Books: Jacob\'s Room
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Virginia Woolf >> Jacob\'s Room
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"And now," wrote Jacob in his letter to Bonamy, "I shall have to read
her cursed book"--her Tchekov, he meant, for she had lent it him.
Though the opinion is unpopular it seems likely enough that bare places,
fields too thick with stones to be ploughed, tossing sea-meadows half-
way between England and America, suit us better than cities.
There is something absolute in us which despises qualification. It is
this which is teased and twisted in society. People come together in a
room. "So delighted," says somebody, "to meet you," and that is a lie.
And then: "I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I
think, as one gets older." For women are always, always, always talking
about what one feels, and if they say "as one gets older," they mean you
to reply with something quite off the point.
Jacob sat himself down in the quarry where the Greeks had cut marble for
the theatre. It is hot work walking up Greek hills at midday. The wild
red cyclamen was out; he had seen the little tortoises hobbling from
clump to clump; the air smelt strong and suddenly sweet, and the sun,
striking on jagged splinters of marble, was very dazzling to the eyes.
Composed, commanding, contemptuous, a little melancholy, and bored with
an august kind of boredom, there he sat smoking his pipe.
Bonamy would have said that this was the sort of thing that made him
uneasy--when Jacob got into the doldrums, looked like a Margate
fisherman out of a job, or a British Admiral. You couldn't make him
understand a thing when he was in a mood like that. One had better leave
him alone. He was dull. He was apt to be grumpy.
He was up very early, looking at the statues with his Baedeker.
Sandra Wentworth Williams, ranging the world before breakfast in quest
of adventure or a point of view, all in white, not so very tall perhaps,
but uncommonly upright--Sandra Williams got Jacob's head exactly on a
level with the head of the Hermes of Praxiteles. The comparison was all
in his favour. But before she could say a single word he had gone out of
the Museum and left her.
Still, a lady of fashion travels with more than one dress, and if white
suits the morning hour, perhaps sandy yellow with purple spots on it, a
black hat, and a volume of Balzac, suit the evening. Thus she was
arranged on the terrace when Jacob came in. Very beautiful she looked.
With her hands folded she mused, seemed to listen to her husband, seemed
to watch the peasants coming down with brushwood on their backs, seemed
to notice how the hill changed from blue to black, seemed to
discriminate between truth and falsehood, Jacob thought, and crossed his
legs suddenly, observing the extreme shabbiness of his trousers.
"But he is very distinguished looking," Sandra decided.
And Evan Williams, lying back in his chair with the paper on his knees,
envied them. The best thing he could do would be to publish, with
Macmillans, his monograph upon the foreign policy of Chatham. But
confound this tumid, queasy feeling--this restlessness, swelling, and
heat--it was jealousy! jealousy! jealousy! which he had sworn never to
feel again.
"Come with us to Corinth, Flanders," he said with more than his usual
energy, stopping by Jacob's chair. He was relieved by Jacob's reply, or
rather by the solid, direct, if shy manner in which he said that he
would like very much to come with them to Corinth.
"Here is a fellow," thought Evan Williams, "who might do very well in
politics."
"I intend to come to Greece every year so long as I live," Jacob wrote
to Bonamy. "It is the only chance I can see of protecting oneself from
civilization."
"Goodness knows what he means by that," Bonamy sighed. For as he never
said a clumsy thing himself, these dark sayings of Jacob's made him feel
apprehensive, yet somehow impressed, his own turn being all for the
definite, the concrete, and the rational.
Nothing could be much simpler than what Sandra said as she descended the
Acro-Corinth, keeping to the little path, while Jacob strode over
rougher ground by her side. She had been left motherless at the age of
four; and the Park was vast.
"One never seemed able to get out of it," she laughed. Of course there
was the library, and dear Mr. Jones, and notions about things. "I used
to stray into the kitchen and sit upon the butler's knees," she laughed,
sadly though.
Jacob thought that if he had been there he would have saved her; for she
had been exposed to great dangers, he felt, and, he thought to himself,
"People wouldn't understand a woman talking as she talks."
She made little of the roughness of the hill; and wore breeches, he saw,
under her short skirts.
"Women like Fanny Elmer don't," he thought. "What's-her-name Carslake
didn't; yet they pretend..."
