopy that hung over
the sea and the fields._

_Now the corn was cut. Now only a brisk stubble was left of all its
flowing and waving. Slowly a great owl launched itself from the elm tree
and swung and rose, as if on a line that dipped, to the height of the
cedar. On the hills the slow shadows now broadened, now shrank, as they
passed over. The pool on top of the moor lay blank. No furry face looked
there, or hoof splashed, or hot muzzle seethed in the water. A bird,
perched on an ash-coloured twig, sipped a beak full of cold water. There
was no sound of cropping, and no sound of wheels, but only the sudden
roar of the wind letting its sails fill and brushing the tops of the
grasses. One bone lay rain-pocked and sun-bleached till it shone like a
twig that the sea has polished. The tree, that had burnt foxy red in
spring and in midsummer bent pliant leaves to the south wind, was now
black as iron, and as bare._

_The land was so distant that no shining roof or glittering window could
be any longer seen. The tremendous weight of the shadowed earth had
engulfed such frail fetters, such snail-shell encumbrances. Now there
was only the liquid shadow of the cloud, the buffeting of the rain, a
single darting spear of sunshine, or the sudden bruise of the rainstorm.
Solitary trees marked distant hills like obelisks._

_The evening sun, whose heat had gone out of it and whose burning spot
of intensity had been diffused, made chairs and tables mellower and
inlaid them with lozenges of brown and yellow. Lined with shadows their
weight seemed more ponderous, as if colour, tilted, had run to one side.
Here lay knife, fork and glass, but lengthened, swollen and made
portentous. Rimmed in a gold circle the looking-glass held the scene
immobile as if everlasting in its eye._

_Meanwhile the shadows lengthened on the beach; the blackness deepened.
The iron black boot became a pool of deep blue. The rocks lost their
hardness. The water that stood round the old boat was dark as if mussels
had been steeped in it. The foam had turned livid and left here and
there a white gleam of pearl on the misty sand._

****

'Hampton Court,' said Bernard. 'Hampton Court. This is our
meeting-place. Behold the red chimneys, the square battlements of
Hampton Court. The tone of my voice as I say "Hampton Court" proves that
I am middle-aged. Ten years, fifteen years ago, I should have said
"Hampton Court?" with interrogation--what will it be like? Will there be
lakes, mazes? Or with anticipation, What is going to happen to me here?
Whom shall I meet? Now, Hampton Court--Hampton Court--the words beat a
gong in the space which I have so laboriously cleared with half a dozen
telephone messages and postcards, give off ring after ring of sound,
booming, sonorous: and pictures rise--summer afternoons, boats, old
ladies holding their skirts up, one urn in winter, some daffodils in
March--these all float to the top of the waters that now lie deep on
every scene.

'There at the door by the Inn, our meeting-place, they are already
standing--Susan, Louis, Rhoda, Jinny and Neville. They have come
together already. In a moment when I have joined them, another
arrangement will form, another pattern. What now runs to waste, forming
scenes profusely, will be checked, stated. I am reluctant to suffer that
compulsion. Already at fifty yards distance I feel the order of my being
changed. The tug of the magnet of their society tells upon me. I come
nearer. They do not see me. Now Rhoda sees me, but she pretends, with
her horror of the shock of meeting, that I am a stranger. Now Neville
turns. Suddenly, raising my hand, saluting Neville I cry, "I too have
pressed flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets," and am
churned up. My little boat bobs unsteadily upon the chopped and tossing
waves. There is no panacea (let me note) against the shock of meeting.

'It is uncomfortable too, joining ragged edges, raw edges; only
gradually, as we shuffle and trample into the Inn, taking coats and hats
off, does meeting become agreeable. Now we assemble in the long, bare
dining-room that overlooks some park, some green space still
fantastically lit by the setting sun so that there is a gold bar between
the trees, and sit ourselves down.'

'Now sitting side by side,' said Neville, 'at this narrow table, now
before the first emotion is worn smooth, what do we feel? Honestly now,
openly and directly as befits old friends meeting with difficulty, what
do we feel on meeting? Sorrow. The door will not open; he will not come.
And we are laden. Being now all of us middle-aged, loads are on us. Let
us put down our loads. What have you made of life, we ask, and I? You,
Bernard; you, Susan; you, Jinny; and Rhoda and Louis? The lists have
been posted on the doors. Before we break these rolls, and help
ourselves to fish and salad, I feel in my private pocket and find my
credentials--what I carry to prove my superiority. I have passed. I have
papers in my private pocket that prove it. But your eyes, Susan, full of
turnips and cornfields, disturb me. These papers in my private
pocket--the clamour that proves that I have passed--make a faint sound
like that of a man clapping in an empty field to scare away rooks. Now
it has died down altogether, under Susan's stare (the clapping, the
reverberation that I have made), and I hear only the wind sweeping over
the ploughed land and some bird singing--perhaps some intoxicated lark.
Has the waiter heard of me, or those furtive everlasting couples, now
loitering, now holding back and looking at the trees which are not yet
dark enough to shelter their prostrate bodies? No; the sound of clapping
has failed.

'What then remains, when I cannot pull out my papers and make you
believe by reading aloud my credentials that I have passed? What remains
is what Susan brings to light under the acid of her green eyes, her
crystal, pear-shaped eyes. There is always somebody, when we come
together, and the edges of meeting are still sharp, who refuses to be
submerged; whose identity therefore one wishes to make crouch beneath
one's own. For me now, it is Susan. I talk to impress Susan. Listen to
me, Susan.

'When someone comes in at breakfast, even the embroidered fruit on my
curtain swells so that parrots can peck it; one can break it off between
one's thumb and finger. The thin, skimmed milk of early morning turns
opal, blue, rose. At that hour your husband--the man who slapped his
gaiters, pointing with his whip at the barren cow--grumbles. You say
nothing. You see nothing. Custom blinds your eyes. At that hour your
relationship is mute, null, dun-coloured. Mine at that hour is warm and
various. There are no repetitions for me. Each day is dangerous. Smooth
on the surface, we are all bone beneath, like snakes coiling. Suppose we
read _The Times_; suppose we argue. It is an experience. Suppose it is
winter. The snow falling loads down the roof and seals us together in a
red cave. The pipes have burst. We stand a yellow tin bath in the middle
of the room. We rush helter-skelter for basins. Look there--it has burst
again over the bookcase. We shout with laughter at the sight of ruin.
Let solidity be destroyed. Let us have no possessions. Or is it summer?
We may wander to a lake and watch Chinese geese waddling flat-footed to
the water's edge, or see a bone-like city church with young green
trembling before it. (I choose at random; I choose the obvious.) Each
sight is an arabesque scrawled suddenly to illustrate some hazard and
marvel of intimacy. The snow, the burst pipe, the tin bath, the Chinese
goose--these are signs swung high aloft upon which, looking back, I read
the character of each love; how each was different.

'You meanwhile--for I want to diminish your hostility, your green eyes
fixed on mine, and your shabby dress, your rough hands, and all the
other emblems of your maternal splendour--have stuck like a limpet to
the same rock. Yet it is true, I do not want to hurt you; only to
refresh and furbish up my own belief in myself that failed at your
entry. Change is no longer possible. We are committed. Before, when we
met in a restaurant in London with Percival, all simmered and shook; we
could have been anything. We have chosen now, or sometimes it seems the
choice was made for us--a pair of tongs pinched us between the
shoulders. I chose. I took the print of life not outwardly, but inwardly
upon the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre. I am clouded and bruised
with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have
smell, colour, texture, substance, but no name. I am merely "Neville" to
you, who see the narrow limits of my life and the line it cannot pass.
But to myself I am immeasurable; a net whose fibres pass imperceptibly
beneath the world. My net is almost indistinguishable from that which it
surrounds. It lifts whales--huge leviathans and white jellies, what is
amorphous and wandering; I detect, I perceive. Beneath my eyes opens--a
book; I see to the bottom; the heart--I see to the depths. I know what
loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes
hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots;
love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn
apart.

'But there was another glory once, when we watched for the door to open,
and Percival came; when we flung ourselves unattached on the edge of a
hard bench in a public room.'

'There was the beech wood,' said Susan, 'Elvedon, and the gilt hands of
the clock sparkling among the trees. The pigeons broke the leaves. The
changing travelling lights wandered over me. They escaped me. Yet look,
Neville, whom I discredit in order to be myself, at my hand on the
table. Look at the gradations of healthy colour here on the knuckles,
here on the palm. My body has been used daily, rightly, like a tool by a
good workman, all over. The blade is clean, sharp, worn in the centre.
(We battle together like beasts fighting in a field, like stags making
their horns clash.) Seen through your pale and yielding flesh, even
apples and bunches of fruit must have a filmed look as if they stood
under glass. Lying deep in a chair with one person, one person only, but
one person who changes, you see one inch of flesh only; its nerves,
fibres, the sullen or quick flow of blood on it; but nothing entire. You
do not see a house in a garden; a horse in a field; a town laid out, as
you bend like an old woman straining her eyes over her darning. But I
have seen life in blocks, substantial, huge; its battlements and towers,
factories and gasometers; a dwelling-place made from time immemorial
after an hereditary pattern. These things remain square, prominent,
undissolved in my mind. I am not sinuous or suave; I sit among you
abrading your softness with my hardness, quenching the silver-grey
flickering moth-wing quiver of words with the green spurt of my clear
eyes.

'Now we have clashed our antlers. This is the necessary prelude; the
salute of old friends.'

'The gold has faded between the trees,' said Rhoda, 'and a slice of
green lies behind them, elongated like the blade of a knife seen in
dreams, or some tapering island on which nobody sets foot. Now the cars
begin to wink and flicker, coming down the avenue. Lovers can draw into
the darkness now; the boles of the trees are swollen, are obscene with
lovers.'

'It was different once,' said Bernard. 'Once we could break the current
as we chose. How many telephone calls, how many postcards, are now
needed to cut this hole through which we come together, united, at
Hampton Court? How swift life runs from January to December! We are all
swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no
shade; we make no comparisons; think scarcely ever of I or of you; and
in this unconsciousness attain the utmost freedom from friction and part
the weeds that grow over the mouths of sunken channels. We have to leap
like fish, high in the air, in order to catch the train from Waterloo.
And however high we leap we fall back again into the stream. I shall
never now take ship for the South Sea Islands. A journey to Rome is the
limit of my travelling. I have sons and daughters. I am wedged into my
place in the puzzle.

'But it is only my body--this elderly man here whom you call
Bernard--that is fixed irrevocably--so I desire to believe. I think more
disinterestedly than I could when I was young and must dig furiously
like a child rummaging in a bran-pie to discover my self. "Look, what is
this? And this? Is this going to be a fine present? Is that all?" and so
on. Now I know what the parcels hold; and do not care much. I throw my
mind out in the air as a man throws seeds in great fan-flights, falling
through the purple sunset, falling on the pressed and shining ploughland
which is bare.

'A phrase. An imperfect phrase. And what are phrases? They have left me
very little to lay on the table, beside Susan's hand; to take from my
pocket, with Neville's credentials. I am not an authority on law, or
medicine, or finance. I am wrapped round with phrases, like damp straw;
I glow, phosphorescent. And each of you feels when I speak, "I am lit
up. I am glowing." The little boys used to feel "That's a good one,
that's a good one," as the phrases bubbled up from my lips under the elm
trees in the playing-fields. They too bubbled up; they also escaped with
my phrases. But I pine in solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

'I pass from house to house like the friars in the Middle Ages who
cozened the wives and girls with beads and ballads. I am a traveller, a
pedlar, paying for my lodging with a ballad; I am an indiscriminate, an
easily pleased guest; often putting up in the best room in a
four-poster; then lying in a barn on a haystack. I don't mind the fleas
and find no fault with silk either. I am very tolerant. I am not a
moralist. I have too great a sense of the shortness of life and its
temptations to rule red lines. Yet I am not so indiscriminate as you
think, judging me--as you judge me--from my fluency. I have a little
dagger of contempt and severity hidden up my sleeve. But I am apt to be
deflected. I make stories. I twist up toys out of anything. A girl sits
at a cottage door; she is waiting; for whom? Seduced, or not seduced?
The headmaster sees the hole in the carpet. He sighs. His wife, drawing
her fingers through the waves of her still abundant hair, reflects--et
cetera. Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping
a cigarette into the gutter--all are stories. But which is the true
story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in
a cupboard, waiting for someone to wear them. Thus waiting, thus
speculating, making this note and then another, I do not cling to life.
I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always
accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen
ways at once. But Louis, wild-eyed but severe, in his attic, in his
office, has formed unalterable conclusions upon the true nature of what
is to be known.'

'It breaks,' said Louis, 'the thread I try to spin; your laughter breaks
it, your indifference, also your beauty. Jinny broke the thread when she
kissed me in the garden years ago. The boasting boys mocked me at school
for my Australian accent and broke it. "This is the meaning," I say; and
then start with a pang--vanity. "Listen," I say, "to the nightingale,
who sings among the trampling feet; the conquests and migrations.
Believe--" and then am twitched asunder. Over broken tiles and splinters
of glass I pick my way. Different lights fall, making the ordinary
leopard spotted and strange. This moment of reconciliation, when we meet
together united, this evening moment, with its wine and shaking leaves,
and youth coming up from the river in white flannels, carrying cushions,
is to me black with the shadows of dungeons and the tortures and
infamies practised by man upon man. So imperfect are my senses they
never blot out with one purple the serious charge that my reason adds
and adds against us, even as we sit here. What is the solution, I ask
myself, and the bridge? How can I reduce these dazzling, these dancing
apparitions to one line capable of linking all in one? So I ponder; and
you meanwhile observe maliciously my pursed lips, my sallow cheeks and
my invariable frown.

