Books: Jacob\'s Room
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Virginia Woolf >> Jacob\'s Room
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No--Mrs. Flanders was told none of this, though Jacob felt, it is safe
to say, that nothing in the world was of greater importance; and as for
Cruttendon and Jinny, he thought them the most remarkable people he had
ever met--being of course unable to foresee how it fell out in the
course of time that Cruttendon took to painting orchards; had therefore
to live in Kent; and must, one would think, see through apple blossom by
this time, since his wife, for whose sake he did it, eloped with a
novelist; but no; Cruttendon still paints orchards, savagely, in
solitude. Then Jinny Carslake, after her affair with Lefanu the American
painter, frequented Indian philosophers, and now you find her in
pensions in Italy cherishing a little jeweller's box containing ordinary
pebbles picked off the road. But if you look at them steadily, she says,
multiplicity becomes unity, which is somehow the secret of life, though
it does not prevent her from following the macaroni as it goes round the
table, and sometimes, on spring nights, she makes the strangest
confidences to shy young Englishmen.
Jacob had nothing to hide from his mother. It was only that he could
make no sense himself of his extraordinary excitement, and as for
writing it down---
"Jacob's letters are so like him," said Mrs. Jarvis, folding the sheet.
"Indeed he seems to be having ..." said Mrs. Flanders, and paused, for
she was cutting out a dress and had to straighten the pattern, "... a
very gay time."
Mrs. Jarvis thought of Paris. At her back the window was open, for it
was a mild night; a calm night; when the moon seemed muffled and the
apple trees stood perfectly still.
"I never pity the dead," said Mrs. Jarvis, shifting the cushion at her
back, and clasping her hands behind her head. Betty Flanders did not
hear, for her scissors made so much noise on the table.
"They are at rest," said Mrs. Jarvis. "And we spend our days doing
foolish unnecessary things without knowing why."
Mrs. Jarvis was not liked in the village.
"You never walk at this time of night?" she asked Mrs. Flanders.
"It is certainly wonderfully mild," said Mrs. Flanders.
Yet it was years since she had opened the orchard gate and gone out on
Dods Hill after dinner.
"It is perfectly dry," said Mrs. Jarvis, as they shut the orchard door
and stepped on to the turf.
"I shan't go far," said Betty Flanders. "Yes, Jacob will leave Paris on
Wednesday."
"Jacob was always my friend of the three," said Mrs. Jarvis.
"Now, my dear, I am going no further," said Mrs. Flanders. They had
climbed the dark hill and reached the Roman camp.
The rampart rose at their feet--the smooth circle surrounding the camp
or the grave. How many needles Betty Flanders had lost there; and her
garnet brooch.
"It is much clearer than this sometimes," said Mrs. Jarvis, standing
upon the ridge. There were no clouds, and yet there was a haze over the
sea, and over the moors. The lights of Scarborough flashed, as if a
woman wearing a diamond necklace turned her head this way and that.
"How quiet it is!" said Mrs. Jarvis.
Mrs. Flanders rubbed the turf with her toe, thinking of her garnet
brooch.
Mrs. Jarvis found it difficult to think of herself to-night. It was so
calm. There was no wind; nothing racing, flying, escaping. Black shadows
stood still over the silver moors. The furze bushes stood perfectly
still. Neither did Mrs. Jarvis think of God. There was a church behind
them, of course. The church clock struck ten. Did the strokes reach the
furze bush, or did the thorn tree hear them?
Mrs. Flanders was stooping down to pick up a pebble. Sometimes people do
find things, Mrs. Jarvis thought, and yet in this hazy moonlight it was
impossible to see anything, except bones, and little pieces of chalk.
"Jacob bought it with his own money, and then I brought Mr. Parker up to
see the view, and it must have dropped--" Mrs. Flanders murmured.
Did the bones stir, or the rusty swords? Was Mrs. Flanders's twopenny-
halfpenny brooch for ever part of the rich accumulation? and if all the
ghosts flocked thick and rubbed shoulders with Mrs. Flanders in the
circle, would she not have seemed perfectly in her place, a live English
matron, growing stout?
The clock struck the quarter.
The frail waves of sound broke among the stiff gorse and the hawthorn
twigs as the church clock divided time into quarters.
Motionless and broad-backed the moors received the statement "It is
fifteen minutes past the hour," but made no answer, unless a bramble
stirred.
