Books: Jacob\'s Room
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Virginia Woolf >> Jacob\'s Room
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"And you have been to the Acropolis?" asked Sandra.
"Yes," said Jacob. And they moved off to the window together, while Evan
spoke to the head waiter about calling them early.
"It is astonishing," said Jacob, in a gruff voice.
Sandra opened her eyes very slightly. Possibly her nostrils expanded a
little too.
"At half-past six then," said Evan, coming towards them, looking as if
he faced something in facing his wife and Jacob standing with their
backs to the window.
Sandra smiled at him.
And, as he went to the window and had nothing to say she added, in
broken half-sentences:
"Well, but how lovely--wouldn't it be? The Acropolis, Evan--or are you
too tired?"
At that Evan looked at them, or, since Jacob was staring ahead of him,
at his wife, surlily, sullenly, yet with a kind of distress--not that
she would pity him. Nor would the implacable spirit of love, for
anything he could do, cease its tortures.
They left him and he sat in the smoking-room, which looks out on to the
Square of the Constitution.
"Evan is happier alone," said Sandra. "We have been separated from the
newspapers. Well, it is better that people should have what they
want.... You have seen all these wonderful things since we met.... What
impression ... I think that you are changed."
"You want to go to the Acropolis," said Jacob. "Up here then."
"One will remember it all one's life," said Sandra.
"Yes," said Jacob. "I wish you could have come in the day-time."
"This is more wonderful," said Sandra, waving her hand.
Jacob looked vaguely.
"But you should see the Parthenon in the day-time," he said. "You
couldn't come to-morrow--it would be too early?"
"You have sat there for hours and hours by yourself?"
"There were some awful women this morning," said Jacob.
"Awful women?" Sandra echoed.
"Frenchwomen."
"But something very wonderful has happened," said Sandra. Ten minutes,
fifteen minutes, half an hour--that was all the time before her.
"Yes," he said.
"When one is your age--when one is young. What will you do? You will
fall in love--oh yes! But don't be in too great a hurry. I am so much
older."
She was brushed off the pavement by parading men.
"Shall we go on?" Jacob asked.
"Let us go on," she insisted.
For she could not stop until she had told him--or heard him say--or was
it some action on his part that she required? Far away on the horizon
she discerned it and could not rest.
"You'd never get English people to sit out like this," he said.
"Never--no. When you get back to England you won't forget this--or come
with us to Constantinople!" she cried suddenly.
"But then..."
Sandra sighed.
"You must go to Delphi, of course," she said. "But," she asked herself,
"what do I want from him? Perhaps it is something that I have
missed...."
"You will get there about six in the evening," she said. "You will see
the eagles."
Jacob looked set and even desperate by the light at the street corner
and yet composed. He was suffering, perhaps. He was credulous. Yet there
was something caustic about him. He had in him the seeds of extreme
disillusionment, which would come to him from women in middle life.
Perhaps if one strove hard enough to reach the top of the hill it need
not come to him--this disillusionment from women in middle life.
"The hotel is awful," she said. "The last visitors had left their basins
full of dirty water. There is always that," she laughed.
"The people one meets ARE beastly," Jacob said.
His excitement was clear enough.
"Write and tell me about it," she said. "And tell me what you feel and
what you think. Tell me everything."
The night was dark. The Acropolis was a jagged mound.
"I should like to, awfully," he said.
"When we get back to London, we shall meet..."
"Yes."
"I suppose they leave the gates open?" he asked.
"We could climb them!" she answered wildly.
Obscuring the moon and altogether darkening the Acropolis the clouds
passed from east to west. The clouds solidified; the vapours thickened;
the trailing veils stayed and accumulated.
It was dark now over Athens, except for gauzy red streaks where the
streets ran; and the front of the Palace was cadaverous from electric
light. At sea the piers stood out, marked by separate dots; the waves
being invisible, and promontories and islands were dark humps with a few
lights.
"I'd love to bring my brother, if I may," Jacob murmured.
"And then when your mother comes to London--," said Sandra.
The mainland of Greece was dark; and somewhere off Euboea a cloud must
have touched the waves and spattered them--the dolphins circling deeper
and deeper into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down the Sea
of Marmara between Greece and the plains of Troy.
In Greece and the uplands of Albania and Turkey, the wind scours the
sand and the dust, and sows itself thick with dry particles. And then it
pelts the smooth domes of the mosques, and makes the cypresses, standing
stiff by the turbaned tombstones of Mohammedans, creak and bristle.