'But I beg you also to notice my cane and my waistcoat. I have inherited
a desk of solid mahogany in a room hung with maps. Our steamers have won
an enviable reputation for their cabins replete with luxury. We supply
swimming-baths and gymnasiums. I wear a white waistcoat now and consult
a little book before I make an engagement.

'This is the arch and ironical manner in which I hope to distract you
from my shivering, my tender, and infinitely young and unprotected soul.
For I am always the youngest; the most navely surprised; the one who
runs in advance in apprehension and sympathy with discomfort or
ridicule--should there be a smut on a nose, or a button undone. I suffer
for all humiliations. Yet I am also ruthless, marmoreal. I do not see
how you can say that it is fortunate to have lived. Your little
excitements, your childish transports, when a kettle boils, when the
soft air lifts Jinny's spotted scarf and it floats web-like, are to me
like silk streamers thrown in the eyes of the charging bull. I condemn
you. Yet my heart yearns towards you. I would go with you through the
fires of death. Yet am happiest alone. I luxuriate in gold and purple
vestments. Yet I prefer a view over chimney-pots; cats scraping their
mangy sides upon blistered chimney-stacks; broken windows; and the
hoarse clangour of bells from the steeple of some brick chapel.'

'I see what is before me,' said Jinny. 'This scarf, these wine-coloured
spots. This glass. This mustard pot. This flower. I like what one
touches, what one tastes. I like rain when it has turned to snow and
become palpable. And being rash, and much more courageous than you are,
I do not temper my beauty with meanness lest it should scorch me. I gulp
it down entire. It is made of flesh; it is made of stuff. My imagination
is the body's. Its visions are not fine-spun and white with purity like
Louis's. I do not like your lean cats and your blistered chimney-pots.
The scrannel beauties of your roof-tops repel me. Men and women, in
uniforms, wigs and gowns, bowler hats and tennis shirts beautifully open
at the neck, the infinite variety of women's dresses (I note all clothes
always) delight me. I eddy with them, in and out, in and out, into
rooms, into halls, here, there, everywhere, wherever they go. This man
lifts the hoof of a horse. This man shoves in and out the drawers of his
private collection. I am never alone. I am attended by a regiment of my
fellows. My mother must have followed the drum, my father the sea. I am
like a little dog that trots down the road after the regimental band,
but stops to snuff a tree-trunk, to sniff some brown stain, and suddenly
careers across the street after some mongrel cur and then holds one paw
up while it sniffs an entrancing whiff of meat from the butcher's shop.
My traffics have led me into strange places. Men, how many, have broken
from the wall and come to me. I have only to hold my hand up. Straight
as a dart they have come to the place of assignation--perhaps a chair on
a balcony, perhaps a shop at a street corner. The torments, the
divisions of your lives have been solved for me night after night,
sometimes only by the touch of a finger under the tablecloth as we sat
dining--so fluid has my body become, forming even at the touch of a
finger into one full drop, which fills itself, which quivers, which
flashes, which falls in ecstasy.

'I have sat before a looking-glass as you sit writing, adding up figures
at desks. So, before the looking-glass in the temple of my bedroom, I
have judged my nose and my chin; my lips that open too wide and show too
much gum. I have looked. I have noted. I have chosen what yellow or
white, what shine or dullness, what loop or straightness suits. I am
volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or
voluptuous as a candle flame in gold. I have run violently like a whip
flung out to the extreme end of my tether. His shirt front, there in the
corner, has been white; then purple; smoke and flame have wrapped us
about; after a furious conflagration--yet we scarcely raised our voices,
sitting on the hearth-rug, as we murmured all the secrets of our hearts
as into shells so that nobody might hear in the sleeping house, but I
heard the cook stir once, and once we thought the ticking of the clock
was a footfall--we have sunk to ashes, leaving no relics, no unburnt
bones, no wisps of hair to be kept in lockets such as your intimacies
leave behind them. Now I turn grey; now I turn gaunt; but I look at my
face at midday sitting in front of the looking-glass in broad daylight,
and note precisely my nose, my chin, my lips that open too wide and show
too much gum. But I am not afraid.'

'There were lamp-posts,' said Rhoda, 'and trees that had not yet shed
their leaves on the way from the station. The leaves might have hidden
me still. But I did not hide behind them. I walked straight up to you
instead of circling round to avoid the shock of sensation as I used. But
it is only that I have taught my body to do a certain trick. Inwardly I
am not taught; I fear, I hate, I love, I envy and despise you, but I
never join you happily. Coming up from the station, refusing to accept
the shadow of the trees and the pillar-boxes, I perceived, from your
coats and umbrellas, even at a distance, how you stand embedded in a
substance made of repeated moments run together; are committed, have an
attitude, with children, authority, fame, love, society; where I have
nothing. I have no face.

'Here in this dining-room you see the antlers and the tumblers; the
salt-cellars; the yellow stains on the tablecloth. "Waiter!" says
Bernard. "Bread!" says Susan. And the waiter comes; he brings bread. But
I see the side of a cup like a mountain and only parts of antlers, and
the brightness on the side of that jug like a crack in darkness with
wonder and terror. Your voices sound like trees creaking in a forest. So
with your faces and their prominences and hollows. How beautiful,
standing at a distance immobile at midnight against the railings of some
square! Behind you is a white crescent of foam, and fishermen on the
verge of the world are drawing in nets and casting them. A wind ruffles
the topmost leaves of primeval trees. (Yet here we sit at Hampton
Court.) Parrots shrieking break the intense stillness of the jungle.
(Here the trams start.) The swallow dips her wings in midnight pools.
(Here we talk.) That is the circumference that I try to grasp as we sit
together. Thus I must undergo the penance of Hampton Court at
seven-thirty precisely.

'But since these rolls of bread and wine bottles are needed by me, and
your faces with their hollows and prominences are beautiful, and the
table-cloth and its yellow stains, far from being allowed to spread in
wider and wider circles of understanding that may at last (so I dream,
falling off the edge of the earth at night when my bed floats suspended)
embrace the entire world, I must go through the antics of the
individual. I must start when you pluck at me with your children, your
poems, your chilblains or whatever it is that you do and suffer. But I
am not deluded. After all these callings hither and thither, these
pluckings and searchings, I shall fall alone through this thin sheet
into gulfs of fire. And you will not help me. More cruel than the old
torturers, you will let me fall, and will tear me to pieces when I am
fallen. Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when
nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a
bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue
of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here
and now.'

'Drop upon drop,' said Bernard, 'silence falls. It forms on the roof of
the mind and falls into pools beneath. For ever alone, alone,
alone,--hear silence fall and sweep its rings to the farthest edges.
Gorged and replete, solid with middle-aged content. I, whom loneliness
destroys, let silence fall, drop by drop.

'But now silence falling pits my face, wastes my nose like a snowman
stood out in a yard in the rain. As silence falls I am dissolved utterly
and become featureless and scarcely to be distinguished from another. It
does not matter. What matters? We have dined well. The fish, the veal
cutlets, the wine have blunted the sharp tooth of egotism. Anxiety is at
rest. The vainest of us, Louis perhaps, does not care what people think.
Neville's tortures are at rest. Let others prosper--that is what he
thinks. Susan hears the breathing of all her children safe asleep.
Sleep, sleep, she murmurs. Rhoda has rocked her ships to shore. Whether
they have foundered, whether they have anchored, she cares no longer. We
are ready to consider any suggestion that the world may offer quite
impartially. I reflect now that the earth is only a pebble flicked off
accidentally from the face of the sun and that there is no life anywhere
in the abysses of space.'

'In this silence,' said Susan, 'it seems as if no leaf would ever fall,
or bird fly.'

'As if the miracle had happened,' said Jinny, 'and life were stayed here
and now.'

'And,' said Rhoda, 'we had no more to live.'

'But listen,' said Louis, 'to the world moving through abysses of
infinite space. It roars; the lighted strip of history is past and our
Kings and Queens; we are gone; our civilization; the Nile; and all life.
Our separate drops are dissolved; we are extinct, lost in the abysses of
time, in the darkness.'

'Silence falls; silence falls,' said Bernard. 'But now listen; tick,
tick; hoot, hoot; the world has hailed us back to it. I heard for one
moment the howling winds of darkness as we passed beyond life. Then
tick, tick (the clock); then hoot, hoot (the cars). We are landed; we
are on shore; we are sitting, six of us, at a table. It is the memory of
my nose that recalls me. I rise; "Fight," I cry, "fight!" remembering
the shape of my own nose, and strike with this spoon upon this table
pugnaciously.'

'Oppose ourselves to this illimitable chaos,' said Neville, 'this
formless imbecility. Making love to a nursemaid behind a tree, that
soldier is more admirable than all the stars. Yet sometimes one
trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world
beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lust.'

('Yet, Louis,' said Rhoda, 'how short a time silence lasts. Already they
are beginning to smooth their napkins by the side of their plates. "Who
comes?" says Jinny; and Neville sighs, remembering that Percival comes
no more. Jinny has taken out her looking-glass. Surveying her face like
an artist, she draws a powder-puff down her nose, and after one moment
of deliberation has given precisely that red to the lips that the lips
need. Susan, who feels scorn and fear at the sight of these
preparations, fastens the top button of her coat, and unfastens it. What
is she making ready for? For something, but something different.'

'They are saying to themselves,' said Louis, '"It is time. I am still
vigorous," they are saying. "My face shall be cut against the black of
infinite space." They do not finish their sentences. "It is time," they
keep saying. "The gardens will be shut." And going with them, Rhoda,
swept into their current, we shall perhaps drop a little behind.'

'Like conspirators who have something to whisper,' said Rhoda.)

'It is true, and I know for a fact,' said Bernard, 'as we walk down this
avenue, that a King, riding, fell over a molehill here. But how strange
it seems to set against the whirling abysses of infinite space a little
figure with a golden teapot on his head. Soon one recovers belief in
figures: but not at once in what they put on their heads. Our English
past--one inch of light. Then people put teapots on their heads and say,
"I am a King!" No, I try to recover, as we walk, the sense of time, but
with that streaming darkness in my eyes I have lost my grip. This Palace
seems light as a cloud set for a moment on the sky. It is a trick of the
mind--to put Kings on their thrones, one following another, with crowns
on their heads. And we ourselves, walking six abreast, what do we
oppose, with this random flicker of light in us that we call brain and
feeling, how can we do battle against this flood; what has permanence?
Our lives too stream away, down the unlighted avenues, past the strip of
time, unidentified. Once Neville threw a poem at my head. Feeling a
sudden conviction of immortality, I said, "I too know what Shakespeare
knew." But that has gone.'

'Unreasonably, ridiculously,' said Neville, 'as we walk, time comes
back. A dog does it, prancing. The machine works. Age makes hoary that
gateway. Three hundred years now seem more than a moment vanished
against that dog. King William mounts his horse wearing a wig, and the
court ladies sweep the turf with their embroidered panniers. I am
beginning to be convinced, as we walk, that the fate of Europe is of
immense importance, and, ridiculous as it still seems, that all depends
upon the battle of Blenheim. Yes; I declare, as we pass through this
gateway, it is the present moment; I am become a subject of King
George.'

'While we advance down this avenue,' said Louis, 'I leaning slightly
upon Jinny, Bernard arm-in-arm with Neville, and Susan with her hand in
mine, it is difficult not to weep calling ourselves little children,
praying that God may keep us safe while we sleep. It is sweet to sing
together, clasping hands, afraid of the dark, while Miss Curry plays the
harmonium.'

'The iron gates have rolled back,' said Jinny. 'Time's fangs have ceased
their devouring. We have triumphed over the abysses of space, with
rouge, with powder, with flimsy pocket-handkerchiefs.'

'I grasp, I hold fast,' said Susan. 'I hold firmly to this hand,
anyone's, with love, with hatred; it does not matter which.'

'The still mood, the disembodied mood is on us,' said Rhoda, 'and we
enjoy this momentary alleviation (it is not often that one has no
anxiety) when the walls of the mind become transparent. Wren's palace,
like the quartet played to the dry and stranded people in the stalls,
makes an oblong. A square is stood upon the oblong and we say, "This is
our dwelling-place. The structure is now visible. Very little is left
outside."'

'The flower,' said Bernard, 'the red carnation that stood in the vase on
the table of the restaurant when we dined together with Percival, is
become a six-sided flower; made of six lives.'

'A mysterious illumination,' said Louis, 'visible against those yew
trees.'

'Built up with much pain, many strokes,' said Jinny.

'Marriage, death, travel, friendship,' said Bernard; 'town and country;
children and all that; a many-sided substance cut out of this dark; a
many-faceted flower. Let us stop for a moment; let us behold what we
have made. Let it blaze against the yew trees. One life. There. It is
over. Gone out.'

'Now they vanish,' said Louis. 'Susan with Bernard. Neville with Jinny.
You and I, Rhoda, stop for a moment by this stone urn. What song shall
we hear now that these couples have sought the groves, and Jinny,
pointing with her gloved hand, pretends to notice the water-lilies, and
Susan, who has always loved Bernard, says to him, "My ruined life, my
wasted life"? And Neville, taking Jinny's little hand, with the
cherry-coloured finger-nails, by the lake, by the moonlit water, cries,
"Love, love," and she answers, imitating the bird, "Love, love"? What
song do we hear?'