Mrs. Williams said things straight out. He was surprised by his own
knowledge of the rules of behaviour; how much more can be said than one
thought; how open one can be with a woman; and how little he had known
himself before.
Evan joined them on the road; and as they drove along up hill and down
hill (for Greece is in a state of effervescence, yet astonishingly
clean-cut, a treeless land, where you see the ground between the blades,
each hill cut and shaped and outlined as often as not against sparkling
deep blue waters, islands white as sand floating on the horizon,
occasional groves of palm trees standing in the valleys, which are
scattered with black goats, spotted with little olive trees and
sometimes have white hollows, rayed and criss-crossed, in their flanks),
as they drove up hill and down he scowled in the corner of the carriage,
with his paw so tightly closed that the skin was stretched between the
knuckles and the little hairs stood upright. Sandra rode opposite,
dominant, like a Victory prepared to fling into the air.
"Heartless!" thought Evan (which was untrue).
"Brainless!" he suspected (and that was not true either). "Still...!" He
envied her.
When bedtime came the difficulty was to write to Bonamy, Jacob found.
Yet he had seen Salamis, and Marathon in the distance. Poor old Bonamy!
No; there was something queer about it. He could not write to Bonamy.
"I shall go to Athens all the same," he resolved, looking very set, with
this hook dragging in his side.
The Williamses had already been to Athens.
Athens is still quite capable of striking a young man as the oddest
combination, the most incongruous assortment. Now it is suburban; now
immortal. Now cheap continental jewellery is laid upon plush trays. Now
the stately woman stands naked, save for a wave of drapery above the
knee. No form can he set on his sensations as he strolls, one blazing
afternoon, along the Parisian boulevard and skips out of the way of the
royal landau which, looking indescribably ramshackle, rattles along the
pitted roadway, saluted by citizens of both sexes cheaply dressed in
bowler hats and continental costumes; though a shepherd in kilt, cap,
and gaiters very nearly drives his herd of goats between the royal
wheels; and all the time the Acropolis surges into the air, raises
itself above the town, like a large immobile wave with the yellow
columns of the Parthenon firmly planted upon it.
The yellow columns of the Parthenon are to be seen at all hours of the
day firmly planted upon the Acropolis; though at sunset, when the ships
in the Piraeus fire their guns, a bell rings, a man in uniform (the
waistcoat unbuttoned) appears; and the women roll up the black stockings
which they are knitting in the shadow of the columns, call to the
children, and troop off down the hill back to their houses.
There they are again, the pillars, the pediment, the Temple of Victory
and the Erechtheum, set on a tawny rock cleft with shadows, directly you
unlatch your shutters in the morning and, leaning out, hear the clatter,
the clamour, the whip cracking in the street below. There they are.
The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white,
again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of
the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere
dissipated in elegant trifles. But this durability exists quite
independently of our admiration. Although the beauty is sufficiently
humane to weaken us, to stir the deep deposit of mud--memories,
abandonments, regrets, sentimental devotions--the Parthenon is separate
from all that; and if you consider how it has stood out all night, for
centuries, you begin to connect the blaze (at midday the glare is
dazzling and the frieze almost invisible) with the idea that perhaps it
is beauty alone that is immortal.
Added to this, compared with the blistered stucco, the new love songs
rasped out to the strum of guitar and gramophone, and the mobile yet
insignificant faces of the street, the Parthenon is really astonishing
in its silent composure; which is so vigorous that, far from being
decayed, the Parthenon appears, on the contrary, likely to outlast the
entire world.
"And the Greeks, like sensible men, never bothered to finish the backs
of their statues," said Jacob, shading his eyes and observing that the
side of the figure which is turned away from view is left in the rough.
He noted the slight irregularity in the line of the steps which "the
artistic sense of the Greeks preferred to mathematical accuracy," he
read in his guide-book.
He stood on the exact spot where the great statue of Athena used to
stand, and identified the more famous landmarks of the scene beneath.
In short he was accurate and diligent; but profoundly morose. Moreover
he was pestered by guides. This was on Monday.
But on Wednesday he wrote a telegram to Bonamy, telling him to come at
once. And then he crumpled it in his hand and threw it in the gutter.