Sandra's veils were swirled about her.
"I will give you my copy," said Jacob. "Here. Will you keep it?"
(The book was the poems of Donne.)
Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star. Now it was dark.
Now one after another lights were extinguished. Now great towns--Paris--
Constantinople--London--were black as strewn rocks. Waterways might be
distinguished. In England the trees were heavy in leaf. Here perhaps in
some southern wood an old man lit dry ferns and the birds were startled.
The sheep coughed; one flower bent slightly towards another. The English
sky is softer, milkier than the Eastern. Something gentle has passed
into it from the grass-rounded hills, something damp. The salt gale blew
in at Betty Flanders's bedroom window, and the widow lady, raising
herself slightly on her elbow, sighed like one who realizes, but would
fain ward off a little longer--oh, a little longer!--the oppression of
eternity.
But to return to Jacob and Sandra.
They had vanished. There was the Acropolis; but had they reached it? The
columns and the Temple remain; the emotion of the living breaks fresh on
them year after year; and of that what remains?
As for reaching the Acropolis who shall say that we ever do it, or that
when Jacob woke next morning he found anything hard and durable to keep
for ever? Still, he went with them to Constantinople.
Sandra Wentworth Williams certainly woke to find a copy of Donne's poems
upon her dressing-table. And the book would be stood on the shelf in the
English country house where Sally Duggan's Life of Father Damien in
verse would join it one of these days. There were ten or twelve little
volumes already. Strolling in at dusk, Sandra would open the books and
her eyes would brighten (but not at the print), and subsiding into the
arm-chair she would suck back again the soul of the moment; or, for
sometimes she was restless, would pull out book after book and swing
across the whole space of her life like an acrobat from bar to bar. She
had had her moments. Meanwhile, the great clock on the landing ticked
and Sandra would hear time accumulating, and ask herself, "What for?
What for?"
"What for? What for?" Sandra would say, putting the book back, and
strolling to the looking-glass and pressing her hair. And Miss Edwards
would be startled at dinner, as she opened her mouth to admit roast
mutton, by Sandra's sudden solicitude: "Are you happy, Miss Edwards?"--a
thing Cissy Edwards hadn't thought of for years.
"What for? What for?" Jacob never asked himself any such questions, to
judge by the way he laced his boots; shaved himself; to judge by the
depth of his sleep that night, with the wind fidgeting at the shutters,
and half-a-dozen mosquitoes singing in his ears. He was young--a man.
And then Sandra was right when she judged him to be credulous as yet. At
forty it might be a different matter. Already he had marked the things
he liked in Donne, and they were savage enough. However, you might place
beside them passages of the purest poetry in Shakespeare.
But the wind was rolling the darkness through the streets of Athens,
rolling it, one might suppose, with a sort of trampling energy of mood
which forbids too close an analysis of the feelings of any single
person, or inspection of features. All faces--Greek, Levantine, Turkish,
English--would have looked much the same in that darkness. At length the
columns and the Temples whiten, yellow, turn rose; and the Pyramids and
St. Peter's arise, and at last sluggish St. Paul's looms up.
The Christians have the right to rouse most cities with their
interpretation of the day's meaning. Then, less melodiously, dissenters
of different sects issue a cantankerous emendation. The steamers,
resounding like gigantic tuning-forks, state the old old fact--how there
is a sea coldly, greenly, swaying outside. But nowadays it is the thin
voice of duty, piping in a white thread from the top of a funnel, that
collects the largest multitudes, and night is nothing but a long-drawn
sigh between hammer-strokes, a deep breath--you can hear it from an open
window even in the heart of London.
But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with
hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in
skeleton outline, bare of flesh? In Surbiton the skeleton is wrapped in
flesh.
"The kettle never boils so well on a sunny morning," says Mrs. Grandage,
glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. Then the grey Persian cat
stretches itself on the window-seat, and buffets a moth with soft round
paws. And before breakfast is half over (they were late today), a baby
is deposited in her lap, and she must guard the sugar basin while Tom
Grandage reads the golfing article in the "Times," sips his coffee,
wipes his moustaches, and is off to the office, where he is the greatest
authority upon the foreign exchanges and marked for promotion. The
skeleton is well wrapped in flesh. Even this dark night when the wind
rolls the darkness through Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford
Square it stirs (since it is summer-time and the height of the season),
plane trees spangled with electric light, and curtains still preserving
the room from the dawn. People still murmur over the last word said on
the staircase, or strain, all through their dreams, for the voice of the
alarum clock. So when the wind roams through a forest innumerable twigs
stir; hives are brushed; insects sway on grass blades; the spider runs
rapidly up a crease in the bark; and the whole air is tremulous with
breathing; elastic with filaments.
