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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 had 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 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
"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
"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 of 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 dinning-room window is dark blue now," said
Bernard, " and the air ripples above the chimneys."
"That is the first stroke of the church bell," said Louis.
"Then the others follow; one, two; one, two."
"Look at the table-cloth, flying white 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 a woman passing
with red pitches 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 noddings tops of the flowers. They
brush the surface of the world. Their nets are full of
fluttering wings. ' Louis! Louis! Louis! ' they shout.
hedge. There are only little eye-holes among the leaves.
Oh Lord, let them pass. Lord, let them lay their their butterflies
"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.
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 bambles and
"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 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."
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
"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."
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
shinning. 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 days who have never
seen a human form; now we tread in 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.
windows, writing. The gardeners sweep the lawn with
giant brooms. We are 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
"Now you trail away," said Susan, " making phrases.
Now you mount like an air-ball's string, higher and higher
through the layers of 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
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,
"I will not conjugate the verb," said Louis, " until
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 knickerbockers
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
"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
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
"Let us now crawl," said Bernard, " under the canopy
of the current 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, shinning 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 ' 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
portrait of Queen Alexandra. That is where I am going,
"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
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
"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.
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
"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 sqeezes 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;
"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
The sun rose higher. Blue waves, green waves swept a quick
fan
over the beach, circling the spike of sea-holly and leaving
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
on 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
"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
must go on waving, til 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,
"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
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 Fox-hounds. '
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
"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 rise 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
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.
"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 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
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 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 snowwhite
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
"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 traveling 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 influence 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;
"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 mediaeval
"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 a 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 tress,
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 comparsion, 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
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,
"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
despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.
"Now grass and trees, the traveling 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
"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 twentyfifth
-- 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.
strew the hedges with tufts of hay. All this I see, I always
see, as I pass the lokking-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 cartwhells 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.
"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 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
"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
attach myself only to names and faces; and hoard them
like amutes 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 to side from 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 head 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
"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 wicketgate
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 stature 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
"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
"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 Camus, 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
"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
"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
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
"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
skillfully organised 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
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 fire-light,
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
" 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
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
"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 house 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
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
"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,
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 now go 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 cowbind 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
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, this is anguish! I faint, I fail.
Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent.
Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilising, 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 all men I
"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
" 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 post card.
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
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"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
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 in to 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 shinning glass which lines
the tunnel. I see him lower his paper. He smiles at my
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
"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
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 disguishing
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 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 emerging monster to whom we are
"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 now disembodied, passing over fields without
lodgment -- (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 lodgment in me. I am the ghost
of Louis, an ephemeral passer-by, in whose mind dreams
have power, and garden sounds when in the early morning
petals float on fathomless depths and the birds sing. I dash
"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 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
contents of a room or a railway carriage as one fills a fountainpen
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 a mayor. He wears a large ornament,
like a double tooth torn up by 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
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 under B. He tells our story with
extraordinary understanding, except of what we most feel.
"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
thoses 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 center of the civilised world.
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,
In the garden the birds that had sung erratically
and spasmodically
in the dawn on that tree, on that bush, 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
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 built 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
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;
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 attained 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,
"Now, as a proof of my susceptibility to atmosphere,
here, as I come into my room, and turn on the light, and
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 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 note of them),
and so to some reflections apparently casual but full of
"Yet it falls flat. It peters out. I cannot get up stream
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 connections. 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 drawingroom. '
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 fireplace. I can sketch
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 grey 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 ot 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
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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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 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
"He has shot like an arrow from the room," said Bernard.
"He has left 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
"But I want to linger; to lean from the window; to listen.
There again comes that rollicking chorus. They are now
like a torrent jumping rocks, brutally assaulting old trees,
"I think of Louis now. What malevolent yet searching
light 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; out total will be
known; but it will not be enough.
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
"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, prehensible 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
feathers are slipping 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 waltresses,
balancing trays, swing in and out, round and round, dealing
plates of greens, of apricot 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
"I will read in the book that is propped against the bottle
perfect statements, a few words, but not 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 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
"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 civilisation
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 naps 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
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
" Now the wind lifts the blind, " jars, bowls,
matting and the shabby arm-chair with the hole in it are now
become distinct. The usual faded ribbons sprinkle the wallpaper.
The bird chorus is over, only one bird now sings close
to the bedroom window. I will pull on my stockings and
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 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
"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 shoe 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
their 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
"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 nightgowns.