Yet even in this light the legends on the tombstones could be read,
brief voices saying, "I am Bertha Ruck," "I am Tom Gage." And they say
which day of the year they died, and the New Testament says something
for them, very proud, very emphatic, or consoling.
The moors accept all that too.
The moonlight falls like a pale page upon the church wall, and illumines
the kneeling family in the niche, and the tablet set up in 1780 to the
Squire of the parish who relieved the poor, and believed in God--so the
measured voice goes on down the marble scroll, as though it could impose
itself upon time and the open air.
Now a fox steals out from behind the gorse bushes.
Often, even at night, the church seems full of people. The pews are worn
and greasy, and the cassocks in place, and the hymn-books on the ledges.
It is a ship with all its crew aboard. The timbers strain to hold the
dead and the living, the ploughmen, the carpenters, the fox-hunting
gentlemen and the farmers smelling of mud and brandy. Their tongues join
together in syllabling the sharp-cut words, which for ever slice asunder
time and the broad-backed moors. Plaint and belief and elegy, despair
and triumph, but for the most part good sense and jolly indifference, go
trampling out of the windows any time these five hundred years.
Still, as Mrs. Jarvis said, stepping out on to the moors, "How quiet it
is!" Quiet at midday, except when the hunt scatters across it; quiet in
the afternoon, save for the drifting sheep; at night the moor is
perfectly quiet.
A garnet brooch has dropped into its grass. A fox pads stealthily. A
leaf turns on its edge. Mrs. Jarvis, who is fifty years of age, reposes
in the camp in the hazy moonlight.
"... and," said Mrs. Flanders, straightening her back, "I never cared
for Mr. Parker."
"Neither did I," said Mrs. Jarvis. They began to walk home.
But their voices floated for a little above the camp. The moonlight
destroyed nothing. The moor accepted everything. Tom Gage cries aloud so
long as his tombstone endures. The Roman skeletons are in safe keeping.
Betty Flanders's darning needles are safe too and her garnet brooch. And
sometimes at midday, in the sunshine, the moor seems to hoard these
little treasures, like a nurse. But at midnight when no one speaks or
gallops, and the thorn tree is perfectly still, it would be foolish to
vex the moor with questions--what? and why?
The church clock, however, strikes twelve.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The water fell off a ledge like lead--like a chain with thick white
links. The train ran out into a steep green meadow, and Jacob saw
striped tulips growing and heard a bird singing, in Italy.
A motor car full of Italian officers ran along the flat road and kept up
with the train, raising dust behind it. There were trees laced together
with vines--as Virgil said. Here was a station; and a tremendous leave-
taking going on, with women in high yellow boots and odd pale boys in
ringed socks. Virgil's bees had gone about the plains of Lombardy. It
was the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms. Then at
Milan there were sharp-winged hawks, of a bright brown, cutting figures
over the roofs.
These Italian carriages get damnably hot with the afternoon sun on them,
and the chances are that before the engine has pulled to the top of the
gorge the clanking chain will have broken. Up, up, up, it goes, like a
train on a scenic railway. Every peak is covered with sharp trees, and
amazing white villages are crowded on ledges. There is always a white
tower on the very summit, flat red-frilled roofs, and a sheer drop
beneath. It is not a country in which one walks after tea. For one thing
there is no grass. A whole hillside will be ruled with olive trees.
Already in April the earth is clotted into dry dust between them. And
there are neither stiles nor footpaths, nor lanes chequered with the
shadows of leaves nor eighteenth-century inns with bow-windows, where
one eats ham and eggs. Oh no, Italy is all fierceness, bareness,
exposure, and black priests shuffling along the roads. It is strange,
too, how you never get away from villas.
Still, to be travelling on one's own with a hundred pounds to spend is a
fine affair. And if his money gave out, as it probably would, he would
go on foot. He could live on bread and wine--the wine in straw bottles--
for after doing Greece he was going to knock off Rome. The Roman
civilization was a very inferior affair, no doubt. But Bonamy talked a
lot of rot, all the same. "You ought to have been in Athens," he would
say to Bonamy when he got back. "Standing on the Parthenon," he would
say, or "The ruins of the Coliseum suggest some fairly sublime
reflections," which he would write out at length in letters. It might
turn to an essay upon civilization. A comparison between the ancients
and moderns, with some pretty sharp hits at Mr. Asquith--something in
the style of Gibbon.