Only here--in Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square--each
insect carries a globe of the world in his head, and the webs of the
forest are schemes evolved for the smooth conduct of business; and honey
is treasure of one sort and another; and the stir in the air is the
indescribable agitation of life.
But colour returns; runs up the stalks of the grass; blows out into
tulips and crocuses; solidly stripes the tree trunks; and fills the
gauze of the air and the grasses and pools.
The Bank of England emerges; and the Monument with its bristling head of
golden hair; the dray horses crossing London Bridge show grey and
strawberry and iron-coloured. There is a whir of wings as the suburban
trains rush into the terminus. And the light mounts over the faces of
all the tall blind houses, slides through a chink and paints the
lustrous bellying crimson curtains; the green wine-glasses; the coffee-
cups; and the chairs standing askew.
Sunlight strikes in upon shaving-glasses; and gleaming brass cans; upon
all the jolly trappings of the day; the bright, inquisitive, armoured,
resplendent, summer's day, which has long since vanquished chaos; which
has dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stood
glass and stone upon it; and equipped our brains and bodies with such an
armoury of weapons that merely to see the flash and thrust of limbs
engaged in the conduct of daily life is better than the old pageant of
armies drawn out in battle array upon the plain.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"The Height of the season," said Bonamy.
The sun had already blistered the paint on the backs of the green chairs
in Hyde Park; peeled the bark off the plane trees; and turned the earth
to powder and to smooth yellow pebbles. Hyde Park was circled,
incessantly, by turning wheels.
"The height of the season," said Bonamy sarcastically.
He was sarcastic because of Clara Durrant; because Jacob had come back
from Greece very brown and lean, with his pockets full of Greek notes,
which he pulled out when the chair man came for pence; because Jacob was
silent.
"He has not said a word to show that he is glad to see me," thought
Bonamy bitterly.
The motor cars passed incessantly over the bridge of the Serpentine; the
upper classes walked upright, or bent themselves gracefully over the
palings; the lower classes lay with their knees cocked up, flat on their
backs; the sheep grazed on pointed wooden legs; small children ran down
the sloping grass, stretched their arms, and fell.
"Very urbane," Jacob brought out.
"Urbane" on the lips of Jacob had mysteriously all the shapeliness of a
character which Bonamy thought daily more sublime, devastating, terrific
than ever, though he was still, and perhaps would be for ever, barbaric,
obscure.
What superlatives! What adjectives! How acquit Bonamy of sentimentality
of the grossest sort; of being tossed like a cork on the waves; of
having no steady insight into character; of being unsupported by reason,
and of drawing no comfort whatever from the works of the classics?
"The height of civilization," said Jacob.
He was fond of using Latin words.
Magnanimity, virtue--such words when Jacob used them in talk with Bonamy
meant that he took control of the situation; that Bonamy would play
round him like an affectionate spaniel; and that (as likely as not) they
would end by rolling on the floor.
"And Greece?" said Bonamy. "The Parthenon and all that?"
"There's none of this European mysticism," said Jacob.
"It's the atmosphere. I suppose," said Bonamy. "And you went to
Constantinople?"
"Yes," said Jacob.
Bonamy paused, moved a pebble; then darted in with the rapidity and
certainty of a lizard's tongue.
"You are in love!" he exclaimed.
Jacob blushed.
The sharpest of knives never cut so deep.
As for responding, or taking the least account of it, Jacob stared
straight ahead of him, fixed, monolithic--oh, very beautiful!--like a
British Admiral, exclaimed Bonamy in a rage, rising from his seat and
walking off; waiting for some sound; none came; too proud to look back;
walking quicker and quicker until he found himself gazing into motor
cars and cursing women. Where was the pretty woman's face? Clara's--
Fanny's--Florinda's? Who was the pretty little creature?
Not Clara Durrant.
The Aberdeen terrier must be exercised, and as Mr. Bowley was going
that very moment--would like nothing better than a walk--they went
together, Clara and kind little Bowley--Bowley who had rooms in the
Albany, Bowley who wrote letters to the "Times" in a jocular vein about
foreign hotels and the Aurora Borealis--Bowley who liked young people
and walked down Piccadilly with his right arm resting on the boss of his
back.