'They vanish, towards the lake,' said Rhoda. 'They slink away over the
grass furtively, yet with assurance as if they asked of our pity their
ancient privilege--not to be disturbed. The tide in the soul, tipped,
flows that way; they cannot help deserting us. The dark has closed over
their bodies. What song do we hear--the owl's, the nightingale's, the
wren's? The steamer hoots; the light on the electric rails flashes; the
trees gravely bow and bend. The flare hangs over London. Here is an old
woman, quietly returning, and a man, a late fisherman, comes down the
terrace with his rod. Not a sound, not a movement must escape us.'

'A bird flies homeward,' said Louis. 'Evening opens her eyes and gives
one quick glance among the bushes before she sleeps. How shall we put it
together, the confused and composite message that they send back to us,
and not they only, but many dead, boys and girls, grown men and women,
who have wandered here, under one king or another?'

'A weight has dropped into the night,' said Rhoda, 'dragging it down.
Every tree is big with a shadow that is not the shadow of the tree
behind it. We hear a drumming on the roofs of a fasting city when the
Turks are hungry and uncertain tempered. We hear them crying with sharp,
stag-like barks, "Open, open." Listen to the trams squealing and to the
flashes from the electric rails. We hear the beech trees and the birch
trees raise their branches as if the bride had let her silken nightdress
fall and come to the doorway saying, "Open, open."'

'All seems alive,' said Louis. 'I cannot hear death anywhere to-night.
Stupidity, on that man's face, age, on that woman's, would be strong
enough, one would think, to resist the incantation, and bring in death.
But where is death to-night? All the crudity, odds and ends, this and
that, have been crushed like glass splinters into the blue, the
red-fringed tide, which, drawing into the shore, fertile with
innumerable fish, breaks at our feet.'

'If we could mount together, if we could perceive from a sufficient
height,' said Rhoda, 'if we could remain untouched without any
support--but you, disturbed by faint clapping sounds of praise and
laughter, and I, resenting compromise and right and wrong on human lips,
trust only in solitude and the violence of death and thus are divided.'

'For ever,' said Louis, 'divided. We have sacrificed the embrace among
the ferns, and love, love, love by the lake, standing, like conspirators
who have drawn apart to share some secret, by the urn. But now look, as
we stand here, a ripple breaks on the horizon. The net is raised higher
and higher. It comes to the top of the water. The water is broken by
silver, by quivering little fish. Now leaping, now lashing, they are
laid on shore. Life tumbles its catch upon the grass. There are figures
coming towards us. Are they men or are they women? They still wear the
ambiguous draperies of the flowing tide in which they have been
immersed.'

'Now,' said Rhoda, 'as they pass that tree, they regain their natural
size. They are only men, only women. Wonder and awe change as they put
off the draperies of the flowing tide. Pity returns, as they emerge into
the moonlight, like the relics of an army, our representatives, going
every night (here or in Greece) to battle, and coming back every night
with their wounds, their ravaged faces. Now light falls on them again.
They have faces. They become Susan and Bernard, Jinny and Neville,
people we know. Now what a shrinkage takes place! Now what a
shrivelling, what an humiliation! The old shivers run through me, hatred
and terror, as I feel myself grappled to one spot by these hooks they
cast on us; these greetings, recognitions, pluckings of the finger and
searchings of the eyes. Yet they have only to speak, and their first
words, with the remembered tone and the perpetual deviation from what
one expects, and their hands moving and making a thousand past days rise
again in the darkness, shake my purpose.'

'Something flickers and dances,' said Louis. 'Illusion returns as they
approach down the avenue. Rippling and questioning begin. What do I
think of you--what do you think of me? Who are you? Who am I?--that
quivers again its uneasy air over us, and the pulse quickens and the eye
brightens and all the insanity of personal existence without which life
would fall flat and die, begins again. They are on us. The southern sun
flickers over this urn; we push off into the tide of the violent and
cruel sea. Lord help us to act our parts as we greet them
returning--Susan and Bernard, Neville and Jinny.'

'We have destroyed something by our presence,' said Bernard, 'a world
perhaps.'

'Yet we scarcely breathe,' said Neville, 'spent as we are. We are in
that passive and exhausted frame of mind when we only wish to rejoin the
body of our mother from whom we have been severed. All else is
distasteful, forced and fatiguing. Jinny's yellow scarf is moth-coloured
in this light; Susan's eyes are quenched. We are scarcely to be
distinguished from the river. One cigarette end is the only point of
emphasis among us. And sadness tinges our content, that we should have
left you, torn the fabric; yielded to the desire to press out, alone,
some bitterer, some blacker juice, which was sweet too. But now we are
worn out.'

'After our fire,' said Jinny, 'there is nothing left to put in lockets.'

'Still I gape,' said Susan, 'like a young bird, unsatisfied, for
something that has escaped me.'

'Let us stay for a moment,' said Bernard, 'before we go. Let us pace the
terrace by the river almost alone. It is nearly bed-time. People have
gone home. Now how comforting it is to watch the lights coming out in
the bedrooms of small shopkeepers on the other side of the river. There
is one--there is another. What do you think their takings have been
to-day? Only just enough to pay for the rent, for light and food and the
children's clothing. But just enough. What a sense of the tolerableness
of life the lights in the bedrooms of small shopkeepers give us!
Saturday comes, and there is just enough to pay perhaps for seats at the
Pictures. Perhaps before they put out the light they go into the little
garden and look at the giant rabbit crouched in its wooden hut. That is
the rabbit they will have for Sunday dinner. Then they put out the
light. Then they sleep. And for thousands of people sleep is nothing but
warmth and silence and one moment's sport with some fantastic dream. "I
have posted my letter," the greengrocer thinks, "to the Sunday
newspaper. Suppose I win five hundred pounds in the football
competition? And we shall kill the rabbit. Life is pleasant. Life is
good. I have posted the letter. We shall kill the rabbit." And he
sleeps.

'That goes on. Listen. There is a sound like the knocking of railway
trucks in a siding. That is the happy concatenation of one event
following another in our lives. Knock, knock, knock. Must, must, must.
Must go, must sleep, must wake, must get up--sober, merciful word which
we pretend to revile, which we press tight to our hearts, without which
we should be undone. How we worship that sound like the knocking
together of trucks in a siding!

'Now far off down the river I hear the chorus; the song of the boasting
boys, who are coming back in large charabancs from a day's outing on the
decks of crowded steamers. Still they are singing as they used to sing,
across the court, on winters' nights, or with the windows open in
summer, getting drunk, breaking the furniture, wearing little striped
caps, all turning their heads the same way as the brake rounded the
corner; and I wished to be with them.

'What with the chorus, and the spinning water and the just perceptible
murmur of the breeze we are slipping away. Little bits of ourselves are
crumbling. There! Something very important fell then. I cannot keep
myself together. I shall sleep. But we must go; must catch our train;
must walk back to the station--must, must, must. We are only bodies
jogging along side by side. I exist only in the soles of my feet and in
the tired muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems.
But where? I cannot remember. I am like a log slipping smoothly over
some waterfall. I am not a judge. I am not called upon to give my
opinion. Houses and trees are all the same in this grey light. Is that a
post? Is that a woman walking? Here is the station, and if the train
were to cut me in two, I should come together on the farther side, being
one, being indivisible. But what is odd is that I still clasp the return
half of my ticket to Waterloo firmly between the fingers of my right
hand, even now, even sleeping.'

****

_Now the sun had sunk. Sky and sea were indistinguishable. The waves
breaking spread their white fans far out over the shore, sent white
shadows into the recesses of sonorous caves and then rolled back sighing
over the shingle._

_The tree shook its branches and a scattering of leaves fell to the
ground. There they settled with perfect composure on the precise spot
where they would await dissolution. Black and grey were shot into the
garden from the broken vessel that had once held red light. Dark shadows
blackened the tunnels between the stalks. The thrush was silent and the
worm sucked itself back into its narrow hole. Now and again a whitened
and hollow straw was blown from an old nest and fell into the dark
grasses among the rotten apples. The light had faded from the tool-house
wall and the adder's skin hung from the nail empty. All the others in
the room had overflown their banks. The precise brush stroke was swollen
and lop-sided; cupboards and chairs melted their brown masses into one
huge obscurity. The height from floor to ceiling was hung with vast
curtains of shaking darkness. The looking-glass was pale as the mouth of
a cave shadowed by hanging creepers._

_The substance had gone from the solidity of the hills. Travelling
lights drove a plumy wedge among unseen and sunken roads, but no lights
opened among the folded wings of the hills, and there was no sound save
the cry of a bird seeking some lonelier tree. At the cliff's edge there
was an equal murmur of air that had been brushed through forests, of
water that had been cooled in a thousand glassy hollows of mid-ocean._

_As if there were waves of darkness in the air, darkness moved on,
covering houses, hills, trees, as waves of water wash round the sides of
some sunken ship. Darkness washed down streets, eddying round single
figures, engulfing them; blotting out couples clasped under the showery
darkness of elm trees in full summer foliage. Darkness rolled its waves
along grassy rides and over the wrinkled skin of the turf, enveloping
the solitary thorn tree and the empty snail shells at its foot. Mounting
higher, darkness blew along the bare upland slopes, and met the fretted
and abraded pinnacles of the mountain where the snow lodges for ever on
the hard rock even when the valleys are full of running streams and
yellow vine leaves, and girls, sitting on verandas, look up at the snow,
shading their faces with their fans. Them, too, darkness covered._

****

'Now to sum up,' said Bernard. 'Now to explain to you the meaning of my
life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once, I think,
on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. The illusion is
upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight,
depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it
were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one
breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, "Take it. This is my life."

'But unfortunately, what I see (this globe, full of figures) you do not
see. You see me, sitting at a table opposite you, a rather heavy,
elderly man, grey at the temples. You see me take my napkin and unfold
it. You see me pour myself out a glass of wine. And you see behind me
the door opening, and people passing. But in order to make you
understand, to give you my life, I must tell you a story--and there are
so many, and so many--stories of childhood, stories of school, love,
marriage, death and so on; and none of them are true. Yet like children
we tell each other stories, and to decorate them we make up these
ridiculous, flamboyant, beautiful phrases. How tired I am of stories,
how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet
on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn
upon half-sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language
such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling
of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance
with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then
undeniably. Lying in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining,
then enormous clouds come marching over the sky, tattered clouds, wisps
of cloud. What delights me then is the confusion, the height, the
indifference and the fury. Great clouds always changing, and movement;
something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering,
trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of
story, of design, I do not see a trace then.

'But meanwhile, while we eat, let us turn over these scenes as children
turn over the pages of a picture-book and the nurse says, pointing:
"That's a cow. That's a boat." Let us turn over the pages, and I will
add, for your amusement, a comment in the margin.

'In the beginning, there was the nursery, with windows opening on to a
garden, and beyond that the sea. I saw something brighten--no doubt the
brass handle of a cupboard. Then Mrs Constable raised the sponge above
her head, squeezed it, and out shot, right, left, all down the spine,
arrows of sensation. And so, as long as we draw breath, for the rest of
time, if we knock against a chair, a table, or a woman, we are pierced
with arrows of sensation--if we walk in a garden, if we drink this wine.
Sometimes indeed, when I pass a cottage with a light in the window where
a child has been born, I could implore them not to squeeze the sponge
over that new body. Then, there was the garden and the canopy of the
currant leaves which seemed to enclose everything; flowers, burning like
sparks upon the depths of green; a rat wreathing with maggots under a
rhubarb leaf; the fly going buzz, buzz, buzz upon the nursery ceiling,
and plates upon plates of innocent bread and butter. All these things
happen in one second and last for ever. Faces loom. Dashing round the
corner, "Hullo," one says, "there's Jinny. That's Neville. That's Louis
in grey flannel with a snake belt. That's Rhoda." She had a basin in
which she sailed petals of white flowers. It was Susan who cried, that
day when I was in the tool-house with Neville; and I felt my
indifference melt. Neville did not melt. "Therefore," I said, "I am
myself, not Neville," a wonderful discovery. Susan cried and I followed
her. Her wet pocket-handkerchief, and the sight of her little back
heaving up and down like a pump-handle, sobbing for what was denied her,
screwed my nerves up. "That is not to be borne," I said, as I sat beside
her on the roots that were hard as skeletons. I then first became aware
of the presence of those enemies who change, but are always there; the
forces we fight against. To let oneself be carried on passively is
unthinkable. "That's your course, world," one says, "mine is this." So,
"Let's explore," I cried, and jumped up, and ran downhill with Susan and
saw the stable-boy clattering about the yard in great boots. Down below,
through the depths of the leaves, the gardeners swept the lawns with
great brooms. The lady sat writing. Transfixed, stopped dead, I thought,
"I cannot interfere with a single stroke of those brooms. They sweep and
they sweep. Nor with the fixity of that woman writing." It is strange
that one cannot stop gardeners sweeping nor dislodge a woman. There they
have remained all my life. It is as if one had woken in Stonehenge
surrounded by a circle of great stones, these enemies, these presences.
Then a wood-pigeon flew out of the trees. And being in love for the
first time, I made a phrase--a poem about a wood-pigeon--a single
phrase, for a hole had been knocked in my mind, one of those sudden
transparencies through which one sees everything. Then more bread and
butter and more flies droning round the nursery ceiling on which
quivered islands of light, ruffled, opalescent, while the pointed
fingers of the lustre dripped blue pools on the corner of the
mantelpiece. Day after day as we sat at tea we observed these sights.