"For one thing he wouldn't come," he thought. "And then I daresay this
sort of thing wears off." "This sort of thing" being that uneasy,
painful feeling, something like selfishness--one wishes almost that the
thing would stop--it is getting more and more beyond what is possible--
"If it goes on much longer I shan't be able to cope with it--but if some
one else were seeing it at the same time--Bonamy is stuffed in his room
in Lincoln's Inn--oh, I say, damn it all, I say,"--the sight of
Hymettus, Pentelicus, Lycabettus on one side, and the sea on the other,
as one stands in the Parthenon at sunset, the sky pink feathered, the
plain all colours, the marble tawny in one's eyes, is thus oppressive.
Luckily Jacob had little sense of personal association; he seldom
thought of Plato or Socrates in the flesh; on the other hand his feeling
for architecture was very strong; he preferred statues to pictures; and
he was beginning to think a great deal about the problems of
civilization, which were solved, of course, so very remarkably by the
ancient Greeks, though their solution is no help to us. Then the hook
gave a great tug in his side as he lay in bed on Wednesday night; and he
turned over with a desperate sort of tumble, remembering Sandra
Wentworth Williams with whom he was in love.
Next day he climbed Pentelicus.
The day after he went up to the Acropolis. The hour was early; the place
almost deserted; and possibly there was thunder in the air. But the sun
struck full upon the Acropolis.
Jacob's intention was to sit down and read, and, finding a drum of
marble conveniently placed, from which Marathon could be seen, and yet
it was in the shade, while the Erechtheum blazed white in front of him,
there he sat. And after reading a page he put his thumb in his book. Why
not rule countries in the way they should be ruled? And he read again.
No doubt his position there overlooking Marathon somehow raised his
spirits. Or it may have been that a slow capacious brain has these
moments of flowering. Or he had, insensibly, while he was abroad, got
into the way of thinking about politics.
And then looking up and seeing the sharp outline, his meditations were
given an extraordinary edge; Greece was over; the Parthenon in ruins;
yet there he was.
(Ladies with green and white umbrellas passed through the courtyard--
French ladies on their way to join their husbands in Constantinople.)
Jacob read on again. And laying the book on the ground he began, as if
inspired by what he had read, to write a note upon the importance of
history--upon democracy--one of those scribbles upon which the work of a
lifetime may be based; or again, it falls out of a book twenty years
later, and one can't remember a word of it. It is a little painful. It
had better be burnt.
Jacob wrote; began to draw a straight nose; when all the French ladies
opening and shutting their umbrellas just beneath him exclaimed, looking
at the sky, that one did not know what to expect--rain or fine weather?
Jacob got up and strolled across to the Erechtheum. There are still
several women standing there holding the roof on their heads. Jacob
straightened himself slightly; for stability and balance affect the body
first. These statues annulled things so! He stared at them, then turned,
and there was Madame Lucien Grave perched on a block of marble with her
kodak pointed at his head. Of course she jumped down, in spite of her
age, her figure, and her tight boots--having, now that her daughter was
married, lapsed with a luxurious abandonment, grand enough in its way,
into the fleshy grotesque; she jumped down, but not before Jacob had
seen her.
"Damn these women--damn these women!" he thought. And he went to fetch
his book which he had left lying on the ground in the Parthenon.
"How they spoil things," he murmured, leaning against one of the
pillars, pressing his book tight between his arm and his side. (As for
the weather, no doubt the storm would break soon; Athens was under
cloud.)
"It is those damned women," said Jacob, without any trace of bitterness,
but rather with sadness and disappointment that what might have been
should never be.
(This violent disillusionment is generally to be expected in young men
in the prime of life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon become
fathers of families and directors of banks.)
Then, making sure that the Frenchwomen had gone, and looking cautiously
round him, Jacob strolled over to the Erechtheum and looked rather
furtively at the goddess on the left-hand side holding the roof on her
head. She reminded him of Sandra Wentworth Williams. He looked at her,
then looked away. He looked at her, then looked away. He was
extraordinarily moved, and with the battered Greek nose in his head,
with Sandra in his head, with all sorts of things in his head, off he
started to walk right up to the top of Mount Hymettus, alone, in the
heat.
That very afternoon Bonamy went expressly to talk about Jacob to tea
with Clara Durrant in the square behind Sloane Street where, on hot
spring days, there are striped blinds over the front windows, single
horses pawing the macadam outside the doors, and elderly gentlemen in
yellow waistcoats ringing bells and stepping in very politely when the
maid demurely replies that Mrs. Durrant is at home.