There are no lights in any of these houses. There
is a line of chimney-pots against the sky; and a street lamp
The only people in the streets are poor people hurrying.
"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
preclude, 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 now to join men and
women on stairs, my peers. I pass them, exposed to
their glaze, 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 word. 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 a 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
the groups of unknown people. Among the lustrious 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
"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;
in sinous 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 lonely 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
"Now slackness and indifference invade us. Other people
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
"Night has wheeled a little further over the chimney-poits.
I see out of the window over his shoulder some unembarrassed
cat, not drowned in light, not trapped in silk, free to
individual life. But I am fixed here to listen. An immense
pressure 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
"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
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 an 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 wheel 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, no longer couched on a green mattress darting a
fitful glance through watery jewels, bared its face and looked
straight
In the garden where the trees stood thick over flower-beds,
ponds,
and greenhouses the bird 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 sang 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
streams 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
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
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
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
"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 solemnised 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
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
"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
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 reel; 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
"It is, however, true that I cannot deny a sense that life
for me is now mysteriously prolonged. It is 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
"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 prickling 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 to be alone. We shall dine
India. The hour is still distant, but I feel already those
"It is now five minutes to eight," said Neville. "I have
"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 depises the futility of London.
"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.
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 agonised intensity, nervously straightens the
forks in front of him. Rhoda sees her with surprise, as if
"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 arm-pits. 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,
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 familarity, 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.
"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
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
"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
"Bells rang punctually," said Susan, " maids scuffled and
gigled. 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."
clasped the flowers with their green leaves rustling in garlands."
"We changed, we became unrecognisable," 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 foundations, 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,
"No, that is too small, too particular a name. We cannot
attach the width and spread of our feelings to so small a
South, from Susan's farm, from Louis ' 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 the 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 not 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, this
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 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
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 door opens 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 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
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,
"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 into 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
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 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 off 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 savings 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
bed tired. I shall lie 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
" 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
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
"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
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 far-away 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
-- 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,"
"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
"Yet these roaring waters," said Neville, " upon which
"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 mt palate, down my gullet, into my
stomach, have stabilised 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
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
"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
"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,
"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
"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.
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 heads 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 shine 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
"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.
"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 have made something that will join the innumerable
"Peaked clouds," said Rhoda, " voyage over a sky dark
like polished whalebone."
"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 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, further
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 bayfields. 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
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
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.
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
"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
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 lept 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
"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
joy? I ask, and do not know, only that I need silence, and to
be alone and to go out, and to save one 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 felts 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
"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
doves descending, is over. Chaos, detail return. I am no
longer amazed by names written over shop-windows. I do
"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 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 universal 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
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
"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
once 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
"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??
downwards. The figure that was robed in beauty is now
clothed in ruin. The figure that stood in the grove 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
"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
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
"Where shall I go then? To some museum, where they
keep rings under glass cases, where there are cabinets, and the
Court and look at the red walls and courtyards at the seemliness
of herded yew trees making black pyramids symmetrically
on the grass among the 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 swear;
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 hace 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
"An axe has split a tree to the core; the core is warm;
sound quivers within the bark. ' Ah! ' cried a woman to her
cried, and again she cries ' Ah! ' She 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 this gift, let
me see the thing. There is a square; there is an 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 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 rams, into omnibuses. As we lurch
down Regent Street, and I am flung upon this woman, 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
"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.
rustled stiffly in the random breeze. The birds sat still save
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 their lacquer and
polish.
The green pot bulged enormously, with its white window elongated
in
its side. Light driving darkness before it split 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
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
"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 depths 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
attache ' 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
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
"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 irrelevent, 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.
?e 16050
"But now I have not a moment to spare. There is no
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;
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 passing 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
"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 milkcans,
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.
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 titled 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 grid 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
"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.
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
"Let us sit here under the cut flowers, on the sofa by the
again with facts. People are 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 pegodas hanging from her ears, was the pure flame who
lit the life of one of our statesmen; now since his death she
youth whom she calls the Messiah. That man with the drooping
moustache, like a cavalry officer, lived a life of the utmost
"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
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
"Why, look," said Neville, " at the clock ticking on the
mantlepiece? 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 armchair. But when you come everything changes.
"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
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 destroys 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 centered.
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
crucufixes 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
"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
"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
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
and flash as if a fin cut the green glass 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 discs 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
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 (this 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 civilisation 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 wide-spread
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
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
"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
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 traveling. 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
"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.
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 filed 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
"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,
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
"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
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 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 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,