'But we were all different. The wax--the virginal wax that coats the
spine melted in different patches for each of us. The growl of the
boot-boy making love to the tweeny among the gooseberry bushes; the
clothes blown out hard on the line; the dead man in the gutter; the
apple tree, stark in the moonlight; the rat swarming with maggots; the
lustre dripping blue--our white wax was streaked and stained by each of
these differently. Louis was disgusted by the nature of human flesh;
Rhoda by our cruelty; Susan could not share; Neville wanted order; Jinny
love; and so on. We suffered terribly as we became separate bodies.

'Yet I was preserved from these excesses and have survived many of my
friends, am a little stout, grey, rubbed on the thorax as it were,
because it is the panorama of life, seen not from the roof, but from the
third-story window, that delights me, not what one woman says to one
man, even if that man is myself. How could I be bullied at school
therefore? How could they make things hot for me? There was the Doctor
lurching into chapel, as if he trod a battleship in a gale of wind,
shouting out his commands through a megaphone, since people in authority
always become melodramatic--I did not hate him like Neville, or revere
him like Louis. I took notes as we sat together in chapel. There were
pillars, shadows, memorial brasses, boys scuffling and swopping stamps
behind Prayer Books; the sound of a rusty pump; the Doctor booming,
about immortality and quitting ourselves like men; and Percival
scratching his thigh. I made notes for stories; drew portraits in the
margin of my pocket-book and thus became still more separate. Here are
one or two of the figures I saw.

'Percival sat staring straight ahead of him that day in chapel. He also
had a way of flicking his hand to the back of his neck. His movements
were always remarkable. We all nicked our hands to the backs of our
heads--unsuccessfully. He had the kind of beauty which defends itself
from any caress. As he was not in the least precocious, he read whatever
was written up for our edification without any comment, and thought with
that magnificent equanimity (Latin words come naturally) that was to
preserve him from so many meannesses and humiliations, that Lucy's
flaxen pigtails and pink cheeks were the height of female beauty. Thus
preserved, his taste later was of extreme fineness. But there should be
music, some wild carol. Through the window should come a hunting-song
from some rapid unapprehended life--a sound that shouts among the hills
and dies away. What is startling, what is unexpected, what we cannot
account for, what turns symmetry to nonsense--that comes suddenly to my
mind, thinking of him. The little apparatus of observation is unhinged.
Pillars go down; the Doctor floats off; some sudden exaltation possesses
me. He was thrown, riding in a race, and when I came along Shaftesbury
Avenue to-night, those insignificant and scarcely formulated faces that
bubble up out of the doors of the Tube, and many obscure Indians, and
people dying of famine and disease, and women who have been cheated, and
whipped dogs and crying children--all these seemed to me bereft. He
would have done justice. He would have protected. About the age of forty
he would have shocked the authorities. No lullaby has ever occurred to
me capable of singing him to rest.

'But let me dip again and bring up in my spoon another of these minute
objects which we call optimistically "characters of our friends"--Louis.
He sat staring at the preacher. His being seemed conglobulated in his
brow, his lips were pressed; his eyes were fixed, but suddenly they
flashed with laughter. Also he suffered from chilblains, the penalty of
an imperfect circulation. Unhappy, unfriended, in exile he would
sometimes, in moments of confidence, describe how the surf swept over
the beaches of his home. The remorseless eye of youth fixed itself upon
his swollen joints. Yes, but we were also quick to perceive how cutting,
how apt, how severe he was, how naturally, when we lay under the elm
trees pretending to watch cricket, we waited his approval, seldom given.
His ascendancy was resented, as Percival's was adored. Prim, suspicious,
lifting his feet like a crane, there was yet a legend that he had
smashed a door with his naked fist. But his peak was too bare, too stony
for that kind of mist to cling to it. He was without those simple
attachments by which one is connected with another. He remained aloof;
enigmatic; a scholar capable of that inspired accuracy which has
something formidable about it. My phrases (how to describe the moon) did
not meet with his approval. On the other hand, he envied me to the point
of desperation for being at my ease with servants. Not that the sense of
his own deserts failed him. That was commensurate with his respect for
discipline. Hence his success, finally. His life, though, was not happy.
But look--his eye turns white as he lies in the palm of my hand.
Suddenly the sense of what people are leaves one. I return him to the
pool where he will acquire lustre.

'Neville next--lying on his back staring up at the summer sky. He
floated among us like a piece of thistledown, indolently haunting the
sunny corner of the playing-field, not listening, yet not remote. It was
through him that I have nosed round without ever precisely touching the
Latin classics and have also derived some of those persistent habits of
thought which make us irredeemably lop-sided--for instance about
crucifixes, that they are the mark of the devil. Our half-loves and
half-hates and ambiguities on these points were to him indefensible
treacheries. The swaying and sonorous Doctor, whom I made to sit
swinging his braces over a gas-fire, was to him nothing but an
instrument of the inquisition. So he turned with a passion that made up
for his indolence upon Catullus, Horace, Lucretius, lying lazily
dormant, yes, but regardant, noticing, with rapture, cricketers, while
with a mind like the tongue of an ant-eater, rapid, dexterous,
glutinous, he searched out every curl and twist of those Roman
sentences, and sought out one person, always one person to sit beside.

'And the long skirts of the masters' wives would come swishing by,
mountainous, menacing; and our hands would fly to our caps. And immense
dullness would descend unbroken, monotonous. Nothing, nothing, nothing
broke with its fin that leaden waste of waters. Nothing would happen to
lift that weight of intolerable boredom. The terms went on. We grew; we
changed; for, of course, we are animals. We are not always aware by any
means; we breathe, eat, sleep automatically. We exist not only
separately but in undifferentiated blobs of matter. With one scoop a
whole brakeful of boys is swept up and goes cricketing, footballing. An
army marches across Europe. We assemble in parks and halls and
sedulously oppose any renegade (Neville, Louis, Rhoda) who set up a
separate existence. And I am so made that, while I hear one or two
distinct melodies, such as Louis sings, or Neville, I am also drawn
irresistibly to the sound of the chorus chanting its old, chanting its
almost wordless, almost senseless song that comes across courts at
night; which we hear now booming round us as cars and omnibuses take
people to theatres. (Listen; the cars rush past this restaurant; now and
then, down the river, a siren hoots, as a steamer makes for the sea.) If
a bagman offers me snuff in a train I accept. I like the copious,
shapeless, warm, not so very clever, but extremely easy and rather
coarse aspect of things; the talk of men in clubs and public-houses, of
miners half naked in drawers--the forthright, perfectly unassuming, and
without end in view except dinner, love, money and getting along
tolerably; that which is without great hopes, ideals, or anything of
that kind; what is unassuming except to make a tolerably good job of it.
I like all that. So I joined them, when Neville sulked or Louis, as I
quite agree sublimely, turned on his heel.

'Thus, not equally by any means or with order, but in great streaks my
waxen waistcoat melted, here one drop, there another. Now through this
transparency became visible those wondrous pastures, at first so
moon-white, radiant, where no foot has been; meadows of the rose, the
crocus, of the rock and the snake too; of the spotted and swart; the
embarrassing, the binding and tripping up. One leaps out of bed, throws
up the window; with what a whirr the birds rise! You know that sudden
rush of wings, that exclamation, carol and confusion; the riot and
babble of voices; and all the drops are sparkling, trembling, as if the
garden were a splintered mosaic, vanishing, twinkling; not yet formed
into one whole; and a bird sings close to the window. I heard those
songs. I followed those phantoms. I saw Joans, Dorothys, Miriams, I
forget their names, passing down avenues, stopping on the crest of
bridges to look down into the river. And from among them rise one or two
distinct figures, birds who sang with the rapt egotism of youth by the
window; broke their snails on stones, dipped their beaks in sticky,
viscous matter; hard, avid, remorseless; Jinny, Susan, Rhoda. They have
been educated on the east coast or on the south coast. They had grown
long pigtails and acquired the look of startled foals, which is the mark
of adolescence.

'Jinny was the first to come sidling up to the gate to eat sugar. She
nipped it off the palms of one's hands very cleverly, but her ears were
laid back as if she might bite. Rhoda was wild--Rhoda one never could
catch. She was both frightened and clumsy. It was Susan who first became
wholly woman, purely feminine. It was she who dropped on my face those
scalding tears which are terrible, beautiful; both, neither. She was
born to be the adored of poets, since poets require safety; someone who
sits sewing, who says, "I hate, I love," who is neither comfortable nor
prosperous, but has some quality in accordance with the high but
unemphatic beauty of pure style which those who create poetry so
particularly admire. Her father trailed from room to room and down
flagged corridors in his flapping dressing-gown and worn slippers. On
still nights a wall of water fell with a roar a mile off. The ancient
dog could scarcely heave himself up on to his chair. And some witless
servant could be heard laughing at the top of the house as she whirred
the wheel of the sewing-machine round and round.

'That I observed even in the midst of my anguish when, twisting her
pocket-handkerchief, Susan cried, "I love; I hate." "A worthless
servant," I observed, "laughs upstairs in the attic," and that little
piece of dramatization shows how incompletely we are merged in our own
experiences. On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow
who points; who whispers as he whispered to me that summer morning in
the house where the corn comes up to the window, "The willow grows on
the turf by the river. The gardeners sweep with great brooms and the
lady sits writing." Thus he directed me to that which is beyond and
outside our own predicament; to that which is symbolic, and thus perhaps
permanent, if there is any permanence in our sleeping, eating,
breathing, so animal, so spiritual and tumultuous lives.

'The willow tree grew by the river. I sat on the smooth turf with
Neville, with Larpent, with Baker, Romsey, Hughes, Percival and Jinny.
Through its fine plumes specked with little pricked ears of green in
spring, of orange in autumn, I saw boats; buildings; I saw hurrying,
decrepit women. I buried match after match in the turf decidedly to make
this or that stage in the process of understanding (it might be
philosophy; science; it might be myself) while the fringe of my
intelligence floating unattached caught those distant sensations which
after a time the mind draws in and works upon; the chime of bells;
general murmurs; vanishing figures; one girl on a bicycle who, as she
rode, seemed to lift the corner of a curtain concealing the populous
undifferentiated chaos of life which surged behind the outlines of my
friends and the willow tree.

'The tree alone resisted our eternal flux. For I changed and changed;
was Hamlet, was Shelley, was the hero, whose name I now forget, of a
novel by Dostoevsky; was for a whole term, incredibly, Napoleon; but was
Byron chiefly. For many weeks at a time it was my part to stride into
rooms and fling gloves and coat on the back of chairs, scowling
slightly. I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the
divine specific. Therefore, I let fly my tremendous battery of phrases
upon somebody quite inappropriate--a girl now married; now buried; every
book, every window-seat was littered with the sheets of my unfinished
letters to the woman who made me Byron. For it is difficult to finish a
letter in somebody else's style. I arrived all in a lather at her house;
exchanged tokens but did not marry her, being no doubt unripe for that
intensity.

'Here again there should be music. Not that wild hunting-song,
Percival's music; but a painful, guttural, visceral, also soaring,
lark-like, pealing song to replace these flagging, foolish
transcripts--how much too deliberate! how much too reasonable!--which
attempt to describe the flying moment of first love. A purple slide is
slipped over the day. Look at a room before she comes and after. Look at
the innocents outside pursuing their way. They neither see nor hear; yet
on they go. Moving oneself in this radiant yet gummy atmosphere, how
conscious one is of every movement--something adheres, something sticks
to one's hands, taking up a newspaper even. Then there is the being
eviscerated--drawn out, spun like a spider's web and twisted in agony
round a thorn. Then a thunder-clap of complete indifference; the light
blown out; then the return of measureless irresponsible joy; certain
fields seem to glow green for ever, and innocent landscapes appear as if
in the light of the first dawn--one patch of green, for example, up at
Hampstead; and all faces are lit up, all conspire in a hush of tender
joy; and then the mystic sense of completion and then that rasping,
dog-fish-skin-like roughness--those black arrows of shivering sensation,
when she misses the post, when she does not come. Out rush a bristle of
horned suspicions, horror, horror, horror--but what is the use of
painfully elaborating these consecutive sentences when what one needs is
nothing consecutive but a bark, a groan? And years later to see a
middle-aged woman in a restaurant taking off her cloak.

'But to return. Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance,
shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend
that we can make out a plain, and logical story, so that when one matter
is despatched--love for instance--we go on, in an orderly manner, to the
next. I was saying there was a willow tree. Its shower of falling
branches, its creased and crooked bark had the effect of what remains
outside our illusions yet cannot stay them, is changed by them for the
moment, yet shows through stable, still, and with a sternness that our
lives lack. Hence the comment it makes; the standard it supplies, and
the reason why, as we flow and change, it seems to measure. Neville, for
example, sat with me on the turf. But can anything be as clear as all
that, I would say, following his gaze, through the branches, to a punt
on the river, and a young man eating bananas from a paper bag? The scene
was cut out with such intensity and so permeated with the quality of his
vision that for a moment I could see it too; the punt, the bananas, the
young man, through the branches of the willow tree. Then it faded.