Bonamy sat with Clara in the sunny front room with the barrel organ
piping sweetly outside; the water-cart going slowly along spraying the
pavement; the carriages jingling, and all the silver and chintz, brown
and blue rugs and vases filled with green boughs, striped with trembling
yellow bars.
The insipidity of what was said needs no illustration--Bonamy kept on
gently returning quiet answers and accumulating amazement at an
existence squeezed and emasculated within a white satin shoe (Mrs.
Durrant meanwhile enunciating strident politics with Sir Somebody in the
back room) until the virginity of Clara's soul appeared to him candid;
the depths unknown; and he would have brought out Jacob's name had he
not begun to feel positively certain that Clara loved him--and could do
nothing whatever.
"Nothing whatever!" he exclaimed, as the door shut, and, for a man of
his temperament, got a very queer feeling, as he walked through the
park, of carriages irresistibly driven; of flower beds uncompromisingly
geometrical; of force rushing round geometrical patterns in the most
senseless way in the world. "Was Clara," he thought, pausing to watch
the boys bathing in the Serpentine, "the silent woman?--would Jacob
marry her?"
But in Athens in the sunshine, in Athens, where it is almost impossible
to get afternoon tea, and elderly gentlemen who talk politics talk them
all the other way round, in Athens sat Sandra Wentworth Williams,
veiled, in white, her legs stretched in front of her, one elbow on the
arm of the bamboo chair, blue clouds wavering and drifting from her
cigarette.
The orange trees which flourish in the Square of the Constitution, the
band, the dragging of feet, the sky, the houses, lemon and rose
coloured--all this became so significant to Mrs. Wentworth Williams
after her second cup of coffee that she began dramatizing the story of
the noble and impulsive Englishwoman who had offered a seat in her
carriage to the old American lady at Mycenae (Mrs. Duggan)--not
altogether a false story, though it said nothing of Evan, standing first
on one foot, then on the other, waiting for the women to stop
chattering.
"I am putting the life of Father Damien into verse," Mrs. Duggan had
said, for she had lost everything--everything in the world, husband and
child and everything, but faith remained.
Sandra, floating from the particular to the universal, lay back in a
trance.
The flight of time which hurries us so tragically along; the eternal
drudge and drone, now bursting into fiery flame like those brief balls
of yellow among green leaves (she was looking at orange trees); kisses
on lips that are to die; the world turning, turning in mazes of heat and
sound--though to be sure there is the quiet evening with its lovely
pallor, "For I am sensitive to every side of it," Sandra thought, "and
Mrs. Duggan will write to me for ever, and I shall answer her letters."
Now the royal band marching by with the national flag stirred wider
rings of emotion, and life became something that the courageous mount
and ride out to sea on--the hair blown back (so she envisaged it, and
the breeze stirred slightly among the orange trees) and she herself was
emerging from silver spray--when she saw Jacob. He was standing in the
Square with a book under his arm looking vacantly about him. That he was
heavily built and might become stout in time was a fact.
But she suspected him of being a mere bumpkin.
"There is that young man," she said, peevishly, throwing away her
cigarette, "that Mr. Flanders."
"Where?" said Evan. "I don't see him."
"Oh, walking away--behind the trees now. No, you can't see him. But we
are sure to run into him," which, of course, they did.
But how far was he a mere bumpkin? How far was Jacob Flanders at the age
of twenty-six a stupid fellow? It is no use trying to sum people up. One
must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is
done. Some, it is true, take ineffaceable impressions of character at
once. Others dally, loiter, and get blown this way and that. Kind old
ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat
will always go to a good man, they say; but then, Mrs. Whitehorn,
Jacob's landlady, loathed cats.
There is also the highly respectable opinion that character-mongering is
much overdone nowadays. After all, what does it matter--that Fanny Elmer
was all sentiment and sensation, and Mrs. Durrant hard as iron? that
Clara, owing (so the character-mongers said) largely to her mother's
influence, never yet had the chance to do anything off her own bat, and
only to very observant eyes displayed deeps of feeling which were
positively alarming; and would certainly throw herself away upon some
one unworthy of her one of these days unless, so the character-mongers
said, she had a spark of her mother's spirit in her--was somehow heroic.
But what a term to apply to Clara Durrant! Simple to a degree, others
thought her. And that is the very reason, so they said, why she attracts
Dick Bonamy--the young man with the Wellington nose. Now HE'S a dark
horse if you like. And there these gossips would suddenly pause.