"Little demon!" cried Clara, and attached Troy to his chain.
Bowley anticipated--hoped for--a confidence. Devoted to her mother,
Clara sometimes felt her a little, well, her mother was so sure of
herself that she could not understand other people being--being--"as
ludicrous as I am," Clara jerked out (the dog tugging her forwards). And
Bowley thought she looked like a huntress and turned over in his mind
which it should be--some pale virgin with a slip of the moon in her
hair, which was a flight for Bowley.
The colour was in her cheeks. To have spoken outright about her mother--
still, it was only to Mr. Bowley, who loved her, as everybody must; but
to speak was unnatural to her, yet it was awful to feel, as she had done
all day, that she MUST tell some one.
"Wait till we cross the road," she said to the dog, bending down.
Happily she had recovered by that time.
"She thinks so much about England," she said. "She is so anxious---"
Bowley was defrauded as usual. Clara never confided in any one.
"Why don't the young people settle it, eh?" he wanted to ask. "What's
all this about England?"--a question poor Clara could not have answered,
since, as Mrs. Durrant discussed with Sir Edgar the policy of Sir Edward
Grey, Clara only wondered why the cabinet looked dusty, and Jacob had
never come. Oh, here was Mrs. Cowley Johnson...
And Clara would hand the pretty china teacups, and smile at the
compliment--that no one in London made tea so well as she did.
"We get it at Brocklebank's," she said, "in Cursitor Street."
Ought she not to be grateful? Ought she not to be happy?
Especially since her mother looked so well and enjoyed so much talking
to Sir Edgar about Morocco, Venezuela, or some such place.
"Jacob! Jacob!" thought Clara; and kind Mr. Bowley, who was ever so good
with old ladies, looked; stopped; wondered whether Elizabeth wasn't too
harsh with her daughter; wondered about Bonamy, Jacob--which young
fellow was it?--and jumped up directly Clara said she must exercise
Troy.
They had reached the site of the old Exhibition. They looked at the
tulips. Stiff and curled, the little rods of waxy smoothness rose from
the earth, nourished yet contained, suffused with scarlet and coral
pink. Each had its shadow; each grew trimly in the diamond-shaped wedge
as the gardener had planned it.
"Barnes never gets them to grow like that," Clara mused; she sighed.
"You are neglecting your friends," said Bowley, as some one, going the
other way, lifted his hat. She started; acknowledged Mr. Lionel Parry's
bow; wasted on him what had sprung for Jacob.
("Jacob! Jacob!" she thought.)
"But you'll get run over if I let you go," she said to the dog.
"England seems all right," said Mr. Bowley.
The loop of the railing beneath the statue of Achilles was full of
parasols and waistcoats; chains and bangles; of ladies and gentlemen,
lounging elegantly, lightly observant.
"'This statue was erected by the women of England...'" Clara read out
with a foolish little laugh. "Oh, Mr. Bowley! Oh!" Gallop--gallop--
gallop--a horse galloped past without a rider. The stirrups swung; the
pebbles spurted.
"Oh, stop! Stop it, Mr. Bowley!" she cried, white, trembling, gripping
his arm, utterly unconscious, the tears coming.
"Tut-tut!" said Mr. Bowley in his dressing-room an hour later. "Tut-
tut!"--a comment that was profound enough, though inarticulately
expressed, since his valet was handing his shirt studs.
Julia Eliot, too, had seen the horse run away, and had risen from her
seat to watch the end of the incident, which, since she came of a
sporting family, seemed to her slightly ridiculous. Sure enough the
little man came pounding behind with his breeches dusty; looked
thoroughly annoyed; and was being helped to mount by a policeman when
Julia Eliot, with a sardonic smile, turned towards the Marble Arch on
her errand of mercy. It was only to visit a sick old lady who had known
her mother and perhaps the Duke of Wellington; for Julia shared the love
of her sex for the distressed; liked to visit death-beds; threw slippers
at weddings; received confidences by the dozen; knew more pedigrees than
a scholar knows dates, and was one of the kindliest, most generous,
least continent of women.
Yet five minutes after she had passed the statue of Achilles she had the
rapt look of one brushing through crowds on a summer's afternoon, when
the trees are rustling, the wheels churning yellow, and the tumult of
the present seems like an elegy for past youth and past summers, and
there rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed
through skirts and waistcoasts, and she saw people passing tragically to
destruction. Yet, Heaven knows, Julia was no fool. A sharper woman at a
bargain did not exist. She was always punctual. The watch on her wrist
gave her twelve minutes and a half in which to reach Bruton Street. Lady
Congreve expected her at five.