'Rhoda came wandering vaguely. She would take advantage of any scholar
in a blowing gown, or donkey rolling the turf with slippered feet to
hide behind. What fear wavered and hid itself and blew to a flame in the
depths of her grey, her startled, her dreaming eyes? Cruel and
vindictive as we are, we are not bad to that extent. We have our
fundamental goodness surely or to talk as I talk freely to someone I
hardly know would be impossible--we should cease. The willow as she saw
it grew on the verge of a grey desert where no bird sang. The leaves
shrivelled as she looked at them, tossed in agony as she passed them.
The trams and omnibuses roared hoarse in the street, ran over rocks and
sped foaming away. Perhaps one pillar, sunlit, stood in her desert by a
pool where wild beasts come down stealthily to drink.

'Then Jinny came. She flashed her fire over the tree. She was like a
crinkled poppy, febrile, thirsty with the desire to drink dry dust.
Darting, angular, not in the least impulsive, she came prepared. So
little flames zigzag over the cracks in the dry earth. She made the
willows dance, but not with illusion; for she saw nothing that was not
there. It was a tree; there was the river; it was afternoon; here we
were; I in my serge suit; she in green. There was no past, no future;
merely the moment in its ring of light, and our bodies; and the
inevitable climax, the ecstasy.

'Louis, when he let himself down on the grass, cautiously spreading (I
do not exaggerate) a mackintosh square, made one acknowledge his
presence. It was formidable. I had the intelligence to salute his
integrity; his research with bony fingers wrapped in rags because of
chilblains for some diamond of indissoluble veracity. I buried boxes of
burnt matches in holes in the turf at his feet. His grim and caustic
tongue reproved my indolence. He fascinated me with his sordid
imagination. His heroes wore bowler hats and talked about selling pianos
for tenners. Through his landscape the tram squealed; the factory poured
its acrid fumes. He haunted mean streets and towns where women lay
drunk, naked, on counterpanes on Christmas day. His words falling from a
shot-tower hit the water and up it spurted. He found one word, one only
for the moon. Then he got up and went; we all got up; we all went. But
I, pausing, looked at the tree, and as I looked in autumn at the fiery
and yellow branches, some sediment formed; I formed; a drop fell; I
fell--that is, from some completed experience I had emerged.

'I rose and walked away--I, I, I; not Byron, Shelley, Dostoevsky, but I,
Bernard. I even repeated my own name once or twice. I went, swinging my
stick, into a shop, and bought--not that I love music--a picture of
Beethoven in a silver frame. Not that I love music, but because the
whole of life, its masters, its adventurers, then appeared in long ranks
of magnificent human beings behind me; and I was the inheritor; I, the
continuer; I, the person miraculously appointed to carry it on. So,
swinging my stick, with my eyes filmed, not with pride, but with
humility rather, I walked down the street. The first whirr of wings had
gone up, the carol, the exclamation; and now one enters; one goes into
the house, the dry, uncompromising, inhabited house, the place with all
its traditions, its objects, its accumulations of rubbish, and treasures
displayed upon tables. I visited the family tailor, who remembered my
uncle. People turned up in great quantities, not cut out, like the first
faces (Neville, Louis, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda), but confused, featureless,
or changed their features so fast that they seemed to have none. And
blushing yet scornful, in the oldest condition of raw rapture and
scepticism, I took the blow; the mixed sensations; the complex and
disturbing and utterly unprepared for impacts of life all over, in all
places at the same time. How upsetting! How humiliating never to be sure
what to say next, and those painful silences, glaring as dry deserts,
with every pebble apparent; and then to say what one ought not to have
said, and then to be conscious of a ramrod of incorruptible sincerity
which one would willingly exchange for a shower of smooth pence, but
could not, there at that party, where Jinny sat quite at her ease, rayed
out on a gilt chair.

'Then says some lady with an impressive gesture, "Come with me." She
leads one into a private alcove and admits one to the honour of her
intimacy. Surnames change to Christian names; Christian names to
nick-names. What is to be done about India, Ireland or Morocco? Old
gentlemen answer the question standing decorated under chandeliers. One
finds oneself surprisingly supplied with information. Outside the
undifferentiated forces roar; inside we are very private, very explicit,
have a sense indeed, that it is here, in this little room, that we make
whatever day of the week it may be. Friday or Saturday. A shell forms
upon the soft soul, nacreous, shiny, upon which sensations tap their
beaks in vain. On me it formed earlier than on most. Soon I could carve
my pear when other people had done dessert. I could bring my sentence to
a close in a hush of complete silence. It is at that season too that
perfection has a lure. One can learn Spanish, one thinks, by tying a
string to the right toe and waking early. One fills up the little
compartments of one's engagement book with dinner at eight; luncheon at
one-thirty. One has shirts, socks, ties laid out on one's bed.

'But it is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military
progress; a convenience, a lie. There is always deep below it, even when
we arrive punctually at the appointed time with our white waistcoats and
polite formalities, a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes,
street cries, half-finished sentences and sights--elm trees, willow
trees, gardeners sweeping, women writing--that rise and sink even as we
hand a lady down to dinner. While one straightens the fork so precisely
on the table-cloth, a thousand faces mop and mow. There is nothing one
can fish up in a spoon; nothing one can call an event. Yet it is alive
too and deep, this stream. Immersed in it I would stop between one
mouthful and the next, and look intently at a vase, perhaps with one red
flower, while a reason struck me, a sudden revelation. Or I would say,
walking along the Strand, "That's the phrase I want," as some beautiful,
fabulous phantom bird, fish or cloud with fiery edges swam up to enclose
once and for all some notion haunting me, after which on I trotted
taking stock with renewed delight of ties and things in shop-windows.

'The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and
cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air. If I press them all will
burst. Whatever sentence I extract whole and entire from this cauldron
is only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught while
a million others leap and sizzle, making the cauldron bubble like
boiling silver, and slip through my fingers. Faces recur, faces and
faces--they press their beauty to the walls of my bubble--Neville,
Susan, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda and a thousand others. How impossible to
order them rightly; to detach one separately, or to give the effect of
the whole--again like music. What a symphony with its concord and its
discord, and its tunes on top and its complicated bass beneath, then
grew up! Each played his own tune, fiddle, flute, trumpet, drum or
whatever the instrument might be. With Neville, "Let's discuss Hamlet."
With Louis, science. With Jinny, love. Then suddenly, in a moment of
exasperation, off to Cumberland with a quiet man for a whole week in an
inn, with the rain running down the window-panes and nothing but mutton
and mutton and again mutton for dinner. Yet that week remains a solid
stone in the welter of unrecorded sensation. It was then we played
dominoes; then we quarrelled about tough mutton. Then we walked on the
fell. And a little girl, peeping round the door, gave me that letter,
written on blue paper, in which I learnt that the girl who had made me
Byron was to marry a squire. A man in gaiters, a man with a whip, a man
who made speeches about fat oxen at dinner--I exclaimed derisively and
looked at the racing clouds, and felt my own failure; my desire to be
free; to escape; to be bound; to make an end; to continue; to be Louis;
to be myself; and walked out in my mackintosh alone, and felt grumpy
under the eternal hills and not in the least sublime; and came home and
blamed the meat and packed and so back again to the welter; to the
torture.

'Nevertheless, life is pleasant, life is tolerable. Tuesday follows
Monday; then comes Wednesday. The mind grows rings; the identity becomes
robust; pain is absorbed in growth. Opening and shutting, shutting and
opening, with increasing hum and sturdiness, the haste and fever of
youth are drawn into service until the whole being seems to expand in
and out like the mainspring of a clock. How fast the stream flows from
January to December! We are swept on by the torrent of things grown so
familiar that they cast no shadow. We float, we float....

'However, since one must leap (to tell you this story), I leap, here, at
this point, and alight now upon some perfectly commonplace object--say
the poker and tongs, as I saw them sometime later, after that lady who
had made me Byron had married, under the light of one whom I will call
the third Miss Jones. She is the girl who wears a certain dress
expecting one at dinner, who picks a certain rose, who makes one feel
"Steady, steady, this is a matter of some importance," as one shaves.
Then one asks, "How does she behave to children?" One observes that she
is a little clumsy with her umbrella; but minded when the mole was
caught in the trap; and finally, would not make the loaf at breakfast (I
was thinking of the interminable breakfasts of married life as I shaved)
altogether prosaic--it would not surprise one sitting opposite this girl
to see a dragon-fly perched on the loaf at breakfast. Also she inspired
me with a desire to rise in the world; also she made me look with
curiosity at the hitherto repulsive faces of new-born babies. And the
little fierce beat--tick-tack, tick-tack--of the pulse of one's mind
took on a more majestic rhythm. I roamed down Oxford Street. We are the
continuers, we are the inheritors, I said, thinking of my sons and
daughters; and if the feeling is so grandiose as to be absurd and one
conceals it by jumping on to a bus or buying the evening paper, it is
still a curious element in the ardour with which one laces up one's
boots, with which one now addresses old friends committed to different
careers. Louis, the attic dweller; Rhoda, the nymph of the fountain
always wet; both contradicted what was then so positive to me; both gave
the other side of what seemed to me so evident (that we marry, that we
domesticate); for which I loved them, pitied them, and also deeply
envied them their different lot.

'Once I had a biographer, dead long since, but if he still followed my
footsteps with his old flattering intensity he would here say, "About
this time Bernard married and bought a house.... His friends observed in
him a growing tendency to domesticity.... The birth of children made it
highly desirable that he should augment his income." That is the
biographic style, and it does to tack together torn bits of stuff, stuff
with raw edges. After all, one cannot find fault with the biographic
style if one begins letters "Dear Sir," ends them "yours faithfully";
one cannot despise these phrases laid like Roman roads across the tumult
of our lives, since they compel us to walk in step like civilized people
with the slow and measured tread of policemen though one may be humming
any nonsense under one's breath at the same time--"Hark, hark, the dogs
do bark," "Come away, come away, death," "Let me not to the marriage of
true minds," and so on. "He attained some success in his profession....
He inherited a small sum of money from an uncle"--that is how the
biographer continues, and if one wears trousers and hitches them up with
braces, one has to say that, though it is tempting now and then to go
blackberrying; tempting to play ducks and drakes with all these phrases.
But one has to say that.

'I became, I mean, a certain kind of man, scoring my path across life as
one treads a path across the fields. My boots became worn a little on
the left side. When I came in, certain rearrangements took place.
"Here's Bernard!" How differently different people say that! There are
many rooms--many Bernards. There was the charming, but weak; the strong,
but supercilious; the brilliant, but remorseless; the very good fellow,
but, I make no doubt, the awful bore; the sympathetic, but cold; the
shabby, but--go into the next room--the foppish, worldly, and too well
dressed. What I was to myself was different; was none of these. I am
inclined to pin myself down most firmly there before the loaf at
breakfast with my wife, who being now entirely my wife and not at all
the girl who wore when she hoped to meet me a certain rose, gave me that
feeling of existing in the midst of unconsciousness such as the
tree-frog must have couched on the right shade of green leaf. "Pass"...
I would say. "Milk"... she might answer, or "Mary's coming"...--simple
words for those who have inherited the spoils of all the ages but not as
said then, day after day, in the full tide of life, when one feels
complete, entire, at breakfast. Muscles, nerves, intestines,
blood-vessels, all that makes the coil and spring of our being, the
unconscious hum of the engine, as well as the dart and flicker of the
tongue, functioned superbly. Opening, shutting; shutting, opening;
eating, drinking; sometimes speaking--the whole mechanism seemed to
expand, to contract, like the mainspring of a clock. Toast and butter,
coffee and bacon, _The Times_ and letters--suddenly the telephone rang
with urgency and I rose deliberately and went to the telephone. I took
up the black mouth. I marked the ease with which my mind adjusted itself
to assimilate the message--it might be (one has these fancies) to assume
command of the British Empire; I observed my composure; I remarked with
what magnificent vitality the atoms of my attention dispersed, swarmed
round the interruption, assimilated the message, adapted themselves to a
new state of affairs and had created, by the time I put back the
receiver, a richer, a stronger, a more complicated world in which I was
called upon to act my part and had no doubt whatever that I could do it.
Clapping my hat on my head, I strode into a world inhabited by vast
numbers of men who had also clapped their hats on their heads, and as we
jostled and encountered in trains and tubes we exchanged the knowing
wink of competitors and comrades braced with a thousand snares and
dodges to achieve the same end--to earn our livings.

'Life is pleasant. Life is good. The mere process of life is
satisfactory. Take the ordinary man in good health. He likes eating and
sleeping. He likes the snuff of fresh air and walking at a brisk pace
down the Strand. Or in the country there's a cock crowing on a gate;
there's a foal galloping round a field. Something always has to be done
next. Tuesday follows Monday, Wednesday Tuesday. Each spreads the same
ripple of well-being, repeats the same curve of rhythm; covers fresh
sand with a chill or ebbs a little slackly without. So the being grows
rings; identity becomes robust. What was fiery and furtive like a fling
of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of
life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with
purpose--so it seems.

'Lord, how pleasant! Lord, how good! How tolerable is the life of little
shopkeepers, I would say, as the train drew through the suburbs and one
saw lights in bedroom windows. Active, energetic as a swarm of ants, I
said, as I stood at the window and watched workers, bag in hand, stream
into town. What hardness, what energy and violence of limb, I thought,
seeing men in white drawers scouring after a football on a patch of snow
in January. Now being grumpy about some small matter--it might be the
meat--it seemed luxurious to disturb with a little ripple the enormous
stability, whose quiver, for our child was about to be born, increased
its joy, of our married life. I snapped at dinner. I spoke unreasonably
as if, being a millionaire, I could throw away five shillings; or, being
a perfect steeple-jack, stumbled over a footstool on purpose. Going up
to bed we settled our quarrel on the stairs, and standing by the window
looking at a sky clear like the inside of a blue stone, "Heaven be
praised," I said, "we need not whip this prose into poetry. The little
language is enough." For the space of the prospect and its clarity
seemed to offer no impediment whatsoever, but to allow our lives to
spread out and out beyond all bristling of roofs and chimneys to the
flawless verge.