A stout gentleman laboriously hauled himself in, dusty, baggy, slung
with gold chains, and Jacob, regretting that he did not come of the
Latin race, looked out of the window.
It is a strange reflection that by travelling two days and nights you
are in the heart of Italy. Accidental villas among olive trees appear;
and men-servants watering the cactuses. Black victorias drive in between
pompous pillars with plaster shields stuck to them. It is at once
momentary and astonishingly intimate--to be displayed before the eyes of
a foreigner. And there is a lonely hill-top where no one ever comes, and
yet it is seen by me who was lately driving down Piccadilly on an
omnibus. And what I should like would be to get out among the fields,
sit down and hear the grasshoppers, and take up a handful of earth--
Italian earth, as this is Italian dust upon my shoes.
Jacob heard them crying strange names at railway stations through the
night. The train stopped and he heard frogs croaking close by, and he
wrinkled back the blind cautiously and saw a vast strange marsh all
white in the moonlight. The carriage was thick with cigar smoke, which
floated round the globe with the green shade on it. The Italian
gentleman lay snoring with his boots off and his waistcoat unbuttoned.
... And all this business of going to Greece seemed to Jacob an
intolerable weariness--sitting in hotels by oneself and looking at
monuments--he'd have done better to go to Cornwall with Timmy Durrant.
... "O--h," Jacob protested, as the darkness began breaking in front of
him and the light showed through, but the man was reaching across him to
get something--the fat Italian man in his dicky, unshaven, crumpled,
obese, was opening the door and going off to have a wash.
So Jacob sat up, and saw a lean Italian sportsman with a gun walking
down the road in the early morning light, and the whole idea of the
Parthenon came upon him in a clap.
"By Jove!" he thought, "we must be nearly there!" and he stuck his head
out of the window and got the air full in his face.
It is highly exasperating that twenty-five people of your acquaintance
should be able to say straight off something very much to the point
about being in Greece, while for yourself there is a stopper upon all
emotions whatsoever. For after washing at the hotel at Patras, Jacob had
followed the tram lines a mile or so out; and followed them a mile or so
back; he had met several droves of turkeys; several strings of donkeys;
had got lost in back streets; had read advertisements of corsets and of
Maggi's consomme; children had trodden on his toes; the place smelt of
bad cheese; and he was glad to find himself suddenly come out opposite
his hotel. There was an old copy of the Daily Mail lying among coffee-
cups; which he read. But what could he do after dinner?
No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without
our astonishing gift for illusion. At the age of twelve or so, having
given up dolls and broken our steam engines, France, but much more
probably Italy, and India almost for a certainty, draws the superfluous
imagination. One's aunts have been to Rome; and every one has an uncle
who was last heard of--poor man--in Rangoon. He will never come back any
more. But it is the governesses who start the Greek myth. Look at that
for a head (they say)--nose, you see, straight as a dart, curls,
eyebrows--everything appropriate to manly beauty; while his legs and
arms have lines on them which indicate a perfect degree of development--
the Greeks caring for the body as much as for the face. And the Greeks
could paint fruit so that birds pecked at it. First you read Xenophon;
then Euripides. One day--that was an occasion, by God--what people have
said appears to have sense in it; "the Greek spirit"; the Greek this,
that, and the other; though it is absurd, by the way, to say that any
Greek comes near Shakespeare. The point is, however, that we have been
brought up in an illusion.
Jacob, no doubt, thought something in this fashion, the Daily Mail
crumpled in his hand; his legs extended; the very picture of boredom.
"But it's the way we're brought up," he went on.
And it all seemed to him very distasteful. Something ought to be done
about it. And from being moderately depressed he became like a man about
to be executed. Clara Durrant had left him at a party to talk to an
American called Pilchard. And he had come all the way to Greece and left
her. They wore evening-dresses, and talked nonsense--what damned
nonsense--and he put out his hand for the Globe Trotter, an
international magazine which is supplied free of charge to the
proprietors of hotels.
In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in
the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel
sitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to
get the donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge,
beneath the windows. The whole of civilization was being condemned.
The waiter was quite indifferent to that too. Aristotle, a dirty man,
carnivorously interested in the body of the only guest now occupying the
only arm-chair, came into the room ostentatiously, put something down,
put something straight, and saw that Jacob was still there.