Obviously they meant to hint at his peculiar disposition--long rumoured
among them.
"But sometimes it is precisely a woman like Clara that men of that
temperament need..." Miss Julia Eliot would hint.
"Well," Mr. Bowley would reply, "it may be so."
For however long these gossips sit, and however they stuff out their
victims' characters till they are swollen and tender as the livers of
geese exposed to a hot fire, they never come to a decision.
"That young man, Jacob Flanders," they would say, "so distinguished
looking--and yet so awkward." Then they would apply themselves to Jacob
and vacillate eternally between the two extremes. He rode to hounds--
after a fashion, for he hadn't a penny.
"Did you ever hear who his father was?" asked Julia Eliot.
"His mother, they say, is somehow connected with the Rocksbiers,"
replied Mr. Bowley.
"He doesn't overwork himself anyhow."
"His friends are very fond of him."
"Dick Bonamy, you mean?"
"No, I didn't mean that. It's evidently the other way with Jacob. He is
precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the
rest of his life."
"Oh, Mr. Bowley," said Mrs. Durrant, sweeping down upon them in her
imperious manner, "you remember Mrs. Adams? Well, that is her niece."
And Mr. Bowley, getting up, bowed politely and fetched strawberries.
So we are driven back to see what the other side means--the men in clubs
and Cabinets--when they say that character-drawing is a frivolous
fireside art, a matter of pins and needles, exquisite outlines enclosing
vacancy, flourishes, and mere scrawls.
The battleships ray out over the North Sea, keeping their stations
accurately apart. At a given signal all the guns are trained on a target
which (the master gunner counts the seconds, watch in hand--at the sixth
he looks up) flames into splinters. With equal nonchalance a dozen young
men in the prime of life descend with composed faces into the depths of
the sea; and there impassively (though with perfect mastery of
machinery) suffocate uncomplainingly together. Like blocks of tin
soldiers the army covers the cornfield, moves up the hillside, stops,
reels slightly this way and that, and falls flat, save that, through
field glasses, it can be seen that one or two pieces still agitate up
and down like fragments of broken match-stick.
These actions, together with the incessant commerce of banks,
laboratories, chancellories, and houses of business, are the strokes
which oar the world forward, they say. And they are dealt by men as
smoothly sculptured as the impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus. But
you will observe that far from being padded to rotundity his face is
stiff from force of will, and lean from the efforts of keeping it so.
When his right arm rises, all the force in his veins flows straight from
shoulder to finger-tips; not an ounce is diverted into sudden impulses,
sentimental regrets, wire-drawn distinctions. The buses punctually stop.
It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They
say that the novelists never catch it; that it goes hurtling through
their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what we
live by--this unseizable force.
"Where are the men?" said old General Gibbons, looking round the
drawing-room, full as usual on Sunday afternoons of well-dressed people.
"Where are the guns?"
Mrs. Durrant looked too.
Clara, thinking that her mother wanted her, came in; then went out
again.
They were talking about Germany at the Durrants, and Jacob (driven by
this unseizable force) walked rapidly down Hermes Street and ran
straight into the Williamses.
"Oh!" cried Sandra, with a cordiality which she suddenly felt. And Evan
added, "What luck!"
The dinner which they gave him in the hotel which looks on to the Square
of the Constitution was excellent. Plated baskets contained fresh rolls.
There was real butter. And the meat scarcely needed the disguise of
innumerable little red and green vegetables glazed in sauce.
It was strange, though. There were the little tables set out at
intervals on the scarlet floor with the Greek King's monogram wrought in
yellow. Sandra dined in her hat, veiled as usual. Evan looked this way
and that over his shoulder; imperturbable yet supple; and sometimes
sighed. It was strange. For they were English people come together in
Athens on a May evening. Jacob, helping himself to this and that,
answered intelligently, yet with a ring in his voice.
The Williamses were going to Constantinople early next morning, they
said.
"Before you are up," said Sandra.
They would leave Jacob alone, then. Turning very slightly, Evan ordered
something--a bottle of wine--from which he helped Jacob, with a kind of
solicitude, with a kind of paternal solicitude, if that were possible.
To be left alone--that was good for a young fellow. Never was there a
time when the country had more need of men. He sighed.
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