'Into this crashed death--Percival's. "Which is happiness?" I said (our
child had been born), "which pain?" referring to the two sides of my
body, as I came downstairs, making a purely physical statement. Also I
made note of the state of the house; the curtain blowing; the cook
singing; the wardrobe showing through the half-opened door. I said,
"Give him (myself) another moment's respite" as I went downstairs. "Now
in this drawing-room he is going to suffer. There is no escape." But for
pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures,
whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of
time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and
sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood
spurting, a joint suddenly twisted--beneath all of which appears
something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude. So I
went out. I saw the first morning he would never see--the sparrows were
like toys dangled from a string by a child. To see things without
attachment, from the outside, and to realize their beauty in itself--how
strange! And then the sense that a burden has been removed; pretence and
make-believe and unreality are gone, and lightness has come with a kind
of transparency, making oneself invisible and things seen through as one
walks--how strange. "And now what other discovery will be there?" I
said, and in order to hold it tight ignored newspaper placards and went
and looked at pictures. Madonnas and pillars, arches and orange trees,
still as on the first day of creation, but acquainted with grief, there
they hung, and I gazed at them. "Here," I said, "we are together without
interruption." This freedom, this immunity, seemed then a conquest, and
stirred in me such exaltation that I sometimes go there, even now, to
bring back exaltation and Percival. But it did not last. What torments
one is the horrible activity of the mind's eye--how he fell, how he
looked, where they carried him; men in loin-cloths, pulling ropes; the
bandages and the mud. Then comes the terrible pounce of memory, not to
be foretold, not to be warded off--that I did not go with him to Hampton
Court. That claw scratched; that fang tore; I did not go. In spite of
his impatiently protesting that it did not matter; why interrupt, why
spoil our moment of uninterrupted community?--Still, I repeated
sullenly, I did not go, and so, driven out of the sanctuary by these
officious devils, went to Jinny because she had a room; a room with
little tables, with little ornaments scattered on little tables. There I
confessed, with tears--I had not gone to Hampton Court. And she,
remembering other things, to me trifles but torturing to her, showed me
how life withers when there are things we cannot share. Soon, too, a
maid came in with a note, and as she turned to answer it and I felt my
own curiosity to know what she was writing and to whom, I saw the first
leaf fall on his grave. I saw us push beyond this moment, and leave it
behind us for ever. And then sitting side by side on the sofa we
remembered inevitably what had been said by others; "the lily of the day
is fairer far in May"; we compared Percival to a lily--Percival whom I
wanted to lose his hair, to shock the authorities, to grow old with me;
he was already covered over with lilies.

'So the sincerity of the moment passed; so it became symbolical; and
that I could not stand. Let us commit any blasphemy of laughter and
criticism rather than exude this lily-sweet glue; and cover him with
phrases, I cried. Therefore I broke off, and Jinny, who was without
future, or speculation, but respected the moment with complete
integrity, gave her body a flick with the whip, powdered her face (for
which I loved her), and waved to me as she stood on the doorstep,
pressing her hand to her hair so that the wind might not disorder it, a
gesture for which I honoured her, as if it confirmed our
determination--not to let lilies grow.

'I observed with disillusioned clarity the despicable non-entity of the
street; its porches; its window curtains; the drab cloths, the cupidity
and complacency of shopping women; and old men taking the air in
comforters; the caution of people crossing; the universal determination
to go on living, when really, fools and gulls that you are, I said, any
slate may fly from a roof, any car may swerve, for there is neither
rhyme nor reason when a drunk man staggers about with a club in his
hand--that is all. I was like one admitted behind the scenes: like one
shown how the effects are produced. I returned, however, to my own snug
home and was warned by the parlourmaid to creep upstairs in my
stockings. The child was asleep. I went into my room.

'Was there no sword, nothing with which to batter down these walls, this
protection, this begetting of children and living behind curtains, and
becoming daily more involved and committed, with books and pictures?
Better burn one's life out like Louis, desiring perfection; or like
Rhoda leave us, flying past us to the desert; or choose one out of
millions and one only like Neville; better be like Susan and love and
hate the heat of the sun or the frost-bitten grass; or be like Jinny,
honest, an animal. All had their rapture; their common feeling with
death; something that stood them in stead. Thus I visited each of my
friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers, to prise open their
locked caskets. I went from one to the other holding my sorrow--no, not
my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life--for their
inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I go to my
friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments
something unbroken--I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or
tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who
cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably
lonely. There I sat.

'Should this be the end of the story? a kind of sigh? a last ripple of
the wave? A trickle of water in some gutter where, burbling, it dies
away? Let me touch the table--so--and thus recover my sense of the
moment. A sideboard covered with cruets; a basket full of rolls; a plate
of bananas--these are comfortable sights. But if there are no stories,
what end can there be, or what beginning? Life is not susceptible
perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to sell it. Sitting up
late at night it seems strange not to have more control. Pigeon-holes
are not then very useful. It is strange how force ebbs away and away
into some dry creek. Sitting alone, it seems we are spent; our waters
can only just surround feebly that spike of sea-holly; we cannot reach
that farther pebble so as to wet it. It is over, we are ended. But
wait--I sat all night waiting--an impulse again runs through us; we
rise, we toss back a mane of white spray; we pound on the shore; we are
not to be confined. That is, I shaved and washed; did not wake my wife,
and had breakfast; put on my hat, and went out to earn my living. After
Monday, Tuesday comes.

'Yet some doubt remained, some note of interrogation. I was surprised,
opening a door, to find people thus occupied; I hesitated, taking a cup
of tea, whether one said milk or sugar. And the light of the stars
falling, as it falls now, on my hand after travelling for millions upon
millions of years--I could get a cold shock from that for a moment--not
more, my imagination is too feeble. But some doubt remained. A shadow
flitted through my mind like moths' wings among chairs and tables in a
room in the evening. When, for example, I went to Lincolnshire that
summer to see Susan and she advanced towards me across the garden with
the lazy movement of a half-filled sail, with the swaying movement of a
woman with child, I thought, "It goes on; but why?" We sat in the
garden; the farm carts came up dripping with hay; there was the usual
country gabble of rooks and doves; fruit was netted and covered over;
the gardener dug. Bees boomed down the purple tunnels of flowers; bees
embedded themselves on the golden shields of sunflowers. Little twigs,
were blown across the grass. How rhythmical, and half conscious and like
something wrapped in mist it was; but to me hateful, like a net folding
one's limbs in its meshes, cramping. She who had refused Percival lent
herself to this, to this covering over.

'Sitting down on a bank to wait for my train, I thought then how we
surrender, how we submit to the stupidity of nature. Woods covered in
thick green leafage lay in front of me. And by some flick of a scent or
a sound on a nerve, the old image--the gardeners sweeping, the lady
writing--returned. I saw the figures beneath the beech trees at Elvedon.
The gardeners swept; the lady at the table sat writing. But I now made
the contribution of maturity to childhood's intuitions--satiety and
doom; the sense of what is unescapable in our lot; death; the knowledge
of limitations; how life is more obdurate than one had thought it. Then,
when I was a child, the presence of an enemy had asserted itself; the
need for opposition had stung me. I had jumped up and cried, "Let's
explore." The horror of the situation was ended.

'Now what situation was there to end? Dullness and doom. And what to
explore? The leaves and the wood concealed nothing. If a bird rose I
should no longer make a poem--I should repeat what I had said before.
Thus if I had a stick with which to point to indentations in the curve
of being, this is the lowest; here it coils useless on the mud where no
tide comes--here, where I sat with my back to a hedge, and my hat over
my eyes, while the sheep advanced remorselessly in that wooden way of
theirs, step by step on stiff, pointed legs. But if you hold a blunt
blade to a grindstone long enough, something spurts--a jagged edge of
fire; so held to lack of reason, aimlessness, the usual, all massed
together, out spurted in one flame hatred, contempt. I took my mind, my
being, the old dejected, almost inanimate object, and lashed it about
among these odds and ends, sticks and straws, detestable little bits of
wreckage, flotsam and jetsam, floating on the oily surface. I jumped up.
I said, "Fight! Fight!" I repeated. It is the effort and the struggle,
it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and piecing
together--this is the daily battle, defeat or victory, the absorbing
pursuit. The trees, scattered, put on order; the thick green of the
leaves thinned itself to a dancing light. I netted them under with a
sudden phrase. I retrieved them from formlessness with words.

'The train came in. Lengthening down the platform, the train came to a
stop. I caught my train. And so back to London in the evening. How
satisfactory, the atmosphere of common sense and tobacco; old women
clambering into the third-class carriage with their baskets; the sucking
at pipes; the good nights and see you tomorrows of friends parting at
wayside stations, and then the lights of London--not the flaring ecstasy
of youth, not that tattered violet banner, but still the lights of
London all the same; hard, electric lights, high up in offices; street
lamps laced along dry pavements; flares roaring above street markets. I
like all this when I have despatched the enemy for a moment.

'Also I like to find the pageant of existence roaring, in a theatre for
instance. The clay-coloured, earthy nondescript animal of the field here
erects himself and with infinite ingenuity and effort puts up a fight
against the green woods and green fields and sheep advancing with
measured tread, munching. And, of course, windows in the long grey
streets were lit up; strips of carpet cut the pavement; there were swept
and garnished rooms, fire, food, wine, talk. Men with withered hands,
women with pearl pagodas hanging from their ears, came in and went out.
I saw old men's faces carved into wrinkles and sneers by the work of the
world; beauty cherished so that it seemed newly sprung even in age; and
youth so apt for pleasure that pleasure, one thought, must exist; it
seemed that grass-lands must roll for it; and the sea be chopped up into
little waves; and the woods rustle with bright-coloured birds for youth,
for youth expectant. There one met Jinny and Hal, Tom and Betty; there
we had our jokes and shared our secrets; and never parted in the doorway
without arranging to meet again in some other room as the occasion, as
the time of the year, suggested. Life is pleasant; life is good. After
Monday comes Tuesday, and Wednesday follows.

'Yes, but after a time with a difference. It may be that something in
the look of the room one night, in the arrangement of the chairs,
suggests it. It seems comfortable to sink down on a sofa in a corner, to
look, to listen. Then it happens that two figures standing with their
backs to the window appear against the branches of a spreading tree.
With a shock of emotion one feels "There are figures without features
robed in beauty." In the pause that follows while the ripples spread,
the girl to whom one should be talking says to herself, "He is old." But
she is wrong. It is not age; it is that a drop has fallen; another drop.
Time has given the arrangement another shake. Out we creep from the arch
of the currant leaves, out into a wider world. The true order of
things--this is our perpetual illusion--is now apparent. Thus in a
moment, in a drawing-room, our life adjusts itself to the majestic march
of day across the sky.

'It was for this reason that instead of pulling on my patent-leather
shoes and finding a tolerable tie, I sought Neville. I sought my oldest
friend, who had known me when I was Byron; when I was Meredith's young
man, and also that hero in a book by Dostoevsky whose name I have
forgotten. I found him alone, reading. A perfectly neat table; a curtain
pulled methodically straight; a paper-knife dividing a French
volume--nobody, I thought, ever changes the attitude in which we saw
them first, or the clothes. Here he has sat in this chair, in these
clothes, ever since we first met. Here was freedom; here was intimacy;
the firelight broke off some round apple on the curtain. There we
talked; sat talking; sauntered down that avenue, the avenue which runs
under the trees, under the thick-leaved murmuring trees, the trees that
are hung with fruit, which we have trodden so often together, so that
now the turf is bare round some of those trees, round certain plays and
poems, certain favourites of ours--the turf is trodden bare by our
incessant unmethodical pacing. If I have to wait, I read; if I wake in
the night, I feel along the shelf for a book. Swelling, perpetually
augmented, there is a vast accumulation of unrecorded matter in my head.
Now and then I break off a lump, Shakespeare it may be, it may be some
old woman called Peck; and say to myself, smoking a cigarette in bed,
"That's Shakespeare. That's Peck"--with a certainty of recognition and a
shock of knowledge which is endlessly delightful, though not to be
imparted. So we shared our Pecks, our Shakespeares; compared each
other's versions; allowed each other's insight to set our own Peck or
Shakespeare in a better light; and then sank into one of those silences
which are now and again broken by a few words, as if a fin rose in the
wastes of silence; and then the fin, the thought, sinks back into the
depths, spreading round it a little ripple of satisfaction, content.

'Yes, but suddenly one hears a clock tick. We who had been immersed in
this world became aware of another. It is painful. It was Neville who
changed our time. He, who had been thinking with the unlimited time of
the mind, which stretches in a flash from Shakespeare to ourselves,
poked the fire and began to live by that other clock which marks the
approach of a particular person. The wide and dignified sweep of his
mind contracted. He became on the alert. I could feel him listening to
sounds in the street. I noted how he touched a cushion. From the myriads
of mankind and all time past he had chosen one person, one moment in
particular. A sound was heard in the hall. What he was saying wavered in
the air like an uneasy flame. I watched him disentangle one footstep
from other footsteps; wait for some particular mark of identification
and glance with the swiftness of a snake at the handle of the door.
(Hence the astonishing acuteness of his perceptions; he has been trained
always by one person.) So concentrated a passion shot out others like
foreign matter from a still, sparkling fluid. I became aware of my own
vague and cloudy nature full of sediment, full of doubts, full of
phrases and notes to be made in pocket-books. The fold of the curtain
became still, statuesque; the paper-weight on the table hardened; the
threads on the curtain sparkled; everything became definite, external, a
scene in which I had no part. I rose, therefore; I left him.