"I shall want to be called early to-morrow," said Jacob, over his
shoulder. "I am going to Olympia."
This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a
modern invention. Perhaps, as Cruttendon said, we do not believe enough.
Our fathers at any rate had something to demolish. So have we for the
matter of that, thought Jacob, crumpling the Daily Mail in his hand. He
would go into Parliament and make fine speeches--but what use are fine
speeches and Parliament, once you surrender an inch to the black waters?
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our
veins--of happiness and unhappiness. That respectability and evening
parties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back of Gray's
Inn--something solid, immovable, and grotesque--is at the back of it,
Jacob thought probable. But then there was the British Empire which was
beginning to puzzle him; nor was he altogether in favour of giving Home
Rule to Ireland. What did the Daily Mail say about that?
For he had grown to be a man, and was about to be immersed in things--as
indeed the chambermaid, emptying his basin upstairs, fingering keys,
studs, pencils, and bottles of tabloids strewn on the dressing-table,
was aware.
That he had grown to be a man was a fact that Florinda knew, as she knew
everything, by instinct.
And Betty Flanders even now suspected it, as she read his letter, posted
at Milan, "Telling me," she complained to Mrs. Jarvis, "really nothing
that I want to know"; but she brooded over it.
Fanny Elmer felt it to desperation. For he would take his stick and his
hat and would walk to the window, and look perfectly absent-minded and
very stern too, she thought.
"I am going," he would say, "to cadge a meal of Bonamy."
"Anyhow, I can drown myself in the Thames," Fanny cried, as she hurried
past the Foundling Hospital.
"But the Daily Mail isn't to be trusted," Jacob said to himself, looking
about for something else to read. And he sighed again, being indeed so
profoundly gloomy that gloom must have been lodged in him to cloud him
at any moment, which was odd in a man who enjoyed things so, was not
much given to analysis, but was horribly romantic, of course, Bonamy
thought, in his rooms in Lincoln's Inn.
"He will fall in love," thought Bonamy. "Some Greek woman with a
straight nose."
It was to Bonamy that Jacob wrote from Patras--to Bonamy who couldn't
love a woman and never read a foolish book.
There are very few good books after all, for we can't count profuse
histories, travels in mule carts to discover the sources of the Nile, or
the volubility of fiction.
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like
sentences that don't budge though armies cross them. I like words to be
hard--such were Bonamy's views, and they won him the hostility of those
whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up
the window, and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can't forbear a
shout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature.
That was not Bonamy's way at all. That his taste in literature affected
his friendships, and made him silent, secretive, fastidious, and only
quite at his ease with one or two young men of his own way of thinking,
was the charge against him.
But then Jacob Flanders was not at all of his own way of thinking--far
from it, Bonamy sighed, laying the thin sheets of notepaper on the table
and falling into thought about Jacob's character, not for the first
time.
The trouble was this romantic vein in him. "But mixed with the stupidity
which leads him into these absurd predicaments," thought Bonamy, "there
is something--something"--he sighed, for he was fonder of Jacob than of
any one in the world.
Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. There
he saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people of
the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into
groups and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for him
was not the cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction--it
was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are.
Yet next day, as the train slowly rounded a hill on the way to Olympia,
the Greek peasant women were out among the vines; the old Greek men were
sitting at the stations, sipping sweet wine. And though Jacob remained
gloomy he had never suspected how tremendously pleasant it is to be
alone; out of England; on one's own; cut off from the whole thing. There
are very sharp bare hills on the way to Olympia; and between them blue
sea in triangular spaces. A little like the Cornish coast. Well now, to
go walking by oneself all day--to get on to that track and follow it up
between the bushes--or are they small trees?--to the top of that
mountain from which one can see half the nations of antiquity--
"Yes," said Jacob, for his carriage was empty, "let's look at the map."
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To
gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth
spin; to have--positively--a rush of friendship for stones and grasses,
as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang--
there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty
often.
The evening air slightly moved the dirty curtains in the hotel window at
Olympia.
"I am full of love for every one," thought Mrs. Wentworth Williams, "--
for the poor most of all--for the peasants coming back in the evening
with their burdens. And everything is soft and vague and very sad. It is
sad, it is sad. But everything has meaning," thought Sandra Wentworth
Williams, raising her head a little and looking very beautiful, tragic,
and exalted. "One must love everything."