The gilt clock at Verrey's was striking five.
Florinda looked at it with a dull expression, like an animal. She looked
at the clock; looked at the door; looked at the long glass opposite;
disposed her cloak; drew closer to the table, for she was pregnant--no
doubt about it, Mother Stuart said, recommending remedies, consulting
friends; sunk, caught by the heel, as she tripped so lightly over the
surface.
Her tumbler of pinkish sweet stuff was set down by the waiter; and she
sucked, through a straw, her eyes on the looking-glass, on the door, now
soothed by the sweet taste. When Nick Bramham came in it was plain, even
to the young Swiss waiter, that there was a bargain between them. Nick
hitched his clothes together clumsily; ran his fingers through his hair;
sat down, to an ordeal, nervously. She looked at him; and set off
laughing; laughed--laughed--laughed. The young Swiss waiter, standing
with crossed legs by the pillar, laughed too.
The door opened; in came the roar of Regent Street, the roar of traffic,
impersonal, unpitying; and sunshine grained with dirt. The Swiss waiter
must see to the newcomers. Bramham lifted his glass.
"He's like Jacob," said Florinda, looking at the newcomer.
"The way he stares." She stopped laughing.
Jacob, leaning forward, drew a plan of the Parthenon in the dust in
Hyde Park, a network of strokes at least, which may have been the
Parthenon, or again a mathematical diagram. And why was the pebble so
emphatically ground in at the corner? It was not to count his notes that
he took out a wad of papers and read a long flowing letter which Sandra
had written two days ago at Milton Dower House with his book before her
and in her mind the memory of something said or attempted, some moment
in the dark on the road to the Acropolis which (such was her creed)
mattered for ever.
"He is," she mused, "like that man in Moliere."
She meant Alceste. She meant that he was severe. She meant that she
could deceive him.
"Or could I not?" she thought, putting the poems of Donne back in the
bookcase. "Jacob," she went on, going to the window and looking over the
spotted flower-beds across the grass where the piebald cows grazed under
beech trees, "Jacob would be shocked."
The perambulator was going through the little gate in the railing. She
kissed her hand; directed by the nurse, Jimmy waved his.
"HE'S a small boy," she said, thinking of Jacob.
And yet--Alceste?
"What a nuisance you are!" Jacob grumbled, stretching out first one leg
and then the other and feeling in each trouser-pocket for his chair
ticket.
"I expect the sheep have eaten it," he said. "Why do you keep sheep?"
"Sorry to disturb you, sir," said the ticket-collector, his hand deep in
the enormous pouch of pence.
"Well, I hope they pay you for it," said Jacob. "There you are. No. You
can stick to it. Go and get drunk."
He had parted with half-a-crown, tolerantly, compassionately, with
considerable contempt for his species.
Even now poor Fanny Elmer was dealing, as she walked along the Strand,
in her incompetent way with this very careless, indifferent, sublime
manner he had of talking to railway guards or porters; or Mrs.
Whitehorn, when she consulted him about her little boy who was beaten by
the schoolmaster.
Sustained entirely upon picture post cards for the past two months,
Fanny's idea of Jacob was more statuesque, noble, and eyeless than ever.
To reinforce her vision she had taken to visiting the British Museum,
where, keeping her eyes downcast until she was alongside of the battered
Ulysses, she opened them and got a fresh shock of Jacob's presence,
enough to last her half a day. But this was wearing thin. And she wrote
now--poems, letters that were never posted, saw his face in
advertisements on hoardings, and would cross the road to let the barrel-
organ turn her musings to rhapsody. But at breakfast (she shared rooms
with a teacher), when the butter was smeared about the plate, and the
prongs of the forks were clotted with old egg yolk, she revised these
visions violently; was, in truth, very cross; was losing her complexion,
as Margery Jackson told her, bringing the whole thing down (as she laced
her stout boots) to a level of mother-wit, vulgarity, and sentiment, for
she had loved too; and been a fool.
"One's godmothers ought to have told one," said Fanny, looking in at the
window of Bacon, the mapseller, in the Strand--told one that it is no
use making a fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it
now, looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines.
"This is life. This is life," said Fanny.
"A very hard face," thought Miss Barrett, on the other side of the
glass, buying maps of the Syrian desert and waiting impatiently to be
served. "Girls look old so soon nowadays."
The equator swam behind tears.
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