'Heavens! how they caught me as I left the room, the fangs of that old
pain! the desire for someone not there. For whom? I did not know at
first; then remembered Percival. I had not thought of him for months.
Now to laugh with him, to laugh with him at Neville--that was what I
wanted, to walk off arm-in-arm together laughing. But he was not there.
The place was empty.

'It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in
dreams.

'This fitful gust blowing so sharp and cold upon me sent me that night
across London to visit other friends, Rhoda and Louis, desiring company,
certainty, contact. I wondered, as I mounted the stairs, what was their
relationship? What did they say alone? I figured her awkward with the
tea-kettle. She gazed over the slate roofs--the nymph of the fountain
always wet, obsessed with visions, dreaming. She parted the curtain to
look at the night. "Away!" she said. "The moor is dark beneath the
moon." I rang; I waited. Louis perhaps poured out milk in a saucer for
the cat; Louis, whose bony hands shut like the sides of a dock closing
themselves with a slow anguish of effort upon an enormous tumult of
waters, who knew what has been said by the Egyptian, the Indian, by men
with high cheek-bones and solitaries in hair shirts. I knocked: I
waited; there was no answer. I tramped down the stone stairs again. Our
friends--how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And
I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen,
often not. Life is a dream surely. Our flame, the will-o'-the wisp that
dances in a few eyes, is soon to be blown out and all will fade. I
recalled my friends. I thought of Susan. She had bought fields.
Cucumbers and tomatoes ripened in her hothouses. The vine that had been
killed by last year's frost was putting out a leaf or two. She walked
heavily with her sons across her meadows. She went about the land
attended by men in gaiters, pointing with her stick at a roof, at
hedges, at walls fallen into disrepair. The pigeons followed her,
waddling, for the grain that she let fall from her capable, earthy
fingers. "But I no longer rise at dawn," she said. Then
Jinny--entertaining, no doubt, some new young man. They reached the
crisis of the usual conversation. The room would be darkened; chairs
arranged. For she still sought the moment. Without illusions, hard and
clear as crystal, she rode at the day with her breast bared. She let its
spikes pierce her. When the lock whitened on her forehead she twisted it
fearlessly among the rest. So when they come to bury her nothing will be
out of order. Bits of ribbons will be found curled up. But still the
door opens. Who is coming in? she asks, and rises to meet him, prepared,
as on those first spring nights when the tree under the big London
houses where respectable citizens were going soberly to bed scarcely
sheltered her love; and the squeak of trams mixed with her cry of
delight and the rippling of leaves had to shade her languour, her
delicious lassitude as she sank down cooled by all the sweetness of
nature satisfied. Our friends, how seldom visited, how little known--it
is true; and yet, when I meet an unknown person, and try to break off,
here at this table, what I call "my life", it is not one life that I
look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not
altogether know who I am--Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda or Louis; or how
to distinguish my life from theirs.

'So I thought that night in early autumn when we came together and dined
once more at Hampton Court. Our discomfort was at first considerable,
for each by that time was committed to a statement, and the other person
coming along the road to the meeting-place dressed like this or that,
with a stick or without, seemed to contradict it. I saw Jinny look at
Susan's earthy fingers and then hide her own; I, considering Neville, so
neat and exact, felt the nebulosity of my own life blurred with all
these phrases. He then boasted, because he was ashamed of one room and
one person and his own success. Louis and Rhoda, the conspirators, the
spies at table, who take notes, felt, "After all, Bernard can make the
waiter fetch us rolls--a contact denied us." We saw for a moment laid
out among us the body of the complete human being whom we have failed to
be, but at the same time, cannot forget. All that we might have been we
saw; all that we had missed, and we grudged for a moment the other's
claim, as children when the cake is cut, the one cake, the only cake,
watch their slice diminishing.

'However, we had our bottle of wine, and under that seduction lost our
enmity, and stopped comparing. And, half-way through dinner, we felt
enlarge itself round us the huge blackness of what is outside us, of
what we are not. The wind, the rush of wheels became the roar of time,
and we rushed--where? And who were we? We were extinguished for a
moment, went out like sparks in burnt paper and the blackness roared.
Past time, past history we went. For me this lasts but one second. It is
ended by my own pugnacity. I strike the table with a spoon. If I could
measure things with compasses I would, but since my only measure is a
phrase, I make phrases--I forget what, on this occasion. We became six
people at a table in Hampton Court. We rose and walked together down the
avenue. In the thin, the unreal twilight, fitfully like the echo of
voices laughing down some alley, geniality returned to me and flesh.
Against the gateway, against some cedar tree I saw blaze bright,
Neville, Jinny, Rhoda, Louis, Susan and myself, our life, our identity.
Still King William seemed an unreal monarch and his crown mere tinsel.
But we--against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many
million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of
past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all;
the moment was enough. And then Neville, Jinny, Susan and I, as a wave
breaks, burst asunder, surrendered--to the next leaf, to the precise
bird, to a child with a hoop, to a prancing dog, to the warmth that is
hoarded in woods after a hot day, to the lights twisted like white
ribbon on rippled waters. We drew apart; we were consumed in the
darkness of the trees, leaving Rhoda and Louis to stand on the terrace
by the urn.

When we returned from that immersion--how sweet, how deep!--and came to
the surface and saw the conspirators still standing there it was with
some compunction. We had lost what they had kept. We interrupted. But we
were tired, and whether it had been good or bad, accomplished or left
undone, the dusky veil was falling upon our endeavours; the lights were
sinking as we paused for a moment upon the terrace that overlooks the
river. The steamers were landing their trippers on the bank; there was a
distant cheering, the sound of singing, as if people waved their hats
and joined in some last song. The sound of the chorus came across the
water and I felt leap up that old impulse, which has moved me all my
life, to be thrown up and down on the roar of other people's voices,
singing the same song; to be tossed up and down on the roar of almost
senseless merriments, sentiment, triumph, desire. But not now. No! I
could not collect myself; I could not distinguish myself; I could not
help letting fall the things that had made me a minute ago eager,
amused, jealous, vigilant, and hosts of other things, into the water. I
could not recover myself from that endless throwing away, dissipation,
flooding forth without our willing it and rushing soundlessly away out
there under the arches of the bridge, round some clump of trees or an
island, out where sea-birds sit on stakes, over the roughened water to
become waves in the sea--I could not recover myself from that
dissipation. So we parted.

'Was this then, this streaming away mixed with Susan, Jinny, Neville,
Rhoda, Louis, a sort of death? A new assembly of elements? Some hint of
what was to come? The note was scribbled, the book shut, for I am an
intermittent student. I do not say my lessons by any means at the stated
hour. Later, walking down Fleet Street at the rush hour, I recalled that
moment; I continued it. "Must I for ever," I said, "beat my spoon on the
tablecloth? Shall I not, too, consent?" The omnibuses were clogged; one
came up behind another and stopped with a click, like a link added to a
stone chain. People passed.

'Multitudinous, carrying attach-cases, dodging with incredible celerity
in and out, they went past like a river in spate. They went past roaring
like a train in a tunnel. Seizing my chance I crossed; dived down a dark
passage and entered the shop where they cut my hair. I leant my head
back and was swathed in a sheet. Looking-glasses confronted me in which
I could see my pinioned body and people passing; stopping, looking and
going on indifferent. The hairdresser began to move his scissors to and
fro. I felt myself powerless to stop the oscillations of the cold steel.
So we are cut and laid in swaths, I said; so we lie side by side on the
damp meadows, withered branches and flowering. We have no more to expose
ourselves on the bare hedges to the wind and snow; no more to carry
ourselves erect when the gale sweeps, to bear our burden upheld; or
stay, unmurmuring, on those pallid noondays when the bird creeps close
to the bough and the damp whitens the leaf. We are cut, we are fallen.
We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at
our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep. We have renounced our
station and lie now flat, withered and how soon forgotten! Upon which I
saw an expression in the tail of the eye of the hairdresser as if
something interested him in the street.

'What interested the hairdresser? What did the hairdresser see in the
street? It is thus that I am recalled. (For I am no mystic; something
always plucks at me--curiosity, envy, admiration, interest in
hairdressers and the like bring me to the surface.) While he brushed the
fluff from my coat I took pains to assure myself of his identity, and
then, swinging my stick, I went into the Strand, and evoked to serve as
opposite to myself the figure of Rhoda, always so furtive, always with
fear in her eyes, always seeking some pillar in the desert, to find
which she had gone; she had killed herself. "Wait," I said, putting my
arm in imagination (thus we consort with our friends) through her arm.
"Wait until these omnibuses have gone by. Do not cross so dangerously.
These men are your brothers." In persuading her I was also persuading my
own soul. For this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or
woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny or Rhoda--so strange is
the contact of one with another.

'Swinging my stick, with my hair newly cut and the nape of my neck
tingling, I went past all those trays of penny toys imported from
Germany that men hold out in the street by St Paul's--St Paul's, the
brooding hen with spread wings from whose shelter run omnibuses and
streams of men and women at the rush hour. I thought how Louis would
mount those steps in his neat suit with his cane in his hand and his
angular, rather detached gait. With his Australian accent ("My father, a
banker at Brisbane") he would come, I thought, with greater respect to
these old ceremonies than I do, who have heard the same lullabies for a
thousand years. I am always impressed, as I enter, by the rubbed roses;
the polished brasses; the flapping and the chanting, while one boy's
voice wails round the dome like some lost and wandering dove. The
recumbency and the peace of the dead impress me--warriors at rest under
their old banners. Then I scoff at the floridity and absurdity of some
scrolloping tomb; and the trumpets and the victories and the coats of
arms and the certainty, so sonorously repeated, of resurrection, of
eternal life. My wandering and inquisitive eye then shows me an
awe-stricken child; a shuffling pensioner; or the obeisances of tired
shop-girls burdened with heaven knows what strife in their poor thin
breasts come to solace themselves in the rush hour. I stray and look and
wonder, and sometimes, rather furtively, try to rise on the shaft of
somebody else's prayer into the dome, out, beyond, wherever they go. But
then like the lost and wailing dove, I find myself failing, fluttering,
descending and perching upon some curious gargoyle, some battered nose
or absurd tombstone, with humour, with wonder, and so again watch the
sightseers with their Baedekers shuffling past, while the boy's voice
soars in the dome and the organ now and then indulges in a moment of
elephantine triumph. How then, I asked, would Louis roof us all in? How
would he confine us, make us one, with his red ink, with his very fine
nib? The voice petered out in the dome, wailing.

'So into the street again, swinging my stick, looking at wire trays in
stationers' shop-windows, at baskets of fruit grown in the colonies,
murmuring Pillicock sat on Pillicock hill, or Hark, hark, the dogs do
bark, or The World's great age begins anew, or Come away, come away,
death--mingling nonsense and poetry, floating in the stream. Something
always has to be done next. Tuesday follows Monday: Wednesday, Tuesday.
Each spreads the same ripple. The being grows rings, like a tree. Like a
tree, leaves fall.

'For one day as I leant over a gate that led into a field, the rhythm
stopped; the rhymes and the hummings, the nonsense and the poetry. A
space was cleared in my mind. I saw through the thick leaves of habit.
Leaning over the gate I regretted so much litter, so much
unaccomplishment and separation, for one cannot cross London to see a
friend, life being so full of engagements; nor take ship to India and
see a naked man spearing fish in blue water. I said life had been
imperfect, an unfinished phrase. It had been impossible for me, taking
snuff as I do from any bagman met in a train, to keep coherency--that
sense of the generations, of women carrying red pitchers to the Nile, of
the nightingale who sings among conquests and migrations. It had been
too vast an undertaking, I said, and how can I go on lifting my foot
perpetually to climb the stair? I addressed myself as one would speak to
a companion with whom one is voyaging to the North Pole.

'I spoke to that self who had been with me in many tremendous
adventures; the faithful man who sits over the fire when everybody has
gone to bed, stirring the cinders with a poker; the man who has been so
mysteriously and with sudden accretions of being built up, in a beech
wood, sitting by a willow tree on a bank, leaning over a parapet at
Hampton Court; the man who has collected himself in moments of emergency
and banged his spoon on the table, saying, "I will not consent."

'This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling
in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition.
He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened.
Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete
desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this
immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no
varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than
the death of youth. I am the swathed figure in the hairdresser's shop
taking up only so much space.

'The scene beneath me withered. It was like the eclipse when the sun
went out and left the earth, flourishing in full summer foliage,
withered, brittle, false. Also I saw on a winding road in a dust dance
the groups we had made, how they came together, how they ate together,
how they met in this room or that. I saw my own indefatigable
busyness--how I had rushed from one to the other, fetched and carried,
travelled and returned, joined this group and that, here kissed, here
withdrawn; always kept hard at it by some extraordinary purpose, with my
nose to the ground like a dog on the scent; with an occasional toss of
the head, an occasional cry of amazement, despair and then back again
with my nose to the scent. What a litter--what a confusion; with here
birth, here death; succulence and sweetness; effort and anguish; and
myself always running hither and thither. Now it was done with. I had no
more appetites to glut; no more stings in me with which to poison
people; no more sharp teeth and clutching hands or desire to feel the
pear and the grape and the sun beating down from the orchard wall.