She held in her hand a little book convenient for travelling--stories by
Tchekov--as she stood, veiled, in white, in the window of the hotel at
Olympia. How beautiful the evening was! and her beauty was its beauty.
The tragedy of Greece was the tragedy of all high souls. The inevitable
compromise. She seemed to have grasped something. She would write it
down. And moving to the table where her husband sat reading she leant
her chin in her hands and thought of the peasants, of suffering, of her
own beauty, of the inevitable compromise, and of how she would write it
down. Nor did Evan Williams say anything brutal, banal, or foolish when
he shut his book and put it away to make room for the plates of soup
which were now being placed before them. Only his drooping bloodhound
eyes and his heavy sallow cheeks expressed his melancholy tolerance, his
conviction that though forced to live with circumspection and
deliberation he could never possibly achieve any of those objects which,
as he knew, are the only ones worth pursuing. His consideration was
flawless; his silence unbroken.
"Everything seems to mean so much," said Sandra. But with the sound of
her own voice the spell was broken. She forgot the peasants. Only there
remained with her a sense of her own beauty, and in front, luckily,
there was a looking-glass.
"I am very beautiful," she thought.
She shifted her hat slightly. Her husband saw her looking in the glass;
and agreed that beauty is important; it is an inheritance; one cannot
ignore it. But it is a barrier; it is in fact rather a bore. So he drank
his soup; and kept his eyes fixed upon the window.
"Quails," said Mrs. Wentworth Williams languidly. "And then goat, I
suppose; and then..."
"Caramel custard presumably," said her husband in the same cadence, with
his toothpick out already.
She laid her spoon upon her plate, and her soup was taken away half
finished. Never did she do anything without dignity; for hers was the
English type which is so Greek, save that villagers have touched their
hats to it, the vicarage reveres it; and upper-gardeners and under-
gardeners respectfully straighten their backs as she comes down the
broad terrace on Sunday morning, dallying at the stone urns with the
Prime Minister to pick a rose--which, perhaps, she was trying to forget,
as her eye wandered round the dining-room of the inn at Olympia, seeking
the window where her book lay, where a few minutes ago she had
discovered something--something very profound it had been, about love
and sadness and the peasants.
But it was Evan who sighed; not in despair nor indeed in rebellion. But,
being the most ambitious of men and temperamentally the most sluggish,
he had accomplished nothing; had the political history of England at his
finger-ends, and living much in company with Chatham, Pitt, Burke, and
Charles James Fox could not help contrasting himself and his age with
them and theirs. "Yet there never was a time when great men are more
needed," he was in the habit of saying to himself, with a sigh. Here he
was picking his teeth in an inn at Olympia. He had done. But Sandra's
eyes wandered.
"Those pink melons are sure to be dangerous," he said gloomily. And as
he spoke the door opened and in came a young man in a grey check suit.
"Beautiful but dangerous," said Sandra, immediately talking to her
husband in the presence of a third person. ("Ah, an English boy on
tour," she thought to herself.)
And Evan knew all that too.
Yes, he knew all that; and he admired her. Very pleasant, he thought, to
have affairs. But for himself, what with his height (Napoleon was five
feet four, he remembered), his bulk, his inability to impose his own
personality (and yet great men are needed more than ever now, he
sighed), it was useless. He threw away his cigar, went up to Jacob and
asked him, with a simple sort of sincerity which Jacob liked, whether he
had come straight out from England.
"How very English!" Sandra laughed when the waiter told them next
morning that the young gentleman had left at five to climb the mountain.
"I am sure he asked you for a bath?" at which the waiter shook his head,
and said that he would ask the manager.
"You do not understand," laughed Sandra. "Never mind."
Stretched on the top of the mountain, quite alone, Jacob enjoyed
himself immensely. Probably he had never been so happy in the whole of
his life.
But at dinner that night Mr. Williams asked him whether he would like to
see the paper; then Mrs. Williams asked him (as they strolled on the
terrace smoking--and how could he refuse that man's cigar?) whether he'd
seen the theatre by moonlight; whether he knew Everard Sherborn; whether
he read Greek and whether (Evan rose silently and went in) if he had to
sacrifice one it would be the French literature or the Russian?
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