'The woods had vanished; the earth was a waste of shadow. No sound broke
the silence of the wintry landscape. No cock crowed; no smoke rose; no
train moved. A man without a self, I said. A heavy body leaning on a
gate. A dead man. With dispassionate despair, with entire
disillusionment, I surveyed the dust dance; my life, my friends' lives,
and those fabulous presences, men with brooms, women writing, the willow
tree by the river--clouds and phantoms made of dust too, of dust that
changed, as clouds lose and gain and take gold or red and lose their
summits and billow this way and that, mutable, vain. I, carrying a
notebook, making phrases, had recorded mere changes; a shadow, I had
been sedulous to take note of shadows. How can I proceed now, I said,
without a self, weightless and visionless, through a world weightless,
without illusion?

'The heaviness of my despondency thrust open the gate I leant on and
pushed me, an elderly man, a heavy man with grey hair, through the
colourless field, the empty field. No more to hear echoes, no more to
see phantoms, to conjure up no opposition, but to walk always
unshadowed, making no impress upon the dead earth. If even there had
been sheep munching, pushing one foot after another, or a bird, or a man
driving a spade into the earth, had there been a bramble to trip me, or
a ditch, damp with soaked leaves, into which to fall--but no, the
melancholy path led along the level, to more wintriness and pallor and
the equal and uninteresting view of the same landscape.

'How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun?
Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It
is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next
moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and
out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone
walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods
throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold,
brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour
like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself;
hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet.

'So the landscape returned to me; so I saw fields rolling in waves of
colour beneath me, but now with this difference: I saw but was not seen.
I walked unshadowed; I came unheralded. From me had dropped the old
cloak, the old response; the hollowed hand that heats back sounds. Thin
as a ghost, leaving no trace where I trod, perceiving merely, I walked
alone in a new world, never trodden; brushing new flowers, unable to
speak save in a child's words of one syllable; without shelter from
phrases--I who have made so many; unattended, I who have always gone
with my kind; solitary, I who have always had someone to share the empty
grate, or the cupboard with its hanging loop of gold.

'But how describe the world seen without a self? There are no words.
Blue, red--even they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of
letting the light through. How describe or say anything in articulate
words again?--save that it fades, save that it undergoes a gradual
transformation, becomes, even in the course of one short walk,
habitual--this scene also. Blindness returns as one moves and one leaf
repeats another. Loveliness returns as one looks, with all its train of
phantom phrases. One breathes in and out substantial breath; down in the
valley the train draws across the fields lop-eared with smoke.

'But for a moment I had sat on the turf somewhere high above the flow of
the sea and the sound of the woods, had seen the house, the garden and
the waves breaking. The old nurse who turns the pages of the
picture-book had stopped and had said, "Look. This is the truth."

'So I was thinking as I came along Shaftesbury Avenue to-night. I was
thinking of that page in the picture-book. And when I met you in the
place where one goes to hang up one's coat I said to myself, "It does
not matter whom I meet. All this little affair of 'being' is over. Who
this is I do not know; nor care; we will dine together." So I hung up my
coat, tapped you on the shoulder, and said, "Sit with me."

'Now the meal is finished; we are surrounded by peelings and bread
crumbs. I have tried to break off this bunch and hand it you; but
whether there is substance or truth in it I do not know. Nor do I know
exactly where we are. What city does that stretch of sky look down upon?
Is it Paris, is it London where we sit, or some southern city of
pink-washed houses lying under cypresses, under high mountains, where
eagles soar? I do not at this moment feel certain.

'I begin now to forget; I begin to doubt the fixity of tables, the
reality of here and now, to tap my knuckles smartly upon the edges of
apparently solid objects and say, "Are you hard?" I have seen so many
different things, have made so many different sentences. I have lost in
the process of eating and drinking and rubbing my eyes along surfaces
that thin, hard shell which cases the soul, which, in youth, shuts one
in--hence the fierceness, and the tap, tap, tap of the remorseless beaks
of the young. And now I ask, "Who am I?" I have been talking of Bernard,
Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and
distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead,
and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find
any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As
I talked I felt "I am you." This difference we make so much of, this
identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome. Yes, ever since old Mrs
Constable lifted her sponge and pouring warm water over me covered me
with flesh I have been sensitive, percipient. Here on my brow is the
blow I got when Percival fell. Here on the nape of my neck is the kiss
Jinny gave Louis. My eyes fill with Susan's tears. I see far away,
quivering like a gold thread, the pillar Rhoda saw, and feel the rush of
the wind of her flight when she leapt.

'Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story
of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall
things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part
of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old
half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night; who
turn over in their sleep, who utter their confused cries, who put out
their phantom fingers and clutch at me as I try to escape--shadows of
people one might have been; unborn selves. There is the old brute, too,
the savage, the hairy man who dabbles his fingers in ropes of entrails;
and gobbles and belches; whose speech is guttural, visceral--well, he is
here. He squats in me. To-night he has been feasted on quails, salad and
sweetbread. He now holds a glass of fine old brandy in his paw. He
brindles, purrs and shoots warm thrills all down my spine as I sip. It
is true, he washes his hands before dinner, but they are still hairy. He
buttons on trousers and waistcoats, but they contain the same organs. He
jibs if I keep him waiting for dinner. He mops and mows perpetually,
pointing with his half-idiot gestures of greed and covetousness at what
he desires. I assure you, I have great difficulty sometimes in
controlling him. That man, the hairy, the ape-like, has contributed his
part to my life. He has given a greener glow to green things, has held
his torch with its red flames, its thick and smarting smoke, behind
every leaf. He has lit up the cool garden even. He has brandished his
torch in murky by-streets where girls suddenly seem to shine with a red
and intoxicating translucency. Oh, he has tossed his torch high! He has
led me wild dances!

'But no more. Now to-night, my body rises tier upon tier like some cool
temple whose floor is strewn with carpets and murmurs rise and the
altars stand smoking; but up above, here in my serene head, come only
fine gusts of melody, waves of incense, while the lost dove wails, and
the banners tremble above tombs, and the dark airs of midnight shake
trees outside the open windows. When I look down from this
transcendency, how beautiful are even the crumbled relics of bread! What
shapely spirals the peelings of pears make--how thin, and mottled like
some sea-bird's egg. Even the forks laid straight side by side appear
lucid, logical, exact; and the horns of the rolls which we have left are
glazed, yellow-plated, hard. I could worship my hand even, with its fan
of bones laced by blue mysterious veins and its astonishing look of
aptness, suppleness and ability to curl softly or suddenly crush--its
infinite sensibility.

'Immeasurably receptive, holding everything, trembling with fullness,
yet clear, contained--so my being seems, now that desire urges it no
more out and away; now that curiosity no longer dyes it a thousand
colours. It lies deep, tideless, immune, now that he is dead, the man I
called "Bernard", the man who kept a book in his pocket in which he made
notes--phrases for the moon, notes of features; how people looked,
turned, dropped their cigarette ends; under B, butterfly powder, under
D, ways of naming death. But now let the door open, the glass door that
is for ever turning on its hinges. Let a woman come, let a young man in
evening dress with a moustache sit down: is there anything that they can
tell me? No! I know all that, too. And if she suddenly gets up and goes,
"My dear," I say, "you no longer make me look after you." The shock of
the falling wave which has sounded all my life, which woke me so that I
saw the gold loop on the cupboard, no longer makes quiver what I hold.

'So now, taking upon me the mystery of things, I could go like a spy
without leaving this place, without stirring from my chair. I can visit
the remote verges of the desert lands where the savage sits by the
camp-fire. Day rises; the girl lifts the watery fire-hearted jewels to
her brow; the sun levels his beams straight at the sleeping house; the
waves deepen their bars; they fling themselves on shore; back blows the
spray; sweeping their waters they surround the boat and the sea-holly.
The birds sing in chorus; deep tunnels run between the stalks of
flowers; the house is whitened; the sleeper stretches; gradually all is
astir. Light floods the room and drives shadow beyond shadow to where
they hang in folds inscrutable. What does the central shadow hold?
Something? Nothing? I do not know.

'Oh, but there is your face. I catch your eye. I, who had been thinking
myself so vast, a temple, a church, a whole universe, unconfined and
capable of being everywhere on the verge of things and here too, am now
nothing but what you see--an elderly man, rather heavy, grey above the
ears, who (I see myself in the glass) leans one elbow on the table, and
holds in his left hand a glass of old brandy. That is the blow you have
dealt me. I have walked bang into the pillar-box. I reel from side to
side. I put my hands to my head. My hat is off--I have dropped my stick.
I have made an awful ass of myself and am justly laughed at by any
passer-by.

'Lord, how unutterably disgusting life is! What dirty tricks it plays
us, one moment free; the next this. Here we are among the breadcrumbs
and the stained napkins again. That knife is already congealing with
grease. Disorder, sordidity and corruption surround us. We have been
taking into our mouths the bodies of dead birds. It is with these greasy
crumbs, slobbered over napkins, and little corpses that we have to
build. Always it begins again; always there is the enemy; eyes meeting
ours; fingers twitching ours; the effort waiting. Call the waiter. Pay
the bill. We must pull ourselves up out of our chairs. We must find our
coats. We must go. Must, must, must--detestable word. Once more, I who
had thought myself immune, who had said, "Now I am rid of all that,"
find that the wave has tumbled me over, head over heels, scattering my
possessions, leaving me to collect, to assemble, to heap together,
summon my forces, rise and confront the enemy.

'It is strange that we, who are capable of so much suffering, should
inflict so much suffering. Strange that the face of a person, whom I
scarcely know save that I think we met once on the gangway of a ship
bound for Africa--a mere adumbration of eyes, cheeks, nostrils--should
have power to inflict this insult. You look, eat, smile, are bored,
pleased, annoyed--that is all I know. Yet this shadow which has sat by
me for an hour or two, this mask from which peep two eyes, has power to
drive me back, to pinion me down among all those other faces, to shut me
in a hot room; to send me dashing like a moth from candle to candle.

'But wait. While they add up the bill behind the screen, wait one
moment. Now that I have reviled you for the blow that sent me staggering
among peelings and crumblings and old scraps of meat, I will record in
words of one syllable how also under your gaze with that compulsion on
me I begin to perceive this, that and the other. The clock ticks; the
woman sneezes; the waiter comes--there is a gradual coming together,
running into one, acceleration and unification. Listen: a whistle
sounds, wheels rush, the door creaks on its hinges. I regain the sense
of the complexity and the reality and the struggle, for which I thank
you. And with some pity, some envy and much good will, take your hand
and bid you good night.

'Heaven be praised for solitude! I am alone now. That almost unknown
person has gone, to catch some train, to take some cab, to go to some
place or person whom I do not know. The face looking at me has gone. The
pressure is removed. Here are empty coffee-cups. Here are chairs turned
but nobody sits on them. Here are empty tables and nobody any more
coming to dine at them to-night.

'Let me now raise my song of glory. Heaven be praised for solitude. Let
me be alone. Let me cast and throw away this veil of being, this cloud
that changes with the least breath, night and day, and all night and all
day. While I sat here I have been changing. I have watched the sky
change. I have seen clouds cover the stars, then free the stars, then
cover the stars again. Now I look at their changing no more. Now no one
sees me and I change no more. Heaven be praised for solitude that has
removed the pressure of the eye, the solicitation of the body, and all
need of lies and phrases.

'My book, stuffed with phrases, has dropped to the floor. It lies under
the table, to be swept up by the charwoman when she comes wearily at
dawn looking for scraps of paper, old tram tickets, and here and there a
note screwed into a ball and left with the litter to be swept up. What
is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we
to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers
use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into
the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright
wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the
storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch
unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with
all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes
that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts, making wild
music, false phrases. I have done with phrases.

'How much better is silence; the coffee-cup, the table. How much better
to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the
stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee-cup, this
knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself. Do not come
and worry me with your hints that it is time to shut the shop and be
gone. I would willingly give all my money that you should not disturb me
but let me sit on and on, silent, alone.

'But now the head waiter, who has finished his own meal, appears and
frowns; he takes his muffler from his pocket and ostentatiously makes
ready to go. They must go; must put up the shutters, must fold the
tablecloths, and give one brush with a wet mop under the tables.

'Curse you then. However beat and done with it all I am, I must haul
myself up, and find the particular coat that belongs to me; must push my
arms into the sleeves; must muffle myself up against the night air and
be off. I, I, I, tired as I am, spent as I am, and almost worn out with
all this rubbing of my nose along the surfaces of things, even I, an
elderly man who is getting rather heavy and dislikes exertion, must take
myself off and catch some last train.

'Again I see before me the usual street. The canopy of civilization is
burnt out. The sky is dark as polished whale-bone. But there is a
kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a stir of
some sort--sparrows on plane trees somewhere chirping. There is a sense
of the break of day. I will not call it dawn. What is dawn in the city
to an elderly man standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at
the sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening of the sky; some sort of
renewal. Another day; another Friday; another twentieth of March,
January or September. Another general awakening. The stars draw back and
are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film
of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on
the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers
light their early candles. Yes, thus is the eternal renewal, the
incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.

'And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware
once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud
horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we
now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand
pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is
death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back
like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike
spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and
unyielding, O Death!'

****

_The waves broke on the shore._






[End of The Waves, by Virginia Woolf]
